“Were board games named board games because most of the time you played them when you were bored? Hmm.”

“The game had to be played the same way every day or the pieces would fall to the floor, the board would collapse, and the illusion that you were shaping your own life, that you were in control, would break.”

“It was all so meaningless when I looked at it that way. It was meaningless in the same way as when I stood up from a game and then looked down on the scatter of playing pieces, and realized that they all were just bits of polished stone on a wooden board marked with squares. All the meaning they'd had moments before when I'd been trying to win a game were meanings that I'd imbued them with. Of themselves, neither they nor the board had any significance.”

“Dante and this Palero were definitely playing some sort of game, and I didn’t know the rules, which was fine with me. Whenever a game became too complicated, I just set the board on fire.”

“at the end of the game the team with the most points on the board is going to win.”

“Fred prepared a board game he had created for the entire family to play. And they did.”