Do you like playing games — whether online or in real life, alone or with others?
Do you tend to play digital games, such as Roblox, Madden 24 and Fortnight, or old-school classics like chess; dominoes; poker; rock, paper, scissors; double Dutch; or tag?
How about board games?
In “The Extremely Offline Joy of the Board Game Club,” Callie Holtermann writes about how Gen Z and millennial players are joining old-fashioned chess, mahjong and backgammon groups:
When Michelle Kong started a chess club last year, hoping to meet other players in their 20s, attendance was so meager that she needed only one chessboard. She posted about the club on social media until a tattooed cross section of young people in Los Angeles began showing up to exchange pawns and phone numbers.
Before long, boxes of triple-weighted bishops and rooks were piling up in the back seat of Ms. Kong’s sedan. Last December she upgraded the club’s home base from a cozy jazz bar to a warehouse that was barely large enough to accommodate the 500 people who attended the Thursday night meetings of the group, LA Chess Club, this summer.
“It kind of blew up,” said Ms. Kong, 27, who is in urgent need of a place to store 200 chessboards.
Staring down an epidemic of loneliness, people in their 20s and 30s are gathering to play chess, backgammon and mahjong in hopes that old-fashioned game clubs might help ease the isolation and digital overload that weigh heavily on their generation.
Many have already been experimenting with more physical alternatives to doomscrolling like pickleball and running clubs. But organizers like Ms. Kong say that the kind of board games stored in their grandparents’ attics are hot among Gen Z-ers and millennials hungry for less athletic modes of socialization.
“A running club sounds like absolute torture to me,” said Victoria Newton, 35, who has been hosting Knightcap Chess Club events in Austin, Texas, since July. “I have found that it’s easier to connect with someone when I’m not trying to catch my breath or covered in sweat.”
The article discusses the growth in popularity of board games during the pandemic:
Board game sales in the United States surged more than 30 percent from 2019 to 2020, fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic, said Juli Lennett, a toy industry adviser for Circana, a market research firm. Stuck at home and starved for social interaction, many Americans were able to “rediscover the love of gameplay,” she said.
The habit appears to have made it out of lockdown: The number of board game events organized using the invitation service Partiful quadrupled in the past year, the company said. The number of groups related to board games on Meetup increased roughly 10 percent per year from 2021 to 2023.
It continues:
Young people are only several thousand years late to the board game boom.
Tabletop games are about as old as civilization itself, said Zachary Horton, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies games. But they may be especially attractive to a generation that is fully saturated by digital media, he said, and living in an acrimonious political era in which it can feel like different groups are playing by their own rules.
“The analog game stubbornly insists on its own presence,” Professor Horton said.
Formal clubs devoted to board games gained steam in the United States in the 19th century, when wealthy men could meet for competitive play at the Mechanics’ Institute Chess Club in San Francisco and the Manhattan Chess Club in New York. As different game styles became more popular, gatherings shifted too, Professor Horton said. Role-playing games of the 1970s gave rise to Dungeons & Dragons groups, and board game cafes and bars proliferated in the early 2000s, catering to players of elaborate strategy games like Catan.
But with more games to choose from than ever before — including video games — many young players are drawn to the classics. Among Gen Z, Professor Horton said, “it couldn’t be a clearer or stronger movement toward analog play.”
Students, read the entire article and then tell us:
What are your favorite games? What do you find enjoyable and compelling about them? With whom do you like to play? If you don’t play any games now, did you like to play any when you were younger?
What’s your reaction to the increasing popularity of old-fashioned game clubs with Gen Z and millennials? Ms. Holtermann writes that many young people are seeking out these gatherings in hopes of easing the “isolation and digital overload that weigh heavily on their generation.” Does that desire resonate with you? Does reading the article and looking at the photos make you want to join an in-person game club? Why or why not?
Have you ever found or created a community through games? For example, have you ever attended a game night, joined a game club or done any other kind of social bonding over games? What was that experience like?
Why do you think games have been popular throughout history? What would your life be like without them? Are there skills or lessons you have learned from playing games?
Which of the games discussed in the article do you most want to try? What games would you suggest for other young people to play, and why?
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.
