Gamers still prefer human interaction and the echoes of the 1970s hit Video Killed the Radio Star doesn’t apply to the age old entertainment option.
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Murray Whiteford, who has operated Echuca Games for the past three years, said video had certainly not killed the board game.
“Monopoly, Scrabble, even Game of Life, are as popular as ever,” Murray said.
“And the new-age party games, things like Cooked Aussies, still walk out the door regularly.”
Murray, a Sydney librarian specialising in research for 20 years, has always been a keen gamer and his passion for gaming comes through loud and clear.
“I was playing games back in the 1970s and ’80s, hard-core war games using little chips of cardboard with rules so complex that it wasn’t an inviting environment,” he said.
“Modern games attract people of all ages, professions and backgrounds. We host groups at the store for games five nights a week.”
He said the gaming community was diverse in its interest, from civilisation building and role playing games to party and family games.
“People are generally either hard core or family gamers,” Murray said.
“But the biggest thing in the last 30 years has been growth in between those categories.”
Board games not everyone will be familiar with now attract a crowd of Echuca gamers through the door every week.
“The biggest one is Magic: The Gathering. That’s the only game that really has money involved. There are events with prizemoney. The company has sponsored these since 1994,” Murray said.
“Grand prix events have a minimum purse of $US35,000, with one tournament carrying $1 million in prizemoney, the winner walking away with $300,000.
“You can make a living out of it.”
But in Echuca a $5 charge to cover the cost of what they call a DM (a Dungeon Master) or Game Master is the extent of the financial commitment.
“The DM controls the event and are paid accordingly via store credit,” Murray said.
“They spend hours preparing to play the role.”
Murray said “argument games”, such as Cards Against Humanity and Trial By Trolley were big sellers at his store.
His COVID-19 frustration came with an inability to predict the popularity of jigsaw puzzles during lockdowns.
“One of the big manufacturers I use is in Italy and they weren’t making them last year,” Murray said.
“Jigsaw puzzles completely sold out. Unfortunately I did not see it coming.
“I could have sold twice as many.”
Old-school card collectors also came out of the woodwork, with Pokémon going crazy last year in lockdown.
“People started collecting cards going back to their younger days,” Murray said.
“A famous YouTuber was almost tricked into paying $375,000 for the original set of Pokémon, which turned out to be fake.”
Murray said when he first opened his store he was surprised by how many role players were in town.
And just how dedicated they were.
“They love it,” Murray said.
“It’s a passion. The occasional dice will go flying across the room during game play and the occasional swear word.”
Murray doesn’t stock any video games at the store and on closer inspection it’s any wonder - he would have nowhere to put them.
“Most of the people who play are Echuca people, but we have some from Deniliquin, Kyabram, Tongala and the occasional group from Shepparton with War Hammer,” he said.
Lockdown created a big hole in the gamers’ lives.
Murray said people really enjoyed sitting around a table interacting.
“A huge part of gaming is being in the same room, rolling the dice and the instant reaction,” he said.
And, as we are reminded nightly on Channel Nine, Geek Sheik is a real thing.
“I get a lot of IT people, school teachers - one of my War Hammer regulars is a baker,” Murray said.
“I always know what is on special, because I get a lot of Coles and Woollies people.”
Lockdown game play has increased global board game sales by more than $US1 billion in the past 12 months, but the Gen Xers and Boomers shouldn’t immediately reach for the Monopoly or Scrabble board.
Gone are the days, at least it appears, of players battling to secure Park Lake and Mayfair in those intense family kitchen table confrontations.
Instead, the latest board games to capture a lion’s share of the market are The Crew, Wingspan and Gloomhaven.
These are the three biggest sellers with gamers who are 30 years old and under.
Australia ranked well inside the top 10 board game buyers, behind the heavily populated US, UK and Canada.
Passionate cries of “do not pass go”, “triple word score”, “king me” and “you sunk my battleship’’ have been replaced by astronauts searching for a ninth planet and nature lovers collecting rare birds.
The Crew, apparently the hottest tabletop game on the market, is played with cards and has a heavy science fiction feel. Far removed from outer space, Wingspan (as the name suggests), is ornithological in nature and points are earned by adding valuable birds to your wildlife preserves.
No arguing about who is the hat or the boot in these games.
But never fear, the lockdown has had old-school gamers jumping back on a familiar bandwagon, at least according to Google data.
The data shows the term “board game” was searched more often in March 2020 than in any other month since records began in 2004.
Pandemic, the board game, had almost a quarter-of-a-million hits for the month – the most searches since the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009.
Between February and March last year, searches for Pandemic increased by 300 per cent. The game challenges players to eliminate diseases that have broken out in different parts of the world.
Scrabble remains the world’s most popular game according to the data, with Monopoly a clear second.
There are several variations of the original British board game. Monopoly is now in 103 countries and in 37 different languages.
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