I’ve always enjoyed table top games, and my family were not gamers. We played games occasionally, and I think I largely encouraged what we played.

I could be wrong. On vacations, my extended family played Canasta, Spades, and “The Dictionary Game” long before it ever was published as Balderdash. Perhaps my older siblings brought some board games into the house, because we had an old edition of Parcheesi and an art masterpiece game long before I was old enough to show interest in them. In the early years, I was interested in PayDay, a silly, pun-filled game about making it to the end of the month. (I think that’s where I learned of the classic book Running to the Outhouse, by Will E. Makit.)

We played harder games in a gifted program in which I was placed for grades 4-6, games like Avalon Hill’s TUF, a dice game that asked you to make the longest working equation you could from the roll you made. You always had an equals sign and some kind of math symbol with the numbers, maybe eight dice total. It was hard. Other games I remember were Word Power and The Stock Market Game. Avalon Hill made great games back in the day. I wasn’t good at Word Power btw.

One of the project choices in that class was to design a game. I think I worked up two of them, neither entirely successful. One was an adventure. I vaguely recall a board that resembled a Narnian map with a sea serpent in watery sections. There was some kind of Sasquatch and a UFO too. Players could move in any direction on the grid in search of treasure, which was hidden by someone controlling the enemies.

The thing I remember most about this is working with my dad on how to design the game pieces. He cut up a broom handle to make each piece. The rounded tip of the handle was the UFO. Dad made smoothly sanded player pieces in different colors. I don’t remember how we handled the two monsters. I think the other kids liked it. It didn’t totally work as a game, but it was good project.

As a teenager, I wanted to play more complicated games but didn’t have a regular group to do it with. My sister married a guy who played chess with us often and enjoyed large games like Kingmaker, with a four-hour play time that probably begins after you study the rulebook for an hour or so. Diplomacy was another one we started and never finished (six-hour play time?!). I wasn’t good at these games. How could I be without playing a single full game?

I think I did play a single game of Squad Leader. That’s the kind of game my best friend in high school enjoyed. Military tactics was one of his strengths, and this was a complicated game that could be expanded into many more tiers of complication. He destroyed me. And I enjoyed it, I think.

Winning is not the main thing in a game. I want to enjoy the challenge of it, even if I lose, which is certainly a strength, seeing that I have had only marginal success in my life. Enjoying the challenge with some good people makes for a fun evening.

If you can tolerate it, I’ll write more about games in upcoming posts.