Brandwatch Bulletin #117: Board Games Are Booming

Get your dice at the ready.

6 May 2022

According to our research, you might be spending more time playing board games this year than you expected. We’ve got a list of the games you’ll likely end up playing too.

Let’s get to it.

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The year of the board game

Board games have been around for as long as we’ve had, well, boards (or at least surfaces to play on). From chess to the Game of Life, there’s nothing like a board game to wile away some spare time or to tear a family apart on the roll of a dice.

We decided to take a look at the conversation around board games online to see if interest has changed over the years, and find out what games people are talking about. As we’ll see, there’s a huge world of board games out there that extends well beyond the recognizable classics.

But first, let’s look at how much we talk about them.

From 2017 to the start of 2020, our online interest in board games remained stable. As we’ll look at in further detail shortly, there’s a seasonality to the data, with festive spikes in late December. This is caused by gift research, gift-giving, and people talking about the games they’re playing with friends and family over the holidays.

But when the pandemic hit, there was a marked increase in the conversation. This was due to people turning to board games to keep them occupied, either for lockdown sessions with housemates or by playing online versions with people around the world. When people were desperate for social interaction, board games helped fill that gap.

That’s not to mention there is a popular board game literally called Pandemic, which many people sought out as Covid-19 brought a halt to our normal lives.

This surge in interest wasn’t permanent though. It dropped off by the end of 2020, although a minor increase on pre-pandemic levels persisted. This was still evident in 2021’s festive spike which was up on 2020’s, and way up on the years prior to that.

Continuing into 2022 levels remain higher than normal but, more interestingly, interest seems to be growing again. To show how abnormal that is, we worked out when Board Game Season really is.

Never heard of Board Game Season before? That’s because we just invented it.

We took four years worth of data to see how we talked about board games across a normal year. When we plot that on a line chart, Board Game Season is clear as day. From mid-November to the end of Feb, board game mentions are consistently above the yearly average.

Interest wanes after that and usually May numbers are consistently below the yearly average. But with board game mentions currently rising, 2022 could be a bumper year for the board game industry.

Does this mean Monopoly and Risk are set to rocket in popularity like chess has in recent years? Apparently not. The board game world has moved far beyond the well-known titles.

The most popular board games online

We dug further into our data to find the most-mentioned board games online, and then worked out their net sentiment. We did this by excluding neutral mentions and comparing the shares of positive and negative mentions. As an example, if a game’s mentions were 60% positive and 40% negative, their net sentiment would be 20.

Here’s what we found.

First you’ll note the absence of any big names. While we found they were mentioned a lot, it was rarely in a positive light. Monopoly was the most mentioned game in the whole conversation, but its net sentiment score was -38, while Risk’s was -30. Scrabble fared better, but still only managed -4.

What’s clear is that there is an appetite for something different. Players don’t want to play the games they did as children. Instead they want something new and interesting. Clue just doesn’t cut the mustard any more. And neither does any game released pre-2000 either.

Take Wingspan, the most popular on our list, as an example. The aim of this game is to collect eggs and create a better wildlife habitat for birds than your rivals. King of Tokyo on the other hand has you playing the part of a robot, alien, or monster who wants to take over Tokyo. Both are big departures from buying property or forming long words.

In fact, all of the games in this top ten are generally more complicated, or need more imagination and creativity, than what the average person may expect from board games. Of course this isn’t news to the board game community, but as people outside it realize there’s much more to board games than Monopoly, we can expect a slew of new players in 2022.

This all means that if you get invited to a board games night soon, be prepared to learn a whole new set of rules. It’ll be fun though, we promise.

What should we cover next?

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Thanks for reading

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch Bulletin team