My son came into bed with me this morning to snuggle. He told me that he was setting up the Catan game board. He was considering playing a full round where he played as all the players. He wasn’t really sure why he wanted to.
But it got me thinking. So I told him how important it can be to play a game like this. Because in order to play this game, in that fashion, you have to compartmentalize your brain in order to see what strategy is best for each player while you are representing only that player. You can simultaneously look at the same board from various perspectives, make different decisions depending on specific criteria, and most importantly hold opposing thoughts in your head all at the same time, while only acting on the ones that count in that moment.
It’s easy in board games. We don’t have a lot on the line. It’s harder in games we get emotionally attached to, a favorite team, a loved one playing. It’s even harder when we have our money involved. A trade. When money is involved, we tend to, as my daughter put it, “choose our favorite and try to make all the others lose.”
We don’t have the ability in the markets to make all the others lose. There are other players, other variables. Learning to see the other side, learning to compartmentalize, to play the strategy that works best in the moment, while maintaining several perspectives, often opposing ones. We can play long into a lower high, we can be aggressive when we have the right cards, we can be patient when we don’t. We can play one strategy even when it doesn’t fall in line with our macro view.
And most importantly we’ll learn to be good losers while simultaneously being good winners.
