The Games We Play

In 2017, a girlfriend and I went to visit our mutual bestie in Colorado. We drove through the Rockies, drank microbrews, ambled along the pedestrian mall in Boulder, and visited the Denver Botanical Garden. In downtown Denver, we stopped by a game store to look for a new board game to play together. (My travel companion, Audrey, and I had first met thanks to a gaming group in Portland.) We brought a couple of them back to our friend’s apartment in Boulder. One was a card game that we absolutely could not make sense of despite our best reading of the instructions and a YouTube consultation. We dissolved into half-drunk giggles trying to figure it out. If memory serves, the game was Elevenses.

The other game was called Here, Kitty, Kitty. As a trio of cat lovers, we got into that one easily and successfully played it to the end a few times. I won the honor of bringing it home with me, perhaps because I was the woman who had the most cats (three at the time). My husband isn’t really into games, so it languished in the cabinet with the rest of my aging collection, moving from house to house over the next few years.

The friends I hung out with in Colorado now live in different cities and/or countries, and do not have children. I had a baby in 2018. That baby is now a first grader who never showed interest in learning how to play games that have rules.

I bought him Chutes and Ladders. I bought him several toddler-friendly, simplistic games that involve stacking things or following simple directions to jump up and down or spin around. Our friends got him an Uno deck. Nothing has ever caught on in terms of actual gameplay, although he sometimes likes to take pieces out of the boxes for freeform play. I can’t say I don’t understand; I had Mousetrap as a kid, and rather than playing it, I only ever wanted to assemble the contraption that would result in dropping a little basket on top of an unsuspecting toy mouse. As soon as that basket dropped, I was done.

Still, I’ve been eager to get my son into board games. Growing up, I played a lot of games with my brother and cousins and friends. When nobody was around, I played Solitaire with an actual deck of cards. It was a different world back then, but I’m not ready to give in to a new order in which all entertainment is digital and everyone in the household is glued to their own screens. I want some activities in my back pocket that I can pull out when the kiddo needs a break from screen time.

I’m not very good at freeform play, or setting up an arts and crafts station, or whatever responsible parents do to keep their children constructively busy. Board and card games are structured and logical, requiring little imagination from me. They can introduce a kid to lots of concepts, like pattern matching (Set), strategy (Ticket to Ride), and taking turns (Uno or anything else). My son is getting old enough to learn a little more discipline. Also, I naturally want him to develop a sustained interest in good, clean fun. Some of my best memories are of game nights with my nerdy friends, when we rarely consumed anything stronger than beer or wine.

I sensed an opening with him recently, and stuck my Mom Jeans-clad leg into it with an offer to show him how to play Here, Kitty, Kitty. He loves cats and seemed excited by the idea of the game, which involves setting up a “neighborhood” and taking actions to lure stray cats to your yard, porch, or house. The first time we opened it up at the dining room table, he threw out a pitch to just play with the little plastic kitties instead of learning the game, but I persisted, and he actually listened to my instructions.

It’s a turn-based card game, so I had to show him, in basic terms, how to maintain a hand and what to do on each turn. He easily read aloud the instructions on each card. Whenever he didn’t understand their meaning, I kept my tone light and positive while explaining the action, tiptoeing around his sensitivity to not grokking things right away. I was surprised at how readily he picked up the rules, even for more complex things like deploying a special card on the fly to stop another player from taking an adverse action. But he struggled with me making plays against him, like stealing a kitty from his house to put in my own house. “That’s not fair!” he said. I knew this would happen at some point, so I parceled out my hand carefully, trying not to play cards that would give me a strong advantage.

He miraculously (ahem) won the first few rounds we played together, and was so excited that he bragged to his dad about how good he is at the game. I praised him and suppressed the immature, know-it-all part of my brain that wanted to call out the favorable treatment I’d given him. The true miracle was that he’d had genuine fun doing something that involved rules taught by Mom.

As he gets more comfortable with the rules and with using cards to his own advantage, I am slowly tightening my enforcement of said rules, but discovering limits as we go. If he suggests an unorthodox interpretation for one of the cards, I’ll say yes. If he feels generous and wants to give me a useful card from his hand, I’ll try to explain that that’s not how the game works, but if he persists, then okay. His latest idea is trying to rig the game by putting his favorite card at the top of the draw pile and not letting me shuffle it before we start. He fully understands that this is cheating. As a habitual rule-follower, I chafe at it, but the look of glee on his little face is too delightful to be denied. It’s largely a game of luck, anyway.

Last time we played I won by a comfortable margin, and I was pleased that he didn’t get upset. Our record is about 4 to 1 in my son’s favor, which feels like a good ratio to keep our gaming relationship peaceable and fun for him. I need to wait at least a few more years before letting my competitive side come out.