My Backgammon Boss

Navigating the Perils of Game Night with The Wife

The Wife loves games—Pictionary, Monopoly, Scrabble, crossword puzzles, she can’t get enough.

I do not love games. I don’t even like them.

A few years ago, a friend gifted us an old school backgammon board for Christmas; it’s brown and white with felt material. The smooth backgammon pieces are large and satisfying to the touch.

For reasons I don’t care to question, I don’t mind playing backgammon. I even enjoy it, which makes The Wife happy.

“Let me know if you’re up for backgammon,” she’ll say from her end of the couch, timid and hopeful. We play during the evening, two or three games in a row, old movies playing in the background: Fletch, What About Bob?, Ruthless People.

I’m not sure how long we played before I started egging her on, probably a year or more. But it was around the time we started playing Acey-deucey, introduced to us by the friend who gave us the board, who learned it Turkey as a child. In Acey-deucey, if you roll a 2 and a 1 combo, you get three consecutive moves, often toppling the game in your favor.

Neither Emily nor I have sharp elbows. We play to win but also help each other out, pointing out better moves to make, even if it hurts our own cause.

“We’re ridiculous,” says Emily, who is as fair-minded and ethical a person as you’ll ever met. She doesn’t cheat; she has manners and poise. She was not raised with brothers and is unfamiliar with the art of talking shit. Though she is familiar with self-deprecation.

After I went on a winning streak, Emily cursed her bad luck and my good rolls. I couldn’t resist. I rolled a double and made the Road Runner sound, “meep meep!” as I moved my pieces.

Emily’s eyes widened, mouth agape.

“Oh, it is so on!”

And here, dear reader, is where The Wife let herself go.

“Suck on this, Tit face,” she’ll say after a good roll. Or she’ll just tilt her head to the side and go, “Hmmm,” as if she’d expect nothing less. Sometimes she adds, “Not surprised.”

I mocked her “Hmmm” after I had a good roll, I was told in no uncertain terms that it is her trademark sound and not to be imitated.

When she’s losing and annoyed, The Wife abandons her thoughtful strategy and does anything to take out one of my pieces whether it’s a smart move or not. “Outta my way, outta my way,” she says, her rolls increasingly forceful—sloppy dice jumping off the board and slipping under the coach. I’ve just ordered a mouthguard in the event the dice ricochet off the board; I don’t need no chipped teeth, man.

“This is fucking bullshit,” she’ll say. “You suck. I’m so winning this game.”

She calls me “Cocktoasten”—as in John Cocktoasten, one of Fletch’s aliases. Also “Peckerwood” and “Peckerhead,” “Fuck hole,” “Fuck wad,” “Fuck face” and other euphemisms too shocking to print even in a Substack newsletter.

“I have all this strategy,” she says, “I get you where I want you, and then you whip out your cheap deucey.”

A “cheap deucey” is when I roll an Acey-deucey late in the game disrupting her careful planning. This does not apply to when she rolls an Acey-deucey late in a game.

Which brings us to a golden rule:

“When you win, it’s luck,” she says. “When I win, it’s skill.”

This falls under the larger category of Wife Rules, which around here entitle her to behavior that would get me in trouble, like say eating—anything—in bed. I once walked past the bathroom to find her standing in the bathtub in six inches of water holding her laptop. She was fully clothed, pant legs rolled to the knee, apparently soaking her toe. Duh. I don’t even need to say what would happen if she saw me doing some dumb shit like that.

Wife Rules, keep it moving.

When Em gets really sore at losing, she’ll start in on me—how I don’t shake the dice enough and am therefore cheating. Or how I move each piece space-by-space—“Can you count? Do you want me to put numbers on the board?” Or how, unbeknownst to me, I scrape my fingernails along the board. “I haven’t said anything for a year about it but it is killing me,” she says.

If she’s really out-of-her-mind she’ll start rolling before I’ve finished moving my pieces.

“Am I stressing you out?” she says. Then she laughs.

During a winning streak, Em doesn’t talk trash; worse, she feels badly for me. No, the smack is reserved for when she’s losing.

By the way, if you ever ask her about any of this she’ll deny it all, smiling, and even after she winks you’ll still believe her, too.