Four players gathered around a felt-top table covered in cards and figurines as facilitator Mark D. Murdough explained the rules to the game. The game on the table was one of more than 400 arranged in tall shelves around the room, all with enticing names and artwork. It was a setup that would incite the envy of any serious board gamer, one of the largest private collections in the region – and just another Wednesday night for the Avenue A Teen Center’s tabletop game club, playing just one door down from the Teen Center at Ragdoll Animation Studios.
Ragdoll Animation Studios co-founder and manager John Anderson said he had been collecting board games for two or three years, and the studio made for a convenient home for his and Murdough’s growing personal libraries. The collection since expanded to include donations and contributions from other gaming friends. “If we ever break up we’ll need visitation rights,” said Murdough. Anderson said he opened the space and collection to the teen gaming club on a suggestion from Avenue A coordinator and fellow gamer Jacqueline Roland.
For the uninitiated, a tabletop game is any game normally played on a table or a flat surface. However, Anderson and Murdough’s collection goes far beyond traditional staples like Monopoly or Parcheesi. The games in the collection are typically made for niche audiences, many with involved rules and rated for players ages 14 and up.
“Mark got in through Pandemic,” Anderson said, referring to a well-known board game where players cooperate to prevent global disease epidemics. Anderson himself became hooked on board games through “Arkham Horror,” a game based on the horror stories by author H.P. Lovecraft. Murdough and Anderson described games in the collection in terms of playing style: cooperative games are popular among the teens, where all players unite to beat the rules of the game.
“They claim they beat The Banishing,” Murdough said, referring to one of the games in the collection. “We don’t believe it, because we haven’t been able to beat it yet ourselves.”
Some games in the collection are too complex for casual play, said Murdough. They mentioned one game that took two hours to get through one turn.
The gaming club restarted in late September after a summer hiatus. Murdough said that leaders naturally emerge from the teen group, and that some regulars will master a certain game and enthusiastically teach new participants to play. Last year, he said the game club had a core group of six, although he saw as many as 30 teens attend a weeknight session. One of last year’s regulars ran a Dungeons and Dragons campaign over several of the club’s weekly sessions.
The collection includes educational games like Evolution and Cytosis, whose rules are based on biological concepts, and a slew of games based on movies, and even historical events, such as the Jack the Ripper murders in London. There are games with physical components, such as Shadow in the Forest, where light and shadows from a lantern in the middle of the board determines players’ movements, and other games that have soundtrack accompaniment. Anderson described his favorite games as social deduction-based, where players have to root out a player secretly assigned a certain role, such as a werewolf hiding among townspeople.
BoardGameGeek, an online database, documented a marked increase in board games published since the year 2000. Anderson spoke of a new board game cafe in Manchester that regularly has a two hour waitlist. Many sources refer to a current “golden age” of tabletop gameplay, said to have taken off as European board games like Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan gained international enthusiasm just as the internet made it easier than ever to share game rules and concepts.
Many new games get their start on Kickstarter, and Anderson and Murdough’s collection includes some games they sponsored themselves.
The club is open to teens ages 13 to 18, and meets Wednesdays from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Contact avenuea@grapevinenh.org to get involved.
Anderson said that adults interested in playing tabletop games are welcome to visit the studio during a 24-hour tabletop gaming marathon for the Extra Life charity fundraiser, starting Nov. 2 at 7 a.m. and continuing until 7 a.m. the next day.