Shouting, pouting, cheating, bragging, and showboating. If there was any other way of playing games, my siblings and I didn’t know it.
We grew up with a ceiling-to-floor, double-door wardrobe packed full of tabletop games, and we made frequent use of it. From an early age, we’d spend what felt like hours cherry picking, skipping past peanut brittle houses, and screaming “King Me!” at a decibel rarely perceived by adult human ears.
Intense sibling rivalry masqueraded as friendly competition and flourished over well-worn game cards. The older sibling explained that each Chess piece had a pattern of moving, but conveniently those same patterns were not allowed for the younger sibling. I exacted revenge by stacking all my battleships in a tower reaching the sky, securing a less-than-honest victory of my own. Any time things didn’t go as planned, the youngest sibling shrieked “MOOOOM!,” signaling that game time was over, and we’d have to try again at making nice tomorrow.
We craved the victory, and when we played fairly, the prize was even sweeter. And the loss all the more sour. The champion’s smug grin was merely a challenge to start over. If the conditions were right, could play the same game on a loop all weekend.
As we got a bit older, we began playing games from our parents’ collections. The impossible decades-old Trivial Pursuit questions paved the way for teams with 3 kids vs. 2 parents. Let me tell you, when you guess your way into a niche political detail from 30 years before your birth, you CELEBRATE.
Suddenly, we were allies, and we’d exhaust this new structure through our teen years.
Today, we still play games whenever the whole group is together, and we can more gracefully accept defeat without demanding a do-over. We do still bend the rules, but only when we mutually agree it’ll improve the experience (eg: playing Guess Who? with subjective traits like whether they look like they’d invest in NFTs or play bongos on a college campus).
To this day, games are synonymous with joy, and I have so many memories of my siblings interwoven with overwhelming feelings of nostalgia, pride, and cheer.
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