A View from the Golden Age of Board Games
04 Mar 2025If you spend time in the board gaming community, you’ll eventually hear people talk about the “Golden Age of Board Games.” The one small problem is that nobody seems to agree on exactly when or what this golden age is. Historians may place it in the distant past, while newer gamers and industry voices tend to say we’re living through it right now, or perhaps that it just recently ended.
I believe the story is more complicated. The past few years have undoubtedly been good ones for certain types of games and certain industry business models. These prosperous times have attracted investment and attention, but they’ve also created a market crowded with similar products and a more homogenous gaming culture. And as any ecologist will tell you, homogenous ecosystems also tend to be fragile. That fragility leads publishers to grow conservative, fearful that changing customer preferences or economic conditions could threaten their businesses. It’s not easy being golden.
Setup Phase: Laying the Board on the Table
I don’t claim to be a historian of games, just someone with the perspective of a lifelong gamer. I grew up in a house where my parents kept a closet full of board games we played regularly. As a kid, I pored over my dad’s SPI games, careful not to lose a counter or damage a paper map. Over the years, my gaming touchstones grew to include Dungeons and Dragons, Axis & Allies, and Diplomacy. I learned to play Magic the Gathering on the wildly unbalanced Unlimited Edition. And sometime in college, between games of Axis and Allies and Diplomacy, I played my first game of Settlers of Catan (now simply CATAN).
After college, I got more involved with Play by Email Diplomacy. I have never been a big convention-goer, but I attended a few around this time, including DipCon XXXIV in Denver, where I was playing at the table next to Edi Birsan’s legendary Immaculate Concession. My wargaming peaked around these years with an epic World in Flames campaign and explorations of classic games from before my time, like Flat Top. I have even beheld firsthand the immensity of The Campaign for North Africa, considered by some the longest and most complex wargame ever published.
Like many American game enthusiasts in the 1990s, my perspective on board games’ potential was reshaped by contact with contemporary European design. While “eurogame” has become a vaguely defined term today, it originally referred specifically to games developed and published in Europe, characterized by language-independent design, indirect player conflict, and non-military themes.
Although I remain a game omnivore who enjoys everything from wargames to party games, most of my current gaming falls into what I would categorize as “hobby gaming,” which I describe broadly as the activity of the dedicated community that has arisen around contemporary tabletop games. As it is in most hobbies, the gaming community is integrally connected to a network of professional and commercial interests, including publishers, retailers, conventions, and media.
Opening Moves: What Makes an Age Golden?
When people claim we’re in a golden age of board gaming, they typically point to the volume of new releases, the quality of designs (referring variously to design or production quality), the size of the market, and the proliferation of board gaming events.
I used to hear more celebration of game diversity, but this seems less common now than it was 20 years ago. This reflects a real shift in the industry toward larger, more elaborately produced games and away from smaller, more economical ones. Crowdfunding platforms, which have become critical channels for discovery and marketing, contribute to the escalating expectations around new major releases. Where crowdfunding once largely served to help small publishers validate demand for projects, it now draws consumers’ attention to projects’ growing scale and ambition. You’re not just buying a game, you’re participating in a campaign! As more and more money rolls in and the game swells with stretch goals and bonus materials, the excitement of the campaign can overshadow the long-delayed enjoyment of playing the finished product.
Publishers have adapted to these raised expectations by adopting familiar strategies from other parts of the media world, relying on established intellectual property, sequels, and series to manage risk. This isn’t entirely new, of course. Before Settlers was CATAN, there were Seafarers, Cities and Knights, expansions, and expansions for expansions. But when one of the most popular recent releases, Wingspan, spawned fantasy (Wyrmspan) and aquatic (Finspan) followups, the community couldn’t help poking a little fun at the emerging pattern of “Thingspans”.
Early Game: The Play Remains the Same
The repetitiousness of popular new releases is no joke. When Wingspan became a commercial success with its then-unusual birdwatching theme, the market responded with all manner of plant- and animal- and nature-themed card collecting games. Even visual presentation serves a commercial end: talented artists do amazing work, but once successful, the industry transforms them into marketable brands. And that’s not even considering the recognizably one-note visual slop of AI-generated graphics, sadly becoming more common.
Gameplay itself is growing monotonous, in part due to the growing role of conventions in the hobby. Playing with strangers in a convention setting is very different from playing with friends at home. Some players react badly when they feel they’re being attacked, so managing conflict at a table can be challenging. It’s even more difficult when friends and strangers play together, as often happens at conventions. It’s no accident that designers and publishers attuned to the needs of convention play tend to create games with limited player interaction, sometimes derisively called “multiplayer solitaire.”
This may be my own bias talking here. I’ve never been comfortable at large conventions, and even my limited participation has exposed me to bad experiences with problem players. But interestingly, Diplomacy—a game with an undeserved reputation as a “friendship killer”—has one of the most cordial communities I’ve encountered in the hobby. I have only ever had positive experiences playing this high-conflict, betrayal-heavy game face-to-face with strangers at conventions. One reason may be that it’s an established game with a dedicated community, whereas mainstream hobby gaming focuses on newer releases with fewer established expectations.
Midgame: The Consumption Machine
The focus on new releases is driven by board game media and publishers who rely on these channels for publicity. Gaming content increasingly centers on acquiring new games, creating a whole subgenre dedicated to reviews and buying guides. Content creators face tremendous pressure from both audiences and sponsors to produce definitive verdicts on games as early as possible in their release cycles.
With the predominance of crowdfunding, much of this coverage occurs before games are widely available, requiring advance copies and publisher collaboration. Unsurprisingly, this arrangement creates significant conflicts of interest and conditions ripe for misbehavior, as we’ve seen in cases like that of the Quackalope YouTube channel.
Even honest reviewers work under intense time pressure, creating a media environment full of superficial impressions based on little play time and even less reflection. It’s just not possible to produce thoughtful analysis of an unreleased game comparable to what you could create for a game that’s 20 years old, like Twilight Struggle, or 30 years old, like Settlers of Catan, or 66 years old, like Diplomacy.
But this isn’t solely a media issue, and the fact is that most new games aren’t designed to be played in 66 years, or even 20. They’re created to look impressive, drive successful crowdfunding campaigns, be easy to review, learn, and teach, and play reasonably well during early learning sessions (often with unfamiliar players you won’t see again). If particularly ambitious and farsighted, they’ll include hooks for expansions or sequels. In short, they primarily serve the industry’s commercial interests rather than hobbyists’ personal enjoyment.
Interlude: The Things We Lost in the Dark
One example of what today’s “Golden Age” seems unable to produce is Nacht der Magier. This innovative game casts players as wizards gathered around a magic campfire, with a unique twist—it’s played in complete darkness. The elevated board features only a few glow-in-the-dark elements to guide players as they try to land one of their glowing cauldrons in the central divot. They cannot see most of the obstacles that fill the board, and they must end their turn as soon as any piece falls off, signaled by the sound of wood hitting the tabletop.
Such a game would struggle to succeed today. It’s essentially impossible to play at a convention, requiring darkness and light-charged phosphorescent pieces. It can’t be effectively demonstrated in a youtube video. It’s an intimate experience, played huddled together in the dark with hushed voices listening for the clatter of falling pieces to break the tension.
It’s also a bit complex to produce, requiring custom wooden and plastic pieces with glow-in-the-dark printing. And unfortunately, for a game with targeted appeal, production complexity alone likely takes it out of the realm of economic feasibility.
The game may not be for you personally. Its BoardGameGeek reviews are not all glowing. But even though Nacht der Magier isn’t for everyone, I find it hard to argue that it is good for the hobby for there to be so little room for such innovative designs. Hobbyists sometimes look down on “kids’ games,” but it’s precisely through these games—designs for kids that can be enjoyed by grownups—that we transmit our love for this hobby to the next generation of players. My school-aged daughter had a sleepover a few months ago, and I can confirm that Nacht der Magier was a hit.
Late Game: Bright Spots
Despite the challenging environment, designers and publishers continue to do interesting and challenging work. Stonemeier Games, despite receiving gentle ribbing for their Thingspans, consistently produces a variety of high quality designs. Niche publishers like Hollandspiele and New Mill Industries use small print runs and just-in-time production to produce designs that larger publishers can’t or won’t.
On the design side, Cole Wehrle has found commercial and critical success doing diverse and innovative work. His recent games range from asymmetric conflict in a fantasy (Root) or historical setting (Pax Pamir) to sci-fi campaign games that creatively combine gameplay mechanics (Arcs), to an ambitious and earnest exploration of colonialism (John Company). Even if these games don’t appeal to you, they clearly avoid repetition.
While I appreciate these creative outliers, they remain exceptions to the rule. As the industry mainstream grows larger and louder, the vital work being done outside of it seems increasingly marginalized by comparison.
Final Scoring: Reconsidering the Golden Age
Considering how much the hobby has changed during my life, I can’t deny that we’ve likely been living through some kind of golden age. What remains unclear is whether it has ended, and whether it was as golden as it could have been. I can’t celebrate the commercial pressures that have limited our imagination as players and reduced the space for innovation. And I remain particularly skeptical of the role commercial interests play in prioritizing consumption and acquisition over enjoyment.
Speaking for myself, I like variety, creativity, and innovation. I believe a healthy hobby publishes diverse games, even if not all appeal to me personally. And while the end of this golden age may hurt commercial interests, it might not be so bad for the hobby as a whole. After all, many of us now have shelves full of great games, and we’ll have plenty of time to enjoy them while we wait for the next golden age to begin.