Board Games
I am not a games person. As a child, I once deserted an extended family game of Monopoly in tears, not having understood understanding that the goal was to buy as many properties as possible so I could charge the rest of the players, my older relatives. I had bought only the colors and names I liked. My uncle, who took over my position, said, you left me with nothing here!
But a few years back, I pledged to be a life partner to someone who does enjoy games, and enjoys them a lot. My mother, as well, is a big fan. So board games or ‘table-top games,’ have become a part of my life. The stack of their boxes seems higher every month.
As more games come into my home, I’ve put them into a few mental categories. First are the games that require at least 30 minutes and sometimes a YouTube video to understand the intricacies of the rules These usually involve conquering land and controlling commodities like Settlers of Catan. Then there are the loud-outburst, memory-recall games, like Taboo. There are games that are solely chance, like bunco, and games that require a lot of strategy and skill. There are games that are completely subjective, like Apples to Apples. (I’ve found that usually annoy the heck out of people who like the strategy games.) There are trivia games too. The categories can overlap, of course. In fact, the sweet spot is a game that crosses more than one of these categories.
6 Nimmt is one of these games. Its cards studded with silhouettes of technicolor bull heads, the game requires that you place randomly drawn cards in numerical order in turms. As Wikipedia explains: A round of ten turns is played where all players place one card of their choice onto the table. The placed cards are arranged on four rows according to fixed rules. If placed onto a row that already has 5 cards then the player receives those five cards, which count as penalty points that are totted up at the end of the round. Rounds are played until a player reaches 66 points, whereupon the player with the least penalty points wins. To summarize: when you have to take cards, you want the least amount of bull.
As a theme or aesthetic, 6 Nimmt doesn’t make any sense. Why cattle heads? Why the colors? Maybe there’s a German in-joke in the original? Who knows? But 6 Nimmt has the perfect mix of luck and skill. If you strategize, you still can lose based on the way the other players play the cards they have. Or you can apply minimal skill and still win, for the same reasons. This seems, to me, the perfect game.
My colleagues often bring in games for downtime with students, but I’ve always turned my nose up at that, thinking my own facilitation skills were enough to make that time fun and meaningful. The truth of the matter is that I was afraid I would lose or look silly. I’ve learned that a good game — flexibly playable, fun, and a little challenging — is an entry point into relationship. It can break up old loyalties and create new ones in safe ways, because it is both contained and transitory. You can always start over, and play again.
