This is Part IV of the intro series. This is where you can find Part I, Part II, and Part III.
To wrap up the intro series, we’ll go on a journey through time to explore the development of modern board games. My aim with this is to align with you on what I mean when I say board game, and give a little background for those of you who came here because of interest in management rather than games. Chances are, if you count modern board games among your hobbies, you are familiar with the ideas presented in this next section. Even if you are, bear with me as I try to illustrate why board games evolved into incredibly powerful tools for learning.
If the words “board game” only invoke names like Monopoly, Risk, or Cluedo in your mind, then firstly - thanks for sticking around. There’s an amazingly rich world waiting for you in this blog. Secondly, we are not going to discuss anything made by Hasbro here - With all due respect, I am trying to write about learning and growth, not being lucky with dice and making your friends hate you.
Most of us spent a night at some point in our lives with family or friends taking the role of generals on a cardboard representation of Europe like Risk, Stratego, Axis & Allies. Even more likely, you’ve felt the pain of rolling through a game of Monopoly just so your dad or best friend could smugly drain you from everything you’ve got until you just want to flip the table and charge out of the room.
For a long while beginning in the ‘70s, development in these types of games west of the Atlantic mostly meant slapping the skin of a major film franchise on them, or copying them into said franchise. While Monopoly was originally created to show the folly of a consolidated, unregulated economy, it keeps wrecking friendships in 37 languages even today. While these gaming behemoths of the West, which have now earned unflattering names by board game aficionados, were gaining popularity, an entirely different culture of family nights evolved across the pond.
Nürnberg, Germany, 1978, the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the year) award was established. German, Austrian and Swiss game developers and critics were guided by one strong principal of the psychology of gaming - Most of us are capable of accepting losing, but very few people can cope with watching themselves being eliminated. So the ‘80s saw the rise of games in Europe that obfuscated scoring and delayed it to the end of the game, or discrete phases of it. I am of the opinion that this fact alone is likely the reason that so many Germans still maintain board games as a hobby well into adulthood.
In post WW2 Germany, glorification of war or the capitalist machine were not appropriate themes for games, or anything else, really. Games developed by and for German crowds, in straying away from the themes of war, tend to be themed around building rather than conquering. Instead of generals, players take the roles of CEOs, farmers, colonists, or railway pioneers. As such, they tend to avoid direct conflict mechanics, favouring a competitive race style rather than attacks against other players. That means they are not zero-sum, so having someone beat you in a race does not necessarily spell catastrophe for you. It wasn’t until the mid 90’s that these design principles consolidated into the genre now called Euro Games.
Many attribute this to the release of Settlers of Catan in ‘95. It will take a decade for it to rise to prominence (By the time of writing this post, more than 22 million copies have been sold worldwide) and gain global popularity. Catan was one of the first German style games to achieve commercial and critical success outside of Europe. With this, it helped make the aforementioned principles a mainstay of modern board games development.
Recent years have shown a massive growth in this once child-hobby. The majority of successful kickstarter projects today are board games, amounting to over $1B in 2019 alone.
Euro games offer variable board settings, flexible scoring systems, multiple paths to victory, all rolled up in an abstract array of wooden and cardboard pieces. The result is a magnificently fair, yet asymmetric competition. They have been among my favourite pastimes years before moving to Berlin over four years ago.
Much more importantly, board games have been training me to calmly deal with a multitude of stressful situations. The challenges I face as a people manager on a daily basis - decision making, prioritisation, sequencing, stakeholder identification, and most of all, coaching reports outside my area of expertise - are all things I’ve encountered to a smaller degree while moving wooden pieces on cardboard maps with friends. This allows me to play where my workplace couldn’t afford for me to, and grow through it.
If you want to hear more, stick around. Starting from the next post, I will tie real life office challenges with specific game mechanics, and muse over the growth they’ve allowed me to undergo.