
Why we still love board games - ColinWright
http://timharford.com/2010/07/why-we-still-love-board-games/
======
cletus
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German-style boardgames are my favourite hobby. I've played probably 300+
different ones now. Perennial favourites include Agricola, Dominion, Ora et
Labora (relatively new), Age of Steam and Titan (played this to death in the
90s, not so much now but I still love the game).

For me these games are a sweet spot between traditional family games (which
tend to be largely luck-based and not very "deep") and the truly deep games of
Go, Chess and even Bridge, probably even Poker. The former group is (for me)
unfulfilling. The latter group is (again, for me) a massive time sink.

You can play a lot of games online now but honestly I don't like that. For me,
it is both an intellectual and a social activity.

German style boardgames have been around for many years but they saw a
renaissance that probably began with Settlers of Catan in the 90s that then
exploded in the 2000s with Carcassonne and Puerto Rico and what came after.

It's a great hobby, particularly if you can find people to play with
(physically) in your area, which doesn't tend to be a huge issue in urban
centers.

EDIT: to clarify what a "German style" game is (commonly just called a
"Eurogame"), it's basically a set of principles. Eurogames:

1\. Tend not to be elimination games (all players generally are in the game
until the end);

2\. Tend to de-emphasize or eliminate direct conflict where your side or units
or whatever directly attack those of other players;

3\. Tend to minimize luck to varying degrees. Some games (eg Caylus) are
perfect information games; and

4\. Tend to take 1-2 hours to play;

5\. Typically have a central board and a bunch of brightly coloured wooden
pieces; and

6\. Are often played by 3-5 players but can often be played with 2,
occasionally 6, rarely more.

These are not hard and fast rules. Contrast this with what are called
"Ameritrash" games (which isn't as derisive as it sounds).

~~~
yycom
Thanks for telling us about your favorite hobby, how many you have played,
where it fits in your personal spectrum, that it has been around for many
years, and giving us some titles!

But, what is a German-style board game?

~~~
DanBC
German style board games are so named because of the influence of a few
designers in Germany, and because of the popularity of some games in Europe.

Luck is reduced. Planning and skill is increased. They can be short fun easy
to learn games for a wide age range (Carcassonne; Bohnanza), or they can be
harder more in depth games that take longer to play (Le Havre).

Usually there's an element of competing against the game itself, not just
against other players. Usually they avoid player elimination (unlike
monopoly).

Ticket to Ride is a great game. You have some destination cards. You draw
train cards. You use the train cards with your train counters to build routes
(for points) on the destination cards. Routes consist of a bunch of shorter
routes, and these are limited so other players can claim them. The luck comes
in drawing good destination cards, and what train cards come up. You can try
to cobble other players by claiming their routes, but you really need to claim
your routes. (This isn't a great description. See Board game geek for better.)

Carcassonne is a 'simple' "draw a tile, place a tile" game. You need to build
towns or farms or roads, while stopping your opponent doing the same.

Monopoly gets harsh treatment among some people. I tend to agree. If you play
it properly (with all the auctions, and with the intent to drive other people
out of the game) it's okay, but vicious.

~~~
qznc
I think you rather classified "modern" board games, not "german style".

On the other hand, do you know a modern non-german board game?

~~~
hendrik-xdest
There are quite a few. From the top of my head: Pandemic. Even non-European is
not unheard of. For example my all-time favorite: Robo Rally
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboRally>)

~~~
bergie
Space Alert is another interesting one:
<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38453/space-alert>

Sort of cross-over between Pandemic and Robo Rally... you play and win/lose as
a team like in Pandemic, but much of the mechanics is "programming" your
actions like in Robo Rally.

------
ygra
Something I found quite nice was a web series by Wil Wheaton: TableTop
(<http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/>) which basically consists of a round of
people playing a board game, explaining the rules and generally having fun
doing so. The nice part is that you can experience how the game is played and
whether you might like it or not – much better than just with a verbal
description or review on Amazon.

Of course, for cities that have such a thing, a dedicated board game shop
where you can try out games is even better, but those seem to be rare, even in
Germany.

~~~
jdludlow
Minneapolis has an embarrassment of riches on this front. We have game shops
everywhere and dozens of public groups that meet regularly. There's also a
monthly gathering that typically runs Friday to Sunday (16 hours each), and
sells out its 90 person capacity almost instantly.

The groups are very newbie friendly, which is typical for this hobby.

------
luu
What's interesting to me is new board games aren't just variants on existing
games; there's noticable innovation in board game "technology". If you ever
play board games from the 80s and 90s, they often feel dated and clunky, even
more so than video games from the same era.

I recently went back and played some classic Avalon Hill games that were
popular when I was a kid. I can't believe me and my friends spent so much time
playing them when we were younger. Depending on the game, a full game might
take 5 or 10 hours. For many games, the majority of the time is spent rolling
dice, looking things up in tables, and moving stacks of counters around. And
that's when you're lucky enough to have a chance to do anything -- there's
often half an hour or more of dead time when you're waiting for other players
to make their moves. By contrast, if you play a game of Dominion, it's
possible to finish a game in 15 minutes. You'll have to make a larger number
of important tactical and strategic decisions than you would in most six hour
long games from the 80s and there's zero idle time [1].

Even with games that use modern game technology, you can see a noticeable
improvement over time. Puerto Rico introduced a move selection system that
allowed for serious tactical planning (10+ moves ahead) in a lightweight [2]
game that could be finished in half an hour (with experienced players). But,
the game wasn't perfect. One weakness was that the player turn order was fixed
and very important. If you play a game with one weak player and three strong
players, whoever goes after the weak player is almost guaranteed to win.
Conversely, if you have one strong player, whoever sits down to the left of
that player is going to get crushed.

Caylus fixed that by building a mechanism to change turn order into the game
itself. Caylus was wildly popular for a year or two, but it's rare to see
people play it now. Ironically, the game designer was too good at removing the
element of luck for the game to be popular. If you ever played on BSW (an
online board game service), you probably ran into 'Alexfrog', who had a record
of something like 431 wins and 2 losses. You can predict, with very high
probability, the outcome of the game based solely on who's playing, and most
people don't like being crushed by the same players over and over again.
Another issue the game had was that the gameplay was almost purely tactical.
There were only a few viable strategies, so games all had a similar feel to
them.

Agricola and Dominion fixed the problems Caylus had by adding significant
randomization. Not only does that add strategic variety to the games [2], it
also means that anyone can win any given game.

It would be fun to sit down and draw out a board game tech tree. It might hard
to make a decent visualization, though, because of the huge span, plus a high
degree of multiple inheritance.

[1] There may be some idle time with certain strategies on some of the newer
expansions, due to the incredible amount of shuffling required. You can avoid
this by playing here: <http://dominion.isotropic.org/>. I tend to play on
isotropic even when playing face-to-face games because it's 2x faster
normally, and there are some pathological cases where it's over an order of
magnitude faster.

[2] I'm using 'light' to refer to how cumbersome and complex the game
mechanics are. Examples of 'heavy' games are Enemy at the Gates (which has
over 1000 counters) and ASL (which has something like 500 pages of rules).

[3] Both games do this by strongly randomizing the initial state of the game,
and adding a small degree of randomization throughout the game. Technically,
Caylus also randomized the initial state, but the initial random state in
Caylus was minor; it was just barely enough keep you from pre-computing an
opening book, the way you can in chess. Even in Dominion tournament games,
where most players have played thousands of games, it's common to see wildly
divergent strategies, because neither player has played on a board with a
similar starting state, so they both have to figure out the best strategy in
real time. I always cringe when that happens, and I realize I'm playing an
inferior strategy. It doesn't really help that you can see what they other
player is doing, because if you realize that her strategy is superior and try
to switch, you'll be doing the same thing, but N turns behind, which is pretty
much a guaranteed loss [4]. Your only hope, at that point, is some combination
of superior tactical play and luck.

[4] Well, not always. A hybrid strategy can work in some cases. It depends on
the strategies and the stage of the game. It depends is a safe answer to
pretty much any strategy question, which is what makes it interesting.

~~~
gliese1337
> Agricola and Dominion fixed the problems Caylus had by adding significant
> randomization. Not only does that add strategic variety to the games [2], it
> also means that anyone can win any given game.

While Agricola and Dominion do a pretty darn good job of it, it's often a
matter of individual opinion whether adding randomization is a 'fix' or not. I
hate playing a game where I feel like I could lose by pure chance no matter
what my level of skill is. There's a balance to be had between having
guaranteed good strategies, too much of which makes a game feel stale, and
real randomization, too much of which makes a game feel like glorified
gambling to no effect.

What you really want is just some way of ensuring that you don't play the same
situation twice, so that some mental exertion is always required, while
keeping the playing field level. One way to go about it is to just devise a
game with sufficiently complex positions that players are likely to create new
ones on their own- that's what Chess, Go, and Hnefatafl do, despite being very
lightweight. Another way is to find some means of randomizing positions that
doesn't too seriously impact player standings- that's what randomized Nim does
and what Backgammon tries to do. A third is to make game progression depend on
player judgments/voting, which magnifies the social aspects of a game; it's a
form of randomization, but fundamentally different from, say, rolling dice or
drawing shuffled cards, and there are very few popular games I know of that
make use of it (Dixit is the only _board_ game I know of, though there are
card games like Taboo and Apples to Apples). It seems to me that modern board
games tend more and more towards the randomization approach (sometimes with
good reasons to do so given the simulation conceits of the game- i.e.,
agricultural productivity in Settlers). This makes sense because its easy to
do, especially in the context of trying to make games that play faster-
randomizing starting conditions is a great way to save the first ten or twenty
opening moves prior to interestingness that you'd go through in a fully
deterministic Chess-style game, even if there's no further randomness- and
especially if you're willing to be lax with the requirement to not obviously
upset player standings by random chance. But I wonder if we're missing
something by not doing more exploration of the space of "interesting"
deterministic games.

Incidentally, Tsuro is an interesting edge case- as the board is built during
game play, I'm not sure if that counts as randomized initial conditions, or
continuous randomization. While Tsuro is the simplest example, there are
several games similar to this, like Infinite City or Wasabi. I was recently
introduced to a Tsuro expansion that added dice rolls that alter the
previously-played board tiles, and it was pretty uniformly considered by the
players to be inferior due to over-randomization destroying any real reliance
on individual skill.

P.S. Most of my recent exposure to modern games comes from periodic sampling
of board game events run by my university SF&F club, so it's entirely possible
that there are filtering and selection biases in the kinds of games that I
have seen. I would certainly not mind having my entire argument torn to shreds
by being introduced to yet more new games that I was not previously familiar
with.

~~~
bunderbunder
> I hate playing a game where I feel like I could lose by pure chance no
> matter what my level of skill is.

I've discovered this is a crucial element in social games. Because the
implication is that someone could also win by pure chance no matter what their
skill level is. That makes the game a lot more approachable for people of all
skill levels, and makes it easier for a room full of people to have fun
together.

Compare with another game I'm particularly fond of, which has absolutely no
random element: Go. Considered on its own merits and ignoring any outside
factors, it's easily my favorite game. But my usual Go partner moved across
the country a while ago, and since then I almost never get to play Go. And
when I do, it's really not very much fun. I've been playing it for so much
longer than anyone else I know that we both know going into it exactly who's
going to win and by how much. There's just no excitement in that. Sure, Go has
a fantastic handicapping system and if we wanted to put out the effort of
figuring out an appropriate handicap we could even the odds. But for most
people that (quite justifiably) feels terribly condescending, so we're not
going to do that.

~~~
dminor
Exactly - it's like the difference between chess and poker. Both are popular
but poker is more widely played because differences in skill are less apparent
(especially to an unskilled player)

People who don't like randomness mixed with skill just need to stop measuring
themselves by the outcome of a single game.

~~~
gliese1337
> People who don't like randomness mixed with skill just need to stop
> measuring themselves by the outcome of a single game.

It's not measuring yourself, it's the emotional experience of playing that one
game. If you _can_ play the same game a bunch of times, such that the
randomness gets smoothed out, that experience is different from the experience
of just playing one game. There is thus something to be said, I think, for
games that are explicitly designed to be played in a tournament style. For
example, Mexican Train Dominoes- you're _supposed_ to play it in 13 rounds, so
even though you may get completely screwed over by bad draws on any one round,
it's highly likely that everyone ends up on even footing overall (except for
that one time I got a double 6 five rounds in a row...). Or Hnefatafl- it's
empirically unbalanced, so standard practice is that you always play two games
switching sides.

Hnefatafl has another interesting option for redressing unbalanced skill
levels, though; each player can simply bet at the beginning on how many moves
they think it will take them to win. If you play beyond the lowest number of
moves wagered, that player loses. It's a similar idea to handicapping in Go,
but extremely simple and requiring no negotiation such as would seem
condescending. Unless, of course, you want to be a jerk about it and just
always overestimate your move count on purpose.

~~~
darkarmani
> "Mexican Train"

That's offensive to those of us that use that to describe a sexual position!

But seriously, I agree with you. Since I only played it about once a year, I
usually forget to play it very conservatively and get a large score. You don't
have to win a single round to win overall, but people seem to forget what the
real metric is with the excitement of winning a round.

------
lmm
Worth noting the article's a couple of years old, as anyone who plays Dominion
will realize.

I'm always amazed at how much innovation is going on. With board games you'd
think that the best ones would all have been figured out decades ago, but it
seems like more are being invented than ever.

~~~
d4rti
The variety and refinement in game mechanics is great. Browsing BoardGameGeek
by mechanic[1] can be useful for new board game selection.

[1] <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic>

------
RTigger
Love this article. I think the end captures it perfectly - there's really
nothing else that gets the same social interaction as board games.

At work we use board games on a daily basis for team building, usually play a
1-hour-or-less game over every lunch. It's amazing how quickly you get to know
someone and how those relationships build and blend into your work as well.
You can see how someone teaches a new person how to play the game, how they
interact with alliances and respond to attacks from other people.

Some 1-hour games we play for reference, if anyone's interested:

Dominion - Already discussed in another post :)
(<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion>)

7 Wonders - Drafting based card game where you interact with your immediate
neighbours (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68448/7-wonders>)

Race for the Galaxy - Card game where action choices enable other players
(<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28143/race-for-the-galaxy>)

Lords of Waterdeep - D&D themed worker placement game
(<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/110327/lords-of-waterdeep>)

Stone Age - Most "german" game of this list, worker placement and resource
gathering with dice (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34635/stone-age>)

Space Alert - co-op game where the main game mechanic is "communication"
(<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38453/space-alert>)

Galaxy Trucker - fun tile-based spaceship construction game
(<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31481/galaxy-trucker>)

The Resistance - 2 out of the 5 players are secretly spies
(<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/the-resistance>)

I wrote this list out in a bit more detail on my website:
<http://rtigger.com/blog/2012/12/14/board-games-are-great/>

~~~
alphaBetaGamma
Could you suggest a good board game that is playable turn by turn? We are a
group of friends in very different time zone, and playing a turn based game,
about one turn a day works nicely.

We have played Tigris & Euphrates, and it works great, but would be looking
for something different.

Thanks.

~~~
elemeno
Take a look at VASSAL (<http://www.vassalengine.org/>) and the games it
supports - between that and Dropbox, I find that playing turn based games over
the internet is made a lot easier.

How many of you are there? How much complexity and/or depth do you like? At
the deep (deep) end, 18xx and specifically 1830 plays well as PBeM (with a
Java app called Rails), or there are games like Here I Stand that play well
PBeM, or war games. Pretty much anything which doesn't need much interaction
between players during each person's turn works well (especially if you can
trust each other to roll dice for each other where needed).

If you want some more suggestions, feel free to drop me an e-mail and discuss
further.

------
JimWestergren
I absolutely love board games and card games. And I love to think about game
mechanics. If I would not be a web developer I would love to work with this
kind of game development.

I have developed a version of Magic the Gathering which is played with a
normal 52 card deck (one deck per person) with much more simple rules and good
strategy (better?) and less luck. I have played it around 100 times and the
rules are finalized. I think I should translate the rules to English.

A note about Monopoly, the new card game Monopoly Deal is actually quite good
as a family game with simple rules and around 20 minutes.

~~~
endersshadow
I'm very curious--is there a way for me to play this game? I'd love to get the
rules from you and try it out. I loved the mechanics in Magic when I was
younger, and I'd love to not have to buy all the cards and worry about
building a deck, and just be able to play the game with my fiance without
telling her it's Magic.

~~~
b0rsuk
<http://code.google.com/p/magarena/>

Magarena is a GPLed program to play almost Magic: the Gathering. There is only
a small rule modification to simplify AI calculations: the defender chooses
how combat damage is distributed, not the attacker.

Magarena doesn't have ALL the cards - only close to 3000 - but it has
disturbingly good AI. Several AI algorithms to choose from, in fact. It plays
like a bastard, and despite having a few flaws (sometimes it performs suicide
attacks, it doesn't save cards for later, is bad with activated abilities and
doesn't guess what card you might have in hand) you will dearly regret
underestimating it.

More cards are coming, but each new mechanic needs to be coded separately.

------
itemshoppe
Quinns from Shut Up & Sit Down did a fantastic talk about the current "Board
Gaming Golden Age" at GameCity this year!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4921146>

------
mikeknoop
Haven't seen these mentioned yet, and I recommend both:

Powergrid: Unique because there are no dice involved; a game of economics

Steam: Unique because there is a bank (partly tied to your score) that you can
borrow against to build pieces faster

~~~
archon
I enjoy Power Grid with a larger group (4+) people, but with a small group,
the game really drags. This is unfortunate, because my usual gaming group
consists of my fiancee and myself.

~~~
infinite8s
Which 'german' style board games do you recommend for 2 people? It's often
just my wife and I, and it seems like most popular eurogames are best with 3-4
people.

~~~
dagw
Take a look at [http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/67262/near-
perfect-2-playe...](http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/67262/near-
perfect-2-player-games-top-25-who-occasionall)

edit: for what it's worth the game my wife and I end up playing most of the
time when we have 45 minutes to kill is Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers,
which isn't on the list.

~~~
ajtaylor
My wife and I bought Carcassonne because it could be played with only 2
people. But it's one of our favorite games because it's never the same game
twice!

------
intinig
I would have never expected a thread like this to pop up on hacker news :)

Anyway I have to weigh in and suggest to try a game I produced with some
friends (by co-founding a publishing company): Al Rashid
(<http://www.yemaia.com/al-rashid> \--
<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/127282/al-rashid>).

I think most people with a development background are naturally disposed
towards liking eurogames, and in my case to work on one :)

------
phatbyte
Lately I've been buying some of my child board games like Monopoly, Cluedo,
Hotel and such...

I noticed that people are going back at this type of games, and I can see it
why. It's an awesome excuse to invite some friends to your house, setup a
game, get a few drinks and just play, talk and have some fun.

You can't do this with videogames.

Also, you'de be amazed at how much a good strategy boarding game can reveal of
someone's personality.

~~~
lmm
Seriously, try some modern, German-style boardgames like those described in
the article - settlers if you play with people who pay attention, something
slightly less interaction-heavy (san juan?) if you don't. You'll be amazed how
far game design has progressed since the ones you remember from childhood.

~~~
simonw
Couldn't agree more. German-style games make Monopoly etc look positively
archaic. Two great starter games are Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. I'm a
big fan of Ticket to Ride as well.

There are a couple of things that make these games so good. Firstly, they're
extremely well balanced - unlike Monopoly, it's rare for one player to pull
ahead to the point that it's impossible for anyone else to catch up with them.

Secondly, they tend to come to an inevitable conclusion - a game of Settlers
will virtually never last more than an hour and a half due to resources /
space on the board depleting over time. I've had games of Monopoly last 6
hours or more, by which time everyone is fed up and wishes they'd never
started playing.

~~~
lmm
I've never been able to stand Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride falls firmly
into my "meh" category - with multiple players you optimize your chances of
winning by taking a lot of routes, and it's then mostly a matter of luck
whether you get a set that overlaps enough to complete. Settlers is good if
you play it with people who pay attention, but if not you can easily be
waiting half an hour while everyone asks everyone else several times over if
they want to sell them any grain for their sheep.

So yeah, I've mentioned San Juan; Citadels is similar and conveniently is
playable for 2-8. If you're a group of programmers then Roborally is fantastic
(just ignore the life tokens).

~~~
DanBC
> Ticket to Ride falls firmly into my "meh" category - with multiple players
> you optimize your chances of winning by taking a lot of routes, and it's
> then mostly a matter of luck whether you get a set that overlaps enough to
> complete.

You score points if you complete the route. You subtract tat route's points if
you do not complete the route.

Thus, taking extra cards is a gamble - do you gain 12 points for completing a
route or lose 12 points for not completing a route?

~~~
lmm
Yep. But if you treat the game as win/lose then your best strategy is to
increase your variance, which you do by taking a whole lot of tickets. Since
many ticket routes overlap, it becomes a game of pure luck - the game is
mostly determined by who happened to get tickets that overlapped, and all your
efforts in playing won't overcome such an advantage.

------
henrik_w
Not strictly a board game (nor German-style), but I'll just mention the card
game Set too (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(game)>). It's quick to play,
both adult and children can play together, and you can play against each other
or work together to find the sets. We've brought it to a ski trip with two
other families, and it was a hit.

Maybe it is well known, but I hadn't heard of it until I read about it here on
HN (Peter Norvig had simulated the odds of not finding a set,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1303797>). Having played for a while, I
ran my own simulations. The results differed a bit from Peter Norvig's. I
wrote it up here: [http://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities-
revisite...](http://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities-revisited/)

------
kriro
I've always had this hypothesis that if a country has a strong cultural
background in games people tend to have good critical thinking skills c.p. The
case study for this would be Germany.

Either way I'm pretty convinced playing board games with children is an
excellent thing to do to foster their development (sadly in this day and age
it almost seems spending any time with your kids puts you way ahead of the
curve already as far as parenting goes). It's fun, too.

Crowdfunding seems to work pretty well for board games btw. And I wouldn't be
shocked to hear that passionate board gamers make good startup guys (poker
players seemingly do)

~~~
eru
> Either way I'm pretty convinced playing board games with children is an
> excellent thing to do to foster their development

Planning. Simple arithmetic. Social interaction. Patience. Sure, that's going
to be useful.

------
javanix
Also enjoyable is building and designing a board game from the ground up.

Similar to software development in that you need constant iteration, _much_
different in that it takes forever to implement and test those iterations.

------
cpeterso
The _Ludemetic Game Generator_ [1] is an amusing, and often inspiring,
fictional game generator. It randomly combines BoardGameGeek.com's game
category and mechanics keywords to create a new game. Some random examples:

* _Web Tycoon in Space_ : Categories: Expansion for Base-game, American Indian Wars, Mythology. Mechanics: Commodity Speculation, Hand Management.

* _Popbid_ : Categories: Music, Territory Building. Mechanics: Auction/Bidding, Modular Board.

[1] <http://kevan.org/ludeme>

------
smoyer
My daughter has been an avid board-gamer for several years and just started
the 3D board game club at the University of Alabama. Look it up if you're in
the area and want to find a group to play with!

[http://cw.ua.edu/2012/10/29/3d-board-game-club-introduces-
ne...](http://cw.ua.edu/2012/10/29/3d-board-game-club-introduces-new-way-to-
interact/)

------
anakha
Junta is an example of a older well playing board game if you have 5-7 people.
Especially good for a mature crowd and with appropriate props like hats and
sunglasses.

<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/242/junta>

~~~
eru
If you have seven people who like that kind of game, and have enough time on
their hands, the 1900 variant of Diplomacy is also worth a try. But make sure
they can separate backstabbing in-game, from behaviour in real life.

------
PussyRiot
My main problem with board games is that they're too expensive sometimes.

~~~
kriro
If I'd do a ROI analysis on all my board games most of them beat out lots of
other social activities.

If an average game lasts maybe an hour and you play it with an average of 3
players that's 3h of entertainment per play. 10-15 Euros per hour of
entertainment seems very reasonable so most games actually tend to pay for
themselves after just one play if oyu look at it that way.

~~~
archon
And with sites such as boardgamegeek, there isn't as much risk involved unless
you're buying just-released games.

I've had my copy of Dominion for over three years. I got it on sale for $30.
I've played literally hundreds of games since I bought it.

Granted, I've added expansions over the years. But let's assume I paid full
retail price for the game and four expansions: around $225. I've played at
least 300 20-to-60 minute games. Conservatively, 100 hours of gameplay time.
$2.25 an hour to entertain myself and 1 to 5 friends is an amazing value
proposition.

~~~
jdludlow
BoardGameGeek also has an active secondary market, lowering the risk of new
purchases. Unless the game is utterly terrible, you'll be able to recoup some
of your money.

The user auctions there fetch high enough prices that I would not hesitate to
sell there as opposed to eBay. They also have their own marketplace where
users can sell games at fixed prices, but the organic "hey I want to sell
these, who wants to give me cash" lists of games[1] are quite successful.

[1] [http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/66420/metalist-for-
geeklis...](http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/66420/metalist-for-geeklist-
auctions)

------
vampirechicken
I miss playing 8 board, 5 flag roborally marathons.

------
yycom
On iPad: how do I get this in the google cache??

~~~
RaSoJo
The link to the original content on FT would be easier:
[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1aab09a4-8fb2-11df-8df0-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1aab09a4-8fb2-11df-8df0-00144feab49a.html#axzz2F1syyIU9)

------
michaelochurch
Board games are discrete and closed, often in a well-thought-out and beautiful
way. It's generally intended as a social experience, but the discrete world
makes the game possible to take apart and analyze, so that if you want to dive
deep into the game, you can. It's up to you what kind of experience you want
to have. If you want to play today and forget who won tomorrow, that's fine.
On the other hand, if you want to get analytical about why starting that
external conflict in a game of T&E was such a good (or bad) move, you can do
that as well. In a continuous, real-time computer game, you can't as easily
reason "to the bottom" because the mathematical microstructure is hidden, and
often emergent.

Germany, Hungary, and to some degree, France, have a really strong (tabletop)
gaming culture, which is a really cool thing. I tend to think that games
confer a lot of benefits not just for "weird gamer types", but for everyone.
It's a lot easier to get to know people over a board game than when there is
nothing "in the center" to talk about: can people really carry on a 2-hour
conversation about the fucking weather? I'm a weather geek and even _I_ would
prefer not to (possibly because I know from experience that it bores most
people).

I actually think there's space in the world for a "board game cafe" niche.
Instead of board games being a fringe activity that require corralling people,
I don't see why there couldn't be a revival of the culture where a person can
walk into a coffee shop at any time and find a game.

~~~
kriro
I love to analyze games and as a programmer there's quite a bit of neat stuff
you can do due to the discreteness. Build DSLs for the game logic or strategy,
the whole field of AI, modelling of games as FSM, Petri Nets whatever seems
interesting.

There are quite a few of these cafes. They have game collections and you can
rent a table+game and pay for the drinks. You can also bring you own etc. the
atmosphere is usually pretty nice/relaxed.

~~~
michaelochurch
Are you taking this Coursera course, in April?

<https://www.coursera.org/course/ggp>

It looks really interesting.

~~~
kriro
Pretty nice wasn't aware of this course. A colleague of mine actually has a
student that is doing a paper on GGP this semester.

I'll sign up for it but will mostly just follow along and not treat it like a
real course (that's kind of how I do all my online courses).

