Board Game Pintxos: Uno, Duck & Cover, Finished!

My friend and fellow Gumbo Live! contributor, Steve O’Rourke, coined a term when we touched on the topic of small box games that I have talked about before on the blog. What do we call those games that are small bites in size, but pack a lot of flavor, and can be added to a menu of gaming for your friends or family? 

He calls them “tapas” games, after the bite-sized offerings for lunch or dinner throughout Spain. Walk into almost any bar or cafe in Madrid or Barcelona, and you will find a row of pintxos or tapas with toothpicks on top ready for you to enjoy. 

I mention this style of game to explain my absence from the blog the last month. But I have good reasons for being away. For the last two weeks, we traveled to Spain (with a side trip to France) to attend my son’s destination wedding in the Tarragona area of Spain. In a previous life, he taught English in Madrid and fell in love with the country. The last-minute planning, work stuff, and just being in Europe for two weeks shoved gaming way down on the list of priorities.

But my wife and I made sure that we were prepared to play some games, just in case. I grew up as a kid spending days in the back of a motorhome playing small box card games like Pit and Rack ‘Em and even bigger games like Monopoly or Risk that we used to while away the hours traveling from one end of the country to the other. 

So, we knew that having a few games in our backpack might make the downtime easier when we were on a train or waiting at the hotel. And we were right. Having three little pintxos-sized games was perfect for the trip.

My wife brought Uno, one of my little grandbugs favorite card games — and yes, we play by the strict rules of only pulling one card if you don’t have the match, which makes the game tolerably short for me — while I brought Duck & Cover for family gaming(complete with my favorite decks from the artist’s pack)and Finished!, to play solo. 

These were perfect little pintxos to bring. I will never forget the day that we traveled from Barcelona to Carcassonne playing an hour’s worth of Uno games, three generations of gamers (including my nearly 80-year-old mother who traveled with us) all playing these quick little 5–10-minute games of Uno. I even saw the smiles of the other travelers as they watched my little eight-year-old Uno wizard win a couple of times in a row, at how happy she was. 

We only had one night of Duck & Cover, but it was memorable, too. We were on a patio porch in our apartment near Park Guell when the two bugs asked to play. With the light fading as the sun set over the rooftops, we played a game of Duck & Cover with a house rule that each player had five decks, and after each round, we could “trade” decks with other players. (Yes, we know the decks are essentially all the same, but we like to joke that Duck & Cover’s decks are asymmetrically built based on luck.) 

And finally, there was that quiet night where everyone else was busy checking their phones or taking showers, and I got to play a few rounds of Finished! while my mom sat beside me and played her more traditional version of Solitaire. 

So it was an unusual trip for me in terms of gaming. There was just one brief visit to a game store on our way to look at the new Labubu offerings and Evelyn found a Labubu-style version of Stitch that she took home. But, returning to my childhood roots as an itinerant gamer, grabbing quick little tapas card games along the way, was somehow very comforting to me. 

Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo