Don't Get Bored -- Get a Board Game

A board game is a game in which counters or pieces that are placed on, removed from, or moved across a "board" (a premarked surface usually specific to that game). As do other form of entertainment, board games can represent nearly any subject.

There are many different types and styles of board games, including those, at the most-basic level, that that have no inherent theme?such as Checkers?as well as more-complicated games with definite subjects, or even narratives, such as Cluedo.

Cranium is a party board game based on Ludo. Whit Alexander and Richard Tait created Cranium in 1992 after Richard spent a weekend playing games with another family and recognized the need for a game involving a variety of skills. He left his job at Microsoft, convincing friend and co-worker Whit Alexander to join him in the creation of Cranium. Cranium is manufactured by Hasbro subsidiary Cranium, Inc. Cranium is billed as "The Game for Your Whole Brain." Unlike many other party games, Cranium includes a wide variety of activities.

Dave Edelstein of Foundation Design created the packaging and brand identity for the game, and Gary Baseman, creator of the animated series Teacher's Pet'', did the art.

Backgammon is a board game for two players in which the playing pieces are moved according to the roll of dice. A player wins by removing all of his pieces from the board. There are many variants of backgammon, most of which share common traits. Backgammon is a member of the tables family, one of the oldest classes of board games in the world.

Although luck plays an important role, there is a large scope for strategy. With each roll of the dice a player must choose from numerous options for moving his checkers and anticipate possible counter-moves by the opponent. Players may raise the stakes during the game. There is an established repertory of common tactics and occurrences.

Like chess, backgammon has been studied with great interest by computer scientists. Owing to this research, backgammon software has been developed capable of beating world-class human players.

Monopoly is a board game published by Parker Brothers, a subsidiary of Hasbro. The game is named after the economic concept of monopoly, the domination of a market by a single entity.

Monopoly is the most commercially-successful board game in United States history, with 485 million players worldwide.

According to Hasbro, since Charles Darrow patented the game in 1935, approximately 750 million people have played the game, making it "the most played (commercial) board game in the world."In the instruction booklet that comes with the 70th Anniversary (U.S.) Edition of Monopoly, Hasbro cites a statistic that over 750 million people have played Monopoly. Presumably even higher numbers have played traditional games, such as chess and Go. The 1999 Guinness Book of Records cited Hasbro's previous statistic of 500 million people having played Monopoly.Guinness World Records page for Monopoly's (disputed) world record of Most Played Game Games Magazine has inducted Monopoly into its Hall of Fame.GAMES Magazine Hall of Fame web page The mascot for the game is a monocle-wearing man, wearing morning dress, named Rich Uncle Pennybags (often referred to as Mr. Monopoly).

Pictionary is a guessing word game published in 1985. The game is played with teams with players trying to identify specific words from their teammates' drawings.

Stratego is a board game featuring a 10 × 10 square board and two players with 40 pieces each. Pieces represent individual officers and soldiers in an army. The objective of the game is to either find and capture the opponent's Flag, or capture so many of the opponent's pieces that he/she cannot make any further moves. Players cannot see the ranks of each others' pieces, so disinformation and discovery are important parts of the game.

Trivial Pursuit is a board game in which progress is determined by a player's ability to answer general knowledge and popular culture questions. The game was created in 1979 by Canadians Scott Abbott, a sports editor for The Canadian Press, and Chris Haney, a photo editor for Montreal's The Gazette. After finding pieces of their Scrabble game missing, they decided to create their own game.The History of Trivial Pursuit With the help of John Haney and Ed Werner, they completed development of the game, which was released in 1982.Trivial Pursuit History

In North America, the game's popularity peaked in 1984, a year in which over 20 million games were sold. The rights to the game were licensed to Parker Brothers (now part of Hasbro) in 1988, after initially being turned down by the Virgin Group; in 2008, Hasbro bought out the rights in full, for US$80 million.Trivial Pursuit sells for a non-trivial sum: $80 million US , nearly 88 million games had been sold in 26 countries and 17 languages. Northern Plastics of Elroy, Wisconsin produced 30,000,000 games between 1983 and 1985. An online version of Trivial Pursuit was launched in September, 2003.Trivial Pursuit Launches Online Version

Dozens of question sets have been released for the game. The question cards are organized into themes; for instance, in the standard Genus question set, questions in green deal with science and nature. Some question sets have been designed for younger players, and others for a specific time period or as promotional tie-ins (such as Star Wars, Saturday Night Live, and The Lord of the Rings movies).