Board Game

Anyone who has ever been carried aloft by the great trickster Monty Python knows that there is much sense in nonsense. Monty Python’s film The Meaning of Life was both profound and preposterous, and in honor of its irreverence and its disregard for all moral certainty and codes of ethics, I’d like to encourage you to create a board game whose theme is also “the meaning of life.”

As a kid, my friends and I would often spend an afternoon making up board games. Sometimes they’d be serious attempts to invent a new Monopoly or the like, but quite often they were just plain strange, like Pigs vs. Penguins (one of my less cohesive strategy games). In many ways it was our wacky inventions that gave us the most pleasure.

Leaving reason on vacation, this exercise will require a merciless willingness to engage fully with absurdity. From birth to death, we are subjected to a dizzying maelstrom of confusing events. No matter how hard we strive to overlay reason, life just won’t cooperate.

With that in mind, I encourage you to construct your board game so that it reflects both the ridiculousness of existence and the pure exhilaration of our journey.

Please feel free to make your game as general or personal as you wish.

Materials: wooden board, newspaper and magazine clippings, old foreign coins, pictures of houses or people or things, paint, little blocks of wood, small plastic animals, whatever else takes your fancy, paintbrush, and wood glue

Time: 1 hour plus

Size: up to you

INSTRUCTIONS

Using your disparate accumulation of oddments, create your own game board with pieces. Feel free to make it as illogical as you see fit.

Just make sure your grand Meaning of Life game includes everything from philosophy to politics and spirituality to the arts and commerce. Use cards, dice, money, or whatever traditional board game devices you desire in order to play.

Have fun. Keep in mind that it’s important to step back far enough to see beyond our day-to-day struggles.

HINT

Many people find it hard to throw off the shackles of sensibleness, or when they do their ideas dissolve into chaos. The trick here is to select everyday things, allow the elements to shuffle into absurdity, then re-order them into their own kind of reconstituted sense.