New Versions of Old Board Games

The success of micro-blogging and digital media players is a testament to Americans’ ever-shorter attention spans, and although new devices have expanded digital gaming to anyone with a smartphone, don’t count the analog world out just yet.

Game manufacturer Hasbro (Stock Quote: HAS), the owner of pretty much every iconic game that’s ever existed (Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Life, Scrabble, Simon – the list goes on and on), is breathing new life into the board game market with new offerings this year.  How? By speeding up the gameplay on classic titles and giving more players something to do when they aren’t the ones rolling the dice. Watch our video preview here.

Gone are the days when “bored games” let only one player play at a time while everyone else sat around and watched.

Longtime industry watcher and editor-in-chief of Time to Play magazine Jim Silver sees it as a reinvention of the whole board game world.

“In this age of instant gratification, I think game makers know to keep people involved on every turn - it’s not much fun to sit and watch for ten minutes. They’re trying to build it into every game and I think it’s going to be a part of most games in the future,” he says.

So how do they do it? The newest version of Trivial Pursuit, released in August and dubbed “Trivial Pursuit: Bet You Know It,” allows players that used to just sit there and wait their turn (while one lucky player got to ask the question) to bet on whether they think the active player will answer correctly.