Not So Bored Games

The date was the 25th of December 2013 and it was a Christmas I will never forget. Our annual household Monopoly game had commenced.

Now Monopoly is a very serious game in my family. I remember being 6 years-old when my mother gave me my first Shrek-themed Monopoly game and before you knew it I was playing with the adults at the mere age of 11. 

Now back to the Christmas of 2013, the four players included myself, my sister and my parents and I had just finished telling everyone in the room how I had been a Monopoly protege and was simply going to dominate everybody in the room. The game started and within the first 30 minutes I was made bankrupt by my little sister and came dead last…..

However, the laughter and the shame that was bestowed upon me that night gave birth to fire that to this date has not been quenched. I shut myself in my room and I read every single Monopoly page that I could find, from the statistical probabilities of landing in certain areas to the most and least valuable cards to the beautiful art of negotiation, I learnt it all. By next Christmas I was undefeated, after beating my family twice, laughing at everyone while posting on my social media and being branded a sore winner, I then went onto to university where my flatmates quickly decided that they were not going to play with me after winning the first two games we played swiftly. 

Now the rules of Monopoly along with other well known board games such as Scrabble, Cluedo and Snakes and Ladders are all ingrained in me by my parents but are the parents of today passing on this sacred knowledge. Are board games still popular? 

Well during the pandemic many people started to look at board games as a means to cure their boredom. According to Google trends, there was a peak interest in them that started in March 2020. Was this just a trend due to the pandemic or has there been a steady rise in popularity? The data suggests the latter. According to Statista, the global market value of board games was estimated to be roughly 12.02 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 and was projected to reach 21.56 billion dollars by 2025.

Many thought that due to technological advances board games would phase out with new exciting forms of entertainment being introduced, however these technological advancements have only accelerated their popularity. These advancements have meant that board game enthusiasts can now buy board games online and print them off at home, no longer having to wait until they arrive in the mail. Many other board games have been duplicated virtually due to websites such as Tabletop Simulator where you can play or create your own board game. Other platforms such as Kickstarter, a fundraising website, have also contributed to the rising popularity of board games. Board games such as ‘The Witcher: Old World’ a board game based on the video game series received $2.6 million in funds in one day

So the evidence does suggest that there is a continued increase in the popularity of board games and so hopefully a worthy competitor will rise one day and take my Monopoly crown.