Hot take: My neighbor's kid just schooled me on what makes a good board game night

I was setting up a game of Catan for my usual group last weekend, you know, the whole shebang. My neighbor's 14-year-old son was hanging around and just said, 'Why do you guys always play the same three games?' I kinda brushed it off, but then he said, 'My friends and I try a new game every month, even if it looks dumb. It's more about the surprise than winning.' That hit different, man. I realized my whole collection of 50+ games just sits there while we replay Ticket to Ride for the hundredth time. We've become those geeks who talk about new games but never actually play them. It's about comfort, not discovery. How many of you are stuck in a rut with your game group?

3 comments

3 Comments

daniel1408d ago

Spot on. That kid nailed it. We get so caught up in mastering the games we own that we forget the whole point is to have a new experience together. My shelf looks like a store but we just cycle between the same safe bets. It's like buying a cookbook and only ever making scrambled eggs. You have to force the issue, pick something totally unknown, and be okay with it being a mess. The fun is in figuring it out as a group, even if the game itself is bad.

matthewdixon8d ago

Totally get that. We pulled some weird looking box off the shelf last month, a game about building a bee hive or something. Rules made no sense for the first hour and we messed up scoring twice. But we were all laughing so hard trying to figure it out, way more than our usual polished game nights. Now it's a running joke. What's the last "mess" you guys tried?

wendy1318d ago

Is it really that big of a deal though? I mean, sometimes you just want to relax with a game you know. Maybe the comfort is the whole point.