Happy Christmas? Hope so. Perhaps you ate turkey, watched Doctor Who, and fell asleep in front of the fire. Perhaps you had beef teriyaki, played squash and stayed up late stargazing. Either way, there’s an above average chance you did something that absolute baffles me: played a board game.

I loathe board games, but my defenses are down at Christmas. There’s a roomful of people, each with a bellyful of wine and warmth. Telly seems antisocial, but something must be done if you’re all to avoid dozing off. And someone has a big new box, full of cards and counters and dice and totems and it really does seem like a good idea. This year it was Top Gear: Race The Stig. It seems to have sold out almost everywhere, which is awfully depressing.

Now, even I agree that board games have their merits, one of which is that unlike many Christmas gifts, getting them going doesn’t start with vexations like ‘has anyone got three AAA batteries?’ Should you wish to race The Stig, however, that’s exactly what you’ll need. Instead of dice it has something that looks a little like an executive electronic desk barometer from the 1994 Innovations Catalogue. This controls the game, which consists of you moving your little Stig helmet round the board in a mechanised version of top trumps. As you play you accumulate money, which allows you to upgrade your capabilities (top speed, 0-60, etc). Each time you press the desk barometer, it tells you The Stig’s notional rating in that category. If yours is better you move on six spaces, if it’s worse, you move on one.

Almost everything about the game is shockingly broken. It’s called ‘Race The Stig’, but there is no Stig, and you’re only racing each other. The conceit that represents your upgrade in each category is that you’re buying a better car, but there’s no meaning or advantage to these – all that matters is that you’ve got a level 4 and the desk barometer is currently saying that The Stig has a level 3. There are chance cards, but the pile is so thick, and the number of occasions they are called into use so few, that the tactical parings offered (do you buy an ‘extra fuel tank’ card, to protect against the possibility of getting hit with a ‘you’ve run out of fuel’ card later on?) are totally irrelevant. The game calls for players to continually run other players off the board, for one or more turns, but there is no way to keep track of how many turns players have missed, or of where they were on the board before they got booted off.

I appreciate Race The Stig is not selling to discerning table-toppers. But, much as with videogames, that excuse makes no sense to me. The group of people I was playing with (not least thanks to those winey bellies) were far more in need of a bullet-proof, crystal clear, perfectly balanced play experience than a batch of hardened pros used to wrangled complex games into satisfying submission. Indeed, I tend to find that almost everything I know and understand about videogames applies to board games, which serves to highlight how closely related they are, and reveal the big conundrum I still don’t understand.

Why do I hate board games if I love videogames? They are, functionally, the same thing. Many videogames that I adore are just automated board games. I once spent an entire day proving that you could play Disgaea with nothing more technical than a handful of dice and a shelf of reference books. Admittedly, each move of each character required something like 134 separate calculations, but it could be done by someone with +72 Patience (and possible a stackable Mental Arithmetic bonus). And while Halo, Gradius, Virtua Fighter or Project Gotham may not have board game cousins, it’s obvious that most strategy games, RPGs and many puzzlers are just virtual boxes full of cards and counters, dice and totems. If I love Advance Wars on my GBA – even Dice Wars on my browser – why does my blood run cold when I meet them in the real world?

So these are the questions that I’m left with. Why are so many board games, especially ‘casual’ board games, so dreadful? Are bad board games worse than bad videogames? What is the alchemy that occurs when you turn one into the other? Is it just that videogames are faster than board games? Am I really so much of a savage that I’m drawn purely to the flashing lights and colours? Is the problem that board games are fundamentally social and I am fundamentally not? And can anyone suggest something we can play next year that won’t make my blood boil? And don’t say Wii Sports, or you’re off my Christmas list for good.