game on

I've not written about this, aside from the mention of RoboRally in the last proper entry I made here — but I have really gotten into board games in the past couple of years. In case you didn't know, there's a kind of renaissance going on in the board game world these days, which started about ten to fifteen years ago. It's been lead primarily by companies in Europe (Germany and Italy especially, it seems) but the U.S., ever ready to pick up on something that can make money, is has come around.
And the thing that I'm finding, over and over again, and which I'm impressed and slightly amazed by is that many of these games defuse my very competitive need to win.

Which brings up a whole other question for me as to how I can be very competitive (I hate to lose, in general, at anything) and yet be, as I said, not that interested in "the game" of life. I suspect it has to do with having to deal with, and influence other people that I have problems with — not to mention the stakes. But I digress.

I've heard people say and sign, read fiction and non-fiction, and seen movies which all try to explain to us (oh, and been to plenty of meditations about this, too) that it's not the destination, but the journey that matters. Yeah yeah yeah. Whatever. I mean, okay, we can all agree that we should stop and smell the roses and you don't know what you've got until it's gone and all that — but we're all result oriented.

So it comes as a pleasant shock to me that these games (the aforementioned RoboRally, plus Bang!, Memoir '44, Tichu, Carcassonne, etc.) all inspire fun in the process of playing them, in addition to winning them. I still play to win, and still want to win, but find that I'm getting off on the actual gameplay as much as the competition.

There's no real point to this, other than to put down in words something I was briefly ruminating on as I crossed the street, coming back from lunch today.

If you're interested in these kinds of games, check out the BoardGameGeek link to the right there.