A Feminist Analysis of Modern Board Games

This study examines whether modern board games reinforce patriarchal imaginaries through their creators, visual representation, and linguistic choices. Written as a feminist gender-perspective analysis, it situates itself in a board game research field that remains small compared with video game scholarship, building on earlier work that documented white male dominance among designers and recurring underrepresentation and Eurocentric narratives in the sector. Its sample comprises 68 highly rated, internationally recognized games published in Spanish, selected through sales data from 77 Spanish stores (2018–2023), major awards (Spiel des Jahres and As d'Or, 2014–2023), and popularity rankings, and analyzed through content analysis drawing on cultivation theory.

The findings point to pronounced gender imbalance. Women accounted for roughly 5% of the 91 designers and about 20% of illustrators, and only 7.35% of games were created by women, with a single game having a woman as sole designer. On game boxes, women appeared in 27% of human figures compared with 66% for men, and they were far more likely to be stereotyped (39% versus 17%) or sexualized (10% versus none). Rulebook language was overwhelmingly masculine-generic, appearing in 98.5% of rulebooks, with only a slight, statistically non-significant rise in female representation in more recent titles.

The authors attribute these patterns to androcentric industry dynamics, limited leisure time for women, and male-oriented marketing, while noting that an apparent upward trend relative to earlier studies remains unconfirmed. Spanish-language translations largely follow the masculine generic, appearing in about 72% of components and nearly all rulebooks. The study concludes by calling for future research that records creator gender and applies an intersectional feminist lens to the field.