Family game night always looks like so much fun…when it’s someone ELSE’S family.

About 2 months ago, I started Operation Organization.

It was initiated for several reasons.

A combination of several major stressful events occurring simultaneously had me feeling seriously out-of-control.

I was wasting tremendous amounts of time looking for things that would have been easily located if the house was picked up.

And I wanted a place to play board games as a family, and my dining room table always looked like this:

Once I got the dining room cleaned up so that we had a place to play games as a whole family,

I had another problem.

Locating the games.

Once we cleaned it up, we had about 8 partial games.

We had the Candy Land board, but none of the pieces.

Plus we had about 14 of the cards, and the only one with a picture on it was the candy cane, and drawing that card automatically sends whoever picked it into a fit of hysterics.

Or calling a do-over.

We had the Othello board and approximately 23 of the pieces.

That makes for a very short game of Othello.

We had the Battleship boards, most of the ships, and about 5 of those little red and white plastic pieces.

I think Number 7 ate most of those.

So during Operation Organization, we pretty much threw all the games away.

Now we had a clear dining room table, an organized playroom,

but no games.

So when my parents asked for suggestions for Christmas gifts for the kids, I asked for some board games.

Each of the kids got a new game.

Last night Number 5 asked to play her new game.

She got Chutes and Ladders.

You’ll notice that it says ages 3+.

I was in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner.

We used to have Chutes and Ladders.

That one got destroyed way before Operation Organization went into effect.

Number 4 and 5 both wanted to play, so I asked Number 4 to help Number 5 get the game set up while I finished in the kitchen.

She had played before.

Number 5 is 4 years old.

A year older than the minimum.

She’s really smart.

Our old babysitter used to call her GB.

Genius Baby.

Number 4 also has some sort of photographic memory thing going on.

She already knows her multiplication facts, and at her report card conference, her teacher told me she was by far the best writer in the class.

Between the two of them, they’d be able to figure it out and get started.

Now when I had Chutes and Ladders, the game board looked like this:

Granted, that was about,

gulp,

40 years ago.

But still…it had to be pretty much the same.

The last board we had looked like this.

Still the blue and white squares.

All the chutes and ladders in the same places.

But if you look closely, they’ve changed the kids.

They added in some Asians and some African American kids to make it more diverse.

But that’s not all.

They also took out the kid whose mother was dragging him by the arm.

And the brother ripping his sister’s ponytails off her head is gone too.

There’s no more kid about to puke after eating an apple and going down the slide.

And the kid whose mom is basically drowning him in the bathtub is gone.

Now all the kids are smiling.

No one is bleeding or puking or crying.

But basically the same board.

The spaces on the board are clearly defined.

Easy enough to figure out.

It took about 60 seconds for the yelling to start.

“MOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!! WE NEED HELP!!!!!”

I guess they’re not as intelligent as I thought.

I went into the playroom.

The board was out of the box.

I would like to invite the designer of this new game board over to my house to play with my kids.

With my screaming, crying, confused, and angry kids.

Maybe at first glance it doesn’t look much different than the others.

But it’s very difficult to distinguish between the light and dark green spaces.

The shadows under the slides and the sprouts of grass and curlycues and arrows make it even more of a challenge.

Plus, the numbers for each space are not in the same spot on each space, which seriously adds to the confusion.

There is so much shit going on  on that board that Numbers 4 and 5 had no idea what the fuck they were doing.

They might as well have been playing blindfolded.

Add in an annoying three-year-old on a mission to destroy the game,

and a two-year-old who really wanted to play

but who repeatedly grabbed all the pieces and made a break for it,

and what I envisioned being something like this:

felt much more like this:

I basically played Chutes and Ladders against myself while running interference for Number 4 and 5’s game pieces for about 30 minutes.

“We” played 2 games.

Thankfully they each won a game.

We were all exhausted.

As soon as Number 4 declared victory I took the board and folded that shit up.

As I was putting the board into the box, Number 3 walked into the playroom.

“Can I play?” he asked.

“NO!” Numbers 4, 5, and I all yelled in unison.

That was enough for one night.

Tonight when someone asks to play a game, forget Chutes and Ladders.

We’re going to stick to something simple.

Like Bridge.