FOR a while, if you weren't paying attention, you might have thought that board games had gone the same way as cassette tapes, eight-track cartridges, VHS videos, Trimphones and bulky TV sets - quaint relics of a bygone and curiously innocent era, now fit only to be consigned to the nearest landfill site or to be given to charity shops.

If you're like me, you probably have piles of old board games stuffed into the back of a cupboard: you haven't touched them in years and likely never will.

But board games, it seems, have been going through a golden age for the last decade. Sales, though lagging well behind those of video games like Call of Duty, have been increasing by as much as 40 per cent a year over the last few years.

Every 12 months there are thousands of new board games; the most popular sell in their millions.

They're becoming increasingly innovative, too. One caveman game, Ugg-Tect, invites you to build functional structures while limiting communication to 'primitive gestures and sounds'. Other games are more serious.

One focuses on the Abolitionist movement in America; another casts players as medical experts tackling four deadly diseases.

I dig out my old stash of board games from the back of a cupboard, dislodging a considerable layer of dust in the process.

Some of them might count, at a pinch, as reasonably sophisticated. Poleconomy ('the Power Game') is there, as are the games that once featured in what passed for dinner-parties in my house - Trivial Pursuit, and Scrabble, and Enigma, and a film-trivia game.

There are jigsaws, all with several pieces missing, and a chess set I bought and used only once, having discovered that it was a lot harder than draughts.

But the other games are embarrassingly unsophisticated. Mouse Trap, for one.

There's even an elderly edition of Ker-Plunk, a game expressly designed to irritate parents hoping for a quiet Christmas morning. There's a Simpsons edition of Cluedo and a quite spectacularly tattered box of Monopoly. I look inside. Half of the board is missing.

Part of me is glad that board games have stayed in fashion and that they are enjoying a Golden Age. Another part of me … well, let's just say that that game of Mouse Trap is looking strangely appealing right now.

Even if it does make Ugg-Tect look like the very model of urbanity.