Forget Puzzles. Vintage Board Games Battle Boredom Over the Long Term

Jigsaw puzzles have received the lion’s share of the attention, but they aren’t the only old-school game that’s experienced a renaissance during the pandemic self-isolation period. Board games such as chess and backgammon have jumped in popularity. Even as lockdowns lift, fans are investing for the long-term, surfing the web to splash out on pricey vintage sets, rather than plastic stopgaps. Take the surge in online business reported by London-based Luke Honey, one of the world’s foremost collectibles dealers. Honey tells Pursuits that he sold four high-priced vintage chess sets in the last week alone; he estimates that his unit sales in such games is up by a third over the same period in 2019. Honey isn’t an outlier: Online antique marketplace 1stdibs has seen a similar uptick. According to data supplied by the firm, page views for vintage chess and backgammon sets were up 67% in April vs. a year earlier, and the posting of comparable sets for sale rose 180%.

Honey explains that these seemingly similar games appeal to distinct markets. “You’re most likely to get a well-connected hedge funder buying a backgammon board, and a Silicon Valley computer guy buying a chess set,” he says. When backgammon was invented, it wasn’t for gambling, but the introduction of the doubling cube in the U.S. in the 1920s made wagers viable. (This is a numbered die that allows players to increase the point value of a game.) The doubling cube transformed the audience for backgammon, making it a high-stakes game players can win or lose quickly. Anyone gifted at math and comfortable with risk will be a natural at backgammon, which explains demand among Wall Streeters. Honey says many of his middle-aged buyers refer to memories of childhood in the 1970s and early ‘80s, when backgammon was the purview of playboys and Playboy. They recall how Roger Moore’s incarnation of James Bond memorably won a game over Octopussy villain Kamal Khan. Honey also points to the ads touting Hefner’s clubs, which showed a backgammon player surrounded by bunnies. “The idea was simple: The man who reads Playboy is the man who wins at backgammon,” he laughs.