Thoughts On A Life Upended

Sara and I loved playing games – card games, board games, deck-building games… they were one of the primary ways we spent time together at home. I can map our relationship through the games that we played.

A month after we met, for my birthday, she bought me the X-Files board game. It was a little complicated to play but we figured it out and played it once a year or so. X-files was one of the things that brought us together in the early days.

Our first New Year’s together – we played Takenoko, or the “Panda Game” as we called it. I tended to win – I remember how happy she was on the rare occasions that she beat me. We played that game a lot the first year of our relationship. I think she might’ve gotten it as a gift the first Christmas we were together, but I can’t remember for sure.

Racko was another game we played pretty early on – it was one I had and shared with her. Sara loved it, which delighted me. We also played Rummy a lot, all throughout our relationship. We were pretty evenly matched!

The summer we moved in together, Sara ordered the game of Life – we ended up only playing it a few times, but it was a classic! I remember playing it with Sara’s niece and nephew one time when they slept over, and we made sure to make it a point to ask every time someone got married if they wanted a pink or a blue spouse – we never made assumptions!

I think we got battleship around the same time – for some reason that was a game Sara almost always won! Exploding Kittens, Sushi Go, Double Crossing (an older game from my youth that I had to share with Sara), Uno, Connect Four – all games we enjoyed in the first year of our relationship.

After we bought our house, I found out Sara had never played cribbage before, so she ordered a cribbage board and it became a new staple – another game we were well matched in. It still makes me laugh that apparently I remembered some of the rules wrong. When we played it with my dad the Thanksgiving we visited them (2018), he insisted on playing by the correct rules. Now I have trouble remembering what it was we had gotten wrong…

When we got married November 18th, 2016, our “guest book” was a set of generic jenga blocks. I still have them in our game shelf – all the well wishes and love from our friends and family that day. We played with the set a few times over the years.

For our holiday season right after we were married, Sara got me the incredibly thoughtful gift of two games that were particularly well suited to be two-player games. Boss Monster and Star Realms – we played them regularly for awhile, and brought Boss Monster with us for the above-mentioned Thanksgiving visit with family in 2018. I so enjoyed building dungeons and trying to kill heroes with Sara and my brothers.

Telestrations also joined our collection that holiday season. Unfortunately it isn’t really a 2-player game, so we only played it a few times. I remember playing it with some of our best friends and it was so much fun.

We didn’t acquire too many new games in 2017 – Sara was busy finishing up school, which she did that summer semester. We continued playing games from our selection though – I think that’s when we might’ve played “Gloom” the one time we did play it. Eventually I also got her to play SPANC with me (Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls) – which was a game she’d had that I always found intriguing. We had much fun and ended up playing it a handful of times over our remaining time together.

In 2018 we discovered several games that were new to one or both of us, that we shifted our game-playing focus to. Munchkin and Dominion were the main ones, plus we broke out the Wii and got a few fun games for it – Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. We got those to give Sara something to do when she was recovering from her weight loss surgery, I think. We both enjoyed playing them though. We ended up with probably 5 different Munchkin decks. Our favorite was the knock-off Harry Potter deck that Sara got on sale for about $10 or $15. After Sara died, I ended up sharing Munchkin with some friends of ours, which was a good time. We also got Plague, Inc. in 2018 – we had both loved the phone app version, so when I saw that they turned it into a board game, I knew we needed it. I’m still impressed at how well they turned the app-based solo game into a board game.

Then there were the games that we had that we never ended up playing together – Arkham Horror, Race for the Galaxy, Discworld, Pictionary .

I miss playing games with Sara so much. We didn’t just play together, but together with friends – at their houses, at ours; it was one of the constants throughout our relationship. After she was diagnosed with cancer we didn’t play quite as often, especially toward the end when she started really feeling sick and was worried. I think the last game night we had was when some friends came over in August of 2019, and we played Dead of Winter, a game they brought over. It was so nice to have a little bit of “normal” even in the midst of Sara’s treatment. It was a few weeks after we had lost George.

Part of me will always be sad anytime I look over our games, but the other part of me is happy that this is something that I can carry forward. I treasure the memories I have of all the games we played together, and they can continue to be something I share with people in my life to bring joy and have fun. I know Sara would want me to keep playing them.