Board Games And Holidays
I am on holiday! In Kefalonia if you must know. It is lovely and sunny, the sea is ridiculously blue1 and I am typing this out on my phone while my girlfriend has an afternoon nap in the air-conditioned house/apartment/micro villa. I am outside, in a shady terrace, and in front of me is a coffee table. Two empty mugs formerly filled with tea, a glass of Fanta, two donut peach stones, and the remnants of our latest game of Bananagrams all sit on the table. I won by a whisker, thanks to a late Q pick up, with words such as FENDING, TONGUES, ZOOS2 and TARN.
We always bring games with us when we go on holiday. It started with a deck of cards, the usual 52 pack. She taught me the games she played with her family when traveling that somehow passed me by: gin rummy, knock-out whist, Jacks are anything to name a few. We played card games wherever we were, from aeroplane trays to taverna tables.
I don’t remember when we got the first commercial game for our holidays. We now have a few travel friendly options, some we play more often than others. Bananagrams is a favourite, and hotly contested. She definitely wins more often than I do, but I am never far behind. We both like Scrabble, and this is a much faster and more enjoyable word game that scratches the same itch, with the added bonus of being very travel friendly!
An early addition was Hive (the pocket edition). I always see this game as like a freeform chess, except with insects instead of Rooks, Knights and Queens. You place and move your insects around a collective hive, aiming to surround your opponents bee without ever breaking the hive. The game comes with nice plastic pieces inside a brightly coloured drawstring bag which can very genuinely fit inside your pocket. I take this game with me whenever I go travelling, and I have had games of it up mountains after a day’s hike, using the flattest rock I could find as a board.
We have brought two other games to Kefalonia. Agent Avenue is probably the least travel friendly but our most played game recently. It comes in a small enough box that it was worth putting in the suitcase. In Agent Avenue, you are racing around a circuit trying to catch each other. You move by playing cards with varying abilities, but the catch is that you always play two (one face up, one face down) and your opponent gets to choose one for themselves first. The layers of bluff, double bluff and triple bluff that we have got to is unreal!
The last game, and the only one we haven’t played yet a few days into the holiday, is Trailblazers. This comes in a very smart hard case, making it perfect for slinging into a bag. You connect trails together in this game, trying to make the longest trails between your camps. It takes up a good amount of table space, which is why we haven’t got it out yet, but the end results are satisfying to look at, but always one or two tiles away from your dreams. Hubris gets us all.
I can’t imagine a holiday without games. When I went to France with my family last year, we brought stacks of games, and managed to play most of them.
Now, time to put my phone down and lose a game of Agent Avenue or two.3
Quack