Why I Play Board Games (And So Should You)

Four years ago, I wrote a short apology for playing games, targeted specifically towards digital video games. Today, I would like to reiterate my statement and expand the idea to analogue board games. The analogue and innate social nature of these force us to approach the idea in a slightly different way. The reason why this thought bubbled into my head is Blaise Pascal’s criticism of games and leisure time in general. According to Pascal, we’re all squandering our valuable time and should instead be looking for God by living the ascetic way devoted to prayer and spiritual growth. After his (second) intense spiritual experience, he began to ponder the way in which we invent all kinds of means to distract us from the more pressing and urgent questions of life and death (Graham Tomlin’s words): Take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without disguising it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as…