Why Board Games Are Now Becoming Popular

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I think you're largely correct, though I'll tell you this -- the two games pulled from the pile by non-gamers at my one group are Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, both old games and my copies have the old "less attractive" covers.

I think the effect you're seeing has taken the last 20 years to occur, largely because people enter hobbies such as this in their teens and early twenties and these people are now pushing towards fifty years old and bringing the hobby to their kids. A cultural shift takes time to mature. The effects you're describing such as box art, play length and complexity become starker still when you compare 1980 to 1995.

The thing that's most frustrating for me personally is that a huge part of this is style over substance, but in a world where Apple products are shipped in packages designed to present your new widget in a tah-dah fashion upon opening I shouldn't be surprised. Truth be told looking professional is more valuable that being professional from a sales perspective.

S.

I think I disagree with every single one of your points. I'm pretty sure I could come up with counter examples as well.

In my opinion, the main reason board games are becoming more popular is simply because the momentum grows every year. Older games like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride continue to bring new people into the hobby every day. Most gamers have at least one part evangelist in them, just because they need to find more people to play with.

Gregarius wrote: Most gamers have at least one part evangelist in them, just because they need to find more people to play with.

That's a fascinating point that I hadn't thought of before. I've certainly been the evangelist among my group of friends, and some of them were quite skeptical in the beginning. Now many of them are buying games of their own and introduce boardgames to other circles of friends. Also, I wonder when or if boardgame publishers will really start advertising on a broad array of media platforms besides the internet. Or do they already? I can't remember an ad from TV, magazines, or anywhere in the outside world. Has anyone seen anything like that?

I think the growth of the hobby goes hand in hand with it's visibility thanks to the internet.

When I was 10-12 years old I owned HeroQuest. I loved it so much. I knew all the rules and spent hours just going over the magic spells and creating scenarios in my head. My problem was that NONE of my friends had any desire to play this game. That sucked so bad for me and pretty much derailed me from getting into gaming back in my teenage years.

"Egg...what the fuck are you getting at?" I'm glad you asked. I think this sort of problem persisted for many people that didn't have boardgaming friends. Thanks to the internet, people can share in their love of hobbies AND meet people with similar interests. I think alot of that growth comes from the much easier entry point. Back in the day if you hit a wall and couldn't find anyone to play with, you were screwed. Now it's much easier to find a game store or a meetup with people to play games with. There is much less of a stigma about meeting up with strangers. Hell...the concept of meeting people online has now become a lucrative industry. That barrier of meeting people being smashed I believe has a big thing to do with gaming being on the rise.

On top of that boardgames are getting more mainstream coverage as well. You're starting to see more hobby-style games show up in places like Barnes and Noble and Target. Hell I think Gamestop even got in on the boardgame thing for a while. Websites like Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun feature boardgame articles. The guys that write Penny Arcade are very much into boardgames and write about them. Basically, boardgames are no longer hidden. They're more integrated with other hobbies like videogames, comics and movies.

So yes...while the packaging has gotten nicer and the games have gotten more newbie friendly I think the fact that it's not impossible to find people to experience the hobby with helps big time. Couple this with the massive growth of gaming and it's more likely that a person will hear from a friend about Catan or Ticket to Ride or Battlestar Galactica.

I agree that internet exposure and board game evangelists are factors, but i think these are driven by the ease of access of the product. If boardgames were still designed and packaged like they were in the 80s or 90s I don't think RPS or Penny Arcade with give them more than the occasional coverage, equally i don't think the evangelist would have that much success.

What's funny is my thread that you reference asked if there was correlation. And with the links I provided in the article it was easy to answer that "No, there is no correlation" as every top five/ten list posted on icv2 there are only one or two games that started off as a KS game.

Basically what I found interesting in the reports and top game lists is that KS isn't a factor. It was to point out that KS is only a drop in the bucket of the market as a whole and that KS will not and cannot be the end of gaming and that only very involved gamers actually know what is going on with KS.

As far as your article goes, I think 30 years ago when video games were on the rise it was because plugging in had a novelty factor associated with it.

Now, as we're constantly plugged in, sitting down with people and unplugging is a bit of a novelty.

Then there's also the fact that as attention spans shorten there's a desire to be doing something. So sitting around in a group, rather than just talking and socializing, a game gets pulled out as an activity.

And then there's also a bit of a hipster quality/appeal to board gaming. Much like pulling out a typewriter in the coffee shop.

There's also the element of word-of-mouth and popular culture feeding board games into the zeitgeist. We've now seen Settlers directly referenced on popular shows like Parks and Recreation and Big Bang Theory, and celebrities going on the Tonight Show and talking about playing it. It took 10-15 years, though, for that one title to really permeate to something more than the average geeky hobby gamer. And I also see Ticket to Ride a lot, and Cards Against Humanity, but beyond those and maybe Pandemic and Dominion, I think hobby board games are still pretty relegated to a certain type of "gamer" personality. But I think there was always that audience there, clamoring for better board games than the ones the culture knew about and regurgitated (Monopoly, et al). So now that's being fed a little better and wider, which is great.

In my field (children's music) I still get comments from parents referring to my CDs like "I'm so glad there's kids' music now that I don't mind listening to, myself." Well, the reality is that there have been dozens of people making that kind of kids' music for a long time. I'm definitely not unique. But there's still some perception in a wider sense that "kids/family music = Barney." It's not that those people are newly evangelized to like more contemporary kids' music, it's that they just didn't know it was there. I think that's the same thing for board games right now... some of the better modern ones are finally seeping into the public consciousness and catching up with the audience who wanted them.

Thanks to the internet, mainstream culture has become more geeky over the last 20 years. Kids are growing up less physically active and more inclined to sit down and play games.

scrumpyjack wrote:

Gregarius wrote: Most gamers have at least one part evangelist in them, just because they need to find more people to play with.

Also, I wonder when or if boardgame publishers will really start advertising on a broad array of media platforms besides the internet. Or do they already? I can't remember an ad from TV, magazines, or anywhere in the outside world. Has anyone seen anything like that?

They used to advertise quite heavily until the mid nineties. Big companies did anyways.
But as Gregarius points out, it word of mouth through evangalists who've grown up seeing the commercials and playing big hit games like Survive. It backs up Sagrilus' remark that its taken a long time to get to this point, and the industry has reinforced this with better packaging and retail outlets.

I think this whole evangelist thing is going to change soon, because I think the entire industry is changing right now. Up until a couple of years ago you had game companies like Z-Man and Days of Wonder and Fantasy Flight, privately owned LLCs making solid coin from a cottage industry perspective. That size company was the bulk of the business. That's changing very rapidly right now, with companies gobbling each other up, and it would not surprise me to see much of the current IP in the hobby game sector be in the hands of one or two mega-corporations a couple of years from now. It may be Hasbro that ends up with the lion's share. The genre is getting big enough to attract that kind of attention. If that happens you may see advertising via more traditional media come back into play because Hasbro can print 100,000 copies of something and make it sell.

What remains is the opposite end of the spectrum -- the onesies on Kickstarter. They'll continue to "advertise" via announcing their existence in forum threads, but the hope may be to get purchased instead of making it work on their own.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote: I think the effect you're seeing has taken the last 20 years to occur, largely because people enter hobbies such as this in their teens and early twenties and these people are now pushing towards fifty years old and bringing the hobby to their kids. A cultural shift takes time to mature. The effects you're describing such as box art, play length and complexity become starker still when you compare 1980 to 1995.

This is certainly the most important factor. You have a generation that grew up with boardgames and RPGs to a smaller extent, that introduced their kids to those and a generation that grew up with video games. With the latter's maturity "playing" became an acceptable pastime for adults and their disposable income available to this industry.
What I wonder is, whether the increase in boardgames and the increase in boardgame sales correspond. I suspect that they don't. While there certainly are more people playing boardgames now than, say twenty years ago, a large part of the industries' growth can probably be attributed to the hobbyists, who spend a "disproportionate" amount of their income on games. But at what point did boardgames switch from a pastime to a hobby in and of itself, at least for quite a few people? Maybe this is mostly an american phenomenon, because I don't really see this change in Germany, myself excluded obviously. However, I'm living in a rather rural area, so take that with a grain of salt.

I think there's some easy explanations:

1. Pushback against video games. Parents don't want their kids sitting in front of a TV yelling expletives.
2. Family values. People want to spend more time with their kids and families.
3. Hipsters. These folks are changing culture, like it or not, and it's now "trendy" to be an analog gamer.
4. "NEW". People have played video games for decades and they've reached the point that not a lot new is going on there. They want to still play games, but not the same kinds of game. So, this is different.
5. "Dark Room Syndrome". Some people are sick of playing video games in a dark room. They want to play something new that involves other people, and not other INTERNET people.
6. Hubby/Wife. There's not many Couch Co-Op games out...the number of games that feature this are like 1 in 50 releases. So, this is a viable alternative for something to do after dinner.

Shellhead wrote: Thanks to the internet, mainstream culture has become more geeky over the last 20 years. Kids are growing up less physically active and more inclined to sit down and play games.

Don't forget the Star Wars effect. By the 80s this had made geek culture mainstream in a way quite unknown before.