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Contrary to popular belief, Jean-Paul Sartre did not in fact say “Hell is other people.”
The full quote was “Hell is other people playing Monopoly.”
I admit that I’m not one of life’s great board-gamers, but has anyone ever finished a game of Monopoly? It is one of those games that lasts for hours, even though it is clear within two or three circuits of the board whether or not you have any chance of winning. It is also a game of luck masquerading as a game of skill — Snakes and Ladders for very slow learners. I keep reading about the fertility crisis in the west. Has anyone checked whether the reason far fewer babies are being born is because couples are wasting their fertile years still trying to put an extra hotel on Coventry Street?
Lest you think this is just about Monopoly, I must also steer you away from many of the evening tortures known as board games. (I should at this point declare that this week’s inspiration comes from my editors, who are running a special games-themed issue and had not perhaps realised that I would be speaking up for the victims of isolated oppression who will be badgered into playing said games.)
I do accept that there is an argument for games in that they are a communal activity. As the spawn grew up and gained possession of their own computer screens, we would often attempt to use game nights as a way of coaxing them out of their rooms and into some family time. So they too have suffered at the hands of Hasbro.
The board game is also useful on holidays with friends in some quiet idyll when the conversation gets slow, as long as you can avoid the twin perils of people not taking the game seriously enough and those taking it far too seriously. I have no problem with competitive games for two — chess, backgammon and the like. My issue is with games that are not played for themselves but in order to facilitate communal feeling, laughter, conversation and rows over whether the rules specify you need to have asked for the money before the dice were rolled.
You must also avoid really slow games with overlong gaps between turns as the participant gurns their way through all possible options. This is one of the primary arguments against Scrabble, a game that is unaccountably popular given that it has all the entertainment value of karaoke night at a Trappist monastery. What is the communal value of a game where the silence is broken only for its players to argue about spelling?
Aside from the interminable pauses as each struggles to find an alternative to adding “ly” to the end of another word, it also encourages the worst kind of smugness as enthusiasts pull out some word never observed in literature or conversation. Apparently, two of the very best Scrabble words are quixotry and caziques. In case you are wondering, caziques is the plural of cazique. Happy to help. Quixotry is a wild or eccentric notion, named after Don Quixote, the fictional character who tried to spell pedant with two Es.
I know some make the case for long strategy games like Risk, but these are generally the same type of people who used to hang out in Games Workshop, playing Warhammer and arguing over whether dark elves could be painted the same colour as chaos dwarfs. The very best board games are those that move rapidly, are not entirely dependent on luck and take no more than an hour, preferably 30 minutes with an option to play again. Charades is bearable, though Pictionary disadvantages those who can’t draw.
Last Christmas, in an effort to up our recreation efforts, we bought two new, well-recommended board games. One turned out to be simply a tiresomely over-engineered version of Cluedo, and the other was something to do with creating train lines across continents but with rules so complex or poorly explained that it would be quicker to just build HS2.
The solution to this dilemma, by the way, is cards, apart perhaps from bridge or poker with those who take those games too seriously. A round can be over very quickly and you can fix a duration by agreeing the number of hands or points to be reached. My own recommendation is Hearts, which has the magic combination of speed, tactics, laughter, luck and viciousness.
So next time you find the ground shifting beneath you towards the tyranny of board games, just remember: the answer, my friends, is in the cards.
Email Robert at magazineletters@ft.com
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