My dad loved boardgames. He played all sorts of different boardgames and was always on the lookout for a new one. He favored abstract, strategic games with minimal amounts of luck and lots of possible strategies he could devise and play.
Sometimes he found games such as Twixt, which was perhaps the epitome of abstract strategic games of a certain period in the board gaming world. (It was also the epitome of a game which nobody would ever agree to play more than once.)
At that time, of course, we didn't have the deeply developed worldwide culture of inventing, playing, and sharing board games which arose in the 21st century. There are much more entertaining board games than Twixt nowadays!
During the pandemic years, my dad picked up Gloomhaven, which was possibly the most famous game to come out of the board gaming surge of the last twenty years. Dad was initially interested in Gloomhaven primarily because it was so famous, but he became quite interested in it because it was in the category of cooperative boardgames: in Gloomhaven, all the human players must collaborate to successfully win the game.
My dad particularly liked cooperative boardgames.
Also, dad liked Gloomhaven because I liked Gloomhaven.
I liked Gloomhaven because I had grown up playing computer games like Adventure and Zork and Wizardry and Bard's Tale and Ultima, all those Dungeons and Dragons style games where you build a party and explore the world and have encounters and accomplish quests. Dungeons and Dragons is great but it always succeeds or fails based on the efforts of one person, the Dungeonmaster, who has to do a huge asymmetric amount of work to envision, construct, and facilitate the scenario, while the other players just show up and play. Sometimes you have a great Dungeonmaster, but even then sometimes the Dungeonmaster has an off night. Gloomhaven was like playing Dungeons and Dragons, but you didn't need to have a Dungeonmaster.
But playing Gloomhaven as a true table-top boardgame was a lot of work!
First of all, you have to have a large table. Gloomhaven is an immense game with an enormous amount of physical kit that must be manipulated during the game.
But more importantly, playing the original table-top version of Gloomhaven requires an extensive amount of intricate bookkeeping, in which each play must adjust various tokens and state markers during the playing of their turn in order to keep the game flowing along nicely.
That is, table-top Gloomhaven successfully got rid of the Dungeonmaster, but only by making everyone the Dungeonmaster.
However, it turned out that there was a computerized version of Gloomhaven; even better, it was a very well done adaptation which retained all the fun of playing Gloomhaven while removing all the drudgery.
Conveniently for me, playing the computerized version solved several other problems that I had with Gloomhaven: firstly, we didn't have to leave the physical game set up in the living room, a huge benefit since it took up the whole room and it often took us days to play through a single scenario; secondly, I didn't have to make the 30 minute drive to my parents house just to play some Gloomhaven with my dad, which made it vastly easier for us to fit in some time for game playing and chatting without all the wasted driving time.
The result was that, during the last few years, my dad and I must have played several hundred hours of Gloomhaven together. Amazingly, during that entire time, we never even finished the complete original Gloomhaven campaign, mostly because there were a few scenarios that we just couldn't crack with our party.
We played Gloomhaven faithfully right up until the final few weeks of dad's life, when he was finally just too exhausted to work the computer. At that point I went back to driving over there when I could, and we sat and talked instead.
Over the past few months I've thought a couple times about firing up the game again and finishing off the campaign, playing the entire party by myself. I don't think I'll do that; it's nicer instead to just leave things just as they are in my head.
But I'll remember those years of Gloomhaven for a long, long time.