I was in Morrhead Kentucky visiting my girlfriend. She was in town for special job training, and I was treating myself to a mini-vacation.  Across from the hotel was what most people would call an abandoned building.  I called it a challenge.  Just as a man must climb a mountain because it's there, my sweety and I charged up our cameras, clipped flashlights to our belts, and spent two hours exploring the shell of a building in the dead of night. What we found there was strangely appropriate.

As it turned out, the building was all that remained of another hotel that had closed down the previous year.  After making our way through the laundry room full of rusted driers, the second floor landing without a bannister, and the corridor littered with broken glass, we found what remained of the lobby.  In that lobby we found a nearly complete, slightly water damaged copy of Candy Land.

This had a certain impact on me.  The first memory I have related to gaming is one of my parents and myself, in the basement of the old house on Brakenridge Avenue, playing Candy Land.  From age four to six many of my fondest memories involve playing this game with family and friends.  And there is was.  The icon of my lost youth and innocent, the happiness of childhood now unfelt, abandoned on the floor of a condemned building.  I shall leave the symbolism to more sophisticated minds than mine, but at that moment I was Charles Foster Kane and there was Rosebud.

My girlfriend and I spent a few moments turning over the board, riffling through the box, and counting up the pieces.  It was an almost complete set.  But why there?  Did the staff of the hotel have a copy on hand?  Had previous lodgers left it there?  The other discarded toys in the area suggested the picked over remains of a lost-and-found.  Had it not been for the rats, and our need to press deeper into the heart of the building, I'm sure we would have stopped to play a round or two.  But I'm glad we didn't.

I'm approaching thirty now, and my taste in games has changed since I was four.  Once you've had Settlers of Catan, Twilight Imperium, and Mage: The Ascension, can you ever go back to colored cards and gingerbread playing pieces?  You can't.  But you can bring someone there.  I'll have children one day.  And when they enter the world, I'll be ready to great them with a certain board game tucked under my arm.  I'll never feel the same happiness I felt when I played this game as a child.  But when the time comes, I'll be ready to show my own children the joy of the game.