ArcaMax

We recently received an invitation to a friend's house for game night.

"Great," I told my husband. "Do we have to play games?"

I am not opposed to all games. I'm not opposed to anyone who plays games, game designers, game salespeople, game collectors. I hereby recognize that games bring pleasure to untold humans in an often dispiriting world.

It's just that, somewhere in the middle of my fourth decade, a fascinating phenomenon came into relief: Many of my aging, geeky friends had taken to tabletop role-playing games in a rather ferocious way. They were getting together for hours upon hours of strategic battles involving small figurines of Druids.

I believe this trend was exacerbated by the pandemic. Hours, days, weekslong kitchen table skirmishes became a way to pass the time when growing spring onions inside a mason jar became too bleak. The research bears this out. COVID-19 did nudge people to buy more games, and toy industry analysts credit "kidults," teen and adult buyers who collect action figures and play games.

My husband dabbles, occasionally being welcomed into an all-day game coven. I try to curtail my churlishness, to be all, "Go! Have a blast, honestly! Leave me here to read my chunky novel about a perimenopausal woman obsessed with a guy who works at Hertz! This sounds like a great use of our individual growth time as humans!"

My proverbial cast-iron pan is finally seasoned enough to draw boundaries for myself, to understand the limits of my tastes and abilities. I have a floppy kind of brain, a brain that has rejected every outline I have ever attempted to make. I can only learn by doing, which is why I have to physically touch every single blouse inside my local Kohl's. My head is all, "Oh, you want to think five steps ahead? Too bad, because we're going to sing the collected works of Dua Lipa."

Nothing fills me with more dread than when a person who obviously does have a sharp, process-oriented brain begins describing an elaborate schematic to me. I might as well go to sleep, because the info is not getting into this hat rack. Like, I am supposed to remember that 16 turns from now I have to announce my intentions to enter the haunted bestiary?? I am supposed to recall that on page 46 of the instruction manual there was a line about the pending execution of the maids of the one ring guild??? I simply decline!

Games I will play: Monopoly; Scrabble; Mall Madness; Trivial Pursuit/trivia at a bar; New York Times Games app games and crosswords; giant Jenga if forced (but also in a bar).

Games I will not play: anything with a book of instructions bigger than a novella; anything with too much three-dimensional architecture; anything with LEGENDS, DRAGONS, SETTLERS, WORLDS, HAMMER, CRAFT, DAWN, COMMAND, REALM or MASTER in the title; anything that must be purchased at a small specialty store in a strip mall next to a T-Mobile.

But here's the thing about being declarative about your desires: Your best friends will respect you for it. Your best friends will understand, and if they really want your company, they will adjust.

We went over for the game night. We played in the pool with their kids, ate a lovely dinner, had wonderful conversation. The kids went to bed. I thought everyone forgot about the game night portion!

Wrong.

"We pulled two choices," my friend said. "Dungeon Mayhem ... or 13 Beavers."

They pulled a game called ... 13 Beavers!? I felt my heart grow three sizes. They knew. Emphatically, I said, "13 Beavers!!!" and they laughed because it was so obvious, it was the plan all along. This is what friends do for friends. They meet in the beautiful, sacred middle.

We proceeded to play 13 Beavers, which I can only describe as Candy Land with beavers. The goal is to move your beaver around the board, finally reaching Beaver Paradise (I am not making this up). There is something involving stinky fish and shortcuts through beaver rapids, I don't know. This game is for children 7 and up, and I still found my mind wandering as my process-oriented friend explained the rather small set of instructions. "I'll figure it out as I go!" I said. It's just beavers!

We had a great night. We made stupid beaver jokes and laughed and socialized when the other option would have been losing more brain cells to the blue light box in my hand. There's always room in my matrix of boundaries to benefit from someone else's favorite things.

In way, you could say we did find Beaver Paradise.

I'll exit the game now.

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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on X or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

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