on games

It may be said that I like games.  It's no secret, really.  I have since I was little - I would go with my parents to the local thrift store and immediately head over to the board game section.  I found quite a few that way.  At one point I had over a hundred games.

C-. has a theory that learning new games is key to keeping one's mind sharp as you get older.  Not just playing the same game many times, such as chess or sudoku, but learning a new set of rules, a new set of tactics, starting again as a beginner.  I tend to agree.  Admittedly, maybe it's a little bit of attention deficit, but on the other hand the hardcore crossword/chess/Go players can get a little obsessive-compulsive.

For my part, I had plenty of different games to try, and I liked almost all of them (which is good since the main "goal" of games is to have fun).  And I'd say that games have gotten better over time - and not in a nostalgic way, but that modern games seem to have learned from the less-fun parts of the games I grew up with.  Growing up, I played Trouble, Parchisi, Aggravation, and other highly-random race style games (Backgammon, Sorry!, Life, also).  I also had a few different kinds of Monopoly, of course.  There were word-games: Scrabble, Password, Probe; strategy games like Risk, Stratego; and hexagon-board games like Gettysburg and Flat Top.

Some of these were standout games, don't get me wrong.  I have huge appreciation for the Milton Bradley historical set (Dogfight, Broadside), 3M's bookcase-game series (Breakthru, Bazaar, Acquire, even Twixt), and the early Avalon Hill sim games like Gettysburg and Richthofen's War.  These guys were pioneers.

But modern games have really just made huge leaps as well, from standing on these shoulders.  Compare Risk to Cosmic Encounter, Axis & Allies, or Pandemic.  Contrast Monopoly, versus Settlers of Catan, Stone Age, or Power Grid.  And the reliance on dice in Parchisi-like games is downright crude next to Formula D, for instance.

Innovations abound: there are whole new grid-free movement styles as found in Wings of War, X-Wing, and many other miniature-based games (which have themselves come a pretty long way from H.G. Wells' Little Wars, though his tag-line of "Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books" could probably still be used by Games Workshop, sigh.  Card-based games have evolved, too, deck-building ones like Dominion on through "Living" card games for various franchises that require a bit more collecting.  Plus there are lots of little abstract and almost unclassifiable games like Dixit, Hive, or Tsuro.

So it's neat that as I've grown up, so have board games - it's not that there weren't complicated games in the past (see Flat Top again) but rather that there were fewer intermediates between Chess and Trouble, Flat Top and Checkers.  In an area where being both relaxing and engaging is key, games have raised the bar on both fronts together and there is now quite a selection of games that are easy to learn, tactically interesting, and fun to play.  Everybody wins.