Board and Card Games I Like

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks which board and card games book reviewers like. 

Well, the card games category is easy. I don't. When I was growing up, many churches had rules about packs of cards in members' houses. We didn't belong to those churches, but we didn't want to trigger preaching fits in people who did, so we didn't have any playing cards either. One summer a pack of cards turned up in a house we were renting. I was old enough to know better but I thought the next-door neighbors were the type of young, worldly people who might have a use for them, so I slipped out and left the cards on their porch. Within minutes they came around to ask whatever they had done to give anyone the impression, etc., etc. So I did not grow up playing card games and have no fond memories associated with them. 

Board games were more acceptable to "conservative" Christians, generally, so I grew up playing some of them: 

1. Candy Land 

Typical board game, for young children, with color-coded cards for those who couldn't read yet. Instead of chutes and ladders it had desserts. I played this game at primary school. Some things were found only at school, just as other things were found only at home; I had no problem with that until, while I was home with mumps, a catalogue of board games fell out of a box of Cheerios. It was possible to have Candy Land games, and likewise Monopoly and Parcheesi and Battleship and even a Ouija board if you wanted one of those at home, if you sent in a dollar or so and a few Cheerios box tops! I wanted to collect box tops and buy board games! My parents conferred and refused to buy Cheerios again for more than two years. 

2. Bingo 

Several versions of this game were played in grades two and three to help everyone learn their letters and numbers. Regular Bingo, and other five-letter words that featured different letters, and versions where the numbers were read out in the form of equations that had to be solved to find the number. I didn't like Bingo enough to want to have a board at home, but when my brother was in grade two someone gave us a set. Sometimes we played Bingo at home.

3. Password 

It wasn't really a board game or a card game. The home version of the short-lived TV game show did feature cool colored plastic covers that allowed each player to see a word the other player had to guess. The words to be guessed were printed on special cards in blue, and "Password" was printed across them in red to make the blue letters hard to see without the special covers. We'd never seen the TV show and had only the rules printed in the top of the box to go on. We had a good time with the game until the covers fell apart. 

4. Checkers 

My brother and I played checkers for years until Dad took a job where the grown-up men sat around playing checkers. They were paid by the hour, not by the job, and usually had at least one hour to kill after their jobs were done. Dad wanted to practice so he started playing checkers with us and teaching us strategies. We had never cared enough about who won to have paid attention to strategies, before. We learned. Dad had been quite good at checkers (he'd never played chess) and quickly became the office champion. He kept trying out strategies with us, and our games improved to the point where each of us beat Dad once. After that, my brother continued playing checkers with Dad; I retired, but still played with my siblings when Dad was at work. 

5. Chess 

In grade six some of us started playing chess at school. I learned which pieces could move where, but didn't give the game much thought before marriage. My husband was quite good at chess. Once again I gave the game serious thought, played until I beat my teacher once, and declined all further invitations. 

6. Scrabble 

Being a well-known word-nerd, I had no qualms about beating my husband repeatedly at Scrabble. I did apologize first, but I not only won a game with "qiviut" on a triple word score, but said a Canadian ought to have recognized the word without needing to look it up. He thought that whole episode was funny. I liked his sense of humor. 

7. Connect Four 

This was not really a board game, though it obviously developed out of one. In the late 1970s it was a game played with a vertical frame into which players took turns dropping big plastic disks. A whole four-generation family could pass the game around a table and play, as recommended by doctors and physical therapists to help Grandpa exercise his hand after a stroke, Sister practice working around cerebral palsy, and Mama feel that the family were happy together while she recovered from surgery. I was the very inadequate home nurse in such a family during a few weeks when Mother was not available. We played this game every evening. 

8. Parcheesi 

An aunt gave my brother and me a beautiful Parcheesi set. We played the game often, until my natural sister sneaked into my room, tried to play the game, and spilled the pieces all over the floor. Naturally a piece was never found, and the game was never quite so much fun again. "And so you see why we should not have expensive board games," Mother would say. "And so we see why people who already have two children should not have another baby," I would not say out loud. Nevertheless, when we wanted to take a long hike and were burdened with "...and take the Baby with you," even though we often walked along the top of a steep cliff we brought Baby home unharmed, every single time. 

9. Jigsaw Puzzles 

Talk about missing pieces...but I've always liked any and all jigsaw puzzles. After putting them together we used to break them down and try to put them together faster the next time--except for a thousand-piece puzzle on which Mother and I gave up quickly, leaving Dad a whole week to put the puzzle together, and when that one was finished we glued it onto a board and framed it. On the back of the board, I remember pasting the first printing (torn out of Redbook) of Judith Viorst's story/poem, "I'll Fix Anthony." I was four years old. Two years later I was in school; everyone had an official friend and an official enemy, and my enemy was called Anthony. 

10. Operation 

This was a board game designed to test and improve hand coordination. The game was laid out in the shape of a patient with little odd-shaped openings containing all the things he needed to have removed--funny bone, broken heart, and about a dozen more tokens based on figures of speech that do not really refer to medical conditions. Players had to take turns picking them out with special tweezers, and if your tweezers touched the side of the board, when the battery was in, quite a loud buzzer would sound and the game piece would fall back into the slot. We had played this game at friends' houses before the year we had the junk store, when Dad brought home a set to put on the junk display. Either it sold on the first day or it was one of the things Mother didn't want to handle, wrapped in a bag of real garbage, and sent back to the county landfill. At least I can blame lack of opportunities to play this game for my lack of fine hand coordination.

Later some housemates and I repaid most of our social obligations by inviting friends, young and old, to "Game Parties." Board games were set up on tables all over the house and the idea was for guests to try to get a turn to play one round of each game, nibbling, sipping, and chatting as they went along. This is still my favorite theme for large booze-free parties thrown to repay obligations to people someone knows from grade six, people other people know from work, and people met through entertainments at the retirement project.