Not Like Mousetrap: The Perception of Analogue Games

PART 1 – Bungalow Banshee

Recently, I played a game. In a bar. With people. Crazy, right?

The game we played was called ‘Billionaire Banshee’. The premise, for those unfamiliar, is that players are presented with the traits of a hypothetical person (one positive and one negative) and must then decide if they would go on a date with this person. That’s it. That’s pretty much the entire game.

For something so simple, Billionaire Banshee is a surprising amount of fun. Or at least I assume it is, because I don’t actually own a copy of Billionaire Banshee, and have never played it. Instead I had a deck of blank cards and some biros (the supermarket own-brand cola of gaming), and an at-best hazy understanding of the rules. This version of the game was dubbed, thanks to a mishearing, ‘Bungalow Banshee’.

Memorable questions were posed. Would you date a person with the voice of Patrick Stewart, but who frequently screamed the word ‘BEES’ at the top of their lungs? Truly, we plumbed the depth of our souls in the search for answers. I laughed a great deal. We all did.

A few days later, one of the people I was playing with came up to me and said what a good time they had. Indeed, that their view of games had been altered because of it. Admittedly this was delivered at the far end of several beers, so maybe the idea was exaggerated slightly. Still, I hope the sentiment was true.

In traditional SPPS fashion, this got me thinking things over. Really, today’s topic is how the hobby of gaming is perceived by those who are not a part of it, and what I’m really trying to do when I introduce people to analogue games like Bungalow Banshee.

Is it reasonable to want to shift popular opinion to see the hobby in a more favourable light?  Can it be done, or is it the naive dream of a fool high on bath salts?

PART 2 – The early years

To understand my view on the subject, it would be worth taking a moment to shed some light how my abrupt, disorganised and entirely unexpected entry into the hobby came about.

Unlike many people who are now part of the combined hobby of board, table and role playing games, I was a relative latecomer. Aside from the occasional game of Monopoly or Risk as a child, my experience with analogue games was limited. As far as the more complex side of the hobby went, I read a couple of Ian Livingstone’s wonderful Fighting Fantasy books, but I have absolutely no recollection of playing them as they were intended.

During my teen years I played poker precociously although always avoided playing for money, partly because the thought intimidated me, but mostly because I wasn’t very good. Once leisure time became more limited, and it became harder to get groups together regularly, my relationship with analogue games pretty much ended.

However, all this changed, rather abruptly, sometime in the mid 2010s. My dad, ever the fan of car-boot sales and questionable bargains, had acquired a bag of houses and hotels from some special edition of Monopoly. Why he bought these, especially considering the purchase was literally just a plastic bag full of metal with no board, or box, or cards, I have no idea. That said, these were no ordinary pieces of plastic –these were lovely, heavy pieces of gold and silver metal which had real weight and substance to them. They were nice to own but entirely useless.

The moment my dad realised he didn’t want them (which I suspect was more or less the same moment he handed over his money), they were gifted over to me rather than being sent straight to the bin. That same afternoon, a warm summer Sunday, I emptied the bag onto my kitchen table and began thinking about what they could be used for.

The next thing I know, eight hours had passed and I was sitting on the floor, cutting out hundreds of cardboard hexagons amid a feverish nest of paper clippings.

Inspired by the pieces in that simple plastic bag, I had envisioned a game of my own design – a grand strategy game rich in diplomacy, intrigue and negotiation. A game that would model politics and technological progression across generations. ‘Diplomarisk’, as I dubbed it, became the first game I ever made.

Looking back, it was actually pretty terrible– slow, clunky, and packed with counter-intuitive rules that made sense at the time, but were largely incomprehensible afterwards. In the moment, though, I was brimming with excitement at the possibilities it represented. Although it was bad, I hesitate to call it uninspired given the inspiration which went into it.

I’ve made other games since then, and would like to think they have steadily improved, but have yet to create something better than what I would consider ‘mildly okay.’

All this said, I am of course wildly biased when it comes to my take on this topic. But if some of that bias can help broaden the appeal of the hobby, even if it’s only a little, it’s worth including.

PART 3 – You mean like Mousetrap?

I might have been hooked by the potential that games could bring, but I feel it’s safe to say that the majority of people, at least in Britain, are in the dark when it comes to realising what games are, and what they can be.

In the past, when I have mentioned to people that I design (or used to design) games as a hobby, several times the reply has been “You mean like Monopoly?”

In one case I shudder to recall, the person I was talking to looked at me with a mixture of pity and disgust and asked with absolute sincerity “Board games? You mean like Mousetrap?”

No. I do not mean like Mousetrap.

Games have come a long, long way in a relatively short space of time. Monopoly and Risk are no longer the go-to games as designs and themes have improved exponentially over the last 30 years. I am immeasurably thankful for this, and there are many excellent essays and videos on the subject available online. I highly recommend checking them out.

But to most people, the idea of board or table games is restricted to the mental image of asocial, nerdy looking people playing Dungeons and Dragons in a dim basement, or the classic icon of arguments during the annual game of Monopoly.

Perhaps you have memories of sitting around the table at Christmas, playing Monopoly with your family. You are three hours in, and down to your last £100.  Your father, having indulged in one too many Christmas eggnogs, insists that Park Lane isn’t a real space and therefore he doesn’t have to pay rent there. Your younger sibling, who hasn’t really understood the rules or even realised you were playing a game, has begun to eat the houses.

Monopoly-related arguments are so prevalent, in fact, that Hasbro opened a hotline a few years ago to help deal with fallout during the Christmas period. I really wish I was making that up.

But despite a negative overall image, within certain niches the hobby is thriving and moving from strength to strength. I attend a gaming group extremely sporadically in the city in which I live. It takes place in a nice, spacious bar and the group occupies the entire upper floor. Although I hardly ever show up because I am lazy and unmotivated, last I saw it is going strong. All kinds of games are played – short party games of social deduction and bluffing, heavy war games involving dozens of tiny figurines, complex strategy games, and everything in between. I have not seen one copy of Monopoly.

One day, while waiting at the bar, I overhead the following conversation between some other patrons:

“What’s going on upstairs?”

“I don’t know. Some board gaming group or something.”

“Like Dungeons and Dragons?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“…”

“…”

“It looks really fun though.”

“Yeah, it does.”

Conversations like this give me a glimmer of hope, but also illustrate just how far the hobby has to go in order to break away from its stereotype.

I genuinely believe games can be for everyone. They can be stupid or funny, or exciting or tense or even intimate. They can let you bluff and negotiate and pull off amazing feats of social dexterity in a way so many other things can’t. In this strange, twilight world where social norms are suspended, you can spend an evening flamboyantly lying to the people you are with and making every effort to disrupt their carefully laid plans, and have a great time doing it. And at the end, everyone has enjoyed themselves. What a wonderful prospect that is!

One of the greatest things about analogue games, played face to face with other people, is the ability to genuinely elevate mundane actions to points of significance. If you pull off an amazing bluff, or outwit an opponent, or make a suggestion that wins the game for your team, it is you who have actually done it. Not a character on a screen, but you personally. Such moments of significance have an extremely important place in social interaction, and the opportunity to experience these moments in a context where the usual rules of interaction are tweaked never fails to get me excited.

All good games, I think, play off this idea to some degree and it is one of the most appealing things about the hobby – something which is so often overlooked by those outside it.

I do so want to break the stereotype that gaming has. I want to show people, like with Bungalow Banshee, that they can be fun and cool. I want people to think of Pandemic instead of Monopoly. I want people to think of Werewolf when they think of party games, and I know if I hear someone suggest we play a drinking game called ‘Ride the Bus’ again I’m going to beat them to death. If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. I hate Ride the Bus so, so much.

PART 4 – Games and inclusivity

But this raises the question: do games have an obligation to be open to everyone? Is it a duty to strike out and attempt to appeal to people outside of the niche market? Obviously, games will not break the stereotype without reaching out into the wider community, but that doesn’t quite answer the question.

Many people will be put off by a game heavily featuring wizards or robots, and not without reason. Some games, which have done extremely well on Kickstarter, actively seem to be trying to create controversy. Kingdom Death: Monster, a game which attracted over $12 million, prominently and frequently features scantily clad, large-breasted women being murdered in a variety of horrific ways.

I have never played the game and so can’t comment on it, but if your idea of board gamers is of the asocial, awkward variety, this is not going to do much to change your mind.

That said, I don’t believe games have an obligation to be inclusive. Take Munchkin, a very widespread game filled with jokes and references to Dungeons and Dragons. If you are unfamiliar with Dungeons and Dragons, as I am, the humour is likely to go totally over your head. But I don’t dislike Munchkin because I don’t understand it. I don’t like Munchkin because it isn’t very good. I have only played once and, while I enjoyed myself, it was because of the people I was with rather than the game.

And this, I think, is the crux of the issue. Games do not have to reach out to people outside the hobby, but the hobby probably isn’t going to grow without that happening.

Football isn’t inclusive at all. It is, essentially, a game of millionaires, incoherent chanting, casual racism and binge drinking, but it is still immensely popular. I don’t get football, but if you do I totally understand why – my view of football is a simple and stereotypical one. Football, however, doesn’t have to reach out- it is so ingrained in British culture that it can sustain an enormous fan-base with very little active effort. The hobby of analogue gaming does not have such a luxury.

PART 5 – The future

If gaming is to grow as a hobby, word of it needs to be spread in a way that doesn’t isolate people. The people I played Bungalow Banshee with would never in a million years have agreed to play a heavy war game where orcs and humans hit each other with pointy sticks. At first they weren’t even that interested in playing a game at all. But thanks to the suggestion of someone else at the table, something was brought out that hopefully changed at least one mind, at least a little.

Things such as Escape Rooms are doing wonders to demystify games to people who wouldn’t ordinarily consider them, and I hope to see them continue to thrive. Halloween is coming up soon, and I’m looking forward to reeling out a game of Werewolf if I can convince enough people. Drinking games are common, and for me Werewolf is up there with the best precisely because drinking is entirely optional. That, and the colossal amounts of lying, paranoia, and finger pointing which become so fun when intoxicated.

I’d like to bring out Two Rooms and a Boom at some point as well, but of course I have a vested interest in all of this. I want more people to see games as I do: to see the potential for fun, for excitement, for tension and strategy and all those moments that make life more interesting. I want games to be accepted in the same way that being a football fan is. I want this because I have, both intentionally and unintentionally, invested a large part of my life so far thinking about games – how they work, why they work, and how they are seen.

Perhaps I want to change things because large parts of my regular life are underwhelming and dull. It’s a long way to go and the effort is immense, but I hope that someday it will be the case that Monopoly is held in its rightful place, as a relic of what the hobby once was, rather than what it is, and nobody will ever again think of Mousetrap as all that games can be.