What Games Say

One of the things I will deeply miss when Quinn leaves for college at the end of August is our regular evening games. 

It's not every night, but it's almost any night I ask. The game the two of us play most often is Boggle. Sometimes we do Scrabble, or Cribbage. Other favorites when there are more players around are Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Concept, Code Names, Just One, Spite and Malice, and Point Salad.

Much of the entertainment for me and Quinn when we play Boggle is adding to our word card. Nearly every round we spot something that sounds like it could be a word, and we check online at the end of the game. Some are easy to remember for no apparent reason, like DAP (which is a form of dip fishing), and others we absolutely never remember if they are allowed or not. We check everything against the online Scrabble dictionary, and after looking up the same few words over and over we started making lists on a card. One side of the card is legal words (like PAC, SLOE, and EFT) and the other side are things we always want to be words that are not (like POC, LIM, and HAR). 

We laugh a lot, and we discover many new things during Boggle. Quinn recently started learning all the variations on the spellings of letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which is a treasure trove of short words that the game allows (like BETH, TAW, and MEM). We know many forms of currency around the world thanks to Boggle.

Far and away the most interesting things I've learned while playing games with my kids over the years, is simply seeing how their minds work, and how their thought processes differ (or don't) from my own. 

The most vivid example of this in my memory was when Ian and I taught the kids how to play Monopoly at the family cottage. They were young, and the days are long up north and perfect for sprawling kinds of activities. We thought Monopoly was the kind of thing they should experience at least once, but we warned them up front that it was a mean sort of game. We didn't expect them to like it, but it's referenced enough in the culture at large that we thought they should try it.

We proceeded to play the weirdest game of Monopoly I've every experienced, because nobody got a monopoly anywhere on the board, so it became rent controlled. There were no houses or hotels to spike prices. My kids wanted to own collections of assorted property colors and each have their own railroad, etc., so everyone continued to affordably circle the board until we'd passed Go enough to break the bank and we had to stop. It was fascinating and rather heartening.

Anyway, that game gave me a glimpse into my children's possible relationships to money. Quinn likes rules. She had no interest in bending any during the game. If I could not pay rent on one of her properties, that was too bad. Aden, on the other hand, could not abide anyone suffering, so she would slip me money in order to pay rent to Quinn and expect nothing in return. Mona could not tell the difference between $200 and $200,000. Her approach to money in the game was pure chaos. The whole thing made me laugh because I told them when I am old if I have to rely on the three of them, Quinn should be in charge of my bills, Aden should decide when to pull my plug, and Mona will keep things interesting but should be in charge of nothing. Those assessments have shifted a bit as my children have become adults, but some of it's still apt.

The latest game we've been playing is called So Clover (which I think is supposed to sound like "So clever"). Each person gets a small board in the shape of a four-leaf clover, and you arrange four cards on it into a square. Each side of the square has two words and you have to write a word above each pair that will relate to them or connect them in some way. Once you've completed your board, you mix up the cards, add a decoy card, and then hand it all over to the other players who have to see if they can reassemble the board the way you had it.

To do this, you have to have a sense of how that person thinks. It's a little like Code Names, which changes depending on who your partner is and you have to rely on your shared knowledge to create meaningful clues. My kids know, for instance, that coming up with references to video games will not spark anything for me at all. Or if I'm playing with Aden I can reference Star Trek, but with Quinn that would get us nowhere.

The other night we did a round of So Clover that I found fascinating. Maybe because the two of us play so many word games together, Quinn knew intuitively how all of my clues worked. For example, I connected the pair of words "Hammer" and "Dreams" with "Nails." She kept insisting (correctly by my way of thinking) that a hammer would dream of nails. Mona and Aden kept taking the card back off and telling her that was insane. What kind of maniac would see Hammer and Dreams and write Nails? It was taking them so long to solve my board that they eventually agreed to a hint, and I told them to listen to Quinn, who put it together in seconds.

Aden, who I usually think I understand rather well, had an approach to this game I could not fathom. She didn't try to connect pairs of words, she simply found a clue that applied to each one independently. So for the words "Raft" and "Spicy" she put "Water." Her thinking was you need water for a raft, and you also drink water when eating spicy foods. My brain could compute almost none of her clues, but Mona seemed to get them. 

Like the long ago game of Monopoly, Quinn was logical, Aden was creative, and Mona was unpredictable. It made for a very entertaining game night.

I love seeing different people's strengths and priorities while playing games. In Settlers of Catan, Mona will always go for The Longest Road card. She doesn't even care if she wins, as long as she gets and retains that card as a point of pride. Quinn likes things that line up neatly. Aden will often take a purely sentimental tack and finagle it into a win. If it's a game that centers on pure strategy and Ian's playing, the rest of us seldom have a chance.

It's also enlightening to realize what gaps in experience others have that you make assumptions about. When I was growing up, my family and my Uncle Joe's family used to celebrate New Year's Eve together, and there was a different theme every time. One year we played a homemade version of Wheel of Fortune, and in addition to the kind of confusion only my dad could bring to any game, my mom and her brother were shocked to discover that none of their children knew the name of our great-grandmother. We uncovered all the letters of her name and still couldn't solve the puzzle. It had never occurred to my mom or uncle that we didn't know the name of their beloved grandmother. (But then, I also remember when someone asked my grandfather what his grandparents' names were, and he just said, "Grandma and Grandpa." He honestly didn't know.)

Word games always make my mom feel self-conscious, even though Quinn and I assure her the number of times the words POO and PEE show up in Boggle is embarrassing and she's perfectly capable of finding those, but she still won't play with us. She'll only play number based games involving cards or tiles.

Any game where I might need graph paper makes me glaze over, and makes me think of an episode of Gravity Falls where Dipper tries to explain how to play "Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons" and his sister whines, "This is like Homework: The Game!"  

My dad seldom went a week without doing a crossword puzzle. I have one in ink on my refrigerator that he didn't quite complete. I found it among his papers after he died. I tried to make him a crossword puzzle once when I was in second grade, because he loved them so much and I wanted to make him happy. I had zero idea of how they worked, though, and he had to hand it back to me explaining that the clues had to lead to words that overlapped properly, not the random mess I had made. He was very sweet about it. 

Crosswords summed up a lot about my dad. He liked clever use of language, and knowledge of both past and current events. It was an activity both solitary and neat and came in a newspaper. I used to snuggle up to him on the couch or in bed and try to help, but I was useless. I remember once the two of us puzzling over a clue about Newton, and both of us assumed it had to do with Sir Isaac Newton, but as other words came together, my dad exclaimed it was Wayne. Wayne Newton. Wayne seemed like a significant step down, history-wise, and we really laughed.

I find Sudoku puzzles relaxing. I have them stashed in glove compartments and in gig bags and on shelves and tables around the house. If they really help stave off dementia, I should be in good shape for a while.

Online I like to do the Wordle, Connections, the Mini, and Strands. Quinn and I regularly compare notes on how we did with those Times puzzles at the end of the day. We commiserate over how the Mini resets on a different schedule than the other games. The things I find easy in Connections are usually the things Quinn found hard, and vice versa. Solitary games like these feel like private interaction between me and the person who designed the puzzle. There's usually at least one category in the Connections where I scoff a bit, and feel like the game maker somehow knows and were maybe going for that reaction.

The dog just likes fetch/keep-away, and a little bit of wrestling. She has board-game-blindness and will happily tromp over whatever my kids and I are trying to play to seek affection.

I've been trying to remember what games Ian and I used to play before we had kids and everything shifted to include them. I don't know if when it's just us again what will feel right. I have such a specific rhythm of playing Boggle with Quinn that I don't know if I want to do it without her. It may become something I wait to do at holidays when she's in town.

Is it odd that when picturing the imminent empty nest that I imagine missing Boggle nights the most? Probably not, when I remember that playing games says very little about the actual games. They are about connection and time and humor and love. Losing that puzzle piece from our daily home life will be rough.