"During the second half of the nineteenth century, the rise of industrialization and a gendered division of labor set the stage for tastemakers, architects, and social reformers to equate a comfortable white middle-class home with morality. What better image of this family-centric idea than mother, father, and children around a tabletop in the parlor playing a board game. Marketing such intergenerational and cooperative play was at the fore of manufacturers minds as their ads highlighted the capacity of games to bring families together. But beyond actual play, the game content peddled its own agenda and represented a certain brand of the American dream. As the home became marketed and sought after as a retreat from work, board games played a critical role in the development of leisure culture. In Family Game Night: Board Games from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, Susan Asbury provides a history of early American board games, the cultural mores embodied in the games and their instructions, and the influence game designers had with respect to navigating consumer society during late nineteenth century. Drawing from a variety of sources, including the historical records of manufacturers and designers as well as marketing materials, advertisements, patents, diaries, and photographs, Asbury shows how American board games designers and manufacturers produced a host of games that incorporated concepts related to progress and abundance, including clear delineation of the purported beneficiaries: the white, middle-class family. Asbury analyzes the box covers, game boards, and instructions produced from the 1880s through the 1920s, during the "golden age" of the board game industry.

In so doing, she uncovers the ways in which designers and manufacturers urged players to use games to form new rituals within a home facing the social and cultural changes brought about by late nineteenth-century industrialization. By marketing games based on their educational and aesthetic qualities, as well as their capacity to bring families together, manufacturers and designers served as mediators who crafted middle-class narratives of progress in order to maintain a sense of cultural hegemony in a rapidly changing world. Through the imagery and instructions woven into the framework of play, Asbury argues, these games influenced players cultural values and associations, shaping how they saw the world"-- Provided by publisher.