2023, Family, Fantasy, Games, News, Uncategorized

Games!

51 Comments

I saw in the news that the creator of the game, Settlers of Catan, Klaus Teuber, died a few days ago.  If you don’t know of it, Settlers of Catan is a multi-player game; you settle and expand on the land using hexagonal tiles.  I’ve always assumed it was similar in play to Risk, but I could be wrong.  It was wildly popular right off the bat in the late 90s and while still played in boardgame fashion, it has also spun off into cyberspace so you can easily find Catan communities of players.

I have a friend, Laurie, who has played Dungeons and Dragons every Tuesday for decades.  This is a serious commitment for her; I’ve known her to turn down other invitations if they fall on Tuesday.  I’ve known her for 40 years and she’s never once invited me to join; non D&D folks just aren’t allowed.  That’ fair – all I know about D&D is what I’ve seen on Big Bang Theory!

But seeing the news about Klaus Teuber made me think of our blog about jigsaw puzzles the other day which led me to thinking about the games I’ve played in my life.  We didn’t have a lot of boardgames when I was a kid.  The obligatory Candyland, which I never cared for much.  My Nana had Chutes & Ladders at her house, which I adored.  I begged for the game Operation and never received it. It was just as well; a friend got one for Christmas and it was BORING.  Same with the Mousetrap game.

I played a lot of backgammon in college but hardly ever since.  I like trivia games, although I’m not very good at the ones that have a lot of current/trendy questions. We played one at Thanksgiving that had a lot of current sports questions and even a category about stock exchange abbreviations – I stunk.  When YA was little, we did Yahtzee and cribbage on vacation, but almost never at home.  I do play mahjong online but just with myself which isn’t anything like real mahjong.  I guess my favorite boardgame is still Aggravation, which I play exclusively with my mom.  We each play three colors and we’re a little cut-throat.  YA won’t play with me although when we were in St. Louis last summer she did play once, she and Nonny and I each fielding two colors.  She complained later that Nonny and I are mean.

Any favorite boardgames as a kid?  These days? 

51 thoughts on “Games!”

  1. As a kid, I had Monopoly and Yahtzee and a few other short-lived games whose names I don’t recall. I played no games in college and very few now at home, though we have some Robin has acquired. I am never the one to suggest game play and except for Scrabble I don’t really care whether I win or not.

    My grandkids and their family are big gamers. They own every game under the sun and we are often drawn into games with them but I don’t remember the names of them because they are all unfamiliar

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  2. My best friend and I loved to play Life. We sometimes played a version where we’d try to get the most children by going back and forth between marriage and the last baby. When visiting my maternal grandparents, the cousins played a lot of Parcheesi, Racko, and Chinese Checkers. Twister was a childhood favorite played with neighborhood friends. We never played Monopoly but there was a similar game, I think called Finance, that we played often.

    These days my favorites are Scrabble, the original Trivial Pursuit, and Racko. I don’t care for games like Pictionary or Cards Against Humanity. And I don’t get sucked into online games.

    My paternal Grandma taught me and my sisters 500 Rummy, which we played for years. She also loved playing Uno (which she pronounced “YOU know”).

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  3. My parents didn’t play board games. As an only child, I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to play games with actual people, so sometimes I would just play the games by myself. I remember doing that with the Life game. My, that really sounds pathetic!

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  4. I have many of the Settlers of Catan expansion games.
    Civilization VI is currently up on the computer.
    Played Princess Bride last Saturday afternoon with daughter and friends.
    Monopoly. As the banker, I always won. 🤑😇

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  5. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    We played a lot of games. As a child I loved Monopoly and we would set up games that last for days. The neighborhood kids were into Chicago or MIchingan Rummy that had a folding board. That could only be placed on a still day because we played outdoors on a picnic table. Cribbage we played daily after school with our retired neighbor and that was fun. We still have the “Stratton Sound Effects” that go along with certain moves, as well as double runs and double-double runs.

    A client showed me a new game Iwant to get called Wings about birds. The art work on that is worth the high price of the board game.

    Off to my day. Lou’s back is better—no pain, and he is responding to ibuprofen. He is fully off the Prednisone for 2 days and now makes sense. That was soooo stressful.

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  6. My dad’s family were card players, especially poker. My Uncle Alvie played high stakes poker at all hours at the Magnolia Bar. Farm land sometimes was won or lost. His wife put an end to all that when she got so mad at him for being at the bar playing poker so late at night she threw a chair through the bar window to tell him to come home.

    My mother’s family were all anti-card games as my great grandfather lost all his money playing poker and had to immigrate from Germany to avoid his creditors.

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  7. I miss playing D&D! I fell out of touch with the really good dungeon master I used to play with, and the DM completely makes or breaks the game.

    I’m terrible at board games (I don’t know how to play cards, either). Dad was teaching me checkers while we were on road trips when I was around 7 years old, but I’d get frustrated because he’d never let me win, and we stopped playing. Mom didn’t know how to play games, as she’d been saddled with too much housework too young, so when I aged out of Candyland we also quit playing board games. As an only child with no cousins in the state and no friends in the neighborhood, I didn’t have anyone else to play with, so I got very good at things like word finds and jigsaws, and of course I’d always rather read than anything else.

    Oddly, I’ve been interested by chess since I read Lewis Carroll as a small child, and later became interested by Senet, Go, and Tafl, but my interest is more cultural, aesthetic and literary, not in actual play. I’d still love to learn to play Thud, though!

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    1. I played Go in college and I did have a board for many years, but didn’t work very hard to find anyone to play with after school was finished. So it eventually went into a yard sale at some point.

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  9. A friend posted this haiky to FB this morning:

    “A haiku about my life:”

    I am so tired
    Where did all my money go
    My back is hurting

    It would work equally as well with “My knee is hurting.” Feel free to modify as it suits your particular circumstances.

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  11. OT – I just made an appointment with a physical therapist to help build back some strength after my knee troubles. The earliest appointment I can get is on April 20th, two weeks from now. On line I discovered that the therapist I’m “assigned” to also has a private practice (located in the same vicinity as the facility I will be going to). I don’t know him, have never seen him, and my appointment with him was merely the “luck of the draw.” Would it be considered unethical for me to call his private office to see if I could get an appointment there earlier? It’s already been over a month of no walking or standing, and I’m really concerned about another two weeks of inactivity. What do you think?

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    5. Thanks everyone, I’ll call and see what happens. What I’m concerned about is putting the therapist, who I don’t know, in some sort ethical bind. Obviously I’m calling this particular therapist because he’s the only therapist that I know who deals with my issues, and I only know his name through the appointment I made this morning.

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    1. I wish I could take credit for what a good position the picture is in for playing. I found it on one of our free sites, and it was a good size for our blog and good definition.

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  13. I don’t remember too many board games as a kid. I’d try to get mom and dad to play Monopoly, but it’s such a long game they didn’t like too very often. They played a lot of cards with friends and neighbors. 500. And they roped me into games often enough I learned not to like cards. So never played them either.

    With our kids, we had Chutes and Ladders, Life, Trouble, Uno was a big one. Others. Daughter liked her games for a long time. But she’s out of that phase.

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  14. Agree about Balderdash, though I’ve mostly played a boardless version called Fictionary – we played it with just a dictionary and blank paper.

    I’ve loved, at various times of my life: Canasta with Leslie LaRue in the Trailer Court, Gin Rummy with best high school friend, Double Solitaire with my mom (starting when I was in 5th grade), Oh Hell with Husband’s relatives, Cribbage & Mexican Train with Husband, Yahtze with step-son Mario. Interesting, I most like these games with the special person…

    There was a Parchesi-type game we played with Joel, can’t remember the name – no wait, SORRY! : ) and Uno of course, though it’s really just Crazy 8s with a fancy deck…

    We have a Unitarians’ Game Night a couple of times a year, and I was introduced to several there, including Settlers of Catan.

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  15. From when I was very young, my parents had a Monopoly game and, as I remember, it had metal tokens in the form of the iron, the shoe, the race car, the cannon, I think there may have been a hat, andI don’t remember what else. What were the classic Monopoly tokens? What am I forgetting?

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      3. My sister and I always argued about who could have tje Scottie. We had to be careful about how heated these arguments got because more than once my mother stepped in and chose the Scottie for herself.

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  16. Growing up, Monopoly and Scrabble were my favorites. Mexican Train is a newer addition. There was also an old game called Mill – I think we had a board that was on the back of a checkerboard.

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  17. monopoly parchisi and rummy as a kid
    today we’ve always done games at our gatherings

    charades, trivial pursuits, the one where you draw the clues … then we changed to different fun ones
    an odd picture gets pulled out of the deck and everyone gives it a caption control person chooses their favorite then goes on to guess who submitted what
    new one lately has words laid out in a jeopardy like grid then a member of each team gives clues to which words in the grid are our teams words
    if your team guesses other teams words they are awarded them there is also an auto death word so if your lue leads your teammates to that word it’s over

    clue is a huge hit for the last year or so

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    1. Yes, we’ve played this one several times with friends here –
      “an odd picture gets pulled out of the deck and everyone gives it a caption”
      I was going to mention it but still can’t think of the name, maybe in the morning. And you can buy additional decks of the picture cards…

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  19. We were a board playing family so most of the ones mentioned above and several more. A German game called Mensch Ager Dich Nicht ( Don’t Get Mad ) very similar to Aggravation and Battleship, Tripoley, Pictionary, among others. I miss those days. I’m only 56 but I’ve lost 3 siblings and most of my friends. Wish our small town had a game club or something.

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