Final Rating: 4/5
Those not yet fully acquainted with the board-gaming community – those who do not practice “the hobby,” to put it in the terms of this film – might be surprised by the vast variety of modern board games. That’s not to mention their frequent complexity, which often involves building entire worlds over long, social sessions. “Games are the art of agency,” philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen explains about 20 minutes into The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop, a new documentary from Simon Ennis about the culture of board games. Nguyen elaborates: “The game designer tells you what you want, what kind of abilities you have, and…what obstacles you’ll face. … Games can engineer a space where what you have to do fits with your abilities perfectly. … You are in beautiful harmony with the demands of the world.”
Essentially, games give us a sense of purpose. Perhaps this is why the “hunger to play” these games stretches back as far as history itself – a fact laid out by the British Museum’s Assyriologist Irving Finkel, who agrees that we’re drawn to games because they’re “fair, and just, and exciting, and unpredictable.” He spends the opening scene showing off one of the world’s earliest (and most decadent) game boards, and even games etched surreptitiously into the base of a statue dating back more than 2,500 years. Presumably put there by on-duty guards slacking off with a relatability that erases the unimaginably long millennia that separate them from us.
It’s also from Finkel that the audience gets its first taste of the range of interests and opinions in the gaming community: the complex and very specific board games that will be the focus of the majority of the film do not interest Finkel one bit. But that’s OK, because for every game like Dune: Imperium Uprising with an instruction book, as Finkel puts it, that’s one inch thick, there’s an easy-to-learn modern classic like Azul, with rules that can be quickly memorized but reward repeat play with growing mastery. Fear not, you’ll get plenty of peeks into the staggering variety as the movie tour progresses.
At another point in the doc, popular podcaster Tom Vasel rightly emphasizes that it’s not the games themselves that are important – it’s the people who play them. The documentary demonstrates repeatedly that we are perhaps never more fully engaged than when playing games together.
Throughout the film we see a wide array of colorful characters – a musician looking for a new creative outlet, veterans drawn to complex war games, a Black family who decided to be the representation they wanted to see in the board-gaming community, a Chinese husband-and-wife duo proving their prowess (and recording content for their vlog) in Vegas. Viewers will find themselves fully invested in the outcome of the World Board Game Championships in Las Vegas, rooting for their favorites. And also rooting for game designers at every level of experience. Some are playtesting and shopping around their very first games, and we follow them through scary test drives at public events, begin rooting for the accessibility of the crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter that have helped level the playing field, allowing for more creative concoctions that wouldn’t get past many corporate moneymen.
But we also follow the lives of already successful designers – like designer of bird-themed-game Wingspan Elizabeth Hargrave, who toured Canada with Simon Ennis to promote this documentary. After an unlikely beginning, she can now count herself as the creator of one of the most popular games in the world. (On a personal note: The writer of this review counts Wingspan as one of her favorite games, as it achieves a rare balance of cooperation and competition that helps level the playing field when going up against more competition-oriented players.)
We get peeks into vast collections from different eras featuring hundreds of games, a range of designs that often synthesize real-life experiences, from bird-watching to sightseeing in Barcelona, into unique game concepts that delight players around the world. As the Strong Museum of Play’s board game curator says, while showing off a rare collection of antiques: “Games really reflect the culture in which they exist.” This doc explores what that means. Along the way you get to sample a huge range of themes and structures, check in on the German-based Spiel des Jahres (“kind of the Oscars of board games”), explore personal stories, and learn – as philosophy professor Nguyen puts it – how games “[heighten] the beauty and action that comes out of our choices, out of us.”
Most of all, you’ll just enjoy spending 90 minutes hanging out with this crew.
Thank you to Vortex Media and Route 504 PR for the screener.
