Never On Sunday

We host a monthly Game Day: anywhere from four to ten friends get together and play board games. And tomorrow’s the day. We have a few new games to try, but I don’t know whether I have the heart.

There’s a certain trade-off between rich strategic and/or tactical play on the one hand, and accessibility and ease of play on the other. Everyone has their individual preferences, and every group finds its own balance between these competing qualities. Our group tends to orbit games just a whisker more complex than Settlers of Catan—Small World is the current favorite, and we tend to play a lighter game toward the day’s end, when brains are burnt out. Games markedly longer or more complex than the gold standard of Catan, such as Agricola or 1830, aren’t very popular; deeper games get neglected, as do the players who want to tackle them from time to time.

Sadly, our two new games waiting in the wings, Through the Ages and Civilization (the board game) fall firmly in this latter category. Both are ambitious attempts to encapsulate all human history into a workable package. Eileene and I took a stab at Ages a while ago, the simplified tutorial version, and that was modestly complicated—nothing show-stopping, but lots of fiddly maintenance functions, like producing and consuming food to maintain as well as grow your labor pool. The full game will doubtless be even more tangled; whether all the extra work will yield extra fun is less obvious. Civ never even got fully unwrapped.

Talking people into trying games like these is a chore in itself. Teaching the rules to a table full of players, not all of whom are willing to sit through the instruction, is harder still, especially when still learning the rules myself. So I tend to beg off from trying.

Yet the more time that passes, the more I suspect that’s just a convenient excuse. I’m beginning to think that maybe I don’t really want to dig into long, slogging games myself. This is becoming more apparent as a new crop of friends brings new games, and I’m on the learning end of things. I’m still willing to take on complex games, but I’ve grown to see complexity as a necessary evil, whereas in my youth it was simply how things were, or even a positive attraction. Experience has taught me to ask, if only in the privacy of my own head, “Is all this really necessary to make the game fun?” And increasingly, the answer is “No.”