Some of us are gamblers. Some of us like sports. And some will bet on whether a dime will land heads up or not. Me, I like board games. Always have. Not every one, mind you, and not all the time. But one of the consequences of The Big Austin Move is that the board games that once languished in mom's icy basement on the top of a big white set of shelves, gathering mouse droppings and dust (and Lord knows what else) is that my favorites have now been transferred to New York. They now sit on the bottom of a big wooden shelf and sometimes gather dust (no mouse droppings, mercifully), but lately I've been working on changing that.
You can't just ask anyone to play a board game. Even if they're your friend. Good friends might roll their eyes a bit and put up with one, but to find someone you want to play with, who won't either get too pissy competitive or to whom you could reasonably live with losing to, is rare. Recently, since I have a friend who is staying over for a couple of weeks while she gets a gig and permanent housing, I've been in clover. Most nights it's too busy around the apartment to consider it, but once or twice a week, when I'm not out late and have approximately 65% of my brain cells on full, and when we can put on "House" or "Law & Order: SVU" or "Lost" and multi-task, we've been breaking out the board games.
C and I started with the old classic of Monopoly. I got mine at a birthday party -- can't remember which one -- in the early 1980s. The board died a bad death years ago, but we had a spare board because my brother's bat mitzvah was ... wait for it ... Monopoly themed. The board from my party got used; his sat in the basement, unplayed for about 17 years before we moved it. Make that 20. So I have a brand new Monopoly board, lots of pieces to play with, all of the cards and money, and sadly too few houses and hotels. Despite getting all the Kentucky-Illinois-Indiana and Ventnor-Marvin Gardens-Atlantic trifectas, C landed most of the rest of the board. We split Park and Boardwalk, so no one won that downhill slope, and I ended up with Baltic-Mediterranean, which I always land on and always buy like a sucker because I feel sorry for them. Two dollars for rent, please!
Anyway, I lost.
We moved on to one of my all-time favorites in Life. And not just some modern version of the famous game ... no, this is Mom's life. So to speak. Mom's life, with the copyright on the box lid of 1960. A dated Life is the best game ever, because while you circle around picking up peg-headed babies and spouses, you also have a salary coming to you. You're a doctor! $20K salary to you. You're a journalist! $10K to you. This is a never-ending source of amusement to me.
My friend Rebecca came over and played once; she's straight as a pin and has two little ones, but decided to go and have a lesbian marriage when they hit the church. A little subversive humor for a 1960s game that features Art Linkletter on the cover touting the family nature of the enterprise. And, of course the lid announcing it's a 3-D action game! Life has nothing on Castle Wolfenstein, I guess.
I won this one; unlike real-Life, there are many chances to land on inheritances and other such major windfalls: I kept picking up $100K bills like they were candy. Sigh.
We also recently delved into PayDay!, a game so boring even as children we realized it wasn't any good, and jazzed up the board with pencilled-in extras. (I'm stunned to see it's still around, in a 30th Anniversary edition. Mine looks like the cartoonist from Schoolhouse Rock did the illustrations, which seems about right for the time period.) Unlike Life, which provides faux-Life bonuses of $100K or more, PayDay! Is a little too much like real life to get a lot of enjoyment out of it as an adult. The board is a calendar, and as you travel through the months, you get a paycheck ($325 monthly, yikes), get mail (complete with junk), entertain guests, play the lottery, buy a washing machine and so on. Who wants to entertain themselves with a speeded-up version of real life? Yet this game persists.
What's struck me about each of these games, though, is the ghostly whiff of childhood memories that come at me every time we lift a lid. My brother Craig and I were (when not battling over something wholly insignificant) inveterate board game players. It was one of the few times when we knew the rules, and made certain we stated the rules to one another ahead of time, and therefore there was to be no crying in baseball once the game turned sour for one of us. (Being older, this usually meant me winning but in such a way that he couldn't say I cheated.) We were all about the rules. What happens to Community Chest money you have to pay? Put it under Free Parking, of course. (Who really doesn't do that, anyhow.) Who gets the Free Parking money? The person who rolls three doubles in a row. And yes, you get to go again if you get doubles. And so on. That childhood whiff of memory isn't like one of those soppy Hallmark moments where you think, "Ah, those were the days." It's more like remembering the rigid necessity of boundaries we needed as kids -- and which we insisted on imposing even when we weren't being watched. And yet there's good stuff in those layers, too -- board games, when we set it up right, were one of the couple of areas my brother and I came to a meeting of the minds. I didn't like playing sports with him, and he wasn't usually up for a long bout of stuffed animal play, so most of the time we were on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Oddly, PayDay!, awful as it was, was the best game we ever played, I think. As much as it stinks now, the fact that it stunk then (and had lots of extra space in the calendar days) meant we could make up our own bonuses. Days which nothing happened at all (and really, how stupid is it to design a game which has four squares of 31 in which nothing occurs) we allowed for small money bonuses. Didn't have a "Deal" card? Go back two spaces and pick one up. We had one square for "all debts off" which meant you could keep your bills until you passed that spot; if you landed on it, you were in the clear. (And how great would life be if we had a day like that each month?) We were probably in our early adolescence when we showed Parker Bros. a thing or two with that game, and had lots of fun with it after that. And no matter how bad that game really was, that makes it my favorite: It did the one thing no other board game has ever done, then or since. Win or lose, for an hour or two, we weren't just siblings: We were partners.
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