Before I got married a few years ago, I had a respectable board game collection, or so I had long thought. Having finished building my house in 2010, I had been fortunate enough to nab nearly a dozen book shelves from the book retailer Borders for a small pittance to what they would have cost to build, let along purchase new from a furniture store (yes, the closing of Borders was not so great an event, but there are often silver linings to such sad days). On my shelves, I placed my ever growing collection of games that included the likes of Star Wars Monopoly, Lord of the Rings Risk and Ikusa, as well as a number of other, non-traditional games such as Killer Bunnies and Hero Quest. All told, I filled maybe one of the bookshelf units, but that was quite alright, as I have a rather large collection of vintage video gaming consoles and game collections that filled a great deal more of the shelves. And while I was in the process of changing careers from literature and creative writing professor to academic librarian, I still possessed all of my book collections from college, teaching and my fantasy collection I have been building since I was little. There was certainly more than enough to fill all the shelves.
And yet, what I had then pales in comparison to what I have now (which is only partly shown in the picture above). Meeting my wife very rapidly changed that. As my knowledge of board games has grown over our years together, so too has our, at first individual but now, combined collections. Each year yet new games found their way onto our shelves. Each birthday or Christmas found us adding anywhere from one or two to as many as four or five games. At first, this did not prove to be a problem, as I still had plenty of shelf space for them and my future wife's collection was still housed with her at her parents' home. And of course, there was always the nearby hallway closet for overflow if it did become a problem. Fast forward a few years, and suddenly the small but growing collection more than doubled in size when we were married and she moved in. While there was still space, the new additions filled out the holes and empty shelves I had quicker than I had expected. As the picture above attests, our shelves have become rather cramped as of late, so much so that we find ourselves beginning to evaluate just which games are most vital to the collection, while identifying just which ones we rarely ever play, noting them as ideal for donations or sales to make room for yet more games (and yes, I have already gone through and culled my rather large book collections, removing many titles I would no longer be using as a librarian. However, this did not make much additional space, as I also inherited much of my father's collection of books when he passed on and my wife also has her own collection of books).
As I reviewed all these games of ours, I have come to realize just how many game genres there are, even among physical board and card games. Long gone are the days when the simple "roll and move" games made up the majority of a gaming collection, supplemented by the few more strategic games like Risk or perhaps classics like Chess and Go. Today, games exists for just about every kind of gamer you can imagine. The players who dislike the competition and strategy of a game like Risk may find a home in the worker placement genre, where competition is mainly for the resources available to achieve some end goal (often to somehow gain points by completing various objectives in the game). Other players who dislike the cutthroat competition in general may feel drawn to the cooperative board game experience, where players work together to defeat the game system, winning or losing together (this is probably my favorite type of game). The fact is, so many kinds of games exists that our shelves, as full as they are, are likely to continue to fill and empty as we discover new games we enjoy, while putting aside those games or genres that we enjoy less.
Looking back on the development of the board game industry, I am not the least bit surprised by the changes that have taken place and that I see as continuing to take place. Gaming, as a part of our culture, has grown exponentially over the past several decades. A number of factors have caused this, not the least of which is the technology involved in making board and card games and in games in general. For one, the video game industry (which itself has evolved even more dramatically than the board and card game industry has) has greatly assisted in breaking down the barriers in our society and has helped to make gaming "cool." It too has had its growing pains, having gone through its own version of a stock market crash when Atari's E.T. (my brother still owns a copy of this one) signaled the end of the second console generation supremacy. But that was only a momentary fall, which the march of technology has continued to push forward, albeit aided greatly by first Nintendo (which I grew up on) and then by Sony's Playstation empire.
Perhaps it was inevitable that with the rise of the modern computer and console games, gaming has found an ever increasing presence into all aspects of our lives. Soon gaming was not just for the home computer, nor the living room. Now gaming was part of our mobile lives, with the Nintendo Gameboy (I owned one of these) being the biggest early mobile gaming device, followed by mobile gaming on smartphones. Gaming is literally everywhere today, and major celebrities and political figures have even joined the ranks publicly, with games like Dungeons and Dragons, originally begun in the seventies, taking center stage in such movies as E.T. Extraterrestrial and Bender's Game to popular tv shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Big Bang Theory.
All of this is to say that technology has played a large role in the ever-steady stream of improvements and expansion we have seen in the gaming industry, and this is readily apparent in the board and card game industry as well. There will always be some variance in the quality of game components, to be sure, as smaller companies or even large companies looking to save money on manufacturing of their games for a wider profit margin will and do cut corners on component quality. But that doesn't mean that manufacturing quality hasn't improved since the dawn of the early modern board games in the early twentieth century with games such as Parcheesi and Monopoly. I am sure most of us have played board and card games with varying levels of quality components. But the variety and types of those components has certainly increased over the past century and have influenced, to some degree, what kind of games can be made. The question I find myself asking, however, as a game designer is, does the improvement in technology that helps drive innovation in game design also drive consumer interest in new types of games, or are people's own gaming tastes the deciding factor behind what new game designs "work"? If I had to posit a guess at the many board and card games I have seen at thrift shops such as Goodwill and Salvation Army, I would say that game design in board and card games, while not as dependent on technology as are video games, has nonetheless evolved, with not all new designs being seen as either a welcome path, or perhaps a path too often taken by other and better games.
While some of these deficiencies that cause games to be cut from our collections may have as much to do with poorly written instruction manuals or shoddy game components, there is almost always a general theme in the kind of games I find large numbers of at these thrift shops. In the past, I have not really given much thought to what traits these games might have in common as I have browsed the shelves looking for a game I might want to try out. My main concern really has been, "what is this game about and does it fit with the kind of games I know I typically enjoy?"
As my wife and I look to cull our own collection and add to the used games appearing at these thrift shops, perhaps as a designer I need to begin considering, what is it about these games we are getting rid of that makes them "not for me" enough that we don't play them? I know I want to be making games that I enjoy playing, as that should be one of the first tests of a good game, or at least I would think so. If you don't enjoy the game you are designing, who will enjoy it? That joy you take not only in designing the game, but in playing that same game will shine through in the end product. That seems like it should be self-evident, but as a beginning designer, I cannot take anything for granted. But equally important when designing a game should be, what is it about games you don't enjoy that you want to avoid having in your own games?
To me, it is just as instructive to understand what I don't enjoy and that make games likely to be removed from a person's collection as to be not purchased in the first place. Certainly there are many different kinds of gamers today, and the plethora of game genres and sub-genres speaks to that variety. There is not a single game that exists today that will please every single gamer out there. This is why such a wide range of games exists. Every genre has its own audience, its own type of gamer that enjoys it. Many gamers do enjoy more than one genre, but they also tend to gravitate to one or two genres the most. For me, I love cooperative games, but also enjoy worker placement games immensely. But secret identity and area of control games? Not nearly so much. While we have several versions of Risk or similar games on our shelves, the number of times I have played them recently I can count on one hand and still have fingers to spare. But Caverna and Spirit Island? Those games are regular companions to our evenings. Fortunately both games are made with quality components and will likely last us a long time. And moving forward on my own game design endeavors, I hope I will always keep in mind those aspects of games I like (and that I dislike) and will be able to spot them in my own work.
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