Why Board Games Are Now Becoming Popular

There's also a push towards tactile (Miniature) games. Something great about holding am army in your hand as opposed to pushing buttons. Miniature games really seem to be breaking out again.

I think it's a pushback against online-only gaming.

Adult gaming is acceptable, and a lot of people don't want to live their lives entirely online. They want to play games face-to-face and video gaming doesn't allow that anymore. When I was a teenager, we played LAN space trading games on a local VAX network, all in the same room. That's shifted to logging in and playing against strangers - you need to be pretty introverted to want to spend your evenings alone in the dark, messaging someone in Morocco.

Some people are sick of the Sex and The City nightclubbing/bar culture too. As it's possible to find niche activities via Meetup, etc. then you can get 55 people every night of the week in a pub in central London, playing Coup, Carcassonne and Catan. It's fun, sociable, offline and playing games on your phone/laptop is acceptable - so why not offline gaming too.

*Geek* culture has also entered the mainstream. Half the blond American women in my gym (with two kids, in their forties, wearing $120 tennis skorts) have watched Game of Thrones. They were talking about it during body pump (cardio with weights). And that has dragons... In my teens, anything with dragons labelled you a smelly spotty friendless weirdo.

veemonroe wrote: blond American women in my gym (with two kids, in their forties, wearing $120 tennis skorts) . . . a smelly spotty friendless weirdo.

Not necessarily exclusive of each other, but point well made.

I played all the typical Hasbro /Parker Bros/old-school games as a kid of the 80s-90s. (Monopoly, Trouble, backgammon) I played some 40k in high school. My friends were way more into it and willing to lay down their allowance, but I mostly spent my time staring through all the White Dwarf magazines our local library happened to have.

But I did not appreciate board games as a mature hobby until I was at my first real game company internship in 2008. I got introduced to Bang! and Robo Rally and Descent during Thursday lunch games. (Well, Descent was a Saturday venture.) I've been slowly deepening my knowledge only through other people's games or rare purchases or Barnes and Noble discounts.

With that perspective, of someone who does not spend money on games except maybe once or twice a year:
I feel like the internet allowed board gamers to find the games they knew they wanted. My friend found all the train games he wanted. The train designer could reach his audience. And as people started to find what they loved, it seems like they could also push ones on their friends they knew would hit. Most of the games I've played I don't need to play again, but it only took Cash 'N Guns for me to realize I would actually like to own a few games. I love Robo Rally but may not ever buy it unless I become wealthy.

$50 is a lot to spend on a thing (I know, I'm stressing about that for Scoundrels), and I personally need to reeaally want a game to lay that money down. The internet provides the 1000 people. And Kickstarter of course provides more opportunity for creators, which finds more opportunity for gamers looking for games, which feedback loops!

So, internet allows gamers to find creators to find gamers. And that filters outward little by little to families and friends and everyone becomes a little more appreciative of cool games. That's my belief.

I do agree that games now are more fit to a wider audience, they are shorter, easier to learn and require less investment than say, Battletech or whatever game was representative of the 80s.

But the audience is also far more open to playing games, reading rules and setting up a dedicated day to play them.

So it's a bit of both IMHO.

womanizes!