The Most Dangerous Game

By Michael

I don’t play board games, a fact that annoys the rest of my family, especially my daughter who would happily spend every afternoon cycling through Monopoly, Risk, and Clue, reserving backgammon (her favorite) for the couple of hours between dinner and bedtime. My sons have started playing chess – a game I admire but little understand – and also play Risk and sometimes Battleship: the common themes are territorial incursion and world domination. My wife will play any game, though like my daughter she’s partial to backgammon.

My intolerance extends to most card games. I can manage a few hands of blackjack because they last, on an average, three or four seconds. If I’m in northern Canada and the weather is bad and the bookshelves are bare and the power is out, I’ll play a game of Gin Rummy without complaining. Same thing goes for getting stuck overnight in an airport -- as long as the airport is in northern Canada. I’ve sometimes enjoyed playing Scrabble, but only against linguistically challenged opponents, which is to say, only when I’ve won.

I suspect I would like these games better if we changed the rules every fifteen minutes. For instance, all the pawns would move like queens and then at the fifteen-minute buzzer if your fingers so much as touched a rook an electric shock would knock you off your chair. Or Colonel Mustard would be having an affair with Professor Plum and would refuse to betray him and then at the buzzer Mrs. Peacock would become a homicidal maniac and march over the board knocking down the other game pieces.

But for now, I’ll sit on the sofa reading a newspaper while the rest of my family maneuvers to buy Park Place. If my kids get upset because they’re losing, I’ll offer fatherly advice about how to be good sports. And if my advice fails to calm them (as it inevitably will), I’ll tell them to pretend the dice are asteroids and their goal is to wipe out the houses and hotels at Marvin Gardens.