Why board games offer a rich alternative to video gaming

Last week I heard that two of my favourite video games — farming sim Stardew Valley and fantasy adventure The Witcher — are being turned into board games. They join the ranks of dozens of games which have traded pixels and polygons for cardboard and plastic.

This might seem unusual at first: aren’t video games the successors to board games? Why choose to go retro and prod fiddly pieces (or “meeple”) around a board when you could be blasting alien viscera at 60 frames per second? Yet even as video games have exploded, the board game industry has proven remarkably robust. Why did video games never kill the board game star?

Most board game connoisseurs make a distinction between sophisticated recent titles and the older generation of games you’d find in your grandparents’ cupboard such as Ludo, Scrabble, Cluedo and, in the house of my school friend Ben, Escape from Colditz. These games have ancient forebears: backgammon dates back to ancient Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, while chess has a long history in India, like go in China. A game known as senet was discovered in ancient Egyptian tombs dating from the first dynasty in 3,500 BCE, while another game with slender, beautiful pieces appeared around 2,000 BCE and was named “hounds and jackals” by Egyptologist Howard Carter. The 19th century saw the emergence of board games resembling those played today: the earliest, such as The Mansion of Happiness, had religious messages, leading players along a path to virtue, while games with more worldly, acquisitive pursuits such as Monopoly and The Game of Life emerged around the turn of the 20th century.

My introduction to more exciting board games came with Catan, a deceptively simple game where players compete to build settlements on an uninhabited island; it has sold 32m copies since its release in 1995 and won Spiel des Jahres, the board game equivalent of an Oscar. It became a fixture among my family and friends, adored for its subtle balance between co-operation and competition, strategy and luck. It served as an introduction to “eurogames”, which emphasise resource management, building and particularly trading, which means players stay engaged even outside of their turns. Other games in the style include Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride and Brass: Birmingham. 

For those who fancy themselves not Victorian engineers or colonial settlers but fantasy warriors and space explorers, games such as Twilight Imperium and Terraforming Mars hold more appeal. You can learn the rules of most within an hour or two, but there are more elaborate offerings such as dungeon crawler Gloomhaven, which weighs 10kg in its box and currently sits at the top of the rankings on the authoritative site Board Game Geek. Games have grown in beauty as well as sophistication — see Wingspan, with its 180 gorgeous bird illustrations and pleasing tokens in the shape of pastel-shaded eggs.

As the games themselves have become more desirable, board game cafés such as Draughts in London and Snakes and Lattes in Toronto have sprung up and helped legitimise board gaming. At the same time, the internet has facilitated the discovery of new games and willing opponents, as well as enabling the rising trend of board game crowdfunding — Frosthaven, the follow-up to Gloomhaven, raised almost $13m on Kickstarter. While board game adaptations of video games tend to underwhelm, as the two mediums are suited to different approaches to play, programmes such as Tabletop Simulator approximate existing board games for online play, a boon over the pandemic.

During lockdown, board games have offered our household relief from boredom

A particular lockdown favourite at my house has been Pandemic, where you work cooperatively to fight a virus spreading across a Risk-like world map. We know that role-playing medics, scientists and researchers jetting around the world to wipe out a contagious disease is an exercise in fantasy, but the feelings of exhilaration, connection and optimism it offers are real. 

While meaningful social connection can be found playing video games online, there is a richer quality to sitting around a board with friends, in agreeing to abide by the same rules in a shared space. During lockdown, board games have offered our household relief from boredom, and while arguments do occasionally flare over games of Catan, they’re nothing compared to the vicious invective flying around the voice channels of your average online shooter game. 

I particularly love the physicality of board games, the ritual of clearing the table and assembling the board, rolling the pieces between my fingers as I decide what move to make. At a time when even live music and theatre are being beamed to us on a computer, it’s easy to feel that there’s no fun in lockdown except via a screen. Board games offer a physical space where we can gather for joy and communion, one that doesn’t fatigue your eyes after a full day of screens. A year into the pandemic, that’s more relevant now than ever.