I admire a store like “The Compleat Strategist,” whose name makes its intentions known from the outset. This board-game store, on E. 33rd St. between 5th and Madison, doesn’t just seek to attract “players.” It demands “strategists.”

The distinction is important. Everyone knows that kid games like Chutes & Ladders and Candy Land are games of chance, prettied-up dice races to keep the little hellians quiet. Yet our prototypical “grown-up” board games don’t offer much strategy, either. The Parker Brothers juggernaut Monopoly is highly dependent on dice rolls, and offers scant strategic decisions relative to the epic time it takes to finish a game.¹ A nuanced gameplan comes in handy when playing the venerable Scrabble, but it’s still primarily a game of skill (i.e., linguistic ability) rather than strategy. Likewise Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Taboo, etc. In spite of their strategic paucity, you can find all these familiar games at The Compleat Strategist—in the back.

The prime shelf space up front goes to games that require tactical prowess, and to my eye these boxes satisfy a broader range of taste than “traditional” board games. For seasoned tabletop veterans, there are war simulations that reenact seemingly every major conflict of the past millennium, so if you’ve got a late-17th-century Indian Subcontinental imperialistic itch to scratch, you’re covered.

There’s also an array of role-playing games in the Dungeons & Dragon lineage (with associated pewter tchotchkes), but before your eyes glaze over at the thought of graph paper and dodecahedron dice, take a close look, as many are more accessible than old-fashioned D&D.

And then there are the “Your wife will like it!” games. In gaming forums like BoardGameGeek, where male contributors outnumber their female counterparts by a ratio of around 13 to 1,² “Your wife/girlfriend will like it!” has become an unfortunate but easy shorthand for games that “non-gamers” can enjoy.

YWWLI! games are exemplified by titles with deep possibilities but a shallow learning curve, like Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Settlers of Catan. Incidentally, all of those modern classics originate from Europe, as do most of the best novice-friendly games these days, the Continent having long surpassed the New World in its ability to engage the minds of budding strategists with cardboard and little wooden men.

This place isn’t just “The Strategist,” though; it’s “Compleat,” an anachronistic term at a store that deals in a seemingly anachronistic medium. The word choice is inspired. It entices customers with a sense of nostalgia to get them in the door, and once they’re in, they’re hit with the newness of it all. There are some dusty items, like a “1993 Year in Review” Trivial Pursuit expansion or old Strat-O-Matic sets, but the store always impresses me as the hub of a vibrant community. The Compleat Strategist doesn’t preserve a dying art. It lives.

Indeed, on my latest visit, I was admonished for not keeping up with the times. I asked a clerk if they had the Cold War simulation game Twilight Struggle (mentioned previously on these pages—I’ve only played with a friend’s copy), and the store manager walked over to tell me that it was out of print, awaiting another run by the manufacturer.

“It’s one of the hottest games! Where have you been?” he said. He seemed to be kidding, but I wasn’t sure, so I made a half-hearted excuse and chuckled. He rebuked me again, and again I couldn’t tell if he was kidding, so I made another dumb excuse and chuckled a little louder. This continued so that by the time we were finished, I was making remarks like: “I guess I was busy playing other great games. HA! HA! WHAT A HUMOROUS EXCHANGE WE ARE HAVING!”³

But the manager never cracked, so I left the store determined to march back in there when Twilight Struggle returns, cash in hand, to prove that I am in touch with the board-game zeitgeist, dammit. This is exactly the victory he desired, of course. I realized that I might consider myself a strategist, but I am far from compleat.

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1. In fairness, Monopoly gets a little better when people follow the letter of the law as printed in rules booklet. For instance, very few players are aware of the “auction unsold properties” rule, and the common “Free Parking jackpot” house rule throws the game mechanics out of whack. ↑

2. That ratio is accurate in my experience, but it’s still just a ballpark estimate; it comes from this report on gender biases in game ratings conducts by a BoardGameGeek member. ↑

3. It should be noted that the staff is generally quite friendly and helpful. This is simply a HUMOROUS ANECDOTE! HA! HA! ↑