The timeless allure of board games

My grandmother came to the United States from Cuba in 1965 and never learned to speak English. She tried her best to teach me Spanish, with workbooks and newspaper clippings and constant drilling to make sure I could roll my rrs and properly pronounce the letter ñ. Her lessons worked to a degree; I can converse in Spanish, with her or with anyone, but not with much depth. English was without question my first language. That became one of many barriers between the two of us. Even though our countries shared a common waterway, we came from different cultures.
When I stayed at her house in Miami, where I grew up, she’d watch her telenovela — a style of Spanish-language soap opera — on Univision from the couch in the living room while I sat in one of her plastic-wrapped dining room chairs watching “Clifford the Big Red Dog” on PBS Kids. Later, I moved on to Florida Marlins highlights on “SportsCenter.” But there were two things that reliably brought us together, always at the dark wood table with heavy, stone legs. One was, predictably, food. She’d spend all day cooking up arroz con pollo or picadillo or black beans simmered with white onions, green bell peppers and garlic — the signature flavor trio of any Cuban kitchen — and then expect me to clean my plate. When I didn’t, she’d tease me about being too skinny, calling me her “little lizard” in Spanish. The other was Parcheesi. Or Parchís, as my grandmother called it in Spanish.
Sometimes it was just the two of us, but more often, we played when my cousins came to visit. They spoke even less Spanish than I did. We’d blow on our little cylinders for good luck before rolling the dice, and we’d chant “Dobles! Dobles!” because doubles would let us roll again. We’d joke about “eating” each other’s pieces and sending them back to the beginning of the board. I’m sure we talked about other stuff, but I don’t remember that. What I can’t forget is how that simple game’s universal appeal became a bridge between our separate worlds.
In today’s digital world, I talk to my grandma on FaceTime instead of sitting around that table. You might think the analog games we played are relics now, a kind of trivial pastime easily replaced by the latest upgrade. But if anything, board games are thriving in the marketplace, even more popular than they were back then. There’s something here, hidden beneath the surface, that transcends technology and changing lifestyles. Something that my grandmother and I felt a long time ago.
Board games have a long and murky history, but some record of recreational table games can be found in almost every advanced ancient society. “Whenever you do archeological excavations,” says Mikael Jakobsson, a researcher with the MIT Game Lab, “you realize people have been playing games all the time, everywhere.”
Ancient Sumerians played a version of backgammon some 5,000 years ago. A few centuries later, they rolled pyramid-shaped dice playing the Royal Game of Ur, “the oldest complete tabletop game ever discovered,” according to The New York Times, named for the birthplace of the biblical prophet Abraham in modern Iraq. One thousand miles west, ancient Egyptians were already playing “senet,” in which players move around a 30-square checkerboard. They valued the game so much, Queen Nefertari is depicted playing it on the wall of her tomb, while King Tutankhamun’s tomb contained at least five boxed sets.
From Europe and the Americas to China and the Mongol empire, humans have gathered around board games pretty much since we transcended hunter-gatherer lifestyles and started to form societies. Parcheesi is descended from an Indian game that dates as far back as the sixth century, but versions are found in cultures across the world, from “Patolli” in ancient Mesoamerica to “Wahoo” in Appalachia. The industrial revolution brought games to the masses. By 1874, Parcheesi became one of the first board games trademarked in the United States. Many others — like Sorry!, Aggravation and even Trivial Pursuit — are modeled on its “cross and circle” format, with players rolling dice and moving pieces accordingly, trying to reach the end of the board first.
Many classics, like Monopoly and Life, grew out of advances in printing technology during this era. Printers in Europe and the U.S. learned that people would buy board games even if they weren’t particularly thrilling or inventive. Some adopted the spinner to replace dice, which were associated with gambling, but most involved moving pieces around a board. That was enough to make them a hit during what Jakobsson dubs the “first golden age” of board games.
That lasted until about 1977, when the Atari 2600 brought basic video games like Combat and Street Racer into American living rooms. Soon kids were gathering around the family TV to play arcade hits like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. For nearly five decades, cultural successors to that console have dominated recreational games in the American home — and the marketplace. But the pendulum is swinging back. In 2016, The Guardian proclaimed “a boom in board game sales.” In 2022, The Washington Post heralded a new “golden age of board games” that “might be here to stay.” Fortune Business Insights, a market research firm, projects that the global board game industry will double in value from current estimates of over $14 billion by 2032.
One reason: Board game designers have learned from their mistakes, bringing creativity and the lessons of digital gameplay to a discipline where innovation was lagging. As Jakobsson says, they’re “catching up” from “neglect over the last half-century or so.” Another: digital fatigue. “The interest in board games is a retaliation against the ubiquity of digital media,” Zachary Horton, a professor of English who studies board games at the University of Pittsburgh, told the school’s news service in 2020. “People are looking for more engaged and social activities as they become more isolated by technology.”
Something about board games, it seems, remains timeless. That takes me back to Grandma’s dining room. To muttered mantras calling for the seven I needed to keep my grandma from winning; to the rattle of dice against the sturdy board; to finishing the game just in time for a bowl of ice cream; and to my cousins and I begging for one more round before bed.
Gabe Barrett played the standards first. Monopoly. Stratego. Connect Four. Chess, especially, before school with his friends. Games took a backseat for a few years as he played college football at Murray State, then Auburn. He was an upperclassman when some high school friends recruited him to play Dungeons & Dragons. He was captivated. In a role-playing game where each player takes on a fantasy persona like a knight or a druid and makes decisions on their behalf, it felt like anything was possible. Soon he launched a gaming podcast, wrote a book on the subject and started his own company, testing games and creating his own. So he thinks a lot about how the mechanics of board games work as social connective tissue.
The best designers, he says, start by thinking of a particular audience — like edgy teenagers or families with young children. “It’s better to make a game that people love and hate versus a game that people just think is OK,” he explains. “You want to focus in on that group of people you’re aiming at, and then make it the most enjoyable experience possible for them.”
They can certainly learn from video games, which have gleaned valuable insights into the human psyche. For example, Barrett says the best board games today give players a chance to live out a pleasant alternative reality, if only for a little while. So, “How is this game going to help people feel powerful, wealthy and/or clever?” In Catan, released in 1995, players race to build societies on a fictional island. In 2008′s Pandemic, they race to prevent a tragedy we all went on to experience. Some might boil down the allure of such examples to another key factor: agency. The more a game allows its players to control their own fate, the more engaging it becomes.
At the same time, it’s a mistake to make a game too complex. The fix might require making painful cuts. But attention spans are declining, so games need to move quickly. There’s no magic duration, but as anyone who has played Monopoly knows, nothing kills fun like a drawn-out and predictable conclusion. A good game also needs memorable, emotional moments throughout — but especially at the end.
Barrett considers two factors when evaluating a game. First, is it fun? Second, can I sell this? If the first answer is yes and the second is no, the solution might be a change in trim. Baseball, for example, may not attract many casual fans in 2024, but if the game’s mechanics are good, a more popular framing — say, outer space, or a zombie apocalypse — can make all the difference. If not, people have plenty of alternatives.
These days, that includes craft games from indie designers. Board games are a popular subgenre for crowdfunding on GoFundMe and Kickstarter. The latter lists just under 50,000 projects at various stages of development; a role-playing game based on the fantasy world of Latter-day Saint author Brandon Sanderson may be the most heavily crowdfunded board game project of all time. These sites can even give funders a voice in how the games will be played.
“Humans are natural game designers,” Barrett says. “If you ever are on a playground with a bunch of kids, they’re out there creating games.” And while modern board games have become more efficient, intentional, marketable and, ideally, more fun, they still stack the shelves at Walmart and Target next to old fixtures like Yahtzee, Candyland and Uno, because they all tug at an elemental part of our humanity. Something innate that emerges early in childhood. What players want, at day’s end, is a challenging experience that helps them to connect with each other.
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the “Lord of the Rings” book series, believed that acts of creation, like art and music and world-building, are expressions of the divine within us. In an essay called “On Fairy Stories,” he even used games to justify faith in a higher power, because playing a role in friendly competition is also an act of imagination. By extension, the board games we play must tell us something about what it means to be human on this planet.
The substance of classic games is not coincidental. Monopoly is a microcosm for navigating the economy, first published during the Great Depression. Life, created in 1860 but relaunched a century later, lets players vicariously experience the impacts of financial and career decisions like going to college, taking out a mortgage or getting homeowners’ insurance. Axis and Allies, released in 1981, at the height of the Cold War and a Reagan-era wave of patriotic fervor, lets players relitigate World War II through the eyes of a commanding general, weighing the risks and benefits of deploying troops or invading a country.
On the other hand, the specifics of each game may not matter all that much. What matters, argues Chris Sinkinson, is that games bring us all to the table, a level playing field where our real-life differences fade into the background. And we sit together for however long the game might last. “That creates the context for fellowship,” he says. “It creates a space where you can have those conversations that, in my experience, can get into some meaningful topics.”
Games are not Sinkinson’s focus as a professor of theology and apologetics at Moorlands College in England, but in 2023, he wrote about a recent surge of interest in board games that seems particularly acute among Christians. His church even has a tabletop gaming group that is open to the public and members alike. Perhaps that’s why he corrects me when I describe board games as “trivial,” as mere leisure. “There is something more profound (happening) than just filling a bit of time,” he says. “And I think that speaks to that sense that men and women … have a yearning to explore, to create.”
And to connect, which is something video games can’t quite replace.
With a game on a screen, “you’re configured to look away from the world or the room,” says Jakobsson, the MIT researcher. “When we play board games, we all show up at the same place and face each other. So there’s a lot more socializing and talking and having fun that doesn’t have that much to do with the game. The game just configures the social event, so we have a reason to come, but we’re there for the people.”
Barrett, the game designer, believes that is what makes board games sacred, even in the digital era. They encourage us to be fully present and engaged with each other. They offer a forum to transcend our differences and become more fully human in one another’s company. “Maybe we’re competing. Maybe we’re cooperating,” he explains. “But whatever it is, we’re gonna have some stories to tell when we get done.”
Or not. There’s not much narrative-building in Parchís. There’s no real strategy, much less alternative reality. But I miss it. I only see my grandmother once or twice a year now. She’s in her 90s and nearly deaf. And I live far away, where I rarely get to practice my Spanish. But whatever our differences, we can always pull out that game board, where the dice clack toward the inevitable thrill of victory and pain of defeat. Because whatever our differences, that’s a language we both speak fluently.
This story appears in the December 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.