Gentler designs with an emphasis on teamwork are fuelling a boom in board game sales. Why, in the golden age of video games, are we choosing to play with counters round a table? Below, the best of the new wave.
It’s a bright Thursday morning in Oxford, and the Thirsty Meeples cafe on Gloucester Green market is thrumming with activity. As we sit at a sun-warmed window table, the maitre d’, Gareth, introduces himself and presents a list of recommendations.
First, he suggests Forbidden Desert. It is not a cocktail. “You have all crash-landed in a desert where you are searching for a lost civilisation,” explains Gareth, who sports a purple Thirsty Meeples “Game Guru” T-shirt. “A sandstorm hits, and you have to find all the pieces of a mythical flying ship to escape.” Next he offers up Escape: The Curse of the Temple, in which we’ll become “Indiana Jones-type people” who have to flee a crumbling ancient tomb. “Or,” Gareth says, “how about fighting fires?”. Last, he recommends Flash Point, in which I, my wife and two sons would rescue people from a burning building. Pull enough of them from the flames and we all win. But if a certain number are lost to the inferno, we lose. We choose Flash Point.
As we battle the conflagration, a 30-something couple next to us race against each other to construct railway routes in the Netherlands. Elsewhere, a young woman and two children play foxes raiding a farmyard. A pair of millennials create cartoon sushi meals depicted on playing cards. And a lone man from Bournemouth sits before an elaborate board, racing against the clock to defend a 1920s city from Lovecraftian horrors.
“About five years ago, I noticed we were selling fewer miniatures,” says Wooding, “so I started putting shelves of board games down here” – he gestures to rows of colourful game boxes with snappy titles, Small World, Agricola, Carcassonne, Pandemic – “and every time we did that the takings went up.” He also noted a decline in what he tactfully describes as the “stereotypical gamer” – dyed-in-the-wool hobbyists who would typically be lone, white men.
“You get a lot more couples now – young, professional, just bought somewhere. They still want to meet up with mates but they don’t want to go out and get pissed any more. They like the idea of getting a game out, having a few drinks, bit of fun for two or three hours around the table.”
Once, he admits, this more casual, “mainstream” gamer, certainly the women, would have blanched at walking into his establishment. He points out the cover of Pandemic, a key title in the board-gaming resurgence, whose players must collaborate to fight global disease outbreaks. Front and centre on the box art is its Scientist character, a woman. “Much more inclusive,” says Wooding. “Much wider appeal. More friendly.”
The awful thing about Monopoly is the first person to go bankrupt is left in a corner and everyone else plays on
Catherine Howell, curator of toys and games at the V&A Museum of Childhood in east London, describes Pandemic as “the game of the moment”. She chose it as one of four focus games, alongside chess, Game of the Goose and Monopoly, in her exhibition Game Plan: Board Games Rediscovered. Howell describes herself as more of a traditional gamer, whose strongest memories of childhood are playing Scrabble and Cluedo with her family. She confesses that, until she began thinking about the exhibition around five years ago, she wasn’t familiar with the new wave of board games that populate the shelves of Orc’s Nest and Thirsty Meeples, part of what she calls a “designer-led resurgence” that originated in Germany, then spread across Europe and North America. But she was struck by advances in game design that made the experience of playing these games far less fractious (and more enjoyable) than those family Monopoly sessions.
“Eurogames”, as they are known, are notable for their relatively gentle themes (farming, landscape-building, dock-working), the fact that they reduce the element of luck and – most importantly – the way they ensure no player is eliminated before the end. The game zero for this revolution is The Settlers of Catan (now rebranded Catan), created by a German designer, Klaus Teuber. Since its publication in 1995, it’s sold more than 22m copies in 30 languages. Players competitively establish settlements on an island and trade resources with the other players, deeping participants fully engaged and sustaining the drama of the narrative right to the conclusion. “That’s very important,” says Howell, “because nobody feels left out. That’s the awful thing if you’re playing Monopoly: the first person to become bankrupt is left in the corner while everyone else plays on.”
That crucial development finds its ultimate refinement in the most recent tabletop trend, the “co-operative game”, whereby every player wins or loses as a team member, whether fighting fires (Flash Point) or saving the world from infection (Pandemic). “It provokes a lot more social interaction,” says Howell.
Pandemic was created by a 43-year-old Californian, Matt Leacock, who is one of tabletop gaming’s most successful designers. He was inspired by Reiner Knizia’s 2000 Eurogame title Lord of the Rings, which requires players to cooperate as one of the four questing hobbits from Tolkien’s fantasy epic. “When I played that with friends we got scared,” recalls Leacock. “There was self-sacrifice. There were all sorts of highs and lows. At the end, everybody felt good, whether they won or lost. I wanted to see if I could do something like that.”
For More: The Rise and Rise of Tabletop Gaming
First Seen on: https://www.theguardian.com
Kenneth McKay 