
High-Tech Push Has Board Games Rolling Again - jbae29
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/technology/high-tech-push-has-board-games-rolling-again.html?hpw&rref=technology&_r=0
======
ixnu
My family with two teenagers has recently discovered that board games
(specifically Dominion) are the most effective and enjoyable means of
communication. We have spent over $250 on expansions and accoutrements. It is
worth every penny and more.

If anyone is struggling to connect with your teenagers in a meaningful way,
you should really try board games. It sounds funny to say, but board games
have improved our relationship within our family more than any other
experience we have tried. I would be devastated with family game nights now.

I'm thankful that I stumbled on Will Wheaton's TableTop series on YouTube
([http://geekandsundry.com/shows/tabletop/](http://geekandsundry.com/shows/tabletop/)).
If you need tips on good games, this is a great place to start.

~~~
danielweber
Teenage son refuses to play most games. Although we can get him in for a few
rounds of "Geek Battle."

~~~
greatbigtable
Try heading to a game night in your community in order to explore different
games that are out there.

Some games that go over well with teenagers at the monthly community board
game nights that I co-host in my community have included:

Pandemic - A cooperative game where all the players play different riles
within the CDC as they try to work together against the game to defeat global
disease outbreaks.

Forbidden Desert - Another cooperative game where the players are a crew of
adventurers who have crash landed in an ancient city that is being buried by a
sandstorm. They have to work together against the game to recover and assemble
the necessary parts needed to repair a flying machine and affect their escape
before they are buried alive or die of thirst.

The Resistance - A social deduction game where players are members of the
Resistance fighting to bring down a common enemy. The only problem is that a
few of them are spies sent to sabotage their mission. They spies know who each
other are and can more easily work together. It is up to the Resistance to
ferret them out before it is too late.

Summoner Wars - A two player strategic card game in which two wizards summon
forces to do battle with each other across a map. There is a great mix of
factions and the simple ruleset combined with the asymmetric faction powers
leads to a lot of interesting emergent properties in the play of the game.

Zombicide - Basically, it is Dead Rising the cooperative board game.

Rampage - A dextexerity board game that is largely influenced by the classic
video game. You flick discs to move your Kaiju monster. You drop your large
wooden monster on buildings to destroy them. You blow on buildings to shoot
people out of each floor of skyscrapers or a football stadium. You flick
wooden cars off the heads of your monster's pawn to simulate throwing them at
buildings or other monsters for even more destruction.

Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space - A hidden movement game where haklf of
you are scientists and the other half are mutants on a derelict space station.
The scientists have to try to sneak to one of a number of airlocks that may or
may not be functioning before being caught and eaten by the mutants. The trick
is that you don't know which players are scientists or which are aliens and
all your movement is secretly plotted on your own blueprint of the space
station. Some spaces are safe zones. Others require drawing event cards. If
you are lucky, no sound is detected. If you're slightly less lucky, a sound is
heard somewhere else in the space station and you get to announce it; maybe
your there and maybe your not (hopefully it throws off the mutants in
pursuit). If your really unlucky, you make a sound at your coordinates, but
hopefully you can bluff it so that the aliens think you aren't actually there.
Teenagers LOVE this game and you can play with up to eight players at once.
Its fun to watch a large group of teenagers play this together as you can
watch it change their concept of what a board game is before your eyes.

Pitchcar / Roadzters - Wooden (or plastic, respectively) track dexterity
racing games where your car is represented by a wooden disc (or plastic ball,
respectively) that you flick around the course. The first to finish a
prescribed number of laps wins. These games a lots of fun and always draw a
crowd of spectators.

Small World - A "dudes on a map" light war game like Risk, but way more fun.
Each faction is a random pairing of a trait like "seafaring" or "flying" with
a race like "giants" or "skeletons". You do your best to control as much of
the board as you can for as long as possible. When you can no longer hold out,
you put your current faction in decline where ispt still earns points, but not
as much and pick a new pairing that you think will help you hold the most
ground.

Telestations - Combine Pictionary with Telephone and you get this game that's
really,more of a gaming activity. Each player gets a random clue that they
have to illustrate and then pass to the left. The next person guesses apwhat
the drawing is and writes it as the next clue before passing to the left. At
which point the next person illustrates the most recent clue. Wash, rinse,
repeat. I've seen the clue "Bar of Soap" morph into "War of the Worlds." This
is another that pre-teens and teenagers love and is only made better by people
who are terrible at drawing (so most of us).

Dixit - Kind of like Apples to Apples, Dixit is a game where players hold a
hand of surreal paintings. One you turn, you choose a card and make up a short
story or say a phrase or word that you associate with it. Then all the other
players choose amcard from their hands that they think matches your spoken
clue. You all place the cards face down in the play area and then mix them up
before turning them over. Then each player (other than you) votes on which one
they think is the card you put down. If all the players or none of the players
choose your card, you earn zero points; you clue was either too obvious or too
obscure. Otherwise all the players and you score three points if they chose
your card and every other player whose card was also chosen scores one point.

Neuroshima Hex 2.0 - Mad Max meets the Terminator, the abstract tactical
puzzle game. Take one of a group of assymetric postapocalyptic gangs
represented by a stack of hex tiles and try to figure out how to destroy the
other faction bases using a combination of skill, luck, and timing, before
they destroy yours.

Kill Doctor Luck, the Deluxe Edition - Think of this game as Clue's evil
prequel. You're all stuck in a mansion with Doctor Lucky, an old coot that you
all hate for some reason or another. You want him dead and you want to be the
one that does it. The trouble is that he a slippery sun of a gun and it is
incredibly hard to pull off the deadly deed without getting caught so you have
to find a way to get him alone and out of direct eyesight so that you can try
to kill him with whatever is on hand from "a killing joke" to "bad cream" to
"a tight hat" and more normal fare like "a dagger", "a candlestick," and a
"gun." Kids like this because they think it is subversive; they feel like they
are getting away with something. If you like this one, make sure to check out
Save Doctor Lucky, a prequel game where you have to make sure that Doctor
Lucky survives the syncing Titanic so that you can kill him later.

These should get you started. In general a lot of the kids that come to our
monthly board game nights like either direct confrontation games like Risk
Legacy, Summoner Wars, Neuroshima Hex, and Small World where they can try out
one upping each other in playful ways or the like cooperation games like
Pandemic, Ghost Stories, Forbidden Desert, Shadows Over Camelot, and
Zombicide; the harder the better. Kids love the challenge, but don't feel on
they are on hook for any one decision as they can get input from the other
players.

Good luck.

------
gault8121
Board games can connect people in ways video games cannot. There is a level of
rapid interaction, brought about by being at a shared table, which cannot be
mimicked digitally.

If you like Settles of Catan, and you are looking for something more advanced,
I'd highly suggest Eclipse, Twilight Imperium, and Puerto Rico. These are
challenging games that require careful resource management, political
negotiations, and long term strategic thinking. In many ways these games
mirror the challenges of building a company.

~~~
anigbrowl
_a shared table, which cannot be mimicked digitally_

Not to dispute your point (I like tactility too), but I am very interested to
see where the next wave of 'coffee tble computers' go, eg Panasonic's 4k
toughpad
([http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughpad/us/windows-4k-tab...](http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughpad/us/windows-4k-tablet-
specs.asp)) when they reach commodity rather than vanity pricing (they're
$5-6k now, aimed at medical/media professionals).

~~~
pessimizer
I think board games on table touchscreens would already be common if there
were an open platform/framework to program them on, and they took advantage of
additional phones/tablets over IP. The manufacturing cost on big touchscreens
is already pretty low.

~~~
VLM
The term you need to google for is "vassal engine"

Note the engine might be open but there's all kinds of schemes WRT the data
files ranging from "we don't care" to DMCA takedowns to the max.

Also some people are simply tactile and really want meeples and feelies in
their games, so an ipad is going to be a very rough sell to them simply
because they very explicitly don't want a screen experience.

Also the resolution of a tablet is incredibly low. Maybe some kind of google
glass thing can be implemented, walking around in a backyard? I've
occasionally considered this problem and I feel cramped at a mere 5-ft round
table and 5 feet at 300 dpi is something like eighteen thousand pixels,
assuming you can "invest" in a 5 foot round screen and the best COTS available
now is only about a tenth of that resolution at that size...

~~~
anigbrowl
Most interesting, thanks! I don't expect board games on touch screens to take
over and your points about allowing games to spread out is well made. But it
will be interesting to see how they continue to evolve in parallel.

------
replicatorblog
Boardgames are quietly one of the most lucrative categories on Kickstarter.
Multiple miniature-based boardgames have out earned Oculus Rift and up until
the end of 2013 5 of the top 20 projects were board games. There are a couple
companies that are approaching $10MM in revenue by running multiple campaigns.
There are also lone artists who have raised millions.

It's fascinating on a number of levels, from the individual creator stories
(Frustrated designer quits job, raises $2MM) to the way small businesses are
evolving the platform (some co's have turned stretch goals into a marketing
artform). I've written about a few of these companies in the past if you'd
like more details:

[http://www.wired.com/design/2012/12/kingdom-
death/](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/12/kingdom-death/)

[http://www.wired.com/design/2012/08/reaper-miniatures-
bones-...](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/08/reaper-miniatures-bones-
kickstarter-success/)

[http://www.wired.com/design/2012/06/coolminiornot-success-
ki...](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/06/coolminiornot-success-kickstarter/)

[http://www.wired.com/design/2012/05/zombie-apocalypse-
board-...](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/05/zombie-apocalypse-board-game/)

[http://www.wired.com/design/2012/05/game-
salute/](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/05/game-salute/)

[http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/designers-kickstarter-
an...](http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/designers-kickstarter-and-uspcc)

~~~
VLM
Kickstarter seems to be turning into a market research technology.

Ask the internet, "Would anyone like a Lovecraftian Cthulhu themed card game?"

The internet says, "Sure, here's $30K".

According to the blog, my copy is in the mail...

~~~
araes
I did a little business startup competition over the weekend (aside: won too),
and one of the main discussions in the marketing panels provided was on the
use of Kickstarter not purely for the money influx, but more as a way of price
and feature discrimination. By cleverly arranging your stretch goals, or
making them fluid, and then by providing price determined plateaus for models
or entry points, Kickstarter actually provides a lot of information that you
might have to do some pretty painful market research, survey's, ect... to get.

The Reaper miniatures Kickstarter linked above was a particularly well done
form of this, which has continued to experiment with the follow-ons. They were
one of the first (maybe the first?) to provide the "buy once, get them all"
tier for accessing stretch goals. They also got a lot of good market data and
well discussed customer feedback with every post on what types of models
people liked, how they liked them made, what they were willing to pay for
them, and where the breakpoints in value / model were in the consumer mind. It
was a pretty amazing shift from the ways of Games Workshop and the like with
$5 / figure, $10-20 / big boy, take it or go home.

------
karlb
The BoardGameGeek Gift Guide opened up a whole new world for me:
[http://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Board_Game_Gift_Guide_201...](http://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Board_Game_Gift_Guide_2013)

I now own about half of the games on it.

I discovered early on to buy only games that are either suitable for my two
young kids (like Carcassonne, King of Tokyo, Blokus and Labyrinth) or are
suitable for two players (my wife and me; Dominion, Pandemic and Ticket to
Ride Europe).

We seldom get to play the games that require four or more adults.

Incidentally, my favorite board games on iOS are Dominion, Blokus, Neuroshima
Hex, Hive and Chess.com's app. However, I'd recommend against getting games on
your phone that you also play with your family, because you'll either become
too good at them or you'll get bored of them before your family does.

~~~
craigching
> I discovered early on to buy only games that are either suitable for my two
> young kids (like Carcassonne, King of Tokyo, Blokus and Labyrinth)

How old are your kids? I would love to add more board games, but my kids are
pretty young.

I have a five year old daughter with whom I started playing Forbidden Island
about a year ago. She loves the game, though she has her own way of playing,
she just loves collecting the "treasures", I usually have to feed her cards so
she can do this ;) Adds a bit of a challenge for me to get her the cards
before the island sinks!

My son is three, we haven't really added him into the fun yet.

~~~
rubinelli
With a five year old, you can try playing Carcassonne without farmers, or pick
up Catan Junior. Cockroach Poker is a fun and simple bluffing game -- and kids
love bluffing. Other card games, like Coloretto, may also work. Takenoko is
more complex, but it's colorful, and comes with a lovely panda.

~~~
craigching
Excellent! Thanks for that list! I have Carcassonne and have been thinking
about seeing if she'd be into it. You're right, take farmers out, I'm not even
good a farmer strategy myself :p

------
thomaslangston
I would posit that Meetup.com and other public social networking sites are
also a significant factor in the recent board game boom. Finding and playing
games with 3 to 6 adults is much easier when you can quickly find multiple
free events each week in any major U.S. metro area.

~~~
VLM
That is insightful and correct, also advise hitting google to keep track of
"fellow travelers" like the paper/dice RPG crowd and of course local cons.
Most cons have a boardgamer presence even if they're supposedly for RPG folks
or card gamers. Somebody who plays Pathfinder Society probably is up for a
board (or card) game, and unless you're truly in the hinterland there's
probably a PFS group "nearby".

From observation, it seems most cons, not just gaming cons, have some kind of
board / card / rp gamer meetup.

------
silverlight
Shameless plug for our product which lets you play RPGs and board games online
with others for free: [http://roll20.net](http://roll20.net)

~~~
theg2
Looks like a great product, just haven't had the chance to actually give it a
full spin yet.

------
kriro
I love board games (own a little over 150) and enjoy them a lot more than
video games. You can extract pretty good optimization problems form many of
them (especially Eurogames).

In fact I own quite a few games that I haven't really played a lot but spent
quite some time thinking about AIs for those games...dunno it's a strange but
fun hobby :D

Cooperative games are probably the most popular ones in my collection.
Incidentally they make for excellent solo puzzles as well.

------
chris_mahan
My son (9 next month) loves playing Munchkins, Risk, Monopoly, Settlers of
Catan. We've also played Puerto Rico, but it's not very fun with only two
players.

~~~
fsiefken
There are various 2p variants for puerto rico. We play 2p all the time, see
[http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/650038/puerto-rico-
as-a-2-pl...](http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/650038/puerto-rico-
as-a-2-player-game-and-which-variants) Sometimes we play behind the laptop
with tropic euro (anagram) exchanging some tactile and atmosphere for time

~~~
chris_mahan
Thanks, I'll definitely check that out!

~~~
mdkras
San Juan, while a slightly different dynamic, is also a fun Puerto Rico-like
game that works well with two players.

------
Semaphor
When I was younger (14-21), we had LAN parties. The older we got (starting at
around 18), the rarer they became, what happened instead were board games:
Descent, Axis & Allies, Twilight Imperium (or pretty much anything in the
6-12h range or sometimes more).

My friends from school and me moved all to different places, but we still meet
up once in a while to spend a day and night playing, all of us getting close
to being 30 :)

I love board games.

------
code_chimp
My six year old daughter loves this game and Monopoly.

------
eliot_sykes
Here's a good episode of The Incomprable podcast where they discuss their
favourite board games, helped me discover new games to play:
[http://5by5.tv/incomparable/184](http://5by5.tv/incomparable/184)

------
jaydub
Board games are great because they are one of the last refuges of shared
attention.

I'm personally a big fan of Axis & Allies, Puerto Rico, Castles of Burgundy
etc. There's something really nice about people coming together and focusing
on the same thing.

------
batmansbelt
Were board game sales ever suffering? You wouldn't know it after dealing with
some of my insufferable board game aficionado friends.

~~~
VLM
You've gotten massively downvoted (why?) but before the eurogame invasion
around the turn of the century, sales were not as good.

There's a pretty good documentary called "Going Cardboard" focused around the
early years of the eurogame invasion, mid to late 00s products, tells the
story fairly well in an hour or so.

~~~
logfromblammo
When I was younger, if you wanted to play a board game and actually have fun
across multiple ages and skill levels, you had to read the GAMES Magazine's
"GAMES 100" issue, pick out a few candidates, go to one of these places called
"shopping malls" that were popular in the 80s, enter the specialty game store,
and shell out a decent amount of cash for your choice. The resident geekployee
was probably busy setting up a table for the Warhammer 4k miniatures game that
they hosted in the store on alternate Nerdsdays, so if you asked him about the
game you were buying, you might get a lukewarm positive response. He was
really more into "Axis and Allies"-scale games, anyway.

Nowadays, you can find a game you might like on boardgamegeek any day of the
year, order it off the Internet, and play it a few days later. You can pile up
a bunch on your public wishlists, and lo, they are priced just right for
birthdays and holiday giving.

Best of all, the intense competition tends to weed out or downvote games that
are not at least good in their niche. So the games you buy are by gamers for
gamers _and_ the people gamers want to socialize with, not by Hasbro marketing
executives for bored kids, or by detail-obsessed simulation engineers for
detail-obsessed consumers.

I think the "Eurogame" phenomenon was more about Internet commerce and niche
social networks than the games themselves. You could still find non-mainstream
games before then, but it was harder to get them into widespread distribution.
You couldn't ever get them into a department store, and only the geeks and
nerds even went into the specialty games shops. But when Amazon shows up,
these games are on the virtual shelves right alongside the horrid and
overrated Monopoly.

As Kickstarter et al lower the startup cost barriers, you will see all kinds
of new entrants ramping up the competition. And while more bad games will
fail, I think the market will probably expand to accommodate more good ones
rather than squeeze out the ones at the margin.

~~~
VLM
I believe there's also a narrowcasting / local maxima / monopoly (in the .biz
sense) effect, where Hasbro and friends hyperoptimized for American 6 year
olds, leaving a gigantic empty unserved market which the eurogame folks never
abandoned, so someone translates from German to English, the games hop the
Atlantic with the help of internet publicity and online stores, and take the
country by storm.

To help the HN readership, WRT board games, Germany is more or less the
Silicon Valley of board games.

~~~
logfromblammo
And to extend that analogy, Klaus Teuber, Reiner Knizia, and Wolfgang Kramer
are like the Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniak of board games.

------
michaelochurch
Tabletop games are also great for helping people overcome social anxieties,
which are common among smart people. The "flow" state is deeply anxiolytic.
Games are good for getting people, who don't know each other, together to do
something that isn't drinking.

This is why I thought Google+ should have focused on putting German-style
board games (using Hangouts, then an enormous technical advantage) instead of
Zynga dreck in its Games product. The original G+ vision was that Hangouts
would actually be something people "hang out" in, coming and going like it was
a dorm room in college. That was a long-shot, an attempt to centrally direct
culture, but games provided the perfect context for getting that motion going.

~~~
tekalon
Totally agree. I used to play D&D with friends and it really helped with my
anxiety. I could contribute to the conversation if I wanted, be quiet and just
listen if I wanted, or read something else. I was an excuse to socialize, but
also something productive to do if you want to socialize.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I remember being part of a D&D group (all preexisting friends). When the
social atmosphere would get going well and everyone would be laughing and
enjoying themselves... there'd always be someone to say "hey, everyone, quit
trying to have a good time and pay attention to the game instead!"

Socializing isn't always smiled upon. :/

~~~
craigching
> quit trying to have a good time and pay attention to the game instead!

I admit it, that was me. Playing the game (and the fantasy that goes with it)
was always more fun for me :)

