Roll for Friendship
“I activate Mecatol Rex.”
What a crazy thing to say and, yet, there I was saying it. Standing with four of my closest friends, huddled around a table in my small college apartment, I moved my fleets in a last ditch attempt to wrest the planet from the evil clutches of my friend Joe. Doing so, I felt completely, uninhibitedly, enthralled.
We were playing Twilight Imperium for the very first time. Unless you’re a board game nerd of the highest caliber, you’ll have no idea what Twilight Imperium is. All you need to know is that during the depths of the pandemic, and an endless Chicago winter, Twilight Imperium took us far far away from 55th and Kenwood street to a universe with a new set of possibilities.
That’s all well and good, but you’re probably thinking: what possessed you to play a board game that takes 8 hours to complete, at its shortest?
My friends and I had played all sorts of games by that point, from Settlers of Catan to Carcassone. We’d played more experimental games, like A Quiet Year, and put on our role playing hats with Dungeons and Dragons. By the time we made it to Twilight Imperium, I think it’s safe to say we were more than mere initiates to board games.
It wasn’t always that way. If I had to draw a clear line in the sand, I’d say my love of games emerged from the Christmases when my uncle would come stay with us. He, my dad and I would play Risk together. Neither of them are big gamers, nor big talkers, and yet this was an activity that brought us together. It probably tickled my pre-adolescent mind to be counted among them, and (on the rare occasion) to beat them!
That’s the power of games: they warp the boundaries between playful and serious, they take us outside of ourselves and they bring us together. When I was younger, I found life and other people confusing, messy and impossible to fit into clean boundaries. Despite my wishes, it’s impossible to ever know what others are truly thinking and feeling. The best we can do is decipher things through the cloudy mirrors that are their actions and our selves.
What is a game but a set of clean boundaries, an obvious purpose, and a way to draw lines between action and intention; it makes clear the rules of engagement and gives us the space to step outside ourselves.
Come holiday time, you’ll still find my family and I huddled around the dining table playing a game. Now my cousin joins us, and I see on his face the same delight, frustration and concentration that must have played on mine. He’s a shy kid, often stuck in screens rather than joining in on conversation (at 14, I was probably the same way) but games offer an alternative.
When I see a couple playing cards or Backgammon in a cafe or a bar (a move I’ve shamelessly pulled over and over again), it makes me smile, knowing the vocabulary of their relationship shares something in common with me and mine. It’s not just about competition (though that part's fun too). It’s a way to feel close to each other, to be around each other without having to constantly express oneself with words.
I’ve found in my life that games are a way to broker deeper mutual understanding from a starting point that feels fundamentally easier to approach. This has been especially true of a lot of my male friendships. Once we understand each other within the context of the game, we have a recipe to begin going beyond it.
I don’t find myself so worried about what others might be thinking anymore. That old flash of myself definitely reappears, but it isn’t a motif in my emotional life. I honestly believe that games have given me this tool; I can see life as its own game and approach it on those terms.
Games are such a gift to us; they’re so human.
It’s kind of startling to realize that playing games with my friends is a large percentage of my social life these days. I’m not discomfited by that. In fact, I’m happy that I’m doing so much of something I love. I’ve even been working on designing my own game, a project that has taken many twists and turns and taught me so much about how game mechanics map onto “fun”.
In my experience, games are the richness of life condensed into something you can do together, anywhere from an hour to eight of them. So if you’re sitting around with your friends doomscrolling pick yourself up and go to a board game cafe. Rent a game and play it together. You’ll basically never regret it.
I hope I’ve set the stage for what will be a series of essays, reviews and uncollected thoughts about games of all sorts, their creators and practitioners. Games have made my life so much fuller, and I’m excited to share that with you.