Family Feud

My family loves to play board games; it’s quite the tradition in my house. However, someone always gets upset, or someone gets hurt, the game easily turns into anything but fun, no matter how hard we try to make it enjoyable. Paradoxically, a few months later, or another event in which all the family is around we all get excited at the thought of playing a board game, knowing how it will most likely end. What made me think to write about this in my blog this week was the most recent family event that took place about a few weeks ago…Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Day my family wasn’t all together, seeing as both my older brother and sister has fiancés and they have a couple families to visit. So our family’s Thanksgiving took place on Friday, and of course once the bellies were full and the plates and leftovers were cleaned up, everyone gathered into the living room to play a board game. This year it was my younger sister’s idea to get a new game instead of playing the usual, Family Feud DVD game, Outburst, or Charades. We got the game “Battle of the Sexes,” so we split up into boys and girls, and then realized it was uneven and they made me switch the guys side. Then it was time to lay down the rules…once they were laid down most people seemed pleased, we were just ready to start the game…and so it began.

Everything was clam and fine until certain rules which were established at the beginning of the game started to get challenged, and then whoever it was would grab the directions and we would waste about 10 minutes while someone read and analyzed the rules of the game, and of course the rules were vague in the way they were written which lead to us having to interpret them, which lead to controversy. Once, that rule was established the game would continue. Towards the end of the game some of the questions that were asked in the game began to become repeated, and so that led to us having to make up a rule such as, “If you remember the answer you are not allowed to answer.” This rule was put in place after my older sister got angry at the fact that my memory was amazing and I remembered the answer to all the previous questions, I let her make the rule and didn’t argue.

However, later when one question was repeated my older sister, Candice, remembered the answer and yelled it out, and so being the stubborn, typical person in my family I called her out on the rule which, she herself had put in place. So then she decided that I was allowed a free is. Now looking back on it now, if everyone in my family wasn’t so interested in being fair, and so obsessed with the justice of the game, a lot of argument could have been avoided…a lot. But since we all have the same genes, no rule gets looked over, and not a single ten minutes goes by without a challenge of the rules is presented. Battle of the Sexes was coming to an end and my older brother, Brandon and his fiancée, Carolyn, were growing tired.

Candice however was very awake and ready for the next game, and so a fight between games was beginning. Brandon was ready for bed and wanted to sleep but Candice wanted to keep playing, and seeing as how Brandon and Carolyn were staying the night at Candice’s apartment one could see how a problem had now been created. So the yelling began, and the insults were exchanged, feelings were hurt, and in the end we were sitting in a circle of chairs around the table playing Outburst, Candice had won, and the new rules were being presented.

Round two, everyone was playing Outburst minus my mom who had gone to bed in the midst of the drama. The first few minutes of the game were fine of course, however once it was my dad’s turn to describe the word to his team, without using it, he began to act it out, which was against the rules, and so everyone started yelling at him, because he had misunderstood the rules, well more like just didn’t hear them. The rest of the game surprisingly went pretty smooth, except that I kept forgetting to give the opposing team’s points to them on the score sheet, because I was the score keeper, but besides that the game wasn’t bad. It ended nicely, everyone was tired and we all went home or to bed.

Even though our family bonding times always end in arguments or have bumps along the way I look at it like just the way our family works. There are calm times, when things are smooth, but soon something happens to start a fight and we hit some bumps for a while, but we work through them and then things are calm, at least for a while, but at the end we forget about how badly we fight because we remember that we enjoy each other’s company, and no matter what game is thrown our way it will never change the way things are.