Boardgaming Innovations

One consequence of the board-gaming boom has been to help designers come up with a set of principles and rules-of-thumb that add up, more or less, to a theory of fun. One way to get a sense of it is to look at a well-known game that violates many of this theory’s tenets. Monopoly is, by most calculations, the bestselling board game of all time. Yet it languishes near the bottom of a list of games as reviewed by the users of BoardGameGeek, a popular website. In the eyes of a modern game desi...