Do you remember what Board Games you played in your childhood? For me it was Horse Racing and Betting, memory game, dice and Rain. I was born in 1983, and without knowing it at the time, the aforementioned “games” became the cornerstone of my longtime hobby – collecting board games.

I recently looked back in time, to the pre-revolutionary years, and realized how much this whole business has actually changed in just a few decades. So I decided to summarize what I remember into a few hopefully informative, but mostly nostalgic paragraphs. Our story begins in what can rightly be described as a difficult time…

DARK TIMES OF BOARD GAMES

Not that there was no imagination in our country during the socialist era, but the authors were limited by an ideology that permeated all layers of society. The ownership of private property or the promotion of ideas that the regime, even out of the corner of its eye, might consider obscurantist, imperialist, or even Americanist, were taboo. And the same rules governed the entertainment we could indulge in.

While American children were fleeing from rolling lava boulders in Fireball Island, or being hacked to bits by sharks and water lizards in the board game Survive: Escape from Atlantis, we, the imperialistically uncorrupted youth of the Eastern Bloc, were left with such gems as The Flash, The Mikado, Man, Don’t Be Angry, and Robbers. But the game that is probably the most etched in the hearts of all those who remember it at the time is Racing and Betting. A conceptually benign clone of the successful American game Monopoly (original design from 1938), where you don’t build imperialism, but honestly, socialistically, bet hard-earned crowns on horses.

For that time, the most typical component of board games was probably a six-sided dice. In most cases, chance decided where you could move, what you got for a card, and what you did with it. Kind of indicative of the degree of decision making you usually had in real life.

FALL AND RISE OF BOARD GAMES

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the floodgates of entrepreneurship opened, and the first private companies focused on the sale of toys and board games. One of the first foreign products on our market was the collectible card game Magic the Gathering, which dates back to 1993. This flagship game eventually became immortal, gained a gigantic community of fans, and thanks to its success, it lives on to this day.

Diverse ideas and mechanisms are beginning to emerge, giving rise to new genres. The famous Settlers of Catan appear, Doomtrooper and Shadowfist are played in school desks, and players who have longed to be a hero all their lives encounter Dragon’s Den for the first time.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF BOARD GAMES

The first decade of the new millennium is recorded in our history as the golden age of board games. A number of fantastic and much-praised board games appeared on the scene, definitively writing off the last days of Člobrda. The still-played family game Tickets, Please! and Citadel, blockbusters like Race for the Galaxy (Conquerors of the Universe), and the legendary Galaxy Trucker by developer Vladi Chvátil, whose Arena cast a spell on many board gamers back in the late nineties.

Every year more and more new foreign language games are coming to the Czech Republic, especially from America and Germany. A company called Fantasy Flight Games is emerging on the market, whose hallmark is mass-produced, luxuriously crafted games, some of which often reach monumental proportions. It’s a time when FFG still holds the rights to process the then-legendary Warhammer, and so they’re churning out WeHook from the factories through every orifice. Little did anyone know then that games like Horus Heresy or Chaos in the Old World would become such legends in a few years – thanks, among other things, to the manufacturer losing the WH license within a few years.

THE SILVER AGE OF BOARD GAMES

The end of the golden age was heralded on April 28, 2009, when the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter appeared.

Kickstarter was created to bring small projects to life by enthusiasts, visionaries and passionate entrepreneurs. All you need to do is to have a good enough business plan and presentation, and if there is interest among the public, your backers can fund it.

On February 19, 2015, Exploding Kittens, published by Blackfire in the Czech Republic under the title Exploding Kittens, became one of the most successful projects on the platform. The game boasted more than 219,000 backers and nearly 9,000,000 dollars raised.

Within three years, Kickstarter’s gaming section grows to a total of 3,301 successful projects, and as of March 16, 2019, approximately 17,000 funded games totaling $1 billion are reported.

If we’ve written before that FFG was (and still is) churning out licensed games at breakneck speed from every orifice, we can say the same with confidence about Kickstarter itself. Potential fresh designers quickly discovered that the crowdfunding platform is best succeeded by polished presentation, and the market was (and still is) flooded with a whirlwind of games that were a feast for the eyes on first play, but were rather mediocre, and in many cases below average, pieces.

On the other hand, many (not only) Czech publishers are now looking to Kickstarter as the primary tool for capturing new talent and game hits. Thanks to it, not only Kittens, but also the West Kingdom trilogy, the fantastic Brass, and the upcoming Radlands have reached us.

CONCLUSION

If the first decade of the new millennium can be considered a golden age, marked by games that were especially appreciated by the then still nascent gaming community, the current state of affairs marks a silver age, when games like Unmatched, Chronicles of Crime and Legends of the West begin to fill the busy supermarket shelves. Slowly but surely, board games are beginning to creep into the homes of “muggles” who were virtually untouched by modern gaming culture and new game mechanics. The dice roll as the primary movement mechanic has all but disappeared, and control and choice have become the watchwords of modern 21st century games.

The younger generation has come to see board games as a new kind of social entertainment for hipsters, while the older generation prefers them as a way to pull the “young” away from the computer.

So much for the brief history of board games, and their evolution over some 40 years. You’d think there’d be nothing to improve on. But time has proven that even something as simple as dice, wood and paper goes hand in hand with both technology and a change in social mindset.

Many games have already managed to find their way not only to our desks, but even to our phones and tablets through various apps. As a result, they offer a much broader narrative, allowing you to experience adrenaline and panic in real time, and can also set game objects in the real world through augmented reality.

If you love these board games, don’t hesitate to visit this online store (Tlama Games) focused on exciting board games for fans of all genres.