A 100-Year-Old’s Sly Tactics At Family Games

Longevity experts suggest that strategic thinking and subtle game tactics help centenarians boost their mental agility.

👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson, author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the book's origin story.) 🍇 The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life. It also includes stories of the Gemello Winery, which her late husband, Mario, ran for nearly half a century. 📖 I’m sure you’ll find my maternal grandparents are quite lovable characters. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button.

This newsletter is published twice a month on Mondays. Every third Monday features a story or tips on living a longer, higher-quality of life.

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A 100-Year-Old’s Sly Tactics At Family Games

Grandma Kay presses her index finger and thumb into a black marble. We’re playing Chinese Checkers and she’s thinking hard. I know this because the lines on her forehead just became indented. You can imagine the hamster spinning in a wheel.

And then she makes her move. A slight left diagonal hop over two of my marbles, but she doesn’t stop there. Whoops! She subtly moves one more slot. An illegal move. After an exaggerated pause, she looks up. Was I sly enough? 

I let it go. I’ll call it an extended birthday gift. It was a warm July day in 2021. She had turned 100 a few weeks earlier.

I jump one of her marbles, and settle two spots away from entering the final destination - the triangle region opposite of me.

“Your turn,” I tell her. It’s a tight match, the second game of possibly five.

This time, she’s determined to move a marble I have blocked, with a wall of my marbles. Somehow she slides her marble free of my blockers, pressing her luck yet again. But this time, it’s beyond my patience.

 “You can’t do that. See the lines on the board?” I remind her. “They show the moves that are accepted. That diagonal move is out of bounds.”

 “You can’t do that. See the lines on the board?” I remind her. “They show the moves that are accepted. That diagonal move is out of bounds.”

“Oh, oops.” She smiles. 

About five minutes later, she wins by one move. I start rethinking if I should have let her win that first game. I coasted in that game, just to see the joy it would bring to her face. Now, my competitive spirit is kicking me. She wins the third game, too, triggering her trash talk.

“3-0, Kevin!” Grandma Kay quips. “You’re off your game.”

“Yep! What can you do?”

During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, Chinese Checkers had become part of our daily activities. Taking her for walks in the park, asking her about the family winery stories triggered from old newspaper clippings and playing Chinese Checkers, all helped pass the time.

 When I was a preschooler or perhaps kindergartner, she taught me to play Chinese Checkers.

6/15/24: Alexis and her Great Grandma Kay, 102, about to eat cake!

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Now, it appears this pandemic ritual could be helping to keep her going. Longevity experts say cognitive activities like Chinese Checkers, crossword puzzles or playing chess are good exercises for the brain. 

Dr. Tom Perls, founder of the New England Centenarian Study, is one of them. He describes it as a way to “develop new connections in the brain.”

“My analogy is if you think of in the Midwest along the railroad tracks there are these telephone wires that have lots and lots of wires, not just one wire. And if you want to decrease the communication from one part of the country to the other you have to start snipping at the wires. But if there are more wires to snip at, you have to snip at more and more wires before there is a problem,” Perls explains. 

He adds, “along the same lines, if there is a neurodegenerative [disorder] going on, but you’ve done cognitive activities that increases the number of connections, it’s going to take longer to cause a problem.”

Perls further analogized if weight lifting is the most efficient way to train your physical muscles, then the best way to exercise your brain would be to learn a new musical instrument or a new language. 

“Those are hard to do, but the more you do it, it becomes easier,” he says. “It’s probably because of the new connections you’re making.” 

He says if you aren’t willing to do the difficult things, at least do something that’s new and different. 

“Like painting, then do sculpture or take up reading or crossword puzzles or Sudoku. Once you get good at those things, then do something new that you’re not as good at,” he says.

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