Technology
High-Tech Push Has Board Games Rolling Again
MERCER
ISLAND, Wash. — Dan Shapiro sold a company to Google and worked at
Microsoft. His name is on nearly a dozen technology-related patents.
But
when it came time for his latest venture, Mr. Shapiro turned to
technology to produce something decidedly low-tech: a board game for
children.
Technology,
by all rights, should have killed old-fashioned games, which can never
equal the eye-popping graphics, visceral action and immense online
communities of today’s video games. Yet the opposite has occurred.
Largely because of new technologies, there has been a creative
outpouring of games by independent designers like Mr. Shapiro.
“It has unlocked a whole generation of innovative gameplay experimentation that just wasn’t feasible before,” he said.
New
tools now power the creation of tabletop games — many in the strategy
or fantasy genres — from idea to delivery. Crowdfunding sites provide
the seed money and offer an early gauge of demand. Machines like 3-D
printers can rapidly create figurines, dice and other prototype game
pieces. And Amazon, the online retail giant, can handle shipping and
distribution, cutting out the need for middlemen.
Sales
have followed. While the video game business long ago eclipsed its
low-tech cousin, sales of tabletop games have continued to grow. Sales
at hobby stores in the United States rose 15 to 20 percent in each of
the last three years, according to ICv2, a trade publication that tracks
the business. Amazon says board game sales increased by a double-digit
percentage from 2012 to 2013.
On
Kickstarter, the crowdfunding service, in which users can pledge money
to finance projects, the amount raised last year for tabletop games
exceeded the amount for video games, $52.1 million to $45.3 million.
“It
has been this amazing boon for the average game designer to come in,
put up an idea, get it funded and get to press,” said Peter Adkison,
founder and former chief executive of Wizards of the Coast, a tabletop game publisher he sold to Hasbro in 2001.
Mr. Shapiro’s experience with his creation Robot Turtles, a game meant to stealthily teach children basic computer programming concepts, illustrates how the new model works.
He
raised $631,000 on Kickstarter in under a month, far exceeding his
$25,000 goal. Robot Turtles has more backers than any other tabletop
game in Kickstarter’s history, with 13,765 people pitching in money for
the project, and Mr. Shapiro had more than 20,000 presales on the site.
He
then found a manufacturer in Michigan by doing a Google search, and
paid it to make 25,000 copies of the game from over 36 tons of cardboard
and paper, shipping most of them in three semi trucks directly to a
warehouse for Amazon. Amazon then delivered them to customers.
“It
felt like technological advancement had anticipated my needs almost
perfectly,” said Mr. Shapiro, who sold all 25,000 copies.
Some
of the new games from independent makers have even started to outsell
games by major toy companies. Three years ago, a group of eight men in
their 20s — middle school friends from Highland Park, Ill. — came up
with an idea for a game that resembles a profane version of Apples to
Apples, the game that involves creating humorous combinations by pairing
noun and adjective cards.
The
result was Cards Against Humanity, billed as a “party game for horrible
people.” During each round, one player draws a card with a question or
sentence with a missing word while the other players compete to come up
with the funniest, most outrageous answer from their own selection of
cards.
A typical question: “What are my parents hiding from me?”
“The placenta,” reads one of the tamer answers.
Cards
Against Humanity and four expansion card packs for the game are
currently the top five best-selling items in Amazon’s toys and games
category. While the game’s co-creators continue to work at other jobs or
attend graduate school, Max Temkin, 27, one of Cards Against Humanity’s
creators, said none of them needed to work since they all had “pretty
substantial savings” from sales of the game.
Mr.
Temkin said that without the help of crowdfunding, he doubted the game
would have been made. “Nobody in their right mind would think it would
be a commercially viable project,” he said. “It was too nerdy and weird
and taboo.”
Enthusiasts
trace the vibrancy of tabletop games to the mid-1990s, when Settlers of
Catan, a German game in which players establish colonies on a fictional
island, helped kick off a renaissance in board game design. The wave of
“Euro games,” which tend to emphasize strategy and competition for
scarce resources rather than combat, that followed added a dash of
creativity to a category, populated with familiar names like Monopoly
and Clue, that many people considered tired.
But in recent years, the momentum has accelerated. Gen Con,
a four-day tabletop game conference being held in Indianapolis this
August, took 15 years to grow to 30,000 attendees from 20,000. In the
last three years, it has grown to 49,000 from 30,000, according to Mr.
Adkison, who owns the convention. Hasbro, which publishes Monopoly,
Battleship and Trivial Pursuit, has seen sales in its games category
grow in recent years, including 10 percent last year from the year
before.
Events
like Gen Con and the visibility of board gaming is part of a growing
celebration of so-called geek culture that is often associated with
hard-core fans.
“We’re
definitely in this moment of the fetishization of geek,” said Yancey
Strickler, Kickstarter’s chief executive. “And everyone is running out
to talk about their geek cred.”
Somewhat
ironically, perhaps, video game players are often among the biggest
devotees of tabletop games. Some in the business believe that is no
accident, theorizing that the abundance of opportunities to connect
electronically with people through games and social media has also
created a hunger — sated by tabletop games — for face-to-face contact.
“It
turns out that being together is very addictive,” said Jerry Holkins, a
creator of Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX, a series of video game
conferences that dedicate about a third of their exhibition space to
tabletop gaming.
Still, the gaming community often finds its way back online, too. Wil Wheaton, an actor and blogger, hosts Tabletop, a popular show on YouTube and other online channels, in which celebrities and others play board games against one another.
“I want to put more gamers in the world,” Mr. Wheaton said.
At
his home in Mercer Island, a Seattle suburb, Mr. Shapiro recently
played a spirited round of Robot Turtles with his twins, a boy and a
girl. The children, who are 5, had to navigate a maze created by Mr.
Shapiro on a grid to reach gemstone cards.
With
determined expressions on their faces, they selected cards to move
their pieces around the board, pushing or destroying obstacles in their
way. Those pieces, Mr. Shapiro said, are intended to represent the
commands of a computer program.
Mr.
Shapiro, who has signed a deal with a publisher, ThinkFun, to continue
making the game, said he was still shocked by its success. But he said
he created the game for a simple reason: so his family had a way to play
together.
“This came from, ‘I want to do something fun with my kids,’ ” he said.