The International Board Game Studies Association (IBGSA) is an academic professional association "devoted to the history and development of board games throughout the world".[1] The IBGSA sponsors an annual scholarly conference, the BGSA Colloquium, as well as an academic peer-reviewed journal, Board Game Studies. The IBGSA's membership includes academics, museum curators, game designers, archivists, and collectors.
The International Board Game Studies Association grew out of a colloquium organised by Dr Irving Finkel at the British Museum in 1990. A volume of papers related to this event was subsequently published by the British Museum Press as Ancient Board Games in Perspective.[2] After the initial colloquium, Dr Alexander de Voogt, then of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, convened a second colloquium, held at the University of Leiden in 1995. It was agreed by the members of the International Board Game Studies Association to meet biennially, and the next event was held at Leiden in 1997. An associated journal, sponsored by the University of Leiden, was established and the first volume of the Board Game Studies Journal was published in 1998.
The colloquium continued as a biennial forum, meeting in a different European city every two years, while the journal was published annually. From 2002, the colloquium became an annual event. The journal was discontinued as a physical publication after seven issues, but reconstituted as an online journal on the De Gruyter platform. The annual Board Game Studies Colloquium is now the largest and single most important academic conference related to the study of board games. It has occasionally been hosted outside Europe, but it now established as a European event.
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