Nobody Wants Your Blasted Sheep

How we rediscovered the world of board gaming

I met my husband over board games. At a weekly game night in 1997, DJ and I and several others battled it out over classic 90s party games like Taboo, Guesstures, Scattergories, and Balderdash. Well, I say “we” battled it out. Most of us just facilitated gameplay so DJ could win. He won everything.

Eventually, he won me over too, and it seemed inevitable that our new life would be full of fun and board games.

But something happened through my teen years to my adulthood. I got tired of games. Except for Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit — both of which were long and slow — I was never interested in playing anything. DJ and I did go through a phase of learning classic card games, but those are very fiddly and only sort of fun unless you’re bidding money or removing clothes or attaching some other stakes to heighten the interest. I was a little sad about this development, because games are fun and it was how DJ and I first connected. But one can play Taboo only so many times before wanting to chew the cards in half. I just didn’t play games anymore.

Then, somewhere around 2006 or 07, all that changed. I was introduced to a game that opened up a vast, unexplored world to me. Hey, gamers, are you smiling knowingly now? Do you know what comes next? I bet you do. Everybody knows “the gateway game.”

We played The Settlers of Catan.

This game was unlike all those party games I’d played before. It wasn’t frantic and fast-paced. Nor did it require players to have an affinity for words or a bank of random knowledge like Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. No, Catan had an interesting hex-shaped board, beautiful art, and adorable wooden houses and cities and roads. We learned to gather resources, trade for what we needed, weigh the benefits of building another settlement vs. drawing a Development Card. Best of all — and this was the aspect that most intrigued me — there was more than one way to win. You could amass your points by building the most cities… or you could supplement your settlements with Largest Army or Longest Road… or you could draw some lucky Development Cards and gather victory points that way. And sometimes, sometimes, I actually beat DJ. I actually won!

DJ and I fell deeply in love with Catan. We played it a hundred times the year we got it. As our kids got older, they learned to play as well. They learned all about supply and demand, and how hard it is to offload a resource that everybody has. I once saw a t-shirt that said, “Nobody wants your ****ing sheep!” We adapted the saying into a more family-friendly version, and it became a part of our Catan life. We were so excited when we bought our first expansion set. An expansion! Of the same game! That added new mechanics! Taboo never could!

Over the next many years, we discovered other games beyond Catan. Carcasonne! Ticket to Ride! 7 Wonders! The Castles of Mad King Ludwig! Clank! (this one actually does have an exclamation point in its name). Our boys turned out to be voracious gamers, so we were always in the market for a new one. The price tag for one can be hefty ($40 is “hey, that’s not bad”), so it became — and often still is — a standard Christmas/birthday/Easter treat.¹

We’ve discovered lots of other board-gamers outside our family. In fact, over twenty years later, DJ and I are back to attending a weekly game night with friends — exactly the kind of thing I envisioned in our early years together.

I set out in this post to list some of our favorite games. I even took pictures of our game shelves as reference. Turns out that I just wanted to talk about the journey. So I’ll just leave this one as is, and dedicate another post to actually discussing the games we love.

It’s been a decade and a half since we first played Catan. We don’t play it often anymore. This “gateway game” has some of the same frustrating elements of earlier games, such as luck-based progress (you better hope the dice likes where you placed your settlements) and no real catch-up mechanism if you fall behind everyone else. But I will always be fond of this game. It was the one that brought fun back into my life.

Even if I am stuck with all these blasted sheep.

1. Despite our full game shelves, we’re just casual gamers. There are dozens… scores… hundreds? of games we haven’t played. Even my son is more dedicated than I am; he’ll spring for much more elaborate, much more expensive games that involve hundreds of pieces and campaigns that take hours to accomplish. I consider these the other extreme of Taboo. I don’t play those, either.