Are There Board Games to Suit All (or Most) Moods and Occasions?

Over the last 25 years, the board game hobby has seen revolutionary change. Before the mid-1990s, board games could have been categorized in two basic groups. On one hand, there were casual-player games like Monopoly, Risk, Clue, Scrabble, and Trouble, which were available in toy stores and big-box stores everywhere; they were ubiquitous and well-known, but not always highly regarded. Conversely, there were decidedly esoteric games that involved complicated rules and many chits. These included railroading games and war simulation games. Rare were the games that straddled both camps; games such as Axis & Allies and Fortress America were two examples of games that involved complex rules, but still somehow inserted themselves into the public consciousness. (Note that I'm not including role-playing games or collectible card games in this discussion.) Then, in 1995, a curious game called Settlers of Catan was published, followed by El Grande (1996), Tikal (1999), Carcassonne (2001), and Ticket to Ride (2004), along with a plethora of intriguing titles. These games ushered in a new era of games that populated a middle ground between casual board games and esoteric board games, combining relative complexity with accessibility and aesthetic craftsmanship. They could be somewhat easy to learn by casual players, intricate enough to engage old-school esoteric gamers, and be downright beautiful on the table. Nowadays, the games on the market exist as a testament and response to the increasingly-demanding standards of consumers that expect artistry, well-written and test rules, and theme.

Despite the revolutionary transformation of the board game hobby, there is one question that is as prevalent as ever: are there board games that are suitable for all people and all occasions? Obviously, the answer is a resounding "No," so the question we should ask is, "Are there any games that come close?" To that query, the answer is a resounding "Maybe." Before you form your own mental list of games to suit most occasions, let me share with you some questions that I ask myself when I prepare to host or attend any gathering, whether it's a board game day, a birthday party, or just an extended family gathering.

Before I continue, one useful metric (or better or worse) to which I refer that is available for each game on boardgamegeek.com is the Weight of the game. Users rate games on a score of 1 (Light) to 5 (Heavy). Though I'm not a fan of quantitative scores for qualitative information, this metric is good enough for you to compare games. It has also been very handy for informing my game-buying decisions when thinking about my family. Note, however, that the ratings were entered by hobby gamers; what they think is "Light" might be a little heavy for the non-gamer. As a rule of thumb, I consider games between 1 and 1.5 as "a little challenging for non-gamers, but not too bad," between 1.5 and 2 as "requiring some hand-holding and more explanation," and between 2 and 2.5 as "requiring the patience and guidance of an expert if this person has any chance of gleaning any fun from the session." Oh, and for games at 3 or higher... well, I'd stay away from those until your would-be gamer has had a few sessions with the "gateway games."

Who is invited to the game session?
The most crucial question you can address is the composition of your invitee list. Do you have board game enthusiasts, non-gamers, or people who fall somewhere in between those two groups? Did you invite people who actually do not like games? Depending on who is attending, you have to assess your game collection and determine which games match your invitees. For casual gamers, skew towards 2 or under. For your enthusiasts, aim for at least a high 2 (2.8, for instance).

What's the occasion?
Barring the possibility that your event is a dedicated board game session, your invitees will not be mentally prepared to break up into separate groups and game tables. I have found that people mostly want the freedom to intermingle and talk to many different people. For the gamer host, this can be frustrating, but you have to think about the people; usually, when people hear "Party," they think of everyone interacting with each other, not tables in different rooms for focused gaming. Thus, games that involve (almost) everyone are more readily accepted.

Beyond that, consider the purpose of the session. Is it a birthday party? Maybe choose party games like Codenames (1.3), Taboo (1.22 -- yes, I said Taboo), or Pictionary (1.24). Is it a family gathering of aunts and uncles? Once again, party games or games that involve more than eight people are effective in engaging the entire group. Are two families with four or fewer members (each) present? Then, consider a game like Seven Wonders (Weight: 2.3) that involves simultaneous play or team games like Secrets (Weight: 1.27).

Do any of your invitees NOT like games?
This is a tough one because one unenthusiastic person can stymy any attempt at a game. At best, that one person will wander in and out of the room as they bounce between the refreshments table and your game table; at worst, he or she will distract the table with side comments and scuttle the session. In either case, the person is neither trying to be awful nor trying to sabotage the game; for whatever reason, he or she just doesn't like games. Maybe it's because of a childhood memory, or maybe it's because they're not competitive. Whatever the case, this person has yet to have a favorable experience with games.

With individuals like this, there may be NO game that suits them, but that shouldn't stop you from organizing a game. Give advance notice to your invitees that you will organize a game; then, take the non-gamer aside and ask him or her to participate. If your attendee declines, then offer the freedom of observing. For your reluctant gamer type, skew towards simpler games at a Weight of 2 or less. Among the best at that Weight for large groups include Codenames, Dixit (1.2 -- especially the Odyssey edition), and One Night Ultimate Werewolf (1.4). A lesser-known game with a traitor element is Saboteur (1.33).

How much time do I have?
If your gathering is not a dedicated gaming session, then only a portion of your scheduled time will be committed to board games. With this in mind, aim for shorter games. Another data point that you find on boardgamegeek.com is Playing Time, which assists you in determining a suitable game for your gathering. However, I recommend adding 50% more time to that; for instance, a game with a Playing Time of 30 minutes may actually take 45 minutes because of setup and instruction. Generally, select a game that fits well under your projected play time.

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Thanks to Board Game Geek's website, you can answer the question of "Are there any games that come close to suiting all occasions?" based on Playing Time and Weight with a fair degree of confidence. In my experience, I have found that a confluence of medium Playing Time length (1-2 hours) and a Weight between 1 and 2.5 often ensures that the games you choose will target most audiences. Simpler gateway games like Codenames and Dixit have been easy to teach and fun for gamers; slightly more complex "Next Step" games like 7 Wonders have required a bit more teaching and guidance, but have won over people and turned casuals into nascent gamers. Will such games enthrall esoteric gamers? Well, games that fall in this confluence of data points should entertain them enough outside of a dedicated board game night, but they may become withdrawn and slightly resistant if your game night consisted of games with a Weight of less than, say, 2.3, though I would concede that this is not a rule.  It is indeed amazing how Board Game Geek data points can help in selecting games...

Yet, if you would prefer to trust your own knowledge and intuition, just imagine the perspective of each of your would-be participants. In the past, I have often relied on hunches in selecting games. I have made mistakes, but those mistakes were borne more out of my inability to understand the other person's perspective than out of a lack of effort or information. In other words, you truly have to put yourself in that person's position. Imagine being a non-gamer and what that feels like. It's easy: simply think about a hobby you don't like and then extrapolate from there. If you succeed, you'll understand how boring, unexciting, or daunting board games can be to such a person. After all, these are feelings and thoughts I have when I think about, say, building sheds or scrapbooking (which are NOT bad hobbies at all; they're just not my hobbies). Once you can conceptualize those feelings, you discover that you can choose games that are not-so-painful for the non-gamer.

Spinners: 1HN Long-Lasting Randomizer

Currently, one of the oddly popular fads among children in the United States is the fidget spinner, which is a three-pronged plastic or metal item that spins on its central axis on ball bearings. Apparently, fidget spinners are simply mental distractions that seem to have been intended as a tool to help children focus their fidgety energies on something without shifting in their seats. However, it has had the opposite effect of distracting children by drawing their attention to whomever is using one. I can see the end of this, though: eventually, EVERY boy (and girl?) will have one, get bored of it, and then cast it into a drawer of other junk.

An ironic parallel I see to the predictable fate of the fidget spinner is the spinner in board games. Certain "classic" American games featured spinners, particularly Life and the decidedly non-board game, Twister. As other Americans do, I have both happy and angry memories of these games. As many of you know, spinners are simply decision randomizers that spin on a central axis until the pointing part of the spun arrow or wheel ends up aiming at a space that indicates a number or course of action. It's rudimentarily mechanical, requiring a deft turn of hand or finger to manipulate it, yet it is not necessarily a component of dexterity games. On the contrary, in the two games mentioned above, spinners are the mode of randomization. In this sense, spinners are similar to any randomizer, like dice. This difference is a simple one: there is a visceral element to both kinds of randomizers that are dissimilar enough to separate those experiences from each other, at least in my mind. By this, with a spinner, I could spin it as fast or as slowly as I wanted, affording me the illusion of agency. In any case, whether it's spinning and landing on the best space in the game, or spinning and having to contort my body into an impossible Escher pretzel, using a spinner evokes flashbacks of joy and rage that are markedly different from the joy and rage of rolling dice.

I noted that there is an ironic parallel between game spinners and fidget spinners; this irony is evident in the state of games today. Among the more widely-recognized connoisseur games, spinners are not found, as far as I can recall. Most of the time, decision randomization takes the form of cards, dice, or even the BINGO mechanic of drawing chits or pieces blindly, yet you do not see spinners. One reason might be because of the form factor of certain spinners, like the one in Life; it is a considerably-sized piece of molded plastic that fits fine in the large game box of Life, but may not fit well, say, in a Pandemic box. Another reason might be that shoddy spinners can lead to cheesy results; for example, if the spinner board in your set of Twister is warped, when you attempt to spin that chintzy arrow, you may barely spin it to the next wedge on the decision wheel, which is irritating and completely eliminates the visceral fun of watching an arrow careering around the wheel. The most likely reason, though, may be the most insidious one: spinners seem childish and out of place in a "serious" board game.

In yet another layer of irony, it is this "guardianship of all that is good in gaming" that has both protected current games from being infected with old, horrible ideas (e.g., the "roll-and-move" mindlessness of Chutes/Snakes and Ladders) and prevented game designers from exploring old, not-so-awful ideas, like a spinner. As I type this, I can imagine a game designer creating a game that involves a default spinner that can be customized as you purchase wedge pieces to fit in the outer rim, reconfiguring the options that are randomly available. Couple this customizable spinner with the youthful delight of spinning something with all your might and you may have a game that combines a deck/bag/hand-building mechanic with a bit of childish fun. (I'm patenting this idea, by the way.)

Sadly, though, we do not find spinners in a lot of games, and I think this is because board game enthusiasts seem to favor games that they can readily dissociate from those awful roll-and-move days of their childhoods. I certainly understand this because I used to have an aversion to dice (traumatic memories of Risk!), poppers (Trouble!), BINGO, and even the luck of the draw (I'm talking about you, War and Uno!). However, as I look at those older games from a perspective shaped by years of Euro gaming, I wonder if enthusiasts have forgotten about the primal joy of pressing a popper, rolling handfuls of dice against another dice-chucker, and even the sheer elation of drawing the high card. This leads me back to the comparison between the fidget spinner and the game spinner; one is an intriguing, somewhat distracting fad that will fade; the other is an often derided and disregarded game mechanic that has lasted a long time. Why not ride the wave of a fad and bring back the game spinner in an entirely different way? Rise of Augustus brought back BINGO in my mind, so I think a Euro game can incorporate a fidget... er, game spinner.

Advance to Boardwalk: 1HN High-Rise Unit Builder

Whenever I go to a retailer like Target or Wal-Mart, I am surprised at the board games I find and how they've stood the test of time. Some games, in my estimation, are worthy of their longevity: Monopoly (in which the outside-the-game-rules negotiations are more fun than the game itself), Stratego, Clue, and Scrabble come to mind. Conversely, there are some games that shouldn't have lasted this long, particularly Risk, which I loathe immensely; I can't count how many times my massive armies have been defeated by "lucky" defense die rolls. Also, games like Sorry! and Trouble seem to make new fans of children every generation because of their tactile in-game elements (like the dice popper in Trouble) and simple rules.

But, some games have come and gone, much to my chagrin. One of those games was Advance to Boardwalk, which Parker Brothers published in the 1980s. It was spun off from the Monopoly universe with Uncle Moneybags prominently included on the packaging and on the in-game cards. The premise of Advance to Boardwalk was deceptively simple: amass more wealth than your opponents by building up units (which are like floors in a skyscraper) that comprise high-priced hotels along a beachfront boardwalk. In the game, you roll a color-coded die to determine which area of properties on which you can build, and another two dice (I think) to determine the total dollar value of units you can build on that color. As gameplay progresses, you can build units on top of other players' units; if your units outnumber an opponent's units, you gain control of the property, which means you move up the boardwalk (which is marked with dollar amounts) and your opponent moves down the boardwalk. Each property has different inherent values, so some properties are more favorable yet more difficult on which to build because a higher rolled amount is required to be able to build on those properties. Along the way, there are "Fortune" cards that either allow a player to gain an advantage (such as "Windfall" cards that provide an infusion of capital for building) or create obstacles for opponents (such as "Hurricane" cards that can wipe the units off a property). Gameplay ends when one player has used up all of his or her units (you get 15-17 units with which to build at the start of gameplay).

As I write this blog entry, I am not aware of the publishing history of Advance to Boardwalk except of what I know personally, but I can safely say that the game was available in the 1980s, but then faded into obscurity. It was only during a recent clearing of my grandma's rafters that I found this game amidst a treasure trove of my old packed games (which included several Nintendo and Colecovision cartridges). I unearthed it, dusted it off, and played a round with my family, who were sadly unimpressed by the game. I suppose that equating units of building to money value isn't as direct or exciting as acquiring a group of properties and then building houses (a la Monopoly). However, I find Advance to Boardwalk to be more rewarding and less time-consuming than Monopoly. Unlike Monopoly, you can gain (and lose) properties each turn; and you can rise and fall so quickly in Advance to Boardwalk, while you tend to amass wealth slowly in Monopoly and then crush opponents quite suddenly until there are two people who own the entire board. Then, it's only a few turns before one player loses his shirt paying the other player an exorbitant amount of rent. While Monopoly games can seem interminable, Advance to Boardwalk can be played in 30-45 minutes and can result in numerous grudges and vows of vengeance, which may spur another game right after it. Okay, I'm joking about the vows of vengeance, but I can see that it would be hard to NOT have a grudge after you watch your opponent build two or three units on your property and usurp the $7 million of value, putting him or her seven spaces up and you seven spaces down -- a 14-space swing!

Anyway, Advance to Boardwalk should've gotten more of a chance at becoming a classic because it really is a fun, addictive game with a deeper layer of strategy than Monopoly, which relies much on dice rolls. In Advance to Boardwark, you do roll to determine how much "money" you have to build, as well as the color of properties on which you build, but you also have to decide (assuming you roll a "10," for instance) if you want to build two units on the $5-million-dollar property (which would move you up five spaces on the board) or two units on the $3-million-dollar one and one unit on the $4-million-dollar one (which would move you up seven spaces). There are many lead changes in the game and, often, it can take one play to reverse your fortunes and win the game, even if you spent most of the game in the back of the pack. If you can find it, I recommend Advance to Boardwalk; challenge even your hard-core gamer friends and let me know how much fun you have from a once-mainstream game.