Picture a scene: four antiseptic, twenty-somethings, wearing fashionable, but not too fashionable, clothing - neither excessively expensive or excessively cheap people, sat around a wooden table, eating nibbles, having fun together playing a board game. Martin, a senior culture and events manager at the council, is telling a joke involving ironically quoting a popular R&B song, and as he laughs along with the inevitable reaction, he breathes in, fully inhaling the cocktail sausage he was nibbling, cocktail stick and all. As his friends try, in vain, to Heimlich the spiky nibble out, he panics, foodie saliva detritus dripping down his face, as a dungaree wearing person opposite calls an ambulance, a large bearded man pulls at his sternum like aggressive copulation, and his girlfriend screams as Martin turns a spent colour and loses conciousness. It really put a downer on Spirit Island.
I don't dislike people called Martin or playing boardgames with people. Mostly. Martin and his friends do not exist. And, obviously, someone choking to death is awful and I feel for anyone who has experienced any loss or injury. The second and third paragraph would have obliterated any sense of pity for Martin when I revealed some very unsavory, but quite humorously framed, things. Hand on heart I think it is better that I deleted them.
I've played and enjoyed all of those games. Exploding Kittens, Carcassonne, Shards of Infinity and The Mind are the most accessible games for beginners and younger (aged 10+) players, also, not strictly boardgames. I've bundled some card games with boardgames because I don't think simple rules or scoring mean a game is necessarily less complex, take Go which has very simple rules but is complex, and having seen competitive younger relatives playing Exploding Kittens or Shards of Infinity people can employ complicated bluffing and tactics. They're relatively easy to learn games and a great deal of fun. Pandemic sits somewhere in the lower middle difficulty of teaching and learning difficulty.
Gaia Project is complicated and revels in having a complicated system of scoring. Dune Imperium is a good hybrid of 'deck building' and 'worker placement' games. The Crew is greatly simplified bridge, with a narrative theme. Catan was previously known as 'Settlers of Catan' and is a game of colonising an island. Spirit Island flips that on its head and each player is a spirit trying to stop colonisers. Spirit Island is a co-operative game, players are not playing against players but everyone plays against the game. Cooperative games seem like they would encourage co-operating and good will, but having seen tweens punish people making stupid moves or making stupid moves deliberately that utopian vision has flaws. Imperium Legends is tremendous value for money and also a very well designed game (although the errata matters).
I like that boardgames, particularly the complicated or hard ones, force a player to slow down and learn. I like that boardgames are not dependent on much else other than the contents of the box and the attendance of a player or players. Maybe a suitable surface. There is something meditative about sitting down, setting out a board and the components according to the instructions and organising all of the bits. I like a good sturdy fold out table. I like algorithms that we can see in front of us. I like computer games but play them less. I probably won't blog about those because I also feel duty-bound to make up an anecdote about someone called Matt getting an entire Warhammer 40k box set up his bum and having to explain his peculiar gait while swapping XBox One games at CeX. Matt also doesn't exist.
back© John B Everitt