Board games are off limits this Christmas—Hallelujah! Admittedly this guidance is only intended for separate households meeting during the festive period, but uncertainty over the rules has been a feature of 2020 and I hope to exploit that confusion in my own bubble. I’ve never been good at board games, because I don’t like losing very much and I’m also not particularly keen on winning.
That ambivalence—like so many problems—started in childhood. My brother and sister were much older than me and any time I played a board game it was with adults. They didn’t always let me win, but a certain leniency came my way. That seems like the right approach to me: a child playing Scrabble against adults is going to need help. In chess, my father often suggested the best next move.
Admittedly, the leniency sometimes stretched to indulgence. In Monopoly everyone knew that I liked the orange and pink streets and sold them to me on favourable terms. I was happy to reciprocate: if you needed Bond Street, I’d swap it for Pall Mall. I might even trade Park Lane or Mayfair. We helped each other complete sets so that we could quickly get to the more exciting phase of the game—houses and hotels. There’s a lot to recommend this collaborative approach: the race for supremacy may be less exciting, but it’s definitely quicker. When I was a child a game of Monopoly could be over in less than two hours. As an adult I’ve played games that take more than twice as long, and often end with someone crying (usually me).
That’s because my new family, the one in which I’m a parent rather than a child, is much less indulgent. Nobody honours my preference for the pink streets in Monopoly. I’m not allowed to consult a dictionary during Scrabble. My husband doesn’t believe in showing leniency to anyone, even a very small child. Ultimately it’s not good for their morale, he thinks, if someone lets them win—and perhaps he’s right. Children need to develop a competitive instinct. They must learn to be gracious losers if they don’t want to end up like Donald Trump. Equally, they need to be comfortable winning if they hope to emulate Kamala Harris.
It’s a tired stereotype, yet even recent studies show that women are less competitive at work, that the difference leads to a significant disparity in earnings and promotion, and that it starts in childhood. I remember watching a friend’s ten year old who, on the point of winning a hurdles race at school, opted to hang back and wait for another girl, so that they could win together. At the time it seemed like a nice gesture, but perhaps she should have seized her chance of glory. A fear of winning could be as detrimental to our life chances as an inability to cope with losing.
In the Netflix series Queen’s Gambit, we see eight-year-old orphan Beth Harmon pitting her wits against Mr Shaibel, the caretaker who teaches her chess. He doesn’t let her win, but Beth’s determination and genius are such that soon she is beating him anyway. We can’t all be a grandmaster, though, and the child who is given no leeway, who stands no chance of winning Scrabble or chess may lose interest in playing.
Do board games help build character, then, or do they just reveal the character traits we already had? It’s tempting to speculate that a competitive games player will be a lone wolf in the office while a more collaborative approach indicates a team player at work. Perhaps the trick is to use different approaches and strategies, depending on the game, the players and the moment. I think I'm getting better at winning and losing. It still rankles, though, when I walk down Pall Mall or Whitehall, and think of the all the hotels I could have had there by now if only my opponents hadn’t been so obstructive.
