The Remnants of Play

This weekend, my mother came to visit me in my new town, and we managed to get a lot of play time in even while exploring the new town. We played with LEGO, which mostly involved repairing her LEGO camper that had suffered heavy damage during its last trip; my mother colored a bit; and we played card and board games. We joked about being big kids, and generally had a much better time than we would have if we had just watched TV all weekend. After she left, I was picking up the apartment, and I came across the remnants of our play: the score sheet, the cards out of their box, etc.

The games we played varied wildly. We started with a National Park themed Trivial Pursuit card game, which was almost completely impossible for people who aren’t experts in National Park trivia. My mom wanted to approach the game as a learning experience, so I went along and we had fun. I don’t know if I actually learned much because the questions were often really obscure, but I did learn that I don’t really know anything about National Parks. I finally begged off of this game, and we moved on to a Camp Ground trivia game. This game was quickly derailed when I asked her the first trivia question. She answered, but we realized the card game requires a decoder to show the actual answer, so we had to give it up. We also played a game called Race to the Top that she had picked up in Colorado. Race to the Top was a dice game that didn’t seem to require much skill or strategy, so we both quickly got bored with that game.

forbiddenislandI really enjoyed playing the games though, so the next day I suggested we make a trip to Target to pick up a game we might enjoy better. My mom expressed an interest in Ticket to Ride, but was afraid to pay so much for a game she might not like. Because she’s never played a strategy type game, I suggested we pick up a less expensive one to see if she likes the type of game play before spending $50 or so on a more expensive game, so we settled on Forbidden Island. We also picked up UNO because I was feeling nostalgic. These two new games led to a different type of fun game night. Forbidden Island is cooperative, so that was a new experience for her (and somewhat for me as well). We had a lot of fun working together to try to complete the mission and get off of the island before it flooded. I get the feeling we’ll be playing Forbidden Island or something similar at Thanksgiving. Then, we switched to UNO, which is really a strange game when playing with only 2 players. The game goes lightening fast with 2 players, so we kept score as suggested in the instructions. I was the score keeper, and I managed to mess it up by getting confused as to which column belong to each of us. We had to restart a game we had already almost finished because of my not-so-stellar score keeping.

It was that score sheet that got me thinking about the remnants of the game and even the remnants of the weekend. I moved here a little over a month ago to start my new job, and while I love the job and the town so far, it hadn’t yet felt like home. My new apartment, job, and town are all great, but they felt strange and unfamiliar. Our typical routine of exploring a new area is fun, but when I saw the remnants of our play, I realized that playing games injected life into my new apartment and made it feel like home.

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