Fallen out over Monopoly? Come to blows over whether ‘OMG’ counts as a word in Scrabble? Kat Brown insists that a festive row is actually the perfect way to bring the family together this Christmas. It’s Christmas, so we’re smack in the middle of the danger zone of the family argument – when the pressure to “have a really lovely time” on Christmas day couples with someone playing fast and loose with the rules of Bananagrams. As Tolstoy so nearly said: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family has a relative who isn’t allowed to play card games unsupervised.”.
But, it turns out, we’re a nation of board game cheats and overly-competitive arguers. A new survey of 2,000 Britons, for the toymaker Mattel, recently found that one in four of us describe ourselves as “extremely competitive”, while a third of us have experienced a game being abandoned entirely because of an argument.
If this comes as news to you (my sweet summer child!), then clearly you have no family equivalent to the Great Scrabble Fall Out of 2002, when my father took “too long” to play his turn, at which point my mother wrote a mandatory time limit into the box lid with such feeling that it looks more like God’s carving of the Ten Commandments.
The survey also found that 63 per cent of us have experienced a good game turning bad, with half finding it was because of cheating – while 27 per cent had had a full-blown row with a friend or relative over a game. Compare that to the mere 11 per cent of us falling out at Christmas lunch.
