Late night blogging on my phone again. I was going to work on the computer, but I got sleepy, so here’s what you get.
Tonight, we talk chess.
I remember as a kid a few times playing with my dad; I remember asking repeatedly to play. It was rare. My dad wasn’t home a lot; he was a doctor and when he was home, he was exhausted.
So I should probably have more sympathy for my own kid, who has recently developed an obsession with chess, and asks me repeatedly and often to play.
I like to play games with my kid. We play at dinnertime a lot – Games like Story Cubes or I’m Going on a Picnic* – but games it takes longer than about 10 minutes to play? I’d rather stab myself with a fork.
Naturally my kid’s favorite games are chess and a game called fairy-opoly, which is just as horrifying a turn on monopoly as you could possibly imagine.
I’d rather play fairy-opoly, to be honest. At least that game doesn’t usually end with my kid in tears of frustration at least once during the game because I saw a move they didn’t.
Plus I don’t have the patience for chess. I know how to play, I’m not horrible at it. but UGH strategy. Just takes way too many brain cells especially after work or after school or after wrestling my kid into doing homework and actually eating dinner. The problem is that I’m good enough to win (against an 8 year old).. but not good enough to let the kid win without them knowing that’s what I’m doing.
So instead I play chess with no strategy whatsoever. Which has the interesting result of kid sometimes winning, me sometimes winning, or sometimes neither of us winning.
It has the added bonus of usually making the game very short, because if you’re just moving the pieces around randomly it’s pretty easy to get stuck in checkmate and lose your king.
Chess is a great game; it’s challenging, it can be fun, it teaches you how to think several moves ahead.
But I’d really rather play at maybe once a year instead of four times a week.
*I’m Going on a Picnic a few nights ago included: aliens, Voldemort’s friend Edna (?!), a kid from Germany, and the people of the jury. I have no idea.