Two years ago, when I left video games criticism to work full-time in table top games, a lot of people, my mum chief among them, were startled.

These days, it’s easy to explain. Board game cafes are springing up all over the world, and investors are pouring millions into the industry.



But I didn’t have this evidence two years ago. I was working on my instinct that these games were just as interesting as video games, and it seemed board games and card games represented an absurdly thick seam of ideas. The money might still be in video games, but there’s huge success waiting for the digital designers who implement those ideas first.



Digital card game Hearthstone already makes more money than World of Warcraft, and it has managed that success while really just being a beautifully presented stop-gap before video games get a truly strong card game.

So what are the biggest ideas in contemporary board gaming that video games have yet to pick up on?

1. Fragile alliances are the best alliances

In 2004, a small card game called Saboteur and a big board game called Betrayal at the House on the Hill were released. Both of these games randomly pick one (or more) players around the table to be a mole, secretly working against everybody else. This turned out to be so much fun that table top games have been a den of liars and traitors ever since.

A Game of Thrones board game. Photograph: PR

Whether you’re figuring out who on your ship is a Cylon in the Battlestar Galactica game, or just earnestly telling your friends that you won’t invade them (you promise!) in A Game of Thrones, modern board games often offer an interesting social dynamic on top of their puzzle. Maybe to win you need to coerce two other players into fighting. Or you can swap who is on whose team halfway through. Or you can win by correctly guessing who will win, and on what turn, and then engineering it.

By contrast, human interactions in video games feel anodyne: you can play in a team, or not.

DayZ is an open world survival video game. Photograph: PR

Rarely do we see video games that give players the chance to be something more than a dramatic, yet functionally identical, replacements for AI opponents. While massive multiplayers like DayZ mean for the first time everyone’s capable of playing against other humans at all times, video games haven’t figured out how to let us be human when doing so. Bluffing, deceit, trust, creativity – the traits first and foremost in a list of things AI cannot do – is still not something allowed in competitive video games.

It’s true that the socially nuanced multiplayer modes we’ve seen in video games (Kane & Lynch, The Ship, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood) have historically only confused their players. It’s also true that board games are more suited to creating complex relationships between players because those players can talk.

Then again, when video games like Journey and Dark Souls enable such wonderful bonds to form between players in spite of their inability to talk, you’ve got to wonder if there might be a future for online games beyond basic cooperation and competition.

2. Economies are more terrifying than wars

Strategy in board games and video games often runs parallel, with both formats exploring and refining classic set-ups like civilisation-building or warfare. But there’s an entire genre of strategy that video games have never touched, which is economic conflict.



Does that sound boring? It shouldn’t. Fantastic games like Chinatown or Lords of Vegas feature merciless battles and cutthroat negotiations for control of property. Acquire, which I’ve heard charmingly referred to as “Monopoly for nerds”, sees players fighting tooth and nail to engineer mergers and lock other players out of them. Suburbia is a wonderfully bleak game with players rushing to build and populate a suburb, where the purchase of every fancy restaurant or homeowner’s association will dent your friends’ operations.



These games are every bit as ferocious and interesting as any war game, and sometimes more so. At least in a war, you know when you’re being attacked.

It’s not just that economic conflict is an entire, entertaining and accessible genre of strategy that video games have left almost untouched. It’s that this genre has countless fascinating mechanics that could be incorporated into existing video games. Let supply and demand affect the prices of soldiers. Hold sporadic auctions for powerful upgrades. Let players invest their war’s budget for an even greater return, forcing them to ask how much they can spare, and for how long.

3. Absurd physics is something to be championed

Catacombs is a phenomenal board game that tasks players with invading a dungeon and slaying the grand, evil being at its heart. There’s just one problem. Their heroes are small wooden disks, the monsters are wooden disks, the stone pillars of the dungeon are disks that have been slotted into divots in the board, and the entire game is played by flicking your team’s disks at other disks in the style of Carrom.



The game’s perfectly interesting and tactical, but it’s this dramatic theme combined with the preposterous movement of the pucks – the elf bouncing an arrow off your team’s wizard to kill a dragon, the barbarian charging boldly towards a pack of trolls, but losing momentum and coming to a polite stop right next to them – that make it so entertaining.

Flick ‘em Up is another dexterity game set to continue this tradition when it comes out in a few months. Tiny wooden cowboys exchanging tiny wooden gunfire on your dining room table, the game’s dramatic theme at odds with the inevitable errors of trying to manipulate the board by flicking, and flicking alone. This game’s “dynamite” playing piece deserves a special mention. Being a stereotypical red cylinder, it’s almost impossible to flick accurately, but nonetheless blows up wherever it comes to a stop.

Similarly, I’ve been playing video games my whole life and know that they never get an easier laugh than when their physics simulation surprises you. A bouncing object picking up speed instead of slowing, a man’s limp body losing its rigid skeletal framework as it collapses in a jelly-like pile of limbs, a car rebounding off a wall with terrifying force.

There are entire modding communities that try and draw this idiocy out of commercial video games, like trying to siphon oil from a hidden reservoir, precisely because it’s so much fun. And while we’re seeing more and more indie games that offer these kinds of slapstick models, as the occasional high-budget game (Just Cause, Burnout), these all feel like the work of auteurs.

For the most part, games use their overwhelmingly expensive and complex physics models to create something as close to reality as possible. Board games are thought-provoking because they have the most accurate physics model you can possibly get. They exist in reality. And they’ve found out that the most fun you can have with physics is to undermine it.

