Board games are my son’s salvation from smartphones
Iwill deny my eight-year-old son a smartphone until he has the money to get one himself. Meanwhile, he can contact me by landline, or shouting, or sending the dog. The smartphone is a gateway to compulsiveness and idiocy. I am addicted to mine, and I am 48. It’s too late for me, but not for him. The larger your fantasy life, the smaller your real one, and the worst evils flow from smartphones.
Even respectable sources of information – Wikipedia, magazines – cannot teach you to read meditatively; only books made of paper can do that. I fear everything that flows from smartphones; I think they are demonic. There is pornography, which is the opposite of love. There is Instagram, which tells him he is ugly. (He isn’t.) There is social media, which tells him not to listen, or adapt, or change his mind. (He should.)
Instead, we play board games because my husband thinks it’s 1952 and the only television I really love is Prime Suspect, which isn’t suitable for children unless they are morbidly interested in the struggles of a female DCI in the 1980s.
We adore board games: not the dull ones, like Monopoly, which is covetous (at the end of the rainbow is another housing development), or Scrabble, which my husband always wins by memorising obscure two letter words.
Instead, we play Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, in which we fight fictional villains with magical objects. Or Munchkin, in which magical creatures kill all the lawyers and you can be any sex, or species, or trade. Or Dragonwood, in which you collect points for more magical creatures. (They are in no way anti-capitalist). Or Kingdomino, in which you are invited to build an idealised medieval village: it is Monopoly really, but in the 12th century, and with fields. Or Tiki Topple, which I cannot explain because I do not understand it (any strategy seems superfluous) or Exploding Kittens, which speaks to a child’s sense of the macabre.
I don’t like them all. Ticket to Ride, where you build railway lines across Europe, feels like being the Fuhrer’s chief engineer in 1939. Photosynthesis, in which you grow trees, is as boring as watching trees grow, because it is watching trees grow. But it is wonderful watching your child playing with something other than a smartphone. And board games work. Play them long enough and, very soon, they will beat you.