The last time I went out with a group of friends, we went to a disco, spent a lot of money and returned home a little "dizzy" to sleep and wake up very late the next day. The next time I went for a "healthier" way to relax and have fun, I went to the cinema with a friend, stayed there for about two hours and a half, eating pop corn and sipping soda from a giant recyclable glass. But it was until the last time I went to my grandmother's house and met with some of my cousins when I could really have fun.
What we did was to play an old board game —which name I won't mention to avoid giving the creators any unnecessary advertising. I remembered the old days in which I was a kid and played board games with my own family a Sunday afternoon and it was a nice time. I also remembered how you sometimes tend to take out uselessly "your courage and influence" just to try to avoid falling into the pit the naughty dice —yes! dice!— had just sent you to. After that, at home, I logged into the instant messaging program in the computer and started to chat with some friends... just to discover it was not the same.
As time has gone by and we have grown up, we have given in ourselves to the trend and stopped doing things that were real fun some years ago. Network games are cool; hanging out with your friends is cool too, and we both know it well; instant messaging services help us learn —among others— the latest gossips as fast as never before, and this is very cool too. But we have abandoned the old-fashioned games as if they weren't fun too. That's bad.
These are the advantages of board and other family games I can point out: First of all, they are free —well, I mean free as soon as you buy the game itself. Next, they require all the players to be at the same place, which is very cool because you can talk about a lot of things while you play! Third, you really laugh at the good and bad luck you or other players can get during the game, which means healthy laughter, not the one that comes from humiliating another human being. Fourth, these games last hours without spending a penny. Last but not least, they are fun! If you all get bored, you just close the game and change it, or start over again.
You can supplement it with some food or, why not?, stop the game just where you are and go hang out a while after that. You never lose.
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Body and soul + Youngsters
