From Eurogames To Ameritrash: Why Tabletop Gaming Is Making A Comeback
It might not look like it but everyone in this photo is having the fucking time of their lives.
It may not exactly look like it, but the folk in the photo above are having the fucking time of their lives.
Attempting to describe the excitement of a great boardgame is sort of like describing why everyone should dance: it looks a bit silly from the outside and everyone’s scared that they won’t know how to do it properly, so people don’t always take the bait. You have to entice friends in by getting a good group together, ensuring the environment is as pleasant as possible, and just going for it.
Luckily, I can also point to last week’s PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) Australia — the three-day games convention that’s drawn tens of thousands of people each year for the last three years — for proof that tabletop games are gaining popularity. As well as demonstrating new releases from major and indie games companies (and a bunch of other exciting stuff), PAX devoted an entire quarter of the whole exhibition space to tabletop gaming.
Considering the amount of pull that the multi-billion dollar international video games industry has, that’s a big deal.
Tabletop gaming has a reputation as an activity for grandmothers and certain basement-dwelling Neanderthals, but — similar to the way we think of video games these days — that stereotype has long since evaporated. At PAX, the tabletop area hosted people from all different walks of life playing card games, boardgames, role-play games, dice games, and even giant cog things.
Everyone’s played Monopoly or Uno at some point in their lives, of course, but over the last decade a whole new generation of boardgames — with high quality artwork, complex but fun rules, and in some cases involved storylines — has revolutionised the way you can spend a Friday night eating chips with your mates.
Marnie Hipkins is one of the owners of the immensely popular store Mindgames in Melbourne’s CBD; she had a stall at Pax, and has keen insight into the tabletop game industry in Australia. “We first attended PAX in 2014 and we were amazed at how popular it was,” she recalls. “Conventions like this are a great way for customers to get involved in their passion for games … Even those who went there just for the video games were impressed by how fantastic the tabletop area was.”
But while the PAX founders — American webcomic tycoons Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik — have used the international convention to champion the tabletop gaming industry, the industry explosion has mostly stemmed from Europe, not America. Europe’s highly prominent tabletop game award, Spiel des Jahres, is based in Germany and has been running for over 25 years; Spiel tends to bump a winning game’s sales up by a cool quarter of million units or more.
‘Eurogames’ are known for being cooperative and strategic, and incorporating more complex playing styles and rules systems. This stands in comparison to American-style (‘Ameritrash’) games, which tend to be more luck-based, and based more on eliminating players. “No longer do people think playing a board game will involve rolling a die and going round and round the same board a hundred times,” Marnie says, of the Eurogames movement. “Instead, these games can often involve strategic planning, outwitting, and sometimes even involve working together as a team.”
The new generation of tabletop game genres and styles vary widely. Surprisingly, some of the most popular genres are, in fact, often economy-based — in Power Grid, players vie for an energy monopoly of Europe; in Machi Koro, the runner-up for 2015’s Spiel des Jahres Game of the Year, you are a mayor trying to build the best village.
Every conceivable genre has been covered, from well-respected war games genre to science fiction, horror, fantasy and even romance. As with any genre-based system, there are a tonne of variants. There is also a huge difference in play time, with 15 minute games like Coup or Ultimate Werewolf, to medium-length games of 1-3 hours like Munchkin or Gloom, to long games like Eldritch Horror at 5-8 hours — to the new epic boardgames like Pandemic Legacy, which can go for days or weeks or even months.
There is even an Aussie-designed (go figure) drinking game, Suddenly Drunk, that parasitically feeds off any other boardgame and turns it into a drinking game as well.
The confluence of the two burgeoning industries — tabletop and video games — at PAX raises a fair question: why are boardgames suddenly so popular, when video games seem so much more exciting and dynamic? “Many people think it has to be one or the other, but board games and video games really do complement each other,” Marnie says, noting that board games have the added bonus of letting people catch-up, talk and think together.
The video games industry has also whetted the appetite of gamers for high-quality design, story elements, and more complex rule systems. The old ‘classic’ board games like Monopoly and Scrabble are now competing with younger, more flexible and high-designed games like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. Highly popular review forums like Boardgamegeeks and web series’ like Geek and Sundry’s Tabletop demonstrate the huge community that has grown up around the new tabletop generation.
Of course, one of the best things about boardgaming is that the more common issues that occur in the videogame/interwebs world — issues like bullying, sexism, homophobia, ageism and elitism — are far less prevalent. Whether it’s because you usually end up sitting down with mates, or because the face-to-face nature of the gaming table means there’s far more social accountability than when you’re online, people rarely get up in arms over anything more extreme than rules debates, minor sulks and someone eating all the chips.
All-in-all that was probably one of the best things about PAX this year: thousands of strangers from various backgrounds sitting around tables and learning how to wage a (mostly) friendly war.
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Raphaelle Race is based in Melbourne and works as a freelance journalist and editor. She writes regularly about general geekery and culture.
Feature image by Kris Wilson.