by Justin Bell

“Call me as soon as you can man.”

My brother’s third text of the day chased back-to-back missed phone calls. When I’m not writing tabletop content, I work as a program manager for a consulting company. Thanks to a meeting with our company’s COO and Global People Officer, it had been a busy, stressful morning. My phone was on “do not disturb”, so when I flipped the phone over, my brother’s communication thread made it clear that there was a real emergency.

Sadly, my fears were confirmed. After a series of alarming health changes over the past few months, our father had collapsed at his home in upstate New York. Even though CPR had been administered relatively quickly, my father’s pre-existing health issues and the morning collapse led to a visit to the emergency room, which quickly became a visit to the intensive care unit.

The situation quickly became tragic. Dad never regained consciousness, and he was placed on a ventilator. Suddenly, machines were the only thing keeping him alive. I booked a flight to Rochester and arrived about four hours before Dad was set to be taken off of life support.

You always think you will have more time.

“Immediate family only,” the signs outside the ICU said. That meant just five of us—stepmom, half-sisters, my brother, me—spent Dad’s final hours in a small hospital room, holding Dad’s hands and shedding plenty of tears. We also did what we loved to do any time the group was together: laugh about the memories that have lasted a lifetime.

A few of those memories were about games.

***

My father was never the person who suggested playing games; in fact, he never seemed to even enjoy playing them.

As a kid, we played a lot of the traditional “roll and move” games with Dad, like Monopoly and Parcheesi. From time to time, we tricked Dad into joining something like The Game of Life. UNO? Obviously. The Rummy family was always lurking nearby: Rummy, Rummy 500, Rummikub, Rummoli (the Poker/Rummy variant of Michigan Rummy that I grew up with).

It felt like Dad was always working late, so games were usually limited to weekends, and my time with him was further limited thanks to a divorce that changed our family dynamic when I was just a child. For my father, games clearly felt like work, so he was less inclined to playing games and more inclined to other leisure pursuits—long meals, action movies, road trips, televised golf tournaments (which mostly doubled as “dad naps”, a tradition we carry on in my home today).

Later in life, Dad could occasionally be tricked into playing games, but there was a limit to how many rules he would bother to learn before throwing up his hands. Like the relatives of many players in my network, Dad seemed to hate just about anything that was “too complicated.” (This is only funnier because my dad loved to play golf—itself a very complicated sport—and he worked in complex management roles throughout his career. I get it: everyone’s brain needs a break. But often, the “too complicated” label felt like lip service.)

Occasionally, the sibs and I pushed Dad to try something new. Seven or eight years ago, I brought a bunch of hobby games to a Thanksgiving family weekend, and forced my dad to play Luxor, the Rüdiger Dorn hand management game. (Although I love other Dorn designs, such as Istanbul and Goa, Luxor is still the Dorn title that hits the table the most.)

Luxor is a relatively rules-light experience that plays in about an hour. The main hook: players manage a hand of five movement cards and a small pool of adventurer tokens, tokens that must be moved forward on a track that ends with a treasure tomb in the middle of the board.

On a turn, players can only play either their left-most, or right-most, card from hand to move one of their tokens toward the tomb. (Cards in a player’s hand are never shuffled or moved, only played when they reach one side of their hand.) At the end of each turn, a player must add a new card to their hand from a draw pile, which must be inserted into the middle of their now-four-card hand to give them a new five-card hand for their next turn.

“This is ___ ridiculous!” Dad said, after hearing the hand management rule two minutes into the teach. (I’m leaving the profanity out, for the purposes of a family-friendly website.) “This game has too many rules.”

Still, Dad decided to play Luxor with my wife and stepmother…and almost won, coming in just a few points behind the eventual winner. At the end of the game, he begrudgingly admitted that he had fun thinking through the best ways to move his adventurer tokens around the map to pick up treasure tokens and sets of cards from the movement track. The best part? Dad didn’t really listen during the teach, so he only ever played his left-most card all game long, and only ever added new cards to the right side of his hand.

My father also hated the idea of cooperative games. “I want to have a chance to win,” he would say, because to Dad, winning meant “beating everyone else at the table.” So, whenever we floated co-op games by Dad (The Crew, anyone?), it was a hard pass.

Now, Dad WOULD play games with a team…as long as the goal was to beat the other team. The day we got Dad to play Codenames—a family favorite for everyone else in the household—is still one of the most shocking moments in Bell Family Vacay history. Codenames is always a riot with my family; when a team’s Spymaster goes on a one-word clue run that scores three or four cards on a single turn, that story becomes legend. (Naturally, when someone blows it and gives a clue that reveals the Assassin, that kind of story becomes legend, too!)

Most years, Dad would politely pass when given the chance to play Codenames. But when he finally did decide to join the family for a play, it was a moment. He didn’t want to play as a Spymaster that first time—let’s give the man a “try bite” first, right?—but simply being willing to join the whole family for once was such a thrill.

***

Ultimately, Dad’s favorite thing about games wasn’t playing games at all. It was grabbing a newspaper—or later, his iPad, since even my father had to come to grips with reading the news in the present—and being at the dining room table while others played games.

My dad loved being near the action. He was constantly looking up from his newspaper, smiling at his family, watching them enjoy themselves, laughing along with the group when something funny happened during a player’s turn.

I recently went to a friend’s game night…not to play, but to simply sit around. I’ve done that a few times over the years, and lately, my work schedule has been rough and I don’t always have the capacity to do much more than sit in the same space as my friends. (I am very good, however, at eating your snacks, drinking your bourbon…or, both.)

A friend was running a game of Blood on the Clocktower, and ten adults laughed their way through hours of fun as they ran two sessions back-to-back. The friends asked if I wanted to jump in, to take on a character role in-between rounds.

“Nah, I’m good,” I said. “I just love being here.” Watching innocent friends get eliminated by their peers was glorious. Standing in a corner of the room with two others as they plotted their way into the next night’s accusation was a blast, too. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but just being around others as they had fun on a game night made me think about how much Dad must have loved just being in the room with his kids.

***

The five of us at the hospital were rolling, laughing as we reminisced about so many great times with Dad. As a group, we laugh with and at each other all the time, and we laughed at some of the funny things Dad used to say, some of the bad fashion choices of the last 40 or 50 years we could remember, that time Dad claimed to be on a diet while pounding eight pieces of fried chicken at a local theme park, Dad’s everlasting appreciation for the musician Prince, and took a moment to appreciate the biggest laugh of anyone I have ever met.

And, the times when Dad would settle into his spot at the end of a large table, a glass of Cutty Sark and a plate of cheese and crackers nearby, watching everyone else having fun playing games.

Eventually, the harsh reality of the hospital situation returned. A nurse walked in; a doctor joined her. We had a few more minutes with Dad before…well, before.

I got in one more squeeze of Dad’s hand. Everyone gave him one more kiss on the forehead, then the doctors did what they could to offer him a peaceful passing.

I’ll miss you, Dad.