A Christmas from back in time

Santa reached back in time this Christmas.

It's probably a trick of memory, but it seems as if the Christmases of my childhood were marked by board games.

One year, Clue was under the tree.

The next year, it was a new Monopoly set to replace the battered one with missing pieces.

A few years later, Risk appeared and the whole family sat around a table plotting devious ways to dominate the globe. (Usually those plots gave way to weariness and games were decided by surrender rather than conquest.)

Some years, the new board game might be received by a younger sibling. When my sister received Careers one Christmas, the game was clearly aimed at kids a few years younger than I. But it didn't matter.

That summer the whole neighborhood whiled away hours on the front porch playing the game.

On those rare occasions when there wasn't a new game under the tree at our house, something would pop up at a friend's. When one of the kids in the Stith household received The Game of Life one Christmas, I found myself spending hours on the living room floor there, playing the game.

As a game aficionado, I had my preferences and prejudices. I was a loyalist for Parker Brothers and held Milton Bradley in disdain. (Life was the exception.)

At some point, though, the board game tradition and I parted ways. The complicated, rule-heavy war games involving hexagons to replicate Gettysburg or the Battle of the Bulge never caught my fancy in high school or college.

And in married life, we played games with our daughters (Hungry Hungry Hippos anyone?) but never really caught the bug the way we had when we were kids ourselves.

For our children, the situation is dramatically different. The twins and their husbands are avid gamers, both role-playing and electronic, and it's a point of family pride that Emily's husband Mike played a key part in the development of Rock Band: The Beatles in his work at Harmonix.

Sally had introduced us to the game Apples to Apples a few years ago, and we agreed it was a tremendous amount of fun. But she took the game with her to IU.

When it came to the game shelf at the old homestead, the cupboard was pretty much bare. Now, thanks to Santa, that has changed.

Under the tree this Christmas we found a copy of The Settlers of Catan. Santa had read an article about the game in The Wall Street Journal which noted its popularity with entrepreneurs because it requires constantly shifting strategies. Santa was also able to order it from Amazon at the last minute and get it here in time.

So this Christmas, like a step back in time, we spent a few afternoons after the holiday, gathered around the kitchen table trading sheep for lumber, building roads, and establishing settlements and cities.

It's a great game, different each time you play it, and it's good to know it will be in the house when the kids gather in years to come.

Maybe one of these days I'll even win the darned thing.[[In-content Ad]]