Board Game Weekend

Newsletter 2024-06-25

I don’t only assemble my friends when I need to rescue an uncooperative animal. Sometimes, we get together for games.

Okay, we actually have game nights all the time. I round up between four and six humans who can tolerate my presence for a few hours in a row and force them to play make-believe with me over little bits of cardboard. This weekend was different. It wasn’t just a time to move around some meeples. It was a replacement for an entire vacation. A few years ago, my Friday night Halo crew and I rented an Airbnb in Vegas. Booking a house with a pool is relatively affordable if you have enough people and stay away from the Strip. I made several miscalculations on that front. I didn’t have as many friends as I thought. Or, more accurately, I didn’t have enough friends who would pay to hang out with me somewhere else. Honestly, asking people to hang out with me for free is kind of pushing it. The plane tickets weren’t even the most expensive part. Staying away from the Strip turned out to be a costly mistake. For what we spent on fifteen-minute Uber rides, we could have bought our own horse-drawn carriage. I’m not sure how stallions do in dry heat. We could have used camels. The least expensive part was the gambling, which was also the least fun. I don’t enjoy setting money on fire, so I stopped five minutes into the trip when I lost my first twenty bucks. When I think about that adventure, I still get upset about all the things I could have done with that twenty dollars instead of handing it over to a casino. I could have turned that into four McDonald’s value meals. I hope Ronald doesn’t hold a grudge.

The most fun we had was day drinking in the pool at the Airbnb. I didn’t need to fly across the country for that. I have friends and alcohol in Indiana. I also have a house. No need to rent a different one when I already paid for a place to live. Replace the pool with board games and you’ve got the recipe for the best staycation ever. I’ll believe any lie if it saves me money. My wife Lola and I invited all our friends to our house for a weekend of at-home fun. Without plane tickets as a barrier, we could summon practically everyone we knew. A few of them even showed up. The stage was set for the most frugal way possible to have a good time. Party on.

The downside of hosting is we had to panic clean. I solved that problem by overextending myself and running out of time. It’s hard to vacuum the curtains when you have to work all day and then drive your kids to a thousand different places. Instead of focusing on cleanliness, I concentrated on packing the beer fridge to maximum capacity with Tetris-like precision. Nobody notices the dust on the baseboards when they’re on their third Busch Light. I was also less motivated to hunt down every speck of dust because I wasn’t certain who was coming. Our Facebook invitations received seven yeses and six dozen maybes. We expected anywhere between no one and half the population of Indiana to show up. I had to be ready for any eventuality. To be extra prepared, I stopped cleaning altogether and made one final grocery run. You can judge me for living in squalor if you want, but you can never look down on me for letting the beer run out.

I didn’t skimp on the food, either. In the Midwest, sending a guest home hungry is punishable by stoning. To avoid that terrible fate, I zeroed in on the bakery clearance rack at Walmart. I’m a big fan of cheap cakes close to their expiration dates. Gluttony is more fun when it’s also a race. I wasn’t sure how many cakes to have on hand for between zero and infinity guests. To be safe, I went with six—plus a platter of twenty-four cupcakes I bought at the last minute when I became worried that half a dozen regular-sized cakes might not be enough. The amount of cake people actually wanted at the party was none. The only conversation I had all weekend was asking everyone why they weren’t eating cake. Even after I gave away entire cakes to people as they were leaving, I still had two left. As a matter of principle, I’ll eat them both myself to prove that everyone else missed out. I look forward to ingesting so much frosting that I see the face of God. Maybe he’ll hand me a glass of milk.

Board game weekend kicked off Friday afternoon, though not by my choice. I was ready to go at 9:00 a.m.. Unfortunately, most other people had a lame thing called “work.” Several of my friends took the day off but didn’t feel like waking up early or had a considerable drive ahead of them. We didn’t have enough people to play a game until almost 1 p.m., which is a disappointingly reasonable time to start drinking. Not that letting things get out of control was an option. All of my kids were home, and I still had to drive them places. If we do a board game weekend again next year, I won’t hire a babysitter, but I might enlist a professional chauffeur to handle all child transportation duties on my behalf. Maybe I could keep them around for the rest of the year, too. Do me a favor and buy an extra million copies of my book this week so I can afford a full-time driver.

Things amped up Friday evening when Lola and the rest of the responsible adults got off work. We greeted them with a lethal load of carbs. We had my frozen store-bought lasagna, my friend Peter’s homemade gluten-free pasta bake, and my sister-in-law Alice’s crock pot full of macaroni and cheese. In this house, pasta is a blood type. By the end of the dinner, our player count climbed to eleven, and the party achieved its final form. In the planning stages, I thought we might have to break into smaller games, but we managed to keep everybody together around one table. At our most crowded moment, I brought out Deception Murder in Hong Kong, which is among my favorite pastimes. Nothing brings friends together like accusing each other of a violent homicide. Things got loud and shouty, as is our custom. Nothing got spilled, and no one’s appendix exploded, which are my only metrics for a successful game night. Everyone went home by the perfectly reasonable hour of 11:00 p.m.. We are very old. It was a fine start to a great weekend. I was more than ready for day two.

Photo by Christopher Paul High on Unsplash

Saturday, I once again found myself waiting. I assumed everyone would rush over at the crack of dawn, but I underestimated how much people like not spending all day with me. I used the morning to run errands and bolster our cake supply just in case. The first arrivals didn’t show up until 11 a.m., excluding Greg who spent the night at my house. Peter and his wife Delilah kept another of my out-of-town guests at their house. They’re better hosts than I am, so they needed the morning hours to offer her a luxurious homemade breakfast. Get the kind of friends whose homes you can use as boarding houses for your other friends. There’s no stopping you once you master secondhand mooching. We finally had enough people to play a game around lunch time. The first beers were cracked, and the day got underway. The board games never stood a chance.

Once players started showing up, they didn’t stop. All those “maybes” turned into an avalanche of “yeses.” It wasn’t a day for strategy games. The only genres we played were loud and louder. The crown jewel of the afternoon was our classic hybrid abomination of Cards Against Humanity and Telestrations. Instead of laying out cards that say terrible things, you have to draw those terrible things for other players to interpret. There’s no way that could go wrong. This time, we had to impose additional rules. We didn’t suddenly become more prudish. We were just disappointed by our own lack of creativity. Left to our own devices, we turned every prompt into a certain anatomical feature. There is such a thing as too many penises. To set things right, we declared that if you drew male genitalia, you had to take a shot. On an unrelated note, two bottles of Kraken disappeared awfully fast. Once again, we shut things down around 11 p.m.. I didn’t know if there would be a third day of Board Game Weekend or not. We were all pretty spent, and our borderline introverts were peopled out. I wasn’t one of them. I’m always up for playing games if I have any friends left, which I won’t if I keep trying to get them to eat discount cakes. I didn’t expect to see these people ever again.

To my surprise, we had a full house Sunday. Most of the crowd showed up around noon. I put out the finest leftovers the previous two days had to offer. My friends ate everything but the cake. It’s now a matter of principle for them. I will forever be cursed with uneaten desserts. We had enough players that we had to stick to party games for a third straight day. We hoarded sushi, swapped work-related meltdowns, and debated the ethics of running over people with a trolley. My game collection covers all genres. We made it past dinner before we remembered that we needed to stop having fun. If you enjoy yourself too much, the universe will notice. Those smitings are never as random as they look.

By my admittedly low standards, it was a wildly successful weekend. People showed up, nobody cried, and nothing got broken, other than my spirit when I lost almost everything we played. It was an extremely economical way to reconnect with far-flung friends as long as you don’t consider how much I’ve spent on board games over the years. That’s a number I’ll take to my grave. If I had to choose between flying across the country to hang out in a literal desert or waiting in my dining room and having my friends come to me, I know which option I’m going with. Staying home is the real jackpot.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James