Tabletop Games: The Hangover-free Social Lubricant

I have had difficulties with social interactions for most of my life. Whether this is due to growing up awkward and nerdy during a time in which those traits tended to be punished by your peers or if it was the underlying anxiety disorder, I didn’t realize I had for years, I am not sure. Though I suspect it’s a little bit of both. I tend to freeze up and begin acting very shy around new people. It takes a great deal of energy for me to push myself passed it. I found alcohol tended to ease that quite a bit when I got older, though it comes with a litany of undesirable side effects. Then within the past decade I discovered tabletop games. I’m not talking about the old Milton Bradley standards of my youth, like Monopoly and its ilk. No sir. There is a new breed of games out there that come in wide variety of styles and complexity. I found fairly quickly that having a game on the table to distract my brain made it easier for me to get out of my own way and talk to new people.

One of the most recently influential games in this respect in my life turned out to be Android: Netrunner from Fantasy Flight games. An asymmetrical card game that pits Megacorporations against Netrunners (hackers) in a surprisingly fleshed out cyberpunk setting. One of my close friends had been playing it for a while and had ended up playing it consistently with a group of people he met at a local game store. We played it together on a few occasions at my house and he asked if I wanted to go with him to a tournament. I was, unsurprisingly, hesitant to agree. After all a tournament meant people, worse yet, people I didn’t know. But I agreed to join him and that weekend we set off to the tournament with one of the guys from his Netrunner group. The ride there was pleasant enough, I didn’t say a lot as I recall, but that’s no surprise when I comes to me interacting with someone I haven’t yet met.

We arrived at the game store, a fairly cozy little place. We got signed up for the tournament and did a little browsing. Soon other people started to show up and I found myself drifting back toward my friend. As time to begin the tournament approached, I began to get nervous, I know it probably sounds crazy given the low stakes here, but by the time they announced the pairings for the first round my heart was almost racing. Not from excitement, but sheer nerves at the thought of spending the next thirty minutes sitting across from a total stranger.

Then something bordering on miraculous happened. At some point during the process of moving around those cards with their dazzling art and clever rules, the anxiety melted away. Like some sort of emotional alchemy this game had turned my anxiety into excitement. I smiled as my runner deck assailed my opponent’s servers looking for the winning agenda. I laughed when the card I was digging towards turned out to be a trap that killed me and won my opponent the game. I was no longer overthinking every little interaction in my head, I just interacted with the person across from me. I walked out of that tournament with a losing record, but I didn’t care. Like the Runners in the game breaking through code walls, I felt like I had cracked a code. As it turned out good game can beat my anxiety, or at minimum knock it down and out of the way for a little while.

After that I ended up purchasing a copy of the game for myself and meeting my friend at the game store the next Tuesday when his group met. I got there early and went into the backroom of the store where I was told they regularly met. There were already a couple of people back there, sitting at a table talking and going through their decks. I of course instinctively went to the empty table and sat down to wait for my friend to arrive. After long enough that it would have been even more awkward if I had grown enough of a spine to turn and introduce myself to the other people. In walked a mustachioed gentleman in a ball cap that I recognized from the trip to the tournament, not going to name him, but he knows who he is. He said hi to the people that were already there and then noticed me and asked if I was there to play Netrunner.

After that he introduced me to the rest of the group that had arrived and those that trickled in as the appointed time drew near. I was still nervous, but it was getting better. These people were here to play the game too, I didn’t know them yet, but we had that much in common at least. Then when we started pairing off to play, I found I was able to carry on conversations as we played the game and enough of my mind was occupied with trying not to lose that I wasn’t nearly as anxious as I would have been otherwise. I enjoyed myself so much that I continued to go most weeks.

Over time I got to know most of the group fairly well. We did more than just play Netrunner, we talked about things in our lives. They became friends. Then through them I met more people and while gaming with these new people I found that I was able to relate to most of them without too much trouble. These people came to be counted amongst my friends.

Then along came the pandemic and I couldn’t see people in real life, but I continued to play games with these people over the internet via Tabletop Simulator on Steam. I wasn’t stuck in a house alone like many people, but not getting to interact with these people I had come to value as friends, an important part of my life, would have been fairly devastating over that kind of timeframe. That’s something that honestly came as a surprise to me. I had always been fairly introverted, I assumed I’d be fine on my own. Yet, not seeing these people wore on me, even with the ability to interact over the internet.

Now that we can see each other in real life again, or meat space as we sometimes jokingly call it, I appreciate it more. Not that I didn’t appreciate it to begin with, but I have a different perspective on it now. I hope to continue playing games and socializing with these people for many years to come. I hope to play games with new strangers, who with any luck will turn out to be new friends or at least new acquaintances. I’m not saying this will work for everyone. Of course, it won’t, everyone is different after all.

This has maybe been a little long winded, but I hope you walk away from reading this understanding the power that something as simple as a deck of cards or a colorful board, some tokens and clever rules can have. Tabletop games could be just the distraction you need, something for your mind to focus on other than your anxiety. If all else fails, you won’t be hungover the next day, at least not as a direct result of the board game.