Going Deutsch
Who makes America's best board games? Hint: It's not Hasbro
When Jay Tummelson travels to Germany on business, he meets up with company executives and waits for them to put their cards on the table. And then he picks them up and plays with them.
"Instead of visiting the castles, I visit the toy companies," says Tummelson, whose New Mexico-based Rio Grande Games has imported English versions of nearly 100 Deutsch diversions in four years. Board games are more than child's play in Germany, where inventors' names are plastered on boxes and the spiel des jahres (game of the year) is the closest equivalent to the Oscars.
American game connoisseurs are playing, too. When Games Magazine released its list of the best games of 2002, German imports topped seven of 10 categories, including game of the year. Editor in chief R. Wayne Schmittberger says the distinctive German style is the reason for the near sweep. While American board games are typically luck-based and everlasting, German games are more strategic and faster paced. "You wind up with a lot of choices, a lot of dilemmas," says Schmittberger. "And when you're done, you'll want to play again."
Take Adel Verpflichtet (sometimes known in America as Fair Means or Foul). On a recent Tuesday, Virginians Ben and Marcia Baldanza welcomed two members of their weekly game group for a match. The goal is to assemble the finest collection of antiques by bidding on works at "the auction house" or displaying items at "the castle." Players can play nice, steal art and money, or catch thieving friends. Ben was a deft thief; after 45 minutes, he emerged victorious. And the gang was ready for Round 2.
The Baldanzas and friends are a distinct minority. While board game sales are spiking, the number of German-game devotees in the United States is probably under 30,000, speculates Alan Moon, an American designer who took home the 1998 spiel des jahres for Elfenland (players visit elf towns via giant pigs and troll wagons). Top-selling German games have about 10,000 copies in print in this country. By contrast, Scrabble sells more than a million copies a year.
The German infiltration began in 1995, when Die Siedler von Catan came to America. Players establish cities, roads, and universities and acquire sheep and lumber for an island society; the game broke records in Germany, selling 5 million copies, and snagged the spiel des jahres. A few U.S. game stores decided to try it out--in the original German.
A cult following developed, but many players found the instructions hard to follow. In 1996, Mayfair Games transformed Die Siedler von Catan into the Settlers of Catan, and a new world of board games opened up to American players. They now share opinions at Web sites like funagain.com and boardgamegeek.com, and the spielfrieks newsgroup on Yahoo! Boston hosts nightly German game confabs.
Many adult fans play with their children. Mark Engelberg of Everett, Wash., was fed up with boring American games for his kids, ages 2 and 4. The challenging choices of German games impressed him. "We're so used to decisionless games," he laments. Isaac Samuelson, 12, of Lancaster County, Pa., is another fan. "I like thinking hard," he says, "but not hard hard, like at school."
Novices may be put off by the box art (think hoary history text) and the stiff, translated directions ("Now everyone can be a successful bean farmer!"). But beyond the umlauts lies a good time. "One game we played wrong the whole way," says Sarah Samuelson, Isaac's mom. "But we liked it enough we played again."
More Americans may soon join in. Capcom's PlayStation 2 and PC versions of Settlers are set to debut this spring. And last summer, Cactus Game Design, a U.S. Christian firm, released Settlers of Canaan, which moves the setting to Jerusalem, right after the Israelites leave the desert.
German games are "never going to be the biggest thing," admits Ben Baldanza. "They're never going to be as sexy as friends or as mainstream as Britney Spears." Still, Yankee game producers can't count on their monopoly lasting forever.
This story appears in the December 9, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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