I’ve been playing board games since I was a toddler. But I’m embarrassed to say that while I’m in my mid-40s, and am almost certainly more than halfway through, I’ve only just now learned how to play.
In my childhood, we needed two and a half large cupboards to store all the games we owned. We had the standards — Monopoly, Clue, Scrabble — but we were also on the cutting edge of the 1990s German board-game revolution. I’m tempted to roll my eyes when a lifelong Monopoly player tells me with great excitement that he has discovered “this fabulous new game” called Catan. We’ve been playing Settlers of Catan since 1995, when it first came out. This is not to say that I’m an aficionado. I have shied away from it for some time now because I rarely win, and this makes me a little too competitive for comfort.
In 2020, OnBuy.com asked 1,220 respondents which board games caused at least one argument with their significant other. Cluedo came in first at 87 percent, Monopoly second at 81 percent. Catan registered at number 10, with 38 percent of respondents confessing that it caused at least one fight. The value of this study is dubious, but the very real concern that board games can cause marital strife is real. One blogger tried to promote the new game 7 Wonders Duel as guaranteed to make couples divorce. You can find a long and very serious thread on BoardGameGeek.com that follows the prompt “Why you shouldn’t play games with couples … games that can cause divorces.”
I find Monopoly the most incendiary board game, which is probably why I haven’t played it in decades. I have long thought there is a design flaw that plagues Monopoly: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, by design. It lacks a “catch-up mechanic.” How many Monopoly players have languished for hours as their funds have gradually bled away?
Catan doesn’t score very high on this rubric either. Often you can see within one or two rounds just who is going to come off on top. This was exactly what happened when I was playing with my youngest two children recently. Many of the first few dice rolls were nines, and I had the robber placed on my precious six. Before long, my 9-year old had a city and an extra settlement, while I had only managed to build a single, meager road.
In my younger years, I would have almost certainly become agitated or, more likely, started canvassing for pity. But this time a profound sense of wonder suddenly took hold of me. The plight of my meager attempt to conquer the imaginary island of Catan suddenly seemed irrelevant. As one nine was rolled, and then another, my wonder only increased. It wasn’t just that I was genuinely happy that my daughter suddenly found herself with more resources than she could hope to use, though I was deeply impressed by the course of the game. Another nine — why nine? Why this number, and why now? I was tempted to invoke Providence — the God of the gaps — to account for this statistical anomaly. But at that moment I would have also been impressed had the dice gone my way and given me a six. Who is to say why it is now this and not that?
Games with dice bring the particularity of the world into view. To speak of this world is not just to speak as a cosmologist of a finely tuned universe. It is simply to speak of the world in which we live. This is a world of inequality because it is composed of more than one thing. Each created thing, which comes into being as this and not that, therefore comes into the world as more and less. And this world, which is composed of more and less, becomes more more and less. The reason for this is that time, which can only be measured as entropic, is not only the measure of disintegration but also of subsequent convergence.
This convergence is expressed in its starkest form in the Pareto principle, which helps to explain the persistence of inequality. It can be illustrated through a simple experiment. If a thousand people were given a dollar bill, asked to pair with an opponent and flip a coin, with the winner taking both dollars, and if this exercise were repeated again and again, more and more people would end up with no money. Eventually all of the money would end up in a single person’s hands. This is frightening, given that the historical record strongly suggests that income disparity, which is rapidly expanding along a Pareto distribution, is a precursor to economic and societal collapse.
Jordan Peterson calls it Matthew’s Law, citing Matthew 13:12: “For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” It is crucial to receive Jesus’ words as descriptive rather than normative or an imperative. He is not justifying the oppression of the poor or speaking as a modern capitalist. He is simply describing the world and the world to come as they are, under God. The world as we know it is the world we read about in the Bible.
The disciples, you may recall, had been fishing all night without catching a thing. The resurrected Jesus called to them from the shore, suggesting that they cast their nets on the other side of the boat. When they obeyed, their nets were suddenly filled with 153 large fish (John 21:1-14). Richard Baukham has argued that the careful use of number and proportion in John’s gospel strongly suggests that he was as interested in the theological meaning of numbers as were his early interpreters. Before peering into the meaning of the number 153, it is important to consider something more basic: there were just this many fish, no more, no less. Each was there because Jesus had said, “Cast your net on the right side.” Each was there because it was summoned, just as each mating pair that made its way into the ark did so in response to a mysterious divine command (Gen. 7:15). In the world of the Bible, each numbered thing is delimited and denominated, and each numbered thing is beheld as what it is, a work of God.
Mathematics uses numbers to register abstract quantities or inequalities. There are numbers in the Bible because the Bible partakes of a world of inequalities and indeed names this world. The key issue is not whether we will suffer such a world — we will — but whether we will choose to suffer it with God.
This is a world in which the poor will always be with us (Matt. 26:11). As history unfolds, we behold that there is more and less, and then more more and less. Many of the board games we play partake in this history, since they are a part of this world. In the world there is more and less wheat, more and less ore, more and less brick, more and less sheep, and more and less wood. Catan describes this world and partakes of it in just these ways, and when you know how to play the game, it can teach you how to live. Catan is a world given to you. And while it is a world in which you are forced to make decisions, your decisions are always about that world and determined by your location within it. It is a world governed by a specific set of rules. Like every other board game and sport, Catan hypostatizes arbitrary conditions of victory. Since victory is the result not just of cunning but of random chance and the play and intrigues of others, it should be regarded as the least serious matter in play.
Of far greater consequence are the opportunities Catan provides for real success: managing and disposing finite resources; patience in the face of hardship, scarcity, and intrigue; kindness to others; generous giving in the face of growing inequality; losing well; contentment “whatever the circumstances” (Phil. 4:11). Somehow my 9-year-old knows many of these things, though I am just beginning to learn them now. I think I need to play with her more often.
