Something out there – deep within the mall, specialty shop or big-box store – is the perfect game that children, parents and grandparents can play happily ever after. Or at least till the deluxe/junior/nostalgia version comes out.

Board-game manufacturers, of course, assure us they have the very thing. They’re forever reinventing old standards, cooking up complex new games and promising their latest $29.95 box of cardboard and plastic pieces will transform your clan into modern-day Cleavers (as in “Leave It to Beaver”).

Seattleites Richard Tait and Whit Alexander, who created Cranium in 1998 and have since added eight titles to what they call a “family” of games, state their mission this way:

“To create fun moments, memories and emotional touchstones that people could celebrate at home, at work, and with friends and family – all the while smiling and learning.”

That’s awfully sweet. But is it possible for a board game to do so much for so many?

Cranium attacks the question from all angles, with a multitasking game that has players sculpting, dancing, drawing and charading. And the latest incarnation from the Cranium guys, Balloon Lagoon, is a children’s board game that mixes word-matching, puzzle-solving, frog-flipping and more.

On the old-school side, Scrabble and Monopoly come in Deluxe, Starter, Disney, Shrek, Simpsons and NFL versions, among others. And as titles have multiplied, they have been fruitful. Board-games sales sped past $70 million by the third quarter of this year, an increase of 7 percent over 2003. Video-game sales, meanwhile, slowed in the first half of 2004, according to industry tracker NPD Funworld.

NPD also reported that adults ages 25 to 34 – the coveted young-family demographic – plan to cut their spending on holiday gifts by 21 percent over last year. So while iPods, digital cameras and plasma TVs get the larger share of press and promotion between October and January, shoppers are resisting. They see the beauty in buying a $20 or even a $50 board game designed to entertain two to six players, rather than a $250 iPod mini or $80 Game Boy that serves one.

Not that it’s easy to go pick up a popular new board game whenever you get around to it. An early December phone survey of Tacoma’s Starbucks cafes yielded exactly one remaining Cranium game, and it was being held for a desperate customer. And at Teaching Toys in Tacoma’s Proctor District, shoppers jostled around the one lucky woman who’s gotten her paws on the last Blokus game. As she inched toward the cash register, others crowded around, craning their necks, barking questions about its price and cooing over the list of awards on the box.

Blokus is the “Toy Story” of board games. Both children and adults adore it, according to Teaching Toys owner Melissa Tenille. The rules are deceptively simple: You must place all of your squares on the board kitty-corner from one another, making sure their edges don’t meet.

Beware. It’s harder than it looks. And your children might beat the pants off you. “It’s not one of those games where adults always win. – Kids are on pretty equal footing,” said Tenille. But grown-ups mustn’t give up. “You’re always seeing what you could do next time you play. You’re constantly learning.”

There’s something about Blokus, added Greg Aleknevicu, editor of GamesJournal.com, that turns players into addicts. But he also calls the game “very satisfying.”

Satisfaction, learning and intergenerational fun, all from a bunch of squares on a table? Board-game inventor Kyle Weinandy isn’t surprised. A Western Washington University alumnus who lives in Paris, Weinandy has watched low-tech games take off, even as the Internet and video games have become omnipresent.

Weinandy’s publisher, Eagle Games of Plainfield, Ill., converted the Civilization, Age of Mythology and Pirates computer games into table-top games. This shows that “people do not necessarily want to plug in to the computer to have fun. These conversions have been very successful,” Weinandy noted, “because (players) already know the name, but discover they enjoy playing the game with the human contact element.”

Weinandy, whose “hard action mafia war” board game, Blood Feud in New York, went on the market last week in stores and on http://www.eaglegames.net/, credits the World Wide Web for nourishing the board-game culture. “The board-game community is expanding exponentially,” he said, thanks to Web sites such as http://www.boardgamegeek.com/. That site has logged more than 40,000 users since it went online in 2000. Players use it and countless other Internet portals to read game reviews, find games that brick-and-mortar stores have run out of and plan actual games with players near them.

This appetite, Weinandy said, is in part “due to video game fatigue. Video games become slicker every year, but people still want to have human contact.”

This being 2004, we also crave speed and multiple stimuli. Game makers hurry to oblige, of course. Blokus takes about 20 minutes to play; Cranium’s Ziggity is 10 minutes of spelling and matching. Quiddler, a card set that acts like portable Scrabble, is a quick two-person game that flies off of Teaching Toys’ shelves.

Then there’s the Scene It? phenomenon. Inventor Dave Long premiered his DVD-driven movie-trivia game two years ago in 300 U.S. stores. A year later, it was selling in 8,500 outlets, and this holiday season, Scene It? – in six versions – is in 25,000 stores in eight countries.

Simplicity and familiarity spelled success, Long said.

“The most successful games in past 20 years have been easy to play. The consumer wants to be entertained very quickly,” he said. So he started with dice, an old-fashioned board and trivia-question cards players draw from a deck. Those amount to about half of a typical Scene It? session. The other half of the game is devoted to watching clips from classic movies, spy flicks, Disney fare or 50 years of TV shows, depending on the Scene It? version you buy. Hundreds of trivia questions are embedded in the clips, and they’re arranged so that you can watch and play alone or in a group.

“If you’re having an Oscar party, say, you can set the disc on ‘party play,’ and it will give you one visual puzzle after another,” with no remote-control use necessary, Long said.

With four players, a typical Scene It? game lasts about an hour. But Long, angling for attention-span-deprived consumers, made the Scene It? board foldable. Crease it, and you cut playing time in half.

But doesn’t a screen-centric game defeat the pursuit of family face time?

Not surprisingly, Long says no. He goes as far as to call a TV and DVD player “the family hearth.”

People who play Scene It? “are relating their memories of when they first saw a certain film and where they were in their lives,” Long said. “We’ve been able to touch on an emotional chord.” The game hooks players, he added, by serving up streams of seductive visuals. “When you see a clip from ‘Charlie’s Angels’ rather than read about it,” he said, “that’s a much deeper connection.”

Scene It? is among several popular games invented in the Pacific Northwest. Cranium and WonderChess, a children’s chess game whose pieces contain tiny prizes, were born in the Puget Sound, and the Scene It? headquarters in downtown Seattle has increased its work force from 15 in 2002 to 50 today.

Long was in commercial real estate in San Diego, Calif., before moving north to develop the game. Relocating “was a key piece,” he said. “If I’d stayed down there, we might not have gotten this off the ground.”

Is that because Southern Californians, with more sun to play in, are less inclined to stay indoors in front of the TV?

Long won’t go there. He credits the “very creative people up here. There’s venture capital up here, and very creative graphics people.”

Teaching Toys’ Tenille has another game theory.

“It’s the coffee shops,” she said. “People are just sitting around,” caffeine-antsy. No wonder they invented these indoor sports.

Tenille doesn’t, however, carry Scene It? or any other DVD game in her shop. “We don’t have a lot of room,” she began. Then came the real reason. TV-free board games, she said, teach her things – hilarious things – about friends and family. One Apples to Apples session, for example, led to a player’s juicy high school prom-related revelation.

“When you watch TV, you’re laughing with the TV, not with each other,” Tenille said. She and her family have no tube. Instead she and her children, age 15 and 17, gather around the board, “all the time. We’re interacting, we’re talking, we’re making jokes, we’re laughing together.”

All over the board