Board games have always been part of my life, since the time I was a youngster and all through my adult years.
I am very fond of word games – Scrabble, along with its offshoots like Boggle and Bananagrams, have always been family favorites. My new go-to game is called A Genius Square, a fast-paced puzzle game designed for one or two players. It challenges players to fill a 6×6 grid using various shapes, thus testing one’s spatial skills. What’s great about it is that you can play against yourself or against another person. If you like Tetris, you’ll love this game.
Occasionally, I will take out an old classic like Mastermind, which still holds up as a great game to play (we need more of those black and white pegs for the game, though, which seem to have disappeared from many years of use).
We are big fans of Rummikub, and when we entertain sleepover guests, we’ll often take out the Rummikub set on Friday night and play. (You can’t play this game with only two people; it’s best with four or five players.) Our daughter Tova, of blessed memory, loved playing this game, and she was quite skilled at it. (For the life of me, I cannot figure how comfortable she was understanding the number configurations in this game, considering that n she struggled mightily in school with math. It’s fascinating how the brain works.)
However, I’d like to reminisce about three classic board games in more detail, two from my youth and one from adulthood.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers playing Monopoly as a child. This popular board game, which was first introduced in 1935 by Parker Brothers, was a staple in our home. We usually played the game as a family on Friday night during the winter, when Shabbat started early and we could spend a couple of hours after dinner competing in the game.
My father was usually the banker (my mother was not a game player), and I played with my three siblings. As I recall, my brother always demanded to use the racing car as his game piece; for some strange reason, I always preferred the shoe (don’t ask me why).
As for strategy, I always loved the orange spaces—St. James Place, New York Avenue and Tennessee Avenue—and I would do everything I could to obtain these properties. I thought that there would be a greater chance for people to land on these properties because over the course of a game, players often spent time in jail – and the orange properties were six to nine spaces away from the jail, ripe for landing once someone got out of jail.
I also thought the railroads were a good buy, and I always tried to accumulate as many of the four railroad properties as I could.
As I recall, my brother Eric seemed to win the game an inordinate number of the times we played, perhaps a foretelling of his eventual success in the world of finance.
My wife and I also played the game with our kids, but for some reason they didn’t take to the game like we did as youngsters. I’m not even sure if we still have the game in our possession anymore.
Of course, there was also the game of Risk, manufactured by Parker Brothers and first introduced in 1959. Who can forget those long summer Shabbat afternoons, when three- or four-hour Risk games with friends in the neighborhood was not uncommon. The game always took interesting twists and turns and never seemed to end, until someone finally was able to take control and conquer the world.
I always liked to start accumulating armies in South America, which was relatively easy to defend, and I would expand from there. That was a good strategy sometimes, but others who preferred to load up in Africa or even Australia sometimes were successful, too. I always stacked my troops on choke points, where opponents were likely to attack. And I always tried to expand strategically, never spreading myself too thin and carefully taking calculated risks where appropriate. Timing is everything in the game of Risk, and I would usually wait until the middle or end of the game to make big moves for global domination.
I clearly remember the unusual geographic map of the world on the Risk board game. Kamchatka was a very important part of the Risk game, but I have never seen an area called by that name on any other map or in any geography class! I also got a kick out of how big Afghanistan was on the Risk map; while Afghanistan is not a small country, it is certainly nowhere near as big as China or India (yet it is shown to be much larger on the Risk map of the world). And Vladimir Putin should only know how big Ukraine is on the Risk map – bigger in area than all of Europe!
Finally, there is the game of Trivial Pursuit. This game remains one of the best-selling board games of all time, with more than 100 million copies sold in 26 countries and 17 languages. It has become an iconic part of trivia culture, continuing to challenge and entertain generations of new players.
I clearly remember the beginning days of this game in the early 1980s. My wife and I were newly married, and when the game was first introduced, we bought a set and often invited other couples to come over on Saturday night to play. The idea of a trivia game was something very innovative at the time and the popularity of the game was fueled by the growing popularity of trivia-based entertainment and game shows at the time.
The game features six categories of trivia questions: geography, entertainment, history, arts and literature, science and nature, and sports and leisure. Players move around the board, answering questions to earn colored wedges, with the goal of filling their “pie” with all six wedges and answering a final question correctly.
There are 6,000 total trivia questions. Each card in the game has one question for each of the six categories, and the game includes a large deck of question cards to ensure plenty of variety during gameplay. At this point, I guess there are some folks who have gone through all the questions and know all the answers, but back in the 1980s when the game first was launched, there were enough questions to make sure that the game was played fairly.
It was quite a phenomenon in the early 1980s, but like anything else, some other games eventually struck the fancy of game players and replaced Trivial Pursuit in popularity. However, this game will always have a warm place in my heart.
What are your favorite board games?
Michael Feldstein, who lives in Stamford, is the author of “Meet Me in the Middle” (meet-me-in-the-middle-book.com), a collection of essays on contemporary Jewish life. He can be reached at [email protected].
