Our theme for the month of March is “I was wrong about.”

when the rules of literally any card game are explained to me pic.twitter.com/9dvMpxF8Pd

— Shafeeq (@Y2SHAF) November 6, 2022

At some point in college, I started keeping a list of Things That Make Me Immediately Grumpy and Tired—the closest I could get to naming things that I actively disliked. The list includes (in no particular order): men who say “gals,” my housemates running the cold tap when I’d just gotten the water hot for dishwashing, and Handel’s Messiah. (Someone here is gonna put me on a hit list for that last one, I know.)

But at the top of the list were board games and card games. I avoid those buggers at all costs. I’ll talk to you about anything, I’ll help you bathe your dog, I’ll even play capture the flag (ugh)—but please, please do not ask me to play Exploding Kittens. Or Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. I don’t want to learn how the kittens explode. I don’t care what the cat or the goat or the pizza is doing. Life imposes enough arbitrary rules on us; why would anyone waste their energy and time mastering further, even more arbitrary rules? Just so you can put down little pieces of cardboard in exactly the right way? Forget it.

So yes, it was devastating to arrive at Calvin and realize that Catan and Dutch Blitz were legitimately popular social activities. I skated by as much as I could: I advocated for jigsaw puzzles, I learned to like Jackbox, I even tried to learn euchre from my coworkers over one very painful lunch.

But still, when my friend opened her game closet last month, I wept silently. It was her birthday weekend, and she loves games. I’d gotten lucky so far with Mario Kart and Sorry! (I make an exception for Sorry!), but it seemed my luck had run out.

“Let’s do a card game,” she said. “Have you guys played Hell?”

“No,” I said, thinking that that was likely an apt name for whatever it was.

Then my adult tricks for dealing with myself (some call them “coping skills”) kicked in. Come on, I told myself. You can be a good sport. It’s her birthday. And, It’s just a game. How bad can it be? And, If you do poorly, then so what? Who cares?

The last thought was the most comforting, and I mused on that as my friend dealt out cards and explained the rules of…Hell. (Turns out it’s a lot like the game Peanuts.) Has my hatred of games, all these years, stemmed from performance anxiety? Do I really just hate trying to catch on to rules that everyone else at the table already knows? Maybe, too, it’s the competition that scares me—the possibility of ranking objectively below others. Of feeling like I don’t belong in the group if I play worse than everyone else.

Even with these epiphanies, learning Hell wasn’t easy. The birthday girl didn’t hold back her cackles as she wiped the floor with us round after round. I came in last several times—and it did sting, I won’t lie.

But my friend also pointed out cards we could play, and she slowed down to beat us in ten minutes instead of five. It helped, too, that I wasn’t the only one learning. (Plus, we were all pretty gassy from eating some birthday cheese, and it’s hard to be a cutthroat card shark when someone is breaking wind every five minutes.)

By the end of the night, I was getting better. And I was surprised by how much fun I was having.

Eleanor Lee

Eleanor Lee (‘23) graduated from Calvin with degrees in computer science and writing. She grew up in South Carolina but currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She loves coffee, laughing, and bringing emojis to the workplace.