CINCINNATI — A weekly meetup where a group of friends gather to drink alcohol and enjoy one another’s company was once again spoiled by the introduction and uncontrolled use of board games, confirmed multiple buzzed sources.
“This night used to be about a bunch of buddies getting together and bonding over a shared interest in booze,” said Will Reid, who hosts the gatherings at his house. “Now it’s just dice roll after dice roll until they all blur together. As the night goes on, people start getting belligerent. Actual fights have broken out over different interpretations of the rules. Hell, Kenny doesn’t even come around anymore. He developed a board game problem in college and says this isn’t a safe environment for him anymore.”
Mark Hardin, whose wife Kristina attends the weekly get-togethers, said he has grown increasingly concerned as the night’s focus shifted from beer to gaming.
“I was happy when it started,” said Hardin, who explained that he enjoyed having some alone time to work on his car. “Kristina would meet up with her friends after work on Thursdays and have a couple of beers as they caught up about work and life, that sort of thing. She’d be home in time to tuck our kids into bed, laughing as she shared her friends’ stories with me. Nowadays, she’s out until all hours of the night. It’s the worst when they play Twilight Imperium. There have been Friday mornings when I’ve woken up alone.”
Professor Norman Underwood, a gaming epidemiology researcher at Northwestern University, said that the issue is hardly limited to Reid’s group.
“After the lockdown, we saw lots of people eager to re-establish connections with their friends and loved ones,” said Underwood, who stressed that there is no safe amount of board gaming. “They started organizing these drinking nights as a healthy, harmless way of rebuilding relationships. Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before some well-intentioned invitee brought along their copy of Settlers of Catan without thinking about the consequences. Even some more savvy groups might be fooled by more recent games like Drinking Quest. Really, without early intervention and board game safety education in the schools, we’re just going to see this sort of thing continue to spread and worsen for decades.”
At press time, Reid and his friends were excitedly gathered around his kitchen table, ready to sample an exotic board game that one of them had brought back from a trip to Germany.
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