Hacks and Variants
Board Gaming in 2020 Will Be DIY
A Reply to Ignacy Trzewiczek
Everybody makes their own fun. If you don’t make it yourself, it isn’t fun. It’s entertainment.
- David Mamet, ‘State and Main’
Ignacy,
I read your call for insight about the future of the board game industry. As a board game junkie AND a former fortuneteller, I am uniquely qualified to realign your compass. Here’s the short version:
Sales of new board games will TANK this year. Mainly because…
- No one has any money.
- No one has time to play the games they already have.
- Kickstarter resentment.
This has been in the making for a while. In late 2018 Meeple Like Us committed to a “Depth Year”. They vowed they wouldn’t buy new games until they’d played all the games they already owned. If memory serves me they got more than a little encouragement on Twitter. This year I saw some similar commitments.
There’s going to be a particular rejection of Kickstarter games. The parade of miniature-heavy Kickstarters with backer-only add-ons never sat right with a lot of gamers. Plus the lag between backing a game and actually receiving it is getting ridiculous.
If gamers buy anything, it’s going to be:
New Editions of Out-of-Print Classics and Award-Winners
Gamers will be less keen on taking chances with brand new games. They will, however, shell out for praised games they’ve played but didn’t buy. Maybe they played it at a convention. Maybe their former neighbor owned it. Whatever the case, reprinted must-haves will be popular this year.
Books About Board Games, Including Media Tie-ins
Sales of books about the hobby, best-of books, and strategy guides will see an uptick. Tie-in novels and comic books will also do well. You might want to consider starting a book publishing arm, Ignacy.
Expansions and Upgrades
There’s no better excuse to replay an old game than getting a new expansion. The smaller and more incremental, the better. Also, component upgrades.
Gamers will have a powerful need to wring every ounce of fun out of their games. That will lead to a new appreciation for unofficial upgrades and expansions. Both print-and-play and print-on-demand. If a game’s publisher isn’t extending the life of Maiden’s Quest and Power Grid, amateurs sure as hell will. If Monopoly can have unlicensed expansions, so can Theseus. Because someone out there liked Theseus enough to want more expansions. Even if they’re bootlegged.
Print-and-Play Games
Either dirt-cheap or straight-up free games. Since a lot of gamers have basic components on-hand, PNP games can even call for meeples, tokens, or currency. This leads in to…
Incomplete Games
An idea that might have come too soon will finally have its day: incomplete games. Cheap Ass Games’ practice of letting the customer provide their own dice/pawns/money was ahead of its time. Now that more collections have hit the point where they include every basic component, that model’s time may have come.
Universal Expansions and Metagames
Metagames will get some love this year. Games about picking the game of the night, like Game Election, and games that are played in parallel, like Pretense. Also, universal expansions like The Game Changers will breath new life into otherwise played-to-death games.
Game Systems, DIY Kits, and Whatnot
Games Systems, compendiums of games that share components, will gain traction. Book of Dragons and Pyramid Arcade are just two examples. None of these boxes-of-games have been huge hits yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Then the promise of lots of games in one box will be too good to pass up.
Also, games about making games. A Series of Interesting Choices is the only example I can cite, but more are sure to follow. And DIY kits like The White Box and Board Games to Create and Play will lead more gamers further down the dark path.
Not to mention other weird shit I can’t even imagine right now. A cookbook of edible games and a book of purely imaginary games are just two of the more subversive examples in circulation.
What is this dark path I speak of? It starts with the mind-melting revelation that a rulebook is not The Bible.
Unlike roleplayers, most board gamers don’t like to mess with the rules. Some say they shouldn’t have to. Games should be fun from the get-go. Maybe, but it’s a big waste if you REFUSE to fix a game yourself with a simple tweak. This is the year house-ruling won’t be nigh-heretical. Then, homemade variants and expansions will become a lot more common. It’s all downhill from there.
The next step will be mining components to make proxies of out-of-print classics. Next will be reverse-engineering current games that are just too expensive. Because even if you can’t replicate a certain deck of cards, good game designs will still be fun with salvaged dice, score tracks, and tokens.
By year’s end a big chunk of board gamers will be rolling their own with pawns, dice, and whatnot mined from their collection. Not because they want to publish. They just won’t need to be spoon-fed their fun anymore. They’ll make their own.
It’s possible I’m off base. New games might continue to roll out at the same insane pace as the last few years. But it’s just as likely that the smart money, business wise, will be on catering to the growing urge to hack, mod, kitbash, and mash-up one’s own board game collection.
So get on board the subvert-board-games train, Ignacy. If you don’t, other publishers will.
Best, Oscar
