Board games are typically seen as a childhood activity. Everyone remembers going bankrupt in Monopoly or arguing over words that may or may not be words in Scrabble. Others like Uno and Chess remain more or less timeless.
Today, board game sales are on the rise, fueled by COVID-19 lockdowns and a new general interest in non-digital forms of entertainment.
With the large availability of other digital entertainment, it may seem counterintuitive that a comparatively outdated form of leisure is making a return. However, according to buissnesswire.com, the worldwide board game market in 2022 was valued at about $20 billion and is expected to nearly double by 2028. To put that into perspective, the global recorded music industry was valued at about $26 billion in 2022. Interestingly, Europe holds the largest market share at about 40 percent. Sales there reflect a culture that has embraced board games as a way to connect.
Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website, has been a massive driver of the production and sale of new board games. Kickstarter allows smaller game developers to get their innovative ideas out to market in a way that would not be traditionally possible. According to Polygon, $236 million were raised in the tabletop games category on Kickstarter, funding just over four thousand projects in 2022.
Between Kickstarter and the internet, board games have seen quite a renaissance in the 21st century. A vast market that goes way beyond the classics like Clue or The Game of Life has exploded. For every imaginable theme, there is a corresponding board game. Want to build a railroad across America? Ticket to Ride has your name on it. Want to stop a disease from wiping out humanity? Pandemic! (Incidentally, Pandemic was the most searched board game in 2020. Go figure.)
Board games have also had an upgrade from their luck-based progenitors. While games like Monopoly subject their players to an entirely luck-based system, modern games are designed to do a much better job balancing strategy and giving weight to player choices. If competition is not your thing, cooperative board games like Forbidden Island have increased substantially in popularity.
It would be impossible to continue without mentioning the number one best-selling board game of all time, Chess. Like board games in general, Chess, in particular, has also seen a massive boom with the release of the hit Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” back in late 2020. According to the New York Times, Chess.com saw monthly active users nearly double from $8 million to almost $20 million between the release of “The Queen’s Gambit” and April 2022.
The common denominator between all these games is that they bring people together. Board games are inherently a social activity. They allow you to be more invested in the people you are with than in an activity such as a movie or video games.
With the amount of time spent online only increasing, many look for ways to reduce screen time. Board games are part of the same obsession with returning to the physical world. Board games are a part of the lifestyle shifts made to reduce digitization, like paperback books and going out into nature.
Nowhere else is the board game obsession quite perfectly seen than with board game cafes. These kooky-sounding locales are precisely what they sound like. Like any other cafe, you can get coffee or a bite to eat, but the key difference is the cafe’s library of board games available for patrons to play. The idea is that groups can go somewhere to eat as they usually would, but with a slight twist. Over 5,000 of these cafes opened in the United States in 2016 alone.
So the next time you go to make plans with friends, try a board game. There is something to be said about authentic human interaction in the age of digital entertainment.
