Trapped at Home? Board Game On!

I am, in the best circumstances, a poor loser. I’m also a clumsy, fidgety winner.

Yet I have spent the past month playing games. All kinds of games: Twenty Questions, I Spy, matching games, memory games, and as much hide and seek as a three-room apartment allows. Mostly, I have been playing board games with a fixation I haven’t known since I was 9 or 10 and cheating at Candy Land (slipping the Queen Frostine card just below the top of the deck and then saying, brightly, to my sister, “You can go first!”).

If you, like me, grew up with a battered box of Sorry and a Battleship missing at least two of its boats, you should know that board games have improved. With a large number released each year, the variety of games and the mechanics that govern them are almost infinite.

My library books remain unread, a stack of untouched New Yorker issues has become a household obstacle, and I can’t make it through a movie, or even a 23-minute sitcom, without reaching for my phone. So why can I spend a focused hour-and-a-half bartering for camels in an Indian marketplace playing Jaipur or simulating quilt-making in Patchwork?

While I have slashed most discretionary spending, I keep lowballing used children’s games — Outfoxed!, Ticket to Ride: First Journey, Sushi Go! — and a few adult ones on eBay. The other week, I fell into a Google abyss comparing cooperative puzzle games. When I finally clawed my way out, I found that I had ordered Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, from England. The shipping was surprisingly reasonable.

With so much of life transported online, there is huge satisfaction in the tactility of board games, an almost indecent pleasure in rolling dice, dealing cards, hopscotching a game piece to a square. And many of them are beautiful, eye-candy confections of color and shape. But library books, after all, are tactile. Some of them are even illustrated. Why games?

I wrote to Joey Lee, who directs the Games Research Lab at Teachers College at Columbia University, hoping he could figure out this one. Tabletop games, he said, create a “magic circle,” an idea borrowed, more or less, from the cultural historian Johan Huizinga. Lee wrote that the circle, inside which everyone agrees to abide by the same constraints and rules, provides “a structure and environment that sparks laughter, creativity, joy and other pleasure-filled moments that come from solving problems successfully, optimizing one’s strategies, working together or competing against other players.”

That sounded like an ambitious way of describing what happens when my 3-year-old and I fend off trolls in My First Castle Panic, but sure.

Nicholas Fortugno, a games designer and lecturer, explained why playing games with my two young children improves on our flustered attempts at homeschooling. “Games level differences in age,” he said. “If I’m a 10-year-old playing a game with my parents, the authority structure that normally governs how I behave is actually kind of released. For the purposes of the game, we’re equal.”

When I try to teach place value to my 6-year-old, there’s a hierarchy at work. When we play Zeus on the Loose, which has her practice addition and subtraction as we lay claim to Mount Olympus, we play as equals.

Sort of.

I should probably confess that I have been throwing a lot of these games, cheating as avidly as I ever did, but now in favor of my opponents. Losing offers valuable lessons — grace, resilience, accepting the randomness of a flicked spinner. But being confined to our home without birthday parties or play dates feels like lesson enough. So somehow the children always seem to beat me, simultaneously, at Scary Bingo.

I have also been playing board games with my husband, because they are a welcome change from our other games like, Hey, Have You Looked at the 401(k) Lately? and Why Are You Drinking So Much? As long as I had game experts on the line, I asked several to act as games concierges (“I prefer sommelier,” Fortugno told me) and recommend games that wouldn’t push us any closer to divorce, or at least delay it until after lockdown. I also mentioned that I’m the kind of monster who takes games very seriously.

“Board games are one of the few outlets in life where that is kind of a socially acceptable thing,” said a reassuring Erik Arneson, who writes books on tabletop games. “As long as you don’t get angry and flip the table over if you lose.” I told him that I wouldn’t. Our table is very heavy.

He recommended Patchwork, “a lovely little two player game that’s about making quilts.” Coincidentally, my husband had bought a sale copy of Patchwork. (An exception to my “games are beautiful now” claim, its color scheme combines a sickly beige and a clinically depressed green.) Arneson had warned that I would sometimes resent my husband for snatching a piece I needed. And I did. But that particular resentment, unlike my feelings about the distribution of emotional labor, say, was discrete and local.

Still, I suggested a move toward cooperative games. The best cooperative game, several experts agreed, is Pandemic, which seemed just a little on the nose. Instead, we have spent a few companionable evenings playing that Sherlock Holmes game and sampling escape room games. These, too, are a little on the nose, in that family life during a pandemic does have the feel of a locked room, but in the game at least, escape is possible. Two nights ago, we broke out of a sinister museum, and felt — against all real-world evidence — like we had really accomplished something.

We could have played any of these games in the past several years, but we didn’t. I was out at the theater most nights. The children sleep fitfully. No previous pandemic marooned us indoors. “A lot of games,” Fortugno said, “were invented because groups of people had to be around each other and were bored.” That’s most families. But it doesn’t quite explain why games — even Patchwork — feel so specifically soothing right now.

Games can be a healthy escapism, according to Robert Hewitt, who runs Brooklyn Game Lab, an after-school program that has since moved online. “When you sit down to one of these games, you’re existing within the parameters of the game,” he said. “For an hour or two hours, you’re concentrating on managing your sheep and your barns and your goats and you have that total sense of control. So I think that’s pretty calming.” (Really hoping this goat game isn’t a hypothetical.) He sent me a picture of his kitchen table covered in Robinson Crusoe, a solo game involving hundreds of cards and tokens. Consider Hewitt extremely calm.

Naomi Clark, a professor at New York University’s Game Center, described games as safe spaces to practice patterns of thought that now feel risky in the real-world, like long-term planning or resource allocation. She also mentioned some neuroscience research suggesting that games occupy the same neural pathways that might instead flashback to traumatic experiences, like, say, living through a pandemic. “Games actually sort of turn your brain down other pathways to allow your brain to heal,” she said.

In two months or six months or whenever lockdown relaxes, I can’t imagine we’ll play together as much. The children will spend most of the day in school; Broadway has to reopen sometime. We’ll pass some board games onto friends, donate others to the Brooklyn Library’s lending collection. But until then, we’ll open the box, unfold the board, shuffle the cards just so. Deal me in.

Some of Our Favorite Games

For the Whole Family

Animal Upon Animal It’s like Jenga, but better. This dexterity game asks players to stack sturdy wooden pieces (an alligator, hedgehogs, penguins, some weird little guys who might be lizards).

Outfoxed A cooperative game for kids, it asks you to play as chickens investigating a fox who stole a pot pie. (What is in that pot pie, anyway?) The fox hasn’t beaten us yet — even when I don’t let the kids cheat.

Scary Bingo The mechanics of this game are simple and familiar: A caller selects random tokens, players cover the relevant squares. But the design is witty and the monsters exuberantly weird.

And for Two Adults

Exit These escape room games have frustrating aspects — you have to be very precise in how you manipulate the pieces and you destroy some elements during play, so you can’t pass a game on. But the puzzles are delicious and solvable if you peek at the preliminary hints.

Patchwork The aesthetics are appalling and the set-up may seem overly simple. Just how complicated can a game about quilting get? Very. The design encourages you to think several moves ahead.

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective This cooperative game, if you can track down a copy, is meticulously constructed and maniacally engaging. You and yours play Baker Street Irregulars solving a Holmesian mystery.

--- By Alexis Soloski