Every night after dinner in Sweden we played some board games. It was my son who started this “tradition” and he invited me and his grandparents to many different games that he found among the toys my parents has saved from when my siblings and I were young. Labyrinth became a favorite, so much so that I bought a game to bring back to Japan. Memory is of course always fun, as well as Uno. But what made me most happy, since it brought back so many memories from my childhood, was two simple simple board games using just a dice with pieces to walk around on a big illustrated cardboard where you learn about Swedish nature or the history of Sweden while hoping for luck with the dice so you don’t end up on the spot where it says you need to go backwards as many steps as your age (which I of course did time and time again).
I have many sweet memories from when I was my son’s age playing this game with my farfar, grandfather. I also remember how he hated to loose so much that he was trying to convince me that I was actually the one losing since the point of the game was to be last. Farfar also ended up on the go-back-your-age-spot and I remember getting really upset with him when he was joking about how good that was for his chances of winning. Going through old photos from my childhood I came across a photo of me and my grandfather playing this game on a grey carpet in our living room. That same carpet is still on the floor in my parents’ house so I could not resist taking a photo of my son playing the same game with his grandfather. And it was quite emotional, to say the least.
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