Keko Chronicles

Keko Chronicles - Journal

Origins: Part One

In the Beginning...

Games were a huge part of my childhood.

I don’t know what other people did growing up. I know that we played games.

We played Clue, and Candyland, and Hungry, Hungry Hippo. We played Trouble and Sorry, War and Atari. We played Chutes and Ladders, and Dungeons & Dragons, and Hide and Go Seek. If you can think of a game that existed about 35 years ago, chances are, we played it. Pick Up Sticks? Yes. Tic-Tac-Toe? Yep. Risk? Uno? Scrabble? Guilty on all counts. Monopoly? Let me tell you something.

We played Monopoly like a boss.

Well, I didn’t. I was always the first one out when it came to Monopoly. I would go to bed and stare at the ceiling waiting to come down from my Jolt or Mountain Dew induced caffeine high, while the others got louder and louder swapping properties and buying hotels. Always the first one out Except for that one time.

Literally, all I had was Boardwalk and Park Place. No other properties. No houses. No money. No Get Out of Jail Free Card. I traded everything I had just to get Boardwalk and Park Place. I figured, hey, I’m going to lose anyway. Let’s just try it. Let’s see if it can be done.

Know what? You can totally win Monopoly when all you have is Boardwalk and Park Place.

Been there. Done that. It still comes up once in awhile in conversation. But I digress...

We played games.

And when we weren’t playing games, we were coming up with ways to make the games we played better. We would add House Rules, or design our own Uno cards, or come up with ridiculous, double elimination tournament scenarios that we would never get to finish. And when that wasn’t enough, we would just invent our own games. There were Drawing Adventures, and Smash-Up Derby, and Skid Ball. (Skid Ball, just so you are aware, involved each of us coming up with a team made up of individual, imaginary players that had names, and backstories, and different batting stances. Some of these imaginary players didn’t even speak English. For real.) And there was some sort of game that we played in the attic with a cane and a squishy ball and big heavy blankets and a trash can. Or maybe that’s two different games that my memory has mashed into one. It might have been called Rolaids for some reason. Not sure. I may need to be Fact Checked on that part. One thing, however, is for certain.

That game was brutal. I think we broke the cane at some point. (which didn’t go over very well, because the cane belonged to my Nana. I think it was some sort of family heirloom or something). We would come down from the attic after playing a few rounds of Rolaids with rug burns. We would be scraped up, winded. We would be drenched in sweat and exhausted. And we would be laughing our butts off. Laughing until it hurt.

Because, you know what? (And this is kind of the point of this entry.)

Games are fun! They can be ridiculous, or social, or strategic, or a little bit of all three. They can be intense or laid back. Games are really fun. As an adult, I wanted my own kids to know that games were fun. And that’s a big reason why Keko Chronicles exists.