Evolution of board games in recent times
Quite recently for my birthday I got a very popular roleplaying board game as a birthday gift from my parents, this game is known as ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ or ‘D&D’. So, as I delved into the complicated yet amazing world of D&D I started to wonder about how complicated board games are getting compared to the ‘Cliche’ games like Snakes & Ladders,Checkers and Ludo.
Now I’m not saying the old school games were all simple there were interesting games that genuinely needed you to think and use your brain like chess, but, the fact remains that the old games were al relatively simple in the fact that they didn’t have any story building up to the game, you just played. But, nowadays a lot of games have a story and a certain roleplayability to them. Take for example D&D(a game that is based on story and roleplay)or Escape E.V.I.L(a good family game)or Last Bastion(a pretty cool game)or Lord of The Rings: Journeys in middle earth(App oriented)or Chthulu: Death may Die(not for the faint of hearted) etc.
My point is that Board games have evolved a lot compared to their older versions. Why is that?
My guess is that it’s because board games were invented to pass time in case you didn’t have anything else to do but they evolved into something much more then that. People started to play board games as a hobby making time to play them, enjoying them. As such people started to get competitive about them betting on games, holding tournaments for them etc. In the midst of this expansion of its popularity people started demanding for board games that required more interaction from them, games that engaged them more.
To achieve interaction and engagement from players the game designers implemented a simple technique, that is they based the games on movies and books(Lord of the rings, Chuthulu etc)therefore attracting audiences who had read the books and watched the movies and if not, developing their interest in the books and movies. This combined with some fun elements from previous board games like- Dice and Figures shape the board games as they are now.
So finally we have reached the end of this article I hope you enjoyed this short segment and didn’t find it completely boring and pointless. Thank You (:
