Recently finding myself hating staring at screens more and more, I've dove pretty deep into the world of board games and its incredible. It reminds me a lot of the earlier days of the web — the group is still small enough to be niche, and there isn't competition so much as there's a general willingness for everyone to succeed together.
People create new ideas and then other games will iterate and improve the mechanics until you end up with some I pretty genius stuff. And if you try to create your own games (which I am), then you'll find another sub-niche of people that are even more awesome. Nearly everyone is friendly and really happy to set aside generous amounts of time aside from their undoubtedly busy schedules (because there are very few full-time game designers out there) to help you out.
It's the same feeling I used to get from Internet stuff.
As for the games themselves, they've come a long way from the days of Monopoly and Sorry, and they're not all games about slaying dragons or waging war. Check out games like Scoville, where you're a pepper farmer growing new peppers to aid chili recipes, or Camel Up, a game of racing and betting on a wacky camel race, or Tokaido, where you're traveling on the road between Kyoto and Tokyo trying to have the best experience along the way. Anything might make good game fodder, and people aren't scared to try it all.
Board games are so fun and low tech. It's a great way to get away from staring into a screen and to actually find a way to be social while keeping people of their phones for entire hours at a time.
People create new ideas and then other games will iterate and improve the mechanics until you end up with some I pretty genius stuff. And if you try to create your own games (which I am), then you'll find another sub-niche of people that are even more awesome. Nearly everyone is friendly and really happy to set aside generous amounts of time aside from their undoubtedly busy schedules (because there are very few full-time game designers out there) to help you out.
It's the same feeling I used to get from Internet stuff.
As for the games themselves, they've come a long way from the days of Monopoly and Sorry, and they're not all games about slaying dragons or waging war. Check out games like Scoville, where you're a pepper farmer growing new peppers to aid chili recipes, or Camel Up, a game of racing and betting on a wacky camel race, or Tokaido, where you're traveling on the road between Kyoto and Tokyo trying to have the best experience along the way. Anything might make good game fodder, and people aren't scared to try it all.
Board games are so fun and low tech. It's a great way to get away from staring into a screen and to actually find a way to be social while keeping people of their phones for entire hours at a time.