International Board Game Studies Association

Lore & Background

The International Board Game Studies Association grew out of a colloquium organized by Dr Irving Finkel at the British Museum in 1990. A volume of papers from that event was published by the British Museum Press as Ancient Board Games in Perspective. After the initial colloquium, Dr Alexander de Voogt, then of the University of Leiden, convened a second colloquium held at Leiden in 1995. Members agreed to meet biennially, and the next event was held at Leiden in 1997. An associated journal, sponsored by the University of Leiden, was established, and the first volume of the Board Game Studies Journal was published in 1998.

The colloquium continued as a biennial forum, meeting in a different European city every two years, while the journal was published annually. From 2002, the colloquium became an annual event. The print journal published eight issues (volumes 1–8) before ceasing print publication. An online continuation, the *Board Game Studies Journal* (ISSN 2183-3311), was launched by De Gruyter as a new series, not a direct reconstitution of the original print journal. The annual Board Game Studies Colloquium is now the largest and single most important academic conference related to the study of board games. It has occasionally been hosted outside Europe but is now established as a European event.

Reader's Guide

The International Board Game Studies Association has played a central role in formalizing the academic study of board games. Originating from a 1990 colloquium at the British Museum, it provided a structured forum for scholars, curators, and designers to share research. The association's journal, Board Game Studies, initially published by the University of Leiden, later moved to an online format via De Gruyter, ensuring continued scholarly dissemination. The annual BGSA Colloquium, which became annual in 2002, has grown into the largest and most important academic conference for board game studies. Its meetings have been held across Europe and occasionally beyond, reflecting the global interest in the field. The association's membership, spanning academics, museum curators, game designers, archivists, and collectors, underscores its interdisciplinary nature. By fostering collaboration and publishing peer-reviewed research, the IBGSA has established board game studies as a recognized academic discipline, preserving and analyzing the cultural and historical significance of board games worldwide.

Did You Know?

• The Board Game Studies Journal was first published in 1998, sponsored by the University of Leiden.
• The BGSA Colloquium became an annual event in 2002, after being biennial from 1995.
• The print journal published eight issues (volumes 1–8) before ceasing print publication; the online continuation is a new series published by De Gruyter as the Board Game Studies Journal (ISSN 2183-3311).

The Board Game Studies Journal's Landmark Review

The International Board Game Studies Association, through its publication the Board Game Studies Journal, produced what it itself termed a review of "history's most infamous board game" — the 1936 cross-and-circle title Juden Raus! The journal's article did not merely catalogue the game's mechanics, in which players rolled dice to move figurines wearing large pointed hats toward deportation points outside city walls. Instead, it positioned the game within a much wider cultural and historical framework, arguing that the very existence of such a title for children demonstrated how deeply antisemitic ideology had permeated everyday German life by the mid-1930s. The review emphasized that while racist themes appear in various board games across history, Juden Raus! stood apart in its unflinching depiction of how prejudice operates within a society. The IBGSA's publication thus served as a scholarly act of remembrance, transforming a commercial product from a bygone era into a serious object of academic inquiry and moral reflection.

Challenging the Commercial Myth

A distinctive contribution of the IBGSA's Board Game Studies Journal article was its willingness to interrogate a widely repeated claim about Juden Raus!. Popular accounts, including documentation from the Holocaust museum at the Wiener Library, have described the game as a "considerable commercial success," with estimates suggesting as many as one million copies were sold. The journal's authors pushed back against this narrative, arguing that the true commercial performance of the title may never be verifiable. They pointed out that the million-copy figure could have been inflated within advertising materials, and they further noted the logical difficulty of a game achieving sustained sales in the German market after the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps had publicly condemned it for trivializing antisemitic policy. By subjecting a popular historical claim to careful scrutiny, the IBGSA's publication demonstrated that even the most well-known artifacts of the era deserve methodological rigor, and that the story told by surviving copies — only three are known to exist today — may differ substantially from the story told by marketing and memory.

The Banality of Evil as Scholarly Lens

The IBGSA's review of Juden Raus! went beyond historical documentation to offer a moral and philosophical reading of the game. The article's authors drew on the concept of the "banality of evil" to explain how a society could normalize the deportation of an entire ethnic group into the mechanics of a children's parlor game. In their analysis, the game's instruction to send six figurines to "collection points" outside the city walls for deportation to Mandatory Palestine was not an isolated act of cruelty but a symptom of decades of propaganda that had made such language feel ordinary. The review explicitly stated that Juden Raus! was "a warning to us all," framing the game not as a relic confined to the 1930s but as a living caution about how prejudice can become embedded in the most mundane cultural products. Through this lens, the IBGSA positioned board game studies as a discipline capable of illuminating broader questions about how societies manufacture consent for injustice, making the field's scholarly work directly relevant to contemporary moral discourse.

Contextualizing Board Games Within Nazi Propaganda

The IBGSA's scholarship on Juden Raus! gains additional depth when read alongside the broader landscape of Nazi-era board games that the article helps to contextualize. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels recognized that effective messaging required attention-grabbing media, and board games and toys for children became one such channel for disseminating racial, military, and political ideology. The journal's review sits within a wider ecosystem of titles including Bomber über England, a pinball-style game in which players scored points by bombing British cities while losing points for hitting German-controlled territories, and Jagd auf Kohlenklau, a 1944 roll-and-move game produced in four million copies as part of a 1942 energy-conservation campaign. By examining Juden Raus! — a commercial product containing no Nazi symbolism yet condemned by the SS — the IBGSA's article highlighted the complex relationship between state propaganda and private enterprise, showing that the normalization of hatred in German society extended well beyond official channels into the commercial marketplace and the domestic lives of families.

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