Bored? Games can help
Whether bumping off other players with a smug “sorry” or banking off the boardwalk as a silver-hat realtor, families and friends have been gathering around board games for years.
What draws people to games is a mystery that the Parker Brothers and Hasbro have found very successful. However, it leads others to question if we are what we play.
With plastic pieces in hand, gamers are transformed into conquerors, competitively seeking the annihilation of their friends and loved ones using strategy, luck and a fair amount of cheating to end up on top.
Denise Hatch, a sophomore at USU, said, “I hate long games like Risk or Monopoly. That’s why I like Candy Land; it’s short, especially if you rearrange the cards to get the fairy at the end and win.”
For others, games offer an escape from reality. As junior Mike Mabey said, “I really like board games that use dice because rolling dice always makes me feel like a hot shot.”
For Robert Steed, it’s all about keeping a title. He credits his psychology major as the secret weapon to his undefeated history in Clue Master Detective, a game that stretches the limits of Clue to a bigger board, eight characters and more weapons – “intense,” as Steed described it.
“The Colonel never loses in Master Detective,” said Steed, or Colonel Steed.
Variations of classic games have been largely popular in recent years. As the game industry expands, these classic games adapt to offer something for everyone. Monopoly, for instance, has several new variations including Star Wars, Coca Cola and John Deere Monopoly for the agriculturally inclined.
Beyond the classics, however, a new stream of strategy games has changed the way people look at board games. For instance, The Settlers of Catan is currently a top-selling game that is different every time you play it. In Catan, players use ore, wood and other resources to either aid or sabotage others in the creation of settlements and cities, as Andrew Smith from Wacky Games explained. This game employs the strategy of keeping your allies close and your enemies closer.
In addition to Catan, Anthony Wilkinson of Magical Moon Toys named any Rio Grande or Days of Wonder games as extremely popular right now. These games have a common theme of history and conquest that provide a storyline separate from the standard Guess Who or Battleship.
In one of these complex games, Tikal, players work as archeologists uncovering sites of mezzo-American history. Within the same genre, Ra takes on an Egyptian twist to bidding and Carcassonne is a history-based game on a fortified medieval city in France.
For those uninterested in history, however, Killer Bunnies is another favorite mentioned by both Wilkinson and Smith as a widely entertaining game with a lot of humor.
They said, in this game, players try to get the winning carrot by killing off others’ bunnies and gaining more for themselves. With obscure weapons like whisks, roaches and nuclear warheads, players have the option of destroying each other creatively and even launching bunnies into space.
Though perhaps board games receive a bad wrap as an option for the truly “bored,” there are now a lot of diverse options to satisfy any audience ages 8 and up. Whether looking for a way to laugh, escape from reality, compete, destroy or cheat shamelessly, board games offer a way to pass the winter months ahead.
-cynthiadiane@cc.usu.edu