My family never really played board games. My dad refused to play Battleship with my mother because she would play purely by intuition, erratic, seemingly at random, but she always won and it infuriated him. We played a couple games of Clue, but my sister hated the process of logical deduction necessary to compete, so she'd rage quit. My mom used to love Tetris until it came to light I was even more competitive than her and she couldn't keep up with my high scores. I practiced playing foosball on my own to get competitive with my dad; when my new skills proved very effective my dad flipped the whole table. I would rage quit every trivia game as a kid because I didn't stand a chance against my parents. The only game we ever played more than a handful of times was Sorry; an absolute excuse of a game that needs little to no skill or strategy.

So the most prevalent relationship between board games and video games in my experience has been their common inspiration for rage quitting. That compulsion is born from fierce competition. Most humans have some compulsion for competition that's expressed through sport or skill. But those expressions require some initial training before you can participate in them, like learning an instrument or being taught to throw and catch.

I think games often bridge this accessibility gap. Often the rules of a game can be understood in a few minutes, and playing can begin. Players can jump immediately into strategizing. A sport strategies fall apart if a player lacks the physical capabilities necessary to execute them, but a game allows any strategy to be immediately executed. There is no prerequisite ability in playing cards, rolling dice, pressing buttons, or moving joysticks. You don't need to be tall, fast, or strong to play or even enjoy Monopoly or Mario; you only need your hands.

There are very few board games that cannot be implemented digitally, and those that come to mind, like Twister, only loosely resemble board games. So in this sense video games are a natural evolution of the board game. Digitalization allows for games that are massive in scale and distribution. The computer is the ultimate game master: unbiased and instant. Computing graduates games from static to dynamic. They can immerse the player in ways no board game can: light, sound, and narrative. And players can be passively immersed; board games that attempt to immerse, like Dungeons and Dragons, require a lot from a player's imagination to hook them.

But video games may struggle to inspire nostalgia the way a board game can. People generally don't pass save data down to their children, but it's not uncommon for a chess board to be decades old. Who hasn't improvised some missing game piece with a funny knick-knack? And there's something to be said for proximity. Board games generally require the players to share there space and time with eachother, to connect directly. Early video game multiplayer experiences came close to this, and a generation of players has incredible nostalgia concerning this dynamic. But with the ever rising popularity of networked gaming the multiplayer experience takes players farther and farther away. Even if they're in the same room rarely do they share the same screen. And I think that's partly why a resurgence in table-top gaming has occurred. The intimacy of that interaction is satisfying. There's a vivid shared experience amongst the players; you feel like a part of something permanent, the memory of it. Video games can be played at any time, anywhere, and this may give them a transient quality.

For all their differences, board games and video games are designed to be played. People play them to pass the time, to go on an adventure, or to test their mettle. They must engage the player and convince them that playing the game is worth their time. The player expects reward for their struggles, and creativity in those struggles. The player doesn't want to be patronized, but they'll be frustrated by unreasonable difficulty. They expect to be treated fairly by the game. Enjoyment is not directly related to simplicity or complexity; both have their place. These qualities are necessary for a good game, of any kind, because a good game is a vehicle for human struggle and reward; where the latter may not follow the former in our real lives, we expect games to reliably provide this dynamic in a format that we find palatable. That is their purpose.