Are Board Games filling our time once more?

In recent weeks more and more news outlets (At least on the web) have been publishing stories and ads stating that America is once again spending vast amounts of time and of coarse money on playing board games. I wonder how much of this is an attempt to sell products and how much is based on actual fact. So why not have a survey that puts some fact to these statements. How many board games do you own and play? How frequently do you play board games? Weekly, monthly, or maybe just a few times a year? How many board games have you bought in the last year and what were they?
It would be interesting to find that games like monopoly which were created at a time of US and World economic depression are truly serving players in the same way in the current recession that it did when it was first released.
On a similar note i think it would be awesome to find that people are playing five or six games regularly.