Amy Lu's View

This weekend our Hunkering-Down-At-Home lead me to try something new: Chad and I played a game.

Actually, the game–Marvel ReCharge card game–is quite old. We’ve had it for about 20 years. But we’ve only played it once in that whole time, because, as I’ve said many times in many ways, I don’t really like games.

I have nothing against games or gamers, but I don’t like rules, or, to be more accurate, I don’t like spending the time or attention to learn rules. I also get bored with games pretty quickly.

If a game is super simple and won’t take too long to play, I might like it. I’m definitely not interested in strategy or role playing games. And usually, I would just rather hang out and talk. But if a game doesn’t require me to think too hard and I can still be social while playing it, I could get into it. I have definitely enjoyed Cards Against Humanity in my time and video games like Mario Kart that can be fun even if you suck at them. Fairly recently I even realized I like Banagrams.

Perhaps I just hit my game quota as a young person. I remember playing Risk with my brother for hours and hours as a kid and thinking that was grand (my brother even had an original song he would sing when engaged in an across the sea campaign. I still remember it: “Oh we’re going on a boat, and we’re never coming back.” Ask me to sing it for you sometime, it’s more impressive when you hear it. Just be advised if you ask me to sing other songs that my brother used to regale us with that they are NSFW). We also played Monopoly, and I loved playing Yahtzee and Gin Rummy with my mom.

As a teen, I liked to play the card game Bullshit with my friends and even the board game Life. But we had our own totally kick-ass and angsty rules for Life that involved having to draw the names of actual boys from our school to be our husbands, and we could have multiple cars full of husbands and children.

I’m not sure how or why Chad and I acquired the Marvel card game. I think we liked buying the card packs and I also don’t think I really understood how disinterested I could be in games (with age comes self-knowledge). So the only time we ever played it was about 5 years ago when we were on a little getaway up north.

It was actually my idea to play it now because:

• The card packs have been sitting around our house taking up space for 20 years so it seems like we should at least try ot play it
• I thought the rules were pretty simple
• I now have a better apprecaition of games as a shared activity
• What better time than now to try something a little different that we can do at home?
• Chad didn’t seem very interested in Banagrams (although I’m going to keep trying to sell it).

This could be the start of a new chapter in my life. I’m even considering buying Exploding Kittens…