It’s Christmas, so we’re smack in the middle of the danger zone of the family argument – when the pressure to “have a really lovely time” on Christmas day couples with someone playing fast and loose with the rules of Bananagrams. As Tolstoy so nearly said: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family has a relative who isn’t allowed to play card games unsupervised.”
But, it turns out, we’re a nation of board game cheats and overly-competitive arguers. A new survey of 2,000 Britons, for the toymaker Mattel, recently found that one in four of us describe ourselves as “extremely competitive”, while a third of us have experienced a game being abandoned entirely because of an argument.
