For me boardgames are a replacement for couch gaming. For me that's really what drove me away from consoles, if we were still in the age of four player couch co op, I probably wouldn't even have a gaming PC. I love the social aspect of gaming, its the main way I knew how to interact with people as a kid (I've since gotten a bit more versatile lol).
The thing about roleplaying games and online gaming is, they require everyone involved to share interests. SSB didn't require that, co op Halo and L4D didn't require that. Pick up and play, variable difficulty, no money involved except for the host. When I was a kid even games that had no good reason to support that style of gaming, like Banjo Kazooie 2, would throw in split screen. Now it feels like all that's left are holdouts from old series that kept on the feature because people expected it... all the new stuff requires everyone to buy separate consoles, separate games, and a separate online subscription. So that you can get the reduced quality experience of trying to communicate with distracted people via nothing but voice. But boardgames... relatively cheap, easy to explain to casual players yet not always lacking in depth, and best of all the way they're set up creates the perfect social white noise to talk about things. Most Americans are afraid of sitting around doing nothing, even if you're talking friends.