Do you like or loathe board games? We love them.
In our house, games come out for family get togethers, or when we have friends staying. It’s something we all (with the possible exception of my father-in-law) look forward to. Yes, my adult children play video games too, but when they’re home, they even bring their own friends round to play board games with us sometimes. There is nothing like a board game to foster, um, healthy interaction and um… Let’s have a think shall we?
Contraband
Contraband was my parents’ and dates back (as you can probably tell) to the 1950’s or 1960s. It’s a bluffing game in which you take it in turns to be a traveller passing through customs, or the customs officer.
Like most bluffing games, the fun is trying to keep a straight face when you’re smuggling stuff or pretending you have the diplomatic bag when you don’t or trying to look guilty when you’re innocent to tempt the customs officer to make a false accusation and have to pay compensation.
My dad made a brilliant customs officer. He’d stare menacingly into your eyes then do something like waggle his eyebrows to make you confess all. I developed quite a good poker face (even if I’ve rarely used it to play poker, and then never for money).
Scrabble
When I was about sixteen and went to visit my German penfriend, we played Scrabble. My penfriend tried making English words while I made German words. However, my vocabulary was tiny, and while her English was very good, the letter selection was designed for the German language, so the ratio wasn’t right. We gave up quite quickly.
My husband can’t spell, but loves Scrabble. Playing it with him is a very long-winded process as the options are (eventually) to tell him how to spell something, or let him use a dictionary.
One pre-internet summer we went on a three-week trailer-tent trip in northern Spain. It rained solidly for the last fortnight, a quagmire forming under the ground sheet. We were a long way from town, so we spent some of our evenings playing Scrabble. It took him so long to play his turns, that I managed to read most of Lord of the Rings during the games we played.
Monopoly
I couldn’t picture Monopoly because it’s in the attic somewhere with Rummikub, Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit and Skirrid. (I like to think that the friendly household ghost (who makes odd noises around the house) and our timid household elf (who moves stuff about) spend their evenings playing them and will be upset when we’ve moved enough clutter to find them.)
I was rather a goody-two-shoes child, but I confess that when my friend and I played Monopoly with our little sisters, a determination to win at all costs possessed both of us.
‘If you give me Mayfair, I’ll give you Old Kent Road and Whitechapel,’ one of us would say, making the most of our younger sisters’ slim grasp on finance. ‘Of course it’s a fair swap!’ Then we’d bankrupt them.
They cottoned on in the end of course, and my sister still complains about it. I feel little shame. It was revenge for all the times she got out of chores by being cute.
Cluedo/Clue
She can’t accuse me of cheating at Cluedo since it’s barely possible, but even as an adult my sister finds it baffling. After playing one Christmas a few years ago, I found a clue sheets on which she’d written ‘Have you got any idea what’s going on?’ and my brother-in-law had written in reply: ‘Nope’.
When the children were little, we bought a French version while holidaying in France. Then we realised that the board had a different layout and extra rules. My French wasn’t up to working them out, so it’s actually never been used.
The layout change wasn’t so bad. That’s happened on and off since it was invented as you can read about here. But ever since that holiday, our family has called Colonel Mustard ‘Colonel Moutarde’ with a bad French accent.
Articulate
Articulate starts the most arguments. You have to describe something on a card to your team mate and if they get it right, you move to the next card, getting as many right as possible until the time is up. The key is being on the same wavelength as your partner. My husband and I usually are which means we’re sometimes not allowed to be in a team. But we’re not always.
There are photos of people crying with laughter while in another team, A shouts at B because B’s suggested something ridiculous as the answer to a perfectly ‘obvious’ clue and B shouts that A is incomprehensible and obtuse. Insults fly and divorce and/or murder is threatened. It makes no odds – we all (with the exception of my father-in-law) still love it.
Winning exchange:
‘You know Shakespeare’s play where they killed a king?’
‘Er…’
‘OK, so the burger place that sells burgers that’s not Burger King? The first half.’
‘Er… Mac?’
‘Yup. Um… the beer that Homer Simpson drinks?’
‘Duff? Oh! MacDuff.’
‘Yes!’
Losing exchange:
‘You know the man who fell out of the tree?’
‘Er…’
‘He was a scientist. What did he discover?’
‘Aspirin?’
What do boardgames teach?
Chess and Backgammon teach strategy (and so does ‘Ticket to Ride’ which I haven’t described as we’ve only played it twice), but the other board games above?
Reading through this list makes me wonder. Monopoly was originally invented to teach about the evils of capitalism, but during a game, almost everyone turns into an evil capitalist. Clearly I was no better than any of them once.
The others might be accused of encouraging lying, manipulating and arguing. Perhaps. Or maybe they just help you let off steam.
Despite a lifetime playing board games, I grew up to be the upstanding moral citizen.
And let’s be honest, they’re great fun.
Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).