I spent the better part of ten years covering board games at Kotaku, even if it had never been a lifelong passion; I didn't really get into it until my 30s!
Beginning with accessible, licensed stuff that some friends had started picking up around 2010--like Wings of War, X-Wing and Game of Thrones--throughout the rest of that decade board games became everything to me. I played review copies for work, covered the industry at the same time, then I played them at home with my family and at other homes with my friends. I even spent five years working on my own game, which came heartbreakingly close to major international publishing deals at least three times before sadly going nowhere.
For ten years I couldn't go a week without talking about a board game, at home or at work. Then along came 2020. The pandemic made life hard for everyone, but it made things especially hard for board games, throwing the manufacturing and shipping of their big boxes and plastic parts into turmoil. The industry is still reeling five years later, as tariffs and uncertainty over international postage continue to make things tough for publishers and creators alike.
At a personal level, Covid's impact on board games ended up deeply affecting me as well. An explosion in the cost of making and shipping games not only sent many companies bust, but left those remaining extremely reluctant to ship review copies all the way to Australia. Throw in price increases from an inflationary crisis that made buying games difficult, and a loss of most of my industry contacts when I left Kotaku, and over the course of 2020 I went from someone who played a ton of board games to someone who was playing almost none.
Which, whatever, if I lose some free board games waaahhh, boohoo, but it helped change me from someone who had been playing a lot of board games with a crew--made up mostly of old friends I'd played football with in the 2000s--to someone who was now never playing them and rarely seeing them. No more nights at home poking at a game for review, no more afternoons at a friend's house with their latest ill-advised Kickstarter purchase. Even our ritual weekends away, which we'd tried to have at least once a year, were gone, a victim of not just everything above but an insane price increase on holiday accommodation in Australia; a house we booked for $450 for a whole weekend in 2019 was, by 2023, charging $1400 for the same weekend.
Joni Mitchell nailed it with 'You don't know what you've got til it's gone', because I'd taken that decade of good times for granted, and now that they were gone there was basically a big hole in my heart, one that's sat gaping and maw-like as I've spent nearly every waking moment since 2023 either working here or at the other jobs I have to do because all of them combined still don't pay what my old job did. Don't get me wrong, I'm immensely proud of everything we've built here, but also, all work and no play has taken its toll.
Luckily (?), I wasn't alone in feeling this. If I wasn't seeing the boys, the other boys weren't seeing the boys either, and so in an effort to try to fill the hole that been in all our hearts, two weeks ago one of us booked some accommodation and the five of us headed off to the beautiful Lake Crackenback in the Snowy Mountains for four days of nothing but board games. Well, board games and some drinking. And let me tell you, it was life-changing.
We fucking crushed the brief. I played 15 different games over those four days, nearly all of them new (or at least new to me), and in spending that much time over a table with old friends, laughing and plotting and laughing some more, it reminded me of just how special board games can be, how they're able to do things that go beyond just running through some rules and moving some pieces around.
I played an entire campaign of Forgotten Waters, which is basically a pirate RPG with enough guardrails that five grown men who had maybe had a few too many drinks could play without rolling dice or arguing about rules. We won after seven hours of play by driving a trident through a witch's heart, but not before one of us had been beaten unconscious and had his pants stolen by dolphins. I played Return To Dark Tower, which also had a story (driven by an iPad), but whose details I never bothered with because it also has a giant mechanised tower looming over the middle of the board that shoots miniature skulls at people.
I played Indiana Jones: Sands of Adventure, a family board game with a card-battling feature that feels weirdly like an actual Indiana Jones fight scene. I played No Thanks, a card game where you're spared from doing the worst thing possible because the person taking their turn before you had to do it first. I played Archaeology, where selling artifacts to distant museums is fine, I guess, because the practice has had so many edges sanded off to make it a card game that it's a blast.
I played The Grizzled, a beautiful card game about how hard it is to keep you and your friends alive during the First World War, which was if nothing else faithful to its theme. I played Game of Thrones, a game I've played so many times I don't want to write anything more about it. I played Raiders of the North Sea, which might be the most perfectly-designed board game ever made.
I played Courtisans, a game about intrigue and secrecy that might have the most beautiful cards I have ever held, or will ever hold. I played Lord Of The Rings: The Trick Game, which I hated every second of, but will remember forever because of how beautiful the artists made every hobbit.
And then finally, on the last night, I played Racoon Tycoon, a game about industrialising a land inhabited only by animals, where doing things like sending cute cats with hats off to build railroads is just a normal thing that happens. Between some heated auctions, a vibrant marketplace system and constant five-beers-in deliberations on just why these animals were industrialising, it was one of the funniest nights of board gaming I've had in my life.
Of course we didn't just play board games; we also went to a distillery and ordered a tray of schnapps that was so big it came out on a modified ski, and the staff rang a giant cowbell when they delivered it to our table. I went for some lovely walks around an alpine lake, and both cooked and ate some great food. It was an A+ time from beginning to end.
After two years of relentless work with few breaks I really needed it, if nothing else than for the time away from a computer. But the thing that's stuck with me the most since getting home was just how good it was to be playing board games again. There's just something about sharing a table with friends, talking about the game but also everything else, that I struggle to fit into my life elsewhere.
Where else can you backstab one of your best friends and have everyone laugh about it, or feel your phone buzz under the table to read a text message from someone else across the table, telling you to murder someone else at the table? There's an accessible pleasure to being able to just sit down and play a game at the same time as someone is explaining the rules to you as you go, and there's something wonderful about the tactile experience of holding some glossy cards, moving some beautiful miniatures across a table just to annoy someone sitting next to you or...having a huge plastic tower shoot skulls at you.
Man, how I missed all this! And yes, this is now the point where I acknowledge that most of the things that contributed to my board gaming drought are still very much around; they're still expensive, accommodation is still unaffordable, I'm still working 2.5 jobs, seven days a week, and one of my favourite board game studios shut down only a few weeks ago, citing the same pressures that have been stalking the industry since 2020. I didn't spend four days in the mountains then come home to find everything magically better again.
But I did get to spend those four days in the mountains. And, however briefly, got to remember that board games fucking rule.
