Well, this past week I was looking down into the holler toward Webb’s Creek thinking about how challenging times like these call for us to go back to the source of our inner strength, character and core values; board games. Yahtzee comes to mind. Something special happens when a family gathers around the kitchen table with a cupful of dice and a cupful of hot chocolate. The struggle of achieving four of a kind and the sheer joy of beating your sister to pay her back for “ratting” you out when you ditched that day in high school is family bonding at its best. There was a time long before Al Gore invented XBox and PacMan when board games brought together family units and built America’s social fabric of capitalism and wealth creation. The first step toward our economic recovery is getting back to the basics and I’ve got dibs on the little car for my game piece in the Monopoly game.
Physical evidence of board games goes back over three thousand years. Folks were playing checkers about 1400 years B.C. and even chess is about 2,000 years old. Dice are still referred to as “bones” because they were first made from the knuckles of sheep (which always land one of four ways). Isn’t it amazing that folks were playing checkers as Rome burned, when Vesuvius erupted and knights were knighted? How do you say “King me!” in Middle English? Scrabble was invented by Alfred Butts in 1948. Those that knew Alfred were not surprised. Board games often require a combination of greed, strategy, luck and deal making …the same core values of humongous business conglomerates. It is no small coincidence that the board games Risk, Monopoly and Sorry were also the favorites of our beloved investment bankers and stock managers.
Board games taught us everything about greed, competition and failure. Unfortunately, Boardwalk and Park Place were never in my real estate portfolio and more often than not I was the slumlord of Mediterranean and Baltic Avenues. Parker Brothers’ Monopoly game is the most played board game in the world (750 million people) and it should not go unnoticed that the only way to win is to seize cash and bankrupt all of the other players. The game of “Sorry” leads you along your merry journey around the board until just before reaching the finish line someone lands on your space and sends you and your game piece all the way back to the starting point. That game offers great practice in saying “Sorry” while holding back a grin at the same time. Small children are introduced to Candyland in order to teach them the importance of sugar before progressing to more advanced games like Chinese Checkers and Bingo. Life begins with Candyland and Bingo and ends the same way.
Electronic games are the preferred choice of the younger generation and it seems that violence and killing is the “winning strategy” for way too many of them. Bankrupting someone or jumping over his checker is simply not enough to win anymore. Winning often requires electronically killing and/or maiming many others. Like the comparatively harmless Candyland game led to hard core Monopoly and occasional addiction to Bingo…Space Invaders and Frogger evolved to realistic 3-D games of killing. There is no humor in “killing” games.
Yes, board games have been around for thousands of years, but sadly most of them have left the shelves in our lower level game rooms when we threw out the green shag carpeting. Time moves on and electronic games are taking over. I can’t even recall the last time I played Yahtzee and had some hot chocolate. I do see a light at the end of the tunnel. There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon and a silver lining around this storm cloud and it has a name: Poker.
Poker incorporates all of the important core values of greed, risk, socialization, strategy, lying, bluffing, bankrupting others and securing cash. As a bonus the cards are decorated with photographs or cool designs. Poker even has its own television shows and cards are being dealt daily throughout America. Hmmmm. On second thought maybe I’ll just buy a Yahtzee game…and on third thought… I did kind of like the feel of that shag carpeting between my toes. Oh, the games we play. That is just how it looks from my log cabin.
is a local speaker and co-author of the interactive national park hiking book series, Scavenger Hike Adventures, Falcon Guides, Globe Pequot Press. Contact John at scavengerhike@aol.com. Artist G. Webb lives in Pittman Center, Tennessee. Gwebbgallery.com.
