Game Day for Nerds

Growing up, I was not from one of those boardgame families that would spend hours diving into some obscure game that no one else had heard of. Though, I wish I was, because the kids from those kinds of families tended to be more intelligent than myself. There is a selection bias in that observation of course, but I do think that things like patience and critical thinking can be developed in those kinds of environments.

I am not great with either.

Or many other strategic soft skills. However, I would like Smallsteps to be less like her parents, and more like someone who will be successful in this world. Not that board games are enough, but they are a good way to spend some time as a family. And. since my wife goes back to work tomorrow, we decided to spend some time and try a boardgame bar that some of my friends frequent.

My smart friends at least.

They have hundreds of games available and they apparently rent them out too, because many of them are those obscure types that go on for many hours, or days. If course, we didn't play any of those, and they had some that were a little more kid-friendly.

Smallsteps first chose Labyrinth, which she lost, but was pretty good at. My wife struggled to begin with, but got the hang pretty fast. It is a super easy game, but might take a little bit of spatial awareness or something to plan for coming moves. The game only took about a half hour or so to play.

After that, we played Alias, which is a Finnish game similar to Taboo, and requires explaining words without using the word itself for the team to guess what it is. As there were three of us only, we made up our own rules and were pretty relaxed with the timer for Smallsteps. And, we were playing in both Finnish and English, and it was difficult at times for everyone. However, Smallsteps had a ball and did really well explaining. We ended up playing this for over two hours, and continued on even though the game had ended, because my wife had claimed victory early on.

I don't think we are smarter now.

But, it was a nice evening and I think it would be good to do it again at some point soon. We could of course do it at home also, but booking the table was cheap and it was nice to be out of the home for a few hours, with a cup of tea, coffee and a hot chocolate.

We play made-up word games a lot and whenever we drive, we tend to play some kind of variation of a word game, or perhaps a math game. They are fun, keep us occupied, and are also educational. I prefer these kinds of games than for instance, trivia games on general knowledge or even specific knowledge like the music game we played last night, because trivia is pretty useless - especially these days where information is available at the fingertips. Those mental and emotional soft-skills though, they still have some value and probably will for some time to come.

Come to think of it...