A History of Gaming

Board games have been a popular pastime for centuries, with some of the earliest recognised games estimated at over 3000 years old. One of these is Mancala in which two opponents redistribute seeds from rows of bowls in front of them in an attempt to empty their bowls. It survives today in a myriad of forms and traces its roots back to ancient Africa and India where it was played with stones and holes dug in the ground.

Everyone plays games. We start as small children with simple games like hide and seek and we progress to richer and more complex games as we grow up. With children especially, games are recognised as an invaluable learning tool. Classics such as Monopoly and Scrabble are known as much for their ability to help children with numbers and words respectively as they are for their enjoyment value.

With adults, however, the popularity of board games as a hobby has waxed and waned throughout the past century. The release of Monopoly in the 30's and Scrabble in the 40's gave rise to the first world wide games crazes and these games have been released in dozens of countries and languages. With the exception of chess, the board game hobby went underground in the 60's and 70's. Board gaming focused mainly on war games in which players enjoyed enacting tactical recreations of historic and fictitious battles with hundreds of counters representing various troops. Conversely, this period also gave rise to the game of Diplomacy. Diplomacy is a war game for seven players where each player starts with only three troops that can move one square per turn. Players conquered Europe to win the game, a task that could only be accomplished by negotiating the help of the other players.

War games evolved from focusing on armies, to focusing on squads, to finally focusing on individual troops. The board was done away with and the hobby of role-playing games (RPGs) was born. In RPGs, each player was responsible for and described the actions of a single character in a story told by a game master. The most renowned of these was Dungeons and Dragons, which rose to infamy in the 80's for its medieval fantasy genre and alleged satanic overtones. Despite its reputation, hundreds of RPGs sprang up over the next decade and many of them vanished again as quickly as they'd appeared. In the early 90's Magic: the Gathering paved the way for a new type of game- Collectable Card Games or CCGs. In Magic: the Gathering players took the role of wizards trying to defeat each other with a deck full of spell cards. Instead of players using the same deck of cards, each player could create their own deck from a base set of hundreds of cards. This allowed for limitless combinations and strategies and the game became an overnight success making millions of dollars and paving the way for countless rip offs and variants.

Meanwhile, traditional board games had vanished into the background with few notable exceptions. The 80's saw the rise of Trivial Pursuit and it's many spin offs and several games such as Heroquest (in which players moved a miniature around a map and killed any monsters they could find) attempted to cash in on the Dungeons and Dragons phenomenon. America seemed to have little else to offer the world of board games apart from expensive variants of pencil and paper games such as Pictionary and Battleships.

Fortunately, other countries actually have a strong board gaming culture that is slowly but surely spreading to the rest of the world. Germany in particular is a haven for people who enjoy quality board games and so understandably it produces some of the best board games and board game designers in the world. While still not yet mainstream, Germany has produced such classic games as Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. Settlers of Catan was first released in 1995 and quickly spread to the rest of the world. In Settlers of Catan dice are rolled to generate resources that players may trade with each other and use to buy settlements and cities worth victory points. Five years later Carcassonne, a tile laying game where players get points for playing tiles to create cities and roads, saw similar success. Both games won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (German for Game of the Year) award following their release and they, along with hundreds of other quality games, are being translated and sold all over the world.

This is becoming a booming multi-million dollar industry that many English speaking countries have been slow to pick up on. American Alan R. Moon tried desperately to get his games published in his native country and eventually sold them to German games publishers where they won multiple awards and were eventually translated to English and sold back to the English speaking world. Last year his game "Ticket to Ride" (a clever, fast paced railway building game across America) claimed the Spiel des Jahres award for 2004 and a much-awaited sequel, Ticket to Ride Europe, has just been released.

While Germany is at the core of this movement, many other European countries are producing quality games of skill and strategy, and the common reference to German Board Games is now changing to Euro Games. These games aren't your boring "roll a dice and move around a board" games that we're used to seeing churned out onto supermarket shelves. For a start the pieces are made of quality materials, usually wood, and the artwork is original, appealing and complimentary to the game. Secondly, in many games a player's turn includes the rest of the players to some degree, avoiding the problem of other players getting bored while waiting for their next turn. In fact, game designers are making more games where each player's turn is either quick (in Ra a player can either reveal a tile or start an auction for the revealed tiles), inclusive of other players (in Traders of Genoa the active player can sell parts of his move to other players) or the player's turn order changes (in Citadels each player selects a numbered character and later acts in sequential order).

Most of these Euro Games involve building (in Manhattan players create skyscrapers), buying (in Modern Art players purchase paintings) or exploring (in Tikal players unearth ancient Mayan ruins) with points awarded for various combinations of pieces acquired or activities performed. The rules are short, simple and elegant, and usually revolve around an easy concept such as taking it in turns to choose a role (Puerto Rico) or bidding on a combination of trade goods (Medici). Luck is always an element in these games but the endless scope for strategy and tactics ensures that luck is never an overwhelming factor. The duration of most Euro Games averages about an hour and the concept of eliminating another player is almost unheard of. In fact, a common design element of Euro Games is to increase rewards as the game draws to an end, giving even the most behind player a chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Needless to say, kids love these games just as much as adults and children as young as eight are enjoying giving their parents a run for their money.

Until recently, it was incredibly difficult for anyone outside Europe to get their hands on these games. Desperate board gamers would have to get the games sent over from Germany at great expense and then download English rules translations off the Internet. Since the new millennium however, and with such runaway successes as Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride, American games companies are now producing many of these games in English and specialty stores are springing up everywhere to sell them to the general public.

Sadly, without the wheels of big business and mass marketing, Euro games are not cheap compared to other games. In Australia, where its size and isolation contribute greatly to freight costs, it's not uncommon to see some of these games being sold for over $100. This is the upper end of the spectrum however, and even then Euro Games are still excellent value for money. There's little else that can offer the hundreds of hours of entertainment provided by a quality board game for such an affordable price.

And so more and more people are organising Friday night games nights with their friends and trying out the latest Euro Games. More and more people are beginning to understand why it is that this popular hobby has survived since ancient times. In spite of the advent of other forms of entertainment such as television, nightclubs and computers, board games are still popular.

As civilisation has grown more sophisticated, so have the games people play. Due to the Internet and its ability to create shared virtual environments it is now possible for thousands of people from all over the world to play with and against each other in a single game. These games are often known as Massive Multiplayer Online Games or MMOGs. In fact, there are many sites on the Internet devoted to board games, where gamers from all over the world can gather and test their skills against each other. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, people on the Internet can even find and play versions of Mancala and other ancient games.