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Swimming at the beach is by no means the hottest activity this summer. Get out your lucky Monopoly token as Callum Glennen delves into Australia’s board game resurgence.

In July last year, the Melbourne Showgrounds played host to the first Penny Arcade Expo to be held outside of the United States of America.

It is one of the most popular videogame events in the world. It featured panels with developers, competitions and a huge numbers of unreleased games available for the public to play. While wandering the show floor during the three-day event, I was surprised to find the busiest area not to be the videogame show floor, but the board game library.

Rarely was there a table free during the weekend. Strangers would meet and either collaborate or compete in one of the hundreds of board games available to borrow. The Penny Arcade Expo’s slogan is ‘Welcome Home’, and there isn’t a better place for Australia’s increasing board game hobbyist community.

Not just a local phenomenon, board games have been seeing a renewed popularity recently in the United States and the UK. While classics like Monopoly and Cluedo are still as popular as ever, exciting new games are constantly being released based on television shows, books and even video games. While these releases are largely coming from Europe and America, Australia’s development community is continuing to grow.

Phil Harding has loved and designed board games ever since he was a child. He founded Adventureland Games in 2007 to hand make a fifty-copy run of his first game Archaeology. It was a sell out and went on to multiple re-prints. As a one-man development team, he faces a number of challenges.

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Achaeology: The Card Game. Image: Phil Harding, Adventureland games.

“Printing a game is really expensive. The main problem is really cash flow, as even if a game sells pretty well you aren’t really making much of a profit. Exposure is also hard to achieve because the board gaming scene is quite small and spread out in Australia. I have had the most success selling my games online and overseas,” says Harding via email.

In July this year he turned to Kickstarter with a target to raise $5,000 to fund a production of his new game Pack of Heroes. It was successfully funded in August, raising $38,339 with over 1100 backers.

“Kickstarter basically allowed me to get the cash flow upfront to produce a game that was going to be my biggest production so far. It is also a great way of building a fan base for a game. Having a ‘Print and Play’ version of the game available meant that people could start playing it and telling their friends about it before the game was even out,” says Harding.

“Running a crowd funding campaign is a lot of hard work though. Each backer has really thrown their trust and support behind you, so you really want to honor that. This means being pretty much on call to respond to questions and concerns, and to keep people in the loop and excited about the game.”

Another of Harding’s games, Dungeon Raiders, recently won Boardgames Australia’s best Australian game of 2013. Melissa Rogerson co-founded Boardgames Australia in 2007 to recognise and promote the Australian board game development community. Her parents owned a game shop and she played competitive bridge with the Victorian youth team. Board games appealed to her as more relaxing competitive game when bridge began to consume too much time.

“We [Boardgames Australia] work in three areas. The first is the awards that we do, and that’s all about rewarding games that are released in a particular year” said Rogerson.

Their Inaugural winner was Harding’s Archaeology, which went on to be picked up by a European publisher after winning.

“The second avenue we peruse is around education and how games can be incorporated into schools,” said Rogerson.

“The third thing we want to do is really foster and grow the Australian games Industry. What we do there is we run workshops for game designers.”

In their ‘Proto Spiel’ events, Boardgames Australia brings game designers together to playtest their unfinished games with each other to get valuable feedback from each other.

The popularity and organisations that surround board games in Germany have been an inspiration for Boardgames Australia, with their game of the year based off the German ‘Spiel Des Jahres’ award given out by the top German board game journalists.

“We’d seen how that had contributed to the quality of games. When there are awards there’s a little bit on incentive there, but also to game sales” said Rogerson.

“For game of the year, they talk about sales of 150,000 units being kind of poor … these really good quality games have become much more mainstream in Germany than they are here.”

Germany’s love of videogames has perhaps been largely responsible for the recently renewed popularity of the game as a medium. Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne have become worldwide smash hits. Referred to as German- or Euro-style games, these stratergy board games have tightly structured rules, complex mechanics, and extremely tactical.

However that is not to say that the rest of the world is left out. Ticket to Ride was published by Mark Kaufmann and Eric Hautemont who left their Silicone Valley jobs to persue their passion. Developed by Alan R. Moon, its popularity has exploded worldwide.

Drew Van Schoonhoven has run the Perth based Red Griffin Games for two and a half years. While Boardgames don’t sell the in the same numbers as comic books, they attracted a dedicated audience at the Penny Arcade Expo.

“We found a lot of people saying they just didn’t have anywhere to get them from or that even online with postage the price was just too much. We also found the crowd that PAX attracted was much more a community of avid gamers who were willing to travel from all parts of Australia and the world. This really affirmed for me, what I already knew was true that people still enjoy playing board games” said Van Schoonhoven.

It’s the players of games that benefit from all these new games. Christopher Short runs Café Games, a Melbourne group who regularly meet to play board games communally. When it started in 2008 he was limiting numbers to 16 people. Now, he has upwards of 150.

“I want it to be accessible to anyone who feels like they can come” says Short. “The concept I’ve always had for Café Games is that it’s a social club, which has board games there. The board games can provide, along with the wine, a bit of a social lubricant. It lets people engage with each other and make friends when they wouldn’t normally know what to say. It’s a bit better than standing around at a bar saying, ‘so what’s your job?’”

Community is at the core for many people’s enjoyment of board games, and for Boardgames Australia community is ultimately what they are trying to solidify.

“Boardgames are primarily a social activity’ says Rogerson, ‘It’s about slow cooking, slow living, and I think people want to turn off sometimes, I don’t think they always want to be always looking at a screen. I’ve heard some suggestions that for shy people, playing a game gives a framework for that social interaction.”

The social aspect is a key element for Harding in his games too.

“Board games are a uniquely social activity that can appeal to people of all ages and backgrounds. Board games are very effective at building relationships in families, schools and community groups. They can also be used in all sorts of creative ways in education and community building.

Callum Glennen is a freelance journalist in Melbourne, Australia. You can tweet at him @CallumGlennen or listen to his music podcast at www.albumattackforce.com.

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