There was a time when playing a Christmas board game meant dusting off an old favourite selected from a narrow range of options. Maybe Trivial Pursuit, if you wanted to show off your pub quiz chops. Or Scrabble, if you felt like flexing your wordsmith muscles. Or Monopoly, if you hoped to roll around in wads of fake cash. But these days the choice is far, far wider. Almost overwhelmingly so.
During the past decade, the modern board game scene has exploded like a cartoon kitten. As screens have come to dominate our eyelines and erode our mental health, more of us are seeking recreational solace in the more social, less toxic worlds of cardboard, cubes and wooden pawns – or “meeples”, to use the hobby parlance. Each tabletop experience has been finely crafted to yield maximum enjoyment in an often gorgeously presented way. Taking their cue from such indefatigable “Eurogame” classics as Catan and Codenames, these modern games have so grown in popularity they’ve encouraged the spread of high-street board game cafes, fuelled a boom in tabletop-related influencer activity, filled convention halls at ever-growing expos worldwide and raised millions on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter.
