Game night is back on my calendar, in an unrecognizable, after-times, form. A vaccine, a downspiral in cases, the mythical “return to normal.” Our large table is mostly unused, the extra chairs banished to the garage to wait for – I’m not sure what. Patchwork, 7 Wonders Duel, Lost Cities, Robin of Locksley – there’s an impressive range of games for 2, frequently offering scaled down versions of the familiar, recalling but not recapturing the game nights of before times. The space vacated by party games on my shelves has been taken over by two-player games, suitable for playing without anyone else entering the house. In that before, board games offered some respite to me as an academic who writes about electronic literature and digital narratives: there’s usually not the same pressure to publish every insight, though inevitably some game nights wormed their way into my scholarly agenda and more importantly, there were no screens.

Touching and arguing over cards and pieces, without a hand sanitizer in sight. Close gathering and elbow bumping at a crowded table. All of those sessions had things that are forbidden now: giant bowls of shared junk food. Game nights have been a fixture of my life, from Magic: The Gathering nights (and a bonus summer camp) in middle school to a truly terrible D&D campaign group in high school on to the conference game nights and scattered gatherings of the before-times.

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