Board game bonds are much-missed during pandemic

The board game we were playing was definitely for the birds.

Some of those birds included the Atlantic puffin, the yellow-rumped warbler and the Carolina wren.

Five of us gathered around the large table learning to play Wingspan, a beautiful board game in which you collect cards featuring birds for your wildlife preserves, feed those birds, lay tiny pastel eggs as currency and try to score the most points through four increasingly complex rounds of play.

The geek factor for this game is, uh … sky high? Released last year, Wingspan took the tabletop gaming world by storm, getting a writeup on the National Audubon Society website, which is not known for its hardcore gaming coverage. BirdWatching Daily called the game, “A collision of worlds nobody could have predicted.”

And now we had it here in front of us, this gorgeous collection of tokens and mats and a birdhouse dice tower. I had my doubts that my daughters, 10 and 12, would be interested. I mean, this is a game about scissor-tailed flycatchers and worms and grasslands and grain, for American white pelican’s sake. But my two girls were into it, as were the rest of us — myself, my brother Pablo and his fiancée Linh — and within an hour, we were fully obsessed. This was a game with 170 birds that we would keep playing whenever we could; it became a favorite in our family.

In the before times.

The last time we played Wingspan was early March, at a board game shop in North San Antonio called The Printed Meeple. The shop was set up with about a dozen felt-covered gaming tables, 3-D printers and a deluxe fountain drink machine dispensing perfectly pebbled ice pellets to thirsty players.

Printed Meeple was becoming our regular weekend hangout. We planned to sign up for a monthly membership before COVID-19 kept us home. Amid the shelves and shelves containing hundreds of different tabletop games, we were in the process of raising our gaming IQ, broadening our horizons beyond The Game of Life and Uno with help from staffers and from Pablo and Linh.

Uncle Pablo and Linh regularly invest in exciting new games from Kickstarter and keep up with out-there titles such as Fog of Love, a two-player role-playing game about starting a relationship.

Last year our family got obsessed with Azul, another game with gorgeously designed components. Ceramic mosaic tiles are used to rack up points while decorating a palace. The game’s German designer, Michael Kiesling, released two other editions, Summer Pavilion and Stained Glass, that are just as challenging and which each have their own unique tile designs and gameplay differences. Between myself, my mom, my brother and my girlfriend, we own all the editions and played them regularly.

In January, the PAX South convention, a popular videogame conference with a huge area for board games, arrived to San Antonio. There, we discovered a whole new set of games, including Macaryoshka, a handmade Japanese game best described as Russian nesting dolls, but with perfectly rendered plastic macarons. The game is so rare that a limited-run of orders filled up in November; it’s not available for sale anywhere online. It was at PAX that we also found Klask, a tabletop hockey/foosball game in two- and four-player versions played with handheld magnets that you move around under the game table.

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As our tastes evolved, we graduated from the popular Exploding Kittens to more complex card games such as Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle and Bears vs. Babies. We got on board the train routes game Ticket to Ride, which was first published in 2004 and continues to be incredibly popular. That’s right, my 2020-era preteens played a board game published in 2004 about trains in the early 1900s. I don’t know how I pulled that off.

When stay-at-home orders hit, board games went from a thing we were having fun doing socially to something we really needed to break the boredom of weeks without work or school, in that uncertain set of weeks before those obligations started to come back online for many.

Left to our own devices, without Pablo and Linh and without the guidance of Printed Meeple’s attentive staff of helpers, we played Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra a lot and got heavily into Clue. We dug out Throw Throw Burrito from the closet and enjoyed some backyard burrito dodgeball (it’s a clever mix of Uno-style gameplay and throwing soft burrito-shaped rubber toys at each other). With my girlfriend, we began a love affair with Sushi Roll, a dice-based version of a card game Linh had introduced us to a while back, Sushi Go!

It’s hard to explain why we found so much comfort in these games, but it could be that they have firm, set rules. They were activities with a beginning, middle and end with orderly instructions. We were in a moment when the world felt (and continues often to feel) like a plate spinning wildly off a dining-room table. Maybe that’s why we locked in so tightly to these games; they were pursuits where the outcome was controlled.

And they passed the time, of course. These boredom busters were so important in those early weeks of the pandemic that we didn’t stop at just the tabletop versions of these games. I went on a jag of playing Ticket to Ride on PC, my iPhone and iPad, then went on to find virtual versions of some tabletop games on the website Board Game Arena, which pairs you up with friends or far-flung strangers online.

In April, Cards Against Humanity released a Family Edition of its very naughty adult party game that tones down the harsh language in favor of words such as “butts.” It arrived online as a free PDF to print and cut out months ahead of its retail release. This kept us entertained, but we spent a lot more time printing, trimming and sleeving into plastic 450 or so tiny paper cards than we did playing.

We set up Zoom meetings for Jackbox Party Packs, collections of group party games available on game consoles and computers from the makers of You Don’t Know Jack trivia. It took a gauntlet of technical challenges to get these working in a chat window and with everyone audible, but we persevered until it worked. Then we played until we got tired of all the hassle the setup was taking for an hour or two of intense online gaming. And besides, we were getting Zoom burnout.

The games we played were fun, of course. But the missing component was the around-the-table joy of being together. We missed playing Azul with Grandma around her big wooden dining room table as her dog Crissy sniffed around our feet. We missed the crunch of the pellet ice in our mouths as we tried to wrap our brains around a new, complicated game at Printed Meeple.

We have missed the tactile sensation of passing dice around the board, of admiring little colorful cubed game pieces, of moving around an army of miniature plastic zombies on a huge table for an all-night Zombiecide session. Playing at home is fine, but we have desperately missed the connections we were making with family and new friends every weekend.

These are small complaints in the middle of a dangerous disease’s spread and racial strife that’s engulfed the nation, but our obsession with board games has been less about the games themselves than about the act of learning things together in orderly peace. We focus together on a landscape of cardboard, plastic and paper instead of holing up in our individual rooms or staring at our smartphones instead of each other.

We haven’t gone back to the game shop, but our family has continued to purchase games there and I check in on their Facebook page every few weeks to see if they’re still in business. In recent weeks, we’ve talked about getting together for a facemasks-and-socially-distant board game session with the whole family, but we’re not even sure if it’s a good idea. There are no inside-the-box instructions for what’s happening.

Of all the things I’ve taken for granted in this very difficult year, I never thought the simple act of opening up a board game and inviting loved ones to come play would be something I would have to wax nostalgic about. It seems like the most innocuous of pursuits, but even this has become a kind of gathering that now feels like something we used to do in the past.

I miss our board game family, not just my actual family, but the community of dice geeks, zombie miniature painters and board-game avian fanatics who understood and shared our tabletop obsession.

My hope is that we’ll be playing together soon, collecting birds, throwing dice, crunching our teeth on tiny ice and playing great games again in person.

Five family games we love

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Board game bonds are much-missed during pandemic