As we all know, there are a good number of board games that haven't aged well, if I may put it like that. In the past, games happily made colonialism their central setting and gameplay, gave women little or no place in their worlds, or treated cultures through the eyes of the oppressor. Yet, these games remain in people's collections and come back to the table. In this article, rather than asking whether we should still play these problematic games, I explore why we don't just choose different games from the large swathe of new releases.

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I never enjoyed history at school. I understood why it mattered as a subject, but learning names, dates and events off by rote simply didn’t work for me, no matter how hard I tried. Events were never taught in their chronological or geopolitical context. Things just didn’t make sense to me. So it seems ironic that historical board games are now one of my favourite genres. Of course, they’ve not made me any better at remembering names and dates, but they replaced my fear of history with a new curiosity that I hadn’t felt before. Horrible History To be clear: I never dreaded having history lessons because of my teachers. No, my fear came from somewhere else. Every new era of history introduced yet another collection of rulers, battles, dates and important events that I was expected to memorise. Learning those facts off by heart was just impossible for me. They always simply felt like a random collection of pieces of information that had nothing to hang them onto. So revising for history tests was always not just a terribly frustrating exercise, but often ended up in tears, because I realised that the further I fell behind, the harder things got. I often felt physically sick and had a tight knot in my chest when another exam was approaching. Somehow, history never felt like one very long connected story thread. Instead, it was just a giant jumble of disconnected facts that were supposed to fit together, but never really formed any sort of pattern for me. Of course, history is a hugely important subject. You don’t need to tell that to a German. Every war, political decision and social movement affected real people, families, communities and often, entire generations. Forgetting historic events means forgetting the people who experienced them, something…

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Throughout human history, stories have been a way for people to share the concerns and ideas of their time. I think we can all agree that books and films are often shaped by the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they were created, whether deliberately or not. Readers and viewers will usually be able to see reflections of real-world anxieties, hopes, and tensions within them. Board games, while also being a form of entertainment, alongside books and films, work differently. In this article, I want to look at whether they still reflect the times in which they were designed.

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Historical board games occupy an awkward space in our hobby. They are usually not designed to teach history in any formal sense, and they are also not entertaining in the sense of being fun. These games stop short of education, offering no syllabus, no claims of being a detailed treatise of their setting, and no obligation to explain themselves. The subject matter historical board games draw on, war, exploitation, inequality, famine, and systemic violence, doesn't suit the lightness or escapism people often expect when playing board games as a leisure activity. The result is a form of play that somehow feels serious but incomplete. In this article, I want to explore this in more detail.

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I have long been fascinated by historical board games. I was never very good at history in school, but whenever I play a board game with a historical setting, I feel I learn something. Often, I feel compelled to find out more about the events that took place back then. No class in school ever evoked that curiosity in me. These days, I look at historical board games from an additional angle: the human element. While war games rarely identify individuals and often work on a larger scale, there is a new breed of historical games that bring players closer to the human experience. In this article, I want to explore these games further,

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