this is not a love poem

game night and freedom from the fog

Alex Dobrenko`

May 30, 2025

This may contain: winnie the pooh and piglet looking at each other

Usually on date night, one of us sends the other three food options to choose from. The other then picks the winner, winner, chicken dinner, except it’s usually a salad dinner because one of my must-haves is salad. The other is unlimited dietcoke refills.

Today, though, we’re both tired, so we each send two options.

Lauren sends Stoney Knob and Nine Mile. I send the two places I’d just walked by - Little Chango and Well Played Asheville, a board game cafe which is exactly what it sounds like.

Lauren picks Well Played Asheville. Game on.

Thing have been hard lately. Harder? No sleep, etc.

Difficult, this parenting thing, like a slog in a bog in a fog.

In russian, the word 'bog' means god. The words 'slog' and ‘fog’ don’t mean anything, which makes the russian translation of slog in a bog in a fog - an unknown in a god in an unknown - also feel right.

game on

Well Played Asheville smelled like an upscale Chuck E. Cheese - the scent of gamers, refined. There were no salads (side salads don’t count I am sorry), but I didn’t care. I got a BLT, Lauren got a Cuban, the diet coke flowed like diet coke, and the games begun.

Imagine a library, but instead of books, there’s games. That’s how one wall of this place looked. Seven hundred games in total. We grabbed a few from the 2-player section, starting with Seven Wonders Duel, a game we learned was too complicated to learn halfway through trying.

Next came Onitama, a “chess-lite” game, according to the ginger bearded guy serving us. One of his favorites. A real thinker. Slow. Also hard. We played a few games and Lauren won all but one.

We agreed there was too much thinking. Felt like parenting, I said.

“The world,” philosopher C. Thi Nguyen says, “is an existential hellscape with too many values and games offer a temporary relief from that.”

Games, Nguyen says, are an “existential balm” for life itself. Especially for parenting, a game in which it feels like you have won the ultimate prize - a lifetime of loving and losing and never feeling like you’re enough.

But in the third game, Hive, we know what’s enough. You just gotta surround the queen bee with the tiles of the other little bugs. Lauren won the first game and we stopped the second one halfway through so we’d get back in time for Wilder’s bedtime.

Walking out of there, we hold hands and talked about how we can bring the kids here soon.

This was nice, we agree. To not debate the big things, or fill each other in on the small things. Sometimes it just feels nice to game.

We get home, finish a movie we’d started three months ago (Dream Scenario), watch a few trailers, and go to bed.

that was last night.

Now its 430am. I’ve been up since 3. “Do you wake up with an alarm clock?” people often ask.

“No,” I respond, “i wake up with anxiety.”

If I go to sleep now, I'll get up around 6 and maybe have some more time to write before the critters wake up and surround the queen bees.

In bed now, I listen to Lauren snore and it makes me strangely happy, hearing it, because snoring means sleeping, and sleeping means we’ve won.

calments

you got one date night that you’re gonna hafta go on for the rest of your life, what are you choosing?
fav games, board or otherwise but mostly board?
are you winning, son? daughter?
how?
are?
you?

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We’ve got 8 cowriting sessions all ready to go for June. There’s a cool chat. I’m gonna do a mini workshop. It really should be priced higher, everyone keeps telling me, but I tell them to eat a rock.