The long, strange summer of 2020 brought me a lot more work than expected. At the time this series ran, I was working on handling an unusually high volume of client work for the Pangea Marketing Agency. I won’t deny for a second that it was a problem of privilege, especially in the grueling and unfair economy of the time.

Yet I still wanted to keep posts going on this blog. For a few weeks I handed the reins to my wife, Maria. The theme of her short series was be “board games, seen by a non-gamer.”

Despite playing Twilight Struggle and Terraforming Mars with me, Maria doesn’t exactly see herself as a board gamer. At least not in the “always watching Kickstarter, painting minis, and 500 games on the shelf” sense. Instead, she’s somewhere in the middle ground between the diehard board gamers I just described and the “I used to love Monopoly as a kid” crowd.

Board games have been growing for the last decade, and I feel like, at least based on what I’ve seen, they’ve become a mainstream part of Millennial / Generation Z life. My friends would play Codenames in college around 2015. Even after my graduation, I didn’t have to go to the game shop to find people to play Pandemic before the pandemic.

For this reason, I think Maria’s point of view will echo the feelings of many people who are quiet fans of board games. Remember: board gaming is big, but hobby board gaming is relatively small. Taking a moment to consider other perspectives may help you to build a business in the long run.