Links: Asmodee Acquires Purple Brain Creations, Fog of Love Acquires a Fan, and Games Acquire Everything

With this acquisition, the Asmodee Group builds the first brick of its future development in children's games publishing.

Stéphane Carville, Chairman and CEO of the Asmodee Group, said, "Our objective as a group is to offer the best games to all audiences, to achieve this we wish to strengthen our offer with transgenerational ranges that will please both children and adults. This is why we are very happy to count Purple Brain amongst us."

Benoît Forget, founder of Purple Brain Créations, said, "As an enthusiast of children's literature, tales and fables of all kinds, it is with passion that I developed game ranges appealing to both children and adults. Joining Asmodee will allow us to increase the reach of our ranges, but also to pursue the innovation strategy that made our success."

Board games are designed to rile us up. Like sports, these games work by creating division. We adopt a "me versus them" mentality.

"By their nature, board games bring out our competitive spirit because they divide us," says Dr. Alok Trivedi, a psychological performance coach and founder of The Aligned Performance Institute. "Whether it's a family, couples hanging out on a Saturday night or just kids having fun, board games usually are an 'every man for himself' scenario, or separate us into teams. This automatically turns on our competitive switch in the brain. We start producing adrenalin and cortisol and we become ready to fight."

I estimate we are looking at the manufacture of 10+ million units of games every year. I use these numbers to get a handle on the volume of manufacture: meaning the consumption of approximately 50 mil kilograms (110 mil pounds) of materials (cardboard, plastics, metal, and wood) each year. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 currently enjoys the top ranking on BoardGameGeek, and since 2015 seems to have sold at least 100,000 units in two years. At 2.1kgs, that's 210,000 kgs (463,000 lbs) of materials in two years, which (once completed) are sitting on shelves gathering dust.

We are now witnessing a hobby, saturated with new titles (and increasing with every year), driven by hype and hunger for constant newness generating high turn overs, and a crowding out effect on established historical titles. These are conditions ripe for conspicuous consumption, with high levels of consumption chasing new titles. Moreover, gaming companies are structurally compelled by this scenario to produce and manufacture a spate of new titles in increasingly demanding fashion, less they become obsolete.

As someone who loves board games and loves playing them with my wife, I frequently feel frustrated by how much better most games tend to be at capturing the external rather than the internal.

As a comparison point, take the incredibly fun card game Love Letter, in which players race to deliver love letters to the princess of a medieval kingdom. Sneak enough letters to her and you win her heart and the game. But the process of falling in love is reduced to tokens. You don't know anything about the princess, or even the character you're playing; you're just competing for those little tokens, which represent some sort of emotional culmination.

Thus, what's most notable about Fog of Love is that it's found a way to make internal mechanisms the center of a game, by adding just a dash of role-playing to the more rigid mechanics of a typical board game. Each time you play, the first thing you do is create your character, by drawing cards that represent three personality traits, an occupation, and three physical features that might help entice the other player. You also give your character a name and a brief history, one that you further tease out as the game continues. As a result, you have an investment not just in "winning" the relationship, but in your character as an individual and making sure that character is happy.

It may sound like a simple approach, but it ends up being conceptually brilliant, especially once the game adds relationship goals to the mix. Perhaps one partner wants to dominate the relationship, while the other wants an equal partnership. Or perhaps one partner wants to let their partner take the lead, while their partner wants a pairing of highly driven, Type A personalities. All of these potential variables make Fog of Love simultaneously cooperative and competitive: You're working together to build a lasting relationship, but you're also working to keep your own head above water.

The umpire for North Korea is a real-life British military officer, Maj Tom Mouat, who lectures at the Defence Academy, at Shrivenham. His presence suggest this is a serious business.

He says war gaming "allows you to better understand what options you have". "You avoid the group-think mindset," he says.

He gives the example of the US academic Thomas Schelling, who was involved in war gaming during the Cold War and helped identify the need for a "hotline" for the US and Russian presidents to talk.