Today’s Stack Overflow is going to start with a little digression into one of my other hobbies, but don’t worry—I’ll bring it back around to reading! It probably comes as no surprise to you that I love tabletop games. Apart from books, the topic that I write about most frequently here at GeekDad is board games—I love playing them, I love discovering new ones, and I love to share them with, well, everyone.
The past two weeks have been full of games for me: I attended our local gaming convention, GameStorm, which is a fairly small gathering as far as conventions go (somewhere north of 1,000 people) and is largely focused on actually playing games, with a small vendor’s hall and a slate of panels that I generally miss because I’m playing games.
I’ve been attending for years (minus the two-year gap when they canceled because of lockdowns), and one of the things I do there is an event called “Gaming with GeekDad.” I bring a selection of games—favorites from the past year, prototypes of crowdfunded games that aren’t generally available yet, new and upcoming titles that I’ve been sent—and then I just spend the whole weekend teaching them to people. Starting in 2018 I began making “menus” of the games to help people choose a game to play, partly because at the time my games were all in bags and boxes, so there wasn’t an easy way to browse. Now GameStorm has actually given me enough room that I can bring in a shelf to put my mini-library on display, but I liked making the menus so I’ve kept doing it.
When I say I teach games “the whole weekend,” I mean it: over the course of four days, I spend over 50 hours teaching games almost non-stop, taking breaks only to eat meals (sometimes) and to go home to sleep. People have asked me how (or why) I do it, and I tell them this is what energizes me. The thing about tabletop games is that (aside from solo games), they’re an inherently social activity. You need to get together with other people to play them, and so there’s a natural desire to introduce games you love to other people—not only to invite others to experience the fun you enjoyed, but also to have more potential partners to play with! Going to GameStorm each year is an opportunity to share some of my favorite games with a wider audience than just my gaming group, in a way that is much more personal and interactive. For the rest of the year, though, I’ll settle for writing about games.
Okay, so what does all this have to do with reading? Well, over the past couple weeks (in between playing games), I’ve been perusing this book:
Everybody Wins: Four Decades of the Greatest Board Games Ever Made by James Wallis
This book is about the Spiel des Jahres award, the German Game of the Year that launched in 1979 and is widely considered the most prestigious award in board games. (I’m sure our own GeekDad Game of the Year is quite coveted, too, but the SdJ had a forty-year head start on us.) In this lavish book, James Wallis takes us through the forty-four years of the SdJ, reflecting on each winner as well as explaining a bit of the history of the award itself.
I remember learning about the SdJ as I got into the hobby, and was told that it was worth watching for that red “poppel” seal at the game store. Winners include several of the “gateway” games that originally hooked us: Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, as well as some that you may recognize from more recent years like Just One or Kingdomino or Codenames. But, as Wallis shows, there are also games that did not find commercial success simply because they won the award. The panel’s selections were sometimes controversial or confusing, as if they were still trying to figure out what exactly they wanted their award to mean.
For each winner, Wallis tries to place the game in its historical context—what were the trends in games at the time? Does the game do something innovative or does it feel familiar? He also gives his opinion on whether it was a worthy win (compared to other games from that year) and whether it’s still worth playing now, as well as how difficult it might be to find a copy. Although I didn’t always agree with his opinions about each game, overall I found Everybody Wins to be a fantastic overview of the Spiel des Jahres and its winners, and there are many titles (winners and otherwise) that I’ve added to my list of games I want to play.
The book itself is a large coffee table book, the sort that you’d probably leave out so that you can flip through it, though I read it straight through from cover to cover. It has lovely full-page photos of the games, and breaks up the timeline into five sections, each with its own introductory chapter. There are sidebars that explain gaming terms like “asymmetric games” and “quarterbacking,” or introduce you to notable game designers. My only complaint about the book (other than some typos here and there that weren’t caught) is that many of these sidebars are very small white text on a yellow background, a design choice that makes them quite difficult to read.
If you love tabletop games, this book would be a fine companion to your game library. If you don’t know anything about tabletop games, Everybody Wins is a fun way to learn what all the fuss is about, seen through the lens of some of the best games of the past forty years.
Green Games Guide
The other reading I’ve been doing related to tabletop games is the Green Games Guide, published last month by a team that includes game designers, publishers, manufacturers, as well as experts on sustainability and climate change. As the barrier to entry for publishing tabletop games has been lowered by crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, the push for more and more stuff in games has increased, and the success of games that include piles of plastic miniatures encourages others to follow suit. For fans of board games, it’s an inconvenient truth that our hobby can be bad for the environment in many ways, from the plastic used both in the game components themselves and in all of the packaging, to the amount of waste in things like shipping, whether it’s for heavy cardboard that get recycled after you punch out your tokens or the wasted space in boxes that are mostly air.
The Green Games Guide is an attempt to start the conversation: manufacturers follow the requests of publishers, and publishers try to give consumers what they want, so changing the industry is going to require everyone to participate. In gaming parlance, it’s a cooperative game. This 28-page paper offers some best practices on materials in the game—wood, paper, cardstock, and plastic—as well as the box and packaging itself. No matter what your involvement is in the world of board games, whether you’re a game publisher or just somebody who enjoys playing them, it’s worth taking a look to see how we can all help to make our beloved hobby even better.
Disclosure: I received a review copy of Everybody Wins.
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