Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) visits the enormous board game convention in Essen, Germany:
Settlers [of Catan] is the game that brought “German-style” or “Eurogame” board games to the attention of an English-speaking audience. The board game market in Germany is more like the book market in other countries: several hundred new games are launched there every year — typically either at Essen’s Spiel convention in October or the Nuremberg Toy Festival in February — and each year, at least one new game will sell hundreds of thousands of copies, perhaps millions, as Settlers has. There are evergreen games, briefly fashionable sensations and flops.
“There are two schools of thought as to why the Germans love board games,” says Martin Wallace of Warfrog. “The Germans are of the opinion that it’s down to their superior education system. We English are of the opinion that it’s because German TV is shite.”
There are, in fact, many more than two schools of thought about why Germany is the world’s board game superpower. It could be the enthusiasm of the citizens. In a country such as Britain, it is downright odd to pull a board game out of a cupboard and offer to teach it to friends alongside after-dinner coffee. In Germany, people do that and more. They discuss old games and act as evangelists for new ones. Naturally, the games are better as a result.
The cause could also be Germany’s pluralistic gaming tradition: most countries play games, but German gaming has never been dominated by a single game — unlike Japan (Go) or Russia (chess). But it could also be the influence of a single pioneer, Erwin Glonnegger. Born in southern Germany in 1925, Glonnegger joined the publisher Ravensburger after the war, where he became its first board game “editor”, working with designers through the 1950s and 1960s to produce a series of elegant games now considered timeless.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, German newspapers were running columns about “family games”. There may have been a social motive — board games were, and still are, regarded as a wholesome activity — but the columns reflected the genuine enthusiasm of mainstream journalists who persuaded their editors to let them moonlight as game critics. In 1978, those enthusiasts decided to create an award, the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year). The first prize was handed out in 1979, to Hare & Tortoise — ironically, an import from England.
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In a makeshift office tucked away behind one of the stands, I met Jay Tummelson, who has done more than anyone to bring Eurogames to the rest of the world. A likeable, fast-talking and opinionated American in his mid-sixties, Tummelson owns the company Rio Grande Games. Its stand is almost as large as those of the industry giants, the Ravensburgers and Mattels, but there are no 20ft signs, stages, or gantries.The stripped-down approach is emblematic of Tummelson’s business model, which is to produce a vast range of gamer-friendly, no-frills translations of German games for the English market. He does business with all the major German publishers, accepting their game design and artwork, sharing their production costs and adding his own English print run to the end of theirs — typically producing 2,000 English versions on top of the 5,000 German originals. Tummelson throws these games into a growing market and reprints at much larger volumes whenever he has a hit on his hands. And he’s had quite a few hits. Before founding Rio Grande Games, Tummelson imported Settlers — and he is responsible for producing the English versions of most recent Spiel des Jahres winners.
(When I met him, Tummelson was launching his first non-translated product, a fast-moving card game called Dominion. It was the talk of Essen and this English-language import promptly won Spiel des Jahres 30 years on from Hare & Tortoise.)
When I suggest to Tummelson that he has, almost single-handedly, brought German games to the rest of the world, he demurs. “I played my part, but the internet was by far and away the most important thing.” German games’ successes may depend on personal recommendations, but in the UK and the US, gamers are spread too thin to speak to one another directly. Ironically, rather than wiping out board games, computers have provided the connections for once-isolated games in the UK and US to swap ideas online and meet up over the gaming table.
(Hat tip to Bryan Caplan.)