Fledgling board game collection

As a child, Scrabble was our family’s board game of choice. We were all well-read and had a sufficiently diverse vocabulary that games could go down to the wire despite substantial differences in age. Monopoly was a painful and frustrating experience, replayed so infrequently that the memories were dulled by time and the agony was rediscovered all over again (I’ve since learnt that this may have been due to an all-too-common relaxation of the official rules, but that is scant comfort for the hours lost). Snakes and Ladders, stripped of its karmic lessons, was unbearably nihilistic. In my adolescence I became (loosely) aware to tabletop wargames and Dungeons & Dragons, but primarily through video games that borrowed from these genres. Through my own failings, it took a relocation to Paris in my late twenties to become exposed to the much richer variety of board games that are available, populating entire bookshelves in friends’ apartments and forming the primary focus of entire afternoons and evenings. They even made frequent appearances during working hours, thanks to the seriousness with which the French treat the lunch break. Julien, Thibault, and colleagues, you know who you are!

Having remained in the same country (heck, the same city!) for more two years now, we’ve begun enjoying minor luxuries such as buying the occasional book (much too heavy and cumbersome to accumulate when relocating to a new continent every other year). And some of our closest friends (figuratively and literally) have a keen interest in board games, with shelves groaning under the weight (be it metaphoric or, indeed, physical) of numerous games. Partly out of a guilt stimulated by no such abundance on our part, but predominantly out of a desire to sate our own appetites, we are slowly addressing this imbalance. For now, the carpeted floor serves as a shelf of sorts to this, our fledgling board game collection …