Board games have made a huge comeback in recent years, even with modern entertainment options like video games. At this year’s recent Gen Con, the longest-running board game conference in the US, 70,000 people showed up. If you’re a huge fan, you might be willing to lay down the cash needed to buy one of the most expensive board games ever. Here’s a list:
Go
Price: $12,950
Invented in China over 2500 years ago, Go is a strategy board game that’s endured. It’s more complex than chess, but still fairly straightforward. The company Kiseido makes an especially-beautiful set crafted from Masame wood, with mulberry bowls. The stones are made from slate and snow-grade (or Yuki-grade) shell, which is the Japanese term for the perfect white stone. All together, one of these sets sells for nearly $13,000.
Normal, non-crystal scrabble tiles
Swarovski Scrabble
Price: $20,000
On the 60th-anniversary of the vocab-building game, the company created a special board with over 30,000 Swarovski crystals. The board is made of glass, while the crystals were carefully chosen to match the normal Scrabble board colors. A board game expert ended up buying it, with the proceeds going to the St. Jude’s Medical Research Hospital.
Jewel Royale chess set
Price: $1.3 million
Jewelry design house Boodles worked with Jewish Royale to create this magnificent chess set. By itself, the king is an 18-karat gold piece with rubies. Rumors spread quickly that the set was worth $9.8 million in total, but according to at least one site, that isn’t true, and it actually costs $1.3 million. We couldn’t find any official confirmation either way, but this chess set is still pretty pricey.
A regular backgammon board
Bernard Maquin backgammon set
Price: $5 million
Backgammon is a very old game at around 5,000 years old. While most sets are cheap, artist Bernard Maquin once made a special board for Charles Hollander, a diamond manufacturer. The game is made with gold, silver, and over 60,000 white, yellow, and black diamonds adding up to $5 million. It took Maquin over 10,000 hours to complete it.