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Was just talking with a friend about this. The reason older people tend to play repetitive card games isn’t because they are captivating, it is just a thin excu

Was just talking with a friend about this. The reason older people tend to play repetitive card games isn’t because they are captivating, it is just a thin excuse to spend a few relaxing hours together. After a few months of hesitation I’ve gotten some of my friends into playing simple games like euchre and hearts and the quality of our time together has gone up significantly.

Terr_ 2y ago
Reminds me of a scene from a favorite book-series, where the protagonist is visiting with a recently-retired/convalescent former boss. > “So,” Illyan said at last. “What do a couple of retired officers and gentlemen do on a country weekend?” > [...] “Tradition is, you take the local beer from the village—there’s a woman there who home-brews it, extraordinary stuff—and hang the bottles over the side of the boat to stay cold. When the beer gets too warm to drink, it’s too hot to fish.” > “What season is that?” > “Never, as far as I could tell.” > “Let us by all means observe tradition,” said Illyan gravely. -- Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
SoftTalker 2y ago
IDK that hasn't been my experience. When I've gotten together with people to play euchre it's always people who are super competitive about it, get annoyed if you misplay a hand, and don't talk about anything except how good or bad their last hand was.
- 317070 2y ago
  Exactly! High quality social time, interaction with real other people. A great excuse to get together.
- seec 2y ago
  That's my experience as well. In my opinion, "social" board games are always an excuse for the people who propose it to "dominate" others in an activity they don't do as often and don't care about much. They call it socializing but it is always a type of problematic socialisation because it always ends up hypercompetitive and solely focused on the game. We know humans can't truly multi-task and this is true for games too, so what happens is that as the game progresses everyone is increasingly focused on its strategy and no real conversation about anything else happens. I think it is actually a crutch for people that are not that interesting to begin with and prefer to retort to this sort of activity (passive-agressive competitiveness built-in) instead of cultivating something interesting to talk about with other peoples. I'm all for socialisation by talking or doing shared activities with a common goal, but games and to an extent sports are really more trouble than they are worth most of the time...
  - sameoldtune 2y ago
    Sounds to me like you are maybe the competitive one. It could be that you are friends with board-gaming sociopaths but in my life I have met only one person who I think would propose a board game just because they could win at it.

Terr_ 2y ago

Reminds me of a scene from a favorite book-series, where the protagonist is visiting with a recently-retired/convalescent former boss. > “So,” Illyan said at last. “What do a couple of retired officers and gentlemen do on a country weekend?” > [...] “Tradition is, you take the local beer from the village—there’s a woman there who home-brews it, extraordinary stuff—and hang the bottles over the side of the boat to stay cold. When the beer gets too warm to drink, it’s too hot to fish.” > “What season is that?” > “Never, as far as I could tell.” > “Let us by all means observe tradition,” said Illyan gravely. -- Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold

SoftTalker 2y ago

IDK that hasn't been my experience. When I've gotten together with people to play euchre it's always people who are super competitive about it, get annoyed if you misplay a hand, and don't talk about anything except how good or bad their last hand was.

317070 2y ago
Exactly! High quality social time, interaction with real other people. A great excuse to get together.
seec 2y ago
That's my experience as well. In my opinion, "social" board games are always an excuse for the people who propose it to "dominate" others in an activity they don't do as often and don't care about much. They call it socializing but it is always a type of problematic socialisation because it always ends up hypercompetitive and solely focused on the game. We know humans can't truly multi-task and this is true for games too, so what happens is that as the game progresses everyone is increasingly focused on its strategy and no real conversation about anything else happens. I think it is actually a crutch for people that are not that interesting to begin with and prefer to retort to this sort of activity (passive-agressive competitiveness built-in) instead of cultivating something interesting to talk about with other peoples. I'm all for socialisation by talking or doing shared activities with a common goal, but games and to an extent sports are really more trouble than they are worth most of the time...
- sameoldtune 2y ago
  Sounds to me like you are maybe the competitive one. It could be that you are friends with board-gaming sociopaths but in my life I have met only one person who I think would propose a board game just because they could win at it.