High-Tech Push Has Board Games Rolling Again

Try heading to a game night in your community in order to explore different games that are out there.

Some games that go over well with teenagers at the monthly community board game nights that I co-host in my community have included:

Pandemic - A cooperative game where all the players play different riles within the CDC as they try to work together against the game to defeat global disease outbreaks.

Forbidden Desert - Another cooperative game where the players are a crew of adventurers who have crash landed in an ancient city that is being buried by a sandstorm. They have to work together against the game to recover and assemble the necessary parts needed to repair a flying machine and affect their escape before they are buried alive or die of thirst.

The Resistance - A social deduction game where players are members of the Resistance fighting to bring down a common enemy. The only problem is that a few of them are spies sent to sabotage their mission. They spies know who each other are and can more easily work together. It is up to the Resistance to ferret them out before it is too late.

Summoner Wars - A two player strategic card game in which two wizards summon forces to do battle with each other across a map. There is a great mix of factions and the simple ruleset combined with the asymmetric faction powers leads to a lot of interesting emergent properties in the play of the game.

Zombicide - Basically, it is Dead Rising the cooperative board game.

Rampage - A dextexerity board game that is largely influenced by the classic video game. You flick discs to move your Kaiju monster. You drop your large wooden monster on buildings to destroy them. You blow on buildings to shoot people out of each floor of skyscrapers or a football stadium. You flick wooden cars off the heads of your monster's pawn to simulate throwing them at buildings or other monsters for even more destruction.

Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space - A hidden movement game where haklf of you are scientists and the other half are mutants on a derelict space station. The scientists have to try to sneak to one of a number of airlocks that may or may not be functioning before being caught and eaten by the mutants. The trick is that you don't know which players are scientists or which are aliens and all your movement is secretly plotted on your own blueprint of the space station. Some spaces are safe zones. Others require drawing event cards. If you are lucky, no sound is detected. If you're slightly less lucky, a sound is heard somewhere else in the space station and you get to announce it; maybe your there and maybe your not (hopefully it throws off the mutants in pursuit). If your really unlucky, you make a sound at your coordinates, but hopefully you can bluff it so that the aliens think you aren't actually there. Teenagers LOVE this game and you can play with up to eight players at once. Its fun to watch a large group of teenagers play this together as you can watch it change their concept of what a board game is before your eyes.

Pitchcar / Roadzters - Wooden (or plastic, respectively) track dexterity racing games where your car is represented by a wooden disc (or plastic ball, respectively) that you flick around the course. The first to finish a prescribed number of laps wins. These games a lots of fun and always draw a crowd of spectators.

Small World - A "dudes on a map" light war game like Risk, but way more fun. Each faction is a random pairing of a trait like "seafaring" or "flying" with a race like "giants" or "skeletons". You do your best to control as much of the board as you can for as long as possible. When you can no longer hold out, you put your current faction in decline where ispt still earns points, but not as much and pick a new pairing that you think will help you hold the most ground.

Telestations - Combine Pictionary with Telephone and you get this game that's really,more of a gaming activity. Each player gets a random clue that they have to illustrate and then pass to the left. The next person guesses apwhat the drawing is and writes it as the next clue before passing to the left. At which point the next person illustrates the most recent clue. Wash, rinse, repeat. I've seen the clue "Bar of Soap" morph into "War of the Worlds." This is another that pre-teens and teenagers love and is only made better by people who are terrible at drawing (so most of us).

Dixit - Kind of like Apples to Apples, Dixit is a game where players hold a hand of surreal paintings. One you turn, you choose a card and make up a short story or say a phrase or word that you associate with it. Then all the other players choose amcard from their hands that they think matches your spoken clue. You all place the cards face down in the play area and then mix them up before turning them over. Then each player (other than you) votes on which one they think is the card you put down. If all the players or none of the players choose your card, you earn zero points; you clue was either too obvious or too obscure. Otherwise all the players and you score three points if they chose your card and every other player whose card was also chosen scores one point.

Neuroshima Hex 2.0 - Mad Max meets the Terminator, the abstract tactical puzzle game. Take one of a group of assymetric postapocalyptic gangs represented by a stack of hex tiles and try to figure out how to destroy the other faction bases using a combination of skill, luck, and timing, before they destroy yours.

Kill Doctor Luck, the Deluxe Edition - Think of this game as Clue's evil prequel. You're all stuck in a mansion with Doctor Lucky, an old coot that you all hate for some reason or another. You want him dead and you want to be the one that does it. The trouble is that he a slippery sun of a gun and it is incredibly hard to pull off the deadly deed without getting caught so you have to find a way to get him alone and out of direct eyesight so that you can try to kill him with whatever is on hand from "a killing joke" to "bad cream" to "a tight hat" and more normal fare like "a dagger", "a candlestick," and a "gun." Kids like this because they think it is subversive; they feel like they are getting away with something. If you like this one, make sure to check out Save Doctor Lucky, a prequel game where you have to make sure that Doctor Lucky survives the syncing Titanic so that you can kill him later.

These should get you started. In general a lot of the kids that come to our monthly board game nights like either direct confrontation games like Risk Legacy, Summoner Wars, Neuroshima Hex, and Small World where they can try out one upping each other in playful ways or the like cooperation games like Pandemic, Ghost Stories, Forbidden Desert, Shadows Over Camelot, and Zombicide; the harder the better. Kids love the challenge, but don't feel on they are on hook for any one decision as they can get input from the other players.

Good luck.

A few years ago some students built a D&D prototype for the MS Surface Table computer that looked pretty awesome: http://vimeo.com/surfacescapes

The use of actual figurines with fiducial markers to control the UI was particularly interesting.

I think board games on table touchscreens would already be common if there were an open platform/framework to program them on, and they took advantage of additional phones/tablets over IP. The manufacturing cost on big touchscreens is already pretty low.

4K pixels is pretty low res compared to board games. At 400 DPI thats only about 10 inches of a board game, which is pretty small.

Something like Agricola expands to encompass all space. That's actually a pretty serious issue if you get into "huge" games like steel wolves.

Only slightly off topic, card driven games (not strictly board games, because there is no board) like Dominion and the Pathfinder card game also expand to encompass all space.

One big problem is TVs / computers / monitors are value engineered to only last 2-3 years before replacement, whereas my Carcassone sets from 15 years ago are all fully playable. I'm not saying its an impossible problem, I'm just saying if you try to push tech into board games you're going to get pushback from people who have a copy of Axis and Allies from 1991 which they still play and they're not going to be happy if you try to sell them a $1000 monitor that only lasts two years.

This - even back in 2010, I remember many fun days of playing Multi-pong (which has changed it's name more times than I could count) and Wurdle - both were really fun 3-4 player games that a 10" made sharable.

Something a bit larger would be great for simpler board games and maybe 4-6 players. Combined with an ability to sense external pieces/cards, the computer could handle the rule processing and drudgery while the humans could interact closely.

I did a little business startup competition over the weekend (aside: won too), and one of the main discussions in the marketing panels provided was on the use of Kickstarter not purely for the money influx, but more as a way of price and feature discrimination. By cleverly arranging your stretch goals, or making them fluid, and then by providing price determined plateaus for models or entry points, Kickstarter actually provides a lot of information that you might have to do some pretty painful market research, survey's, ect... to get.

The Reaper miniatures Kickstarter linked above was a particularly well done form of this, which has continued to experiment with the follow-ons. They were one of the first (maybe the first?) to provide the "buy once, get them all" tier for accessing stretch goals. They also got a lot of good market data and well discussed customer feedback with every post on what types of models people liked, how they liked them made, what they were willing to pay for them, and where the breakpoints in value / model were in the consumer mind. It was a pretty amazing shift from the ways of Games Workshop and the like with $5 / figure, $10-20 / big boy, take it or go home.

I bought Love Letter based on your recommendation, and both kids—and both adults—love it. We have played it twice a day since we got it. My five-year-old daughter doesn't really understand it, but she enjoys being on a team with someone else.

I found the user guide painfully confusing, especially considering how simple the game is. The mechanics of the game are shoehorned into a game theme that barely makes sense. In the end, all four of us watched the following video, stopping once we had got the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX-Du4P_FME

One advantage of Carcassonne is that my five-year-old can play on her own, because the game is "open"—it doesn't depend on players hiding their cards from other players. So whenever it's her turn, we can help her to decide where to place her piece.

Please let me know if you have any other recommendations for family games.

With a five year old, you can try playing Carcassonne without farmers, or pick up Catan Junior. Cockroach Poker is a fun and simple bluffing game -- and kids love bluffing. Other card games, like Coloretto, may also work. Takenoko is more complex, but it's colorful, and comes with a lovely panda.

My daughter is five and Labyrinth is her favorite. She can play Blokus too, and she enjoys Carcassonne, even though we have to guide her.

Thanks, I'll definitely check that out!

When I was younger, if you wanted to play a board game and actually have fun across multiple ages and skill levels, you had to read the GAMES Magazine's "GAMES 100" issue, pick out a few candidates, go to one of these places called "shopping malls" that were popular in the 80s, enter the specialty game store, and shell out a decent amount of cash for your choice. The resident geekployee was probably busy setting up a table for the Warhammer 4k miniatures game that they hosted in the store on alternate Nerdsdays, so if you asked him about the game you were buying, you might get a lukewarm positive response. He was really more into "Axis and Allies"-scale games, anyway.

Nowadays, you can find a game you might like on boardgamegeek any day of the year, order it off the Internet, and play it a few days later. You can pile up a bunch on your public wishlists, and lo, they are priced just right for birthdays and holiday giving.

Best of all, the intense competition tends to weed out or downvote games that are not at least good in their niche. So the games you buy are by gamers for gamers and the people gamers want to socialize with, not by Hasbro marketing executives for bored kids, or by detail-obsessed simulation engineers for detail-obsessed consumers.

I think the "Eurogame" phenomenon was more about Internet commerce and niche social networks than the games themselves. You could still find non-mainstream games before then, but it was harder to get them into widespread distribution. You couldn't ever get them into a department store, and only the geeks and nerds even went into the specialty games shops. But when Amazon shows up, these games are on the virtual shelves right alongside the horrid and overrated Monopoly.

As Kickstarter et al lower the startup cost barriers, you will see all kinds of new entrants ramping up the competition. And while more bad games will fail, I think the market will probably expand to accommodate more good ones rather than squeeze out the ones at the margin.

I remember being part of a D&D group (all preexisting friends). When the social atmosphere would get going well and everyone would be laughing and enjoying themselves... there'd always be someone to say "hey, everyone, quit trying to have a good time and pay attention to the game instead!"

Socializing isn't always smiled upon. :/

I actually wonder if this is going to slowly lead into a revolution in the pen and paper space as well. It has definitely been increasing on the indie side in recent years, with places like Drive Thru RPG doing a decent business, but its still mostly dominated by a few huge folks such as D&D, or the World of Darkness games. Part of that may be the time commitment that's necessary though. Board games really need only about an hour of your day. You can show up at a random meetup, sit down, play a game, and then hit the road if you want. The buy-in for committing to an RPG is significantly more deep in terms of time, the people, and your personal effort.