On Thursday afternoons, Patrick Wyrick does it with a good buddy over lunch.

On Friday nights, he does it with his wife, Patty, at a Borders Books and Music store.

On a Saturday night, he did it with close to 35 guests at his Garden Grove home.

Yes, he's a player all right – a player of board games.

Perhaps the 35-year-old accountant is a bit extreme in his love of hours-on-end board-game competition. He does own somewhere between 300 and 400 games, after all.

But he is a man of the times, when what started five years ago as a marketing campaign for Hasbro Games under the pitch "Plan a Family Game Night" has taken on a multilayered social life of its own in post-Sept. 11 America.

It's not just families with youngsters who are setting aside time to sit down and roll the dice. Couples, groups of friends, adult children with their elderly parents, and strangers in bars, cafes and bookstores find common ground, too, as they move their tokens around a board.

Wyrick rediscovered a childhood joy when he and two of his best friends, Charles Shapero and Tim Thomas, also accountants in their 30s, went to Palm Springs four years ago and spent the entire time in a hotel room working their way through the bins of European-style strategy games Wyrick had started collecting. Games like Settlers of Cataan, Pirateer and Acquire.

"We only left the hotel to get something to eat. It was a really fun weekend. We decided we needed to do this more often."

Wyrick and his buddies formed a game group that met once a month, and things took off from there. Last month, he and his wife hosted their largest gathering of game players, some 30 adults and five children who took their seats at tables set up throughout their house. The diehards left around 1:30 a.m.

"It feeds on my competitive nature. You can play five or six games in a night and you've got a good chance of winning at least one of them," says Wyrick, who prefers strategy games whose outcome depends more on the choices players make than on what he calls the "roll the dice and move your mice" nature of many American games.

One sign of the popularity of board games is the growing trend of finding them for sale – and being played – in nontraditional outlets, such as bookstores.

Barnes & Noble bookstores began stocking board games in 1999, starting with six-eight titles. Now you might find up to 100, the majority of them specialty games not stocked in mass-market stores, says Ellen Heaney Mizer, the chain's game buyer.

Last month, 195 of the bookstores hosted game nights, where customers played a modified version of the newly released Trivial Pursuit Booklovers edition.

The broader allure of board games in the video age has as much to do with connecting as it does with competing, whether people are playing classics like Monopoly, strategy games like Settlers of Cataan, or party games like Loaded Questions.

Hasbro launched its Game Night campaign based on informal research that asked parents and kids if they were interested in playing board games together, says Mark Morris, director of public relations for Hasbro Games. The parents said yes, but didn't think their kids wanted to play with them. The kids said yes, too, but didn't think their parents wanted to play.

"We recognized that families are very busy, running in different directions. But we said, pick one night when everyone is home and play a game together," says Morris.

From there, Hasbro spun off the Family Game Night campaign in other directions that included encouraging adults to play board games with other adults.

"People are looking for a reason to connect," Morris says. "I find it interesting that at a time when people have more entertainment options than at any other time in history, games are still thriving. I think it's because games offer a social experience that you don't get anywhere else."

David Reilly of NPD Group, a consumer marketing research firm, cites figures that show sales of board games rose 2.5 percent from 2002 to 2003, when consumers spent $1.04 billion on board games.

"That tells you something," Reilly says. "The toy industry really has been suffering. But educational and learning toys are doing well, and board games are doing well. It could be a post-9/11 mentality, with families getting closer instead of going out and partying."

The economy also plays a part in the popularity of board games, says independent toy consultant Christopher Byrne, author of "Toys: 100 Years of the Power of Play."

"It seems that whenever there are concerns about the economy, people look for alternatives in home entertainment."

From his travels around the country, Byrne says, he has noticed a particular surge in the popularity of board games among young adults in their 20s and 30s.

Greg Appelbaum, who just earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine, formed a tight social group of a dozen or so friends, and met his girlfriend, Mai Nguyen, playing board games. The group has met just about monthly for nearly three years at each other's homes.

"Everyone was kind of tired of going out to bars, doing your kind of regular young adult activities," says Appelbaum, 30. "The whole atmosphere (around a board game) is much more personal. You get to spend quality time with people who aren't under a lot of social norms to behave as people do at bars. You don't have to go hit on girls, and girls don't have to go hit on guys."

It was during a game of Loaded Questions that Appelbaum and Nguyen made their connection. The game requires players to correctly guess how another player will answer any of more than 500 questions that elicit opinions or reveal something personal.

"Sometimes it's competitive; other times it's just hysterical. You try to give funny answers," Appelbaum says. "She had me pinned."

Gene Feldman, a Los Angeles-area lawyer who visits his mother, 87, at her Los Alamitos home on the weekends, believes playing Loaded Questions together has helped keep her mind sharp.

Sometimes they just go through the questions without bothering to move around the board. Feldman says he's learned things she never spoke about before, as with a question that prodded memories of the Great Depression.

"She didn't really like talking about it because it wasn't a great time. But I really got a sense of her attitudes and how her whole philosophy was shaped by that era. It wasn't something I had really asked about in the past."

For Patty Wyrick, a stay-at-home mom raising a 3-year-old, playing a board game with her husband every Friday on their date night provides an escape. The Wyricks go to a Borders and play a game.

"For me, I'm with my child all week and I'm just dying for that. It's a great way just to get away," Patty says. "Especially if there's not a movie playing that you want to see, and you get bored. It's fun."

Sometimes, others join in.

"It brings people to the table. People stop by all the time."