Sometimes, you just have to give up the dream. I know that now. It’s important to admit your shortcomings. To know who you are as a person, as a people really. For me that day came when I gave up on board games. It was a hard loss.
Past. I grew up on board games. It sounds so iconic, but I swear it really happened. Holidays and Sunday dinners at my grandma’s, the entire extended family would gather around Scrabble or that 1980s fave, Trivial Pursuit. We would spend hours laughing at how much we did or didn’t know. Trivial Pursuit was a lot of fun. We cackled when someone got the obvious free space question of how many mittens did the three little kittens wear? As for Scrabble, my grandmother was the undisputed queen. If anyone ever beat her, I don’t recall. I credit my spelling abilities for trying.
I don’t know if I envisioned that same commitment to family fun for our immediate family, or if it just seemed to be an adult requirement to have a cabinet of board games in a household. Whatever the reason, we had a shelf of games: Monopoly, Life and Parcheesi. I’ve never understood how to play Parcheesi, but I guess every home just manifests that one. I’m not sure how that got here. We had the required Scrabble, checkers, chess and all the great kids’ games like Candyland, Twister and matching games where Winnie the Pooh had to find all his honey pots. With the exception of playing with those children’s games when they were very small, board games never took off with Team Seabolt. We love togetherness, don’t get me wrong. We would just rather hang out in a boat together. We enjoyed winter sports on the sledding hill, cooking together, eating together and laughing uproariously together. What we didn’t do was gather around your old scrabble board.
Storage
So over the years, the board games collected dust until I decided to organize them once again. I was optimistic that if I just displayed them properly we would want to play. It was all about the presentation, obviously. I fell into a Pinterest rabbit hole one day and saw that if they were more accessible or more cutely displayed, we might suddenly become a board-game family. I spent good money on plastic bags with zippers. I carefully decanted all the games, including boards, game pieces and instructions into the bags. I taped the covers to the bags. I then put them all in an adorable big basket with a lid. That was a few years ago. No one has touched them since.
Alas, as anyone but me could’ve seen, cuter storage does not change the fact that we just don’t desire to play board games when we get together. This is not a dig on board games. I’ve already established that I grew up with amazing fond memories of them. For some reason, they just haven’t taken off in this generation.
Last weekend, I cleaned out the board games. I kept Othello (a niche classic) and some playing cards. I also kept one Uno deck. I guess in case all the power and the internet goes out and every single book, cereal box or random envelope I could read was missing. If I have to pass the time, we will always have Uno.
With apologies to my beloved Gram, I dropped the Scrabble mantle.
