Rather than indulge in a few welcoming platitudes I thought I make take advantage of the opportunity to talk in general terms about this hobby of ours.

I came to gaming via a very traditional route. The dinner party was something quite outside the orbit of my parents; their traditional way of getting together with friends was for a game of cards on a Saturday night followed, maybe, by a late drink at the pub or a kitchen supper (supper being a regular meal during those times when the main meal was mid-day followed by ‘tea’ in the late afternoon). This whole arrangement – and, of course there was no TV to distract – provided fertile ground for card playing. More or less everybody could ‘play cards’.

But things changed for the post-war generation. TV had arrived. People started to become more sophisticated (and here I am speaking of the south of England where I live) and we started to give dinner parties accompanied by a bottle of wine! (You will note that I said ‘a’ bottle – never several as now!) The card game ‘Canasta’ had recently swept the world yet only a few years later the idea of getting together to play cards almost totally disappeared. By the late 60’s the idea of almost every English home buying the special packs of cards (with the extra Jokers) in order to play this new card game ‘Canasta’ would have been unthinkable. Yet it is against this unpromising background that the hobby of board gaming as we know it today was borne.

My wife and I, together with like-minded friends, quickly became involved. An evening board gaming followed by a kitchen supper (just like in my parent’s days of card playing) became a household tradition – a tradition that has been going on every week for the past 35 years. But there is one word in that first sentence that is the key to the problem faced by the board gaming industry. That word is ‘wife’. In our house we have one regular weekly gaming session plus one or two more casually arranged sessions with different people. The regular sessions are attended by 5 or 6 males, four of whom travel one hour to get to our house, but who never play at home. In consequence, although they are board gaming enthusiasts they also never buy any games. And the reason? The general one – their wives don’t enjoy it and refuse to play. Consequently they never have board gaming sessions at home. Instead, they travel an hour to come to our house.

There is obviously something about our hobby that our wives and girlfriends often do not enjoy. Not only ‘not enjoy’ but positively dislike to the extent that the card playing families of past times simply no longer exist – neither as card-players or board gamers. The cards are the same so it is the people’s perception that has changed. It is interesting that in addition to board gaming we still do play a lot of cards (and here I am not talking about Bridge parties); yet all of the folk we play cards with are 60+ years old. Our younger friends are simply not interested. (And here I should divert slightly to talk about Italy. I have always regarded Italy as being the place where family card playing is at its zenith. I have seen whole families playing cards everywhere, but maybe, like in the UK, that is no longer the case.)

So, if we return to board gaming, had this newly developed family reluctance to play games not existed it would mean that six copies of each game would have been sold as against the single copy that is played at our house.

How can this situation be turned round? I have always maintained – and here again I can speak only for the situation in the UK – if ever an industry needed an active trade association it is the board game industry. Nobody seems to speak up for it. Nobody is employed to promote the concept. If games are ever mentioned in British newspapers it is usually when some clever-dick reporter tries to be witty at a game’s expense. ‘Monopoly’ and ‘Scrabble’ seem to the only two games the general public knows about. Games are things one buys in toy-shops for children at Christmas, which means that the picture on the box (normally of some TV show) has far more importance than the game inside it. And if it turns out to be a terrible game, as many are, it is another nail in the coffin of the board gaming hobby.

The situation in Germany has shown us all how it should really be done. There are now a large number of journalists who take board gaming seriously. ‘The Game of the Year’ award carries prestige. It all comes down to promotion and awareness. One of the early ‘Games of the Year’ in Germany was ‘Dampfross’. As a result it went on to sell in previously unheard of numbers. Yet nobody seemed to remark that ‘Dampfross’ had been published previously by a smaller (but not unheard-of) publisher, and it wasn’t until it was taken up by a large publisher with a more public profile that the industry suddenly decided it was ‘The Game of the Year’. It was then published in the UK by Games Workshop and was a total failure. All this time the game was the same – it was the public awareness that was different.

So back to GiocAreA on-line. Although I obviously bid it welcome and wish it luck, I reluctantly accept that it will be read by the same group, and that group will be PC users and mostly male. If we wish our hobby to grow it has to be taken out of male dominated enclaves and into the family. In our house we never get together to play a game without it being followed by a really good meal. It is the ‘complete’ social occasion that my parents would recognise even though the games are different.

The word definitely needs to be spread and it is in the family that the start needs to be made. So to you legion of board gamers I leave you with one command – and what better than in the form of a game, namely ‘Dingbats’ –

Derek Carver