Let’s roll the dice: Why should you play a board game?

At some point or another, throughout your life, you have probably played a board game.
Most often, I presume, this was at a point when you were probably fairly young. Candy Land, Sorry, The Game of Life, Monopoly, and so on — these are staples of childhoods across the entire world, propagated and sold by multi-billion-dollar companies. It’s not really a surprise that you’d have played these if you have.
If these were your first experiences with boardgames, I apologize. These are not exactly great or engaging games, at least in my opinion. They’re time killers, semi-preordained ways to put a few hours to bed and pass the time. Hell, in the case of Candy Land, the winner is already determined by the deck before the first card is even drawn.
It’s important to mention these three in the context of this article because of two things, though. First, because they are often people’s first, and worst, introductions to board games. Secondly, because while they are primitive, they are also quite excellent at showing the core draw of board games in general: they present a socially acceptable form of polite competition that encourages socialization.
Stick with me here — fundamentally, people like competition. It’s a natural part of what makes a human. We like going against each other. People also, believe it or not in this day of social media and smart phones, like socializing with other people. People like talking; they like getting to know one another, they like making friends and they like interacting with others.
Well-made board games are social competitions that only require an active attention span. Therefore, they’re the perfect medium for making new friends.
Don’t believe me? Go ahead, find another ice breaker as effective as a board game. Hobbies and work are often hit-or-miss on whether another person will even know what you’re talking about, let alone have any interest. Humor is another way to meet people, but individuals can have different opinions on what is funny in the first place.
But a board game is something that immediately catches the eye and stimulates the mind. They hook people and get them engaged — and if a person is engaged with something, they’re willing to talk, open up and express themselves.
Take a look at something as simple as Settlers of Catan, a board game focused around building up a series of settlements and gaining resources on a little island. On first glance, it’s pretty simple — build your houses and roads, gain more resource cards, repeat. The first one to reach a certain number of houses wins.
That’s the competitive element, the thing that gets people playing and trying. That’s what makes people put in the effort, that natural drive to win. It’s the finer details that make it social. In Settlers of Catan, you are expected to trade resources with your opponents in order to achieve your particular strategy. That immediately forces a social element that requires interaction between players. You need to convince them to make a trade.
From there, it’s pretty simple to see the fundamental appeal of board games and why they’re quite good at what they do: they are designed to draw people out of their shells, encourage them to think critically and to get them to interact with other people.
This goes double for more social games, which are designed on face value to encourage interaction and conversation between players as part of the gameplay itself. Ultimate Werewolf, a who-done-it game where one player takes the role of a werewolf and the others scared villagers, naturally thrives on this sort of thing. It also means you don’t have to start another conversation to get an idea of what a person is like — you can pretty easily pick it up from how they play, they interact, and even how engaged they are with the game itself.
Board games also have so many different subgenres and themes. Wingspan is about the evolution of birds, while Telestrations is all about interpreting the drawings of your friends and trying to recreate their image. King of Tokyo is about giant monsters fighting one another, while Azul is about creating a piece of art. Betrayal at House on the Hill is all about exploring a decrepit, haunted mansion filled with unearthly monsters while Flamecraft is all about having some tea with adorable little dragons.
Overall, I don’t see any reason not to take a look through the back shelves of Walmart, browse through Amazon and even maybe make the trip to your local bookstore to hunt down a few board games that catch your eye. You never know what you might find to fill your evening with.