National Games Week takes place over Thanksgiving week, from the Sunday before Thanksgiving to the Saturday after. The event is the brainchild of Mark Simmons, former publisher of the now defunct Games Quarterly magazine and the Executive Director of GAMA, the Game Manufacturer Association, a non-profit trade organization dedicated to serving the tabletop game industry.

The idea behind National Games Week was to step away from electronic single player games and engage in traditional game play with friends and family. Thanksgiving was chosen because this it is the time of the year when families and friends tend to come together.

Since its inception in 2004, the National Games Week has grown by leaps and bounds. The rules of the holiday are simple. Put your Xbox away. Hide the PlayStation. Pretend like there are no games on your computer, tablet or smart phone. In short, if it’s electronic, pretend that a massive solar flare took it out. We know that this is hard for some people, but keep in mind, this type of game play is fairly new. The early versions of electronic games came in arcades in the 1970s and migrated into the home via Atari, Apple and Commodore computers in the early 1980s. Just give it a try. Grab a beer and relax. It’s okay. The world has not ended. By turning all these electronics off, you’re saving on your electric bill. That’s a good thing.

Here’s the good news. Electronic games as we know them today have been around for about forty years and while they have evolved massively over that time, they are still relatively new. People have played games since the dawn of time. At least forty centuries worth of documented historic time and while we can argue that traditional games have evolved very slowly, they have been around for nothing short of forever.

National Games Week is easy to celebrate and is very inexpensive. All of us have a stash of traditional games in the back of the closet or under the bed. It’s time to pull them out, dust them off and invite friends and family to gather around the table to partake in tradition. The tradition is family and community and traditional games are the means of bringing everyone together to play, talk and laugh.

Over the next week we will profile some of the most popular games of modern times to celebrate this family oriented holiday.

[whohit]2014-11-23 It’s National Games Week![/whohit]