Games People Play

The husband comes from a family of game-lovers. Not just board games but a cork game, mini shuffle board and even a game that requires only paper, pencil and a dictionary. They had a large family and a mother who loved games.

Christmas time at my house was a time to get out the carrom board. I would play with my brother who could not always easily distinguish the red carroms from the green, as I recall. We would shoot with our fingers or a carom stick. We also had checkers, including a metal version of Chinese checkers that we played with marbles, but I don't remember many other games.

Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders were around by the mid-century, but I don't recall them at my country farmhouse.

The Christmas season at our house with our three girls was also associated with games, including "playtime" with their Dad that was accompanied by Mickey Mouse and Sesame Street Christmas music. Later we started acquiring all the usual board games. As they grew older, every year we purchased at least one new game at Christmas time--Wits and Wagers, Cranium, Bible Trivia, Scattegories, Outburst, Deluxe Scrabble, etc.

This game has a $3.00 sticker on it and has never been played here.

This year we will have no children here (or any of THE KIDS) home for Christmas. We will exchange gifts and skype it or phone it in or hang out on Google, but we will not likely play games with just the two of us. We have our smart phones and our computers and our big televison (and even some real books) which provide ample entertainment--but we might have to be a bit inventive to keep up the holiday spirit around here.

In my last post about what was new on our Thanksgiving trip I forgot to include that we played games! We played mostly poker and a little euchre and one game of dominoes. Everyone had to bring a poker game to the table (research the rules and be prepared to explain it). G remembered a poker game from his early years called elevator. I am not very good or lucky at cards and played rather dismally. Fortunately, all that was at stake in the end, was my pride.

But the night we returned from the coast we got out Ticket to Ride - Europe and I redeemed myself! I actually finished all my train routes and got the most points. I could barely locate the cities with European spellings on the map, but it was my time to be lucky for a change.

Another game we play in Florida is Agricola, a game which requires you to build a farm from scratch, decide to select a wife or not and whether to go vegetarian or raise animals for food. It occurs to me that it was not allowed to acquire children without a wife--so a little old-fashioned, as well as primitive--when times get tough you might be faced with feeding your children or cooking a cow in your hearth (if you have one--cow or hearth)!

With no grandchildren on the horizon, it is probably time to stop buying games at Christmas. I still kinda want a deluxe unopened Boggle game (on Ebay?) hint, hint, which is no longer available in the stores.

Words With Friends (or often, Words with Strangers) that I play is enough game for me, I suppose. That and an occasional game of Bubble Safari!

 Do you have a go-to game? Do you play with strangers? Are board game sales declining with all the other available options today? Do you still play Free Cell? Do you remember Pong?

What other games were played back in the mid-century, anyway? I think I may have suffered some deprivation in this area in my childhood...