After sitting and watching my friends play Settlers of Catan night in and night out at college, I decided to join a game one day, to see if it was as fun as everyone said. Maybe I just suck at Catan or maybe I built it up in my mind as more than it was since everyone always raved about it, but I felt like it was a waste of time. Don’t get me wrong –– I waste time for sure, but Catan made me feel like my normal time-wasting time was being wasted.
For a while I considered that it might be the people I played with, but then I played with different people, and it was the –– ordinary, completely unmemorable.
My college friends are notorious board-game players, with stacks of games on their wardrobes reaching up to the ceiling. So, I got dragged into a game of Battlestar Galactica and another of Betrayal, which both sound really exciting since you’re supposed to blow things up and stuff –– until you actually play them.
Then they inevitably become a monotony of rolling dice, waiting for your turn, and then rolling the dice again. Sure, there’s some degree of strategy and interaction with the other players. But when the focus is set on the game rather the people you’re with, the fun you have is limited and superficial at best.
Board games are fun if you have nothing better to do. But they should be a means of interacting with other people. Even if you get really into the game, it should partially be due to the people you’re with, not just the game itself.
My friends concentrated so much on the games, that no one really spoke to one another. There were no stupid jokes told and I didn’t feel any closer to my friends afterwards. Getting caught up in a game that’s ultimately a flimsy sheet of colored cardboard and plastic seems nonsensical when there are actual people surrounding you.
In a way, I kind of think of board games in the same vein as video games. They might be fun, but they’re not very genuine or fulfilling if just played for the games themselves.
I remember playing Smash once with two of my friends. I was Yoshi, and I was so terrible that the two of them built me a “cubicle” that I could hide in so I wouldn’t lose immediately (also because they got annoyed at Yoshi licking them). The two of them would fight, with the victor winning the privilege of entering the cubicle to fight me (and inevitably defeat me).
I don’t know why, but watching Yoshi sit in that stupid cubicle made us all laugh hysterically, and it wasn’t because of the game –– it’s because the three of us were in the room being stupid together. So board games and video games aren’t bad, necessarily. But they shouldn’t be the end, they should be the means.
On the other hand, I realize that everyone has different definitions of “fun.” For the longest time I was dying to play dorm hide-and-seek-tag, and after a lot of convincing, we finally played, and it was amazing. I didn’t understand why you would play board games that mimic running away from people and tricking them, to actually doing it in real life (still as a game, of course). There’s much more laughing, stupidity and bonding.
I understand why people don’t like my somewhat idiotic idea of fun, and while I understand why people like board games, I still feel like they’re a form of complacency. They’re a crutch when you don’t want to actively interact with the people around you, which is fine occasionally, but not as a long-term, only-way-of-having-fun-together kind of thing.
One of my friends once mentioned offhandedly that she thought that board games were more intellectually stimulating than just sitting around and talking, and that’s what really made me stop to think.
She was wrong. I didn’t say it to her then because it made sense at the time, but that comment stuck with me for some reason. Humans are more complex than a board game. One of the hardest things to do is just sit and talk with someone. How the hell was a made-up game with a made-up scenario more intellectual than a person with a brain with a different way of thinking and their own ideas? That was the one moment when I silently waged war against board games in my mind. Because there isn’t anything wrong with board games, until they become more important and more interesting than appreciating people and friends.
