No matter what games you play, no matter who you play with, there are some things that will inevitably happen while playing a boardgame. No, I don’t mean the obvious things like rolling the dice too hard, having them fly off the table and landing in the French onion dip. I mean the more fundamental things.
The biggest of these is “people having to take a bathroom break right before their turn”. And no, they can’t take their turn first since they have to go “NOW”. A common corollary to this is the more suspenseful the situation, the longer they will take. And we all know who the next person is who needs a bathroom break. Yup. The next person with a turn coming up. It is almost like dominos how the progression then goes around the table. And you will find the same sequence with “getting food”.
In our home, we play Zombicide© in many editions, Terraforming Mars©, Mystic Vale©, Pandemic©, and many others. But to demonstrate my idea of things going awry, I’ll start with some old favorites. Does anyone play Settlers of Catan©? This has a perfect example of the “think about it a minute” concept. Someone at the table states that they want to trade grain for sheep. One person says “here” and they pass their card to the other player. These people look at their new card and realize that they both passed grain. Seldom do I hear someone say that “they have grain, they need sheep”. No people are lazy, and it causes a breakdown in communication. But do you know what is worse? After seeing that they have passed grain to each other and have made a mistake, they swap the cards back. Why? Who knows? Isn’t one grain the same as another?
Settlers of Catan© will also present another game tactic that often occurs. I call it “the little mouse in the corner”. Why does there always seem to be one person who tries to stay in the background, never offering unbalanced trades and never hitting anyone with the pirate? While everyone else is killing each other, the mouse slowly grabs the cheese. Settlers of Catan© is really just a minor display of this. Games, like the old card game called Global Thermonuclear War©, really bring out the camouflage and let it shine (mixing metaphors here). In this cold war-themed game the goal is to wipe out all the people in the players’ countries while trying not to make too many enemies so they don’t come after you. I recall one instance where one person literally sat back and once in a while attacked someone with a minor bomb so as not to bring attention to themselves. While the rest of us were committing suicide, this person sat back totally ignored by anyone else. Meanwhile, they were holding on to multi-millions of their country’s people.
One final inevitability of playing boardgames is having the spouse use the “you are sleeping on the couch tonight” response. I discovered this all too painfully in the aforementioned game of Global Thermonuclear War©, I made the mistake of mentioning to everyone that did they realize my wife was just sitting there while we all battled to the death? A look of revelation lit up their faces and they all directed their next attacks at my wife. Her gaze directed itself to me, and it looked more like a “you are dead” stare.
Actually, as I am writing this, the number of additional things that always happen will be provided in later posts. In the meantime, be sure to add any other anecdotes of games gone awry that you’ve experienced in the Comments section below. Also, be sure to subscribe to this blog. I plan to update it monthly but will answer comments regularly.
Neal Berkowitz works for DNB Gaming and the parent company DNB Publishing Ltd as a Game Tester and Associate Editor. He is also a computer analyst and has worked in all areas of systems and programming from design to testing and maintenance. He has worked design for hardware, firmware, and software over his multi-decade career. He loves boardgames and RPG games going back to the D&D © v1. In addition, he loves his camera and taking pictures while cruising.
