Anything-but-bored games

Can Monopoly and Clue survive in a ‘Halo 3’ world?

PROFILE. It all seems so delightfully low-tech: Some dice. A cardboard playing surface. Little cards that tell you to lose a turn, win a spin or go to jail without passing “Go.”

In a world of MySpace, Second Life and iPods, board games can seem hopelessly quaint; nostalgic but hardly thrilling. But they shouldn’t be written off just yet, says Phil Orbanes, President of Winning Moves Games.

“The biggest problem that families have has been competing activities that keep them from coming together to play games,” admits Orbanes, but games are a great learning experience. “And that underlies the fact that everybody is having fun,” he adds.

Orbanes is the author of “Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game and How it Got that Way” and the classic remains one of his favorites. He notes that you can add electronic banking to a game like Monopoly, but not everyone will like it. “While it’s fairly exciting and easy to add a piece of technology into a game, it’s not necessarily always something consumers adapt to,” he says.

Some players, however, do embrace the upgrades:

“Monopoly is a perennial favorite because just like the system it expounds, which is capitalism, it always undergoes and absorbs change,” he says.