You learn about a half-hour into “The Hobby” that it was director Simon Ennis who got his friend Dan Corbett into board games. During the pandemic, the two decided to spend part of their quarantine at Corbett’s cabin in the woods in Canada and Ennis brought Terraforming Mars where they could pass time by colonizing the red planet, a distraction that went so well that Corbett says board games are his “current fix for the rush of endorphines that says you’re good at something” and has set about carving out a space in a house already filled with voluminous collections of vinyl records, books and DVDs for games.
With Corbett clearly already in the bag, Ennis appears to be just as eager to win over others to become board game fanatics and he is bound to convert more than a few with this breezy survey of the resurgent form of recreation. Far more sophisticated than “Sorry!” of “Monopoly,” the tabletop games these days can take Army vets to Vietnam for a strategic do-over or serve as brainteasers for adults far more than kids and while still fun for the whole family, “The Hobby” delves into a more diverse array of players who are connected by their passion. Ennis does visit Mitch and Starla Fitch, whose son Grant will join their games as a third and have become YouTube stars with their show “Our Family Plays Games,” but he finds people who have found a sense of community in board games from Elizabeth Hargrave, who found unexpected success as a game designer with the scientifically sound “Wingspan” after being a public policy expert, Candice Harris, who comes to design games herself after developing one of the premier databases for them, and Tom Vasel, who reviews games and enjoys, in his words, a “cool level of fame” when he is a celebrity nowhere but the game tournaments where everyone can recognize him from his colorful fedoras.
“The Hobby” would be better served if, like the characters it follows, it seemed less invested in the traditional ideas around winning when it’s largely structured around a burgeoning game designer named John Hague’s attempts to launch a new board game with a crowdsourcing campaign and a trip to the First World Series of Board Games in Las Vegas where, among others, Corbett is lured by a $25,000 purse. The film never quite gets the latter storyline to generate much tension when scenes of actual gameplay would require more information about the game being played that Ennis is probably wise not to go too deep into and the former also resists getting into the nitty gritty of how Hague’s game actually improves as he tests it out, but does offer a nice skeleton for other game developers such as Eric Lang to discuss what makes a good game for them.
However, Ennis is far more successful in bringing a number of interesting characters to the table, from its opening moments of a historian from England who has no time for modern games to those who can’t get enough of them and whose enthusiasm dominate the picture, and while the narrative moves may seem familiar, it gets one to think about the purpose of games in a unusual way when everyone is getting something different out of it. In a world where pieces were long sold separately, they come together well in “The Hobby.”
“The Hobby” will screen again at SXSW on March 10th at 11:15 am at AFS Cinema.
