It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the internet is a spring of unending inspiration for people who like to write a lot. Accordingly, I’ve stumbled over a phrase while scrolling through my phone that stuck with me. Somebody had written that they felt as if the line between digital and “analog” games was growing increasingly thin. This surprised me. Because that line appeared to me wholly untouched be the changes and developments in board gaming the last few years. Quite the opposite in fact, because there were digital implementations of board games, you’d otherwise only got to play with others at a table, the differences between digital games and board games seemed all the more pronounced.

But I also understand that you can pick up a certain similarity or kinship between them, if you compare the rules in both. On your gaming device, all the rules of the original board game are included and increasingly so are the same graphics and illustrations. A comparison seems inevitable. Not least of all because the comfortable user interface makes them quite attractive. Because it’s the admin effort that has become part of modern game designs which a digital simulation of a board game can handle much quicker. Set-Up is just a simple button push. The rules are hard-coded into being applied correctly. A digital game never runs the risk of “not counting” because of misread rules. Some games can be run both more fluidly and with a flexible schedule in their digital form. Vlaada Chvatil’s Through the Ages is a text-book example of such a game. Even its die-hard fans vastly prefer to play the digital implementation. Something, that I believe hints at the fact that the board game’s user interface wasn’t optimized for usability. Which I’d say is kind of the point of good game design. But I digress.

The arguably simple usability of a digital version of board game rarely mattered much to me. Digital games became interesting to me, when I wanted to see a rule in action. In some cases it was even an interesting challenge to deduce the rules of a game based solely on the interface on a platfrom like Board Game Arena. I could try out rules that were unclear to me before, instead of wasting a game night with friends on it. It’s better to click buttons on my computer on my own, that trying to awkwardly make it through a full playthrough on game night. To me this was never more than a supplement to my regular gaming. It was mostly at attempt to avoid a shoddy rulebook.

That is why a digital implementation of a board game is primarily a way to play around with the rules, instead of the game itself. But since I fancy myself a game critic, as opposed to a rules critic, I rarely have a use for digital games that replicate a board game’s rules.

This is what I consider the line between board games and their digital implementation similarly unbroken as the one between a book and its film adaptation. There’s no doubt that the latter is easier and more comfortably consumed. You can let a film affect you, let its production wow you and you rarely have to put up the kind of mental effort needed, that a book demands of you. In a book, fiction isn’t just presented differently, it also demands a different type of engagement from us. These differences make each medium unique. It doesn’t much matter that both film and book follow the same plot.

I feel the same way about digital implementations of board games. The qualities that make up a board game, are not the qualities that can be transported on a tablet. I miss the people I share the experience of this game with; the people with whom I make a narrative happen. But I also miss the tactility of play, the finely tuned social interaction the emerges from our different roles at the table: from competitors to friends, to guests and host, etc.

All this isn’t some pleasant accessory to play, or even a beneficial side-effect, that is of little relevance to play itself. It’s actually the reason I play games at all. These are the elements that provide the foundation for playing board games and the reason why I keep writing, arguing and recording podcasts about it. If all this is excluded, so I can experience only the mechanical challenge of the game on my tablet, then it lacks everything that makes board game relevant to me.

So I don’t see the line between digital games and board games growing thin at all. Even with games that increasingly make use of digital tools, I can find a clear distinction for myself. As long as those tools are focused on play as social interaction and seek to support those, I am playing a board game. It’s only when the digital element incorporates our player interaction, that I am playing a computer game. It’s a distinction that has worked well for me, particularly because it helps to name my own enthusiasm for games.