Even with the Internet, board games are still in vogue

April 3, 2008

Tami Warshawsky remembers playing Monopoly when she was young.
Today, the Deerfield resident's closet is overflowing with dozens of board games, thanks to a generous friend who gives the family a new one every holiday.

Pioneer Press staffers play It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, a new board game at the Glenview offices. Starting from bottom left, clockwise is J.T. Morand, Sheryl DeVore, Dorothy Andries and Ruth Solomon.
(Buzz Orr/Staff Photographer)

The No. 1 all-time selling board game: Monopoly, of course.

Warshawsky said playing one of their "gazillion" board games is an excellent social opportunity. "It is a wonderful way to be together, to enjoy each other's company," she said, adding Saturday is often game day when the entire family is at home and guests come to visit.
Warshawsky said the family has also played the century-old game Pit for years.

Recently they discovered a more sophisticated type of Monopoly game called Acquire, invented in 1962. They like it because it requires more skill; players buy and sell stock instead of properties.

The Warshawksys are seemingly experts at choosing the best board games. Indeed, Erik Arneson, of About.com's Board and Card Games forum, chose Acquire as one of the top five best entries for Games Magazine's Hall of Fame, in addition to Diplomacy, Scrabble, Risk and Taboo.

And, Monopoly is the all-time best selling board game. Since it was patented in 1935, more than 250 million copies have been sold, said Pat Riso, a Hasbro spokesman.

Now the owner of Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley, Hasbro has about 80 percent of the board game market, while Mattel has 10 percent and individual companies the rest, said Sarah Gloystein Peterson, editor of Iola, Wisc.-based Knucklebones magazine, geared to board game lovers.

Mancala anyone?

Board games go back thousands of years. A version of mancala, still on sale today, is believed to be more than 8,000 years old. This game of skill requires two opponents to move marbles or stones in opposite directions around an oval-shaped pit, capturing the opposing player's stones along the way.

The game of Go, a two-player game in which you place stones on a grid and try to capture the most territory, dates back to ancient China, backgammon goes back 5,000 years, and references to a more difficult form of Parchesi date to 16th century India.
In 1843, the first board game was invented in America --Mansions of Happiness. It was a morality game with the goal of advancing to heaven (the "mansion" in the title) and not end up in the poor house, said Nik Ricketts, curator of the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y. The Strong Museum's collection of 1,000 board games, some going back to the 19th century, is the largest in the U.S., Ricketts said.

In 1866, The Checkered Game of Life came out and served as a model for the Milton Bradley game of the same name. But instead of dice -- considered immoral because they were often used in gambling -- players used a triangular spinning top called a "teetotum" to advance around the board.

Since World War II, many popular board games were invented, including Scrabble (1948), Clue (1949), Candyland (1949), Risk (1959), Uno (1971), Dungeons and Dragons (1973) and Pictionary (1986), according to About.com's board game expert Erik Arneson.

Settlers of Catan

Despite the dominance of Hasbro, last year, the five best selling games in the U.S were not made by that giant retailer. Comix and Games Retailers magazine named the top five as The Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Zombies, Fluxx and Talisman. Settlers of Catan, called a "masterpiece" by Arneson, has players build roads, settlements and cities in a combination of skill and luck.

It is very difficult to break into the market through giant board game seller Hasbro, said Peterson, the Knucklebones editor. Hasbro uses in-house inventors, although it does look at some games sold by Winning Moves, a Massachusetts company, which serves as an incubator of sorts.

"It's a tough business," Peterson said, adding all inventors think their idea for a board game could be the next blockbuster. Peterson said one of her favorite games is Ticket to Ride, Europe, in which you collect trains and connect cities with railroads.
Will electronic games ultimately make board games obsolete? That does not appear to be the case, with Hasbro's sales of board games up 14 percent last year over the previous year.

And families such as the Warshawskys enjoy both: "We love Wii, too. I wanted to bond with my sons, so we have been playing Wii tennis. It allows you to relate on another level," Tami said.

The Strong National Museum of Play is planning a major electronics game exhibit for two years down the road, curator Ricketts said.
But Ricketts said board games serve a vital function: "Board games are important because they keep families together."

What if you were only allowed to have 10 board games? Erik Arneson, of About.com, lists these games as must-have board games for that collection:

Settlers of Catan, gather resources/compete to build roads and cities with unique board set up each time; Scrabble, for word lovers; Puerto Rico, compete in different roles to be best at growing and shipping crops; Hollywood Blockbuster, an auction/movie making game; Chess; Time's Up, celebrity-identifying game dubbed "hilarious" by Arneson; I'm the Boss, "great game of wheeling and dealing"; Smarty Party, trivia game that "keeps everyone involved"; HeroScape, "ultimate battle game" ; Mystery of the Abbey, deduction/who-done-it game.