I think it’s because games offer a social experience that you don’t get anywhere else.”ĭavid Reilly of NPD Group, a consumer marketing research firm, cites figures that show sales of board games rose 2.5 percent from 2002 to 2003, when consumers spent $1.04 billion on board games. “I find it interesting that at a time when people have more entertainment options than at any other time in history, games are still thriving.

“People are looking for a reason to connect,” Morris says. But we said pick one night when everyone is home and play a game together,” says Morris.įrom there, Hasbro spun the Family Game Night campaign off in other directions that included encouraging adults to play board games with other adults. “We recognized that families are very busy, running in different directions. The kids said yes, too, but didn’t think their parents wanted to play. The parents said yes, but didn’t think their kids wanted to play with them. Hasbro launched its Game Night campaign based on informal research that asked parents and kids if they were interested in playing board games together, says Mark Morris, director of public relations for Hasbro Games. The broader allure of board games in the video age has as much to do with connecting as it does with competing, whether people are playing classics like Monopoly, strategy games like Settlers of Cataan, or party games like Loaded Questions. Last month, 195 of the bookstores hosted game nights, where customers played a modified version of the newly released Trivial Pursuit Booklovers edition. Now you might find up to 100 titles, the majority of them specialty games not stocked in mass-market stores, says Ellen Heaney Mizer, the chain’s game buyer. One sign of the popularity of board games is the growing trend of finding them for sale - and being played - in nontraditional outlets, such as bookstores.īarnes & Noble bookstores began stocking board games in 1999, starting with six to eight titles. You can play five or six games in a night and you’ve got a good chance of winning at least one of them,” says Wyrick, who prefers strategy games whose outcome depends more on the choices players make than on what he calls the “roll the dice and move your mice” nature of many American games. Last month, he and his wife hosted their largest gathering of game players, some 30 adults and five children who took their seats at tables set up throughout their house. Wyrick and his buddies formed a game group that met once a month, and things took off from there. We decided we needed to do this more often.” “We only left the hotel to get something to eat.

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