I’m bad at games. I always have been. My competitive chess career ended in middle school, when I decided that spending a day of Swiss-system combat at a school library in the lugubrious suburbs of Baltimore was not worth it if I wasn’t going to place. My brother was more naturally gifted, as seemed to be the case in most of these sorts of things, but he was young and undisciplined, so he didn’t pursue it much longer than I did. If my father was disappointed—he was a respectable competitive player who had been teaching us to play since we were toddlers—he didn’t show it.

Around the time I decided I wasn’t serious about chess, I taught myself bridge. Our newspaper had bridge puzzles alongside Jumble, and the hieroglyphics were as appealing as those of the chess puzzles (at which I was, needless to say, abject). Bridge was a yet more hapless endeavor than chess. For one thing, you need four players, and my brother and I made two—assuming my brother had the interest and inclination to learn, which he hand't. The handful of friends I had were not much more receptive. (And who can hold it against them? What kind of ten-year-old wants to play bridge?) The result was many a frustrated rubber played alone in my room against myself, an exercise in self-deception the lessons of which have served me well in the years since. This soon grew old, and I have forgotten most of what little strategy I ever learned. I do not think I ever solved a bridge puzzle, either; they joined the chess puzzles, the sudoku, and the crossword as annoying page-filler that could otherwise be given over to printing Andy Capp bigger. As I write this, a few bridge books hunch reproachfully over my desk, a testament to hobbies past.

Games of chance are even worse. Dice and cards simply do not like the cut of my jib (or so I tell myself). My brother inevitably clobbered me in poker, leaving me with a lifelong distaste for it, and the broad gregariousness of craps does not suit me. I have enough bare facility with arithmetic to break even at blackjack, but playing for zero is an uninspiring way to spend an evening. I taught my wife to play backgammon, and after a brief learning curve she has settled into a regular rhythm of beating me six times out of four. While this has been very good for the overall domestic mood, it does little to build the image of an intrepid gamester. As for the more “fun” types of board game—Monopoly, Risk, Life—they are, in my experience, mostly tools for cultivating resentment of your close relatives.

I briefly seemed poised to come into my own in high school, when I quickly ascended to the top of the quiz bowl club—team trivia, that is. Disappointment ensued. My school, it turned out, was not very good at quiz bowl. We would make it to the first round of playoffs in tournaments and then get blown out by the godlike poindexters of the serious-minded academic powerhouses in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Our team’s moderators did not seem inclined to improve on this sort of performance, and by time I was college age I had little interest in continuing as a lesser player among the real McCoys.

In college, my roommates tried to teach me how to play video games. Here, at least, their frustration matched mine. I was hopeless. One, a competitive Super Smash Bros. player who is now a professor of law at a well-respected southern university, took me aside one afternoon to try to show me how to do something called a dash-cancel. The friendship barely survived, and the ordeal sealed my perception of video games as a basically joyless undertaking in the vein of running and higher math. I did not persist.

Is being bad at games a personal failing? Perhaps not. I don’t regularly beat my wife and children, I don’t litter, I hold a basically steady job. Yet it feels like a weakness, an illustration of an underlying lack of cleverness and sense of fun, an admission of being dull and joyless. “Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself,” Baudelaire is supposed to have said. While I suppose I agree, I observe that he died at forty-six. Maybe it’s time to pick up cribbage.