Board games in the US

[Richard]

Hello,
dies wurde heute gedruckt in Chicago Tribune und ist im WWW hier:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0304140248apr15,1,258642.story?coll=chi%2Dleisuretempo%2Dhed
Weil zum lesen man muss registrieren ich habe hier mit copy-and-paste,
Rick

For the love of the game
In the battle for leisure-time hearts and minds, board games are getting a surprising boost over their video and computer competitors.

By Eric Gwinn
Tribune staff reporter
Published April 15, 2003

Board games are on a roll, and Chicagoland is a big part of the comeback. In the monster shadow cast by video games, the area's game enthusiasts are huddled over tabletops, laughing with team members, taunting opponents and basically having a nice, sociable time -- no technology required.

Look around: From Kopi Cafe in Andersonville to Third Coast coffeehouse on the Gold Coast to Blue Frog downtown, bars and coffeehouses are stocking games for patrons to play while they relax. Some schedule regular game nights for board game enthusiasts and clubs.

Area businesses are latching onto the growing market. A Plainfield company has scored a surprising success by translating a popular PC game into a board game.

A Skokie company is helping introduce the U.S. to European games whose clever strategy play continues to gain a devoted following in the States.

A Lake Villa company is creating games that pit stuffed toys against one another, and a Mundelein company keeps alive the role-playing spirit unearthed in the 1970s by the Lake Villa creators of Dungeons and Dragons.

In something of a pinnacle for local game enthusiasts and creators alike, Navy Pier will host the inaugural Chicago Toy and Game Fair over Labor Day weekend, the first event in America that will let mainstream game players try out the latest hoped-to-be-crazes.

Why is the Chicago area a hotbed for board game players and companies right now? Mary Couzin of Lincolnwood, co-organizer of the toy and game fair, thinks the long, cold winters make Midwesterners fall in love with board games.

But traditional game playing appears to be on the rise nationwide.

NPD Funworld, which tracks the toy and game industry, said that in an admittedly slumping market overall, the clear winning category is board games. From July to December 2002, Americans bought $1.55 billion of games and puzzles.

That's a 19 percent increase from the same six-month period a year earlier. Only models and accessories, a much smaller category, did better, with a 26 percent increase.

With their simple rules and abundant laughs, party games such as Trivial Pursuit and Cranium remain mainstays for American game players who rely on such mass-market shelves as Wal-Mart and Toys "R" Us to keep them supplied with entertainment.

Increasingly, though, imported games in specialty shops are winning fans because they are not just the latest riff on the trivia theme or another game using dice to generate moves around a board.

"I prefer games that have a high degree of replayability, a lot of interaction [among players], a nice mixture humor and strategy," said Nataline Viray-Fung, 26, of Evanston, who said she owns 100 to 150 games and strongly favors German titles.

Settlers sets the pace

For thousands of U.S. hobbyists, the breakthrough import was Settlers of Catan, a German game introduced in this country seven years ago by Mayfair Games of Skokie.

"Our sales curve is still rising," said Larry Roznai, Mayfair Games' president, adding that the company sold 20 percent more Settlers games in 2002 over 2001.

"People get tired of seeing the same kind of game being repackaged," he said. "After playing Monopoly 50 or 60 times, it's time to play something else."

In Settlers, players use colored tiles to create cities and roads in a civilization-building game that rarely plays the same way twice.

Like many German games, Settlers appeals to first-timers and old hands alike, said Scott Tepper of the Logan Square neighborhood, who owns 360 board games and organizes weekend game nights with friends.

"It's a lot of fun to sit around and catch up with each other and do something other than go to the movies," Tepper said. "If you went with four friends to see a movie, it would cost you nearly $40 just for tickets, and for $15 to $25, I get a game that we can play over and over and over and will enjoy for more than an hour and a half [the length of a typical movie] and enjoy repeatedly."

By tapping into interest in board games, gamemakers are trying to recover ground they've been losing for the past 20 years to video games, whose 2002 sales of hardware, software and accessories topped $10 billion in the U.S.

Spurred by those numbers, Plainfield game designer Glenn Drover founded Eagle Games in hopes of creating board games that he hoped to license as lucrative video games. But in a twist, video game companies are asking him to turn video games into board games instead.

Civilization the Board Game, Drover's splashiest effort, turned a legendary PC game into a board game.

After selling 6 million units over 10 years, the PC game faded from view. Eagle Games brought it back as a tabletop game, with warships and cavalrymen that players can now touch, adding new depth to the game in which players create civilizations intended to last for centuries.

And despite the steep price -- the board game retails for up to $60 -- the title is a fast seller.

"It's probably the best PC game ever, but it takes 50 to 100 hours to play," Drover said. "It's a lifestyle instead of a game."

Retrieving social aspects

The tabletop version streamlines game play for beginners but allows enthusiasts to dig as deeply as they wish into the game's complexities. Plus, Drover said, as a board game, Civilization captures something its high-tech counterparts cannot.

"Computer games and video games are very hot," he said, "because they're visual and easy to get into. But they don't have the social aspect; you can't sit around and talk and play. Even in a two-player video game, the player might be sitting next to someone else, but interaction is more with screen than with other players."

Hasbro, which owns Monopoly, Operation and other game classics among its more than 150 game and puzzle titles, has seen a boom in sales since introducing the 20th anniversary edition of Trivial Pursuit late last year.

"We're the blue jeans of our industry," said Mark Morris, public relations director for Rhode Island-based Hasbro Games. "We never go out of style."

But by flooding the shelves with the old reliables, the toy giants make it harder for smaller enterprises to get shelf space and publicity for their new games.

Still, "Hasbro is keeping board games in general in front of the public," said Roznai of Mayfair Games, "and they do it in a way that I cannot, and I see that as a positive."

To search out new titles, devoted players are turning to specialty game stores such as Go!, which pops up in malls in time for the holidays. To meet the increasing interest, Calendar Club -- which franchises the short-term Go! game stores -- plans to have 250 stores this year, up from 150 last year, said Howard Barasch, Calendar Club's retail concept coordinator.

Labor Day celebration

But this year, local game fans don't have to wait until December -- they've got the Labor Day toy and game fair, which is all about helping players find new and different games, Couzin said.

Modeled on the hugely successful and influential fair in Essen, Germany, the Chicago gathering will be the first of its kind in the States, so no one knows how many people it will draw. The Essen fair attracts international crowds that number in the tens of thousands, and buzz from enthusiasts sampling titles there generates demand and makes stars of designers in game-hungry Germany.

The Chicago fair is designed for the mainstream audience; thus it differs from other American game conventions for hardcore players such as GenCon, Origins and the American International Toy Fair, which is exclusively for gamemakers and sellers.

Couzin hopes to make it especially enticing to families by showcasing toys as well. She expects the fair to get a boost from a fortunate bit of timing: Chicago Children's Museum plans to launch a games exhibit beginning next month and ending in October.

Some local families may get a taste for board gaming even earlier, during national TV Turnoff Week, said Jill Giorno, school interventionist at Washington Irving School in Oak Park. She has organized the school's first family game night to be held on April 22.

"I'm hoping that families can get a really good benefit out of this," she said, "and maybe turn off the TV every now and then and get together as a family, and play games as a family and eat together."

Germans got game -- especially those based on strategy, not luck

The rising profile of European games in America is led by those created by German gamemakers. Germany takes gaming so seriously that its coveted game-of-the-year awards -- the Spiel des Jahres -- turns game designers into household names. Designers worldwide submit thousands of games a year to German companies, hoping to be one of the dozens of games released every year in that country.

Jurgen Valentiner-Branth, of the German game publisher Schmidt Spiele, has picked a couple of titles that won game of the year acclaim -- among them, 2001's Carcassonne, a game in the tile-laying genre in which players place pieces to create a medieval landscape of villages, cloisters, roads and rivers that their characters -- among them, thieves, farmers, knights and monks -- vie to control.

He sees interesting differences in German and American gaming.

"Germans don't like to smile," Valentiner-Branth said, albeit with a smile. "We like challenging games of problem-solving, games that depend more on strategy than luck.

"If we were to sell a game in which you roll a die and move around the board, we would be laughed at."

That means games such as Cranium and Trivial Pursuit, hugely popular as party diversions in the United States, get dismissed in Germany.

German players like games that combine strategy with small amounts of luck, "so that if you win, you can say, `See? I'm a creative strategist' and if you lose, you can say, `I was a bit unlucky,'" Valentiner-Branth said.

One of the hottest games among specialty gamers now is Puerto Rico, according to www.boardgamegeek.com. Another "city-building" game like Carcassonne, players take turns laying down tiles that shape the island-based plantation terrain of the board to their advantage so merchants can send coffee, sugar, indigo and other products to market in sailing ships.

A similar tile-laying game, Ta Yu, lets players score points by diverting the flow of a river to drain their lands during a flood.

Although the games rely on similar mechanics -- placing tiles on a board -- the terrain of the board changes every time, making the games highly replayable.

War games, popular among American history buffs who like to play what-if scenarios, appall Europeans, he said.

"How can you combine entertainment with death?" he asked, adding that in the case of chess, arguably a classic war game, its abstract nature makes it more palatable.

-- Eric Gwinn

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

[Hajo]

Hey, das hat eine Menge mehr Qualität und echten Informationsgehalt als dieser Patchwork-Artikel weiter unten über wargames!

Vielen Dank für's posten...

Hajo (der bis letztes Jahr um diese Zeit noch regelmässig alle 6-8 Wochen in Chicago aufgekreutzt ist und sich jetzt mal wieder ärgert, dass das leider nicht mehr drin ist!)

[Franz-Benno Delonge]

Lieber Richard,
vielen Dank!! - Das ist wahrscheinlich der erfreulichste Artikel, den ich seit mindestens 3 Jahren zum Thema gelesen habe.
Wenn schon bei uns alles den Bach runtergeht - vielleicht sorgen die Amerikaner für einen neuen Spieleboom. Und da wir ja alles, was aus Amerika kommt etwa fünf Jahre später imitieren, wäre ein Ende der Durststrecke absehbar...
Schönen Gruß
Benno

[Michael Schramm]

Hi,

diesen Absatz finde ich besonders schön:

> One of the hottest games among specialty gamers now is Puerto
> Rico, according to www.boardgamegeek.com. Another
> "city-building" game like Carcassonne, players take turns
> laying down tiles that shape the island-based plantation
> terrain of the board to their advantage so merchants can send
> coffee, sugar, indigo and other products to market in sailing
> ships.

Demnächst heißt es dann bei den Spielen eben nicht mehr "ist wie SIEDLER", sondern "ist wie CARCASSONNE", egal, um was für einen Spieltyp es sich handelt.....

Ansonsten ein wirklich erfreulicher Artikel, und das in einer so renomierten Zeitung!

nice dice

Michael

[Roman Pelek]

Hi Michael,

Michael Schramm schrieb:

> Demnächst heißt es dann bei den Spielen eben nicht mehr "ist
> wie SIEDLER", sondern "ist wie CARCASSONNE", egal, um was für
> einen Spieltyp es sich handelt.....

:lol: Denselben Gedanken hatte ich beim Lesen des Artikels - spätestens als der Autor "Puerto Rico" mit dem "similar tile laying game Ta Yü" vergleicht. Nuja, notfalls dienen wir halt auf der Landkarte als "tile laying game land", und kontern hartnäckig mit dem Klischee des "wargame enthusiast country" :-)

> Ansonsten ein wirklich erfreulicher Artikel, und das in einer
> so renomierten Zeitung!

In der Tat, davon bräuchten wir mehr, auch wenn man sich als Spieler über gewisse Ungenauigkeiten und Fehltritte des unbedarften Journalisten natürlich köstlich amüsieren kann. Ich jedenfalls habe genauso viel (über die unvermeidbaren Klischees) gelacht wie's mich gefreut hat, dass solche offensichtlich wohlwollenden Artikel überhaupt geschrieben werden. Man merkt dem Autor deutlich an, dass er sich, wenn auch im Thema nicht heimisch, wirklich Mühe gegeben hat - insofern: Klasse! Solche Publicity braucht die Spieleszene.

Ciao,
Roman