Full disclosure: I had more than a casual interest in Simon Ennis’ engaging documentary before seeing the first frame, because Constant Companion and I ran a game and puzzle store in our town, from 1978 to early 1997.
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| Once introduced to the ambitious world of today's board gaming culture, Candice Harris can't get enough of it. |
Happily — as Ennis’ film repeatedly proves — board and table games enjoyed a major resurgence as the 21st century’s second decade began, and now the pursuit is arguably more popular and diverse than ever before.
More power to them, because games have been with us for a long time.
Ennis opens his film at the British Museum, where Dr. Irving Finkel — Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East — stands between two enormous Ancient Assyrian “Lamassus” statues. He points between the hooves of one statue, where a rudimentary board game has been scratched onto the metal base: something with which temple guards could while away the time, using pebbles or bits of dung as playing pieces.
Dr. Finkel is quite philosophical about this pastime, explaining that “When a game is invented, which is fair, and just, and exciting, and unpredictable, it spreads like wildfire, because there’s a hunger since the beginning of time, to play.”
That said — and Ennis must’ve been amused to get this quote — Dr. Finkel has no use for modern table games, all of which he considers “too ridiculously complicated.”
(Folks who’ve never progressed beyond Monopoly and Scrabble likely would agree with him.)
Following a brief title credits sequence — backed by a cover of Joe South’s “Games People Play” — the action shifts to opening day of the Indiana Convention Center’s annual Gen Con, a four-day event that draws more than 70,000 attendees (!). We meet moderator Tom Vasel, a board game reviewer and podcaster well known by the regulars.
Vasel is one of roughly a dozen gamers, podcasters and game designers profiled in this film, and he explains why new titles have exploded exponentially during the past decade and change: Crowd-funding allows far more creativity than ever was delivered by the likes of Parker Brothers, Hasbro and Milton Bradley.
(Think of them as the original three TV networks, whose programs had to deliver high ratings in order to survive, as compared to the successful niche options now made available by the multiplicity of streaming outlets. Today’s indie gamers are like the latter.)
