Life Repeats Itself

When I was younger a group of friends would gather on a Friday night at one of our houses and we would play games, well into the night.

Board games were the most usual pass time during these sessions, often it was The Farming Game (yes, a real game, I still have it) but most of the time we would play Risk.

This was back in the old days before all the different versions (Star Wars, etc.) came out or before the "army" pieces looked more military like instead of odd shaped blobs of plastic.

We would play for hours.  I think it was an obsession of some sort, a competitive obsession probably - beat your buddy up consistently - but an obsession nonetheless ...

Well it's a generation later, and I found myself on the front room floor with my boy playing Risk tonight.

He is obsessed with it just as we were, but it's not a competitive obsession with him, he just loves to pretend battle his way across the board and would go for hours if we let him.

The funny thing is that he plays it by himself a lot more than with me or anyone else.  Hours on end if we let him, and we don't, but it's a self-stim that we have to really watch and it's hard to get him to buy into the logic we use to keep him away from it for a few days.

Tonight was the first night in a long time that we had played it together.  I had a great time and he did as well.  It's a lot of fun, I could get used to playing it again like this, for fun instead of for domination.

I was reminded of the old days when we played weekend nights as a group of friends, and hope that between everything else that takes up our time in the evenings I can work in chances to play it from time to time with my boy, keep up the circle of life, so to speak.