Staying in
Board games are back and better than the old family favourites
Time to dust off Monopoly — board games are making a come back with the big kids. Find out why and meet the couple who own 70 games.
A young Auckland couple with more than 70 board games in their collection are among the growing number of adults forking out hundreds of dollars for the hobby.
Board game stores and cafes are reporting more diversity in the types of people taking up a pastime that is traditionally seen as something for kids or boring family holidays.
Online retailer Mighty Ape reported a 25 per cent leap in board game sales last year, plus 15,000 new board game customers.
“We have more than 2300 games but we are aiming to increase that to
3000 for this year,” says spokeswoman Karena Copestake.
TradeMe has seen a 10 per cent increase in board game sales in January this year compared with the same time a year ago, despite the sunny weather getting people out of the house.
Spokeswoman Millie Silvester said the family classic Monopoly had a 21 per cent lift in sale numbers for January.
But it’s more than childhood games that are drawing people in.
Ming Yi Lee and her partner James Williams have about 72 board games between them, and few of them are traditional.
Over the summer holidays, Lee,
24, got a new game and played it every second day, but she said they would usually go through phases of playing. When they do play, it can carry on for hours.
“We have played from 10am until about 9pm . . . we have Twilight Imperium, that game itself is like eight hours.”
Lee said the average cost of a board game was about $90, meaning their collection was likely worth more than $6000. “I think there’s a lot of people, in New Zealand at least, who are still associating board gaming with Monopoly and chess,” she says. “That obviously puts people off.”
“I don’t think there’s enough marketing in New Zealand to push those new varieties of games that have sort of always been there but people haven’t been exposed to them.”
Keith Labad, manager of Wellington board game store Cerberus Games, said more and more people, and a wider variety of people, were coming into the store.
“You’re getting a lot more young adults who are wanting to play some games with their flatmates,” he says.
“When the store opened four years ago, the board game section was maybe those two walls.”
Now, most of the store’s walls and several extra shelves are stacked high with games.
The increasing selection of games could be partly down to more people using Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites to gauge interest in a board game concept and raising the money to make it.
It also helped when games made an appearance on TV. More people became interested in Settlers of Catan when it appeared on Shortland Street, and others wanted to get their hands on Ticket to Ride after it was played on The Big Bang Theory.
Bigger, more complex board games were popular with those in their mid-20s to mid-30s, he said.
At Wellington board game cafe Caffeinated Dragon Games, co-owner Susan Wells charges $5 a head for people to come in and play games to their heart’s content — and drink some coffee while they’re at it.
Monopoly is not one of the games available to play at the cafe as it tends to cause too much angst among players.
“People are becoming aware there are games other than traditional Monopoly,” says Wells, who has more than 300 games in her personal collection.
There has been a “fairly steady increase” in people getting into board games over the three years the cafe has been open.
“We get a mix of university students and young- to middle-aged professionals. It is quite a largespanning group, really.”