Boardgames: Making a comeback
With board game sales growing every year, we take a look at the state of modern tabletop gaming and examine why, in a digital age, the industry is experiencing such a boom
There is a renaissance taking place in the world of board games. Recently, Glasgow’s CCA played host to a pop-up board game café, complementing the city’s already diverse range of gaming haunts. Across in Edinburgh, The Games Hub, a cafe and board game shop not far from The Meadows, has been going strong for a couple of years. Indeed, a healthy scene consisting of meet-ups, gaming sessions and the occasional convention exists throughout the capital city. In the heart of Manchester there is Fanboy 3 which hosts gaming sessions every night, while in Liverpool, the Scythe and Teacup cafe offers food and board games to the masses.
The board game or tabletop scene is thriving, not just in these cities, but across the country. It’s a puzzling phenomenon for those for whom the phrase ‘board games’ may call to mind traumatic memories of mother and father passive aggressively playing out their unspoken marital issues across a Monopoly board. Perhaps latent resentment over too many games of Scrabble lost to a precocious younger sibling returns to the surface. But the contemporary world of board games has little or nothing to do with these dated 'classics.' Instead, the variety of games available on the shelves of your local game shop are likely to cater to any taste you can imagine.
Take, for example, Dixit. Released in 2008, Dixit is a French card game designed by Jean Louis-Roubira and wonderfully illustrated by Marie Cardouat. Each player holds a hand of the game’s cards, featuring a surreal dream-like image. Players take it in turn to become the Storyteller who selects a card from their hand and gives a clue as to what it is. That clue can be anything: a story, a single word, a song, whatever you like.
Mysterium meanwhile, is a more recent Polish game which is set for its first English language release later this year. Like Dixit, there are a collection of cards bearing strange and beautiful art work. It’s essentially a ‘whodunnit’ murder mystery where all but one of the players takes the role of a psychic. The remaining player is a ghost who must use these cards to create a dreamscape for the psychics. The psychics then interpret these visions in order to deduce who the murderer is.
Imagination and Creative Freedom in Boardgames
By allowing players such creative freedom, these games bring out the best of each participant's imagination. They come alive not because of their rules and mechanics but because of the people playing them. They change and adapt to different groups and take place almost entirely inside the players’ heads.
Or perhaps you want something a bit chewier? Games like Pandemic are played co-operatively, each of the players taking on the role of an emergency response operative fighting to contain global outbreaks of deadly viruses. A big map of the world is laid out across the table and you and your friends dart around it trying to beat back these deadly contagions.
Pandemic is currently being adapted by game design maverick Rob Daviau. His adaptation, entitled Pandemic Legacy, is set for release later this year. In Legacy, the actions you take in every game will have consequences for each subsequent game. This could include placing stickers over certain sections of the rule book, opening sealed boxes with new components hidden away, or even tearing up some of the games cards so that they can never be used again. Rob Daviau has done things like this before and it’s a perfect example of how designers are bringing fresh ideas to games that confound expectations and subvert conventions.
Cooperative or team based games, where communication is key, will be familiar to digital gamers but the joy of Pandemic, and co-op games like it, is that the planning and execution of your grand strategy is done in your own living room with your pals sat across from you, not at the other end of a headset. This social aspect is a key component of the successful tabletop resurgence. People like to play games, the multi-billion dollar video game industry is testament to that fact, be it Candy Crush Saga on smartphones or the latest triple-A blockbuster from a big studio.
Group Dynamics
The trouble is that digital gaming is, for the most part, a solitary pursuit. Despite a slight resurgence with recent titles such as Nidhogg and TowerFall Ascension, the days of the ‘couch multiplayer’ are all but gone.
Tabletop gaming obliterates this alienation by inviting you to spend time doing something fun with your friends who are, vitally, in the same room as you. Indeed there are countless games that rely on the social dynamics and thought processes that being in a group creates. Dead of Winter, which was released late last year but seems only now to be reliably available in UK stores, is a zombie survival game set in a bleak post-apocalyptic winter. This game will ask you to make terrible choices; do you rescue the children hiding in the wilderness outside your compound knowing full well they’re just more mouths to feed?
Dead of Winter is, like Pandemic, a cooperative game. However, every time you play, one of those in your group may or may not be a traitor working towards their own ends rather than the good of the whole team. So while you’re forced to work together, suspicion and paranoia hang heavy over the table. Games like Dead of Winter create a palpable atmosphere that relies entirely on the interactions between players. There is a humanity to games like these that video gaming cannot hope to replicate. This is not to denigrate video games but rather to point out that tabletop gaming offers something that the digital realm simply can’t.
Yet even in this golden age of board games, they cannot hope to compete with the sheer scale of the video gaming industry, and so they don’t. Instead they offer something different. For comparison's sake the North American tabletop gaming industry is worth something in the region of $700 million to the video game industry’s $70 billion. What’s more interesting though is that the tabletop gaming figure has been growing at somewhere between 15% and 20% for the last few years.
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While it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact cause or moment that represents the start of this renaissance, there are a few things that it’s fair to assume have contributed. Kickstarter has certainly helped. In 2013 there was more money pledged to support board games than video games by a margin of around $7 million. Board games are expensive things to produce and, due to their bulky nature, ship. Kickstarter provides publishers a guaranteed level of interest and minimises the guesswork involved in production numbers.
While it’s true that a number of underprepared or unscrupulous publishers have used Kickstarter to foist half baked products on the public, there are an equal number of games, such as Euphoria from Stegmaier Games or the hugely lucrative Zombicide series from Guillotine Games, that have delivered successful products with outstanding production values via crowdfunding.
Another factor that has led to a renewed interest in tabletop gaming is the drift of ‘geek culture’ from the peripheries of society and into the mainstream. With the advent of geek chic came the demystification of comic books, video games, cartoons and whatever else them nerds get up to. No longer was the local comic book store a place of dread but rather a gateway into an interesting new subculture. This shift does wonders for board games. More people buying board games means more people making new games, more games being reprinted, and more people to play the games with. Growth fosters growth.
The Success of Settlers of Catan
While that shift was important to the resurgent games industry, there is one particular game that deserves a lot of credit for getting it to where it is. That is the granddaddy of contemporary gaming, Settlers of Catan. First published in 1995 by German designer Klaus Teuber, it was, and continues to be, a runaway success. This isn’t so surprising in Germany where board games have always been extraordinarily popular (there is a whole loose sub-genre of board games referred to as ‘eurogames’) but its success in the UK and America did an enormous amount for the wider board game world.
Key to its success is that it resembles many game elements that someone who had only ever been exposed to Monopoly would be familiar with. Little wooden houses that you have to build, trade and negotiation with other players, a couple of dice – all are present. But the way that Catan uses these tools of game design is quite unlike Monopoly. There’s no rolling to see what space you land on, there is nothing that makes you skip a go and there are definitely no beauty contests.
But by the very fact that Catan includes pieces and components which are immediately recognisable to anyone makes it less scary for the player whose most adventurous gaming experience so far is the Harry Potter version of Risk. It’s somewhat illuminating that the Green Bay Packers, one of the best known NFL teams, are enthusiastic Catan players. Even American Football players, pop culture’s definition of the anti-nerd, have succumbed to the charm of tabletop gaming.
Waterstones and, before its demise, Borders played their part as well. Every one of the big bookshops has always had a game section and by stocking Catan next to Cluedo and Jenga, the veil of mystery was lifted. Placing Catan next to games which are universally recognised carries the implication that Catan isn’t that intimidating, that Catan isn’t that complex, and that’s the truth. Many of these games aren’t any more complex than the games you played in your childhood. Most of them are certainly mercifully shorter than Monopoly. Many of them are better.
New designers with new ideas are emerging constantly and while the very notion of unplugged gaming might at first glance seem to be a thing of the past, its reliance on the physical world and its insistence on the proximity of participants seems almost radically fresh in a time where we rely on softly glowing LED screens for all our entertainment. So next time you wander past your local game store, pop in, browse the shelves and absorb the different games you’ll find there. Then, once you’ve done that, invest in a big old box of fun – you and your friends won’t regret it.