Board games return on cellphones

In the beginning of gaming there was the board. And yes, mankind played an assortment of games on it. Many was the hour spent on the wondrous entertainment it provided. And then along came the PC and ruined it all. Suddenly boards went into the background and everything went cyber with a vengeance. Some popular board games got converted into videogames that bore little semblance to their origins—most people would accuse you of having had a drop too many if you were to tell them that the spectacular Neverwinter Nights series was actually based on the rules of a board game called Dungeons and Dragons!
As the PC took over, games like Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, Scrabble and several other board games seemed set to be consigned to the realms of nostalgia or at best, played before one was old enough to be trusted with a computer.Gaming was serious business with people talking of high-end graphics, non-stop action and immersive environments.
Saved by the cell? Fortunately, the emergence of mobile gaming has changed all that. Suddenly, classic board games are back in fashion. And they are being played not on boards or on PCs but on cellphones. In fact, cellphone gaming seems to be totally distinct from its PC and console brethren—the user generally has far lesser time at his/her disposal and is, in most cases, looking for a short spell of entertainment rather than being anchored to a device for hours. The learning curve also has to be much shorter as the mobile user does not really have time to learn complicated keystroke combinations (which are difficult to execute on cellphones anyway—ever tried holding down two keys at the same time on a cell?)
And classic board games fit right into the slot. Most users are familiar with the rules and developers are saved the trouble of having to come up with a brand new concept. All one has to do is work on the interface.
The result has been a revival in the popularity of old classics such as Snakes and Ladders, Battleships, Mah Jongg and Chinese Checkers to more recent paper and pencil affairs like Sudoku. There’s even a mobile version of Book Cricket—the game which involved opening a page and taking the digit in the unit’s place as the batsman’s score (‘0’ in the unit’s place meant a dismissal!). And as GPRS and Bluetooth-enabled handsets gain popularity, there are versions that actually allow users to play games like Battleships and Snakes and Ladders with each other, instead of competing against the cellphone itself.
A blip or a wave? Mind you, this is not to say that the mobile avatars of board games are perfect. For one, there are far too many versions of each game. Just try Googling for ‘cellphone chess’ and you will find yourself staring at dozens of games, each claiming to deliver a ‘real chess experience’. And as making mobile games is easy (compared to making one for a console or PC), almost every major developer has his or her version of a board classic. Which makes it all very confusing for the user, who cannot really experiment much, as most of the games come with a price tag.
There is also the little matter of the gaming experience. Some of the games are a trifle dull to play—there’s a version of Snakes and Ladders where all you do is hit the button for revolving the dice (you cannot even control when the dice stops rolling or how many times you want it to spin). The fact that demo versions are relatively rare in mobile games does not help matters.
All of which has led some gaming observers to believe that this sudden popularity of board classics is just a blip. As the likes of Nokia invest in cellphones with better graphics facilities, they predict that mobile gaming will soon be on par with its counterparts on consoles and PCs.
But given the fact that most mobile versions of board games can run on mainstream (even lower-end) phones, there is reason to believe that board games are going to be around for a while— even if it is on cellphones, rather than on cardboard and wood.
If you think that’s far-fetched, just head to the Google search box, enter the name of your favourite board game, attach the word ‘mobile’ ahead of it... and prepare to be flooded!