Game night rekindles connections

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, March 16, 2007

Having a family game night isn’t always easy. It’s not that hard to get people together, but it is sometimes difficult to settle on a game that everyone is willing to play.

My personal favorite is Monopoly. I don’t mind squeezing (pretend) rental money out of my wife and kids, and have found that lack of sentimentality is a key to victory.

It’s also a key to other people not wanting to play with me. Plus I’m a bad winner. And loser.

Anyway, Monopoly has been out of the picture for a while, so we turned to Phase 10, a card game.

Personally, I find it annoying, because the luck of the draw plays into the results a little too much. In other words, I never seem to win (see previous paragraph about being a bad loser).

So this past weekend we tried euchre, which was the dominant card game when Inger and I grew up in southern Wisconsin. I spent what seems to have been hundreds of family gatherings watching the grown-ups play euchre and I can still remember what a big deal it was the first time I was invited to play.

We played euchre between classes in high school, played it in our dorm rooms at college and to this day still sit in on a game if we’re visiting friends back in Wisconsin. It does not seem to be as big here in western Minnesota, but many people have at least heard of it.

At any rate, we taught the kids to play, which was a chore because the game has some rules that are, really, rather ridiculously counter-intuitive. Jacks, for instance, can change suits depending on what suit is trump. Takes a while to catch on.

The first game took nearly an hour, due to all the explanations and moments of “Oh, yeah, there’s another rule that I forgot to tell you about.”

It got a lot quicker after that, and while three games does not make a young person competitive with adults who have played thousands, we at least got to the point where everyone was having fun.

Or, perhaps, more than fun. Both my high school-aged kids loved it.

“I’m going to have to carry a deck of cards around with me,” one of them said.

Still, it made me wonder about the fate of card games. The recent, television-inspired craze for Texas hold ‘em poker not withstanding, I wonder whether kids today get much chance to play cards. Seems like television, video games and computer simulations take up so much time that the basic, sit-down-and-play card games may become a thing of the past.

If so, it’s a real shame, because games like euchre, divided into a series of hands and games, provide as much time for socializing as they do card playing.

There’s none of the isolation, staring at a computer or television screen. In fact, observing others and making small-talk are even part of the game.

There is no doubt that our society is becoming more and more isolated. Many — maybe most — people relate far more to the characters on “24” or “CSI” than they do their neighbors, and they certainly see more of their television “acquaintances.”

To mourn change is to reject reality. But, sometimes, it seems like the old stuff might have actually been better.