Charlotte Latvala: Family game night can take different forms

Sometimes things don’t happen the way you plan. But still, they happen.

Take family game night.

One of my fondest wishes, as a younger parent, was that the five of us would eagerly gather around the dining room table for rousing games of Risk, or Clue, or even Go Fish. (I’d imagine Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit if I was feeling extra hopeful.)

I grew up playing competitive games (simple card games, complex word games, obscure board games) with my dad and older brothers. (Who, I might point out, never cut me any slack, even though I was a literal child, and they were adults.) Still, those are some of my best childhood memories (especially when I won. Not that I’m competitive or anything.)

Anyway, when I had my own family, I took it for granted that family game night was a given. That we would designate Friday, or Saturday, or whatever, to hauling out decks of cards and dice and boxes of little plastic markers and fake money.

But it wasn’t meant to be. No one else seemed particularly interested in family game night. Oh sure, when the kids were tiny we would play kid games like Chutes and Ladders, Memory and Operation. Those are an obligatory part of modern childhood, right up there with cheese sticks and booster seats.

But as they got older, family game night just never happened. And when I pushed for it, the evening usually ended in arguments about the rules, or tears, or simple boredom.

And I gave up. (Although we still have a whole cupboard filled with board games. Hope springs eternal and all that.)

Fast forward to 2024, when both my daughters start doing Wordle (i.e. the gateway drug to other New York Times online games). They got hooked, and before you knew it, we were texting results to one another.

“You know, a subscription to the games section is only a few bucks per month,” I let drop. (I’ve been an addict for a year or so.) “Then you’d get a bunch of other great games and puzzles.”

And so it began. What started with a Wordle obsession grew into an interest in the Mini, then Connections, then Strands. Before you knew it, they were texting me their Spelling Bee results. We would ask each other for hints, slyly brag about our wins, and eagerly log on to see the new day’s puzzles.

“We need to get your brother and dad into this,” I said, to complete agreement. They hadn’t both been this enthusiastic about anything since our last Disney vacation 10 years ago.

And it dawned on me: I finally got my wish. We have family game night, or close to it … just in a different form.

As the Rolling Stones wisely put it, you don’t always get what you want.

But if you try sometimes, you just might find … yourself arguing about first-word Wordle strategy with the people you love most in the world.

And feeling vindicated.

Charlotte is a columnist for The Times. You can reach her at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Latvala: Family game night can take different forms