This was the summer of not seeing my children. While we’ve taken multiple road trips across the Midwest together over the last three months, this season has also featured the most time my wife Lola and I have ever spent away from our kids. They stayed with my parents for ten nights while Lola and I went on a river cruise up the Rhine, and then, four days after we got back, they went to stay with Lola’s parents for the weekend. My kids would have taken it personally, but more grandparent time meant more candy, so they didn’t complain. Their love can definitely be bought with sugar at a one-to-one exchange rate. I wasn’t deliberately avoiding my children, but our entire summer was booked up, and all of our kid-free activities just happened to be clustered toward the end. No sooner had we gotten home from Europe than we shipped the girls off again for the best of all possible reasons: We were throwing a wild party for grown-ups, although “wild” is relative when you’re in your thirties. These days, staying awake through two movies in one night is our version of extreme. Truthfully, there was nothing going on at this party the kids couldn’t see, but we needed their beds for people driving in from out of state, so they got the boot again to go be spoiled somewhere else. They’ve now spent basically a month straight living off ice cream.
The party that made us kick them out was actually a scaled down version of a much grander plan. Lola and I had our first ever Friendscation last summer. We spent four nights at an AirBNB in Las Vegas with some of the friends who play Halo with us on Friday nights. I paid for the flights with the travel voucher I got when a convention I was going to was canceled due to covid, and the house was pretty cheap when split five ways. (Well, four ways since Lola and I paid two of the shares. Marriage has a lot of hidden costs.) We didn’t blow much money gambling, either, since it was boring and terrible. If I win money, I feel nothing, and if I lose money, no matter how little, I’m miserable for all time. After I lost my first twenty dollars, I was done with casinos for good. Someday, I’ll pull off an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist to get my double sawbuck back. Our biggest expense, though, wasn’t gambling, but the Ubers to and from the Strip. For how much it cost to take one for the short ride there and back, it would have been cheaper to buy a horse. You might think it would be too hot for one in the desert, but I’ve heard good things about a certain horse with no name. The best part of the trip was also the cheapest. We had the most fun when we were just sitting around the rental house with friends we otherwise might not have seen all year. It was something we definitely wanted to do again. As we pondered other travel destinations for our next Friendscation, I decided to drop the exotic location part and just have the whole thing at my house. It would be way cheaper, and possibly more fun. It would also keep us away from prying ears as we plotted how to get my twenty dollars back.
Naturally, I shoehorned my newfound obsession, board games, into our more modest Freindscation plans. If you remain stationary for more than thirty seconds, I’m guaranteed to pull out a box of something to play. Sit down at your own risk. But here’s the secret about board games that people in the hobby don’t want you to know: It’s not about the games. When I acquire a new one, I’m not purchasing a bunch of cardboard and playing cards; I’m buying a social life. Smalltalk is fine. I really do want to know what’s going on in your life. But after we’ve updated each other about work (fine), parents (fine), and kids (alarming and possibly plotting against me), there’s not much to say. Once the introductory conversation is over, we need a shared project to keep having fun together. With board games, instead of rehashing the same bland topics over and over again, we’re exploring haunted houses or building space fleets or escaping raptors. All of those activities give me a chance to drink and swear, which is all I want from any social interaction when my kids aren’t around. And maybe even when they are around if their bedroom doors are closed.
In our original plan for this year’s Friendscation, we were just going to invite the same small group of people from last year’s trip. Greg was going to drive two and a half hours from Chicago and Seth was going to drive just over an hour from central Illinois. That wouldn’t have put too much pressure on me. We’re good enough friends that I don’t particularly care if I waste their time. I’ve set the bar low in that relationship. But then Lola added one of her friends who agreed to drive five hours from Ohio. I felt like I owed it to her not to be the worst host in the world. Clearly that was where we needed to draw the line. But Lola pushed on, inviting our Wisconsin friends Rocco and Phoebe, who accepted, too. They would have to drive seven hours to see us. They have a boat, so I couldn’t afford to torpedo that friendship. Now I actually had to throw a good party for entirely selfish reasons. I was in way over my head.
That still wasn’t the end of it. Lola invited some co-workers. To balance things out, I invited some local friends. Then Lola invited more people. At first, I had been reluctant to add more guests because of player count considerations, but by the day before Friendscation, I gave up and invited practically everyone I knew. It had gone from a weekend-long gathering of our closest friends to an all-out rager, or as much of a rager as a party can be when the goal is still to get together and play board games. The challenge was that, while I own a million games, I only know how to play some of them, and I’ve only had a chance to teach Lola the rules to a fraction of those. (Every time I explain a new game, I push us that much closer to divorce, so I try to space them out.) If even a quarter of the people we invited showed up, we’d have to split into two (or three or four) games at a time, and there would have to be someone to teach and lead each one. We were in danger of having a bottleneck where we could only run half as many games as we needed, leaving people stranded with nothing to do. Then our board game party would devolve into a regular party, and nobody likes those. It’s possible that last part is a lie. I put out an S.O.S., asking people to bring games they already knew how to play so they could teach the rules to others. Then I just had to wait to see who would show up with what.
The weirdest part about inviting people was that I had to keep stressing that this event was kid-free. I’m usually the guy who wants my children at everything, once-in-a-lifetime trips to Europe and an annual trip to Wisconsin notwithstanding. Yes, I’ve been ditching my offspring a lot lately, but that’s atypical for me. I usually like the slightly malevolent but always entertaining chaos they bring to any situation. I will forever believe that children make every wedding better. If you don’t have swarms of small humans weaving between drunk people on the dance floor, did you even get married? But this time, I kicked out my children to free up beds for out-of-state guests, and I didn’t want to be a hypocrite by then letting other people bring their kids. If my children were banned, everybody else’s kids were, too. It was awkward, though, to reach out to friends and say, “We’d love to see you, but absolutely not your children.” Surprisingly, nobody took offense. Apparently they were eager to ditch their kids, too.
My father-in-law picked up our girls Friday afternoon, and board game weekend kicked off a few hours later. People showed up on time ready to play and drink. The one exception was Phoebe, who stayed home because she had a cold, although Rocco said it was really a concussion. Pro-tip: Don’t let your husband pull you behind a boat for any reason. Just pay for marriage counseling. Within the first hour, we had enough people that we had to split into two games. Then, after more alcohol and pizza, we switched to giant shouty games for huge groups. We had around twelve people at that point, which was more than I expected for the whole weekend, let alone for the first night. Free booze and no kids are the siren’s song for people in their thirties. One party game we played was based on the trolley dilemma where you have to decide who to kill and who to save. For the record, moral conundrums and alcohol do mix, but only if you’re in it for your own twisted amusement. We’re definitely all going to hell. Another popular big group game was Just One, the game we played last month in Minnesota that ended with wookiee noises and the long-buried tale of an ex blowing off his thumb. This time, we played until nearly 2 a.m., with multiple people who had planned to drive home instead opting to crash on our couches. We all surprised ourselves with how hard we went. Forget the fact that we’re all allegedly adults. None of us should be left unsupervised.
We got a late start the next day, I’m sure for reasons entirely unrelated to hangovers. A special honor goes to Rocco, who, after seemingly having a lot of fun playing games Friday night, woke up on my couch Saturday morning and drove straight back to Wisconsin without sticking around for the second day of the party or saying goodbye to anyone. I shouldn’t be too offended, though. The secondary purpose of his trip to Indiana was to drop off his kids at his in-laws’ house, where they were going to spend the next twelve days. After leaving them there Friday, Rocco drove right by his in-laws’ house Saturday on his way back to Wisconsin without stopping to say goodbye. At least he treats me like family.
Around noon on Saturday, people who didn’t sleep at our house began showing up again, and we were off to the races—literally. We played Camel Up, where you bet on a dromedary race. I hate real gambling, but I’m very into the fake kind where only pride is on the line. I can’t lose what I never had. We went through modern classics like Space Base and Betrayal at the House on the Hill with two games going for the entire afternoon. The most exciting game by far was The Lost World Jurassic Park Site B board game. I got the game for Christmas in 1997 and played it for a full afternoon with my Mom and siblings at my Grandma’s house. Some of my best memories are from her place because it was so boring, we had to make our own fun. If that story happened again in 2022, we all would have just spent the whole day on our phones. My original version of the Jurassic Park game met the same fate as anything else I was foolish enough to leave behind at my parents house (Their donations have single-handedly kept their local Goodwill in business), but I recently bought another copy on eBay. It’s a simple push-your-luck game with humans trying to race past raptors and get to a helicopter. The only way to play the game is while standing up, and the only acceptable volume is screaming. Twelve-year-old me was absolutely right to love this game. Dinosaurs are fun at any age, except to the people they’re eating.
The most important rule is you have to roar like a dinosaur when you eat someone or it doesn’t count.
At the climax of the night, I called for all the women in attendance to join me at the table for the pièce de résistance, Marrying Mr. Darcy. The game follows the plot of Pride and Prejudice, with up to six of the book’s female characters competing for the titular Mr. Darcy plus a handful of scrubs who think they can also measure up. I’ve never read the book and have fallen asleep multiple times during the movie, but Lola absolutely loves both. I bought the game and learned the rules for her. Four of the five women in attendance were also crazy about the Jane Austen novel, so I ran the game for them. It was, in a word, terrible, unless you’re super drunk and very loud. Thankfully, I was both. I forget which lady I played, but I was sure I could land a better man than any of the actual women at the table. I was wrong and finished the game as an old maid in dead last. Lola didn’t do much better and married some human barnacle of a guy who latched onto her mid-game and never let go. Hopefully she didn’t notice too many parallels to her marriage in real life. The winner was the one woman at the table who had never even opened the book. The moral of the story is that actually reading the source material makes you worse at everything. That explains my entire performance in college.
We ended up playing super late for a second night in a row. It helped that two of the most enthusiastic gamers didn’t show up until 7 p.m.. They gave us a second wind. By the end, I was falling asleep on my feet. (Actually, I was sitting, so I guess on my butt). Finally, our reinforcements went home and those few of us who remained went to bed. Contrary to all expectations, the party went really well. We had way more guests than I expected. We actually have a lot of friends, or maybe just a lot of acquaintances who will show up for free food and drinks. Either way, the outcome was the same. It was a great two days of board gaming. And, even though we had twice as many people as we thought we would, we bought four times as much food as we needed. As a Midwesterner, I would rather die than let anyone go home less than absolutely stuffed. My kids spent the next week feasting on party leftovers. Not that they minded. Peanut M&Ms are an essential food group.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’m off to find another excuse to play board games. Catch you next time.
James
I Didn't Get Married