As the Friday sun set and the chaos of the week faded into quiet stillness, the aura of Shabbat filled the living room as I watched my mom finish her prayer on the Shabbat candles. With this came a 24 hour pause to our attachment to electronics. Once the televisions went dark, it was time to kill time until Saturday night, when I would rush to turn back on the TV just in time for SNICK.
Sure, we had plenty to do over Shabbat between Synagogue services, large family meals, and outdoor activities like a back yard football game or Kick The Can, especially in warmer months. We played with classic toys like Legos and G.I. Joes. But we eased much of the boredom by playing board games. On Friday nights, we often sat on the carpet and played until bedtime as the smell of a delicious Shabbat meal – challah bread, chicken soup, and whatever else my mom made – lingered in the background. As a kid, I just viewed board games as time-fillers, but a recent encounter with an old game left me thinking that these simple pleasures made a bigger impression on me than I might have realized.
Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, there was no shortage of games to play. Globalization and cheap Chinese manufacturing made board games affordable and plentiful. We had endless choices. During my pre-teen years, most of my friends opted for never-ending games of strategy like Risk and Monopoly (which I rarely had the patience to finish); but my middle childhood years focused on simple, mindless games built around cheap gimmicks that wore off after just a few rounds, before we moved on to the next game. There was the face-flipping flop Guess Who and the frenetic chaos of Hungry Hungry Hippos. And who can forget Trouble and its ever-so-satisfying dice bubble (I still press it in my dreams when I need to find that happy place). We had KerPlunk, Don’t Break The Ice (one of my favorites), Sorry!, Candyland, Battleship, Feed Me, and the list goes on. While each of these games had its own clever hook, one game put the rest to shame: Mousetrap.
I still remember feeling amazed when I first saw the TV commercial. A complex and intricate Rube Goldberg machine straight out of a Tom & Jerry cartoon. This contraption was unlike anything children had ever seen in a board game. I remember opening it for the first time, punching out all the plastic pieces, and dreaming about how awesome it was all gonna be once I set it up. As I assembled the components and set the traps I felt like an engineer and exterminator all at once. It was empowering. But, as every child finds out, the excitement of Mousetrap is surprisingly short-lived.
The truth about Mousetrap becomes evident shortly after you begin to play it. The frustration usually begins when an aggressive roll of the dice prematurely sets off one of the traps. If the cage slipped off its pole and rattled down mid-game, consider yourself lucky as that is an easy reset. If you played on a hard table and the metal ball fell off and rolled under the couch, your game may be delayed by just a bit, but just be thankful it didn’t roll down the vent and end your evening. In fact, be thankful that you even made it to the point of fully assembling the game because 94% of Mousetrap games in existence either have missing or broken components. 62% have both. (Of course, you tend to only realize this after spending quite a bit of time trying to set it all up.)
Let’s say you are one of those especially privileged people with all the pieces and the ability to assemble them and play through with no mishaps or false triggers (and enough patience to move your piece through an utterly pointless gameplay). You’ve reached the end; the pinnacle. It’s time to let it rip! You turn the crank and initiate the chain of events you dreamt about since you first saw the commercial of the cheering kids with happy lives. Then, reality hits. Something like this happens:
Crank crank crank. Kick. The bucket tips over most of the way, but doesn’t dump the ball. You give it a flick to assist. Roll roll. Sliiiide. Clank. The ball hits the blue pole but nothing happens. Another flick to help. Whoops. Too hard. Knocked down the ball. Try again. Reset ball. Flick. Nope. One more time. Flick. There we go. Roll. Drop. Roll. Drop. Thud. Missed the springboard. Try again. Flick. Roll. Drop. Roll. Drop. Thud. Shoot! One more time. Actually, you get the idea. Just hit the springboard with your finger. Whee! Crap! Too hard. Reset. Repeat. Nope. Manually drop diver in yellow bucket. Slide. Click click click click cl—. Stuck. Shake pole to unstick cage. Click click click. Yay, a trapped mouse. 😑
It’s at this point you realize you’ve been had. This is the first time in your life that you understand the basic concept of false advertising and corporate greed. In a fit of protest, you hastily disassemble the board and shove it in the box, accidentally breaking the feet off one of the poles used to anchor it into the board (ah, that explains it!). You shove the game back into the cabinet below all the other games where it will sit until you grow up and your kids find it in your parents' house and ask you what it is, bringing back all sorts of trauma and repressed emotions of childhood disappointments.
I had forgotten about Mousetrap for many years until this past week when a stay at a Florida Airbnb over winter break put it back in the forefront of my mind. At first, I didn’t even notice it. It sat on the bottom shelf below a number of other games. But as Shabbat came and our family turned off our electronics and searched for activities to do together, my 13-year-old son discovered it and insisted on putting it together (he likes to tinker). After a proper disclaimer from me so as to temper his expectations, he built the contraption only to watch it fail just as I had warned. Lesson learned. (Dad is always right?).
But as the game sat out on the coffee table for the rest of the night, I thought about why such a dumb game exists. Was there something else to take away from this game other than its infuriating flaws of faulty mechanics? It did not take much contemplation to start to see the deeper lesson that this game held beneath its surface.
The enticing part of Mousetrap - the whole reason why we play it - is to get to the end and experience a spectacular finale. The actual gameplay of the board itself is essentially pointless. We roll the dice and move through each square just to go through the motions of getting to the end. Of course, we could just build the whole contraption and set it off without the game, but we don’t because the payoff would not seem to match the effort. So we attempt to delay the payoff through a ruse of sorts, surrounding it with a meaningless gameplay. That’s also what makes its failure to deliver so maddening. The ending is the only reason why we played it!
This is much the same way most of us are conditioned to live our lives. We often think about things in terms of the end result. We go to college so we can one day get a degree so we can one day get a (often uninteresting and unrewarding) job so we can one day retire and relax. We build companies to one day sell them and be rich. We pass up spending time with our children or partners (or ourselves) because of some future hope or outcome. This is even true of many religious views, which often push us to make decisions based on beliefs in an afterlife (“The World To Come”). On the whole, we let each day pass by with little thought or intention. We live our lives like we are playing Mousetrap, passing through each square simply as a means of getting to the end. And when we do get there we often find it to be a disappointment, failing to deliver on its promise. This often leads to bitterness, resentment, and suffering.
What if instead of playing the game to get to the end, we played it one square at a time? One day at a time? One moment at a time? What if we let go of the need for climactic end points? What if the game was not a race to get anywhere at all, but rather a game to play just for the sake of playing because every moment of the game had something to offer - including the setbacks and the challenges and even the final square? Much like the game of Mousetrap, perhaps the approach to life that resembles it may be best left to the bottom shelf as a relic of an old way of living.
As I look back, I see not just a child playing board games to pass time, but a journey of learning to appreciate each moment for its own sake. Although many years have passed, games are still an important part of the Shabbat experience with family and friends. These games, once simple diversions, now remind me to cherish the small joys and lessons in everyday life. The lessons to be learned in these games are not in the quality of their gameplay or their construction, but rather in the shared moments they bring. In the end, perhaps the greatest win is not reaching the final square, but in appreciating the journey on our way to it.