Golden Age or Board Game Bubble?

[dirk2112]

Not too long ago, I was lucky to find one board game per year that caught my attention and made me open my wallet.  It seems like Kickstarter and various demonstrations at local game stores have upped that to almost one game per month.  I am running out of shelf space.   As someone who is interested in economics and this hobby, I wonder what the future 2 or 3 years will hold.   

I have inadvertently caused a few people to start their own board game collections.  As more people join the hobby, a greater variety of games will hit the shelves.  Maybe the popularity and variety of games will continue to increase.

When I was young, I remember seeing Atari cartridges in dollar bins and no one was interested in them at all.  It wasn't until a couple of years after the NES came out that video games became popular again.  One could argue that what happened with video games in the early 1980s is happening to board games now.  More and more publishers and developers are springing up and it could be argued that the market is being oversaturated.

What do you think?

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=3290.0

[Whaleyland]

Just gauging from my own interest in games, it definitely has peaked. For a few years, I was collecting everything that looked good on Kickstarter, many mainstream games, and a few niche games. My collection here and in storage is good sized for what I could afford. But there have been very few games that have interested me in the past few years. The only new game I've bought has been 7 Wonders Duel and Pandemic Legacy S1. For the most part, I am happy with those. I rather prefer a few games that I really like and keeping up with expansions when they are released.

I did prompt a number of friends to start game collecting back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but I can't convince more than one friend to play games with me currently. I only average about two games played a month, too, and they are usually Pandemic Legacy and either 7 Wonders Duel or Carcassonne. For me, games have oversaturated the market making it much more difficult to tell which are the real gems and which are just average.

[dirk2112]

For me, games have oversaturated the market making it much more difficult to tell which are the real gems and which are just average.

Finding the real gems has become very difficult.  I try to look for new game mechanics or prior game mechanics that are being combined or altered in an unique way.   I am not really looking to buy a "slightly better Dominion" or a "generic worker placement with cool miniatures". 

[danisthirty]

Although I discovered Carcassonne in 2012 (which is very recently compared to most people here) I wouldn't really have called myself a boardgamer up until a few years ago when it became necessary to broaden my horizons since Becky wouldn't play Carcassonne with me any more.

I've discovered lots of games that I enjoy playing since then, and have been relatively successful at introducing the hobby to others who I'm lucky enough to be able to play with quite regularly now. For the last year and a half my colleagues and I have been playing a weekly game at work and have covered about 60 different titles so far, with some being a lot more popular than others...

I don't think it's reasonable to assess whether the golden age that we're seeing at the moment is destined to continue based on how many new games there are that I have a personal interest in, but it's evident from the growth of things like BGG and boardgaming podcasts etc that things aren't showing any signs of slowing down and the appeal of the hobby is spreading!

I don't know how sustainable this is, and while I agree to some extent that it can be difficult finding the "hidden gems" there is always a lot of advice available if you subscribe to the right news feeds. Our KS thread is a good place to start, as is the BGG Facebook group. A lot of it is hype (sometimes it seems that at least half of the posts in BGG FB are about Blood Rage, Scythe or Rising Sun - none of which interest me very much) but you don't have to look very far to see what other games are getting a lot of good feedback.

I hope the trend continues and I hope that the number of people discovering what boardgaming is really all about (i.e. not Monopoly) continues to increase too.

[jungleboy]

I agree with a lot of what Dan said.

I also think that it's possible for it to be a Golden Age virtually regardless of whether great new games keep coming out or not. We're pretty obsessed in this hobby with brand new games, and while we all like new and shiny stuff, that shouldn't be the only thing that matters. Many people seem to be simultaneously and contradictorily obsessed with both replayability in games and in buying new games all the time and hardly playing the games that you thought required replayability to be purchased in the first place. The number of great games that have come out in the last 20 years and the amount of replayability that's built into most games mean that you could spend the rest of your life playing these games with no new purchases, and the hobby could continue to grow with new players introduced to those games, even if there aren't any great new games coming out.

That's a long way of saying that I voted 'other'.

[Decar]

New games are coming out all of the time.  It's still too early to say which games will be considered classics, played generations later (compared to Chess and Go).

The Computer Game industry went through a resurgence a few years ago with the advent of 'Pay What you Want Bundles'  this encouraged independent developers to risk new mechanics, which would not have been profitable for larger publishing houses to try.

Boardgames are going through a similar resurgence.  Kickstarter has made funding more streamlined and made distribution feasible.
As a child in the UK: coffee shops weren't a thing.   Now I can play games in them.

These trends reflect our commercial society.  People buy what they like the look of.  Currently, it's viable to make a terrible game that looks nice and enough people will buy it.  Promise is an easy thing to sell.  The golden games you speak have have bunked the trend and changed the market, either through mechanics, theme or production quality.  Buy games you like, get rid of games you no longer enjoy.  The market will change accordingly.  People will learn not to invest their money in these projects and quality will plateau. 

[danisthirty]

Absolutely what JB said about replayability. I quite enjoy looking at other people’s shelfie photos, normally just to see if they include many games that I recognise. But when you see certain posts by people with 100s of titles it’s difficult to avoid wondering just how many of them they actually play, or what percentage of their overall collection has been played in the last month/ 6 months/ year for example.

This said, I’m probably as bad as a lot of these people too. The reason in my case, and probably in a lot of theirs, is that I consider myself to be a boardgame collector as well as a boardgame player. Some things I own give me just as much pleasure from the simple fact that I own them, or that they’re still in shrink-wrap, as they would do if I were to open them and play them. And I’d hazard a guess that I’m probably not the only person here who owns certain Carc expansions/ spin-offs more through a desire to be “complete” than because I really wanted to play with them.

So let’s not forget, it can be considered a golden age for the collectors just as much as for the players!

[dirk2112]

The number of great games that have come out in the last 20 years and the amount of replayability that's built into most games mean that you could spend the rest of your life playing these games with no new purchases, and the hobby could continue to grow with new players introduced to those games, even if there aren't any great new games coming out.

Well said! 

Buy games you like, get rid of games you no longer enjoy.

The cool thing about the Internet is I can talk to people in the UK, Portugal, and Thailand about board games.  The bad news is, it isn't easy to swap games with these people.   I went to a local game swap event trying to unload some of the games that we have that we don't play.  Everything there was miniature based or collectible card games.      I did find a lady trying to offload Qwirkle, but I too was trying to offload Qwirkle.  Our FLGS is starting to sell used games, but they want to buy entire collections (I am guessing for cheap).  I may have to go that route if we continue to acquire games. 

[Decar]

Apparently, the Golden Age for comics was between (1938-1950) with the rise of many superheros such as Batman, Superman, Captain America and countless others I've never heard of.  I quite like a bit of Captain America, but I don't care for the other two very much.  So, 12 years of comic book development resulted in one character I'm vaguely interested in.  If we are in a Golden Age of board-gaming, I wouldn't be too surprised to see a similar success rate in 50 years    Let's hope it's Carcassonne and not 7 Wonders or Dominion

[Decar]

The cool thing about the Internet is I can talk to people in the UK, Portugal, and Thailand about board games.  The bad news is, it isn't easy to swap games with these people.   I went to a local game swap event trying to unload some of the games that we have that we don't like.  Everything there was miniature based or collectible card games.      I did find a lady trying to offload Qwirkle, but I too was trying to offload Qwirkle.  Our FLGS is starting to sell used games, but they want to buy entire collections (I am guessing for cheap).  I may have to go that route if we continue to acquire games.

That's commercialism in action.  You bought something for $X along with a lot of other people.  But now you don't want it; along with a lot of other people, so the price drops.  It happens, but there's always charity, or give it to a neighbour's kid and feel good for an afternoon 

[dirk2112]

That's commercialism in action.  You bought something for $X along with a lot of other people.  But now you don't want it; along with a lot of other people, so the price drops.  It happens, but there's always charity, or give it to a neighbour's kid and feel good for an afternoon 

We have been giving games away.  I just don't want to throw perfectly good games away.  If the FLGS offers me $1 for my twice played copy of Jamaica, I will just give it to Good Will or someplace.

[Decar]

Sorry, I didn't want to sound preachy or cause offense before.  But that's another sign of a saturated market.  Your retailer can probably get more mark-up selling the new copy.  That's assuming the stock shifts, if it's really that bad, it already sounds like the 2nd hand-book shops that have far too much stock, very few people are interested in!

This reminds me of my Cathars problem, where I was actually happy to have a used copy, so didn't have to pop open an almanac edition still in shrink!

[chrismalenurse]

Almost very board game I buy anymore is a used game. As much as I like the "new game smell" and popping out the card board pieces, I would much rather save the money and buy used.
I consider myself a game player, yes I have many games and am a tad of a completionist, but my games get played. I have a group I play with every Saturday, and even though they have some games that of their own, it is usually mine we are playing. So those new games become used games very quickly.

I wish my local store would sell used games, as it would probably save me shipping when I get the on BGG.

[Decar]

Saw this today, made me laugh, so thought I'd share as it's kinda related: