Card games and board games are dying out, and it's no great loss

Another day, another story bemoaning the deleterious state of modern childhood. This time it’s card and board games that are on the wane -- killed off by those beastly computer boxes.

According to a survey (conducted, oddly, by Barclaycard) Old Maid, Happy Families and even snap are in danger of going the way of trainspotting and collecting Donald Bradman cigarette cards.

The survey suggested that while 73 per cent of parents remembered regularly playing board games as children, only 44 per cent of the children polled said they do so now.

Do you want to know why? Parents of my generation had rubbish TV. Or rather the TV was often great, but it was only on for a few hours a day. I can still remember during the long, lazy sunny holidays -- in an era before breakfast television and when there were only three channels (an unfathomable idea to today’s children) -- waiting for cricket to come on the telly. My god, being a child was boring back then.

This photo depicts an alternative universe in which

^{iPads haven't been invented (Alamy)}

Which is why our generation (or rather our own parents) resorted to Monopoly or Cluedo. They are deeply, deeply dull games that teach children nothing except billiard rooms are not be trusted. The survey did not ask if parents enjoyed the board games, just whether they remembered playing them.

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Board games are an exercise in killing time -- which, I suppose, is what parenting is for long stretches. But I’d prefer to kill that time doing something more educational, more interesting and more fun.

Also, a vast number of board games are badly designed, with too many pieces, rules, and faff. Lose one small element and whole, cumbersome game is ruined.

My favourite are not really board games at all. Bananagrams, the fast-pace, hipster version of Scrabble I have banged on about many times, really is fabulous. Crucially, it is small enough to pack in your pocket and the games are over in little more than 10 minutes.

Some children, pretending to enjoy a tortuously

^{complicated card game (Getty)}

The demise of card games and chess I feel slightly more ambivalent about. Both, in theory, are passports to potential friendship -- take a travel chess set around the world and you can always find someone to play with, even if you don’t share a language.

Chess is also a rare multi-generational game. My 12-year-old plays against his 83-year-old grandfather as a near equal, and they both get something out of the enterprise.

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But I am not convinced the game really is dying out -- something that has survived a couple of millennia will always fall in and out of fashion. And, of course, it was never more popular than the 1970s, when the Cold War battles of Fischer and Spassky ignited a generation of nerdy schoolboys. It is unlikely to reach such heights again.

Chess: a rare multigenerational game (Alamy)

Cards too are a great travel companion, in theory.

But in practice so many of the games are tortuously complicated or ridiculously simple and not conducive to family bonding. Snap is possibly the most asinine. Can anyone, in all seriousness, claim to enjoy this?

I spent most of my own childhood struggling to get to grips with the rules of gin rummy and just feeling stupid.

Blackjack is fun (and not a bad way to teach children to count to 21), but it’s only fun if you play for matchsticks or pennies. But that’s not really cards. It’s gambling.