No Longer Bored Games

Once upon a time... Is a game Hydee and I own. It's a story game where you create fairy tales based on the cards you have, trying to force the ending to the one you want. A friend of ours from France introduced it to us years ago and it took forever to find.  Even specialty game stores didn't cary it, so we had to order it online. And today I saw it in Powells. In fact, most bookstores these days have layouts like this:

These aren't crap games either.  These are games I would have specialty ordered in years past.

I plan to talk a lot about games and gaming on this thing and one thing that has caught me by surprise is the rise of board games. Board games were a relic of an age without computers.  You either had boring abstract "classic" games like parchesee or you had gmicky remakes such as Lord of the Rings Monopoly.  Gameplay wasn't innovative, but instead laid out like a formula by the men at Parker Brothers.

Then one day, everything is upside down.  Who saw that coming? I remember playing Settlers of Catan years ago and thinking "Wow, this is like Monopoly, except fun!"  I'll let the trailer from the documentary "Going Cardboard" say it better than I could, but rest assured, I will be back to this topic.