Games have always been an important part of the Christmas experience – whether we like it or not. Back in the middle ages, households gathered together in the bleak midwinter to play versions of blind man’s buff and truth or dare; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was inspired by a game played in aristocratic households where the masters and servants swapped roles for a night on the last day of Christmas. The Victorians were famous for their parlour games with charades and twenty questions as important to the 19th century experience of Christmas as roasted goose and rampant diphtheria.
During my own childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, board games ruled the festive period. Frankly, was it even Christmas until someone (me) flipped the dining room table during a particularly sociopathic game of Monopoly? Did everyone have that one uncle who took Trivial Pursuit too seriously – lambasting his terrified teammates for not knowing the chemical formula of sulphuric acid, while claiming the opponents were getting all the easy questions? Did everyone else immediately break Hungry Hungry Hippos?
