What a bored game!

A couple of nights ago, I jumped into my 4-wheel-drive and swerved in and out of Nairobi traffic to pick up my very good friend and head off to a fairly remote part of town for a dinner party with a difference.

No, before you get ahead of yourselves, it wasn’t one of those parties.  It was a games night – and I want to be clear here, a board games night.  [tsk tsk]

I hadn’t dusted off and set up my Lord of the Rings version of Risk for about 10 years, and a good familiarising of the rules was in order.  I slipped on my readers and ploughed through the 19 pages of instructions.  Thankfully, I had two co-players equally keen to learn the rules and they both ravaged the booklet after me.

Both of them boys – this will become important later.

We shuffled, split and dealt the cards; we took laborious turns in placing our battalions; we then decided where we might attack. 

[For those who are perhaps not all that familiar with Tolkien, and his elven-world of conflict, if life doesn’t hold a troll, orc or axe-wielding dwarf in it, it’s not really life.]

The Shire, Mirkwood, Rohan, Mordor – and every imaginable piece of Middle Earth in-between was prepared for bloody combat.  And it was at this point, that our four armies were bereft of the females in our group; the baby in the crib whimpered and they were gone.

We boys didn’t give it a second thought, the dice were thrown, the armies sacrificed, the heads rolled and the territories conquered.  But I can’t help feeling our women-folk were bored of our board-pursuits.  Perhaps less killing and more thinking will be the order of the day for our next clash..!  Something like Scrabble or Monopoly perhaps.

And the moral of the tale?

Actually, it’s far more relevant to the world landscape than we might want to admit – think Gaza. 

If there were more women deciding which games we play on the world stage, there might be far less bloodshed, far less conflict and a lot more peace – even if that is while we’re feeding our offspring.!