The last century has truly been the golden age of boardgames. Improved printing and production techniques and better distribution methods on the manufacturers' part and increased prosperity and greater leisure among consumers combined to make boardgames international big business. Whereas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries hundreds, sometimes thousands, of copies of an individual game were sold, today sales in the million are by no means uncommon, and families from Finland to Fiji can be found settling down to play the same games.
As in almost every other part of the entertainment world, the United States took the lead both in developing new games and in finding new techniques with which to market them, and it is for this reason that the majority of games in this book - all of which can be played with the rules and counters provided - originate in the USA. The Americans were not totally dominant, however, and there were a large number of successful European manufacturers. The truth is that, games being imitative of real life, manufacturers all over the world reacted in much the same way to contemporary events and fashions and saw the same commercial opportunities in them.