Why this man's passion is brainy board games

I'm sitting at Stephen Gauthier's kitchen table in Charlottetown. He's slowly unpacking a pile of wooden and paper game tokens from a box.

"If you're familiar with 'new car smell,' there's actually kind of a similar joke with board game fans about 'new board game smell,'" he says, carefully sorting cards into two even decks.

"It's a very similar phenomenon. They all come wrapped in shrink wrap. You peel it open. You lift the box off. It makes that nice hissing noise. You get that nice waft of plastic."

He laughs.

The game is called K2, named after the second tallest mountain in the world, after Everest.

It showed that I wanted something more, something different.— Stephen Gauthier

"My friends and I sometimes joke when we crack this out it's called Freezing to Death on a Mountain, because that is what happens when you're not careful."

Sounds fun.

Summiting K2

For the last few months, I've been working on a series for CBC P.E.I. about people and their passions. It's called The Things We Do for Love.

Gauthier loves board games.

When he and his buddies get together to play games, it's not unusual for them to play for seven or eight hours.

Gauthier hands me a small deck of cards and a couple of blue wooden tokens. These are my climbers.

"Alright, so the way this works, we both have a team of two climbers. The goal of the game is to first of all reach the summit of the mountain. Second of all, reach the summit of the mountain before the other guy does. And thirdly, to survive," he says. 

"It's not just getting to the peak. It's getting to the peak and not dying afterwards, because if he dies after summiting it doesn't make a difference."

Playing a board game doesn't have to be a miserable experience with your siblings.— Stephen Gauthier

Gauthier grew up with the same games most everyone has on the shelf. Clue. Risk. Monopoly.

He's a competitive guy, and he likes to play games, but as a teen, these games just weren't satisfying. He even tried to tinker with the rules to improve them.

"They weren't any better than the original, but it showed that I wanted something more, something different," he says.

A new era

And then one day, his friends invited him to play a game called Settlers of Catan.

"That's one a lot of people would be familiar with. If all you've been exposed to is Monopoly and Risk, it's just this breath of fresh air," he says. 

"Playing a board game doesn't have to be a miserable experience with your siblings, where you're all arguing about everything and everyone leaves unhappy — which is basically any description you'll ever hear of playing Monopoly with your family."

Scanning his game shelf, I don't recognize a single title. I see games like Net Runner, Flashpoint, Viticulture, and Mage Knight. There's not a pop-o-matic bubble to be found.

"The things in this collection here would be mostly defined by the title Eurogame, which is a broad genre of game that spurted up over the last 20 or 30 years with better developed, more complicated rule sets, which really took off with Settlers of Catan," he says. 

"The two big name ones, which are not in this collection, are Ticket to Ride and Pandemic — which are also pretty common these days."

"Common, but would you call them good games?" I ask.

My climbing team gets all the sweet sponsorship deals and the documentary and all that.— Stephen Gauthier

"I would call them good games," he says. "They're on the lower-complexity end of some of the stuff I've got, but they're very good designs," he says. 

"These days, they might not be the thing I chose to crack out if I'm playing games with friends, but they are definitely good games and definitely fun games to play."

Back on K2, Gauthier's little green guy survives a blizzard above 7,000 metres, while my little blue guy shivers in the cold.

'Actually, wait. Oh no. Oh no!'

The game is trickier than it looks.

The rules are simple, but as I watch Gauthier plant his flag on the summit, I can see he's beating me not with random dice rolls, but strategy and planning.

Kind of like climbing a mountain.

"When you first play this game, it really kind of feels like you're driving your team up the mountain," he says. "It's really easy when you start, and when you get higher and higher up the mountain, you start to think, 'Actually, wait. Oh no. Oh no! We've gone too fast,
we've gone too far!'"

One of my little blue guys succumbs to the elements in a high-altitude blizzard, but my other guy made it to the top.

Eventually.

It wasn't enough to win, but I still feel like I accomplished something.

"So we both made it to the peak," says Gauthier.  

"We did it," I say.

"We did it," he says with a smirk. "I just did it a little bit faster. So my climbing team gets all the sweet sponsorship deals and the documentary and all that. But you know. We both made it."

Gauthier talks a lot about game design and complexity and balance, but he also just wants to spend time with his friends.

It's a good excuse to hang out, which doesn't happen a lot in adulthood.

I'd do this again. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon. And no one had to fight over whether buying all the railroads is a sound strategy.

Which it's totally not.

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