THE JOY OF IMPROVEMENT

So the Table Football Tournament has begun, and once again it's a huge test of our social dynamics.

I was not prepared for the first game - the ignominy of picking the ball out of your goal and swerving it back into the field of play, only for you to have to repeat that three seconds later. We lost that one 10-1, 10-0.

So for the second round, I got into the groove beforehand, knowing full well that we would lose. That's not defeatest - we were playing the best team in the tournament; a crunching loss was always likely. What we needed today, was improvement.

This is an interesting concept with games, isn't it? Improvement requires you to perform, try, act, play the same thing at least twice! It also seems to fuel enjoyment in a sort of hidden way that's a good silver medal to actually being good, or winning.

I went round to my friends' house last night for dinner, and they (loving board games as they do) introduced me to a game called Waggle Dance - it's about bees, and ingeniously, you spend the game turning 'nectar' into 'honey' using dice, cards and plastic.

I was bewildered by the instructions (I was trying to read them at the same time someone was explaining the game to me). The fold-out newspaper-sized book-of-words was almost indecipherable; nothing made sense. In fact, the game-play didn't really click until about two-thirds of the way through - by which time there was not much I could do about the strategy. But next time...

However, the chances of me forgetting exactly how to play Waggle Dance before playing it a second time are incredibly high. So will I enjoy it next time? I'd argue less so. And are board games therefore better when they're quicker to learn? Is this bewilderment one of the reasons why so many people say they despise board games? How do you gain the joy of improvement without the opportunity to practice it? And how do you remove your own inferiority from the mix, when you don't get what everyone else in the room finds so simple?

As for table football, a game where the rules are extremely simple, Alex, my Foosball-Fodder-Teammate, and I, on Team Hapless, lost our second game 10-0, 10-2.

And I for one, was delighted.