The Rise of German Board Games

Kids are always playing the "game" ;).

In this case, they won't get anything out of crying, so I guess it is purely out of frustration.

A lot of times, the winner also enjoys rubbing it in, and making the others cry. Kids have all the survival emotions, and none of the social skills to hold back on them. But that's probably our job as a parent, to teach them the social skills.

Better they learn it now, that when that colleague got that manager job they thought they were entitled to.

A "build your own thing" game always needs a point at which you draw a line under it and count up and decide who won. The better games will find a way to at least vaguely integrate it with the theme - e.g. in Keyflower you play through Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter, in Barbarossa you play until someone captures Moscow.

Still, even for a straight "first to 10 points" or "play 5 rounds", to my mind the positives outweigh the negatives. If you play until all but one player is knocked out then a) most players are gonna lose in a very personal, direct way b) players who've lost have to find something else to do while the game finishes c) there's no way to predict or plan how long the game's going to go on for. A lot of competitions involve a fairly arbitrary limit - why run for 100m rather than 110 or 90? Why play football for 90 minutes rather than 80 or 100? Why do 18 holes of golf rather than 17 or 19? Why drive 3 laps in Mario Kart rather than 2 or 4? Sometimes all you can do is find a point at which to draw a line under it.

I host a gaming club. We're in test for 5 games. They vary from simple card games to collectible sets to party games to complex deck-building board games.

They all have one thing in common: they're social. You play with other people, rather than in the same room as other people.

I've watched some family members play Catan every holiday for years. They sit in virtual silence for 2-4 hours, all looking grim, hardly speaking. When its over, they seem relieved and exhausted. Its depressing.

Our club games have people talking constantly, laughing, chanting, enjoying themselves to the limit. They're fun. And that seems to me to be a critical threshold to deserve inclusion in the category 'game'.

Sure its nice for everybody to be in it until the end.

I guess I object to a race that ends when somebody steps on a crack seemingly randomly, and the one with the most bling on their vest then wins.

Its the part about 'you have to come up with something to end it'. The theme breaks down then. Makes the game seem unfinished, like they couldn't think of some reasonable way to wind it up so they just gave up.

Pandemic ends when you contain the plague, or it kills everybody. You talk and socialize and cajole until the end, with everybody. There's a well-made game.

I regularly introduce new games to my extended family. They particularly enjoy Carcassonne and Cards Against Humanity although both engender certain playstyles; the uncle who dominates monopoly and risk loves to throw out a 4-sided connector against whoever is winning in Carcassonne. One aunt can't help but go for certain jokes regardless of whether they're the "best" jokes or not.

The one time we tried Catan I gave up not because the adults couldn't hack it but because my teenage cousins insisted on being involved but couldn't sit still long enough to set up the board and make it through a turn.

So for me the cultural conflict isn't about European vs American values reflected in game play as much as some people who need constant stimulation and have no patience. Considering the ubiquity of phones, ipads and the internet I'm not sure that ADD-like inability to focus is uniquely American. I think these games can also help teach kinds to slow down, decompress and pay attention if given a enough time but at least in my case I see these guys once a year at Thanksgiving which is not enough.

But glomming onto something mentioned in the article Mah Jong is popular with us because who wins isn't obvious until the game ends and who has the highest score may not be the person who declares Mah Jong. That makes the game more fun because everyone's involved to the end and it adds a layer of strategy as you're not just trying to up your score but block score-increasing moves by others.