Donovan - Its all a game: a short history of board games

Also by Tristan Donovan

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Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World

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First published in hardback in the United States of America in 2017 by Thomas
Dunne Books, an imprint of St Martins Press

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2018
by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Tristan Donovan, 2017, 2018
The moral right of Tristan Donovan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The following images within the plate section are reproduced with kind permission of the following parties: Page 1: Royal Game of Ur Trustees of the British Museum; Senet Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund. Page 2: Lucille Ball at backgammon Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Omar Sharif playing backgammon Rex Features by Shutterstock. Page 3: The Checkered Game of Life and The Game of Life, courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York. Page 4: The Landlords Game and Charles Darrow Monopoly board, courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York. Page 5: Monopoly board, courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York; giant Monopoly board Paul Brown/Alamy Live News. Page 6: Marvin Glass and Ideal Toy Company Al Fenn/Getty Images; Mouse Trap Game, courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York. Page 7: Boys and girls playing Twister Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Monogamy Creative Conceptions. Page 8: Big Catan Maximillian Metzler 2015; Draughts Board Game Caf Draughts Board Game Caf.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 453 5
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 455 9

Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic Books
An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
2627 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To my sister Jade,
the queen of overturned Monopoly boards

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

THE BIRTH OF A NEW GAMING ERA

In February 2014 Nick Curci crawled through a hole in the hardboard sealing up a railway arch in East London and discovered his future.

Once his eyes had adjusted to the gloom inside, he saw a large bare space topped with a ceiling of curved brickwork. It was perfect. This was exactly the kind of place he needed to fulfil his mission to open Draughts, Londons first board-game caf. There was nothing in there at all just an empty old archway but I thought it was amazing, he recalls. It fitted with this retro feeling of being in somewhere cosy with bricks over us.

Today that Victorian-era archway on Acton Mews in Hackney looks and feels very different. While the exposed brickwork and rumble of passing London Overground trains remains, the entrance is now an expanse of glass, the walls are lined with shelves packed with hundreds of board games and the gloom has been replaced by inviting orange lighting.

Its an uninspiring Tuesday afternoon in early January when I visit Draughts, the kind of day where the clouds hang so low the city feels like its trapped under a duvet and yet there are still a few groups of game players huddled around the tables. This is probably our slowest week in the whole year its the first week when everyone goes back to work, says Curci as we grab one of the spare tables. Its busier in the evenings and we can have up to ninety people, depending on how we arrange the tables.

Curci says he stumbled rather than planned to get into the board-game caf business.

Raised in Marlboro, a hamlet on the Hudson River in New York State just north of Manhattan, Curci used to work in e-commerce helping retailers with their digital strategies. His work brought him to London in 2011 and soon after he had his first encounter with the new wave of board games that have been reviving interest in tabletop play in recent years. One of those he tried was Pandemic, a game where players work together to fight global disease outbreaks. I found it to be a novelty as a cooperative game, he says. Its a completely foreign concept to the games we knew about growing up, like Sorry!, Game of Life or Monopoly.

Things snowballed from there. He told his childhood friend Jason Chung, who was still in the US, about the new games he had discovered and the pair began thinking that maybe board games could be the basis for the business they had always talked about starting together while growing up in Marlboro. I had this idea that maybe there was something in board games because it seemed like a growing industry with all the new games coming out, Curci says. Jason then discovered that these board-game cafs existed but there wasnt one in London.

One of the North American cafs that caught their eye was Snakes & Lattes, which opened in Toronto in August 2010. Snakes & Lattes is sometimes called North Americas first board-game caf but others such as the Haunted Game Caf in Fort Collins, Colorado, predate it.

The true birthplace of the dedicated board-game caf seems to be South Korea. By 2004 the Korean capital Seoul already had around 130 cafs renting out games and tables by the hour. Other East Asian countries followed suit and by 2012 there were around 200 game cafs in Beijing, and Singapores The Mind Cafe had gone international thanks to the addition of an outlet in New Delhi.

While Snakes & Lattes was not the first, it was the board-game caf that caught the imagination of the media and board-game fans in the west. So much so that in September 2015 the Canadian TV channel Fibe TV1 began broadcasting a sitcom about the cafs early days called Snakes & Lattes: The Show. Soon, board-game cafs were sprouting up in cities throughout North America and in August 2012 the idea crossed the Atlantic when the Game Hub in Edinburgh opened its doors for the first time.

Today, board-game cafs can be found all over the world, from San Francisco to New York, Sydney to Tokyo and Paris to Berlin as well as cities like Belfast, Brighton, Bristol, Hull, Liverpool, Nottingham and Oxford in the UK.

Most board-game cafs have the same core business model and Draughts, which opened in November 2014, is no different. At Draughts, players pay 5 per person and then get to pick games from a collection that boasts nearly 800 options, which cover the gamut of board-gaming. There are ancient perennials like chess, traditional favourites such as Cluedo, emerging classics like Ticket to Ride and the latest flavour of the month among those who hang out online at websites like BoardGameGeek.

After paying the fee theres little pressure to hurry just the temptation of craft beers on tap, hot coffees and tasty snacks. Draughts also holds regular special events, including game-design workshops with professional game-makers, and offers themed cocktails such as the Galaxy Trucker an espresso, chocolate-and-coffee liqueur, Baileys and whipped cream concoction, inspired by the board game of the same name.

While Draughts is all about games, its clientele is not limited to board-game devotees. We get a good mix of people, says Curci. During the school breaks theres a lot of families in the day. After 6 p.m. we usually have young professionals. We also get a lot of couples on dates a lot of people tell us, We had our first date here. We see ourselves a lot like a modern cinema experience where a film geek could see an artsy film or an action buff could find something for them.