Winning the Game
My mother used to love board games, and one of her favorites was UpWords. She pulled out this game almost any time her mother visited, and when more extended family was around, UpWords tournaments usually formed. After my grandmother passed away, the tournaments went on, though less often. As my mother lost her ability to pull from an extensive mental dictionary, let alone complete sentences, any desire to play the game dried up completely.
UpWords was not the only one crossed off our list of family activities—indeed, any game that required strategy or multiple steps became too confusing for my mother. Soon, they were too unbearable to play without her as the fifth player. Sometimes she participated, but she would be partnered with another family member who helped her along. She knew as well as everyone else that these games had not always been so hard for her, so, rather than suffering the humiliation of limping through the motions, she just stopped playing.
One of the last games she was able to play as an independent player was Apples to Apples, a card game where each player has a handful of nouns that he/she must pair with a designated adjective in the middle of the table. During each round, one player must decide which (anonymously deposited) noun is best described by the token adjective. Some players stick to the literary descriptions (such as matching “scenic” with nouns like “Paris” or “forest”), while others hope to gain points by choosing funny comparisons (like using “scenic” to describe “[the act of] driving off a cliff”). Mostly, this game is more about trying to guess what the person picking the noun is going to like than what best matches the adjective.
When my aunt, uncle, and cousin visited a few years ago, randomness seemed to dominate the game, and with it, my mother. A typical round went something like this:
One player turns over an adjective card. Everyone else picks a noun from their hand and throws it face-down in the middle of the table. My mother is the last to add a card and usually only after persistent prodding by the players around her use the top one in her hand.
The first player reads the nouns and selects one they like the best. As the favored noun is announced, whoever contributed that card gets a point; this person is usually identified by a yelp of excitement over being chosen (though the "yelp" is optional, it adds a nice dramatic element to the proceedings).
As we compare nouns on this night, however, most rounds end in silence. If no one claims the winning card, we use process-of-elimination to award the point to my mother. She plays the whole game either not realizing what nouns she has or forgetting which one she played, or both. Thus, her contributions are completely random, but somehow they find their mark more often than anyone else’s.
This will become the last game she will win in her own right, and, ironically, it is a game usually won by predicting how other players think.
UpWords was not the only one crossed off our list of family activities—indeed, any game that required strategy or multiple steps became too confusing for my mother. Soon, they were too unbearable to play without her as the fifth player. Sometimes she participated, but she would be partnered with another family member who helped her along. She knew as well as everyone else that these games had not always been so hard for her, so, rather than suffering the humiliation of limping through the motions, she just stopped playing.
One of the last games she was able to play as an independent player was Apples to Apples, a card game where each player has a handful of nouns that he/she must pair with a designated adjective in the middle of the table. During each round, one player must decide which (anonymously deposited) noun is best described by the token adjective. Some players stick to the literary descriptions (such as matching “scenic” with nouns like “Paris” or “forest”), while others hope to gain points by choosing funny comparisons (like using “scenic” to describe “[the act of] driving off a cliff”). Mostly, this game is more about trying to guess what the person picking the noun is going to like than what best matches the adjective.
When my aunt, uncle, and cousin visited a few years ago, randomness seemed to dominate the game, and with it, my mother. A typical round went something like this:
One player turns over an adjective card. Everyone else picks a noun from their hand and throws it face-down in the middle of the table. My mother is the last to add a card and usually only after persistent prodding by the players around her use the top one in her hand.
The first player reads the nouns and selects one they like the best. As the favored noun is announced, whoever contributed that card gets a point; this person is usually identified by a yelp of excitement over being chosen (though the "yelp" is optional, it adds a nice dramatic element to the proceedings).
As we compare nouns on this night, however, most rounds end in silence. If no one claims the winning card, we use process-of-elimination to award the point to my mother. She plays the whole game either not realizing what nouns she has or forgetting which one she played, or both. Thus, her contributions are completely random, but somehow they find their mark more often than anyone else’s.
This will become the last game she will win in her own right, and, ironically, it is a game usually won by predicting how other players think.
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