A Solitaire Addiction Was in My Cards

I… I have a confession to make. One of a very serious nature. It’s not easy to talk about, but if the internet isn’t a safe place to talk about serious and personal matters, then what is? A therapist? Please.

I have an addiction. They say admittance is the first step, so I guess you could say I’ve taken the first step. I am admitting I have a problem. I should get help, but I don’t think I’m at that point in my life that I can get it quite yet.

Just looking at it gives me an itch...

I am addicted to solitaire. I know about the problems that arise from card addictions. Solitaire is, after all, the gateway to other game addictions. I can’t help it. If I open a video, I drag it to one side and play solitaire on the other. It started out with plain solitaire, but then it evolved to spider solitaire, despite my intense phobia and severe aversion to spiders. That doesn’t stop it. It doesn’t affect my addiction in any way. If anything, it just proves my addiction to solitaire is stronger than my phobia of spiders.

I imagine my addiction will only progress farther if I don’t try to stop it now. One day it’s solitaire, then it’s spider solitaire, and before you know it, I’m playing a full blown game of Monopoly. And it doesn’t just have to be digital. I have the Monopoly app on my iPod, where I can play against the computer, but what if my iPod dies and I can’t charge it somehow? I will have to resort to playing a full board game of Monopoly against myself! I will be the banker and 2-4 players. I will buy myself out, I will bankrupt myself and I will win and lose. And not only that, but we have several editions of Monopoly! I could play 4 straight games of Monopoly and they will all be different!

The worst part of the situation above is that I don’t even like Monopoly. Seriously. We play it every Thanksgiving as a family and I am one of the first people to go bankrupt because somehow I can’t figure out the balance between liquid capital and assets. I have come to loathe Monopoly. It’s sad to admit that 75% of that reason is simply because I’m not good at it, but I also simply don’t enjoy it.

"Look how much we don't want to kill each other! I'll get you back for taking
St. James Place,  Bobby. You best sleep with one eye open tonight."

Give me Pictionary or Cranium- now there’s a game that I enjoy. Also Clue.

But Clue will probably be on the list of games I will be addicted to. I will start carrying around this giant bag and it’ll be chock full of portable or travel versions of board games and a deck of cards to play solitaire with when my laptop/iPod is dead. Maybe it’ll get so bad that I will actually learn how to play Hearts, Free Cell or, God forbid, Bridge.

Rock bottom will be all those games that are so mind-numbingly boring or so easy that as soon as you’ve set the game up you’ve already regretted your decision. You know which games I’m talking about. I’m talking about Go Fish, Chutes and Ladders, Risk (I am NOT a strategist, nor am I patient when it comes to this game), Candy Land, Battleship, and at the very worst, the card game of War. That’s right. A card game where there is no strategy involved, not even the hand eye coordination of slapping cards to acquire them like in Egyptian Rat Race. You just lay down cards and keep laying down more when you and your “opponent” have laid down the same card. And it’s such a long game- it just keeps going and going and going and going and going….

Good God, there's even a card game app. This is a new low. 

It does feel better to get this off my chest, I must admit. I’m still on the gateway game, but I have no idea when solitaire won’t be enough for me. Some of my friends started and run the Tabletop Gaming club at my university, and I went to some meetings thinking it was a support group. How wrong I was. It was an enabling club was what it was. What it is. There they were, a deck of cards, just begging me to play a physical game of solitaire. How bad could it be? Bad. Very bad. I perpetuated my addiction of solitaire and I was introduced to a slew of new board games to become addicted to.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, like opening up a game of solitaire every time a YouTube video starts, change the things I can and when a card game is acceptable, and the ability to know the difference between enjoyment and obsession…