The diary of a board game lover
By Katherine Tolentino
I try my hardest to avoid video games on low-homework weekday nights.
While the large majority of my friends can navigate through the many levels of Super Smash Bros. or Grand Theft Auto or Halo 3 with swiftness and ease, I'm one of those annoying kids whose character keeps running around in circles because I can't tell the X button from the toggle.
I justify my lack of video game skills by the fact that I led a video game-free childhood. I grew up playing board games from my family's huge collection, which contained everything from classics like Clue, Scrabble and The Game of Life, to lesser-known gems like the Camp Granada Game, Mille Bornes and Go to the Head of the Class.
Board games brought me a number of notable experiences at my tender age. On the weekends, I commanded a fleet of red battleships against my blue enemies, sinking countless submarines and aircraft carriers.
Sometimes I was a wealthy landowner, collecting thousands of dollars for my upscale properties on Park Place and Pennsylvania Avenue. On Friday nights, I was Miss Scarlet, a seductress and occasional murderer with rich socialite friends and shrewd detective skills.
In recent years, I've found that board games not only provide me with important military and investigative experience, they also serve as sound alternatives to the monotony of homework-filled weeknights.
My friends and I have passed many an evening with Apples to Apples marathons (Helen Keller = instant win) and collectively screaming over rounds of Catch Phrase in lieu of statistics homework and close readings of Freud.
Just the other day, my friend Diana and I engaged in a mentally taxing, though thoroughly rewarding, one-and-a-half-hour game of Scrabble. I won, thanks to my beloved 87-pointer "tearing" (Huzzah!), and found the linguistic exercise far more engaging than my English essay.
My brain teems with board game memories from my early childhood to now. The first game I ever played was Clue. I cried because my character, Professor Plum, had cruelly murdered Mr. Boddy in the kitchen with a rope.
On the night of our senior prom, my friends and I actually took a break from dancing to play a few rounds of Boggle in our floor-length gowns and heels. That month was the height of our Boggle obsession.
Essentially, I'm not too worried about my video game naivete. Although my Mario Kart driver consistently places last and my first-person shooter skills are still in their prenatal forms of development, I will always find joy in a game board, a set of Clue cards and a pair of dice.