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TheAtlantic: How Board Games Conquered Cafes
Nadia
Member UncommonPosts: 11,798
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/board-game-bars/382828/?single_page=true
On a gorgeous fall day when most of New York City was outside enjoying the weather, I spent part of the afternoon in a small storefront trying to figure out if my son was a French or Russian spy. Next to us, a family with three kids attempted to get off a sinking island, while in the back of the store, six full-grown adults huddled over a billiards-size table covered with what looked like a model of Mordor. And then, just as I was about to steal the key to the embassy and unmask my son as an Italian spy, my sandwich arrived.
As I looked around the packed space, watching customers come in and purchase games, settle down at tables, and order coffee, I marveled at the sheer number of people who had opted to spend their Sunday afternoon indoors playing board games. At first, “board-game café” sounds like the punch line to a joke about hipsters, a place where people with beards ironically argue over who gets to be the top hat, perhaps (and in fact Brooklyn has three such places). But in the past few years, board-game cafés have popped up across the globe, in places as varied and far-flung as Galveston and Beijing, and if the number of people seeking funding on Kickstarter for these types of establishments is any indication, lot more board-game cafés could be opening up in the near future.
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Board game sales are correspondingly up, with sales at hobby stores rising for the last five years in a row, and growing by 20 percent last year, according to ICv2, which tracks industry sales. Adults and kids the world over have all come to the conclusion that what they really want to do on a weekend is open up a cardboard box and decide who gets to be the blue piece.
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“Adults who spend all day sitting in front of a computer want to spend time with people,” says Jon Freeman, a neuroscientist who left the research world behind to open The Brooklyn Strategist. “It’s really about people having like-minded, shared experiences. We’d lost access to that, and places like board-game cafes have opened up access.”
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Today’s games typically have fewer rules and more variability. As opposed to a single winning strategy, many games have multiple ways to approach them, or strategies that evolve depending on who the players are or how the game board comes together. And in games like Settlers of Catan or Carcasonne, even the boards themselves are different in each game.
Comments
related
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/25/board-games-internet-playstation-xbox
beyond mass-market titles like Monopoly and Guess Who, a community of independent designers and publishers has been steadily producing innovative, exciting and beautiful games offering experiences beyond even those of the most sophisticated gaming hardware.
Ugg-Tect, for instance, challenges players to build a series of 3D structures while communicating only in primitive cave-man grunts. Make a mistake and you’ll receive a smack on the head from one of the inflatable plastic clubs that come with the game – an element of physicality that would be difficult (or at least painful) to replicate with a console controller.
It’s the result of an approach to game design that considers the creation of shared social experiences to be every bit as important as writing rules or designing physical components, and while Ugg-Tect plays for laughs, there are thousands of other games which tackle a broad range of subjects from monster-slaying fantasy to serious social issues.
Pandemic casts players as a team of medics attempting to rid the planet of four deadly and highlyinfectious diseases.
Dead of Winter challenges a group of survivors to stay alive in a world overrun by flesh-eating zombies.
Freedom – The Underground Railroad examines the history of the US abolitionist movement, with players working to shelter runaway slaves while simultaneously fighting to end the practice of slavery by political means.
A golden age of gaming
Many industry figures point to the internet as a key factor in the growth of tabletop gaming. The rise of smartphones and tablets has given players an inexpensive way to try digital versions of board games, and many go on to buy physical copies as well.
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I highly recommend Dead of Winter, it's a co-op game that plays better then Shadows over Camelot
its not about zombies, its about survival --- you could replace zombies with wolves and still have similar game
i'm sick of zombies -- but this is my favorite boardgame of 2014
EQ2 fan sites
I
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Tabletop, season 3 - episode 2
Forbidden Desert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMLP0gn4I6k&list=PL7atuZxmT954wz47aofSlvu0zbD4YuPOF&index=1
EQ2 fan sites
The wife and I been playing Pandemic a lot lately. It's a really fun co-op game.
I recently bought DiskWars which I'm looking forward to trying out. Its seems perfect for me since I like tabletop war games but refuse to spend $1000 on miniatures and months painting them.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
"A game is fun if it is learnable but not trivial" -- Togelius & Schmidhuber
Shutup and Sitdown article about BGGCon 2014
http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/pauls-favourite-games-bgg-con-14/
they liked Castles of the Mad King Ludwig
a new game i own / played and highly recommend
EQ2 fan sites