![]() It wasn’t that I had a bad time, more that I struggled with how close we all stood. Last summer, a few of us from board-games club tried returning to a nightclub we hadn’t visited since before Covid. Out the other side of the pandemic, it no longer seemed so strange to pass an evening clustered around a table, rolling dice, quarrelling over the import price of Catanese wool. After a few months of this, I could hardly imagine having fun any other way. It was a midweek game of poker, played online against the same few friends, all of us hunched in front of our computers, holding supermarket beers and chuntering about bad luck. Trapped at home like everybody else during the lockdowns, I had exactly one social commitment. Despite a downtick in work, the bank balance remained even, and I realised then how just much cash I’d been tossing away on pizzas, pints, coffees, trains, Ubers, childcare, restaurants – paying, in other words, to go on playing the wonderful game of socialising in a British city. By 2021 I should have been more broke than I was in 2019. There was a halt (professional, emotional, educational, physiological, social) and afterwards, perspectives changed. If you’d told me at 30 this was how I would be socialising in a decade’s time I would have been … surprised? Appalled? For sure I would have been curious to know what the hell had happened to my social life as I knew it. I find I’m reluctant to meet the eyes of younger night-outers on the train. You only lust after more supplies, another favourable dice roll, a longer road, a slightly bigger army … But before and after board-games club, I do feel a distinct, queasy melancholy. In my experience, while playing, you feel no ickiness or embarrassment whatsoever. Maybe even appalledĪfter initial experiments with other board games, we tried The Settlers of Catan and never looked back. If you’d told me at 30 this is how I would be socialising, I’d have been … surprised. ![]() But you do what you can to bleed the land, build towns and trading routes, form a militia, prevent property thefts, and talk your way out of mob justice that can be as cruel and arbitrary as any episode-ending betrayal in Game of Thrones. Natural advantages are not evenly distributed. You are given plots of land in an imaginary pre-industrial world called Catan. The game was devised in Germany in the 1990s and it shares elements with Monopoly and Risk, as well as the children’s card game Go Fish, vintage video games such as Civilization and Theme Park, and the parlour game Wink Murder. There are half a dozen people who show up at Catan club, five men and one woman, and for the duration of any contest we turn into savages, betraying one another, abandoning promises, occasionally cackling. “Play” doesn’t capture the totality of our investment.
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