Recently, the internet told me that too many board games are produced each year. Rather than try to get their games published through a traditional publisher — which can prove difficult — game designers can all too easily whip up a crowdfund and blast out a game that hasn’t been fully developed, resulting in a glut of substandard board games. That’s what the internet tells me, anyway.
Too much variety is not often a complaint, but it happens. I hear grumblings that compare how many movies were released in a year thirty years ago versus today. Too many movies! I hear groans about the impossibility of finding the time for all of the video game releases. Too many games! If you’re the same flavor of nerd as me, you may also be stupefied trying to keep up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Too many shows!
The complaint of “too much variety” seems to belong to a specific subgenus of geek. I know the feeling. The “right amount of stuff” is exactly the amount of content I like, can afford, and can keep up with in terms of arcane details. Drip the content at precisely the speed that will allow me to obsess optimally without missing anything.
One doesn’t often hear the “too much” complaint about books; a massive library with a dizzying multitude of books is a wonderment. The attitude isn’t that there are too many to possibly read, but that there are more than enough to satisfy a lifetime. I don’t know of anybody who’s miffed because it’s just flat-out unreasonable to expect somebody to read all the books. Nobody thinks that way. But, here we are with too many board games.
Kickstarter and BLing
Kickstarter (specifically, amongst the crowdfunding options) has really been getting the stink-eye lately by a whole bevy of people, one of the topmost reasons being the empty spectacle of marketing. A successful Kickstarter campaign can consist of a flashy video, a phat stack of buzz words and detailed miniatures, without any real game to be found within. What good is thirty pounds of Cthulhu-shaped plastic if you’re just going to use it to play an eldritch version of Candy Land? The quality and richness of the gameplay itself must match or exceed the production value of the components! But it rarely does.
But how is this different from… anything else? You’re upset because people (you amongst them) are being had by unscrupulous corporate grifters selling empty boxes of unfulfilled wishes? Welcome to your first day in America; I hate to break it to you, it doesn’t get better. From cereal boxes to boner pills, everything is wrapped in a dream and sold at a premium.
Kickstarter and Hope
As a teen and a twenty-something, I had a minor love affair with ‘zines. They were often homemade little rags of hack writing and scrawled drawings, photocopied bundles of misspellings and bad layout. They lacked any of the spit and polish of a standard magazine, but they came with something very different inside them. They were often very niche in subject matter, and extremely personal in tone. When you read one of these ‘zines, you looked right into somebody’s heart with none of the rough edges knocked off. They were grim and poignant and sloppy and hilarious and gross and pathetic and right up in your face, confronting you with emotion.
The ‘zine scene was made possible by increased access to photocopiers. Suddenly, any jerkwad with a a scrap of paper and a charcoal briquette could self-publish. And they did.
Now here we stand as a community with our own board game photocopier. We have the opportunity to create some raw, honest, unapologetic material in this space. Games that are deeply honest to ourselves; games that are generated for very niche subject matter and extremely personal in tone.
But we don’t. Because here’s where my ‘zine analogy falls apart: We’re asking other people to supply the dimes. You’d have to have a pretty rabid following for other people to fund your gritty passion project. So we — as a community and as a business model — opt for the glitz and the bling and the innocuous rounded edges that will attract the greatest opportunity for fulfillment.
Nonetheless, I hold out hope.
Are there too many board games? Well, that’s a personal question for each individual. I’ll go ahead and say, for my part, that there are too many boards and not enough games, and we’ll continue to produce the same polished turds until the Earth spirals into the sun. But there are too precious few good board games, and definitely not enough grotesque ones.
Featured image by Jonathan Kemper.