You can tell a lot about people by the games they play – and how they play a game.

  Board games and cards were a big part of my youth – one of the side benefits of having five siblings. The usual suspects: Clue, Monopoly, Parchesi, and lots of rummy and Hearts.  Then there was a long dry period – very few games at all. Just study, study, study or work, work, work. I remember “Charades” at a party at Josh Hornick’s house in New York, which was quite enjoyable after a few glasses of wine.  I also have fond memories of volleyball after dinner but before the curtain went up at the Dorset Theater Festival in Vermont:  somewhat spastic and often with a theme –Twyla Tharp volleyball, or samurai volleyball. Because theater people are the first to admit they could never have made it as jocks. But boy was it fun, and stress-relieving.

 Then with my own children, the rediscovery of the -  ahem - joys of Candyland and Guess Who.  How about Matchie-matchie on the carpet, finding two of a kind?  This, however, was the era where, to have any game at all, Mom had to let the kids win sometimes or most of the time. By the time we were more equal players, they were on to other games with players their own age – or video games, leaving me far behind. In retrospect, Mancala, that of the glass beads in the cups on the wooden board, remains the only one I would return to with enthusiasm, or I may have missed some good ones.

 From my observation, there are two general types of game players – whether cards or sports – those who play for the end result, and those who just want to enjoy the process - occasionally the two are combined, but most often not. Let’s put it this way – I’m not results oriented, and would rather avoid the type that takes game playing quite seriously.

 I tend not to play games with my husband – we know already who is task- and who is process-oriented. This came to a critical head one day early in our relationship playing Trivial Pursuit with “modified” rules that allowed you to keep asking questions in a single category. I was way ahead, being the acknowledged trivia expert in the family, but he got me cornered in Sports and wouldn’t let up until he caught up, and was ready to win. My response? Tipping over the  board, end of game and game playing.

What I do enjoy are games of Scrabble with my mother, a.k.a. Mimmi, when she comes to visit. Late afternoon, or early evening, we get out the old gameboard, and shake the  tiles out of a soft, worn paper bag, a couple of the blanks changed into missing letters.  I keep score, a column for Erin and one for Mim. Occasionally the boys join in, but most often not. Donald is a very good player, striking gold with those little short words that get placed on double or triple point spaces. But he’s impatient and usually doesn’t have the time for our leisurely pace.

 Plus, he’s doubtful about our rules. That’s because they are in fact flexible.  Our guiding principles are to make interesting, elegant words, to try to cover the board as much as possible, and not to finish too quickly. We allow for originality, although we do check spelling occasionally. We are very excited for the big play words, and will maybe leave a triple space open for someone to create something really great. We accept words that we like, no matter what the rule says.  How about “Paxil”, I ask. “Thank God for the Paxil,” Mom says, so down it goes, and we smile. Some may call it cheating; we call it creative collaboration. Every word is counted and recorded, but we almost never total the score.

 In the end, like two vets who’ve been through the wars, we know this is not life and death, and doesn’t represent anything more than two people having fun with words.  It is about humor and creativity and getting to know each other in a context outside of the difficult and strained time we went through in the early days of her widowhood, when she did not have time or inclination to play games with her children.

  It’s how we play the game.