Games... When video gaming began to become popular many believed it marked the end for board games and RPGs like D&D, however the reverse appears to have have happened. A mate of mine who works for London’s, nay Englands premier gaming store, Leisure Games in Finchley, has seen the market remain strong; so strong in fact they had to move to a larger store across the road. So I got to pondering why this might be so. Well firstly the market for RPGs and boxed games is of course much, much bigger than the traditional family games of Monopoly and Cluedo but has seen consolidation as publishers have merged or been subsumed by the bigger players. The biggest, Hasbro, now owns Parker, Milton Bradley, the war gamers favourite Avalon Hill and Wizards of the Coast who picked up the Dungeons and Dragons license from TSR. The rest of the market is split between a few European companies like Ravensburger and Days of Wonder; although there are also still hundreds of small specialist publishers. In many ways I reckon it's because of the popularity of video games that people have begun think about gaming in general and look for other ways of fulfilling the gaming itch. Board games and 'paper and pencil' RPGs offer a fundamentally different gaming experience to video games. Staring at your mates across a table is always more involving than connecting to the internet to get fragged by an anonymous spotty ‘yoof’ who's hundreds maybe thousands of miles away. And don’t think some of these games can’t complete with the console or PC titles for unit sales. Ticket to Ride published by Days of Wonder have sold over 320,000 copies, lots of video games only dream of selling numbers like that.