Now that I have kids of my own, we play board games free from boredom, but not without some emotion. We have three boys, two parents with jobs, and one full calendar. The question is: what will we do with our leisure time?
Family Leisure Time
When the kids were little, we could strap them into car seats, strollers, and baby Bjorns to go where we pleased with our downtime. Now, as they’ve grown, leisure time looks different. The days of every Saturday meandering around the zoo have passed. Museums have reached a strange ground where they are not engaging enough to hold kids’ attention, and not novel enough to feel enchanted again. Most of our leisure ends up with sports: baseball practice, soccer games, and family afternoons on the 9-hole municipal course.
On the days too hot to walk the golf course or sit on different bleachers and watch minor league baseball, we rest at home. Board games offer the right activity for the days of thunderstorms and free afternoons from school and sports. The games engage and entertain, but also give a chance to educate.
More than Games
I grew up with board games where victory meant bludgeoning your opponents until complete domination. Risk and Monopoly taught me to be ruthless, and taught me a bit about probability. But they also took hours and even days to complete. The new style of board games like Catan, Carcassonne, and others moves faster and ends in a race to points rather than owning everyone’s property. The breadth of games means my kids can learn how to think about different factors like risk-taking, chance, and reading other people.
They have to learn different strategies to account for scarcity, chance, and the unpredictable 6-year-old who will not do what they want. As a dad, I can show them how different approaches will lead to different results. I can model how to win with honor and lose with grace. Indeed, having your children beat you without a single favor gives a great mix of pride in them and frustration—my own kids can compete with me now.
When they were young, I could only move the little plastic pieces along with them. They did not care about how Candyland demonstrates the relationship between predestination and free will. We place our characters at the start, shuffle the deck, and begin. They did not believe me that the game was set after the shuffle. The winner was determined before a single piece was moved.
Nevertheless, the kids still found joy in the journey to the kingdom. They do not mind the theological musings alongside the game; the gospel does the same. God’s sovereign hand brings us home to his kingdom, and whether we know what card will be drawn next or not, the joy is in the journey, the hope is in the kingdom, the glory belongs to God.
Leisure Together
Many of our evenings have us going to sports together, but we end up isolated. We have only had two seasons where any two kids were ever on the same sports team. Instead, one kid plays, one parent reads, one kid wanders off, and the ever-present phone goes from recording a great hit to distracting us with endless emails. Advancement in technology tends to isolate. We may all be in the same room, but the screens give each of us our own experience.
We grow apart together. The board game provides a different path. We have chances to talk about the game and life around the table. There are always times when I just want to lie on the couch and watch a football game. The COVID pandemic gave us a taste of what life is like without meaningful gatherings and engaging with each other in flesh and blood. Christ’s resurrection declares that our bodies are a permanent part of God’s plan. Rejecting the bodies around us for the bots online may entertain, but it will not satisfy. However, sitting at the table engaged together has a far longer impact than lying on the couch apart.
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