An intriguing paper was published in Simulation & Gaming earlier this year: From Monopoly to Ark Nova: An Empirical and Cultural History of Modern Board Game Design (1930-2025) by Azael J. Herrero et al., seeking to document and explore the trends in board game design, mechanisms, and themes based on BoardGameGeek statistics (not necessarily a totally robust dataset, but pretty comprehensive)
They chose to limit themselves to games published between 1930 and 2025, which is not to say that board games didn’t exist before 1930! (Consider the Royal Game of Ur from the third millennium BCE, for example) but the authors wanted to focus on ‘the era of large-scale commercial publishing and the emergence of widely distributed, rules-driven commercial games.’
After data cleaning, they had information on over 100,000 games—that’s a lot!
Growth in Board Games
The first thing the paper covers is simply the growth in board game production, as illustrated in the chart below:
Note that the paper plots this as a bar chart, but I’ve converted it to a histogram to better represent the rate of production, i.e., making it more apparent that the 2020s are likely to produce roughly as many games as were published in the 2010s, assuming everything continues as it has for the first years of the decade.
The jump in the 2010s could well be the effect of crowdfunding, which started to become popular then (e.g., Kickstarter launched in 2009). Are we plateauing now—have we reached crowdfunding saturation? What could be the next big thing to cause another massive hike?
Something I found even more astonishing than this rising trend is the sheer number of newly published games at the moment, of the order of 3–4,000 per year. That’s 10 a day! How can anyone possibly keep up?
There are a few caveats, though: first, as noted, this is based on data from BGG, and the site only came into existence in 2000, so I would imagine (this is just a guess, but I can get away with that because this article is a blog post and not an academic paper!) that the early decades are somewhat underrepresented, though the dramatic upward trend almost certainly still holds. Second, BGG doesn’t distinguish between blockbuster games and those which have tiny numbers of crowdfunding backers, just as long as someone created an entry for the game—who can say how many small games popped up and vanished in the years before it was easy to record and circulate their existence?
Having said all that, BGG is probably the most comprehensive repository of gaming information we have access to.
Mechanisms
The next part of the paper that caught my eye was how mechanisms have evolved. The paper includes a table of top 10 mechanisms during each decade, but parsing that needs a fair amount of concentration; instead of that, I chose to show a different image from Dr Herrero’s which contains broadly similar data (selected mechanisms in BGG’s top 20 rather than 10, and rank rather than percentage) graphically.
A couple of things stand out: that blue line starting at the top shows how the popularity of the basic roll & move mechanism (as used in Snakes & Ladders, introduced to the UK in 1892, or Monopoly, from 1935—both going strong, at least among certain groups of players) has plummeted. (Interestingly, another common mechanism in early game, point-to-point movement, not shown in the chart, but present in the table in the paper, has also dropped substantially.) This is not to say that dice rolling has gone away; the orange line, the next highest one, shows a pretty constant demand for dice within games, implying that dice are used for much more than movement these days. Other mechanisms are coming into play, such as hand management and asymmetric player abilities, some of which act to counter the randomness of dice rolls.
Simulation as a mechanism seems to peak in the 1970s (and appears to be fairly closely tracked by the use of hexagonal grids, again, not shown in the chart but present in the paper’s table). Cooperative and solo play (the latter perhaps boosted by isolation during the pandemic years) are becoming more popular, too. I wonder if there was an increase in the popularity of online board gaming during that period too: perhaps some researchers would care to analyse BoardGameArena usage data!
There’s a lot more detail in this area than I have space to cover, and I suggest poring over the table in the paper if you’re interested in finding out more.
Diversity
There are also more game mechanisms around nowadays, with 69 appearing in the paper’s BGG dataset for the 1930s, rising to 192 currently, indicative of a much more diverse landscape of games as well as some individual current games themselves including more mechanisms than earlier games.
Another interesting evolution is thematic: ‘early decades were dominated by children’s games, sports, and media-related titles, while later decades show a diversification toward genres such as fantasy, party games, and abstract strategy, reflecting broader cultural and market transformations.’
So, there’s more choice in games these days, and it also looks like old stuff is never thrown out, just added to. The authors note that the differences they observed across time indicate that ‘modern board games have become more sophisticated and socially varied’—this is perhaps something that avid gamers are aware of, but that’s not true of everyone. Grandparents need to know this when they’re buying board game presents for little Johnny or Joanna!
Miscellanea and Wrap Up
The paper also includes statistics on BGG ratings, but I’m not sure how useful those are, given how almost every ratings system either ends up being ‘uberised’ (ratings all bunched at the top of the scale) or is abused (for example, well before many people had a chance to play either game, Legacy of Mars garnered a lot of low ratings, and Possess Me, Satan received a lot of high ones, due to non-gaming sentiment). The authors brought up the topic of ratings in a BGG thread about the paper, commenting that the mean number of ratings for games in the 2020s is over 400, while the median is a mere 13, suggesting the ratings are heavily skewed towards a few hugely popular games, with many having very few ratings (and hence open to bias).
A couple of other noteworthy snippets from the paper were that the median (i.e., most common) maximum number of players has remained pretty constant at 4, perhaps the size of most dining room tables, or the number of people you can easily cram around a board and have them all able to see clearly; and that game duration has also been creeping up over the years, from an average of 30 minutes in the 1930s to 45 minutes now.
If you’re keen to investigate further, the paper has a fascinating list of references, but if you fancy a bit of lighter reading, It’s All a Game: A Short History of Board Games by Tristan Donovan is a good read.
About the author
Current favourite board games are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Terraforming Mars and Dune: Imperium – Uprising. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
