Bored? Listless? Sick of avoiding travel in an effort to escape the clutches of COVID-19? Time at home is great in modest doses, but it’s long since started to wear on most of us.
We crave distractions, yet we also lack the energy to contend with the complexities of many hobbies. After another day of anxiety-riddled remote working, who wants to face games with intricate rules?
Thankfully, not all games are so intimidating. And while today’s video gaming industry offers tremendous accessibility, you don’t need to turn to the digital world for some convenient distraction. You can look to classic games instead. They’ve been keeping people occupied and entertained for many years, and they’re still effective now. Here are four you should consider:
The lottery
What counts as a game? Well, if you can win or lose but be entertained by playing, it’s a game. And so it is that the lottery, by which I mean any lottery, is a viable choice. What’s so great about it? It’s simple: it requires no effort to enter, and if you have the right attitude then you essentially win regardless of the result. The main reward is the excitement of knowing that you have a chance, however miniscule, of hitting the jackpot. And if you actually win, even better.
If you want to roll the dice, you can pick up a ticket from a store. If you’d rather not, you may want to know how to buy lottery tickets online. It’s simple: you can buy online Play USA Lotteries following a simple registration process. Grab a ticket, indulge in imagining what you’d do with all that money, and get on with your day.
Snap
We each grab a pack of shuffled cards. I put a card down face-up. You do the same. If the cards are different, no action is required. If the cards are the same, it’s a race to see who notices first and exclaims “Snap!”. That’s it. That’s all there is to snap. The goal is to put down the cards as quickly as possible while keeping track of any matches.
The player who’s had the most “Snap!” moments at the end is the winner. Want to mix it up by matching identical numbers or by using different cards? Go for it. The fundamental matching element never changes, making it one of the easiest games you can play.
Checkers
Chess is reasonably easy to play, yet it gets so complicated at advanced levels that it intimidates many potential players. So what about its easier sibling? Checkers is considerably more straightforward. You set out your pieces and take it in turns to move them diagonally into empty spaces. When you encounter an enemy piece one diagonal space away with a free space on the other side, you can leapfrog that piece to remove it from the board.
You can line up an extended sequence of captures, and you can get a piece to the other side of the board to earn a king with the ability to move backwards (and even move multiple spaces). But that’s essentially it. You don’t need a strategy to play it. Just wing it and have fun.
Scrabble
Everyone’s played Scrabble at some point, and you don’t need any strategy whatsoever if you don’t feel like being tactical. Just make the longest words you can form with the available letters, or go for the shortest words, or the words most likely to make you laugh. You don’t need to play to win, obviously. The objective is to have fun.
And while it isn’t really a single-player game, that doesn’t mean you can’t make it one. Take the whole set of letters and see how many words you can line up about a particular topic. Will it be the most thrilling game in the world? Of course not. But if you’re bored and don’t want to opt for a basic smartphone game, it’ll do the trick.
