By David D. Medina

He who dies with the most games wins.
At least, that’s what Tony Elam enjoys telling people, and judging from the 5,000 games he has amassed over the last 31 years, he is a sure bet to win hands down. At least in Texas. Elam believes that he has the largest collection in the Lone Star State, though it does fall short of the world record of 15,000 games.

By day, Elam is associate dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, but during his spare time he is an avid collector and player of board and card games. You can tell that’s his passion. His big, boyish face lights up when he talks about his collection.

“I’m still a kid,” he says. “I still get excited about getting the next game in the mail. It’s the excitement of the anticipation that keeps me going.”
If he keeps going much longer, he may be out of a house and home. Elam stores all 5,000 games in his suburban four-bedroom house. Board games occupy every room except the bathrooms, kitchen, and laundry space, and most closets are crammed full of games.

His wife, Cherie, pauses for a moment to see if there is a room that does not hold Elam’s collection. “I was thinking,” she says, “there weren’t any games in the living room, but actually, there are some in the credenza.”

“As my two sons leave the house, I am beginning to put stuff in their rooms,” Elam admits. He took advantage of his oldest son’s departure to college by replacing the queen-size bed with a small twin, then filled the room with shelves replete with a variety of board and card games.
One bedroom serves solely for storage. It has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that line the four walls and spill over with board games. In the middle of that room, he’s put more shelves to accommodate his growing collection. Elam barely manages to maneuver through the tight squeeze in search of his prize possessions.

“Here’s the first popular edition of Monopoly, made in 1935,” he says, his excitement growing with every board game he shows off. “This is Polly Anna, made in 1916, and here’s White Squadron, which is about 100 years old.” His collection from the middle decades of the 20th century include Bull and Bears, a stock market game made in 1935; The Lone Ranger, which was created in 1938; and Clue, made in 1949. “Now here’s a beautiful little game called Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer, from 1948,” he says, before he moves to the present, pulling out in quick succession The Godfather, Subway Vigilante, Elvis, Cosmic Encounters, Junta, and Members Only. As he names each game, he gives a brief explanation of its history and rules.

Elam’s collection ranges from the most common and popular games, such as Clue, to the rare and hard to find, such as Full Metal Planet and Super Gangs, both made in France and out of print. Last April, he bought a Canadian game called Crokinole, originally created in the late 1800s.

Using the Internet and other sources, Elam is constantly searching for the latest development in board games. He is particularly interested in games that have a unique and beautiful design and games that have the “neatest” components, such as play pieces made of metal or wood rather than plain cardboard or plastic. “I am always intrigued by what will be the next innovation or novel mechanism,” he explains. For example, he bought a racing game made in Africa in which the play pieces consist of two handcrafted wooden rhinoceroses tied to a leather strap.

After years of amassing games, Elam is refining his collection. “I am buying fewer older products,” he says, “because there are not many of high quality available, and I already have many of the older ones that I wanted.” But he still looks for the occasional older game that is rare and in good shape. He also plans to get rid of many games, particularly those based on TV shows, such as Dallas and Sea Hunt, whose artwork, as he put it, is crude.

Lately, Elam has been buying games from Europe through the Internet and a broker who shops at an annual show in Essen, Germany. The games in Europe tend to be of higher production quality than those from the United States, Elam explains, because games are more popular there. Elam enjoys receiving new games so much that, although he has already selected the games that his wife buys him for Christmas, like a kid, he can hardly wait to open them on December 25th.

Elam’s knowledge of board games is vast. You can ask him about games that have a certain theme and he will rattle off a series and tell you which is the best to play. He is so well versed in board games that he and Rice history professor Patricia Seed teamed up last year to teach a world history course through games. Using anthropological, cultural, and historical analysis, students must evaluate and compare games and offer suggestions on how to improve certain board games.
“Students love it,” says Seed. “Tony and I were blown away the first time we offered the course.” They expected 20 students, but instead, 76 signed up. The course has been so successful, in part, because of Elam, she explains. “Tony is probably the most creative teacher I have ever worked with. He is such a gifted and enthusiastic instructor. His face lights up when he gives a lecture.”

In his lectures, Elam expounds on the history of board games and how they evolved to present time. “Games do reflect society’s interests and values,” Elam explains. “They are little snapshots in time.” Many of the games made before the Civil War, for example, were created with the purpose of teaching children values. Simple, with little creativity, the play pieces moved in a spiral track, and the general theme was that virtue is its own reward.

Between the Civil War and the 1930s, the country moved into the industrial age, and the work ethic changed. “The theme in general was that if you are good, virtuous, and work hard, then you will be successful,” says Elam.

After the 1930s, virtue plays no part in the games. “Our leisure time changed after World War II, and we started to go into the new information age,” Elam says. “Technology started to take off and America became more materialistic.”

Elam is so well versed
in board games that he and Rice history
professor Patricia Seed teamed up last year to teach a world
history course through games.
Using anthropological, cultural, and historical analysis,
students must evaluate and compare games and offer
suggestions on how to improve
certain board games.

During the 1950s, games appeared that, Elam notes, would be considered politically incorrect by today’s standards. The game Park and Shop features a Chinese man as owner of a laundry, and a player would lose a turn if caught driving behind a woman. Another game that was strictly for girls, What Shall I Be?, offeres the player limited options of career choices, such as schoolteacher, nurse, or ballerina. “That was the accepted value back then,” says Elam, “and the games reflected that.”

Every decade for the last 40 years, he says, there’s been an innovation in the game industry that has spawned a new genre of games. In the 1970s, it was Dungeons and Dragons, which started the role-playing games, and in the 1980s, it was Trivial Pursuit, which led to a series of trivia games. In the 1990s, Magic, the Gathering sparked an interest that led to hundreds of new collectible card games.

Though he is an avid collector and acknowledged expert on the history of board games, Elam does not get to play all the ones he buys. He doesn’t have the time. He may play one game three or four times before he moves on to his next search. “I never master a particular game, because I am always looking for new mechanics and creative designs.”

Elam can determine whether a game is worth playing simply by looking at the rules. “A good game doesn’t have to have a long list of rules, but it should have reasonable and clear rules.” He says he likes a game that offers a lot of options and decisions, one that puts pressure on the player. His favorite games, those he has played more than four times, are Junta, Cosmic Encounters, and Citadel. “I like them because they are multiplayer games and there is diplomacy and politics involved in all of them,” he says. “There is a lot of player interaction.”

There is no one theory of gaming that can be applied to all games, he says, because there are so many different games and no one single approach works. However, his wife says that Elam has read so many rules that when he plays a game for the first time against other first-time players, Elam wins most of the time.

Though Elam worked for IBM for 18 years before he came to Rice in 1996, he never found computer games to be as fun as board games. “I like sitting around a table and playing with people,” he says. “When you are able to pull off something at the end of the game and surprise one of your opponents, there’s enjoyment at his reaction. When I play a game, it is a social event.”

Elam has been fascinated by games ever since he was a child. Growing up in the small town of De Ridder, Louisiana, Elam couldn’t find any games to buy, so he started making his own. He was particularly interested in war simulation games since his father was in the military.

Elam would design battlefields on top of a pool table and would maneuver the troops represented by toy soldiers and tanks and spend hours with his friends in make-believe battles.

His passion for collecting games started when he went to the University of Kentucky to study computer science. He learned that companies called Avalon Hill and SPI that made board games, and he quickly became a game tester for them. Many of the games were in the early stages of development, and Elam would send them back with suggestions for improvements.

Shortly after he got married, his wife began giving him games as gifts, and the games slowly began to take over the house. “I have a photo of us when we had just gotten married, and the house was empty of games,” Cherie says.

Since then, Elam’s house of games has continued to grow, and though he claims he is slowing down in his acquisition, his youthful excitement for finding the next new game is not abating. Someday, he may very well claim the world record and win the game of his life.