Through the Lens: Board Games - Game Design Theory - page 131

Note that not every genre of board game appears here, and not everyone
will agree with the classifications I have set up. In general, I've included
sections on categories of board games that I feel will help us to sharpen
the focus of our lens; a few lesser-known genres also are addressed to
make people aware of them.
Although I entered my mid-20s being extremely serious about games
and game design, I had never even heard of the world of board games
then, a fact that I sorely regret. I hope that this topic will excite the same
passion I now have for board games in readers who are currently only
familiar with video games.
The Problem with Board Games
As of the time of this writing, board games do not have the rock-star
cultural status that video games do, at least in the United States. Board
games are often looked at as dry, difficult to learn, and boring. That at-
titude comes in large part from the 20th-century success of companies
like Milton Bradley and Hasbro in publishing very bad, but very popular,
board games. These companies had a pattern of taking traditional games,
stripping them of any interesting qualities (if they had any to begin with),
and repackaging them with new names.
The most famous example of this is Monopoly . Monopoly was origi-
nally created in 1904 by a woman named Elizabeth Magie Phillips. Much
like some modern indie art-games, it wasn't necessarily created to be
fun, but to make a point. The Landlord's Game , as it was called at that
time, was trying to make a political point about land ownership—that
the capitalist system drives money upward and the rich necessarily get
richer from such a system.
I need to take a moment to talk about the modern game of Monop-
oly , which we all know, but maybe haven't analyzed. Monopoly is one
of the worst rated games of all time on BoardGameGeek.com, and for
good reason. This game honestly doesn't qualify as a game for adults at
all, who, unlike children, should be able to recognize that they have no
agency over dice rolls. Monopoly is really just an extremely long version
of Candy Land with player elimination. You really have no choices to
make in Monopoly : if you land on a space, you should buy it. The rest of
the game is entirely up to the roll of the dice. Worse, the game tends to
go on for upwards of four hours, frequently with one or two players be-
ing eliminated in the first hour. Most people I know have never finished a
game of Monopoly ; the game simply goes on and on until someone gives
up because it's just too boring to play.