Family game night is a tradition that comes along with having kids, like attending spring music concerts featuring kazoo solos or cleaning mysteriously sticky globs of who-knows-what out of your minivan after a road trip.
Even if you are not a huge fan of board games, all parents go into this activity with the best of intentions, hoping to connect with the people they love and bring the family closer together. Board games are a great for family bonding! Right?
Unfortunately, the nostalgia of playing Chutes and Ladders wears off almost immediately, and after your fiftieth hike through the Lollipop Woods, you’re about ready to burn Candyland out in the backyard.
Before you’ve ever completed a game of Uno without a tantrum, your kids graduate to post-preschool games which require a little more strategy—like SORRY!, the ultimate game of frustration and petty revenge (which is not their official slogan, but it should be).
If you really think about it, playing board games isn’t that much different from your usual gig of being a mom—just like motherhood itself, game night often starts with someone saying, “Hey, you know what would be fun?” and ends with people crying for reasons that no one understands.
Here are a few ways Playing SORRY! is just like being a mom:
1. In the beginning, you spend a lot of time sitting at Home, waiting for a chance to get out.
2. Once you’re finally out, all you want to do is get back Home.
3. It sounds like it’s going to be loads of fun—until you’re right in the middle of it.
4. You find yourself constantly reminding your kids they have to say “Sorry.”
5. Whenever they do apologize, it sounds pretty insincere.
6. You have to do a lot of counting to get your kids to move…
7. …and if you think they couldn’t possibly move any more slowly, just wait until they start going backwards.
8. If two or more players occupy the same space, one of them gets bumped.
9. The one who gets bumped is definitely going to whine about it.
10. You hear “WHEEE!” every time someone gets on a slide.
11. Just when you get ahead, you’re suddenly sent right back to where you started.
12. The kids take a liiiiittle too much pleasure in controlling your fate.
13. At some point, usually while everyone’s in a fight about something that, ultimately, doesn’t even matter, you’ll mentally calculate how much longer it’ll be until this is over.
14. After all that arguing, you realize it’s way easier just to let them win.
15. No matter how difficult the experience is, if you wait long enough you’ll probably be suckered into thinking it’s a good idea to do it all over again.
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This post was written by Robyn Welling. To read more from Robyn, visit Hollow Tree Ventures.
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Hahahaha!!! This is SOOO true!!!
As a board game geek, I’ll defend family game night as actually fun with the caveat that a lot of mainstream board games for both adults and kids are pretty terrible. Monopoly is the worst, in particular. I actually published a post about some board games that are legitimately fun for kids and parents: https://welleatyouupweloveyouso.com/2015/05/27/family-game-night-that-wont-make-you-want-to-stab-your-eyes-out/
We are in a full on cycle of Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, Uno, and Memory right now. Sometimes the kids will even play it (just the two of them) for hours on end without fighting…..that’s Mommy Heaven right there!
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