It’s all fun and games during holidays
Board games are making a comeback
The boxes are alluring: vivid colours, eye-grabbing graphics, sizzling descriptions of the fun within. Clearly just the thing for Christmas giving and seasonal get-togethers.
Turns out board games are big entertainment these days and there are thousands of them out there. Some are on everyone’s Top 10 list: Pandemic, for example, in which players collaborate — a departure from the competitive zeal that drives most board games — to defeat a series of raging diseases. Others are potential hits: PicWits, for instance, a card-based family game that’s apparently a laugh riot.
Board games have been selling vigorously overall since the industry bounced back about six years ago. That’s when sales hit $808 million in the United States after decades of decline driven in part by the popularity of video games.
“People are tired of being online; it’s impersonal. They want to go back to previous ways of social interaction,” says Brad Thomson, regional director of Strategy Games, which has a store in Ottawa and sells online. Strategy Games is part of a network administered by the national Chess’n Math Association, which promotes chess in scholastic environments and sells board games.
Thomson says that 2012 has been a banner year for the company, with sales up every month over the previous one. He says brisk-selling family games include The Settlers of Catan ($42.99 online) in which players compete to build holdings on an island, as well as Scotland Yard ($49.99 online), a team game whose point is to track a criminal.
He also mentions the card game Dominion, set in the Middle Ages; Axis & Allies, a Second World War strategy game; and Risk, first released in 1957 and continuing to spin off new variations.
Top-selling party games include Apples to Apples, a card game for up to 10 players, which was a Mensa International prize winner, and Dixit, another card game that has won multiple awards.
Thomson says that expansions, which can add additional boards, players and rules to existing games, are big sellers. Once you love a game you almost automatically want to move to the next level. Call it the competitive drive hard at work.
Competition is one aspect of the survival instinct, so it’s no surprise to find that board games date back to 3500 BC. That’s when Egyptians were burying games of Senet alongside rulers, presumably so they could while away the endless afterlife.
Since then, everything from backgammon and chess to the classic Balderdash has entered the board gamer’s lexicon.
Monopoly, first published in the form we now know in the mid-1930s, is one of the best-selling board games of all time with reported sales of more than 200 million units. Its variations include a Lord of the Rings’ edition. About $45, it entails buying, selling and trading properties in Middle-earth (J.R.R. Tolkien must be rolling in his grave).
Canada’s pride and joy Trivial Pursuit, in which team members guess the correct answer to trivia questions in sports and other categories, remains one of the great party pastimes.
It was invented in 1979 by two Montreal Gazette employees at a kitchen table. It took them 45 minutes to figure out the game’s basics. Since then, it’s sold 100 million copies in 26 countries and 17 languages. It continues to spin off new variations, including Wii and iPhone versions.
Games like these and countless others are reviewed, debated and rated at BoardGameGeek.com. This year’s best-of selection includes Eclipse (involving interstellar competition, it’s game of the year and best strategy/gamer’s game) and King of Tokyo (rated best children’s, family and “light/party” game; it casts players as monsters attacking Tokyo).
Kim Vandenbroucke, a Chicago-based board-game reviewer and inventor (Hasbro’s Cover to Cover, Winning Move’s Scattergories Categories), says that the lingering economic downturn has helped inspire a resurgence in family game nights as an affordable alternative to a movie or almost any other activity, especially when you factor in that games can be played over and over again.
As a society, she adds, “we’re always on the go. We no longer just sit around and talk for no reason. (Games) give a reason to do that.”
She is currently big on the railway-building-themed Ticket to Ride, priced from $25. Like many games since the 1980s, it originated in Germany. She recommends Quelf, in which you might have to hold one hand on the ground and snort like a pig whenever anyone rolls a three, for getting players out of their chairs, not something adults always like to do when playing games. Aside from occasional physical exertion, board games can nourish everything from strategic thinking and teamwork to simply having fun, which we straight-jacketed adults too often relegate to the sidelines.