With the holy trinity of holidays coming up… Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas… schedules are slowly becoming more cluttered with adult and parental responsibilities. Time for personal frivolity is becoming a precious commodity, and with that in mind my friends scrambled to fit one last Nerd Summit in for 2024 before we all became too busy for one.
Nerd Summit is a get-together my close friends and I arrange, where we close ourselves off to the world (i.e. our families) and play board games together for an entire day. And I mean an entire day. Nerd Summit has been known to go for over twelve hours straight at its longest. My friend with whom I’ve been close since middle school drives several hours to visit the rest of us. It’s a special occasion and we even refer to it like it’s a recurring holiday.
I don’t win a lot of the games we play. We try out some new ones and return to old favorites. Some of them are too complicated for me to enjoy for long (I am never more miserable than when I feel like the dumbest player at the table) but I try them anyway, at least once. Some of the games I bring are perhaps too simple for my friends’ preferences, so I’ve begun calling them “palate-cleansers” to be played after an especially lengthy or complex game. But, as I try to teach my son, it’s not about winning, it’s about having fun with the people who are close to you.
Beyond a chance to nerd out for hours on end with my friends, it’s important time we all get to spend together. With our aforementioned schedules slowly becoming more cluttered, and while we all keep in regular contact via texts and social media and the like, the in-person time that Nerd Summit allows us is far more important than the actual nerd stuff we spend our day doing. I love* these men and my time with them is the best part of our summit.
*Yeah, we all say the full “I love you” to each other and I recommend you start doing it with your guy friends. Life is short and precious. Say I love you. Make it weird.