My son’s 4th birthday is coming up in three weeks and my husband suggested buying him a preschool-level game system from Best Buy. At first, this idea sounded great. Why, my son could practice his counting and could identify colors, letters, and shapes while chasing after Dora the Explorer or racing around with Lightning McQueen. Yeah! Let’s get it for him!
But then I stopped to think…
Game systems are solitary. Do I really want my son facing a television screen instead of his family? The answer is no. I’ve waited years to be able to play games with this kid and we’re going to start this summer, danggone it! And by games I mean the type that you set up, play, and put away in a box that’s held together by masking tape because it’s been lovingly used and abused for a long time.
When I was growing up, we had two family games. The first was backgammon. My dad loved the game and taught us all how to play at an early age. We also favored a card game called 7-Up, which we played using pennies for the kitty. Other nights my brothers and I unpacked Sorry, Life, Battleship, Monopoly, or Risk and kept ourselves content for at least an entire hour (other than typical sibling squabbles centering on peeking at the location of the opponent’s PT boat or helping oneself to several twenties whilst being the banker during a Monopoly game).
So I was wondering…Do you have a Family Game Night every now and then? What game(s) do you keep returning to and what food do you eat along with your game?
8 comments:
Off and on. Last Christmas we got the kids a Pirates of the Caribbean game that utilizes the DVD (I'm ambivalent about these; we've also got a Harry Potter one. The video part is cool, but it ties the game location to a single site). It's actually a really cool, although a bit slow, board-type game.
What has struck me about these board games as an adult that I didn't necessarily appreciate as a kid is how looooonnnnnngggggg most of them last. Sure, everybody knows Monopoly goes on forever, but Clue? Or Life? Life in particular seems to last forever (and I gotta tell ya, as an adult, some of the fun of this game came and went--I really don't want to play a game where I deal with paying a mortgage, student loans and life insurance--give me pirates, please. Rum and booty and...)
We played Monopoly as kids with my mother, which was how we learned to count back change. When I worked as a cashier, I was the only one who would/could count back change -- that is by starting with the cost of the item and not just repeating what the computer told you was the correct change. When the computer was down, I was the only one who could make change. Sadly, the others were forced to use calculators.
When my now 5-year-old grandson was just learning how to talk, we played "punch bug" in the car, the game of identifying VW Beetles. He'd have to identify the color, too, and keep track of how many he had. We also play card games with him, like war and concentration. He loves these activities far more than his video games.
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We don't have planned game nights. Sometimes my son (age 12) and I will sit down and play a game of Risk or Life, and recently we got Rummikub which is fun. He likes Stratego too.
But I wouldn't call us gamers, per se. When we do things together that are interactive (as opposed to watching a movie together or something), it's usually physical as well. Go shoot some hoops, or throw the baseball. We do that a lot. We can throw the baseball for hours.
Honestly, I don't really enjoy board games much. I play them with him because he likes them. But I'd rather go out and garden with him or something if it was up to me.
As a kid I didn't play games with my parents or siblings - but I did with my friends. We'd get Monopoly tournaments going that would last for days and we'd have to stuff the board under Warren's bed for the night and of course the damn pieces would move and we'd accuse Warren of cheating and we'd all storm off in a huff - for about five minutes. Then we'd get a pick-up game of baseball going and be best friends again....
As the song goes, "Barefoot children in the rain, no need to explain."
I am one of five siblings who grew up in the pre-global warming winters of the Western PA Appalachians. I believe my parents dropped to their knees nightly and thanked God for the invention of board games.
Clue is the family favorite. There are copies in each family household just waiting the arrival of three or more of us. We've taught it to the next generation, but my nieces and nephews remain suspicious (and probably justly so) of anything that gets five middle-aged Boomers that excited.
Wow, board games, what memories! As a young child I lived in Massachusetts and we'd often get together Saturday nights at either our house or one of my uncle's. The adults would be in the dining room playing hearts and my cousins and I would be in one of the bedrooms playing Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, Sorry, Parcheesi. The older kids would be in another bedroom doing the same. We lived more in the country so whenever a hurricane came through, we'd go to one of my uncle's to wait it out and often played games by kerosene lamp.
Both my father and mother loved playing games all their lives. (I do think it's part of growing up in a very cold climate.) My mother loved Parcheesi, Yahtzee, and cards. My father and I played hours of cribbage from the time I was a child until he died at 79. Even today, my boyfriend and I play a lot of Scrabble over take out food and I love playing it online.
Now there's a theme for a series... give each book the title of a board game.
You know, Monopoly always brought out the worst in my family. We were all so greedy that there was usually a big fight before anyone had a chance to win. Same with Life. Whenever I went to the poorhouse instead of the mansion, I'd sulk for hours. Maybe Chutes and Ladders is the best for its simplicity. You rise or you fall. Period.
As a kid, I loved "Clue," and then--as an adult--I found this more sophisticated mystery game called "221 B Baker Street." Kind of Clue on steroids--with complex investigation materials, etc. It also, was LONG . . . and therefore got put aside for rainy days that most often got filled up with other stuff.
Most recently, we've been introduced to a game called Chicken Foot Dominoes, or Mexican Trash Train.
It's fun too . . . and, yes, I live in a community where most folks are like . . . retired. So board games happen. A lot. And always accompanied by wine.
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