A quick glance around most UK high street board game retailers and you will see the same old handful of family board games - Monopoly, Cluedo, Scrabble and a couple of more recent additions such as Cranium and the odd TV series spin-off. If you are lucky, the most recent addition to the family board game range will be perhaps five or ten years old.

Why is it thus – what brings this situation about? Why are we not seeing new board games on the shelves? Could it be that there are no new board game brands of merit?Can you imagine going into a record or video game store and seeing that the newest products on offer are 5 years old? Or going into an electronics shop and only being able to buy goods designed in the 1930s (as is the case with Monopoly)? Or personal music players designed in the 1980s like Walkmans, rather than the latest iPods? This would be absurd!

So why are mainstream British retailers holding back when it comes to board games?

Anyone who has watched Dragons' Den over the last few years can see that there are still plenty of board game inventors trying to produce the next table-top classic.

For a different approach you have only to travel to Germany. Retailers view innovative new family board game products as absolutely key to

retaining customers, and to being competitive during the busy Christmas buying season.

In Germany, retailers embrace new board game products, and see innovation as key to keeping board game sales high. Held near Dusseldorf in October, Essen Spiel is a huge annual pre-Christmas games industry and games-playing public get-together. There, it is all about what is new and exciting. It attracts hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world.

The irony is that, this year, it is a British product called About Time – ‘The Greatest Guessing Game Since Time Began’ – that is one of the hot tickets in the German family board game market.

About Time is a great spin on the trivia genre in which players guess the year of key events through time. The game was snapped up by German

national newspaper Die Zeit for a unique co-production last year. The respected publication worked in partnership with Circa Circa Ltd, the company behind About Time, to create a version of the game using iconic newspaper front covers in place of the question cards. This hot new product then became the subject of a competition between distributors, all vying to take the game on. They were keen to have a new product to sell to retailers, who in turn where looking for a great new product for their customers in time for Christmas 2010.

Next, About Time caught the attention of Gunter Jauch, the famous presenter of the German version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. He was keen to become the first living playing character in the game - joining Gandhi, Mozart and Shakespeare in the box. As the game was unveiled to the German public at Essen Spiel, people queued up to get their game signed by Iain McGill, one of About Time's British inventors.

It’s not that Britain doesn't have a market for family board games. It’s not that the British public doesn’t have an appetite for new innovative products. Nor does Britain lack innovators in the traditional board game format, as the German success of About Time proves.

It just seems that most mainstream UK retailers are stuck in a time warp.

Circa Circa was able to win over some retailers to take on something new and innovative. Waterstone’s have just taken delivery of their first tranche of About Time games, along with Foyle’s and the game has been available from Harrods for some time.

The web adapts quicker than the high street, and the game is also available from Amazon and at http://www.abouttimeboardgame.com.