Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 83
In this third month of quarantine, it has oddly felt harder and harder to find the mental energy for board games. To be fair, work has been quite busy and there's a lot on my mind in that department. On the flip side, we live in a house with over 500 board games and it feels like such a waste not to play them.
As I consider this shift in mode, I think part of my lack of eagerness to play is just missing friends a lot more. Board games are a very social hobby and I love playing with different groups of friends because they bring something different to the game experience every time. There are games we have played over and over again and yet no two sessions are the same when you have a different group of players assembled. But quarantine took that away and playing digital versions of games doesn't quite have the same allure.
I joke that it's tiring to only play against Tobie and that's probably a factor too. Tobie is really good at games and I rarely win against him in head-to-head encounters. Usually having other players in the mix adds more variety to the experience and gives me a bigger chance to snag a victor or two during long game nights.
So I'm starting to buy into that theory that games remind me too much of the people we can't spend time with. And thus it's more exciting to save time for our ongoing online RPG campaigns because at least they involve friends more, even just digitally. It was quite the triumph to figure out how to translate rather nuanced board game experiences like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and Portal Games' Detective into online experiences that leverage our physical copies of these games because they almost feel like our regular board game sessions. The only caveat is that they take a LOT of work as someone has to scan and upload the clue cards and other bits of information so that everyone can still examine things on their own as they could have been doing had we been physically at the same table.
But this is not a reason to avoid playing our games more and I really should shake this off and keep the games going when we have free time. Our love for these games is a big part of what keeps me and Tobie together and it's one of the many ways to help the long quarantine nights move along a little faster.
We can't let the quarantine crazies get to us. We win the battle day by day. We survive to get back to the "normal" world beyond the quarantines, beyond the COVID-19 global pandemic. It's the only way forward.
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