Phil Hogan explains why most games should be avoided at all costs ...
There's a part of childhood that's linked forever to those dismal Sunday
afternoons stuck in the house, school in the morning, raining outside,
Dickens on TV. You're just thinking how things couldn't possibly get
more tedious when someone suggests a nice game of Monopoly. So Dad fills
his pipe and gets the board down and you squabble over who gets the little
metal racing car and who's left with the iron or the old boot and round and
round you go, landing on each other's squares and going straight to jail and
dipping into the Chance cards or Community Chest. Sorry - you have lost the
will to live. Do not collect Β£200.
I accept that Monopoly does embrace all those traditional touchstones of
family life - rabid competition, greed, envy, the enjoyment of contemplating
someone else's misfortune. But family board games are too much like those
other misguided attempts to provide quality time with our loved ones -
sitting down to a meal together using knives and forks; going for a bracing
walk in Siberian temperatures with a flask of Bovril - ie, the notion of
strengthening the bonds of kinship through some shared misery.
But I have to reserve my deepest, most meaningful loathing for party games.
I don't mean kids' stuff: I mean party games for so-called adults -
I mean games involving the passing of balloons between your legs to people
who are determined to show you that being a churchgoer and wearing a suit to
work is no bar to having a great sense of humour. These are masters of
enforced jollity. People who still keep an old copy of Twister for
emergencies, though they have now graduated to a game that entails
manouevring a tea spoon down a woman's dress and up a man's trouser leg. An
excellent way to break the ice at any social gathering. Call me
old-fashioned but I prefer my ice in a glass, with perhaps a touch of
industrial alcohol to numb the pain.
I've got this idea for a party game where everyone stands around talking to
each other, getting drunk and rediscovering the Sex Pistols. It's quite
simple: one personality is pitted against another and whoever loses has to
go and talk to the man from No 14 with an interest in car number plates.
You're right, it's not very sophisticated but it can bring hours of fun.
Though it is, I'm afraid, just for grown ups.
