Not Your Family Game Night

I remember the first time capitalism sunk its teeth into my adolescent flesh.

Christmas morning I tore away the red wrapping paper and in my hands was Monopoly, a board game that can unify each and every individual reading this. We’ve all sat around the four-quadrant stage of familial misery and watched helplessly as the Thimble was turned on its head to catch the tears of that one friend or cousin who wasn’t playing it smart in the earlier parts of the game, too reluctant to buy a single property because he was dead-set on getting Boardwalk. Much to my disgrace, I was that person. To be honest, I just really enjoyed landing on Chance because I like to live dangerously but that’s neither here nor there.

But my fascination with Monopoly extended well into my teens and young adulthood. To this day, I absolutely love tabletop boardgames, in all of their many complex shapes and forms. I was strolling through Target the other day, walking up and down the board game aisle reminiscing of all the great times I’ve had with the many games I’ve played over the years.

But there are so many different and amazing kinds of board games that exist, games that put Monopoly and Boggle to shame (would like to clarify that I’m not a hater, I’m actually quite the Bogglophile). So let me highlight a few of the games I’ve really enjoyed over the last few years:

Unashamedly, I’m a lover of Dungeons and Dragons, the cream of the crop in terms of tabletop boardgames. You can’t say you’ve lived until you’ve been a Dwarven cleric who rolled a lucky +20 on an attack roll that sent your one-handed mace flying down into the thick skull of an attacking Orc. For me, DnD was everything I could want out of a game. It was a world of untold imagination and limitless creativity, storytelling without a clear arc in mind.

Another favorite is Twilight Struggle, which is described quite concisely on BoardGameGeek.com, where it held the #1 spot from December 2010 to November 2016, as being “a two-player game simulating the forty-five year dance of intrigue, prestige, and occasional flares of warfare between the Soviet Union and the United States. The entire world is the stage on which these two titans fight to make the world safe for their own ideologies and ways of life. The game begins amidst the ruins of Europe as the two new “superpowers” scramble over the wreckage of the Second World War, and ends in 1989, when only the United States remained standing.”

Here is an example of the very cluttered game board in all of its glory.

This is the perfect game for those of us who enjoy the fun of growing up and living in an era where nuclear warfare and Communism are constant threats to our very existence. Twilight Struggle is predominantly a 2-player game that will have you seriously wondering if your best friend/sibling/grandmother/that old lady you watch on the weekends sometimes because her daughter has to run some errands is a Soviet master of espionage and deceit. The game can be long. Really long, actually. The game officially lists playtime as 3 hours, but I’ve had a game of Twilight Struggle going for a few months now and as I last recall, I’m losing quite badly. Sorry Eisenhower.

One of my favorite childhood games that I still play to this day is of course, Stratego. It was a mix of chess (in that, various different pieces marked by different numbers could move in different ways and had different skills) and capture the flag. Nothing can surpass the utter bliss of keeping up a poker-face and feigning defeat as your opponent attacked your piece, assuming it was your flag, only to learn it was actually a bomb that automatically destroyed any other piece (except a 3 or 8, which could defuse bombs).

And because I’m obnoxious, I’m also going to put Jenga on this list. Jenga is a game that reminds me a lot of the human spirit: we set so many expectations for ourselves on our shoulders with such fervor, that we hardly realize we’ve been tearing away at the core of our sturdy foundation. Damn. Jenga, man. But seriously, there’s something childishly mindless and fun about the slow, rocking of the tower as it gets closer and closer to crashing into dozens of colorful wooden bricks across the table.

Though it is advised that you play with two people, unlike this guy here who just looks ridiculous.

Sometimes there is just so much to do and see that we forget fun can come in a box we can open up right in our living room. To me, a home is not a home without a closet full of board games. Or in my case, a home is not a home without a closet full of board games that are all missing various important pieces because as much as I enjoy board games, the clean-up is still a drag.

Boggle on,
Christopher LaSasso