Bored Games

To appreciate this post, it has to be undestood that I was born in 1964.  I was 9 y.o. before there came a 3rd channel on the TV.  I did not see my first arcade game until I was 11, and only then because I was in California visiting Knott's Berry Farm and Disneyland.  I didn't see an arcade game in Calgary until 13.  I didn't have cable television until I was 15, which only meant about twelve channels.  I didn't have a Betamax video recorder until I was 16, the year after I began playing D&D.

In short, the number of distractions apart from boardgames and sports was far more limited than now.  Thus, when I say I spent hundreds of hours playing a wide number of boardgames and card games, it was because there was lots of time.

My parents were serious about games.  By the age of 6, I'd learned to play numerous card games, chess, checkers, battleship, parcheesi and Chinese checkers.  Game nights on Saturday were a regular thing, two or three times a month, so that by eight I'd was a veteran of cribbage, backgammon, rummy, canasta and poker.  Whist, and then bridge, would come later.  Every member of my extended family, especially my hard-fisted German material grandfather, played cribbage ... and he in particular played "to educate" trusting young children.  If your not familiar with the cold-hearted rules of cribbage, if you fail to count all the points in your hand accurately, your opponent can call "mulligan" and count those points against you.  No empathy intervened.  My grandfather would be the first to say it was a mean, son-of-a-bitchin' world out there, and if you can't learn to rely on yourself, you deserve to get kicked in the teeth until you do learn.

So ... games were a weird, fucked up battlefield.  Virtually every elder person I played cards with held those sosrts of beliefs, on both the German and Russian side of my kin.

I got rather good at cribbage; there's more to the game than might be imagined, as it's about leading your opponent into playing cards that will enable cutting their throat.  No need to go into it.  Like poker, it's a skill.  I'm an excellent poker player ... if the poker is REAL poker, that doesn't rely on ridiculous levels of chance, such as the ignorantly popular Feckless Hold-em.  I love convincing a bunch of young "players" to try stud or draw; they just don't understand percentages or pressure.

As a kid, I played poker for literal peanuts, poker chips, matches ... whatever was available.  I once was busted during a school science fair for playing poker while waiting for the teachers to bring the classes down to the auditorium one at a time.  Gave lots of time to sit around and be bored.  Got a week's detention for "gambling" ... with jelly beans.  Authority fails to recognize a lot of the time that they're teaching the wrong lesson.

 I never liked checkers as much as chess.  If I played with my sister, it had to be checkers because she didn't understand complicated games.  She was good for games like "war" and "go fish," or any board game that was really linear, like Careers, Payday, Life, Mille Bornes, Snakes & Ladders, Monopoly, that sort of thing.  I played more board games in my childhood than I can possibly remember now.  My sister and I used to play games at the family cabin, all afternoon, playing one kind of game after another.   For my sister, the tougher games were onces like Masterpiece or Stock Ticker, and she certainly wasn't up to RISK.

But, let me get back to chess.  My father taught me when I was very young and I regularly played with him and with my brother, who was five years older than me.  My brother was and is a bastard; he and I have been in the same room four times over the last thirty years.  The last time I saw him was my mother's funeral, nine years ago.  I began beating my father at chess when I reached 11.  My brother, when I was 12.  By 14, I was deep into chess with the school club and competing in the occasional tournament.  My best rating was just over 1400.  I did okay, not great, but I was studying chess by then in addition to playing it; the game became a science rather than fun.  But ... as writing became more important to me, and with the time I wanted to give to D&D, I recognised that to get better at chess I would have to give up other things I liked more.  So I backed away.  I continued to play into my 30s, but I haven't played a game offline in 20 years now.  I'll be sure and teach my grandson, and play with him if he likes it, but that's all chess is to me now.

Stock Ticker hit me like a fever around age ten or eleven.  I got better at the game and my father liked it a great deal.  He did all the calculations instantly in his head — it's just two and three digit multiplication — but it was impressive when he could rattle off how much 11,500 shares of stock would cost at 1.35 cents a share.  He taught me tricks that I used through high school and university, but computers ruined me.  I'd have to struggle coming up with the right number in my head today.

I liked S.T. because it consisted of edging out the competition by risk and tenaciousness ... personality traits I still possess, though I apply them to other things.  I don't imagine many readers here have played the game, and if they did most likely found it rather dull.  But around age 11, it was my favourite game.

RISK, not so much.  I appreciated the geography of it and I was always a strategy player, but children playing the game are liable to argue, kick the board over, sneak armies onto territories and that sort of thing.  I lost friends to RISK, some from cross-accusations and some from hard feelings from getting pasted.  It's hard to like a game when, if a run of luck occurs, the losers start screaming.  I began to shy away from invitations to play that game.  I did try Axis & Allies for a time, but I felt the game was structured against complete freedom of play.  Every game tended to follow the same objectives, reaching the same three or four possible conclusions; I didn't feel there was enough imagination involved to hold me.  In any case, by 13, I had a friend introduce me to Panzerleader.

Before D&D, that set of Avalon Hill tank games became fairly central to me, apart from playing chess.  I continued to play Panzerblitz, Arab-Israeli Wars and Squad Leader through university, until other participants evaporated.  I had two copies each of Panzerleader and Panzerblitz and I remember one summer our group of four played a vast game with 14 boards and seven hundred units to a side — two commanders to each side, each moving two armies against two armies.  Obviously, we never finished it; when the tide of battle started to go one way, the losers lost interest — though of course it could have gone either way, still — and I learned my first lesson in player "commitment."  Often, the idea of a game is much more interesting than actually playing it.  I could have happily played that battle to the last man standing.  Perhaps if there's a heaven, I'll get to yet.

D&D was the elephant that changed all my patterns.  I still played boardgames with my family, but with my friends it was mostly D&D.  There were some dalliances with Car Wars and The Creature that Ate Sheboygan; The Awful Green Things from Outer Space was a riot.  Those were games I never played with family.  Much later on, my parents got interested in things like Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan ... but these are games that have a limited number of practical strategies, and once the strategy is realized, the game is as linear as Careers.  Truth be told, video games in the 1980s began to obliterate any interest in board games.

My father taught me how to play whist when I was 10 and cutthroat bridge soon after.  Bridge was his favourite game; he played it like a tonic, and once I'd become a decent player he wanted to get up a foursome between him and mom and me and whomever I was dating, engaged to or married to.  So a string of girls sat in as a fourth until my first wife Michelle, who was about my level.  But my father really understood that game; he never failed to teach or praise after every hand, as necessary.  For a time he turned me into a good player, a skill I used well at university; through the 80s I played nearly a thousand rubbers with other friends and strangers; sometimes we'd play all day, changing out partners as people went to class, picking them up again when class was over.  Typically, there were two or three tables going at a time, with alternates waiting to jump in.  It wasn't a "club" ... it was just something to do in a world without social media and cellphones.

There are no boardgames of the '70s I didn't play for hundreds of hours; and most especially Monopoly, as there was always a copy of the game around.  On one level, I count a lot of that time as wasted.  There's not much to learn from one's 157th game of Life.  It's really just waiting for death.  It helps put a little perspective on those who talk about teenagers "wasting" their lives with social media.  At least that's a potential to learn skills like communication and writing.  We tend to forget that many of the pasttimes of erstwhile days were based on chewing up hours with purposeless make-work.  Roll the dice, move the piece, buy the property.  Wup wup.

'Course, anyone reading this will argue, "But Alexis, clearly you established a set of game principles that have served you in good stead these decades since!  Not cheating, waiting for others to take their turn, thinking before acting, understanding how many, many different games were constructed — all of that is good meat for the stew!"  Sure, I'll go with that.  One thing a video game doesn't do well is teach participants to wait their turn; and both D&D and life require a considerable amount of letting other people speak and act ... and not just waiting for our chance to speak.  But I'd argue that D&D was a better teacher of that then those old board games.  It's a far, far better game.  I'd far rather work on my game world than spend a minute playing a board game or a card game.  I've spent enough of my life doing that.  I'm not interested anymore.