![]() Hobbyists around the world started paying serious attention to German-style board games (or “Eurogames,” as they’re now more commonly known) following the creation of Settlers of Catan in 1995. “But it’s sufficiently intense that when I get back home, it takes a week just to recover.” “It’s not like I destroy hotel rooms or go out with movie stars,” Eklund tells me. At Germany’s world-leading Internationale Spieltage (“International Game Day”) fair in Essen-which now attracts an audience from all over the world numbering almost 200,000-bookish introverts are mobbed by groupies looking for selfies. Now a board-game star in Germany, Eklund’s friends include such masterminds as Friedemann Friese, the creator of the game Power Grid, and the legendary Uwe Rosenberg, who designed award-winning classics such as Agricola, Le Havre, and Patchwork. They put their name on the box, and people will buy based on their reputation.” “One of the reasons I came to this country is because I knew it was the place where people take board games really seriously,” he told me. He has no plans to move back to the United States. ![]() Eklund now lives in Germany, where he’s attained the status of cult celebrity. The only people who’d wander over were the folks looking for a garbage can so they could throw out their gum.” “My board-game setup would be off in the corner. “I’d go to a gaming convention, and everyone would be crowded around the computers,” he tells me. But he felt like part of the lowest caste of nerds. Within America’s then-tiny board-game subculture, Eklund was making a name for himself. So he started creating his own games, making photocopied print runs of a few hundred or so and mailing them out to customers. As a teenager growing up in Tucson in the 1970s, he became frustrated with the narrow, child-oriented fare on offer at his local toy shops-roll-and-move games like Sorry! and Monopoly. Eklund took to game design early in life. But tellingly, he didn’t really hit his stride until moving to Germany. He was born and raised in the United States. The rise of hobbyist games is legible in the career arc of one of the genre’s most famous present-day designers, Phil Eklund. Whether they knew it or not, the many thousands of people carpeting the field level of Lucas Oil Stadium wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for a small group of obsessives on the other side of the Atlantic. For the first time in the event’s history, all the attendee badges were purchased before the event began. At the 2017 iteration of Gen Con-North America’s largest hobby-gaming convention, in Indianapolis-turnstile attendance topped 200,000. Hobby-game fanaticism is still very much a subculture, to be sure, but it is a growing one. and Canada increased from an estimated $75 million to $305 million between 20, the latest year for which data is available. These games, compared to ones like Monopoly and Cards Against Humanity, represent a niche segment, but that segment is becoming something more than a niche: According to ICv2, a trade publication that covers board games, comic books, and other hobbyist products, sales of hobby board games in the U.S. Growth has also been particularly swift in the category of “hobby” board games, which comprises more sophisticated titles that are oriented toward older players-think Settlers of Catan. (The largest project category on Kickstarter is “Games,” and board games make up about three-quarters of those projects.) ![]() Games like these have proliferated on Kickstarter, where anyone with a great idea and a contact at an industrial printing company can circumvent the usual toy-and-retail gatekeepers who green-light new concepts. ![]() Clever, low-overhead card games such as Cards Against Humanity, Secret Hitler, and Exploding Kittens (“A card game for people who are into kittens and explosions”) have sold exceptionally well. Much of this success is traceable to the rise of games that, well, get those adults acting somewhat more like children. Revenues are expected to rise at a similar rate into the early 2020s-largely, says one analyst, because the target audience “has changed from children to adults,” particularly younger ones. ![]() sales grew by 28 percent between the spring of 2016 and the spring of 2017. Overall, the latest available data shows that U.S. In a development that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago, when video games were poised to take over living rooms, board games are thriving. ![]()
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