Appendix A: The Unboxed Games Manifesto
Board gamers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your boxes.
We, the founders of the Unboxed Games movement, revolt against boxes—boxes of all sorts and sizes—except the soapbox.
Unboxed games are designer games for the people, toppling the tyranny of the boxed commercial game. With the proliferation of game systems such as the piecepack in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there is no longer any other excuse for the existence of boxed commercial games than greed. How many hit commercial card games can be played with only a couple of standard decks and a sharpie? We condemn you, Uno. We denounce you, Phase 10. We rebuke you, Lost Cities. We belittle you, “Great” Dalmuti.
Unboxed games are green, ecological—scorning boxes of components. We repudiate the bourgeois “parakeet” gamer who is only interested in a game if it has “nice,” shiny bits. Hundreds of bits in a box times hundreds of boxes on a shelf times tens of thousands of devoted gamers equals hundreds of millions of redundant pieces of four-color parakeet droppings. Boxed games look nice on the shelf but provide little more than bragging rights, consuming unspeakably more natural resources than a simple rule sheet. We say enough. Unboxed games are the Hercules that shall cleanse gaming's Augean Stables.
Unboxed games are free, merrily robbing the cash boxes of corporate sharks like Hasbro and their pusillanimous remoras. As gamers, we want to play, not pay. As ...
