A Personal Journey

I am three years old, and my Dad has decided to teach my five-year old brother and I a simplified, proto version of Poker to see if children will naturally adopt a correct bluffing strategy. Each player gets one card – a 2, a 9, or an ace – and then a round of betting takes place.

My father says we did indeed intuit the correct strategy – bluff with a 2 one time for every two times we had an ace – though I have no memory of any of this.

I am six years old and my father is now teaching me chess. He is scrupulously fair – once I know the rules I am given queen odds. Once I am able to beat him without his queen, we play again and I get rook odds. Each time he sets the handicap so that the game is tight and tense.

I am eight years old and my parents have divorced, and I only see my father one weekend a month. On these pilgrimages to the Poconos where my father lives, it’s 48 straight hours of board games in a small breakfast room where my father chain smokes Lucky Strikes.

We start the weekend with Risk – I traditionally play the yellow pieces, and if I’m losing my father will sing ‘Yellow Birds…are going down the drain!’ to the tune of Harry Belafonte’s Yellow Bird. Often I’m eliminated long before the end of the game, in which case I play with my Dad’s fat and friendly golden retriever, and rustle up some donuts and sugary cereals which I’m not allowed to eat at home.

Other times, when my grandmother, Aunt, and Erhard (my grandmother’s wonderfully strange German manservant) are available, we will play Oh Hell, a particularly cutthroat trick taking game where one must make their bid exactly or score almost nothing.

Insults, whining, and jokes at everyone’s expense fly around the room. Oh Hell codifies our culture of disparagement by requiring each player to have a demeaning nickname by which they are referred to throughout the game. I’ve seen people nicknamed Stinkfoot, Urine, and Trail of Tears (for her partial Cherokee heritage). Once a nickname was given, it was never taken back. I was christened Loops for my prodigious Fruit Loops consumption, and I am still Loops today, despite not having eaten refined sugar for 40 years.

After a long Sunday bus ride home to my mother in New Jersey, she hugs me, and then wrinkles her nose, complaining of how I smell like smoke. These trips are a reason I have never smoked a cigarette in my life, and if I smell a Lucky Strike today, I am instantly transported back in time, with a strange nostalgic ambivalence, feeling both an immense love and disgust.

In my late teens and 20s, trips to Bear Creek, Pennsylvania to see my father mean Acquire. This classic stock game was modified by our family to allow more cutthroat maneuvers, such as being able to buy stock before playing a tile. I loved our endless battles, though woe to the outsider who joined our game. They would do well in their first contest as we gave them helpful advice – after that, we would destroy them. We wrote down our scores inside of the box to track them for all time.

We have slowly given up playing the traditional board games. I am to blame. In one game of Monopoly, a friend of ours has the oranges, and my father, brother and I must make a deal to get monopolies of our own to avoid losing quickly.

We are finalizing the deal when my brother says “You know Dad, we could make a deal and leave Tony out of it.” My father agrees.

“You could do that,” I say, “but then I’d have to sell all my property to the other person for a dollar.”

“You’d never do that,” laughs my Dad. “You’d have no chance to win!”

So I sell my property to the fourth player for a dollar and they won quickly. My Dad asks why I did it, and I said it was so that my blackmail threats would have credibility in future games. My own vindictiveness is too obvious to mention.

‘Credible future threats’ becomes a family joke and we never play Monopoly again.

I grow older and I don’t see my father and brother as often. I get into other games without them. Magic the Gathering is something of a revelation, but I don’t like spending so much money to be competitive in tournaments.

Instead, I play collectible miniatures games like Mage Knight, winning the first national championship. I win the first ever Heroclix tournament, winning a giant statue of Galactus.

I play Dreamblade, and then the World of Warcraft Miniatures game, flying across the U.S. to high value tournaments, which quickly disappear as soon as Blizzard stops throwing money around.

I move to Chicago and I’m bored. I love playing Blood Bowl online, but I want to do something with real people. I soon start playing Warmachine/Hordes, and build a bunch of armies, despite being a horrible painter. I play local tournaments, then national ones, as a friend and I travel around together.

But I’m eventually dissatisfied. I don’t like spending so much time memorizing every unit, and painting, which I hate. And the games are tense and interesting, but they lack camaraderie. And I’m getting burnt out, and wondering why I’m spending all my time and money on one game.

I gradually give up the game, and I realize that there’s a board game meetup only a mile from where I live, at a store called Dice Dojo south. I bring my dog Rocky to the meetups, and the store lets him stay with me as I play – a little old black Shih Tzu who sleeps on my feet. Without the Dice Dojo’s generosity in this regard, I might never have gotten into modern board games.

After a few months, Dice Dojo South closes, and a friend and I launch the Pilsen Board Games meetup, at a La Catrina Cafe a block from where I live.

I buy a game called Blood Rage. After a childhood spent playing Risk, a 7 hour whinefest, where players would be eliminated with five hours ago and the winning skill was being able to convince other players to attack someone else, an elegant strategy game that lasted 2 hours and rewarded subtle play is a revelation.

But I find my real love is eurogames. Discovering there are thousands of eurogames is like discovering a thousand Acquires. It’s like Christmas every day.

I go to conventions like Gen Con, but now instead of stressful competition, there is something like a joy of discovery, and the camaraderie I’d been missing. Perhaps I am growing up, though I certainly hope not.

I still bring intensity and trash talking on Monday nights to even the most placid euro, and I wonder sometimes if I take it too far. I never used to wonder that.

And now I visit my father in the Poconos for the first time in a long time. He’s in his 80s, and he seems frail and a bit forgetful. But then he takes me to the casino. My father has retired and now he plays poker most every day, carefully charting his (mostly) winnings in a worn notebook.

As he enters the poker room, he appears 20 years younger. Every dealer and regular player knows him. There’s a spring in his step, and his old joking banter is there – his wit has lost none of his sharpness.

One of the dealers shows my Dad his phone. My father can’t (or won’t) operate a computer or cell phone, and he gets his news about my brother from this dealer, who is a fan of my brother’s rock band and follows him on Facebook.

After he reviews my brother’s life on the dealer’s phone, my father guides me to the table. He puts his arm around me and proudly introduces me to everyone there. There is love in his eyes.

And then we begin to play. I’m up $100, which is good, but not as good as my father is doing. And then I notice that I keep getting raised by the two players to my left, who I gradually realize are the best two players in the game, other than my Dad.

I realize that he has seated me there on purpose, the worst seat in the game, in order to get an edge on me. Some things never change.