Flak Games: From Pawns to Pixels (and Back)

Turn to the "games" section of any general interest publication, and you're going to see nothing but video games. You can't find anyone talking about the pleasures of analog gaming — those tabletop expeditions that run the gamut from literal child's play to role-playing to brain-burning strategy to hearty party fare. While no one (in America) was looking, board games have enjoyed a creative renaissance. The fruits of that labor may not be evident on the shelves of your preferred big-box retailer yet. But scratch the surface, and millions of players worldwide have rediscovered the social lubrication, friendly competition and intellectual provocation of sitting around a table to play. It's like radio: far from cutting edge, but unique among its peers in its intimacy and capacity to provoke imagination.

And much like podcasting has given radio a second wind, it may be that board gaming gets reinvigorated on the back of consumer tech. Last week, Xbox Live Arcade released Catan, which recast the modern classic board game The Settlers of Catan in pixels and let a huge population experience the pleasures of post-Monopoly board games for the first time. In this spirit of analog/digital bipartisanship, Flak is debuting an ongoing games section that will cover all manner of games, regardless of whether they require an AC adapter. The video game content will appear soon, but to launch our games coverage, we turn our eyes to what's hopping on tabletops.

JonMichael Rasmus asks whether The Settlers of Catan could be the new Monopoly. (Answer: Yes.) Yehuda Berlinger looks at the pleasures of Puerto Rico, the reigning champion in the heavyweight boardgaming circuit. James Norton joneses for the sweet satisfaction of the two-player card game Lost Cities. J. Daniel Janzen compares Celebrity to traditional charades and illustrates the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. And Matthew Baldwin clues us in on how to conduct the kind of game night that your friends actually want to put on their calendar.