Team Players

Inspirational song: Ice Ice Baby (Vanilla Ice)

The most problematic aspect of board games, the part that irritates me the most, is the competitive side of them. When games turn into a ruthless, "screw your buddy" battle to the death, that's when I have to walk away from them. I don't want to play something that hurts someone else's feelings, and it takes me far longer than I care to admit to get over hurt feelings when I'm the one the other players gang up on. This is why I stopped playing Monopoly when the kids were still in grade school. It's why I used to need to leave the room when Mr S-P and our college roommate (the one who is now in our D&D group) used to play gin rummy, and go for each other's jugular in game-play, every single round. It stresses me out. I'm often grumpy after Mario game nights, too, and I doubt I hide it well.

So tonight, after the main afternoon football game was over (yay, a Broncos win!), neighbor T pulled out a couple of games that he ordered on Black Friday, that we had never heard of, at first I was nervous. One, there was the fear of the unknown, two, there was the reluctance to apply my scattered brain power to learning the rules (harder than I expected, because I was more unfocused than I realized), and three, there was the chance that this could turn into an "everyone gang up on Player X" situation. Imagine my surprise when the first description of the game was "we have to team up, not play against each other." This new game, one I'd never encountered before tonight called Pandemic, required us to collaborate to beat the game.

The first time around, there were four of us, none of whom knew how to strategize to beat the game. We made several key errors, and the outbreaks quickly got out of hand. We lost badly. During our dinner break, my foster daughter's husband arrived after work, and he had played before. He helped us figure out how to work together, and we won on the very last turn the next time, and handily the time after that. How novel!

If we play this again, we can start on a higher difficulty level to challenge us, now that we know the methods. I hope we do play it again eventually. It was nice having a game that wasn't a competition, but rather a group effort to pull everyone across the finish line together.