In which I venture into France, boardgames and subcultures. By the time this post goes up I will have been across to France for a board-gaming week. It’s also an internet de-tox, so I will be away from one of the major distractions in my life, as well as a source of much research, and many rabbit-holes.
Board-games are something of a niche market, catering for a fairly small audience. I’ve never been around a hundred or so people in this niche so I’m looking forward to learning what makes them tick, what drives them to spend a lot of money on this and… as so many of the games are either sf or fantasy in origin or inspiration, if they read sf/fantasy, and what they choose to read.
I’ll tell you what I find next week.
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “Bored Games”
Enjoy!
I just spent a week playing board games every night with a very small group. As one of them said, “For us, it’s all about the banter.”
This antique person thought you meant Scrabble and such.
I know! Right? But we weren’t playing fantasy games either… Castle Panic, Taboo, and Blank Slate. Games I never heard of till last year.
Carcasonne, Settlers of Catan, Azul, Ticket to Ride . . . Board gamers are my other social group. Smaller than my SF/F social group, but all face-to-face, rather than 99.9% on line.
I was big into board wargaming from late elementary school through the end of college. It was how I got into writing as I edited gaming zines in high school and college. (Including writing a lot of copy to fill the pages.) Then I got into model shipbuilding and transferred the writing to articles about modeling. And from there into books on history.
So you never know where gaming will take you.
Even us introverts occasionally need to interact with others. We enjoy having friends over to play a game. There’s a point to the activity which the average social gathering completely lacks.