When I wrote that I love the stories of particularly in-depth board games in my bio, I’m pretty sure people thought I was joking.
Those people need to play more games.
Board games are incredible. My fiancé and I can’t get enough of them. In a metaphoric sense, anyway. In both a fiscal and a physical flat-to-board-game ratio sense, it’s not at all true.
Board games have evolved past Monopoly and Fifty Other Versions of Monopoly Why Is There So Much Monopoly Why?.
Now you have games where you can play co-operatively as Tibetan monks, working together to save a village from evil spirits. You can play as the cast of Battlestar Galactica, trying to work out who’s a human and who’s a cyclon as disaster after disaster hits you in the face. You can change a campaign board game every time you play it, ripping up cards and slathering the board in stickers as your team of (highly attractive) medics and scientists struggle to slow down the colourful disease cubes ravaging the world.
Nowadays, board games are made to compete with movies and video games rather than bubonic plague, the only big time-killer when Snakes and Ladders became popular. They’re not about rolling dice. They’re about strategy and quick-thinking and – yes – story-telling.
Arkham Horror is proof of that.