Rummikub

On board games.

I resent board games.

This sounds harsh. It is not.

In college, I was introduced to the world of board game aficionados. I learned the ways of game nights, reviews, new releases, Reddit threads, and other online forums through friends across my campus involvements, mostly against my will. And while I adored the company of most of these friend groups (my RA staff, for example, included many of my now-closest friends), I tended to despise the new sets of rules I had to learn and the new pieces and props I’d have to become familiar with just to be in the hangout.

I don’t know what it is. I think most of the time, when I want to unwind on a Friday night, this unwind does not include potentially ruining friendships by either caring too much (I’m fantastic at Catan) or caring too little (I hate Scrabble) about a game’s outcome. Additionally, board games, to me, have always sat at a delicate intersection between pretend and reality. The games themselves usually rely on some element of fiction. But the social dynamics are quite real. Board games require you to know the people around your table well: what will upset them, what will trick them, what will make them laugh. They require social cues, familiarity, and even extroversion at times, the ability to command a table and convince your peers of your character’s innocence, or entertain people with your charade of a chihuahua.

These are not my strong suits. There have been many an occasion in which I read the room wrong, in which I did in fact piss people off for messing up Code Names, in which the game wasn’t fun because I couldn’t convince anyone I was not the Werewolf. My talents lie in either smaller, intimate, two-to-three-person conversations or large, rambunctious dance floors. The specific in-between of a game night usually works against me. And after too many anxiety-riddled gaming experiences, I have concluded that if I’m going to leave my house for any particular social reason, I would rather go dancing– an activity that relies less on my ability to navigate a group dynamic and more on my ability to navigate a rhythm.

Recently, I’ve come across an exception.

Every night for the past two and a half weeks, after my mom gets home from work, and she, my dad, and I finish enjoying the rare warm Illinois evenings, the three of us gather in the basement and engage in our newest obsession: Rummikub.

Introduced to us by a close family friend on our road trip up from Miami, Rummikub is an Uno-Meets-Scrabble-Meets-Mahjong tile game. The purpose of the game is to rid yourself of your original 14 tiles by matching your numbered tiles based on color and ascending order.

There are 106 tiles in the game, we only have three players, and you need to tally a specific number under a confined set of rules to even begin the first round. This means that the game can be exceptionally… slow.

Boring. Time-consuming. Laborious.

I’m obsessed.

This may be due to the meditative element of the game. After spending the last five years teaching 100 teenagers a day in four different subject areas, going slow is not something I’m accustomed to. There has always been something to grade (late), something to plan (day-of), something to print (immediately), someone to e-mail (a parent), something to reorganize (the bookshelf), restructure (the curriculum), or improve upon (for next year). The sustained concentration on finding patterns in numbers and colors provides an invitation for my mind to calm down, to cease thinking about the tasks of the day, the future, the past, and the stressors of organizing a move and a new life.

But this may also be due to the fact that I get to share a nightly routine with my two favorite people, people whom I have not lived with in over a decade.

In the comings and goings of adulthood, and especially in the last three years of living alone in a studio apartment, I had forgotten the sweetness and consistency of sharing a domestic space. I had mostly bought into an ideology of separation and isolation, one that determined that if I was still living with my parents in my twenties, I had failed at being an adult, even though there have been intervals in my life when I could have benefited the most from not being alone. I bought into this mindset despite the fact that most of my Miami friends in their 20s live with their parents, siblings, and cousins – not just because of the city’s unaffordability, but because we come from communal and intergenerational family structures.

I had forgotten how comforting it is to know that even when we squabble and spat over mugs around the house, and who is feeding the dogs, my parents and I can share a ritual: a board game, a Diet Coke, NPR Tiny Desk concerts playing on the TV in the background. In the coming months, as I approach more concrete decisions about my career and teaching practice, it’ll be nice to have these rituals to fall back on, even if (or maybe because) these rituals are slow… and laborious… and time-consuming.

And maybe I’ll come to find that the most fulfilling futures we build for ourselves require time and effort and slowness. And maybe I’ll come to find that we do not have to build these futures all by ourselves.