Throw the dice, play that card, we’re all winners at board games

Board games are back. The ‘‘hobby games’’ sector is said to be soaring, worth more than $1.4 billion in the US in 2016, a 20 per cent rise on the previous year.

And if the proliferation of board games cafés – not only in hipsterish Hoxton, but across the country – is anything to go by, they are equally popular over here.

This is surely a cause for celebration. As we increasingly seek respite from digital overload, how refreshing to see people playing with counters and boards, not headsets and controls. To walk into a pub or café and see customers holding cards, not phones, and actually engaging with each other, plotting, bluffing, winning and losing, not for money but good, clean fun.

Of course, board games never really went away, though some have fallen from favour. Nobody now seems to play Kensington (a strategy game involving hexagons), The Business Game (playing at being mining magnates), Totopoly (for wannabe racehorse owners), or Mad, a counterintuitive competition to lose your cards.

Even Escape from Colditz, once beloved of schoolboys and designed by Major Patrick Reid, who really did escape from Colditz in 1942, is lost on today’s young.

Indeed, the board games renaissance is more than a nostalgia-fest: it’s fuelled by a slew of highly complicated but inventive new games that are popular with a generation raised on computer consoles. These include Exploding Kittens, a kitty-powered version of Russian roulette; Secret Hitler, where players take on the roles of fascists backing the Führer, or liberals trying to stop them; and Kingdom Death: Monster, set in a nightmarish world in which you are fighting for survival.

Perhaps board games reflect the age we live in. Today, we are all wracked with worry about the planet’s future, so the nightmarish scenario of Kingdom Death – a world devoid of natural resources – feels apposite and honing your survival skills very sensible. Whereas for twentysomethings unable to climb the housing ladder, the ease of buying London property in Monopoly – not so fantastical in the Eighties – must seem like a mockery.

Board games have a knack of revealing your true colours, your impatient inner-trump, an unsuspected devious side or – more happily – hidden talents. Pictionary allows artists to flourish, Articulate is for quick-witted wordsmiths. Cluedo has no doubt sparked a detective career or two.

Michael Gove is known to be an aficionado of Kingmaker, a Game-ofthrones style fight for supremacy, which requires ‘‘diplomacy, alliances and double-dealing’’. Let us hope that our future leaders are not drawing too many life lessons from Exploding Kittens.

The new generation of niche games are fun and immersive, but it would be a pity if the traditional favourites, such as Monopoly, Cluedo, Pictionary and Risk, are edged out completely. These bring people together across the generations. In the Second World War, families sheltering in Tube stations would whip out a game to while away the anxious hours, the perfect distraction from the very real jeopardy of war. One cannot imagine granny sitting down for a round of Kingdom Death.

All the same, whether it’s Scrabble, Scattergories or Secret Hitler, board games’ winning streak is surely good news for our sanity.