Latest news with #boardgames
CNET
3 days ago
- Business
- CNET
As Trump Moves Tariff Pieces Around the Board, Tabletop Games Face Calamity
I've been playing board games for decades, from crowd-pleasers like Settlers of Catan and Sushi Go to King of Tokyo and Descent -- and in recent years, I've seen them show up in even my most mainstream social gatherings. In a world overrun by digital screens, tactile games are a novelty that gather people around a table rather than in tiny squares on a Zoom call. With bold, vibrant art styles and creative pieces to play with, tabletop gaming has expanded beyond mainstream favorites like Monopoly and Settlers of Catan with ever more intriguing games like Gloomhaven and Hive. It's these physical components that set board games apart, as their makers think up creative scenarios that players engage with using well-designed pieces. Picking up and moving these parts around is core to the magic of tabletop games, of ideas rising out of the board and fitting in players' hands. But the Trump administration's tariffs are crashing hard into that domestic scene, with dire financial consequences for businesses that depend on the import of custom physical pieces. From custom miniatures of creatures and vehicles to the boards the games are made on to the boxes they come in, the vast majority of tabletop products come out of specialized factories in China with decades of experience. Board games are created in volumes and shipped at times that make selling such unique productions profitable. Tariffs have affected many other industries that source products from China, like tech and gadget makers, but those may be manufactured in other areas. The board game industry sources its pieces from specialty factories in China that can handle small-scale batches of very specialized parts. Amid the tariffs, the board game industry has scrambled to find production alternatives in other countries, but the specificity of its products has made it difficult. If they're forced to keep making games in China, they may need to raise prices, which would be passed on to the consumer. The tariffs haven't just paused imports -- they've thrown the rest of the year's schedule into disarray. As a longtime board game player, I'm now facing the prospect of store shelves being empty around Christmas. Now is when board game makers put in their orders for games to ship in time for the holidays. But a dizzying uncertainty -- most recently with a federal court blocking many of Trump's tariffs before an appeals court reinstated them the next day -- might lead them to limit or cancel their orders, leaving store shelves empty around Christmas. "The next three weeks will be telling if we're going to have a holiday season or not, and then we'll know who's in business next year -- because if they can't make the holiday season, they may have to close up," John Stacy, executive director of the Game Manufacturers Association, a trade organization representing about 1,700 companies in the industry, said in early May. Many board game makers are small and medium-size businesses with a dozen or fewer full-time employees, making this especially devastating. Their slim margins rely on tight timelines for order and delivery to retailers and consumers to survive. These tariffs have threatened the financial outlook of anyone bringing games into the US and led the entire industry into an existential crisis. Cephalofair Games COO Price Johnson holding the company's game Frosthaven next to shipping boxes full of the same. Cephalofair Games Cepholafair Games, which makes the very successful board game Gloomhaven, successfully funded its next Gloomhaven game on crowdfunding platform Backerkit. This March, the company planned to deliver on its promises by shipping some of its new products to backers' doors -- except for Trump's new tariffs, which at their peak would have made it so expensive to import them into the country that it would be cheaper to have never made them at all. "I speak on behalf of those publishers, but we cut things really tight, and we depend on the infrastructure of our industry, the right retail stores and distribution models to really get our games distributed widely and at margins that make sense for us to operate," said Cephalofair Chief Operating Officer Price Johnson. Trump's tariffs have gone up and down, charging importers at their height a proposed 145% fee before temporarily reeling that back to 30% for importing from China -- at least for a 90-day pause before the number could shoot back up. Even that timeline is thrown into question with the recent court decisions about blocking the tariffs. The 90-day pause may be enough time to get existing products out of China, but is "the bare-minimum step to avoid pandemic-level trade disruption," Johnson wrote in a Facebook post criticizing the topsy-turvy tariff rates. But even that lower tariff rate is potentially unprofitable to import existing product stock that board game makers have stashed in warehouses outside the US, waiting for trade relief -- and wondering whether to act now or gamble on whether the tariffs spike again, which could potentially bankrupt them to import. Publishers with products to sell now are gambling with incomplete information, Stacy said. Those who will take longer than the 90-day pause to ship or finish production runs of games are left with even more uncertainty. "How can you, in good conscience, commit to a new product without knowing the costs to make, ship and import it?" Stacy said. "Setting prices to ensure profitability becomes challenging without all the factors included in the calculation. It's like playing a game where the rules change every round, and it's unclear what those rules are until you are halfway through the next round." Under the 145% tariffs, 51% of the board game companies GAMA surveyed in late April said they would have to shut their doors or lay off employees if conditions didn't improve in two to three months. "These are small businesses -- they don't have that kind of cash to weather a storm like this," Stacy said. Rollacrit, a board game maker and nerdy merchandise company staffed by veterans from the shuttered online retailer ThinkGeek, had been sitting on a reorder of Heroes of Barcadia, one of its more popular games, which it couldn't afford to bring into the US under the 145% tariffs. "If we were to ship it in now, the amount of money we'd have to pay is astronomical," Erin Zipperle, owner of Rollacrit, told me in early May. In the face of financial calamity, tabletop game producers have been scrambling for alternatives, making drastic changes and calling their US elected representatives in hopes they could lobby for leniency from the Trump administration. The crisis, reminiscent of the COVID pandemic's disruptions, has already forced several game publishers to shut down entirely. A handful of board game companies, including Stonemaier Games, XYZ Game Labs and DinkerHouse games joined product makers from other industries in suing the Trump administration over the tariffs. Even if the tariffs were completely recalled tomorrow, their impacts of increased hardship would still ripple through the industry. Board game makers would clamor for slots in factory production queues, shipping costs would ramp up, and the resulting cost and supply instability would shake consumer trust. If the tariffs extend for weeks or months to come, more publishers will likely go under, and there may not be any new board games on store shelves by the holidays. Board game pieces from a Cephalofair Games tabletop game at PAX East 2024. Cephalofair Games The board game industry is a flotilla of small businesses When most people think of board games, they imagine Monopoly or another mainstream game sold by a company as colossal as Hasbro or Mattel. But many of the popular upstarts defining the new era of tabletop gaming come from companies a fraction of the size. As widely known as the tactical fantasy roleplaying game Gloomhaven is within the games community, Cephalofair employs eight people full time, including Johnson. Rollacrit lists 10 employees on its staff page. Stonemaier Games has eight. For folks who have spent years building their businesses in an industry that requires a unique alchemy of product and marketing shrewdness blended with the wonder of playful design, becoming besieged with spiking tariffs has seemed like something of an existential crisis. Zipperle felt like he worked his entire career ensuring he had enough money to properly start and grow his business organically without outside investment, and now this happens. "We're literally the American dream of what you want to do to create a company out of nothing, and to get to this point just to be derailed by the government from a random war on toys?" Zipperle said. That echoes Trump's recent comment that "maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls" as a result of the tariffs. Board game makers weren't caught unawares -- after all, Trump campaigned on tariffs, and had deployed them in his first term. But the severity blindsided the industry, including Jamey Stegmaier, founder of Stonemaier Games, maker of hit games like Wingspan and Tokaido. "We were expecting tariffs and slimmer margins, but not like this," Stegmaier said. Though Stegmaier concedes that the decrease to 30% tariffs is progress, it still doesn't take into consideration the need for grace periods for all the products made before the tariffs -- around 250,000 units for Stonemaier, including the yet-to-be-launched game Vantage. Like Cephalofair's Price, Stegmaier has been vocal in his criticism of the Trump administration's tariffs, and even after their reduction to 30%, will continue taking part in the lawsuit against the president for tariff disruption of business. "We will absolutely proceed with the lawsuit, which focuses on the Constitutional power of Congress to apply taxes (not the president)," Stegmaier told me. "A tax like this has such a massive impact on small US businesses that it deserves the due process that we're seeking with the lawsuit." The purported intent of the tariffs is to spur US manufacturing instead of sourcing parts or products from China. But board game makers that I spoke to don't believe they'll have that effect. Even in the miraculous scenario of companies breaking ground today on new factories, it could take three to five years before the first ones start producing the kinds of miniatures and other products needed for board games. And it could be a decade before the US ramps up to the kind of product expertise and factory scale that China has. By then, many tabletop companies could be long gone. "It's a craft," Zipperle said, cautioning about all the learning and care that goes into avoiding what can go wrong among dangerous plastic fabrication processes, let alone the years of expertise needed to operate such precisely calibrated machines. "You don't just start making stained glass windows." Then there's the vulnerability of investing millions of dollars in a factory given the uncertain future. Even if a US company invests in domestic factories to make board game parts, if the tariffs are lifted at any time in the years to come, board game makers will likely simply go back to paying for cheaper production in China. It just won't be cost-effective to build in the US without consistent investment for the better part of a decade. Cephalofair Games COO Price Johnson (third from left) and the rest of the company's staff stand beside boxes of their game Frosthaven as they prepare to ship to backers. Cephalofair Games A decisive moment for small businesses with products ready to ship It's not just financial success at stake, but customer trust too. Cephalofair and other board game makers have won customer trust with track records of successful crowdfunding campaigns that stick to schedules and deliver products as they predicted. Now, tariffs threaten that trust. Rollacrit hit all the successful milestones of a crowdfunded project, but at the worst time. After launching a Kickstarter in September for its Heroes of Barcadia game that raised over $1.2 million and secured lots of preorders at set prices, the company put in its order for production, which finally finished in April, on the day Trump announced reciprocal tariffs. "It's my new favorite April Fools' Day joke," Zipperle lamented. Crowdfunding is a pivotal part of these small board game companies' business models, as it allows efficient fundraising that directly connects to customers. In 2024, backers pledged $220 million for tabletop games on Kickstarter, and while tariffs haven't yet measurably impacted the platform, the company's head of games, Asher McClennahan, said lifting the tariffs would be a relief for campaign creators. "Unlike large corporations, most Kickstarter creators are small teams — sometimes just individuals — working hard to bring their ideas to life. Even modest cost increases can have an outsized effect on their ability to fulfill rewards or stay financially on track," McClennahan told me. Kickstarter recently added a Pledge Manager to handle post-campaign schedule adjustments and a tariff manager to handle US import costs. Game makers like Cephalofair, Stonemaier and Rollacrit with successful crowdfunding campaigns scheduled to deliver backer rewards are scrambling to fulfill their orders on time, and the chaos is also affecting those about to launch new ones, said Maxwell Salzberg, co-founder of BackerKit. "You've seen less projects in the tabletop games category being fulfilled, because it sort of feels like everyone's waiting for the shoe to drop," Salzberg said. BackerKit is helping how it can, releasing its own Tariff Manager and a way to charge backers for shipping later -- say, after tariffs are reduced or (hopefully) repealed. "That's what BackerKit provides for creators," Salzburg said. "Creators are going to create. Crowdfunding is predicated off of people making cool stuff, and that's not going to ever stop. Not even tariffs can stop them." An attendee of PAX East 2024 takes a turn playing a Cephalofair Games tabletop game. An over the shoulder view of someone playing a board game with a hand of cards on a playing mat below. Alternatives? Move production outside China, abandon retailer allies…and look beyond the US Originally, Trump's reciprocal tariffs meant dramatically higher prices on imports from many other countries, but a 90-day pause on those tariffs left products from China suffering far more severe cost increases in comparison. In the interim, board game makers have looked at other nearby countries with comparable production capability, like Vietnam and Indonesia, as temporary alternatives -- or if the China-US trade war drags on, for the longer term. Tech giant Apple made similar moves over the last five years to shift iPhone production to Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries, as well as India. Amid the uncertainty, one strategy board game makers are considering is ramping up sales outside the US. Currently, 65% of Stonemaier's sales go to American buyers with 35% elsewhere in the world, but they may try to shift that split to a more even 50-50, Stegmaier said. Another way Stonemaier could offset tariffs and improve its slim margins is to push for more direct sales to consumers, though it's reluctant "because I really, really appreciate our distributor and retail infrastructure," Stegmaier said. "But it might be necessary because of lower margins in China." There will still be board game fans in the US, and there could be ways to avoid tariff price hikes by making them in-country. In fact, that's what board game makers explored during the supply chain crisis caused by the COVID pandemic. The handful of factories in the US that make game components are specialty producers -- Cartamundi, a Belgian game producer, owns a factory in Texas that makes cards for Magic: The Gathering, and another in Michigan produces basic plastic parts that don't match the meticulous detail that modern board games require. When Stegmaier looked into diversifying game production to make parts in China and boxes in the US, he discovered that it would cost as much to make just the boxes domestically as it did to make an entire complete game in China. Further, Chinese factories are better at producing at low scales and high numbers. For smaller board game creators with modest crowdfunding campaigns that want to make only 1,000 units or so to satisfy backers, China can facilitate that, while US factories might require runs of 5,000 to 10,000, Stegmaier said. Attendees of PAX East 2024 play a Cephalofair Games tabletop game. Cephalofair Games If the tariffs go away tomorrow, the damage is still done Board game makers continue looking for ways to survive. But even if the tariffs were completely ended tomorrow, the damage would still be done. "Probably close to a dozen or two" board game businesses have already shut down, Stacy told me. Game makers like Greater Than Games and Final Frontier Games have publicly announced their shuttering, blaming the economic conditions and uncertainty that they'd be able to hold out until relief came. If it doesn't arrive in the next few weeks, more may follow, Stacy said. This point in the year is when board game businesses order their stock for the holiday season, and they may not be able to afford that. The reduction to 30% offered a brief respite for Stonemaier, which was able to place orders for more stock. The bad news is that the company could order only enough during the 90-day pause to last until mid-August, which is well before its holiday print run would arrive in the US. This would strand them unless they receive more tariff respite. Ultimately, increased prices to import on thin margins are going to impact the board game industry regardless, which could -- and may still -- lead to increased costs passed on to the consumer. But companies can't make decisions until they have enough information to make big decisions about pricing, product sourcing and how they'll run their business. "Uncertainty is one of the core problems with the way these tariffs were implemented," Stegmaier said. "There was no due process, just an agent of chaos raising tariffs from 20% to 145% in the span of one week. As a result, it is impossible to properly plan ahead."
RNZ News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Hamilton hosts 45th National Scrabble Champs this weekend
The 45th National Scrabble Championship is being held in Hamilton this weekend. Photo: 123RF Hamiltonians are preparing for the 45th National Scrabble Championship hosted in the city this weekend. Top players from across New Zealand and Australia are flying in to battle it out, tile by tile. Reigning champion Howard Warner has 12 national titles already under his belt. He said he started playing board games and doing puzzles as a child. "Naturally I would gravitate towards the king of all word games when I was a bit older." He said he was pretty relaxed about this weekend's competition. "I've been doing it a long time now and I'd like to get the first game under my belt and at that point then that settles the nerves, butterflies in the stomach and then I'm fine." Warner thought about 100 players would be competing this weekend although said it could be a struggle against other 'brain sports' such as chess and bridge. Anyone who wants to follow the national champs can do so via a livestream on YouTube. A good scrabble player does not just need to be a good speller, he said. "To be honest you have to have a very good mathematical mind, believe it or not, there are a lot of things like probability theory come into it." But Warner described himself as useless at maths "except in the context of scrabble". Strategy was also important which involved knowing where to play which tiles and what to keep on your rack, as well as always looking ahead rather than just focusing on your next turn, he said. At this level players did not just learn words or their meanings, he said. "We learn huge numbers of anagrams, so a combination of seven or eight random letters and what they make, so that when we're playing a game the words can just leap into our minds straight away and we don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about it." High level scrabble players also need to be competitive and have a "killer instinct", he said. "Also what I can hang-in-ability where even if you're losing you just hang in and hang in and hang in, hoping that by the end you can turn the game just so that you can just end one point ahead of your opponent." Warner said the highest scoring word he had ever played was fiberize which got him 252 points. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Wall Street Journal
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Everybody's Mad About Uno
When a fight breaks out between a couple at one of his New York board game cafes, Greg May can guess the likely culprit without even looking up: Uno. More than 50 years after its debut, the card-shedding game is now more popular than ever, fueled by savvy marketing, nostalgia and viral stunts. That is especially true among young adults, who organize game nights around Uno, incorporate drinking rules and embrace increasingly cutthroat variations. But taking a game that already seemed designed to make people mad and reintroducing it to grown-ups who were raised on different rules can be a recipe for tension. Think politics divides? Try mixing competitors with different views on stacking 'action' cards, or getting everyone to agree on the true power of the Wild card. And nobody can seem to decide whether staples of the game of their youth – like mandating players yell 'Uno!' when they have one card left – are socially acceptable at a bar with strangers. 'Emotions can definitely run high, 'said May, co-founder of the Hex & Company and The Uncommons cafes in New York. Josh and Erin Alderson by all accounts have a peaceful marriage. But there is one issue on which they can't seem to come together. Josh says a Wild card only lets a player change the color, while Erin argues it allows the player to change the color and play a card. The couple typically defaults to Erin's ruling. Sitting on the floor of their living room in St. Louis one night this month, the duo were locked in a different kind of standoff: an Uno match that wouldn't end. 'We're both very competitive, so we can't finish in a tie,' Erin said. 'I think we ended up playing nine rounds.' (Josh won, she added somewhat begrudgingly, crediting his victory to a strategy of hoarding action cards until late in the game.) Uno's publisher, Mattel, has embraced the game's power to test relationships and often acts as referee, settling disputes on its X account, realUNOgame. '*Per management: You cannot STACK a +2 on a +2,' the account posted, denouncing a commonly held belief that stacking—or playing the same card on top of itself to double its consequence—is allowed. 'Go ahead, roast us.' Mattel also launched Uno Show 'Em No Mercy, a version designed that features what gamemakers call ruthless rules and penalties. It was the second-best-selling card game in the U.S. last year, according to research firm Circana, trailing only the classic version of Uno. Ray Adler, vice president and global head of games at Mattel, said the game's appeal stems from both its simplicity and its power to divide. 'Best friends become merciless. Seven-year-olds turn strategic,' Adler said. 'This is what makes Uno special – universal accessibility meets authentic emotions disguised as family fun.' Despite several new iterations, Uno's basic rules have remained largely unchanged since its 1971 debut. Players take turns shedding cards that match the color or number of the top card on a discard pile. If a player can't play a card, they draw a new one from the deck. The first person to ditch their hand wins. The deck is sprinkled with cards that force another player to draw more cards, thwarting their path to victory and extending the game. The other catch: You have to call out 'Uno!' when you have one card left. Maggie Burke learned this the hard way while playing Uno at summer camp. After shedding her hand down to one card, she was too shy to yell, 'Uno!' The other campers called her out. Now a 28-year-old writer in Boston, Burke had a full-circle moment while playing with an attractive stranger at a dive bar. 'Had to be really chill abt the fact that they didn't announce uno when they had one card left making their win invalid,' she posted on X. 'Couldn't let them see the game night aggression.' Burke said Uno has had a revival in her life thanks to regular game nights with friends. The group created a drinking version by adding blank cards that require the next person up to either draw 25 cards or take a shot. Andrea Williams frequently plays Uno at a bar near her apartment in Hartford, Conn., with her college friends and random patrons. 'People I don't know will join in at the bar, and I'm just like, 'I feel bad because I don't know you, but I gotta give you the Draw 4,'' she said. Expletives are often exchanged—especially after a few drinks—but 'it's always playful,' Williams said. Uno got an unexpected viral boost from a British YouTuber. At a charity soccer match in 2023, Max Fosh sprinted down the pitch in front of more than 60,000 spectators at London Stadium and tackled an opposing player in the hopes of drawing a yellow card. When the referee obliged, Fosh whipped out a green Uno Reverse card. The stunt helped supercharge a movement to use the card—which in the game reverses the order of play—as a real-life comeback meaning, 'No, you.' Now American middle schoolers stash Reverse cards in their pockets to redirect any manner of affront. In turn, teachers have tucked the cards into lanyards and stowed them in desk drawers, prepared for when students try to use the cards on them. Leigh Dyer, a 25-year-old account manager at an Orlando, Fla., marketing firm, loves Uno so much that she recently bought a miniature deck to keep in her purse for when she goes out with friends or colleagues. She has long followed house rules that allow stacking, as well as dropping multiple cards at once: 'If I have three Draw 4 cards, I'm laying them down,' she said. But recently, Dyer has started to rethink that strategy. 'I've become very cautious about stacking when I'm sitting next to my mom or my fiancé,' she said. 'Because what goes around comes back around, especially with the Uno Reverse.' Write to Connor Hart at
BBC News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Barnsley vintage board games exhibition 'celebrates being quirky'
A board games trader who owns more than 600 titles has put her vintage collection on display as part of an art Jones' 155 classic games are on show at Barnsley Jones, who was a teacher at a Barnsley college before launching her business in 2017, said the games were a great way to "bring people together" - and were of particular benefit to people with said: "For me, having been diagnosed [with autism] for a year now, it feels like a nice positive thing to do that celebrates me and my being a bit quirky." Ms Jones, who says she knows the rules for every one of her games by heart, said: "I've always said board games are great for autistic people, which now includes me."Most of the chat is around the game in some way, and any other conversation comes more naturally."There's reduced expectation of eye contact too – it's not rude if I don't look at you when I speak, because I'm looking at the board."Crochet collections, anime figures, drag outfits and a display of rare Barnsley FC memorabilia are also on show at the exhibition. After spending 17 years as an English teacher, Ms Jones moved to Horsforth in Leeds, and launched her business Cards or Die in the hope of a more "flexible and forgiving" work life."My main focus is on social isolation, so events might be aimed towards people with mental health difficulties, learning difficulties, or people who are disabled or neurodivergent," she said."It's about bringing people together. People say they've made friends who they wouldn't have met otherwise."She also holds sessions in pubs and corporate oldest item in her collection is Hearts from 1918, which people often request at also has multiple copies of Connect 4, Battleship and Guess Who, all "classics" from the 1960s and 70s."People get talking, saying 'we used to play that at my grandma's', or 'I had that when I was a kid'," Ms Jones games appearing at the exhibition include Find the Fault and Jumbles, both from the 1940s. Ms Jones said: "In Jumbles, you have to find the actors and countries in the letters which are all mixed up."The trouble is, it's countries that don't exist anymore and actors you've never heard of."Her love for board games runs in the family, she said, although her mum would tend to only play things she saw as educational."She bought me one called Equality – it's like scrabble but with numbers. It was the hardest thing in the world."Equality remains in Ms Jones' collection, although she described it as "horrific".Some of the older items will have to stay on shelves or podiums at the exhibition, which runs until August, due to them being so Jones added: "I really love my vintage collection. "I hope if people see them, maybe they'll want to play them more."The exhibition is part of Come As You Really Are, a national showcase of hobbies set up by artist Hetain Patel and Artangel, a group which produces "extraordinary art in unusual places". Listen to highlights from South Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
What America's first board game can teach us about the aspirations of a young nation
In 2023 alone, the board game industry topped US$16.8 billion and is projected to reach $40.1 billion by 2032. Classics like 'Scrabble' are being refreshed and transformed, while newer inventions such as 'Pandemic' and 'Wingspan' have garnered millions of devotees. This growing cardboard empire was on my mind when I visited the American Antiquarian Society in August 2023 to research its collection of early games. As I sat in that archive, which houses such treasures as the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in British America, I beheld another first in American printing: a board game called 'The Travellers' Tour Through the United States.' This forgotten game, printed the year after Missouri became a state, has a lot to say about America's nascent board game industry, as well as how a young country saw itself. Produced by the New York cartography firm of F. & R. Lockwood, 'The Travellers' Tour Through the United States' was an imitation of earlier European geography games, a genre of educational game. Geography games generally used a map for a board, and the rules involved players reciting geographic facts as they race toward the finish. 'The Travellers' Tour' first appeared in 1822, making it the earliest known board game printed in the U.S. But for almost a century another game held that honor. In 1894, the game manufacturer Parker Brothers acquired the rights to 'The Mansion of Happiness,' an English game first produced in the U.S. in 1843. In its promotional materials, the company declared it 'The first board game ever published in America.' That distinction ended in 1991 when a game collector found the copy of 'The Travellers' Tour' in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society. By 1822 the American market for board games was already becoming established, and middle- and upper-class parents would buy games for their families to enjoy around the parlor table. At that time, New Year's – not Christmas – was the holiday for gift giving. Many booksellers, who earned money from the sale of books, playing cards and other paper goods throughout the year, would sell special wares to give as presents. These items included holiday-themed books, puzzles – then called 'dissected maps' – and paper dolls, as well as games imported from England such as 'The New Game of Human Life' and 'The Royal And Entertaining Game of Goose.' Since 'The Travellers' Tour' was the first board game to employ a map of the U.S., it might have been an especially interesting gift to American consumers. It's difficult, however, to gauge just how popular 'The Travellers' Tour' was in its time. No sales records are known to exist, and since so few copies remain, it likely wasn't a big seller. A global database of library holdings shows only five copies of 'The Travellers' Tour' in institutions around the U.S. And while a handful of additional copies are housed in museums and private archives, the game is certainly a rarity. Announcing itself as a 'pleasing and instructive pastime,' 'The Travellers' Tour' consists of a hand-colored map of the then-24 states and a numbered list of 139 towns and cities, ranging from New York City to New Madrid, Missouri. Beside each number is the name and description of the corresponding town. Using a variant spelling for the device, the instructions stipulate the game should be 'performed with a Tetotum.' Small top-like devices with numbers around their sides called teetotums functioned as alternatives to dice, which were associated with immoral games of chance. Once spun, the teetotum lands with a random side up, revealing a number. The player looks ahead that number of spaces on the map. If they can recite from memory the name of the town or city, they move their token, or traveler, to that space. Whoever gets to New Orleans first, wins. Though not necessary to play 'The Travellers' Tour,' the descriptions provided for each location tell historians a lot about America's national aspirations. These accounts coalesce into a flattering portrait of the nation's agricultural, commercial, historical and cultural character. Promoting the value of education, the game highlights institutions of learning. For example, Philadelphia's 'literary and benevolent institutions are numerous and respectable.' Providence boasts 'Brown University, a respectable literary institution.' And Boston's 'citizens … are enterprising and liberal in the support of religious and literary institutions.' As the game pieces meander toward New Orleans, players learn about Richmond's 'fertile backcountry' and about the 'polished manners and unaffected hospitality' of the citizens of Charleston. Savannah 'contains many splendid edifices' and Columbia's 'South Carolina College bids fair to be a valuable institution.' Absent from any corresponding descriptions, however, is any mention of what John C. Calhoun called America's 'peculiar institution' of slavery and its role in the fabric of the nation. And while four entries briefly reference American Indians, no mention is made of the ongoing dispossession and genocide of millions of Indigenous people. Though it promotes an American identity based on a sanitized version of the nation's economic might and intellectual rigor, 'The Travellers' Tour' nonetheless represents an important step toward what has become a burgeoning American board game industry. Two centuries later, board game culture has matured to the point that new titles such as 'Freedom: The Underground Railroad' and 'Votes for Women' push the genre to new heights, using the joy of play to teach the history of the era that spawned America's first board game. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Matthew Wynn Sivils, Iowa State University Read more: Gen Zers and millennials are still big fans of books – even if they don't call themselves 'readers' 'Baldur's Gate 3' became the surprise hit of 2023 by upending conventional wisdom about what gives video games broad appeal How the Ouija board got its sinister reputation Matthew Wynn Sivils does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
