Alix’s announcement that the boardgame War on Terror has been seized by police worried that people might use the “EVIL” balaclava included in it for nefarious acts has got me wondering: what other subversive components lurk within my boadgame sets? I would suggest the following; if the Metro Police would care to raid my house and confiscate them they are welcome to as long as they don’t mind me mocking them mercilessly:

• Lord of the Rings Risk contains a replica of The One Ring. Invisibility would be very handy for committing criminal acts and anyone owning a copy of this game may inadvertantly be fooled into thinking that this bit of tin will enable them to hide in ladies’ dressing rooms for acts of voyeurism.
• While Ideology (note to self: second edition is out - check to see if the playing pieces are better quality than the 1st ed) also allows players to play the role of such admirable belief systems as capitalism and imperialism, it also has a darker side. Communism, Fascism and Islamism are all included and by suggesting that these have certain “advantages” the innocent may be seduced into believing such ideals. Filth!
• The playing pieces in Puerto Rico may officially be known as “colonists” but given their colour and the fact that you play plantation owners, it isn’t hard to work out what they really represent. A clear breach of the Race Relations Act. Similarly, the Robber in Settlers of Catan is unforgiveable (and let’s not get into all that “wood for sheep” business).
• Ca$h’n'Gun$ - with real, live (foam) guns. Need I say more?

And that isn’t even mentioning the fact that Monopoly turns the most sane, reasonable of individuals into sociopathic bastards. Fundamentally, with all these games out there, it’s a wonder we have a society left!

I have to admit, I saw this picture of a proposed Energy Island in the Guardian on Monday and my first thought was “what happens if they roll a 7?”

An interesting article in the Guardian today about the revival of boardgames. There is however something a little amiss in this story, in that it seems to assume that the health of a hobby is based on how well Britain is doing at an international level, rather than how many people are simply playing.

It also has a preoccupation with ‘traditional’ boardgames. Although it recognises the Euro-game movement in general, and Settlers of Catan specifically, it seems to measure ’success’ by the popularity of games that granny would have known.

Let’s be clear: a lot of ‘traditional’ games such as Monopoly or Cluedo are, compared to some of the new games that have been emerging, crap. They are largely luck-based and a few good throws of the dice at the start of the game can set you up for the remainder. In the case of Monopoly - at least in its original form the Landlord’s Game - that was the whole point. Diplomacy, very popular a generation ago, takes forever to play and has the added problem of working by excluding players, thereby limiting its appeal to people who are prepared to spend a weekend twiddling their thumbs. Classic games such as Chess and Go don’t have these flaws, but they are predominantly two-player games. By contrast, most Euro-games combine the skill element and ‘fairness’ of Chess with the accessibility of Monopoly. It’s no wonder that they are slowly increasing in popularity.

You also have to question if this indicates anything particularly new. Hobby games such as Warhammer or Bloodbowl had a big following in my youth and continued in popularity throughout the 90s, leading to stories in the financial pages about Games Workshop being a British success story (at least until a miscalculation about the continued success of Lords of the Rings brand caused them to take a tumble). They may not have had the respectability of Monopoly, and some of us might rather resent the business model works by effectively forcing you to buy expensive miniatures, but they encouraged awkward kids to socialise and combined it with the very British schoolboy pursuit of modeling (albeit painting orcs instead of spitfires). The collectable card game phenomenon continued throughout the 90s with Magic: The Gathering and later Pokemon being tremendous successes worldwide. These two combined traditional gameplay with mass-consumerism (there are 458 results when you Google ‘“kiddie crack” pokemon‘).

So it’s too simplistic to say that tabletop gameplay is making a comeback at the expense of computer games. What seems to be happening, rather, is that the nature of the boardgames industry itself is changing. Games Workshop, for example, have just announced the return of an old favourite Talisman and have already returned to roleplaying. The Euro-gaming boom has lead to a renewal in boardgaming across the Atlantic. Much of this success seems to be fueled by the internet, which is proving effective at both spreading the word about games themselves globally (BoardGameGeek being the exemplar of this) and putting players in touch with fellow gamers. Far from people eschewing technology in favour of ‘tradition’, technology itself appears to be fueling this revival. Indeed, technology was at least partly responsible for keeping Chess in the headlines 20-30 years ago as programmers worked to develop a computer that could beat the best Grand Masters.

Thus far, it has been a very behind the scenes revival in the UK (Germany, by all accounts, is a very different story), but I suspect that things like Catan are about to go very mainstream indeed. One of the biggest factors slowing down this trend is the failure of anyone to produce a Euro-game in the same price bracket as a standard set of Scrabble. Basic Catan is £10 more expensive in this country compared to Scrabble (£25 compared to £15), and you get a lot less in the box (this is particularly piss-taking when you consider the English language version is imported from the US which has a low exchange rate at the moment). There’s a killing to be made by a company willing to take a punt.

Just got back from a London shopping spree. Given that I’m utterly skint, it was probably unwise to spend what I did, but there you go.

One of my purchases was the latest expansion set for Carcassonne. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Carcassonne is boardgame (if by board, you mean lots of little ones!) in which the players place tiles to build up a landscape of interconnecting roads, cities, fields and rivers. It’s great fun, especially with the innovation of firebreathing dragon that gets to eat people on a regular basis.

The latest expansion is the “River II” which expands the river (the game’s first expansion set which is now available in the basic set) and adds a few extra options. Nothing too dramatic and just four quid, but it does clear up one very minor anomaly which the dragon expansion caused.

Regardless of the detail, I thought I’d just write a short post praising the renaissance of boardgames, seemingly entirely due to a couple of fiendishly clever Germans. Carcassonne, despite being based on a region of France, was created by Klaus-Juergen Wrede. The game which got the whole ball rolling back in 1995, Settlers of Catan, was created by Klaus Teuber. Both games have deceptively simple mechanics, are non-militaristic, non-genre and have charming wooden components compared to the tendency to make everything out of plastic these days.

And both games have branched out into a plethora of different editions. Catan has, among others, a kiddie edition, a space edition, a travel edition and, bizarrely, a Mormon edition. Both games have their own stone age and Jerusalem editions.

Why does any of this matter? Well, for decades we’ve been cursed with bad boardgames. Let’s face it, Monopoly is rubbish: lots of obscure rules and a tendency for whoever does well in the first few rounds to end up winning the game, with no chance of anyone else catching up (me being me, I should of course mention at this point that the idea for Monopoly was ripped off from a game originally created to teach people the virtues of land value taxation). When I was growing up, boardgames were eclipsed by the Games Workshop hobby game. These had three main attributes: first, they are only really suitable for two players; secondly, you have to spend a fortune buying their bloody miniatures; and thirdly, they are all bloodthirsty combat and fantasy games and thus have rather limited appeal.

Now we are finally entering a Golden Age where anyone can reasonably spend an evening playing games. Almost everyone I’ve forced to play Catan or Carcassonne has enjoyed it a lot more than they expected to. Notwithstanding the golden rule that “Chicks Dig Zombies,” most games tend to be very boyish, yet these ones have appeal to both sexes. And without the bad experiences when growing up of Monopoly and Games Workshop, whole new generations of people will grow up comparatively well adjusted.

Yes, from tiny acorns mighty oaks grow. The German people, through this small gift to the world, may ultimately be blessed with sowing peace and greater understanding across the globe. It’s got to have a more positive impact on world politics than Diplomacy anyway.