Playing Games

I’ve just returned from another watercolour painting adventure near Ravenna in Italy. It had all the usual ingredients I have come to love and expect: great teaching, a lovely villa with comfortable accommodation and excellent food, and an interesting and varied group of nice and mostly older women. I managed to produce a few pictures which I was reasonably happy with and the week passed by quickly and enjoyably. Apart, perhaps, from one evening after dinner when we decided to divide into two teams of four to play a very competitive game called Codenames.

Two of the ‘opposing’ group who were there as friends announced that our group should ‘watch out’ because they were both very competitive. Talk about throwing down a gauntlet.

The game consists of twenty-five cards each containing a random word laid out in a five by five grid on a table. Each word represents the codename of a spy. Both teams appoint a Spy Master who knows the location of your teams’ spies on the grid and who then needs to reveal these codenames to you as quickly as possible by linking the words via a code word. For instance, when I was SpyMaster, two of our spies were codenamed  ‘Gold’ and ‘Note’, so my clue was ‘Money’ and my teammates had to find two words amongst the twenty-five on the grid that might fit with ‘money’. They weren’t helped by the sabotaging from the two highly competitive members in the other group who tried all sorts of distracting shenanigans.

We all managed to just about keep it the right side of fun and flippancy, but after each of us had had a turn as Spymaster, it was getting late and we all agreed to pack it in and retire for the night, feeling that we’d got to know one or two people better, and maybe not in such a positive way! It occurred to me that playing games with adults is very different from playing them either as a child or with children (especially grandchildren). When young, card games and board games teach you many useful life lessons, about cooperation and competitiveness, about taking turns, about teamwork, about disappointment and bruised feelings, and, very importantly, losing and winning with grace and dignity. 

When adults are playing games all those skills are just as necessary, if not more so unless you want to be seen as behaving like a spoilt brat, and the two games that have taught me most are Scrabble over the course of many years, and most recently, the game of Bridge. With both games, I’ve certainly had lots of opportunities to practise losing with dignity! I had never thought of myself as particularly competitive, but constantly losing quite dismally at the game of Scrabble to two married friends when they stayed with me in the house in France, eventually caused me enough chagrin to impel me to teach myself how to play properly and to do lots of practice so that I could, at the very least, stop losing quite so badly. However, I doubted that actually winning against such experienced players would be a remote possibility.

Scrabble lives and dies by the functional simplicity of a game that barely requires a rule book. Just seven letters, rearranged any way you like, scores demarcated on both board and tile and once you have played once, you can play forever, improving every time. My problem was that in between these annual marathons in France with those particular friends, I rarely played Scrabble, so any improvement from one year to the next was minimal. So, one year, in anticipation of their annual visit, I decided to learn by playing over and over again against myself. Nowadays I play Scrabble against the computer online almost every day, but at that time I had little or no internet connection in the French countryside. As I gradually improved, I realised that Scrabble is about numbers as much as words, so that a lovely little two-letter word like ‘QI’ is wasted unless you can get that ‘Q’ onto a double letter square, or better still that a word like ‘JUKEBOX’ will get you gazillions of points if strategically placed to trigger a triple word score.

My fight back came quite early in their visit as we settled down to play our usual game and I failed to mention that I had been practising madly every night for about three weeks before their arrival. I can even remember the word that I placed which caused amazement and garnered me an unheard-of score of 63 glorious points. Blocking anyone from being able to get a triple word score (as he thought) along the top right hand corner, the word ‘DENT’ was created down the right hand edge, but, of necessity, missing the red triple word corner tile. But I had an ‘I’ so I made IDENT, which got me 18 points, and, by luck on the next round I could create ‘IDENTIFY’ also landing on a triple word square and scoring another 45 points. Cue some considerable amazement from my friends, and especially when I started to win a game or two (hopefully with grace).

These are lessons that I have been taking into my newfound fascination with the game of Bridge. Unlike Scrabble, this is not a simple game, and the rule book appears to be multi-layered and written over a great many years. I took the Beginner’s Course in February and after nearly eight months of weekly play, I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface, despite the fact that I practise online every day. It’s also a game that sometimes shines the spotlight on you individually, when you play both your own hand as ‘declarer’ and your partner’s hand as ‘dummy’, and at other times when defending, you and your partner are each playing the cards you have been dealt in order to stop your opponents from winning their contract. Who knew that 52 cards could throw up such fiendish complications and challenges?

On a few occasions I have questioned my commitment to continue because my progress feels glacially slow, but I find myself drawn back to it every Wednesday. For a start, like any competitive game with rules, it’s a really good work-out for my ageing brain. It forces you to concentrate, to plan, to think ahead whilst at the same time remembering what cards both your opponents and your partner have already played. There is obviously considerable skill involved but there is also a massive dollop of luck. I have had sessions during which I have picked up the thirteen cards I’ve been dealt and my heart has either soared or plummeted, depending on how many aces, kings, queens, jacks or cards of a single suit that I have been dealt, or the lack thereof.

Another thing that keeps me returning is the group of women that I play with every week. Very occasionally there will be a couple of youngsters in the room, often playing with or against the resident experts, but Bridge seems to be a game which massively attracts the older generation and for my sessions anyway, most of them are female and, for the most part, we are all roughly at the same level of competence. As beginners, we tend to be kind and supportive of each other’s efforts as each contract is played out and, as in Kipling’s immortal lines, we treat those two impostors of Triumph and Disaster just the same and with good humour and a sense of proportion. My criteria for a successful afternoon of Bridge are that I have enjoyed the company of my group and had some fun. If my partner and I have won the odd game or even a rubber then that’s the icing on the cake, but, for now, anyway, it’s definitely not the cake.

And the cherry on the icing on the cake is that Bridge is so absorbing that you completely forget any cares and worries for the two hours of play and, according to research by Dr. Caroline Small, it’s also really good at boosting both wellbeing and brain power. So if you love playing games, are not too competitive and like the idea of a challenging workout for the brain, why not give Bridge a try, with the added bonus of meeting a new group of like-minded friends?

Tricia x

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