Break out the board games at your next party

It’s a typical Friday night in South Oakland. The beer just showed up at your apartment; your… It’s a typical Friday night in South Oakland. The beer just showed up at your apartment; your buddy braved the garbage that has been dangerously filling the sidewalks since the night before (when it was supposed to be collected) in order to satisfy his thirsty friends.

You and your pals pull up folding chairs, plop down on ratty, used couches and pop open your cans.

Maybe someone switches on the TV. Maybe someone turns up the stereo to a just-below-obnoxious volume. Maybe someone suggests some video games (if you’re a guy and you have that sort of thing in your living room). Maybe you just sit around in a circle, talking about nothing special until you’re drunk enough to talk about complete nonsense. Or, perhaps in a rare phenomenon, a dance party breaks out on your living room floor.

To this I ask: Is that all we’ve got? Whatever happened to more stimulating forms of group entertainment, like card games and board games?

It may sound corny, but try to remember all the fun you used to have playing Monopoly and trying in vain to answer the questions in Trivial Pursuit. Cracking open a board game usually incites boisterous laughter, and the good ones make you exercise your brain beyond the things you normally think about in your day-to-day life.

For instance, Cranium is a popular partner game — meaning oodles of friendly teamwork-driven competition — that requires its participants to perform various tasks, from drawing and sculpting to vocabulary, from spelling and trivia to humming popular songs.

You can’t tell me it wouldn’t be funny to try and decipher your friend’s depiction of a palm tree as she cautiously scrawls it on a notepad — with her eyes closed. And I think you’d get a kick out of your pals’ musical abilities, or lack thereof, when you play a little version of “Name That Tune” as they try to hum a song by the Supremes that ends up sounding more like The Strokes.

The game Balderdash, on the other hand, leaves out the performance aspect and focuses simply on what kinds of crazy ideas you and your friends can dream up.

Do you know what a zygoma is? Yeah, your friends probably don’t, either. But they get to come up with definitions that they think will fool their pals in order to win points, writing definitions like “an East Asian warrior headdress” and “a parasite that lives in garbage cans,” all the while chuckling with satisfaction if one successfully fools you into voting for her definition as the correct one. Incidentally, the zygoma is the long bone that joins the forehead and the cheekbones together.

That’s right; part of the fun is learning something. It’s not passive entertainment, and that’s what makes these games so great. When you get engaged in a game like this, you start to care, maybe you get competitive, and that makes the game itself — and the experience of playing it with the people you like — that much better.

A good game of cards can accomplish the same goal: active entertainment and a friendly, outgoing atmosphere. How about (for the sake of diverting from the poker craze) a game of hearts, spades, pinochle or euchre? You’ve got to have strategy, but you can still have a great conversation while you’re crowded around a table, tossing cards with a smile on your face.

Yes, I know you have reservations. What if the game dies down, nobody is enthusiastic? What if you’re not completely comfortable humming a tune in front of others — perhaps there are a few “strangers” at your gathering? Well, your safety net in this case is the fact that, if you so choose, you can bring back some of that beer from the beginning. The social lubricant is sure to allow people to act and laugh freely.

However, after a few empty cans, the game quality may go downhill, too, unless you’re one of those people who thinks that drinking helps you come up with good ideas.

Without the beer, yes, it is good, clean fun. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Give it a try before you pop open your Miller Lite (or whatever you’ve purchased for the occasion), and you’ll probably find that you can have just as much fun getting a little brain exercise and being as creative as you can rather than just dulling your senses with alcohol.

And, in case of an emergency (or a party with some good-looking co-eds you’d like to get to know better) you can always break out your copy of Twister.

Don’t lie. I know you have one.

Erin Lawley is the Assistant A’E Editor and spends her Friday nights playing childish board games. Email her at enl1@pitt.edu to jump in on the nerdy goodness.