Friday open thread: board game background
Apr. 10th, 2026 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This week's prompt was sparked by an interesting conversation with hamsterwoman in the comments to a previous post, in which we were discussing the extent to which we felt our childhood environments influenced our interest (or lack thereof) in playing board games as adults. And so:
Did you grow up regularly playing board games (either with your family, or in other contexts)? Do you feel that this affected the prominence (or lack of prominence) of board games in your later life?
It's hard to unpick the nature vs nurture element in my own experiences. Certainly I was not raised in a board-gamimg household, nor was it a frequent occurrence in any of my childhood social circles. My mum, her sisters, and her parents played Scrabble from time to time (usually when one or the other of them was visiting another family member for an overnight/weekend/weeklong stay), and she was in a bridge group with several of her friends for a couple of years during my childhood, but board/card games were never something we did as a family. I literally don't think I've seen my dad play any form of board or card game in my entire life. Whenever we got together in multigenerational groups (grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and my sister, cousins and me, or my parents with their friends and their friends' kids and my sister and me), the adults would socialise by preparing food and then talking around the table while eating, and the kids would either join in the dining table conversation with the adults, or go off on our own to the back garden or another room in the house and play imaginative games (i.e. games where we were princesses or zookeepers or sentient dinosaurs or survivors of a war or whatever). When I was with other kids (either just my sister, or with school friends or cousins or the kids of family friends), we'd either play imaginative games, or physically active games like jumping on a trampoline, climbing trees, chasing each other around, hide and seek, etc. When I was on my own, I either read books, climbed trees and ran around, wrote or drew things, or made up imaginary scenarios in my head.
On the rare occasions when I'd find myself in a social situation in which other kids wanted to play board games, I always remember feeling very bored and disappointed (but of course never said anything and just politely went along with it and pretended I was very happy to be playing Monopoly or whatever, because I have been a deeply conflict averse person my entire life, and realised very early on that 'do what the other person wants and pretend you're happy about it' was the easiest way to avoid conflict).
In summary, I was raised in a milieu in which adults socialised by preparing and eating food together, and talking, and in which children socialised by running around/climbing/jumping or by making stuff up in shared worlds together.
So certainly my upbringing didn't encourage any interest in board games, whereas both my parents love cooking, love music, love reading, love swimming in the ocean, and love bushwalking (hiking), and absolutely instilled a love in me for all those activities.
I suppose if I had been raised by board-gaming parents, or been friends with loads of board-gaming kids, maybe I would have developed a love for it, but I feel my personality was such that I would always have felt that reading, swimming, jumping on a trampoline, climbing trees, or making up some shared melodramatic scenario was a much more enjoyable use of my time, so it's hard to know for sure!
What about all of you?
hamsterwoman in the comments to a previous post, in which we were discussing the extent to which we felt our childhood environments influenced our interest (or lack thereof) in playing board games as adults. And so:Did you grow up regularly playing board games (either with your family, or in other contexts)? Do you feel that this affected the prominence (or lack of prominence) of board games in your later life?
It's hard to unpick the nature vs nurture element in my own experiences. Certainly I was not raised in a board-gamimg household, nor was it a frequent occurrence in any of my childhood social circles. My mum, her sisters, and her parents played Scrabble from time to time (usually when one or the other of them was visiting another family member for an overnight/weekend/weeklong stay), and she was in a bridge group with several of her friends for a couple of years during my childhood, but board/card games were never something we did as a family. I literally don't think I've seen my dad play any form of board or card game in my entire life. Whenever we got together in multigenerational groups (grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and my sister, cousins and me, or my parents with their friends and their friends' kids and my sister and me), the adults would socialise by preparing food and then talking around the table while eating, and the kids would either join in the dining table conversation with the adults, or go off on our own to the back garden or another room in the house and play imaginative games (i.e. games where we were princesses or zookeepers or sentient dinosaurs or survivors of a war or whatever). When I was with other kids (either just my sister, or with school friends or cousins or the kids of family friends), we'd either play imaginative games, or physically active games like jumping on a trampoline, climbing trees, chasing each other around, hide and seek, etc. When I was on my own, I either read books, climbed trees and ran around, wrote or drew things, or made up imaginary scenarios in my head.
On the rare occasions when I'd find myself in a social situation in which other kids wanted to play board games, I always remember feeling very bored and disappointed (but of course never said anything and just politely went along with it and pretended I was very happy to be playing Monopoly or whatever, because I have been a deeply conflict averse person my entire life, and realised very early on that 'do what the other person wants and pretend you're happy about it' was the easiest way to avoid conflict).
In summary, I was raised in a milieu in which adults socialised by preparing and eating food together, and talking, and in which children socialised by running around/climbing/jumping or by making stuff up in shared worlds together.
So certainly my upbringing didn't encourage any interest in board games, whereas both my parents love cooking, love music, love reading, love swimming in the ocean, and love bushwalking (hiking), and absolutely instilled a love in me for all those activities.
I suppose if I had been raised by board-gaming parents, or been friends with loads of board-gaming kids, maybe I would have developed a love for it, but I feel my personality was such that I would always have felt that reading, swimming, jumping on a trampoline, climbing trees, or making up some shared melodramatic scenario was a much more enjoyable use of my time, so it's hard to know for sure!
What about all of you?
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Date: 2026-04-10 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-10 08:02 pm (UTC)Not necessarily board games per se, but much of my family incorporated activities into our gatherings. Especially my parents. Less so in the later years, for various reasons, but certainly when I was growing up, we either went places, played games, watched a movie, or we were all doing our own thing.
Like you, I also made my own fun. Partly because I couldn't really be around a lot of people for long. I needed my own space to play and think. But I also enjoyed being imaginative.
I don't mind just sitting around talking to a point, but I can get very bored very quickly. I prefer deeper conversations, and I prefer activities over just chatting if we're not really talking about "anything". For me, it's probably a combination of being raised in a family where social time = doing a thing AND needing more breathing room than many people.