Hello Friend

I have two sons. They’ve both grown up playing loads of board games. The eldest one is now at University, studying Game Design. He’s always keen to play any game.

The youngest is not so compliant. It’s much harder to get him to the table. He prefers to play when his brother is home, rather than just playing with me. (Not sure where I’ve gone wrong here). Because it’s increasingly rare that he’ll join me for a game, I often let him choose what he wants to play. 

The problem is, he keeps choosing the same game. Now I wouldn’t mind so much if this was a really good game. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad. But it is quite card-draw dependent and quite mean. He often gets huffy when we play. It just seems crazy to me that he keeps choosing this game that he doesn’t seem to have that much fun playing. I’m not that surprised that he’s not too keen to play games on a day-to-day basis, because his game-playing experiences have been skewed by this one game. 

So, what do I do about it? This is a problem I’d like to solve. 

Here are three ideas that I’m going to try.

• Get him to write down the names of 12 other games that he’d be happy to play over the next six months. Write them each on a piece of paper and put them in a sparkly box (see the last email you got from me!)  Schedule a regular fortnightly time for game night and pull out a game at random each time. I’d rather have a weekly game night (or more frequently), but I think I have to ease him back into it gently.

• Take him out to eat at the pub. We always play games there. 

• Ask friends and family to come over to play games at times I know he is free - and ask him to join us. He seems more open to playing in a larger group. 

If you have any more ideas, please do reply and let me know!