A couple of years ago I had the idea that I would create a site where I shared my experiences playing video games with my kids. Growing up I always had a strong love of games, and now that my kids were old enough to start playing games that I actually might find interesting, I was excited to share that with the world.  So, the Christmas before last, I ended up buying way more video games than any one person could ever hope to play.  I was excited to actually sit down and play them with my kids and intrigued to see which games they would grow to love.  Unfortunately, what you expect to happen and what does are two very different things.

The thing that actually did happen was that they latched on to one game, and then proceeded to want to play it every chance they got during xmas vacation.  Now, don’t get me wrong, the Lego games are not bad, but I could only take a couple hours of it before I was ready to move onto something else.
I didn’t give up there.  A few months later I proceeded to create a list of all of the games I would like to play with my kids.  I had everything from classic Mario games, to more modern games such as Garden Warfare and Minecraft.  Once again, my kids latched onto a couple of those games and wanted to play them exclusively.  And once again, I quickly got bored of doing the same thing over and over and decided to just give up the idea all together.  Not just playing video games with my kids, but I decided to give them up altogether… Ok, well, at least cut back and stop buying any new ones.

It really wasn’t that hard.  I had been feeling the fatigue of playing games for a while. If I bought a new game because it looked fun or got great reviews, then I would feel obligated to play it and my free time was already in short supply.  On top of that, my job requires me to stare at a computer screen for most of the day, so coming home and staring at another screen started to feel like more of a chore, rather than something I was actually enjoying.

Fast forward to last November…

At work, a few individuals had started a board game group that gathered a few days a week during lunch.  I had been asked to join several times, but I had never heard of some of the games being played and feared I either wouldn’t enjoy them or just wouldn’t understand them and feel silly for trying. (Which seems absolutely ridiculous for thinking now.)  While I was browsing online for potential xmas presents during Black Friday week, I happened to see that a large retailer was having a sale that included many of the board games I had heard my coworkers talk about, as well as some I happened across while looking those up on the popular board game sites. I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn how to play some of the games I had been hearing about, while also picking up some non-video game related activities for my family to play over the holiday break. I picked up SmashUp, Dominion, King of Tokyo, Pandemic, Forbidden Island and Ticket to Ride.

And how did it go? Well, it was a rocky start, but as I’m sure you can guess by now, things turned around very very nicely…