by Justin Bell

I’m a father in a one-car family in Chicago—we don’t drive quite enough to need a second car, and with bikes and a Vespa-style scooter (and a bus line, multiple subway lines, and my own two feet) lying around, it just never made sense to pony up the cash for another vehicle.

Maybe once a month, I try to play board games during the daytime on a Saturday or Sunday. Everyone I know who has kids accepts that weekends are chock-full of kid activities that make it pretty hard—”impossible” might be a better term, based on the season—to break away and sell a partner on the idea that chucking dice is way more important than back-to-back soccer games, music practice, and shuttling children to the local trampoline park for yet another birthday party with 22 other cake-loving rugrats.

Friends were hosting a game day over Memorial Day weekend, so I carved out the negotiations at home to do games for a few hours that Saturday.

“All good,” said the wife. “But I’ll need the car to get the kids around. Can you take the scooter?”

No sweat. That meant I was limited to backpack-friendly games. When you are a trick-taking fanatic, a backpack might be too much space…and when I was hitting game nights at a bar near the Logan Square subway stop in Chicago years ago, I wielded a Quiver card-carrying case. The Quiver was perfect because I brought a few favorites every week that served as fillers between the chunkier titles brought by others. The standing list at the time: San Juan, Race for the Galaxy, UNO, Honshū, and a standard, 52-card deck just in case Spades, Hearts or Gin needed to hit the table.

But I was prepping for a heavier Saturday game day with serious players, and since we had the day, everyone was tasked with bringing one game so that we could hit a lot of different titles. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was starting a series of review plays of Nippon: Zaibatsu, so I broke out my go-to board game backpack and tried to put Nippon: Zaibatsu into the bag.

Uhh…nope!

I had a moment of panic. To arrive on time by making the 45-minute drive to my friend’s house, I needed to act quickly. Do we have any bigger backpacks in the house? No, although I’ve got a bunch of larger duffle bags or a big board game caddy, but I hate wearing that caddy when I’m on the bike. Does my wife really need the car? Yes, because she is toting two kids to different parts of the suburbs in the afternoon and Uber isn’t gonna fit.

I stared at the Nippon: Zaibatsu box. While the box is fancy, it’s a little too wide with its insert…normally, a non-issue, but for backpack travel, a no-fly zone. So I got to work.

All four trays of individual player components came out, along with the four player boards and the two containers with general resources like crates, iron, and cardboard money chits. Rulebook and player aids? Clearly a requirement—this was a first play for everyone—but I was worried that all that jostling from the plastic trays might scratch the finish on the cover pages. (This is mission critical…I’m a nerd and I have to treat my toys like royalty!)

The worker meeples had their own dedicated cloth bag from the game box, so I threw that in. Then, I grabbed my handy BGG microfiber drawstring bags (the ones with the circular bottom, obviously) for the other bits: factory tiles, upgraded department tokens, expert worker tokens, round markers, local market demand tiles, starting tokens. The solo bits and the expansion extras were left behind—I never include mini expansions on my first play—and that left me with a very reasonable set of items in the backpack.

The best part about Nippon: Zaibatsu’s footprint might be its strangely normal-sized board. As a man expecting a double-sided, tri-fold board with a decent amount of heft, I was shocked (in a good way) to find that this game’s main board is the same size and weight as the board for your thousand-year-old copy of Monopoly or Clue.

All of this made throwing the game into the bag easier. I zipped up the bag and made it to game day a few minutes late. No one cared that I had thrown all the game’s components, piecemeal, into the bag, and the initial concerns of scratches on the player aids and game manual were as silly as they sounded when I made the argument above.

The world carried on, as one would expect. But now that I’ve gone through it—how have I not faced this issue before? Shouldn’t I just look at all my games and pick the one that can be dumped, in full, into my backpack for travel? I already toss a lot of the packaging extras when I consolidate SPIEL Essen pickups and try to jam 40 “large square” (12”x12”x3”) titles into two checked bags, so this shouldn’t be such a stretch.

The truth of it is that I love arriving at game night with the original packaging. I love posting up at a friend’s house or a game cafe with the game box at one end, with the box’s bottom half tucked behind, then into, the top half cover so that everyone can see the title of the game. There’s something satisfying for me when I wrap up a game and put everything back in its proper place with some help from a friend or two.

In many ways, teardown can be just as satisfying as setup, even if I don’t subscribe to the same philosophy as our old friend Eric.

For now, I’m a little more comfortable pivoting when needed. And I’m lucky to say that I can usually avoid any issues on this front most weeks…because I’m usually the one hosting game night.