“Bored games,” you say? Nah, you’ve got it all wrong. Board games are anything but boring. You probably haven’t played them in a while, unless you’ve been on a rainy family vacation, but they’re not just for kids and old people anymore. As someone who rediscovered her love of board games last semester and pretty much hasn’t stopped playing since, I am here to encourage you to get back in the game.
It all started innocently enough — one of my roommates and her boyfriend asked us to play because they needed two more people for the game. More people, more fun. How could we say no? It would only take an hour. False. If I had known that I would ultimately spend exponentially more time playing board games than going to the gym and the library combined, I might never have accepted his initial offer. We played again and again, bringing in his roommate to make a complete five. We made a little board game clique, excluding others because, “Sorry, only five people can play.”
Maybe you’ve gone too far when each person in your clique asks for a different version of the same game for Christmas, because everyone knows everyone else’s strategy exactly. Maybe you’ve gone too far when you create a Google spreadsheet and graphs to keep track of your point standings. Maybe you’ve gone too far when you stop updating the spreadsheet after individual games, knowing you’ve played so much that the standings won’t change. Maybe not. For reasons you can probably infer, I can’t judge.
My parents were highly concerned when they learned I was playing board games more than doing my homework. But then I introduced them to a game called Ticket to Ride — or as my clique likes to call it, TTR.
Even though my mom struggled a bit in the beginning — building trains in all the wrong places and drawing cards at all the wrong times — after every game she’d ask if we could play again. Such admirable resilience — maybe it’s genetic? In any case, they began to understand the madness.
If you’re looking to find your way back to the gaming world, I’ve got a few recommendations for you. If we are talking strategy games, you’ve got two stellar options here.
The solid fallback option is the aforementioned Ticket to Ride. Though arguably the best game ever created, don’t fault yourself for being unfamiliar with it — it was created after our age group passed the critical age for playing board games. Don’t be scared off by the unfamiliarity. There are several different version of the game — allowing you to build trains across Europe, America, Asia, the Nordic countries, the Heart of Africa, Germany and India. If that’s not enough for you, they also sell expansion packs. I won’t bother to describe the rules for you here — just play it. Email me at the address below to get in on our next tourney.
Your second classic option is Settlers of Catan. Essentially, you build little settlements on different resource cards that hopefully become cities, gaining points all along. The first person to 10 wins. It may sound easy, but you try getting to 10 points when you have no wheat, limited iron ore and no reliable roads on which to trade. Battling these insurmountable odds makes me feel like a super cool, medieval settler in a strange “Lord of the Rings” or “Game of Thrones” scenario.
I won’t make some quasi-profound claim about how rediscovering board games has changed my life, or how my friends and I have learned how to have fun without being too productive, or destructive — but I’m too competitive for any half-baked attempt at success. So just dust off that box on the shelf, gather your closest clique and let the games begin.
Abbi’s column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at a.sigler@cavalierdaily.com
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