High Society
Composition Posted: 1,752 words
I have a story that’s been pushing on my brain for months now. It’s about a board game, High Society, which automatically makes it a stupid story. But it’s also about friends, a house, plant over-watering, and a particular chapter in our lives.
The chapter in question – five years or so – was highlighted by moving into our house in 2019, and our weekly game night that had been going strong since we got married in 2015. Couples without kids make for a great gaming group, and in 2018 we’d often have dozens of people crammed into our little 800 sq. ft. rental: I think our record was 32. Moving into a 1200 square foot house felt like the Ritz Carlton by comparison.
I have always been a Reiner Knizia fan, and I bought the Osprey Games edition of High Society right before we moved into our current house. We played it a few times in our rental, and then it became a mainstay of our weekly Saturday game night.
B and K were anchors of our game group. Married at a similar time, also without kids, they were a hand-in-glove fit to our own dynamic. My wife gelled with K as they swapped cooking tips and talked about sauteeing vegetables, and B and I were game night buddies. B was always the life of the party, and High Society was one of her favorite games. She felt like the sister I’d never had.
We fell into a solid rhythm with B and K. We hosted the game nights, provided the food, and usually, they brought the people. B was one of those extroverts who never knew a stranger, and if she hadn’t already brought everyone to game night, she’d become best friends with anyone she hadn’t brought.
High Society got played all through these years. My brother moved in to our basement to go to college, and he adopted our friend group as his own. All told, I have 40 plays logged of High Society. Very often, it was the best answer for ‘well, what can we play with everyone?’ which was B’s favorite question. To be left out of the game was to be left out of the fun, and B was never left out of the fun. With High Society playing 5, it was often a great answer to her question.
Our new house felt like just as much an indelible part of our lives as High Society did our game nights. When we moved in February 2019, K laid our kitchen sticky tile while I vomited in the bathroom and fell asleep on a pile of torn-up carpet in an empty bedroom, sick with the flu. The same week we bought and played High Society for the first time, B and K helped us lay the floor in the living room, and then told us they were pregnant after B had spent the whole evening on her knees, malleting planks into place.
COVID, of course, messed everything up. Maybe COVID is the reason everything happened the way it did: it’s a convenient scape goat, at any rate. We played High Society at game night once, just after the Chiefs won the Super Bowl for the first time in our lifetimes, and just before the world shut down. The only other time we’d get High Society played was at an outdoor wedding in May, of yet another game night couple.
In 2021 game nights started back up again. My brother and his girlfriend (now wife) were frequent game night attendees by that point: though they were younger than us all, it didn’t matter. A couple more of our friends had kids by that point, and the few tiny toddler girls made game nights more exciting. Our group was getting more diverse: a few folks over 60 even attended regularly. High Society got played throughout the year, every time as a great way to fit 5 people into a game. You know who was there for every one of those plays? B.
Everything fell apart in November. Even now, four years on, I don’t really have words to explain it. How can you say the D word, even bring it up or mention it? Statistically, it comes for all of us – or at least our friends.
B and K dynamited everything. I didn’t journal for six months – we had just started foster care this year, too – and my written memory is blank as to how November went down. I remember, in the confusion, calling B to make sure she was safe. I remember both of them, at different times, staying at our house. We were the safe place, for both of them: a place where they were literally part of the warp and woof of the house itself. At this time their daughter, nearly two, was more comfortable at our place than anywhere else.
The last time I ever played High Society? It was in 2022. Game night had become a casualty of the divorce. I told both of them that I didn’t want it to be so, but how can you enforce those words? K slowly stopped coming, and I made time to play games with him one-on-one, on other nights. B came about half the time, and brought someone new. The last time I played High Society, I taught it to this new player: B’s new boyfriend — now husband.
We didn’t pick sides: we were the battlefield. Our house, and our game night, was the battlefield. Either way, we lost.
B and K weren’t the only marriage that exploded as a result of COVID. Other close friends divorced. The kids grew up. Others in our group saw things fall apart. The couple whose wedding we went to, at the height of COVID, moved an hour away and fell out of the game night orbit. Other couples moved away, drifted away, or got busy.
With kids in the mix, game nights were a chaotic ruckus from moment one, and we were lucky to get a game in at all. Our own house became dominated by our foster care kids, and eventually, our adopted kids. Those of us who stayed had kids of their own, and finally, we were at ten people just with us and one other family over. 1200 square feet never felt so small.
This year, 2025, after we adopted our third child, we put game nights on indefinite hiatus.
It felt deeply weird to shut something down that had happened every Saturday night without fail, for the first ten years of our marriage. But I couldn’t kid myself. To me, it felt like game nights had died all the way back in 2022, when the social circle blew up, and we stopped playing High Society.
Two more things happened that belong to this story. When B and K sold their house and moved into separate apartments, we helped them move, and pack up their lives into separate moving vans.
I rescued two plants from their move that they were going to throw out. They were peace lilies, and about to die. I put them both in one pot, and I still have them to this day. What can I say? COVID made me a plant person. When I was watering my plants a few years ago, I overfilled one of them, and water spilled down the plant shelf onto my game shelf below. The game that took the brunt was the small card game sitting on the very top: High Society.
I gave the game to my brother to keep at his place. It was still playable despite the water damage, but I don’t know if he’s played it since. Maybe it will bring him as much success in forming a friend group as it did for me.
I also gave it to him because I actually have two copies.
On my birthday, in 2022, not long after we’d played High Society for the last time and come to grips that this was all permanent, my brother got me a birthday present. We’re both graphic designers, and what he gave me was a custom-designed copy of High Society. Every single card has artwork of one of our friends from the era. It exists in a vacuum-packed world where divorce doesn’t exist, and we’re all still friends who get together to game on Saturday nights.
When he gave me this box I almost cried. He’d only recently stepped into this group, and I couldn’t articulate to him, at the time, what a gut punch it was to see this box. So soon after everything had happened, it felt like a reminder of what we’d never get back. I was sure I could never play it, but I hugged him and thanked him for the thoughtful gift.
Now, with the benefit of a few years of hindsight, I can appreciate the gift for what it actually is: a reminder of a time that happened, and has passed. It’s still one of the most thoughtful things anyone has ever gotten for me.
Sometimes I wish for 2019 back again, because being a parent has been challenging.
Losing our weekly game nights, our hospitality, and our meals to the seeming black hole of parenting has often felt like a denial of my own personhood.
But I can keep going, if I remember that this is a chapter of its own. In this chapter, I get the joy of hanging out with my 7-year-old and playing games. I can read the same books to my kids that were read to me, growing up. When we sit down to share a meal, there are 5 of us around the table, all on our own. We’re all playing a slow-motion legacy game, round by round, and we have a new community now.
High Society is my perfect game that I’ll never play again. It is tied to a particular person, time, and place like few others in my collection. A few other games have B’s fingerprints on them (Glory to Rome in particular), but I can still sit down and play them. I can separate the game from the person.
Not High Society.
It’s a triple distillation of everything that made B such a great friend, everything that made our game nights so successful for those 5, and everything that still makes our home a haven for friends and family, old and new.
Thanks for reading.