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There's way more to board games than just MonopolyFeb 04 '01 (Updated Dec 12 '01) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Many quality board games are just waiting for you to discover them -- but you have to be willing to go off the beaten path.
Suppose a stranger were to come up to you and ask where he should go to buy a board game. What would your answer be? Toys 'R' Us? A discount department store, such as Kmart or Wal-Mart? Maybe a Game Keeper store, if you live near a mall that has one. Our perceptions of board games are shaped by the ones we've seen. The ones we've seen, by and large, are not a good representation of the range of games that exist. For starters, about 90 percent of them are made by one company, U.S. toy and game conglomerate Hasbro, which owns the Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley brand names, among others (Tonka, Playskool, Kenner, Larami, Galoob, Nerf, Tiger Electronics, Wizards of the Coast . . . ), and which has an iron grip on the mass-market game distribution chain. Toys 'R' Us and its ilk stubbornly refuse to stock products of small-fry companies. In addition, the average American thinks of board games as something for the kids, something you outgrow around the time you discover beer and the opposite sex. (This isn't surprising, given that the board games we consider "classics," with a few exceptions such as Risk and Scrabble, are quite simplistic. Others, such as Monopoly, are broken by popular house rules that keep the game from ever ending.) Most adults, if they play games at all, confine themselves to "party games," such as Pictionary and Cranium, offering light-to-moderate intellectual challenges. Therefore, in brief, What You Should Know About Board Games is this: If you don't think that board games are much fun, it's because you haven't found the right board games yet. But you're not likely to find them unless you go looking for them. If the 1980s were the decade of the party game, with Trivial Pursuit leading the brief resurgence, then the '90s were the decade of the German invasion by stealth. Starting around 1995 with Settlers of Catan, U.S. companies began importing titles from Germany, where adults take their board games a lot more seriously -- so much so, in fact, that there are awards given out for the best games released each year, one (the Spiel des Jahres) given out by a jury of industry insiders, one (the Deutscher Spielepreis) chosen by critics and players. Since then, the number of titles available to American players has exploded to more than 100. Many of them are available in all-English editions; a few others are abstract games with no writing on the components and English rules either included or readily available. If your expectations of board games have been set by Monopoly, prepare to be blown away. Settlers is considered by some to be the best board game ever made (see my review elsewhere on Epinions for details). Most of these games belong to a loose genre sometimes called "family strategy." They're thinkin' games, but they're simple enough that children as young as 10 or even 8 -- if they're bright -- can grasp the fundamentals well enough to give the grown-ups a run for their money. (There are also plenty of good titles aimed at a younger set.) But don't think that you have to have kids around to justify playing a board game! It's not immature; it's not something you should be ashamed of. It's fun, which is good enough reason to do plenty of other things. Plus, it's a good mental workout. Don't psych yourself out by saying, "Oh, this looks hard -- I'm not good at games that take a lot of thinking about stuff." Come on, you're not playing chess against Garry Kasparov here. You're socializing with your usual circle of friends, and you know you're smarter than all of them as well as better-looking. :-) Anyway, just like your muscles, your brain wears out with disuse and gets stronger with exercise. Play these games often enough, and you'll find yourself thinking more clearly, sharply and quickly than you thought yourself capable of. But first you've got to find them. Go to the Yellow Pages and look under "Games & Game Supples -- Retail." A good benchmark is whether a store carries Settlers of Catan. If it does, that's a good sign that its staff are board game savvy; follow up by asking whether it carries El Grande. A yes to that second question means you've struck gold. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is pretty low. If you can't find a good store in your area, try visiting Matthew Gray's online game store database (boardgamestuff.com/cgi-bin/gamestore.pl). Enter your ZIP code or city and state in the "Find stores near:" box and hit the "Submit Query" button to the right. It'll return a list of game stores, sorted by their distance from you. It may be that the nearest store is some 100 or more miles away. In that case you can either call the nearest store anyway and see whether it will ship games to you or check out one of several online game retailers. Prominent ones include Funagain Games (www.funagain.com), Fair Play Games (www.fairplaygames.com), Boulder Games (www.bouldergames.com) and Sundown Games (www.sundowngames.com). There's also Boardgames.com, but it's sort of a latecomer on the import bandwagon. I recommend the other online stores, particularly the first two, over Boardgames.com. Now that you know where you should be looking, you can either browse on your own or skip on over to "How to Choose a Board Game" for guidance on which title is best for you. But before you run off, let me just note that as you browse through these sources of imported games, you'll also run across some unfamiliar American titles. They're good too! My point isn't that imported is better; it's that better, regrettably, is harder to find. But it's also worth the effort.  |
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