US board game market revenue

As Americans retreated to their kitchen tables for Catan and Ticket to Ride, something extraordinary happened in emergency rooms across the nation: toilet-related injuries began to fall. The inverse correlation of -0.967 between board game revenue and bathroom trauma between 2010 and 2022 raises the obvious question of whether sitting safely at a table for four hours is genuinely protective against porcelain-related mishaps. Perhaps the most dangerous room in the American home is the one you visit when you're not playing board games. The instructions for Pandemic did not include 'reduces ER visits,' but the data suggests they should have.

The board game renaissance of the 2010s was driven by the rise of 'hobby gaming,' crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, and a cultural backlash against screen time, with market revenues growing substantially year over year. Toilet-related ER visits, meanwhile, reflect a different trend: improvements in bathroom safety infrastructure, an aging population becoming more cautious, and better data collection rather than a true decline in some years. The negative correlation is largely coincidental, both series moving for entirely independent reasons across a short 13-year window where any two trending-in-opposite-directions series will spuriously align.

With only 13 data points, an r of -0.967 is less a discovery than a mathematical party trick. The universe does not care that your Catan expansion arrived the same year someone's grandfather stopped slipping in the bath.