Gone Gaming

Flicking the switch

2008-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Thankyou to all our loyal readers and writers over the years.

Gone Gaming has moved to the Boardgamenews website.

You can go straight to the main site, or directly to the Gone Gaming section.

We look forward to seeing you over there.

Turning out the lights

2007-12-31T03:41:00.000-08:00

First, let me congratulate the Gone Gaming bloggers on their new home at Boardgamenews.com. Eric has been doing a bang up job filling Thornquist's shoes at Boardgame News and I wish them all the best of luck.

Guess it's my turn to reminisce.

Many bloggers have passed through the doors at Gone Gaming. They all had something to offer, and all were coming from a slightly different point of view. They all worked together to keep Gone Gaming not only one of the best and most diverse boardgame blogs, but one of the best blogs in general. It is a shame to see it go, but all good things must come to an end.

I would like to specifically single out and thank Shannon Appelcline for going the distance, so to speak. He is the only original blogger to have stuck with Gone Gaming over the years. As he alluded in his last post, Shannon was the last of the original bloggers to sign on. Funny how it worked out. The rest of us were hot-to-trot, and ready to go before he accepted his invitation in literally the last hours before the inaugural post. At the time I only knew Shannon as a noted RPG and boardgame reviewer, I had no idea he was a professional writer. Had I known I might have been too embarrassed to approach him.

Gone Gaming was created in the wake of the demise of the daily boardgame blog feature at the internet game seller, Gamefest. At the same time the noise on the premier boardgame site, Boardgamegeek, was drowning the good content. The desire for a daily boardgame blog where gamers could read quality material and congregate was my intention when I originally solicited contributors for Gone Gaming. I enjoyed reading over the years, and I hope you did as well. In the early days Gone Gaming still had that new-blog smell. In the intervening years blogging has become common place. Personally, I subscribe to nearly one hundred boardgame related blogs on my RSS aggregator. Some of those blogs haven't been updated in a year or more, but I discover new ones all the time. Also, several changes have been made which have greatly improved the situation at BGG, and to a great extent have alleviated the need for independent boardgame blogs.

The main factor that contributes to the demise of many blogs is the fact that blogging is a tough business. About the only thing blogging has going for it is that you can choose your hours, but even that isn't always true when there is pressure to meet a deadline as is (often) the case at Gone Gaming. Sure there are the loose blogger groupies, but even their attention wanes when the blow run low, and your smack dealer is in jail. The pay is low. The benefit package sucks. Feedback can be iffy, and you can't bribe an OSHA inspector to make it tough on the competition. I truly appreciate all the bloggers who are able and willing to keep their blog updated over a period of years. Consider this a thank you to all the bloggers who do so.

In my case work was not only getting in the way of blogging, but in the way of gaming. I was no longer playing a new game or two every month, and there were months in which I played no games, new or old. The stress of writing for a boardgame blog became greater and appropriate material became harder to come by. Like many other Gone Gaming contributors it came time for me to pass the torch. As has happened many times in the past, and as is the case right now, the final Gone Gaming torch will be passed to Boardgame News.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for contributing. Good luck to all, and to all a good night.

Hello Goodbye

2007-12-30T18:51:00.000-08:00

As a biweekly contributor from the beginning of the blog in August of 2005 through the February of 2006, Gone Gaming was a lot of fun for me. It was a great outlet for my thoughts about my favorite hobby, it spurred me to write, and it enabled me to engage in the general buffoonery which I love so very much. More than that, though, the experience was special to me because of the enthusiasm of my co-contributors, Brian, Shannon, Yehuda, Mary, D.W., Alex, GROGnads, Fraser and Melissa; each had their own distinctive voice, but we were all united in our love for the hobby.

Two and a half years later, it's time to put the chairs on the tables and turn out the lights, but is that a bad thing? Not really. Things change, people grow, one door closes and another one opens. Nothing lasts forever, and that's just as well. Like gaming itself, what's important is the fun one has along the way, and for me Gone Gaming was nothing but. I hope its readers feel the same way.

As a parting thought, I will relate a conversation I had with my half-asleep son as I struggled to write something appropriate for this occasion:

The monkey is chasing the bees!

Did the monkey catch the bees?

No, they went into outer space.

What does it all mean? Something important, probably. If nothing else, I think we can agree that while chasing bees might be a fun endeavor for a while, in the end we monkeys have to slow down and let the bees do their thing. What would we even do with the bees if we caught them? It would probably be very awkward and we would just have to let them go again.

Thanks, Brian.

Last "riposte" for "Gone Gaming"

2007-12-30T04:28:00.000-08:00

Here's a last riposte from GROGnads, another of the original Gone Gaming authors.

I was honored to even be asked to JOIN these folks when it first began years ago, so thank you all with that distinction. It was quite the unique experience as far that I'm concerned upon it all, since it brought together a diverse select few, where that was the main point of this all. You were then given their "perspectives" in the GAMES 'World' that they'd currently been involved with, along with the opinings of many another where they delved and diverged from the relevant and "on topic", to lambaste & lampoon one another and even gots some "hurt feelings" with a few. Let's all just BE above that 'pettiness' and 'pitiful' attempts then, to be respectable in PUBLIC displays here or anywheres for that matter.

Now, I'm asking everyone else to JOIN and keep them folks HERE, immortalized within our "communal psyche" throughout the remainder of our days. While certainly, it does require that a few people take it upon themselves to 'work' on being the "Admins" with anything that we shall come up with for whatever shall develop upon this all. I'm proclaiming HERE about a BGG-"related" 'blog' comprising of contributors from the vast amount of people within it there, to make UP that 'blog' with their everyday encounters. I've already gone around and formally asked a few folks to assist with that, while any others are most welcome to submit any content for considerations. Were there to be several individuals that can combine their efforts regarding some specific *topic*, then having their multiple "viewpoints" gathered together in coherent reply with response, is a good means for bringing out continuous discussions and resolution in this manner. WHY many of the actual "Game Designers" don't pursue this course to clear UP 'matters', is something of which I would hope that they're willing to comply abouts. Check out the BGG 'blog' we're creating and WHY don't YOU think of a good "intro" piece about yourself, so that others can gaze within your respective 'vibes' about "Gaming", with what you can? Keep the content 'fit' for public consumption with "civil demeanor" towards one another, and one more 'thang'~"Good Gamings 4 YOU!".

So long, Farewell, Auf wiedersehen, Adieu

2007-12-29T06:58:00.000-08:00

Since we're sharing, here's the original approach to me and Fraser back in December 2005 to join what we saw as the pre-eminent boardgaming blog.

Hello Fraser, Melissa, "BIGGIE" & "lil`un" and the 'critters'-if many as I send this for your to read upon and answer quickly please, thanks for reading over it. We would like for the BOTH of YOU to join in at the 'blog' for ONE 'day' out of the WEEK for a "Weekly" upkeep about YOUR 'gaming experiences' with insights, etc. and you could even alternate or however you'd like to approach this:

"FROM: the BGG 'group of geeks"

I'd suggest EACH of us write to them(you folks~edit.) with our very OWN 'notions' as well, in order to foster IDEAS from them or even US. The better MEANS would be for ALL of us to gather in the CHAT here and maybe some of YOU would be able to LISTEN in for 'moi' TALKING through that as well as ANY others capable for this? I've been on for hours with folks ALL over the world at NO Cost 'extra' for it. At the very least then WE can meet and toss 'subjects' off of one another as a 'sounding board' discussion and fleshing OUT Group missions. Should you agree to such, nobody's to FORCE anything upon another AS they can BE in or OUT on whatever matters. I'd surely expect YOU all to join in with "web-cam" meet ups when you're able, while I've got a T V "camera ready" S-VHS kit for actual tapings of 'gamings' in a to be featured "Games Channel" of some sort. Most likely they'll become 'subscriber based' for JUST certain and MANY varied types huh? So of course just about ALL can cover their 'milieu' since I don't EXPECT to myself. Then there's the "local yokels" of which we ALL would comprise for THIS within every country and soon upon the MOON! "Get with the 'program' of GET left behind"~that's a "Xclamato''
" Have 'your people' contact OUR 'people'! "

As I so eloquently put this, then it shall involve HOWEVER we can EACH accomplish this, while WE should all strive towards WHAT they'd like as well. You may become "famously RICH" whilst participating too, but it'll depend upon IF you'd want to AND in what particular 'manner' this results in. Take care-Robert.

My response, if I recall correctly, used the phrase "Mouse in the Company of Giants". I was honoured and surprised to be invited to join the group, and wasn't entirely sure that I had earned the right to be here.

I'm still not sure that I have earned the right, but I have learned that that is one of the beauties of blogging. There's a sort of upside-down logic to it: By blogging, you earn the right to be a blogger. It doesn't get much more egalitarian than that - and I now have a long list of boardgaming blogs on my RSS feed list.

One interesting side effect of writing for Gone Gaming has been that I now write more on my personal blogs than I used to - once you identify yourself as a blogger, you start to write more.

Unlike on Gone Gaming, where I feel the need to at least try to write something a bit longer and relatively cohesive, my personal blog posts may only be a paragraph or even a sentence long - sometimes it is more important to post than to polish. I have seen many excellent blogs lose their way because the author spent so long polishing a post that they missed posting five other things that would have been of interest. This is not (entirely) an argument for quantity over quality, but an understanding that sometimes the balance lies more in one direction than in another.

It has been an honour to be a part of the team here and to get to know so many people, both my fellow bloggers and our loyal (and sometimes occasional) readers. I hope to meet many more of you over the next few years.

My first post on December 17th, 2005 talked about why beating Fraser gives me a thrill. I have to confess, it still does - while I try not to bring anything from outside into a game, I still love to beat him.

When I wrote that, we were packing for a long Summer holiday away, and finding the time and opportunity to blog was tricky. Given that, I'm amused that we decided that December was a good time to pack up and move shop - but this time, it will just be a change of location rather than something new.

There's definitely a pang at leaving the Gone Gaming site behind. It's exciting to be moving somewhere new, though, and I hope to see our many readers on those pages as well.

*smoochies* - and see you next Tuesday!

Melissa

PS - Sadly, although he and we hoped it would happen, DW Tripp was unable to contribute a farewell post to this series. We wish him well - and those of you who are missing his posts might enjoy re-reading his first post on Gone Gaming.

A Plain Vanilla Gamer

2007-12-28T04:09:00.000-08:00

This Christmas I asked for and received not a single 2007 boardgame. Instead, I asked for and received two older games that I thought should be part of my collection. The games are Manhattan and El Grande. You don’t get Euro-games more classic than these. I believe that both are Spiel des Jahres winners. Manhattan is a quick-playing light strategy game that I expect to play with non-gamers like my in-laws. El Grande is…well, if you’re reading this, you already know what El Grande is.

Now that I’ve come to the end of my Gone Gaming blogging career, I think I’ve earned the chance to be both lazy and to pontificate for once. In other words, here is a list of recommended games. This is not a list of all the games I own, or even a list of all my favorite games (although it comes pretty close to being the latter). But it is a list of ten strategy games that could be the foundation of any good Euro-game collection. (I have a different list of easy-to-play games to be pulled out when non-gamers are around; that list includes Manhattan).

The Hall List of Ten Essential Medium-to-Heavy Strategy Games You Should Own:

El Grande
Puerto Rico
Power Grid
Twilight Struggle
Union Pacific
Liberte
Caylus
Reef Encounter
Struggle of Empires
Age of Empires III

I now own all of these except Reef Encounter, and I hope to add that to my collection in 2008.

What strikes me looking at that list is how mainstream and bland it is. Is there a single controversial choice? About the only unconventional decision I made was to drop Tigris and Euphrates and replace it with Liberte (I’m not that fond of tile-laying games). Many of you undoubtedly would replace Union Pacific with Age of Steam, but overall my tastes are so conventional that I could be a stand-in for that hypothetical beast: the average gamer.

So I guess that is my strength and my weakness as a boardgame blogger as well as game collector; I am a plain vanilla kind of guy. Don’t expect too many quirky insights from me, or too much exploration of the odd corners of gaming. I tend to keep my boat in the center of the current.

I want to thank Coldfoot and the rest of the Gone Gaming crew for allowing me to give you a dish of plain vanilla once a week. I hope most of you readers will check out Boardgame News where some of us will still be chattering about the hobby.

It’s been fun.

Christmas Traditions

2007-12-26T01:24:00.000-08:00

This time of year is always rife with traditions at my house. I’m descended from Scandinavian and German stock, so we tend to make a big deal out of Christmas, particularly Christmas eve when we would exchange presents as a family. I’ve always been a fan of boardgames, so I would often get games as presents. However, on Christmas morning we would all get up and open a few more presents from “Santa” in our stocking. Next to each of our stockings (there were four of us kids) would be one last present, a brand new boardgame! That’s four new games entering into our family’s game closet every year. As THE child in the family who was into gaming (I was in charge of “games and refreshments” whenever we had an official family meeting), new games were a big deal. Having most of our important traditions and activities happen on Christmas eve left the entire Christmas day for me to try to con my brothers, sisters, and parents into playing a game. We’d get all four new games onto the table at some point during the day, and sometimes even a few repeats. While I’ve loved boardgames as long as I can remember, I attribute some of that lasting appeal to the annual appearance of a new game from “Santa”.

One of my fondest Christmas game memories is the year we journeyed out to Montana to do some downhill skiing over Christmas break. My mother packed the large-box Milton Bradley Axis and Allies in the back of our van just so we could unwrap it on the traditional Christmas morning. As it was a bit expensive, it took the place of both my brother’s and my own games for that year. I didn’t mind at all, and my older brother seemed to put up with it. We played through two entire games before we headed out on the trip home. Losing a day of skiing or playing a huge boardgame with lots of little army pieces? – no question in my mind which is the right choice.

I’ve since grown, as has my family. The Christmas morning game tradition at my folks’ house still lives on, although it is now one per family rather than per kid. With my son only 1 year old, I’m anxious to start some game-related traditions of my own but I suppose that may have to wait at least another year. He’s too busy playing the “hide in wrapping paper game” or “chase dad through the cardboard jungle” game.

In fact, my own little future gamer is the main reason I’ve been so silent lately. Returning back to school this fall after staying at home with my son for a year severely cut into my spare time and I’m afraid my posting regularity suffered. It’s great to see the blog going out on such a high note with so many insightful writers coming back one last time for a grand hurrah. I came to Gone Gaming as a blogger later on in its lifetime, but I enjoyed my brief run. Thanks for reading and see you around the net!

New, old, in between.

2007-12-25T12:49:00.000-08:00

I qualify as the new guy I guess. I think I'm still the most recent addition to Gone gaming, so I don't have quite the long period of time to look back on and reminisce. When several folks left Gone Gaming at about the same time, I either mentioned writing to Shannon, or he mentioned it to me. Whoever instigated it, the result was me joining on a mostly biweekly basis to muse about the old and the new. I find it amusing to look at the variety of writers at gone gaming who were also retailers - DWTripp, Smatt, and myself. Did I miss anyone? If Smatt had admitted to owning motorcycles we could have had even more in common¹.

Group blogs usually do have a short lifespan, or at least sporadic, with flurries of activities and then silence. Gone gaming has stood out as nicely even - which I hope we can continue at our new home over at boardgamenews.

It's christmas day for those following that calendar/celebration. Not the biggest blog reading day on the calendar, so I'll keep this short.

For those following the US retail religion of consumerism, this is a pretty even holiday. Lots of late shoppers kept me busy right up until closing yesterday (christmas eve). No big gains over last year, but no horrible drops either.

Gaming on the horizon? Unknown. It's an evening that might get monopolized by Rock Band, or could easily see a game upon the table. One of my regular groups meets on monday nights - we've got an extended break this week and next. I'll find out tomorrow how many people show up for games at the store the day after christmas.

And so it goes - a year ends, a blog winds down, and the new year brings change and all manner of other excitement. I'll see you there.

Merry Xmas, Thanks for the good times, and see you again soon.

--

¹ Obligatory footnote: Yes, my primary transportation is a motorcycle. I don't have the undying love for them that DWTripp possesses. Why didn't you ride a motorcycle Smatt? oh well.

Every end is a new beginning. (Yehuda)

2007-12-24T18:48:00.000-08:00

I still like the original byline for the blog:

If you look you'll never find me
I've gone gaming I'll be back
Got to finish what I started
Got a few things on my stack
Got to ship a few more barrels
Got to trade a brick or two
Got to buy some more provisions
Got to run this train on through
Got to roll a few more 6's
Got to draw a few more cards
Got to shake hands with my neighbors
'Fore I'm back in my backyard
But if you look up to the night sky
That's my spaceship passing by
Give a wave That's me inside her
It's farewell but not goodbye

Every end is a new beginning. Change is the only constant.

When this blog first started, we would change the byline every few days on a whim. I don't know who wrote all of them, but some of them were quite funny. Just one little piece of artistic expression that is uniquely available in this medium.

Blogs come and go. Games come and go. For that matter, gamer interest comes and goes; people pick up a hobby and drop a hobby, or their interests within the hobby changes.

There are no right and wrong ways to live your life if you're not hurting yourself or others. I believe that time can be more or less well spent; but this depends a lot more on the spirituality of the person than on the activity.

Gone Gaming was quickly the best gaming blog out there, and its quality, if not its posting frequency, continued right to the end. Everyone involved can be proud of its content, which will remain online, helping and entertaining people in one form or another, for many years to come.

Here's a (slightly edited) letter I found in my mail archives:

Date: Jul 24, 2005 11:27 AM
Subject: Just an Idea
From: Koldfoot
----------------------------------------------
I've been kicking this idea around for a while.

Right now I'm just contacting you and one other blogger. Shannon Appelcline is the other.

I have only been blogging for 7 months, not as long as you guys, but long enough to know that I will keep it up. You two seem to make it a point to update your blogs at least a couple times each week, as do I. That is the reason I am writing you.

I was wondering if either of you is interested in co-writing a blog. I think a co-operative game blog that is updated nearly everyday would be interesting and have a sizable audience, especially if we all have come from a different perspective. ...

I'm not asking you to abandon your current blog. Just write something on another blog whenever you feel like it, hopefully once each week.

Like I said, it is just an idea I've been kicking around. If you are interested you probably have another person or two in mind that might contribute, don't hesitate to ask them. If you have a different vision for such a blog, let me know. I am very flexible.

Let me know.

Brian "Coldfoot" Waters

---

Thanks Brian, thanks everyone on Gone Gaming, and thanks to everyone who has read or commented in this forum. All the voices of Gone Gaming and its readers will continue to help or entertain, in whatever form, on whatever forum. I'm sure of it.

Yehuda

Baby, You Were The Greatest!

2007-12-23T10:08:00.000-08:00

It all started with a GeekMail from Brian Waters (Koldfoot) in late July, 2005 asking if I’d like to join him in writing a group blog. I was flattered and honored to be asked. O.k., in all honesty, it was a total ego-rush! Of all the posters on BGG, Brian liked my writing enough to ask me. I was still new to board gaming (less than 2 years) and my mind was in a constant whirl of board games, so it didn’t take me long to say “yes” to Brian’s offer. As did DW Tripp, Yehuda, Alex Rockwell, Shannon Appelcline and Grognads.

The first post was made on August first, starting something that, if not great, was damned good. The mix of personalities and tastes brought something to the table for everyone: game analysis, imaginative stories, war games and miniatures, feisty game store owner stories, interviews, and an occasional guest writer. If you didn’t like today’s post, come back tomorrow for something different.

Gone Gaming has offered a lot of excellent articles but one series of posts stands out in my mind from all the posts made in over two years, The Anniversary Tour. This was a fun and imaginative set of posts to celebrate the first year of Gone Gaming. By then, Alex Rockwell and Grognads had left, replaced by Joe Gola, and Melissa and Fraser. If you haven’t read them or you just feel the need for a pick-me-up on a particularly crappy day, you should travel back in time to July 31^st, 2006 where the series starts.

When I got a message from Melissa saying that Gone Gaming was closing its doors, I was shocked and saddened. I understand, though. With the writing burnout that some of us have had and no one willing to step up to fill in the spaces, the blog was slowly dying. Luckily for us faithful readers, Boardgame News is going to take in the last of the Gone Gaming writers. Still…it feels like your favorite, comfortable local shop has packed up and moved to a small corner of a big box store. The sense of cozy familiarity just doesn’t transfer.

I thank Brian for including me in his original line-up; it was a fantastic group of people to work with and I enjoyed every minute of my fifteen minutes of fame. I also want to wish all the present writers good luck in their new home; their voices will make a great site even better.

Many blogs come and go rather quickly but Gone Gaming entertained and informed many people for almost two and a half years and, in my opinion, that’s not too shabby. I think Brian’s dream was a success.
~~~~~~~

Happy gaming to all and to all, a good night.

Mary

Games that we are giving or getting this Christmas...

2007-12-22T23:32:00.000-08:00

The games that we are giving for this Christmas can be broken into a number of categories. A significant number of them come from Amazon.de because they have, or had, a deal where shipping from Germany to Australia was a flat 14.00 Euro regardless of the order. Amazon.de don't stock all German games, but they do stock a significant number of games compared to their counterparts in other countries.

Games for, or to play with, Daughter the Younger and Daughter the Elder (that have already arrived)
Daughter the Younger is 4 3/4 and Daughter the Elder is heading towards 9 1/2.

Beppo der Bock Looks good for the Daughter the Younger age group and we would probably have fun playing it as a family. The winner of the 2007 Kinderspiel des Jahres.

Trötofant A game that is played with party tooters! Melissa has been itching for an excuse to get this for ages, and the 14 Euro shipping was the reason! This will probably remain the only game we have that has components that need to be put through the dishwasher after each game.

Chicken Cha Cha Cha Obscenely cheap when ordering it direct from Germany. This was the winner of the 1998 Kinderspiel des Jahres. The girls will be familiar with the artwork from Pick Picnic.

Games for the family, or games that have already arrived and been broken out
As Melissa and I do not seem to be specifically giving each other games this Christmas these will have to count as "our games".

Wizard We have already played this with Daughter the Elder and a friend of ours. It will be a good training ground for her in the art of trick taking games with suits. Something that comes as second nature to experienced players - before playing the card you want to play, answer the question do I have any cards of the suit that was lead? The fools and wizards make this variation much more interesting to play than standard Oh Hell!

PitchCar, PitchCar Extension and Pitchcar Extension 2. Actually PitchCar was ordered ages ago and finally arrived. These two expansions arrived too and so now we have them. We will probably play it in the next few days.

Other things that haven't arrived yet or are still to be sent but still only cost 14 Euro shipping

Pecunia non olet and Los Mampfos combine with our copy of Drunter und Drüber to complete Melissa's holy grail of the trilogy of poo games. If you are fan of "The Two Ronnies" and have seen Melissa collapse in tears of laughter at the line "and the Richard the Third flew away" you would have some understanding as to how important it is for her to complete the set.

Hart an der Grenze This is a game I played a while ago at Dockers one night and enjoyed. It's not the sort of game I would play every week, it would probably only come out every couple of months, but with the right group of players will be a real hoot.

Make 'n' Break Extreme We have Make 'n' Break and love it. It is pretty much a hit with everyone that sees it, so given that this may not be available in Australia for years, this is pretty much a no brainer.

Die Steven Segal it was only a few euros and we have played other people's copies quite often. Side note, I know Die Steven Segal is not its real name, but I can never remember the real name - to the extent that in BGG I have a page 2 QuickBar entry under the name Die Steve Segal to link to the game's page just so I can find it. I have submitted a game correction to have "Die Steven Segal" listed as an alternate name, but it would seem that my suggestion was declined.

Äpfel zu Äpfeln - Erweiterung - 1, the German expansion to Apples to Apples. Melissa is fluent in German and Daughter the Elder is going to a German Saturday school next year to learn German. Need I say more?

Halli Galli This game is expensive and quite difficult to obtain in Australia. It is an excellent game for children who have just started school. Daughter the Younger is starting school at the end of January, so we have ordered two copies of this to be given as birthday presents for her friends. Note when playing this very competitively protective gloves should be worn.

Destined for Secret Santa recipients
To protect the innocent not many details will be provided, suffice to say that the list of games was Die Säulen der Erde - Die Erweiterung (the German edition of the Pillars of the Earth 5 & 6 Player Expansion (by request), Medici vs Strozzi, Ziegen Kriegen, Notre Dame and All-Zeit. This last game was the most difficult to arrange, but through a complex chain of people and favours, we managed to track down a copy that could be sent to [placename deleted], even though none of the online stores seemed to list it at that time.

... and now the end is near...

We joined Gone Gaming about six months or so after it started, so are not foundation members, but are honoured to have been in such company. I wouldn't call myself a writer, and I imagine most of the readers agree, but it has been fun to be a contributor here. See you over at Boardgamenews in 2008 (or very late 2007 depending on what timezone you are in!)

A Return to Perikles

2007-12-21T04:44:00.000-08:00

Fantasy Flight recently had a sale in which Martin Wallace’s Perikles went for $10. A couple of the Appalachian Gamers took advantage of the offer, and as a result we had Perikles on the table again last night.

Perikles is one of those games that is smack in the middle of the No-man’s land between Eurogames and wargames. A real Eurogamer would probably find Perikles complicated and fiddly, and a real wargamer might find Perikles excessively simplistic and un-historical. But if both took the time to learn the game, they would find a smart design that rewards intelligent play and that remains challenging to even experienced players.

In fact, Perikles is one of those games that has so many dimensions to think about that I believe I’ll have to play several more games just to train my mind to consider all appropriate elements. The only other game that evokes the same feeling in me is Reef Encounter. Someday I hope to play Reef Encounter and pay as much attention to the coral tiles and algae cylinders as I do to the reef tiles that I hope to consume or have to defend. But so far I haven’t managed that feat, and James Lilly, the Appalachian Gamer Reef Encounter champion, regularly defeats all comers.

During last night’s game of Perikles, I came out of the gate strong, captured the leadership of the city I wanted (Corinth), and managed to win three victory tiles in the subsequent round of battles. The problem was that I had not given much thought to which cities I hoped to rule in the second round of the game, and in the end I realized that it might be smarter to avoid ruling any city, and hope to grab the tough Persian army (which is awarded to the player(s) who fails to lead any Greek City in a round). But Dave also had the same idea, and we ended up sharing control of the Persian army. This was not a disaster because both players get the full score of any victory tiles captured by the Persians. But we failed to appreciate how many points Ted and Tony were snagging by splitting the leadership of all six Greek cities between them.

In the end, Tony won the game because he dominated the leadership of more cities than any other player. I’m sure my too-smart-for-my-own-good Persian strategy helped him in the second round. As we were packing the game away, I realized that I had never played my one-time-use special event tile. Just one more element of the game that I had forgotten about.

Early sessions of a game are often about just learning the rules, and the subtleties of the game. But with games like Perikles and Reef Encounter, I need a few sessions to train my mind to pay attention to the big picture as well as to the details of the rules. In David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly, one character complains: “Everything in my life distracts me from everything else.” That seems to be my problem with Perikles and Reef Encounter. Planning strategy is like trying to hold two hundred marbles with my bare hands. Grabbing some of them only ensures that others will slip and fall away.

Of course, that’s what makes it worthwhile to return to these games again and again.

To Every Thing, There is a Season ...

2007-12-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

It's two and a half years now since Coldfoot sent me an email asking if I'd like to contribute to a new group boardgaming blog that he was putting together. I'll admit to being a bit passive aggressive about that initial invite, because I was feeling very busy at the time.

I was obsessively working on a CCG design for a game based on the Stargate: SG-1 TV show. It didn't end up going anywhere, but it sure took up a lot of my time in July and August of 2005. I was also writing scripts for some comic books (though actually the script that was on my desk that Summer was for Castle Marrach #2 which didn't get produced either, as my very reasonably priced and high-quality artist ended up too busy to make a longer term commitment).

Nonetheless, after sitting on Brian's email for a few weeks, I finally mailed him back--just in time, I suspect--and told him I'd be happy to be on board, but could only commit to writing every other week.

On August 1, 2005, Coldfoot announced the group and listed the initial lineup:
http://boredgamegeeks.blogspot.com/2005/08/welcome-to-gone-gaming.html

Blogger and game reviewer extraordinaire, Shannon Appelcline

Israeli blogger, game commentator and most recently game designer, Yehuda Berlinger

The gaming mom from America’s heartland, Mary Weisbeck (Sodaklady)

Game store owner and Gaming’s “Manly Man”, DW Tripp

Strategy guru and author of some of the most referenced game articles ever written, namely the Puerto Rico strategy guides, Alex Rockwell

The wargamer you either love or hate, but who will always leave you asking, “Did that make sense?” Robert Wesley (Grognads)

He doesn’t write a lot, but IMO he is the best game writer out there, Joe Gola

And, myself, the mildly-retarded blogger from Alaska.

Well, it's now December, 2007, and earlier this year, somewhat to my surprise, I realized that I was the final member of our initial group still blogging at Gone Gaming. It immediately put me into a thoughtful mood, considering all the other writers who had come and gone, and also made me wonder about what the future of the blog would be.

You see, the heart of Gone Gaming, to me at least, was Coldfoot and Yehuda--two of those original bloggers, now gone. I've been here the longest, and I hope I've written some articles that everyone enjoyed, but it's never been my baby. It was Coldfoot and Yehuda who put the initial organization into the blog, and who kept it rolling. In their absence--or perhaps just due to the passage of time--we've slowly been winding down.

Don't get me wrong. We still have terrific people posting now, and we all do what we can to keep the blog alive, not just with our own postings but also in finding guest bloggers and new blood. However no one's had that organizational zeal to go out and find an entire slate of writers--like Coldfoot did originally--and like I suspect Yehuda could have if he wanted to, given his organization of the Gone Gaming awards that we ran for two years.

It's not just us. There seems to be a general trend which has resulted in a lot of the gaming blogs disappearing over the last few years. I don't think it's because of any weakness in the core business of gaming--though the US economy is clearly weakening, and entertainment dollars often take the first hit. Instead, it seems to be a weakness in blogging itself. Some people have moved on to podcasts, while others have just disappeared altogether, perhaps because blogs no longer have that sparkle of newness that they once did. I miss the Gathering of Engineers and Chris Farrell's blog and the Best of Board Game blog, all of which have vanished in the last year or two.

And that brings us back to this blog. Through some combination of staff loss and general decline in board game blogging, Gone Gaming has shrunk too. We're still publishing regularly, but with more gaps in our schedule than ever before.

The Future of Gone Gaming

This is the point where you're probably expecting me to announce either my retirement or the retirement of Gone Gaming, and let me say ... not quite.

A week or so ago W. Eric Martin of Board Game News wrote us, noting that he too had lost some writing staff lately, and asking if we'd be interested in merging Gone Gaming into Board Game News.

I think we were all somewhat reluctant to let Gone Gaming go as an independent site. As I said in one of my letters, where before we had two sites, offering the potential for two new columns every day, now we'd have only one. But, honestly, we hadn't met that potential for a while. So we all talked, and we agreed: as of January 1, all of the remaining Gone Gaming writers will be moving over to Board Game News.

In a week or two's time, you'll find everything that you used to read here over there. We're going to port the old articles of the remaining authors, and Eric is also going to create a special Gone Gaming category, so that you can read just the GG blogs if you want. But BGN also features regular columns from other great writers, as well as the best interviews and industry news in the business, so hopefully you'll take a look at them too.

In the meantime, make sure that you stick around and read Gone Gaming through the end of the year, as we'll have return visits from as many of our departed columnists as we can get to write.

I'm really happy to have Gone Gaming go out as an independent site while we were still strong and full of regular, high-quality posts. Knowing that we're going to see the return of lots of old friends in the next couple of weeks makes me feel like I'm at the finale of a roleplaying campaign which ran its full course. In the end we get to tell our final stories and wrap up our lose ends, because we actually planned for an conclusion rather than just letting the game trail off.

(And even better, we've got part two of the campaign all ready to go, with a launch immediately thereafter.)

So that's the news on the future of Gone Gaming ...

My Year in Writing

Even before we got to talking about the BGN/GG merger, I'd been thinking about the 29 months that I've been writing for Gone Gaming, and wondering why I'm the last man standing from the original group. That was going to be my original topic for this column, a retrospective on the year and the blog.

In any case, for me personally, I'm still around because I'm a writer. I can't help it. I write. Constantly. Almost since I got on the net, I've contributed to it. In 1991 I began writing campaign logs for some of my roleplaying games. In 1994 I created an online 'zine called The Chaosium Digest, which as often as not was full of my own writing. In 2000 I began writing a column on computer game design. Last year I tried my hand at a history of the roleplaying industry. I suspect there's one or two million words worth of my writing publicly available on the Internet.

The question was thus never if I'd stop writing, but rather if something else would come along that interested me more that writing about board games.

I'm sure that'll happen in time, and it was actually a very serious threat this year, because it's been one of my most productive writing years ever. I expanded my history articles into an almost-complete manuscript of an RPG history book, before things fell through with my initial publisher (200,000 words). I simultaneously wrote a book on elfs for Mongoose Publishing's RuneQuest, which has since been published (60,000 words). I wrote 7 or 8 articles for Knucklebones magazine (20,000 words), a couple for Tradetalk magazine (5,000 words), four articles for Signs & Portents magazine (14,000 words), 25 articles here on Gone Gaming (50,000 words), and 50 reviews for RPGnet (100,000 words). In all, I suspect I flirted with a count of half-a-million words for the year.

It's been a busy year. Just like that year when Coldfoot first asked me if I wanted to write for his new blog.

Sounds like a pattern.

My Year in Gaming

Fortunately, I still found plenty of time to game amidst all that writing (though I'll admit to turning down some gaming opportunities early in the year, when I was going full-bore on two books intended for professional publication). I've logged 294 games to date this year, compared to 414 last year, and I've still got a few more game nights scheduled.

However, it's also been a year that's seen some changes in my gaming habits.

This is the year in which I decided that I didn't have to own every board game I liked. I think it's a milestone that every board game player eventually hits, as they glance through their shelves, realize how many of the games they never play and that playing a friend's copy of the newest hot game is probably good enough.

Notre Dame is the last game that I actively sought out a copy of (and couldn't get because it was out of print). I think On the Underground was the last game I actually bought. (Though, keep in mind that I still get some review copies, which helps to satisfy the new game urge.)

This is also the year in which I started getting rid of games that I actually like. They're just games that I like less and are less likely to play, so why should I have them continue to clutter up my house?

(Actually, I speak prematurely, because I haven't gotten rid of them yet. I've just packed them up in a box for an auction next Spring at EndGame.)

On the gaming front, there was very little that thrilled me for most of the year. The Pillars of the Earth is the only game from early this year or late last year which has had any staying power for me ... and that might be because I don't get to play it much. Notre Dame was the next game that really caught my attention, but I still haven't purchased a copy of it.

However, this fall has been looking better. Race for the Galaxy has gone onto my usually-want-to-play list, and I suspect that I'll be even more excited when and if the supplements come out. I initially said that I felt like I didn't need to own Race for the Galaxy because I already had San Juan and Glory to Rome, but I'd increasingly like to get a copy.

Brass and Cuba are two more games from this fall that I've liked quite a bit. They've only gotten one play each, and they're generally longer and more intricate than I tend to like in gaming ... but those single gameplays really got me thinking.

I'm really happy to see a few different games that get me excited again, because it tells me that spring was just a poor crop of games, not that I'm losing my interest in Eurogames in general.

My five and dime list isn't quite finished up for the year, because of those aforementioned remaining game nights, but generally it looks much as it has in previous years: pretty scant, because I'm much more likely to play a lot of different games than anything in depth.

Lost Cities (12 plays) was one of just two older game that I really kept playing this year, and that's primarily because my wife has had some renewed interest in the game. The other was Ingenious (5 plays), thanks to my dad buying me a copy last Christmas. (I've also played the computer version of it a ton, and should really review it.) My games of Magic: The Gathering (6 plays) were entirely so that I could write some reviews that required testing out a lot of decks. It's a fun game, but I doubt I'd go to the trouble of playing it otherwise.

New or new-to-me games took up the rest of my five-and-dime list.

Tichu (7 plays) is a game that I quickly came to adore, but it's no surprise because I really like card-climbing games. Gang of Four was a favorite long before I ever tried out Tichu.

Ubongo (6 plays) got all its attention early in the year, and seems to have died out since. My last nickel of the year should be Descent (5 plays), as we've got a game scheduled for Saturday. It's a bit surprising for such a long game to appear as a nickel, but it's because my roleplaying group likes it, so it's gotten some play there, especially when we were in-between campaigns this summer.

That's pretty much been my year in gaming.

And this is Shannon Appelcline, writer and gaming guy, signing off. I'll see you all next year in Gone Gaming at Board Game News. Have a terrific holiday, and make sure you stick around for all the great columns we've got scheduled before the end of the year.

(+2,232 words.)

Not enough time.

2007-12-18T11:16:00.001-08:00

It's reaching the end of the year, and the traditional time for a geek to look at what games they played and reminisce. But rather than talk about what I played lots this year - I'm going to talk about what I didn't play. And my regrets.

Invariably (In my life), the shorter games get pulled out more. There was a year when I must have played Circus Flocati almost 20 times. Why? Because we'd always play it while waiting for everyone else to show up. We might have only finished the game 10 times, but it appeared on the table constantly. So at this time of year, when I lament what I didn't play, it's always the long difficult games. On with the show.

Roads and Boats
A perennial favorite of at least one group I play with, R&B got a ton of play for awhile, and has now declined to a measly one time in 2007. There's still the possibility of play left I think - but one or two, what's the difference there? There was a time when we picked scenarios purely based on not having played them yet. I'm sure there's one or two unplayed ones left...

18xx
This was the year of 1825. It got two plays, along with one Isle of Wight. No 1830, and I missed a chance to try 18CTC at Kublacon because I was working. Sigh. Work interfering with games? Foolishness! We talk constantly about trying to play more often, but 18xx doesn't make it out for evenings most of the time, even though there are several games that play in under 4 hours. So it gets relegated to weekend gaming, and hence more infrequent.

Magic Realm
Two measly plays. Two! More if you would count realmspeak or solo dithering, but I don't. I went to bgg.con with the avowed intention of getting in a game, even going so far as to bring my custom set, but I got distracted by the shiny and new, or the shiny and old.

That crazy Fan game
Speaking of bgg.con, this game makes the list purely because I failed entirely to ever knock the stupid little post off the wooden box. More practice at throwing fans is obviously needed. One play not enough (Though seeing how the game had like 5 copies made, and I don't own one, I doubt that will happen).

Great Battles of History
Well, taking the GBH series as a whole, I've actually played a fair bit. Multiple sessions of Alexander and Samurai, plus one-and-a-half sessions of Alesia. Alesia I don't need to play again, but I'm always up for another Alexander or Samurai game, and we never did get around to reading the rules for RAN (the 2nd half of samurai that was released this year). Overall this is probably the wargame series that I regret not playing more, though Flying Colors is always a contender as well.

Lords of the...
Phil Eklunds "Lords" series were finally attempted by myself this year (along with American Megafauna, and just recently Origins..) I find myself fully enamored of Phil's games, although they are not the easiest to comprehend. Multiple plays of Lords of the Spanish Main left me with nothing but a taste for more. I have yet to attempt either of the two earlier games (mostly due to component issues), but I am sad that I didn't get a chance to play more. The Lords series demands repeat play, not only because you need to learn how the game works, but also because you need to learn how to tweak the base rules to fit the play styles of your local group. To be blunt, the "big deck" problem rears it's ugly head, and for the group of war/euro gamers that I usually play with, a more normalized randomization is needed. That last sentence probably leaves you shaking your head in wonderment, but trust me, it makes sense. One of these days I'll write more about it. For now, trust me that I wish I had played these games more often.

So there's the short list. Of all the rest, the only other game that I feel regret is for poor unloved-in-2007 Fairy Tale. The game is short, I enjoy it immensely, and I used to play it quite a bit. In 2007? One lonely time. Ah well. So many games. I'm sure I'll come back to it.

---

Boardgames for Christmas

2007-12-16T03:36:00.000-08:00

It's fun to play games, but it's fun to give games too. And with Christmas on the way, giving things is definitely on my mind. (Unfortunately, it's also the reason why I skipped posting last week - between family, Agricola and work, the last few weeks have been a bit mad).

We have a friend who loves penguins. Like us, she has a 5' high inflatable penguin; unlike ours, I think hers is still inflated. Last year, we found the perfect Christmas gift - the game Weihnachtspinguine (Christmas Penguins). Not only does it have penguins and even a polar bear, it's also a pretty fun game. Chalk up a gift-giving success.

Some games really scream out to be given to particular people. Here's my list.

Game Name:	On the Underground
Designer:	Sebastian Bleasdale
I'd like to give it to:	My friends Jane and Stuart, who lived in London for 5 years or so.
Why?	Jane and Stuart introduced us to The London Game during the '90s - and we spent many happy times exploring the Tube together from our dining table. On the Underground is a great game for two or more players, so they can play it with one another or with friends, or with their children as they grow up. They'll love the theme, and it's a great game as well.

Game Name:

On the Underground

Designer:

Sebastian Bleasdale

I'd like to give it to:

My friends Jane and Stuart, who lived in London for 5 years or so.

Why?

Jane and Stuart introduced us to The London Game during the '90s - and we spent many happy times exploring the Tube together from our dining table. On the Underground is a great game for two or more players, so they can play it with one another or with friends, or with their children as they grow up.

They'll love the theme, and it's a great game as well.

Game Name:	Thebes
Designer:	Peter Prinz
I'd like to give it to:	My brother, who studied ancient history and classics at University.
Why?	My brother doesn't play a lot of games any more, but I think this one would be an exception. Players take the role of archaeologists at the start of the twentieth century, travelling around Europe doing research and exhibiting their finds, as well as visiting archaeological sites to excavate for treasure. The theme of this game is a real attraction - it works so well, you can really believe that you are on a dig (especially when your precious dig turns up only pot shards). There's enough luck that everyone has fun, and enough skill that the game never gets boring.

Game Name:

Thebes

Designer:

Peter Prinz

I'd like to give it to:

My brother, who studied ancient history and classics at University.

Why?

My brother doesn't play a lot of games any more, but I think this one would be an exception. Players take the role of archaeologists at the start of the twentieth century, travelling around Europe doing research and exhibiting their finds, as well as visiting archaeological sites to excavate for treasure.

The theme of this game is a real attraction - it works so well, you can really believe that you are on a dig (especially when your precious dig turns up only pot shards). There's enough luck that everyone has fun, and enough skill that the game never gets boring.

Game Name:	Trötofant
Designer:	Roberto Fraga
I'd like to give it to:	My 4- and 9-year-old daughters
Why?	Who doesn't need some silliness in their life? This game provides it in elephant-sized doses. Each player represents an elephant, trying to collect as many logs as possible from the top of a tree. But they can't use their hands to collect the logs - they must pick them up in a party tooter whistle, as it rolls back up. I've never played this game, and I honestly don't know whether I can recommend it to anyone else. But I think it sounds great fun, and I think the girls will too!

Game Name:

Trötofant

Designer:

Roberto Fraga

I'd like to give it to:

My 4- and 9-year-old daughters

Why?

Who doesn't need some silliness in their life? This game provides it in elephant-sized doses.

Each player represents an elephant, trying to collect as many logs as possible from the top of a tree. But they can't use their hands to collect the logs - they must pick them up in a party tooter whistle, as it rolls back up.

I've never played this game, and I honestly don't know whether I can recommend it to anyone else. But I think it sounds great fun, and I think the girls will too!

Game Name:	Uno Attack
Designer:	(Uncredited)
I'd like to give it to:	A "giving tree"
Why?	This has become a family tradition. A few years ago, my elder daughter and I decided to buy a gift to put into a charity basket. "What should we buy?" I asked her. "Well, we really love games, and other kids do too, so I think we should buy a boardgame" After much careful selection, Uno Attack was chosen - and it continues to go into the basket each year.

Game Name:

Uno Attack

Designer:

(Uncredited)

I'd like to give it to:

A "giving tree"

Why?

This has become a family tradition. A few years ago, my elder daughter and I decided to buy a gift to put into a charity basket.

"What should we buy?" I asked her.

"Well, we really love games, and other kids do too, so I think we should buy a boardgame"

After much careful selection, Uno Attack was chosen - and it continues to go into the basket each year.

Who would you like to buy a game for? And what is the story?

Melissa

Why Write?

2007-12-14T05:45:00.000-08:00

A couple of things have put me in a contemplative mood this week. For one thing, a college friend of mine just turned fifty. He is older than I am, but the implication that time is passing for all of us is inescapable. Someday soon I will be fifty, and that just sounds so darn mature.

For another thing, this is the first time that I can remember that I have had back-to-back columns. No one seems to have posted on Gone Gaming since last Friday. No doubt the other writers have more important things going on in their lives than writing for free to an audience of unknown size (but that probably rates a description somewhere between small and miniscule).

So why write? Why is this worthwhile for me? I guess for three reasons.

1) Exercise the writing muscle. If you value writing skills (as I do), then anything that gets you writing is good. The subject matter could be gardening, or tennis, or dubious conspiracy theories. It doesn’t matter. Writing helps keep parts of the mind limber. Because of my blogging deadline I write on a regular schedule, and I write more than I would otherwise.

2) A voice in the hobby. This is the reason that may have appealed to me the most when I first considered blogging, but that has turned out to be the least important and most nebulous reason in retrospect. Maybe if I went to more gaming conventions, then I would meet more gamers, and writing a blog could be a calling card. But I don’t go to many cons, and I don’t meet lots of new gamers. And I have found that gamers are more likely to recognize the name of the gaming sites I write for than my own name. But every now and then someone seems to know my writing, or they are at least polite enough to pretend to.

3) An ear to the ground in the hobby. This is a reason I never much considered before I started writing, but that has turned out to be an unexpected bonus. Because I am constantly looking for material for my blogs, I have read more rules for upcoming games, played more games that I might have otherwise passed by, and contacted more people in the industry than I ever would have if I had not been writing regularly. Writing has made me more analytical about games and the industry, and made me a more devoted reader of other folks’ blogs. None of this makes me a better human being, but it does make the hobby more interesting to me.

Some readers may have considered writing an essay or two about the hobby. You might have wondered why such an activity would be worthwhile, while at the same time harboring the vague notion that writing for free is about as smart as digging ditches for free.

I believe that blogging has its benefits. They may be intangible, and the cost/benefit ratio may be a little skewed. But now and then there appear unexpected emotional rewards.

If some of you have something to say about the hobby, we’d love to hear from you.

Brass Impressions

2007-12-07T06:11:00.000-08:00

The Appalachian Gamers got to try Martin Wallace’s Brass for the first time this week, and the initial impressions were favorable. I heard several comments along the lines of “There’s a lot to think about in this game, and it may be one of those games that needs to be played two or three times before I really know what to do.”

Martin Wallace may be my favorite designer; I certainly cannot think of anyone whose games I look forward to with greater anticipation. I will need to play Brass several more times before I can determine where it ranks in my esteem compared with Railroad Tycoon or Struggle of Empires, but at the very least Brass will be among my favorite games of this year.

Brass is an economic engine game based on the Industrial Revolution in Lancashire, England. Players spend their turns purchasing industry counters, placing them on the board, and then trying to get their counters turned over to their backside which generates income and victory points. Much of the complexity in the game comes from the different conditions that will turn over counters; each industry has its own special requirements. For example, coal mines and ironworks counters are placed on the board along with a number of coal and iron cubes. When these cubes are consumed, the counter that generated them is flipped. But cotton mill counters can only be flipped if they are connected by rail or canal to a port or external location, and then the owning player must spend an action to sell cotton. Ports and shipyard counters have their own special conditions as well.

Each particular industry also has its own ratio of income and victory points. Some industries generate a lot of income but relatively few victory points. Coal is the prime example of this type of industry. Other industries generate more victory points than income. For example, shipyards generate little income but they create a literal boatload of victory points.

Also adding to the complexity is the requirement that many industries be connected by canal or rail to ports or coal mines. Players will have to construct a network of canals and rails to make their economic empire work.

All this complexity gives players strategic options, but also makes the game fiddly (a favorite Appalachian Gamer word). Players may need to play the game a couple of times to memorize all the special rules for coal, steel, and selling cotton.

The biggest reservation I have about the game concerns the victory-point-extravaganza shipyards. Both the winning and second place player in our game built shipyards, and it may be that building shipyards is a necessary part of any winning strategy. If that is the case, then game play will be a little more predictable and scripted than if shipyards were of equal importance with other industries.

Brass is a fine addition to the collected works of Martin Wallace. I wonder what he is working on now.

Who Goes Next?

2007-12-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

Who goes next?

In a mass-market game, that wasn't really much of a question, because in Monopoly, Scrabble, Chess, or any number of other traditionals, the answer was always obvious: the next player.

However, as games continue to evolve, adding on new levels of complexity, the answer is becoming more difficult, and the question of who goes next isn't always so obvious.

Starting with Card Games

I would suspect that card games were really the first ones to raise the "Who Goes Next?" question. This is because most card games divide up their play into tricks, where each player plays one card. This means that if you kept having the "next player" go next, then the same player would lead each hand, which would allow him to play to his strengths and win most of the time. Because of this large first-player advantage, card games developed two different answers for the "Who Goes Next?" question, based around their two core units of card play.

At the end of each trick (or each round of play, if you prefer), the player that wins the hand is usually the one that leads the next hand. This tends to offer two rewards to winning a trick: getting the cards of the trick and leading off the next one. Different games play this off in different ways. In most card games, from Bridge to Spades, taking the trick is crucially important, while winning the lead just lets you control what happens next, but in a game like Gang of Four there's no trick taking, and so all that's important is getting to lead the next time around--underlining the importance of this whole exercise.

At the end of each hand, the lead tends to shift around the table clockwise.

And that's how almost every card game answers the question of "Who Goes Next?". As we'll see, some board games have adopted these same answers, but more recently we're seeing a lot of variation as well, going beyond card games' staid solutions.

Back to Board Games

As I've already said, in Ye Olden Board Games, you just kept playing sequentially. There's still a lot of designers that use this model most of the time, including stand-outs like Reiner Knizia.

However, we're increasingly seeing games designed around limited choices and limited resources. These games also tend to divide up into rounds (or tricks, if you prefer), with the most common round giving each player one opportunity to play--though they're sometimes much longer. At the end of each round, a new player then gets the opportunity to be first.

Puerto Rico is one of the earliest notables in this area, but the style of play has really exploded in the last several years with more role-selection games and more scarcity games, all of which tend to make it really important when you go.

Puerto Rico took the old card play model of shifting the lead one to the right each round, which is a fine, simple method. It can also be incredibly painful when you go from first to last, because that increases the length between your turns. It's not a big deal in Puerto Rico because of the low down-time, and in fact becomes a core element of strategy. However, it drove me crazy in Eagle's Attack! (with expansion) because the down-time was high enough that you'd have over an hour in-between your first and last turns.

I'm somewhat fond of the retrograde turn order, where the first player goes counter-clockwise rather than clockwise. Thus, in the extreme case, rather than going from first to last, you instead go from last to first. However, it's more confusing, and can cause serious balance problems when a player gets two turns in a row.

Complexity in Ordering

It's been several years now that the number of round-based board games have been increasing, and I'm pretty pleased to see that the thought being given to the whole question of "Who Goes Next?" is increasing too.

After moving the first-player clockwise (or counterclockwise) I think the next easiest answer is to allow the player with the lowest score to go first (like Torres does), if being first is an advantage, or to make the player with the highest score go first, if being first is a disadvantage. Thus, you have a simple rule that doesn't continually advantage the same player and you have a catch-up mechanism, all in one simple rule.

Sweet.

However I like the board games that have integrated the whole question of "Who Goes Next?" into the game play even better. They treat it as yet another resource that you have to manage.

Caylus and Pillars of the Earth both made the first-player ability a resource that you can purchase, but at the cost of doing something else useful, which is an OK, but kind of in-your-face answer.

I prefer the solutions suggested by Phoenicia and Cuba. In the first you go first in the next round if you have the most victory points, but by doing so you're probably limiting your resource production. In the second you go first in the next round if you choose your roles in a specific order. In both cases you have to minorly disadvantage yourself in other ways to increase your probability of going next, which is generally a more nuanced and interesting answer than just choosing whether to take the first-player action or not.

Conclusion

I've thus far left out my favorite "Who Goes Next?" mechanism, which is that found in Thebes. Therein, every action you take costs time, and whoever has spent the least time overall goes next. This is neat in several ways, because it turns the "Who Goes Next?" question on its head, because there's no longer a guarantee of getting equal turns. Instead, turn management becomes pure resource management.

I suppose you could say it's another way of looking at an action-point system, in that you can take one big action or many small actions, but if so it's more clever and less likely to cause analysis paralysis than any action point system I've ever seen.

Thebes also suggests that we've just scratched the service of the "Who Goes Next?" question. As designer games continue to evolve, we may see lots of other solutions to this question that was taken totally for granted back when we just played Monopoly and Battleship.

Short note on Retail.

2007-12-04T11:05:00.000-08:00

It's a busy time of year for the retail biz. One of the oddities of being on the inside of retail is that you learn exactly how early "holiday shopping season" really starts. No, not the shoppers, but the sales calls.

Every year, like clockwork, on October 1st, I start getting the cold calls¹ from game companies. Usually I already know about three-quarters of the companies that call at that point. These aren't eurogame companies, or hobby games (those companies aren't big enough to fund cold calls). These are the larger family game companies. Some have made it into the Mass Market, some haven't.

I only get frustrated with the ones who take offense that I don't want their products. "We've won an award!" they cry. I hesitate to tell them that while awards are shiny, and the stickers look nice, that only one or two award-winning games sell for more than a year. The chances that your game will do well locally? Not very high.

The cold calls stop by late october/early november. The big companies realize that holiday buying is wrapping up at this point. The big orders have been placed already. Now the smaller companies start calling. I've rarely heard of these companies. Sometimes their product looks interesting. Sometimes they don't. Invariably they won't be good sellers, but every year I try to take one or two risks on a strong looking product. Sometimes it pays off. Again, these are rarely strategy games, these are mostly party games.

The final round of sales contact comes about now. Early december. These are the folks that show up at the store with a game in hand, several cases of product in their car and ask how many copies we need. These people are stunning in their earnest belief that they have a sure-fire hit on their hands. It's also one of the most depressing parts of my job. I have to look at a game, with the inventor/publisher on hand and try to figure out how to say no without entirely offending them. Of course, if they are offensive or rude, I have a tendency to do the same back. It's amazing how many people think that better sales comes from telling your potential customers that they are idiots. Ugly².

I've seen rip-offs of Uno/Crazy 8s³, dice games that imitate LCR, tons of party games, chess variants ⁴, and more. Most are made by one person and tested on their extended family.

I rarely buy these last products. They're just too late, and often too poorly presented. Even if a game offers a great value and gameplay, if nobody has heard of it, and the box is boring - the game won't sell⁵.

This year I've taken less small games. We've seen so many new titles over the past year that I don't feel I have a spot for these last minute games.

That's it for retail. Sometimes the urge strikes me.

I was out at BGG.con and completely failed to introduce myself to anyone. My apologies. Good times though. It was a strong Essen crop this year. The only complete miss for me was a three-player attempt at Army of Frogs (from the makers of Hive). We got into an intractably drawn out endgame. We quit because it wasn't fun and could have gone on forever.

--

¹ Telemarketing speak for an unsolicited sales call. If you didn't already know that. I have no real idea how far into general culture that term has migrated.

² So, last year I took a case of a nameless game. It didn't sell at all. Nonetheless, after taking it, I got a call from the guy every week asking if we needed a restock. Every week I'd tell him - no, your game hasn't sold, I've still got the six copies you sold me, I don't need any more. And every week he'd tell me that it was doing really well everywhere else and was I sure I didn't need any more? Ah. Insanity. Eventually he got told to go away and never call me again. The game is still around. I've even seen it in other stores. Hopefully someone is making money on it besides the salesman.

³ZAR. It even has three letters in its name, just like uno. Surprisingly, this one sells a couple times a year. But remember, LCR sells year-round as well!

⁴ Kruzno anyone? As attendees of our annual party can attest, we had plenty of Kruzno to give away.

⁵ -cough- experience talking -cough-

A Ahort Rules Preview of Supernova

2007-11-30T13:11:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there was a wargame company called SPI that completely dominated the wargame field (at least in terms of numbers of games produced). When SPI got around to producing some science-fiction empire-building games, they made a couple that differed in terms of scale. Their biggest-picture game was called Outreach and the scale was so big that hexes didn’t represent star systems but rather whole chunks of the galaxy that contained dozens or hundreds of star systems. If I remember correctly (and this is a big if—I haven’t seen the game in decades), the grand scale made the game so generic and abstract that the theme was almost pointless.

I was reminded of Outreach when reading the rules for Supernova. This is not because Supernova seems likely to be a bland game. Or because the two games have the same ultra-big picture scale (Supernova has individual planets and their moons on the gameboard). Rather, Supernova recalled Outreach because Supernova is a tile-laying game, and the forces of each space empire seem to be a tad abstract. In Supernova, players don’t move plastic ships around the board, but lay tiles outward from a central sun. When a player places a tile on a hex that has been previously claimed by an opponent, combat begins.

Combat is conducted with battle cards, although fortifying a hex (adding more than one tile to a hex) helps with defense. Battle cards are either numbered or contain a special abilities. There are rules about which combination of cards can be played in each battle, but there is always going to be an element of pure guesswork because players are not going to know what is in other players’ hands.

What adds to the space theme, and makes the game less abstract, are ratings for individual player abilities which can change over the course of the game. Players have ratings for weapons (which increase combat ability), shields (which boost defense), engines (which increase the number of tiles a player can play each turn), and comms (which increase the number of battle cards a player can hold). Players may buy a technology increase each turn, but the increases become more expensive as tech levels rise. This means that players will have an incentive to develop all their technologies rather than sinking their money into one or two increasingly-expensive fields.

Players get a small resource budget each turn (resources are cash in this game), and they can increase their resources by harvesting the moons which orbit the planets. Although moons create more resources than planets, planets are worth more victory points than moons.

There is also an auction mechanism in this game. Every turn there is a chance of a sun flare erupting from the central star. Players bid for the right to control the flare, and the winning player can declare where the flare goes. Sun flares destroy hexes as they move outward from the star. Early in the game, they only destroy a couple of hexes; later in the game they become more powerful and they destroy a greater number of hexes.

Supernova (designed by Oliver Harrison and Mike Roy) seems to me to be a promising game that may give players a chance to dabble in galactic empire-building without requiring the six-hour marathon session that Twilight Imperium demands. With Galactic Emperor also on track for publication in 2008, next year may be a good year for space-game enthusiasts.

Multi-player Solitaire? Nuh Uh!

2007-11-25T07:54:00.000-08:00

The term "multiplayer solitaire" is often used (mostly by people who don't like them) to describe games where there is no direct player interaction - you can't steal my food cubes or blow up my tanks, because we are each working on our own grand master plan for our own area of the world.

Coincidentally, the games the term is often applied to include most of my favourite games.

What these games typically offer, is ample opportunity for indirect player interaction. Often, this comes through competing with other players - for goods, for resources, for actions, for control of an area.

The games reward planning - often long-term planning - but also the flexibility to respond and react to others' actions. While they are less dynamic than some other types of games, players can still have a significant effect on one another's success or failure.

In my experience, while the first few times with a new game often play out as essentially multiplayer solitaire, with experience and increased skill players will watch what other players are doing and respond/react/block/move appropriately. In other words, a game will become more interactive as you play it more and more. This can take time - and it's easy to write a game off after one or two plays without really exploring the strategies and tactics that underpin it.

Moving a game from multiplayer solitaire to a more interactive experience may have a long learning curve, but it is well worth it to someone who (like me) enjoys these types of games. The interactivity enriches the game experience and deepens the thinking involved in playing the game - or at least, in playing it well.

In bad news for designers, there doesn't seem to be a way to shortcut this process - although some seem to be having success by providing solo rules, or versions of the game with less complexity than the full game, to give players an opportunity to familiarise themselves with the game in stages.

I've looked at a handful of these games and have tried to rank them, starting with the most solitaire. Your experiences will likely vary - I'd bet, according to how often you have played the various games I list.

Crayon rails games
You could call them multiplayer solitaire because: The interaction is really only in where you build (taking the best routes into and out of a city) and in taking the goods that other players want.
Opportunities for interaction with other players: I've only played this 2-player so far, but I imagine with more players there could be more opportunity to block other players out of a particular city or to force other players to use your existing train lines.

Ingenious
You could call it multiplayer solitaire because: The game can be played almost co-operatively, with each player placing pieces without regard to their opponent's scores.
Opportunities for interaction with other players: Blocking!

Thurn und Taxis
You could call it multiplayer solitaire because: Each player plays their own hand, without restrictions on how many pieces may be played on a particular city. The high level of chance in the flow of cards (particularly if you choose the 'replace the 6 cards' option) makes it hard to block, especially in a multiplayer game.
Opportunities for interaction with other players: Card hogs! If I have all the cards for Lodz or Sigmaringen, you don't have much of a chance. Also, the need to keep up with other players' carriage cards means that you are under some pressure to play cards and not just to wait for the next card to come along.

Pillars of the Earth - reduced by the random draw of master builders but still very competitive. Has the feel of an auction game in many ways
You could call it multiplayer solitaire because: Each player is working to make the most of their own set of cards.
Opportunities for interaction with other players: Card selection/choice of actions - it is possible to take the action that another player wants. Watch how many workers they have left and make sure you take the only stone they can afford. Block their access to key resources like metal. Watch whether they have enough money to place their master builders.

Notre Dame
You could call it multiplayer solitaire because: Each player plays their own hand of cards on their own section of the board. There is no restriction on several players choosing the same action.
Opportunities for interaction with other players: Card drafting phase. If the next player is out of money, it might be safe for me to pass her a Notre Dame card if it means I can keep a money card out of her hands. Also, the carriages.

Carcassonne
You could call it multiplayer solitaire because: Each player builds their own structures on the board - there's no trade or opportunity to influence your opponent's tile draw.
Opportunities for interaction with other players: Blocking! Stealing cities, pointing roads at cities - there are ample opportunities for evil play.

Princes of Florence
You could call it multiplayer solitaire because: Each player is building his/her own buildings and playing cards.
Opportunities for interaction with other players: The Auction phase (and the restricted supply of some cards for the Action phase) allows you to take choices away from other players. The Recruiter card also offers an interactive element.

Agricola
You could call it multiplayer solitaire because: Each player is building their own farmyard. Unless you are using the I deck, you have little to no direct interaction with other players.
Opportunities for interaction with other players: Taking resources and actions that other players need. Early complaints about cards being overpowered seem to stem from this problem - if one player has a card that makes clay super-valuable for them then the other players should adapt their strategy to ensure that the first player doesn't get the chance to get a lot of clay. That's hard to do while you're still learning the ropes, which is where the family game should get solid play from gamers who are just starting out with this game.

Tigris & Euphrates
You could call it multiplayer solitaire because: It is possible to play this game without ever entering into any direct conflict with another player.
Opportunities for interaction with other players: War! Two different types, even. It doesn't get much more direct than that - yet the first few times you play you will almost always stick to building up your own civilisation.

What other games attract this label? And does the experience = interactivity rule hold true?

Melissa

A Short Rules Preview of Power & Weakness

2007-11-23T08:02:00.000-08:00

Last week I wrote about the rules for Albion, an area-control game set in medieval Britain. Today I’m writing about the rules for Power & Weakness, an area-control game set in medieval Britain.

There are a couple of big differences in the games. For one thing, Albion is a multi-player game and Power & Weakness is strictly two-player. Another difference is that Albion tries to be loosely historical, but Power & Weakness focuses on magicians as well as on conventional forces.

The heart of Power and Weakness is a mechanism in which conventional and magical conflict alternates as players struggle to control regions on the board. A cycle in which players move knights from regions to adjacent regions to combat enemy forces is followed by a cycle in which magicians teleport all over the board between regions that share the same magical symbol.

On his turn, a player can take two actions. Typical actions will be adding a friendly piece to a region on the board, recruiting friendly pieces from the stock, or taking and/or playing an action tile. There are a variety of actions tiles. Some of the typical ones allow a player to remove enemy pieces from a region, add friendly pieces to a region, move pieces from region to region, or cancel an opponent’s action. Some action tiles have duel abilities, and players have to choose which abilities to use. Some action tiles cannot be simply taken, but have to be auctioned off between the players.

Taking some actions removes timing cubes from the timing track. The cycle ends when all the cubes are gone, and manipulating the end of a cycle appears to play a part in game strategy. For example, playing tiles that add friendly pieces to the board can trigger the end of a cycle and make it impossible for the opponent to respond before a scoring round.

Power & Weakness has some interesting mechanisms, but the two-player limitation may decrease its appeal. I would be much more likely to acquire a game like this if it allowed for several players; two-player games just don’t get played as much.

Power & Weakness was designed by Andreas Steding and is available for pre-order from www.funagain.com.

After being defeated by the rules, the play made it clear...

2007-11-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

There have been a few games where I have found myself utterly defeated after reading the rules. Instead of knowing how to play the game I have no idea at all, in some extreme cases I know less about the game than I did before I started and also I am no longer entirely sure what my phone number is.

In pretty much every case this has been cured by playing the game, preferably with somebody who knows how to play it.

Games where I have been defeated by the rules include Coloretto, Mamma Mia!, Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper, Tigris & Euphrates and Air War (OK I will admit that the last one was not at all recently).

With Coloretto and Mamma Mia! a step by step playing of the game in close concert with the rules meant that things that were previously clear as mud suddenly became obvious as if some magic spell had been lifted. Interestingly enough I had no problem at all with Zooloretto, mostly due to the familiarity with Coloretto.

Air War is really a case of being defeated by the errata. I spent hours working my way through the hefty rule book to suddenly find this enormous errata that basically poked out its tongue and said everything you have learnt before is wrong and you must learn it again. I put the rules and the errata back in the box, gave the game back to its owner and went back to playing Foxbat and Phantom instead.

With Tigris & Euphrates I read the rules and felt I was about half way. I had some understanding, but was clearly foundering. This time I went down the path of getting someone who had already played it to teach it. This worked a treat, again suddenly everything was very clear and we played it three times in a row. With the game in front of you an experienced player can teach this in about ten minutes and actually explain the internal and external conflicts in a meaningful way as opposed to that blank look that people get when they first read the rules without having played the game.

In the case of Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper I read the rules twice and even tried playing a game solo. Three - nil in the game's favour. The rules aren't that long, it shouldn't be that hard. I read the rules to War in Europe and just played it from scratch, but am now being defeated by a card game and its cursed melds. At least I could console myself that I was not the only one who has had this problem, there are many similar stories at BGG.

I issued the "Teach me" plea and to my gratitude Gregor responded and it was arranged for the next EuroGamesFest. Sure enough after a brief explanation and about a hand or two it was pretty much all perfectly clear and I could now successfully teach other people how to play, which means Melissa and Daughter the Elder are now fans of the game and we have played it quite a few times recently, including a hand or two waiting for meals to arrive at a restaurant and in the waiting room at our GP's waiting room waiting for a Doctor for Daughter the Younger.

My plan of attack for our unplayed pile is still usually:
1) Read the rules
2) If that does not succeed, try a solo game
3) If that does not succeed, call on somebody who has played the game before to assist.

Usually we have a successful game after step 1, but not always.

Hmmm meeples taste like...

A Short Rules Preview of Albion

2007-11-16T14:28:00.001-08:00

This one I am excited about. I’m talking about Albion, the upcoming area-majority game from the new game company Troy Press. Albion covers a lot of the same territory as Britannia, but looks like it is a quicker, less complicated game.

In Albion, players try to become the dominant force in various regions of the British Isles in order to score victory points. On his turn, if I player has the most cubes in a particular region, and he has the appropriate card for that region, he may play a kingdom card to score points. Petty kingdoms are kingdoms that consist of just one region. After a player has scored at least three petty kingdoms, he may attempt to score a high kingdom which consists of two regions and is probably worth more victory points. And at the end of the game, players see who has the most units in the three final kingdoms: England, Scotland, and Wales.

On his turn, a player will have to choose between the following actions: move settlers (from one region to an adjoining region), attack settlers (opposing settler cubes destroy each other on a one-to-one basis), add settlers (one cube is added to a region where you have a majority or tie for the majority of the cubes), recruit Britons (exchange neutral brown Briton cubes in one region for your own cubes), or play an invader carder (units that invade England from the sea). Complicating matters is a population limit for each of the varying regions that limits how many units may occupy it.

Does this sound simple? Maybe even excessively simple? Perhaps. But I was suspicious of the simplicity of Midgard when that came out, and Midgard turned out to be one of the games from the last couple of years that the Appalachian Gamers plays the most.

Albion may have less historical chrome than Britannia, but the Appalachian Gamers found that Britannia’s victory point system channels players into predictable grooves. Albion looks like it might be a little less predictable, and play in a much shorter time.

It looks like Albion will show up sometime in 2008. I’ll be waiting.

Albion can be pre-ordered for about $40. Troy Press can be found at www.troypress.com.

Agricola - or, everything I know about 17th century farming I learned from the Internet

2007-11-10T16:27:00.000-08:00

As loyal readers will know, I've spent the last 7 weeks or so immersed in translating Uwe Rosenberg's wonderful new game Agricola.

One of the challenges in translating this game was understanding the richly thematic world that the game encapsulates, and reflecting that in the words and ideas used in the translated text.

Nowhere is this more necessary than in the 360-odd cards, particularly the Improvement and Occupation cards.

I've been asked a few times, "Why did you use this word? No-one will know what it means!" - this is my answer.

First, it's important to understand that the names on the cards enhance the theme of the game. We could play a themeless game which says "Swap a white cube for little markers if you have this card" or we could play a thematic game where we put sheep into an oven and they come out as lamb cutlets to feed the family. It doesn't really matter what the cards are called - they still have effect in the game - but Agricola's heavy theming is so tightly bound to its gameplay that I wanted to make sure I did justice to the cards.

That meant spending way more time obsessing about the names of the cards than might have been expected. Thanks especially to John and Ralph who have shared my obsession in the last week and have made suggestions on what to include or have made me think about why particular words should be used, and also to the many others who have emailed or geekmailed suggestions. And thanks of course to Hanno who dealt patiently with my questions about "what did this guy do?" and William who shared his research as we worked through it.

Here are some of the online resources that I've found helpful:

Old German Professions, Occupations and Illnesses - mostly for family historians and genealogists, I think, but it was great for me too! Although I was surprised how many different occupations seem to involve castrating animals.
Grimms Deutsches Wörterbuch - a (the!) comprehensive German-German dictionary.
Ploughs - the hardest part of this translation, I found.
Antique Farm Tools - a private collection of antique farm tools, many with photos.
List of medieval land terms - a hide was a unit of land.
Farming and Farming Tools - more ploughs, I think.
1911 Encyclopedia - Plough and Ploughing - are we seeing a theme here?
German Symbols for Research Work - includes another detailed list of occupations & professions.
Property and Civil Society in South-Western Germany 1820-1914 - OK, I have no idea why I bookmarked this one.
Women and personal possessions: 17th century testamentary evidence - we seem to have another theme going here.
1632: German Farms FAQ - this appears to be a reference document for a Fan Fiction community. I'm not sure how authoritative a source this really is.
Austrian Open-Air Museum - not much English content here, but a useful reference. I wish I'd taken more notes when I visited it in 1993! Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Jamestown Settlement Light Industry 1608 - sawmills!
British Agricultural History Society - there's an interesting article about old rituals associated with ploughing.

There are of course other, more detailed references that I used for individual items. Some are old, some are more modern. Many led to squeals or at least shouts of "Aha!" - not least this picture of a shepherd's pipe (not shepherd's horn or shepherd's flute - phew) and John's discovery of the term Gypsy's Crock, which sounds much better than my very mundane "Tripod Pot".

I hope this set of references has been interesting. I've certainly found it a fascinating process. Look for the full set of card translations on the Lookout Games website Real Soon Now.

And enjoy!

A Short Rules Preview of Pandemic

2007-11-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

In one of my early blogs for Gone Gaming, I listed a few hypothetical games that I wished someone would create. One of my hypotheticals was a game I called NGO (Non-governmental organization) in which players try to stop famines and cure plagues to earn victory points. Now, I’m not so arrogant as to think that Matt Leacock was inspired by my blog to create Pandemic, the upcoming co-operative game from Z-Man Games. But I can at least congratulate myself for being ahead of the curve in predicting what kinds of new subject matter game designers will find interesting.

Z-Man has made the rules for Pandemic available on-line, and when I saw that it was a co-operative game, I knew I had to take a look. There are all too few co-operative games, and some of them (Arkham Horror) can take a long time to play. Pandemic has only about eight pages of rules, and the rules claim that the game can be played in forty-five minutes.

Up to four players can play Pandemic. Each player is a disease control expert who is trying to contain four different pandemics that are spreading around the world. If the players can restrain the spread of disease long enough, they may be able to find cures for the diseases and win the game. If the diseases get out of control and spread to too many cities, the players will lose. At the beginning of each game, each player gets a special power that they will use to modify some rule of the game in their favor. During the game, players move around the world-map game board, and treat disease in afflicted cities while trying to get the cards they need to find a complete cure for the global plagues.

Pandemic is basically a set-collecting game. If a player’s pawn is in a city with a research station, the player may discard five cards of the same color to cure a disease of that color. The player with the Scientist ability can cure a disease with only four cards of the same color.

Players get four actions per turn, and these can be used to move a player’s pawn, build new research stations, or to treat disease (remove cubes) in the city that the player’s pawn occupies. Normally, a player may only remove one disease cube per action, but once a cure for a disease is found, players may remove all the cubes of a cured disease from a city by spending just one action.

Although players will eventually be able to cure all four diseases, they may not have much time. Each turn players are required to draw cards that spread the infection of one or more diseases to cities listed on the cards. Wooden cubes of four different disease colors are placed on city spaces to represent the spread of contagion. The big problem comes when new disease cubes are supposed to be placed in a city that already contains three disease cubes of that color. In that case, an outbreak occurs and disease cubes spread to every adjacent city. Outbreaks in one city can trigger outbreaks in adjacent cities in a deadly chain reaction.

One sign of a good co-operative game is the ability to increase or decrease the difficulty level of the game to suit the experience of the players. In Pandemic, players may add more Epidemic cards to the deck to increase the difficulty of the game.

At least two of the most popular co-operative games are heavy-theme games taken from pop culture sources (Lord of the Rings and Arkham Horror). It will be interesting to see how the gaming community reacts to a co-operative game that isn’t inspired by works of fantasy, legend or horror. I am looking forward to trying Pandemic.

Knizia-thon, Part Two: Obscurity & Palazzo

2007-11-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

Last week I played my second game of Palazzo for the year. I own the game, but it very rarely makes it into my game night bag, hence the low play count. I couldn't really place my finger on why until last Wednesday's game.

The game ended like this:

I'd been doing kind of moderately well throughout the game: not best and not worst. On what was likely to be my last turn I had a pristine 5-story white-marble building with tons of windows, a mixed-material 3-story building and a mixed-material 2-story building.

Now in Palazzo, for those of you unfamiliar, you score points based on how tall your building is and what it's made out of. The core score for a 3-story building is the number of windows it contains, but there are bonuses of +3 and +6 when you reach 4 or 5 stories and those bonuses are doubled if the building is made of a single material.

The result is, unfortunately, very difficult to intuit, and this really showed in last Wednesday's game.

Given the choice between making a for-sure purchase of a single, one-window floor that I could add to my 2-story building and an auction for a couple of much better pieces, I took the latter. Unfortunately I didn't have the most money, lost the auction, didn't get another turn, and thus lost the game. However, what made the defeat especially ignoble was that if I'd instead just made the purchase that looked so much less good to me, I would have won by a couple of points.

The problem was that intuitive difficulty. Sure, I suppose I could have added up the two possible scores, then made a more knowledgeable risk-reward assessment based on the exact values, but that's generally not the way I roll. Worse, I think it would be disastrous in an ultra-light game like Palazzo.

So, instead, I went with my gut, and my gut said that singular one-window story was almost worthless, because my thumbnail way to try and assess the somewhat confusing valuations of Palazzo is to go with window count. Instead I should have remembered that there was a huge drop off in score from a 3-story building (value=windows) to a 2-story building (value=0).

But even when I remember that next time, and I bet I do, especially after writing this article, I suspect I'll be tripped up by something else. And that's really my core problem with Palazzo: not that it's light (though it is), and not that it's sort of Alhambra-like (which it's really not), but rather than the scoring is sufficiently obscure that it's often pretty hard to figure out the right thing to do.

The Benefits of Obscurity

Mind you, there are often great benefits to making scoring obscure in a game.

Hidden scoring is a terrific idea, even when you can see every point earned along the way. Tigris & Euphrates is a fine example of this. Sure someone could memorize every point earned, if they wanted, and thus have some advantage, but most people don't do that. And the flipside is that if all the scores were open then a huge analysis paralysis would start to settle on the players when they began to guess or second-guess all their info in light of the revealed scores. Quo Vadis and Through the Desert both do the exact same thing, with perhaps even more benefit.

The close companion to this idea is to have unscored scoring: valuations which aren't totally scored until the end. Genesis is an example of such a Knizia game, and even offers good reason for holding the scoring up to the end: because you don't know what everything's worth until the last piece is played because the size and ownership of herds of animals can change until the last move. Dead Man's Treasure is another example of game where the scoring isn't settled to the end.

So, I see reasons for making the score itself obscure, but not the scoring, and that's ultimately why I think Palazzo doesn't live up to some of Knizia's better mid-weight games. There's just too much formula in the scoring to allow you to intuitively know what to do.

Which is a pity, because I really enjoy the other aspects of the game.

Persistent Worlds

2007-11-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

Long term games. Role-playing, 12 hour marathon sessions of such-and-such. This post is somewhat inspired by an upcoming (2008?) expansion to FFG's Descent, which adds a campaign system to the tactical dungeon crawl. And some of my recent experiences.

Board games are often beloved for their 'play and forget' aspects. You can start a boardgame quickly, and it makes no demands on your time before and after the game. This is a start contrast to other 'hobby' games. Miniatures demand time painting and sculpting. Collectibles demand time sorting, planning, and devising (deck-building/army building). Role-playing demands prep time from the GM, and require players to carry information from game session to game session.

As gamers age, add families and commitments, board games begin to appeal above other games because of this lack of commitment away from the table. But there still remains in some people the desire to build something lasting within their hobby. Online MMRPGs tap into this. Join World of Warcraft and you are immediately part of something large. The game goes on around you and you experience bits and pieces. Put the game down for a moment and when you return you find your position identical, but the environment has shifted - a living game.

There is obviously some desire to see this sort of persistence in board games. It's not for everyone. Some people bundle this desire into "theme", but it's a whole nut by itself, most often called 'campaign play' - the idea that each playing of a game impacts the next time the game comes out.

One of the best examples in my experience is the old GDW game Imperium. In this 1970's space wargame the two sides fight a short-lived strategic war. Generally the war ends when one or two planets or outposts change sides. One side wins the war - "game" over. But the game doesn't actually end there. You roll some dice and play a 5-10 minute mini-game of peace, and then the next border skirmish/war breaks out - with players in a similar position to the end of the last war, or game. Players can play two wars back-to-back, or keep track of holdings and continue to play the game with an ever shifting series of planets and fleets. Persistence.

Imperium is a good game, taken up to greatness because of the ease of what is often called 'campaign' play. Descent (as mentioned earlier) received some derision early on due to it's complete lack of 'campaign' play. The next expansion will change that, bringing persistence into the game.

An obvious inspiration for Descent is the Heroquest/Warhammer Quest line of games. These games have the same theme as Descent (fantasy dungeon crawls), but had campaign systems from the very beginning. Even granddaddy Magic Realm provided a campaign system.

But a persistent world doesn't need to be tied to a fantasy adventure game. We have yet to see a designer (probably an American or Italian, given their design tendencies) bring the idea of persistence into an economic game, or any genre of game using 'modern' design features.

Perhaps the oft-requested Civ-lite game should be a game that plays in 'mileposts'. Short 60-90 minute games that reach stopping points where one player is deemed the winner, but the game is set up again next game for the next age of the game. Players could even change.

The Lords of.. series approaches persistence in-game by suggesting that players can enter and leave the game as they wish - that the players have no need of being static, and it might be possible to even win the game by playing for the first or final third of the game.

I'm sure there are other persistent worlds built within boardgames. It's an interesting piece of the attraction of games in general - and probably the one that inspires the most loyalty¹.

--

¹Obligatory footnote. It's not a surprise that campaign systems inspire loyalty. Invest more time into a specific game and you will feel more invested in it. What a surprise eh?

²Second Obligatory footnote. The second impetus for writing this is a persistent browser game that I'm involved in called Imperium Nova. It's an economic/negotiation space empire game. Mostly inspired by board games, the main mechanics are economic. Even warfare carries a hefty monetary cost. But it really serves to illustrate how electronic(computer/console) games have fully embraced persistent worlds. It's a selling point of many of these games. The microchip takes care of the math and the note-taking, leaving the player free to remain involved in an ongoing game. Persistence is a strong selling point³.

³But it still hasn't been applied much outside the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Military genres.

Working through the pile

2007-11-04T03:54:00.000-08:00

Around Essen time we decided to make an effort on the pile(s) of unplayed games. This also included playing some new (to us) things at games nights etc.

Starting off with our games:

Australian Rails - Melissa's first foray into crayon rails, my second (or possibly third - I have dim memories of friends playing a crayon rail game a decade or so ago, but don't entirely remember if I played or not, which probably means that I didn't). Melissa enjoyed it, which means that some of our crayon rail games might hit the table soon.

Thebes I had heard a little about this, but not much in terms of details. A nice set of choices to be made along the way and the drawing from the bags seemed fine.

On the Underground - Nowhere near as cut-throat as the London Game. It plays well with different numbers of players which is always good.

Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper Another one of those games where I read the rules and by the time I had finished I still didn't know how to play the game. I tried reading them again, still no go with the game and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew less about the universe in general compared to before I had picked up the rules. Gregor kindly volunteered to teach me and after a hand it or two it was all quite obvious.

Power Grid Power Plant Deck 2 Yes it is just a new deck of power plants, but they are different, they go down to number one and there's one or more that power eight cities. All this is just "blah blah blah" if you don't play Power Grid, but I like it. One day I may play the Power Grid Mega Hello Kitty Grand Tichu Humungous Deck variant where you merge this deck and the original deck, but for now I a happy to just play the maps with the new deck.

Other people's games:

Princess Ryan's Star Marines - Much more your beer and pretzel type game. It probably didn't help that we didn't have a bad guy player, but we really didn't see much in this to elevate it above the basic B&P game. With an active bad guy, I can see that the interplay between the "good" guys could get more interesting though.

Shazamm! - My feeling is that you need to play this a couple of times to get an idea of what the various cards are before you will be able to play it well. On a single play it did not light my fire.

Risk - Star Wars: The Clone Wars Edition - As with most versions of Risk, after a single play I am undefeated. I would rank this above Risk 2210, but slightly below Risk Transformers.

Before I Kill You, Mr Bond - I can see quite a nice game underlying this. I am not sure that it has all managed to get out though. It feels like with the card draw it can become a little unbalanced a finish what seems to quickly.

Eurorails - Do the different maps and goods make the various crayon rails different enough or at an abstract level are they all just the same game? I think my vote falls for the former. This one certainly tests the European geography of the players.

Ziegen Kriegen - Similar to 6 Nimmt! in many ways, but the Geeple (goat meeple) and building of the island during the first four rounds influences whether you want to be scoring high or low.

Downfall of Pompeii - The different stages are almost different games and the whole thing is surprisingly quick. Daughter the Elder was quite taken by it, possibly due to the fun she had dropping my citizens in to Mt Etna.

1960: The Making of the President - Another game where I think you need a couple of plays under your belt to have a good idea of the various possibilities, and build up an idea of the general worth of various states and regions. I gave up the fight for the East Coast on the last turn, partially to repair some damage in the West, but mainly because I had crap cards. However it was engrossing and I will definitely play it again - and I might even have a proper idea of how the media works this time.

Fraser

mmm meeples taste like...

Respect, Not Love

2007-11-02T14:43:00.000-07:00

I didn’t get to the Appalachian Gamers meeting this week (and thus missed what will probably be the only game of Arkham Horror played by us until next Halloween), and I missed my usual blog inspiration. But as I was pondering what to write about this week, it occurred to me that there are games I admire, but don’t actually love. Probably the epitome of this contradiction is Knizia’s Modern Art.

Modern Art is a sophisticated and elegant auction game that can inspire amounts of truly Machiavellian mind games. Each round players are dealt a hand of cards that represent paintings by several different artists. Players take turns auctioning off cards from their hand. If another player buys a card, the auctioneer keeps the cash. The auctioneer can bid as well, and if she wins the auction, the money goes to the bank. Each sold painting is left on the table in front of the owner. When the fifth painting by one artist is sold, the round is over. Players then collect cash for their paintings in proportion to their popularity; the paintings of the most popular artist generate the most cash, while the works of less popular artists generate less money.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize the opportunities for guessing and bluffing created by the game. If you draw a lot of paintings of one suit at the beginning of a round, then you probably want to invest in that artist. But if other players see you buying a lot of your own paintings, then they will probably guess your intentions, and either try to acquire that artist’s work for themselves, or bid you up to limit your profits. You could always auction a painting by a different artist just to fool other players, but you risk helping another player with his plan. There is a constant tension in the game between the need to further your plans, and hiding what your intentions really are.

Why wouldn’t I love Modern Art? Well, it is merely a card game, and I tend to like games with boards. And if it isn’t entirely abstract, it comes pretty close to being so. I also tend to do poorly at auction games, but in the right frame of mind I regard that as a challenge and not a reason to avoid a game.

But having expressed those reservations, I still have a hankering to try the game once again. It may be an abstract card game, but it is a darn good one. It may be the most fun to play the games you love, but playing games you respect isn’t bad either.

Looking forward, Looking back

2007-10-27T17:12:00.000-07:00

So, Essen is over for another year. The pilgrimages have been made, the booty unshrinked, sprues discarded to save luggage space and weight. The first batch of verdicts are in from the Chosen Few - while we, the Unwashed Masses, scoured the Internet with only one mostly industrial medium-sized German town in mind. And occasionally checked airfares and hotel availability.

My loot is still in transit - a couple of consignment numbers my only link to unimaginable greatness. Or, at the least, to hours of gaming fun. (Frustratingly, the consignment numbers only reveal that the package "is in transit to the destination country" - sometimes no information is better than partial)

Meanwhile, there's still time for the older games in our collection. Last night, we had six for games night, including two players who are new to gaming. We kept it light but fun - two games of Diamant, followed by at least ten of Bamboleo. For fun factor, especially with new gamers, it's hard to beat a really good dexterity game.

The game that is getting the most play, though, is Ingenious. This is Otto's favourite game, and she insists on playing it (usually on BSW or on the PC) before bed every night. She's improving, although she does need to be reminded that we are looking to improve our lowest score and not necessarily our highest.

In the past week, we've managed to get two new (to us/me) games to the table. Both are, I think, destined to be family favourites. On the Underground was one Fraser had played before and managed to pick up at 20% off. I enjoyed it a lot - and will put it on a shelf with The London Game. A friend - and regular member of our gaming group - is in hospital at the moment. She and her husband introduced us to The London Game - when she gets out, I look forward to returning the favour.

I have been waiting to find Thebes in Australia for some time, and finally got my chance last week when Fraser's "spies" told him that there were 2 copies available in the city. Ah, the joys of being easily led. We really enjoyed playing this with one another, and hope to get it to the table with more players soon.

We're still trying to work through some more unplayed games before the loot arrives - mostly because I may need some gaming credits to inspire Fraser to try some of my purchases. Australian Rails is on the dining table at the moment, but a combination of factors involving a bicycle, a car battery and a school trip to Hong Kong for older students means that it may not make it to full play today.

Fraser hopes so, though - he knows that once Agricola arrives there will be no chance to get other new games to the table for a while.

Happy gaming! And if you were lucky enough to be in Essen, remember to share the love. Or at least to tell us about the games.

A Short Happy Look At 1960

2007-10-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

CharCon, the gaming con of Charleston, West Virginia, was last weekend, and for me the big event of the con was the appearance of Jason Matthews, the co-designer of 1960: the Making of the President (co-designed with Christian Leonhard). Mr. Matthews taught me the game, and I played two games of it, and I would have gladly played two more.

1960 is a card-driven, area majority, presidential-election game in the same vein as Twilight Stuggle, the game of Cold War conflict designed by Mr. Matthews and Ananda Gupta. In 1960 players play cards for their events or campaign points as they try to increase their support in the most important states of the U.S. Players can also use cards to advertise in each of the four regions, and thus handicap the opposing players. Or they can use their cards to dominate three important issues in the election (defense, the economy, and civil rights) with the most successful player gaining endorsements and momentum points.

As in Twilight Struggle, a lot of the game is damage control. Some of the events on the cards only help one of the two political parties, and each player is likely to have one or more cards in his hand each turn with events that only benefit his opponent. Players can activate events favorable to them on cards played by their opponent by spending momentum points. Players can also stop opposing players from activating events by preemptively spending two momentum points when playing a card. Naturally, there never seems to be enough momentum points, and players often face the agony of letting an opponent activate one event in order to save momentum points to neutralize a worse event to be played later.

In the first game I played, I seemed to get cards every turn that allowed me to pummel my Republican opponent, but Richard Nixon (cleverly played by Charlie Davis) still managed to steal New York state from me on the last turn, and win the election. While I wasn’t happy about losing, I was glad to see that every turn counted, and that the election can be unpredictable right up to the end of the game.

1960 can be played in ninety minutes or less, and it may be one of those fine games that are meaty enough for gamers, but that can be enjoyed by non-gamers as well. For me, 1960 is one of the year’s best games. If I don’t get it for Christmas, I’ll have to buy a copy.

Knizia-thon, Part One: Marco Polo Expedition v. Blue Moon City

2007-10-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

As I've played an increasing number of German games, I've increasingly grown fond of those by Reiner Knizia. Sure, he's the big grand poobah of German gaming, and he designs more games than most small countries, but I've discovered that I like his games because they're just more fun for me than a lot of what I play.

To some extent this surprises me, because they're pretty analytical and pretty mathematical, neither of which matches my definition of fun, but of everything I play they're the ones I come back to the most.

I came to this realization late last year, so this year I've set out to play as much Knizia as a I can. I'd hope to have a pile of Knizian nickles by year's end, and though that hasn't come about, I've still managed quite a few plays.

To date my 2007 play list looks like this: Ingenious x5, Blue Moon City x4, Quo Vadis? x3, Through the Desert x3, Amun-Re x2, Colossal Arena x2, Dead Man's Treasure x2, Dragon Parade x2, Escalation! x2, Genesis x2, Great Wall of China x2, Hollywood Blockbuster x2, Marco Polo Expedition x2, Ra x2, Taj Mahal x2, Buy Low Sell High x1, Ivanhoe x1, Kingdoms x1, Knights of Charlemagne x1, Loot x1, Lord of the Rings x1, Palazzo x1, Relationship Tightrope x1, Rheinlander x1, Stephenson's Rocket x1, T&E Card Game x1, Too Many Cooks x1, Tutankhamen x1, Winner's Circle x1.

Which I suppose one really can't complain about, since I've been playing at least one Knizia game a week.

All this play of Knizian games has gotten me thinking a bit about his design, and thus I offer up the first of what will eventually be several articles on his games.

Marco Polo Expedition v. Blue Moon City

This week I want to talk about two of Knizia's games, Blue Moon City and Marco Polo Expedition.

Blue Moon City is one of his top-tier games, and even moreso one of his best rated games in recent years. It's currently #76 at BGG, with a rating of 7.46. Pretty much everyone I teach it to loves it.

Marco Polo Expedition is contrariwise one of his biggest disappointments according to the general public. It's currently #1270 at BGG, with a rating of 6.17. Most people I teach it to are pretty indifferent, and just last week I had someone who absolutely despised it on his first play. Personally, I think it's a fine game.

I offer up a comparison of these games not just because their ratings vary so widely--and not just because I've played them each in the last week--but also because I'm struck by their similarities.

Blue Moon City and Marco Polo Expedition are both ultimately card-collection games. I tend to call Blue Moon City resource-management and Marco Polo Expedition set-collection, but they tend to come down to the same thing. You decide to work toward the completion of certain spaces and thus you collect the cards that will allow for that.

Let me explain that a bit more for those not familiar with the games:

Marco Polo Expedition is a game of moving your camel along a set track, while trying to stay tight with the rest of your caravan. To move onto a space you must play cards which depict either caravan leaders (in five colors) or four types of goods (in those same five colors). Individual spaces require either matched goods, matched colors, sets of caravan leaders, a group of each of the four good types, or a group of each of the five colors. You get to jump over other camels, and thus you have to carefully track what other players are doing, to try and plan for spaces past where they end up--or else maintain a group of cards that will be viable for advancing onto multiple spaces.

Blue Moon City is a game of moving your pawn around a wide-open city, while trying to stay tight enough with other players to take advantage of synergy. Upon arriving at individual spaces you reconstruct the buildings there. To reconstruct a building you must play cards in six different colors, but cards can also be used orthogonally to generate special powers. Individual buildings require a grouped set of cards in the same color. Each building space can only be accomplished once, and thus you have to carefully track what other players are doing, to try and plan to build spaces which they won't complete before you--or else maintain a group of cards that will be viable for complete multiple spaces (which may largely be done by making good use of those special powers on the cards).

At the base level, there's really a lot of similarities between the two games. In both you manage cards, trying to stay a step ahead of opponents the whole time, but still in sync with them. So, why do their ratings vary so much? I can offer a few suggestions.

It's All About the Complexity

First, there's a dramatic difference in complexity between the two games. Fundamentally, Marco Polo Expedition is a pretty simple game: you have a single path to victory which you must assess. Conversely, while maintaining the same core ideals of gameplay, Blue Moon City adds a lot of complexity. This comes out in a few different ways.

One of them is openness. You really have a lot more choices in Blue Moon City, and if one opportunity closes up, you can always try another one: going to a different building site, collecting different cards, or even deciding to just grab victory points rather than building up your resources.

Another is color. Here again Blue Moon City offers a lot more than Marco Polo Expedition. In MPE the theming is very weak, borne out mainly by the mechanics of camels moving in a caravan, while in Blue Moon City it's very strong, with the cards all having different powers, and even the building spaces feeling very different--again, as opposed to Marco Polo Expedition where there's no real differentiation between the different spaces you can land on.

In their own way, each of Blue Moon City and Marco Polo Expedition are each quite different from what Knizia regularly designs, but in different directions.

In general Knizia games are pretty simple. He uses the bare minimum of mechanics necessary to pull off his design. If you look at most of his top-rated games, such as Through the Desert, Tigris & Euphrates, Samurai, and Ingenious, there's very little color there: the theming is mostly abstract and the mechanics mostly bare (though Blue Moon City is by no means the only game that offers some serious theming).

On the other hand, it's pretty rare for a Knizia game to offer as little openness as Marco Polo Expedition does. In all of those top games that I mentioned, you tend to have a whole board to play on, as opposed to Marco Polo Expedition where you're just looking forward a space or two.

Though not ever game can have the color of Blue Moon City, you can see part of the reason that Marco Polo Expedition might pale even against the Knizia norm when you consider the dearth of possible decisions.

Forgiving Games

However, I think there's a second way in which Marco Polo Expedition really differs itself from Blue Moon City: in its forgivingness.

In Blue Moon City you have a pretty powerful ability to cycle cards. Every turn you can toss out up to two cards, replacing them. Further, you can play cards for their powers if you don't need to use them to build, or you could move over to a different building if you can't get what you need for the building you really want. Still, through all this, you can sometimes get stuck and have to make non-optimal decisions.

Conversely Marco Polo Expedition can make it a lot harder to get rid of "wasted" cards, which tend to be generated when you build up for a space that someone else claims. The dual nature of all the cards--leader/good and color--helps prevent this somewhat, but you can still be set back multiple turns if you misjudge what your opponents are doing.

Further, there's a big difference in scoring visibility between these games.

In Marco Polo Expedition its really obvious when you're behind, because the most important measure--whether you're with the caravan or not--is clearly visible on the board. Further, when you get behind you usually have to sacrifice victory points to catch up (by dumping VP chests rather than playing extra cards).

Blue Moon City actually has a very similar catch-up mechanism, again underlying the similarity between the games: if you get behind in building the central monument, you have to pay more VPs to do so, which in the end is the same thing as sacrificing victory points in Marco Polo Expedition.

However, this sacrifice ends up behind much less obvious in Blue Moon City. Everyone's points are face-down, so you never know definitively until the last minute when someone will claim victory. I think the usefulness of hiding VPs in order to keep everyone interested until the last minute can't be underestimated, no matter how much grognards argue about open VPs becoming secret.

Also, I think there's a serious psychological difference between sacrificing VPs (as you do in Marco Polo Expedition) and paying extra (as you do in Blue Moon City), and that generally the former will make players unhappier than the latter.

Final Thoughts

Generally, I like Marco Polo Expedition, and I'm sad that it hasn't gotten better attention. However after writing through this I can better understand why.

Most directly, I think Marco Polo Expedition walks a hard line. On the one hand, it looks like a serious gamer's game, because of its release in a big, fairly expensive box. On the other hand, it looks like a family game because of its tightly constrained decision tree. On the third hand, it plays like a gamer's game because of its unforgiving nature and harsh-looking punishments.

With a game uncomfortably between all those extremes, it becomes a bit more clear why some are turned off the game after a first play.

GoneGaming features in Wall Street Journal "BlogWatch"

2007-10-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome to new readers of Gone Gaming who have followed the link from the Wall Street Journal.

We are a team of around 10-12 games enthusiasts who enjoy sharing our passion with others. New posts appear every 2 days or so and feature a wide range of games-related topics.

Here are some posts that might interest you - or explore the tags on the side to find more!

New Gamers: Don't Worry, that's normal! - the passion for trying (and buying) new games (Mary)

Gaming Saturation - "I'm finally at a point in my life where I can honestly say I don't feel like I have time I'd rather trade in for more boardgaming." (Matt)

Tie Breakers - ways to break scoring ties at the end of a game - what makes the most sense? (Shannon)

When the goal is to participate - including younger children in family boardgames (Melissa)

A real gaming controversy - where gaming and the real world collide (Kris)

School Games Night the Second - a community-building family boardgames night at a primary (elementary) school (Fraser)

You might be a gamer if ... - if you recognise yourself in any of these sayings (Mary)

Hated Questions - questions that game store owners secretly dread being asked (Aaron)

Games in the Classroom - a report on a classroom games day for 9-11 year olds (Melissa)

Ted Cheatham and the Road to Silk Road - an interview with a game designer (Kris)

The Backwards Brain Teaser Game - something to play at home (Smatt)

Arthur, Arthur! - Arthurian legend in games (Shannon)

Tournament Games - a discussion of how games can be used in tournaments (Fraser)

Lightweight and Feeling good - some lighter weight (simpler) games (Matt)

Gardner and the Multiple Intelligences of Boardgames - applying Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences to boardgames (Melissa)

A Cribbage Tale - playing a master (Smatt)

Collectibles on your game table - games that don't end with one purchase (Aaron)

Board Game => Card Game - when boardgames are adapted (Mary)

Five Game Design Dont's - what NOT to do (Shannon)

Beyond Nickels and Dimes - a different way to look at "games played" (Matt)

Signs that you might be thinking of Essen just a little too much

2007-10-21T04:48:00.000-07:00

o Prior to the media day you are constantly checking boardgamegeek, boardgamenews, Frank's site and other places for the first snippets of information and complaining when there isn't any there

o Planning to SMS "Ready, Set, Go!" to people who are at Essen at the exact time the doors open to the public.

o Posting to blogs, BGG and mailing lists about Essen envy

o Knowing the airfare to Essen

o Knowing which hotels at Essen still have vacancies

o Know that if you take the child who has a passport that your luggage allowance will be doubled

o Searching out German rules for new games on the internet, emailing your partner/spouse/friend with access to a printer to print them out so you can determine whether or not to place an order with your Essen "personal shopper"

o Wanting to go to the airport and ask for a ticket "on the next flight to Germany"

o Being prepared to ditch a local community event that you have put at least 100 hours work into to go to Essen instead

o Knowing what time the doors at Essen close, factoring in time for the Essen correspondents to type up their reports and then you start checking

o Having Aldie say "You are jonesin' for some Essen"

o When ringing your spouse on the phone you say "I'm not at home, but I am not at the airport"

If many of the above apply to you then, to quote Aldie, "You are jonesin' for some Essen"

Fraser

A Short Rules Comparison of Cuba and Hamburgum

2007-10-19T03:15:00.000-07:00

As usual Essen will be showing gamers some resource-churning games that will come our way in the next month or two. Two of the more promising ones are Cuba from designers Michael Rieneck and Stefan Stadler, and Hamburgum from designer Mac Gerdts. In Cuba players try to earn the most victory points by shipping goods, constructing buildings, and paying taxes. In Hamburgum players produce and sell beer, sugar and cloth to gain the money needed to build the citiy’s churches. The player who makes the biggest contributions to the churches will win.

I’m not going to examine the rules of the games in minute detail here, but instead I will show how they handle some of the same basic game mechanisms.

ACTIONS

In Cuba players each have a set of five cards that they use each turn to take actions. The cards are the Worker (who produces resources), the Tradeswoman (who buys and sells resources), the Architect (who constructs buildings), the Foreman (who activates buildings), and the Mayor (who sends merchandise to ships in the harbor and thus generates victory points). Each round, each player will use four of these five cards, and save one card for the Parliament Phase. Each card is worth a certain amount of votes in the Parliament Phase, and the player who has the most votes (votes can also be purchased for cash) will be able to enact certain laws that apply to all players. Note: each of the five action cards has a secondary ability that only one or two players can use each round.

In Hamburgum, Mac Gerdts once again uses his favorite mechanism, the rondel. On their turns, players can move their marker on the rondel from one to three spaces for free. Players can move their marker further by paying prestige points. Three of the spaces on the rondel are labeled Beer, Cloth, or Sugar. Landing on these spaces causes a player to produce the named product. The Trade space allows a player to buy or sell his goods on the market. The Guildhall space allows players to construct buildings. The Dockyard space allows players to build ships in the harbor. The Church space allows players to make those all-important donations to the churches of Hamburg and thus earn prestige points.

BUILDINGS

Cuba resembles Caylus and Puerto Rico in the wide variety of buildings available to players. There is only a single tile available for most buildings, and so only one person in the game will usually own each particular building. The cement factory, the saw mill, and the golf course turn certain resources into victory points. The hotels and the inns create victory points directly. The small bank and the large bank generate cash every time they are activated. The cigar factory and the distillery turn tobacco into cigars and sugar cane into rum, and certain cafes turn cigars and rum into victory points. Other buildings are helpful getting goods onto ships in the harbor, generating extra votes for the Parliament Phase, or have other special abilities.

In Hamburgum players can construct buildings for a variety of purposes. Constructed buildings are placed in front of each player, and a citizen marker of the constructing player is placed on the board. Production buildings increase beer, cloth, and sugar production. Merchant buildings generate a one-time cash payment. Councilman buildings generate cash for every citizen marker on the board. Vicar markers generate cash for every donation made to the churches. The Lord Mayor building generates cash for every church that has been completed. In Hamburgum, players may build more than one building at a time (and the strategy tips in the rules encourage this). This could lead to dramatic shifts in the kinds of buildings available as players build three or four buildings at a time.

OTHER MECHANISMS

Both games have special rules that constrain players or offer them special opportunities. In Cuba, each player has a plantation board with a grid of spaces that produce various resources. When a player uses his Worker card, he places a worker marker on his plantation board. He can then activate only those spaces that are in the same row or column as his worker. As the game progresses, players will construct buildings on spaces on their plantation board, and will thus cover up and eliminate certain resource spaces. Because the Foreman can only activate buildings in the same row and column as the playing piece, careful placement of buildings is important.

In Hamburgum, players making donations to churches get a bonus tile. The first bonus tile for players contributing to a particular church is always worth five prestige points. But the remaining four tiles generate contingent prestige points: one tile generates 1 point for every donation tile that the player already has; one tile generates 2 points for every ship a player has in the harbor; one tile generates points for every citizen that the player has in the church’s district, and one tile generates points for every building that the player has in the church’s district. Players will constantly wonder if they should place a few extra citizens or ships before making the big church donation, but by waiting they risk having another player snag the desired tile first.

Both Cuba and Hamburgum seem like intelligent variations of the resource-churning genre of games that have been so popular the last few years. I look forward to trying both of them. Rules for these games are available online if you want to check them out.

Gaming Saturation

2007-10-16T18:18:00.001-07:00

If you had asked me a few years ago if it were possible, I would have denied it but I now think I'm reaching a saturation level for my boardgaming habits. Sure, I'd love large chunks of time to devote to some more plays of a few longer games (Die Macher, Here I Stand, Twilight Imperium 3 or Revised Axis and Allies anyone?) but I'm finally at a point in my life where I can honestly say I don't feel like I have time I'd rather trade in for more boardgaming.

This is a combination of several factors, the major factor being the formation of a local biweekly boardgame club. It's been running for over a year now and every other Monday evening I get a good three hours of gaming in with a group of 8 to 12 regulars. Keeping my schedule clear on that one night a week has done wonders to satisfy my boardgaming needs. (On the off Mondays a smaller group has been playing an ongoing role-playing game, which also helps to satisfy my gaming needs.) In addition to biweekly play, I have a quarterly full day of gaming at a friend's house about an hour away. This is great for getting in games that just don't make it to the table in the biweekly gatherings. Finally, now that school is back in session I have a weekly boardgaming club that I sponsor. On the one hand, this is great as I get to play even more games, but we're somewhat limited on time - our meetings only last about 90 minutes or so. This means most 60-90 minute games only get played halfway through the first time before its time to pack them up. Future plays can sometimes squeek in an entire game in time alloted.

Will all this scheduled game playing, going back to work full time, and a happy little 1 year old running around to watch out for, I find myself pretty darn busy. Sure, boardgaming is darn fun, but I'm running out of things that I'd give up in order to get more gaming in.

Now, life isn't exactly all rose-colored glasses, there are a few things I'd change, if possible. First, it is all the shorter games I've been playing. Due to limited time constraints, I don't get in as many long-term, deep-thought games as I'd sometimes like. I've played a lot of medium-weight (some would call lightweight) games lately, To Court the King, Ca$h n Gun$, and Owner's Choice being some of my favorites at the moment. While I haven't yet tired of To Court the King, Owner's Choice may need to rest for a few weeks before I pick it up again (I've now got the most games played of Owner's Choice over on the BGG...) The preponderance of lighterweight games comes from needing to grow new players at the high school game club as well as my desire to make sure all the gamers at our biweekly meetings are getting in games they enjoy. Thus, I've been making a bit more of an effort lately to accomodate people by playing lighter games that are more effective at drawing in less hardcore players.

However, on the whole, playing "too many" lightweight games is a happy problem to have. I'd take too many games over too few any day of the week (or month or year). Meanwhile, most of the players I play with are slowly getting the feel of more and more complexity and I can start bringing out the bigger guns at our weekly school boardgame club.

Game design challenge

2007-10-14T03:00:00.000-07:00

Let's be brutally honest here. It's four days till the Essen game fair opens. Three, by the time I post this. And you, gentle Reader, are champing at the bit waiting for reports - or hints - or photos - or ANYTHING really - that give you any information about what is going on with all those New Games.

I know this, because by Tuesday night I too will be compulsively hitting the Refresh key in case anyone has somehow stumbled across a hidden cache of games and managed to play one of them before the Messe actually opened. (Brief pause to gloat: We did manage to play the new Amigo cardgame Ziegen kriegen on Friday night.)

So this week, something different.

I was struck, this week, as I wandered the supermarket listening to Michael Flanders and Donald Swann's classic "Bedstead Men," by how much it sounded like a game.

Oh, when you're walking in the country, Far from villages and towns,
When you're seven miles from nowhere and beyond,
In some dark deserted forest, or a hollow of the downs,
You may come across a lonely pool or pond.

And you'll always find a big, brass broken bedstead by the bank,
There's one in every loch or mere or fen.
Don't think it's there by accident, It's us you have to thank,
The society of British bedstead men.

Oh, the hammer ponds of Sussex, And the dewponds of the west,
Are part of Britain's heritage, The part we love the best.
Every eel and fish and millpond Has a beauty all can share,
But not unless it's got a big brass broken bedstead there.

So, we filch them out of attics, We beg them from our friends,
We buy them up in auction lots with other odds and ends,
Then we drag them 'cross the meadows, When the moon is in the sky,
So watch the wall my darling, While the bedstead men go by.

The league of British bedstead men is marching though the night,
A desperate and dedicated crew,
Under cover of the hedges, Always keeping out of sight,
For the precious load of bedsteads must get through.

The society for putting broken bedsteads into ponds
Has another solemn purpose to fulfil.
For our coastal sands and beaches, All where waving willow wands,
Mark the borders of a river, stream or rill.

You will always find a single laceless, left-hand leather boot.
A bootless British river bank's a shock.
We leave them there at midnight, you can track a member's route,
By the alternating prints of boot and sock.

Oh, the lily ponds of Suffolk, And the millponds of the west,
Are part of Britain's heritage, The part we love the best.
Our riverbanks and seashores Have a beauty all can share,
Provided there's a boot... Provided there's a boot...
Provided there's at least one boot... Three treadless tyres, a half-eaten pork pie, some oildrums, an old felt hat, a lorryload of tar blocks...
And a broken bedstead there.

Can you see it? It's clearly a pick-up and deliver game, possibly with some sort of relative position - each player plays both a British Bedstead Man and an Insomniac Nature-Lover, whose mission is to stop the other players' Bedstead Men from placing their Bedsteads.

Each player starts the game with (or has to collect along the way) a boot, three treadless tyres, a half-eaten pork pie, some oildrums, and old felt hat, a lorryload of tar blocks and of course a broken bedstead. Players must move around the board, leaving them in strategic positions near lily ponds, millponds, rivers, streams and rills.

There could even be an auction component - because you have to collect some of those things (at the least, the tyres, tar blocks and broken bedstead) before you can abandon them in some otherwise picturesque place.

And the board, of course, would show one of those old-fashioned ordnance survey-style maps of part of Britain - with the occasional set of matching sock/boot footprints.

Do you see it?

What obscure and - if we are honest - rather ludicrous - inspiration would you like to one day see as a game?

To those who are lucky enough to be in Germany next weekend, have fun at Spiel. To those with business there, I wish you all the best. If you see an Australian, say hello.

And to any stray people with a company or private jet flying from Melbourne to Germany early next week? Call me!

Melissa.

A Short Rules Preview of King of Siam

2007-10-12T03:59:00.000-07:00

The parade of area-majority games continues with King of Siam. In this upcoming game (to be published by Histogame and designed by Peer Sylvester), two to four players use cards as they strive to place followers from three political factions in the eight provinces of the southeast Asian nation. Players also claim followers for themselves in order to dominate one or more of these factions.

One of the more things that should make King of Siam different from the vast horde of similar games is that each player starts the game with an identical set of eight action cards, and never receives any more. Players had better be darn careful about when they play each particular card.

Each faction has a set of color-coded follower markers (presumably little wooden cubes). In the set-up phase, four random followers are placed in most of the provinces. But each of the three factions has a home province which contains two of its follower markers, and two more chosen randomly. Eight province tiles are placed at random on a track that is numbered one to eight. Then control of each province is resolved according to where the province is placed on the track.

To resolve each province, players play cards from their hand. Most the cards allow players to add followers from one faction or another, or swap followers between different provinces. Each player has one card that allows him to switch province tiles on the track, and thus change the order in which the provinces are resolved.

Please note that each player has eight cards, and there are eight provinces to be resolved. This means that if any player plays more than one card in a province, he will not have a card to play in one or more provinces still to be resolved.

After playing a card, each player takes a follower marker from some province on the board and places it in front of him. Followers gained this way are an investment in the control of the faction.

After all players have played their cards to influence a province, the faction with the most followers in the province places a control marker there.

But if two or factions are tied for control of the region, then an imperialist British control marker is placed in the province. If the British ever gain control of four provinces, they are considered to have colonized Siam, the game ends immediately, and a special set of victory conditions applies. The winning player is the person who has the most complete set of followers (a set is one blue, one red, and one yellow marker).

If the British do not gain control of Siam, then the game ends when control of the last province is resolved. The faction that controls the most provinces gains control of Siam. The player who has the most followers in front of him from the winning faction is the winning player.

One other item of note: in a four-player game, players are grouped into two teams who win or lose together.

Because of the limited number of cards to be played in the game, the playing time of King of Siam should be quite short; the rules claim that a game will last between half and hour and a full hour.

If El Grande and Liberte ever had a love-child, it might look a lot like King of Siam. This mechanics of this game aren’t very original, but it looks like it will be an area-majority game for those gamers who think Midgard takes too long.

Tie Breakers

2007-10-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

Last week, when playing Thurn & Taxis, we momentarily thought we had a tie. (Momentarily, I say, because I added up my 21 points of chips and got 19, but that's neither here nor there.) This inevitably led us back to the rulebook for the perennial question, "What breaks ties?"

In Thurn & Taxis the first answer was, "the player who earned the 'game end' bonus tile'", which makes a lot of sense, because that's a definitive goal that players should usually be going for. However, the second tie-breaker, didn't make sense, because it was, "if [the person with the tile] was not among those tied, the player closest clockwise from this player who was tied with the most is the winner!"

So Thurn & Taxis, to offer a reminder, works like this: when a player goes out, play continues until all players have had an equal number of turns, and thus ends to the right of the start player. This means that unless the last player is the one who went out, the winner is a player who was advantaged because he had more of an opportunity to react to the game ending, which seemed to me to be the opposite of what the tie-breaker should have been. I suggested that going counter-clockwise from the ending player would have worked better, because that would have been a player more likely to be disadvantaged, which led me to a general pondering about how tie breakers should be written.

A Philosophy of Tie Breaking

So what makes a good tie-breaker? I have three criteria: it should be obvious, fair, and ideally unique.

Having a tie-breaker that is obvious is the most important criteria. Inevitably, if a part of the rules doesn't get explained when you're learning a new game, it's how ties are broken. So, you want a tie-breaker that feels obvious: in other words, even if you don't know what the tie-breaker is, when you find it out you want to be able to say, "That makes sense", because the opposite case, where you suddenly find after the fact that you should have been hoarding sheep (or whatever) for the tie-breaker can put a damper on a game.

Almost as importantly, a tie-breaker should be fair. My complaint about the secondary Thurn & Taxis tie-breaker is that it didn't seem fair to me. It would have seemed fair if it in some way either rewarded a player who was truly disadvantaged or else rewarded a player who had extra resources (which especially in a resource-to-victory-point game engine are essentially fractional victory points).

Finally, if possible a tie-breaker should be unique, which is to say something that can't result in yet another tie. Having the end-game marker in Thurn & Taxis is a pretty good example of this sort of thing, because it will usually be held by one of the winners; the designer just didn't think beyond that for the rare cases in which it turns out to be held by a loser.

Looking at Some Examples

So how do different games deal with tie-breakers? I've decided to offer up a few examples, each of which I've looked at by my criteria.

Primordial Soup; Torres: First, the Holy Grail of tie-breakers: games where you can't tie. This is a pretty rare game design element, but usually, I think, a good one. Torres and Primordial Soup are both good examples, because they're games where you literally can't have the same score as another player: instead, you skip over them.

This technique is often put to good use in any sort of game where you have some sort of absolute positional difference, offset in subsystems where ties are relevant. For example in Entdecker you place figures on jungle paths, and if there's a tie, the person who placed first wins; conversely in Patrician you place floors in towers, and if there's a tie, the person who placed last wins.

The Settlers of Catan: Settlers is a game which allows no ties, because you win by having the right number of points on your turn. This really shows the difference between games which go a set length of time, and thus allow ties, and games which just go until someone wins, and thus usually don't.

Ingenious; Tigris & Euphrates: These two Reiner Knizia games offer the next best thing to no ties: a tie-breaker that is so entirely obvious (and fair) that trying to reach it is just a standard part of your gameplay. In each game, you win based upon your worst score in multiple colors, and in case of tie you drop down to your second worst or third or fourth. Thus the entire schoring mechanism is an organic whole.

Havoc: The Hundred Years War: In this Poker-like game, the person who has won the more battles (hands) is the winner, and if there's still a tie, it goes to order of placement in the final battle, making it fair, relatively obvious, and with the second tie-breaker unique.

Ticket to Ride: This is a pretty standard game with good, but not great tie-breaker. The person with the most completed destination tickets wins ties. That strikes me as fair, but it's neither obvious or unique. I'd guessed that the tie-breaker would be the person who has the longest-route bonus, since that's usually unique, but I'm not unhappy with the actual rule.

Carcassonne; Caylus: These games have my least favorite tie-breaker. Either the game explicitly says there is no tie-breaker, or else just doesn't mention one. Besides being anticlimatic, it feels lazy on the part of the designer. I think some game designers feel like they can get away with it because you earn enough points that a tie is pretty unlikely ... but they will come up sometimes. For Carcassonne a potential tie-breaker is immediately obvious: a count of unused meeples. For Caylus a good tie-breaker is a bit more difficult because unused resources have already been valued with points. I'd be tempted to offer a tie-breaker based on total contributions to the castle, with earliest contribution being an additional tie-breaker, since building the castle is the theoretical purpose of the game. Alhambra and Coloretto were another few games that I found that had no tie breakers.

In looking through games, they generally did better than I expected ... other than those which didn't include a tie-breaker at all.

Collectibles on your game table

2007-10-09T10:49:00.001-07:00

I am apparently one of a small group of people in this world who can play a collectible game without getting sucked in. I also have a tendency to be able to wander away from the games and then wander back. This is fine for me, but bad for getting a collectible/constructible game on the table, since my fickle nature has caused me to leave behind groups of players because I became less interested in the game (the only game) they played. I've wandered into and out of Magic: The Gathering multiple times since it's launch, and I still play it with my dad whenever I see him¹.

I've played most of the good collectible games² over the years, either when the came out, or once they were cheap. Here's some mini-reviews on some of my favorites, some of which are odd. I'd love to play these games more often, but the learning curve is high for almost all of them, so even keeping a set of playable decks around doesn't help get them on the table - you really need to commit to playing one game several times with the same group.

It should be noted that with a few exceptions collectible games require player elimination for victory, or encourage player elimination, so... if you didn't know, you've been warned.

Magic: Let's start with the original.
Good Stuff: Huge base of art and styles of play along with easy core concepts so you can get playing quickly. If you want to dabble, this is the game to do it with, since you can have a fun game after a 5-10 minute teaching session. Sadly since the game is older the newer cards require more attention to the rules, so the ease of the core concepts gets hidden by the newer complexities - but at heart it's a very easy game to play.
Bad Stuff: Two player. Multiplayer works okay, but it can bog down into the same traps that occur in multiplayer wargames - "Let's you and him fight so that I win". There's also some attitude in the greater tournament scene, but don't let that worry you. Just play with friends.

Over The Edge: Second/Third game I bought into.
Good Stuff: Quirky. Lots of fun theme³, alternate win conditions and some positional tactics. It's not just about attacking the other players (which is rare), so defensive tactics are possible. Also, dirt cheap these days.
Bad Stuff: Basically just a heavily modified Magic, it's a bit better for multiple players, but a bit more complex. The quirky art and theme isn't for everyone.

Jyhad/Vampire:Jyhad on release, so that's how I always think of it.
Good Stuff: Tied for best multi-player game. This one is all about negotiations and alliances, with a strong set of rules governing when and who you can hassle. A good feeling of running a family of characters (vampires) that then take actions on your behalf. Great costing mechanic that makes you more vulnerable to loss the more resources you put in play. Voting, attacking, etc.
Bad Stuff: Long. Lots of deals, promises and waiting for the most opportune moment (I love it, you may hate it). Very Very hard to teach, with lots of rules and sub-games within the game. I can't comment on the newer sets. At its best with four players.

Shadowfist:
Good Stuff: Other half of the multi-player tie. Theming is strong⁴, and winning doesn't require player elimination. As a second generation game⁵, it pulls mechanics from a bunch of sources, resulting in a more complex feeling than Magic. Less rules than Vampire though.
Bad Stuff: Lots of blowing stuff up. Oh wait, that's a good thing. Still fairly complex to teach, and can run a bit long. Not so great with two.

NetRunner:
Good Stuff: Very nifty two player. Feels more unlike other CCGs than most, and has asymmetrical play. Strong fan base among boardgamers.
Bad Stuff: Good Deckbuilding is really hard. It's still not easy to teach and can be very intimidating due to the asymmetrical play. Hard to find.

Guardians
Good Stuff: Funny. Tactical Board game style movement coupled with some of the best graphic design/art in the genre (That's design from a art perspective, not usability).
Bad Stuff: Light. Hard to find. Very odd.

Deadlands
Good Stuff: Great combat mechanics that use the playing card suit/rank that is built into each card. Good location/character based play that supports the theme (Weird West/Horror). Good for multi-player.
Bad Stuff: A bit overly complex, especially as expansions were added.

Mythos
Good Stuff: Different. More storytelling than any other collectible, though you still have to send monsters to the other players. Nicely done, and works well with a wide range of number of players. I'm surprised that more eurogamers don't try this game - it's got the blend of story/game that seems to appeal to many.
Bad Stuff: Specificity on the cards is a bit much, making building decks frustrating, if not difficult. There are certainly some solitaire elements to the game that don't always mesh well with the aggressive elements. And you have to like stories and Lovecraft.

As you can see, in general the basic drawback to most collectibles as games is that they are complex. Sometimes in the basic rules, always in the infinite combinations of cards.

I've mostly listed older games. I pay attention to the new games, but none have really grabbed me (and many of the recent ones have been launched on the basis of their tournament support). There's a couple games I left out of the list that deserve some note - Legend of the Five Rings, Game of Thrones, Pokemon - but they never really grabbed me (though I played L5R with a group for over a year)

Cheers.

--

¹He got my cards the first time I wandered away from the game, and proceeded to grow them into a huge collection. He started me on Avalon Hill/SPI, and D&D. I repaid him in kind by introducing him to Magic.

² Which were of course almost all cards until the appearance of pre-painted miniatures, which I've dabbled in, but since the prepainted games were basically just applying the concept of collectibility to an existing game genre, I was less excited.

³Based on an RPG called On the Edge about tiny Mediterranean island with about 60 different world-domination conspiracies vying for control. An RPG that was light years ahead of it's time.

⁴ Lots of conspiracies (again) vying for control over the world (again) by using time travel. Cyber-Monkeys with guns. Kung Fu. Think Big Trouble in little China squared.

⁵I'm generous with my CCG generations, using them to categorize games. In general 1st gen are the games from 1993-1995, while 2nd gen are from 1995-crash 1. Third gen games are clumped around the rise of Pokemon/Yu-gi-oh and stretch into modern times. I haven't decided if the games of the past 2-3 years are sufficiently different from the poke-era games to merit calling them 4th gen. In short: 1st Gen - Magic and games that imitate it directly. 2nd Gen - More complex CCGs, with more rules and targeting a 20+ gamer demographic. 3rd Gen - Simpler CCGs, using licenses and anime art to target a younger demographic. 4th Gen - ??? Some weird blend of the prior generations - I haven't really found a common trend that differs too much from early games. Perhaps the 4th gen is the retro gen.

To retheme or not to retheme, that is the question

2007-10-06T21:28:00.000-07:00

It is not an uncommon practise for games to be reissued in a rethemed version. Usually with only minor differences, if any, from the original apart from the theme. Sometimes there may be quite a few changes or additions compared to the original, but does that just make it a "second edition" or does it require the retheming?

Here's a few:
Schotten Totten to Battle Line
Revolution to Atlanteon (OK only one entry)
Tycoon to El Capitan
Dune to Twilight Imperium Universe Dune?

There are some rethemings that seem sensible or reasonable. In some cases the original version is out of print, so the opportunity exists, or possibly the original artwork is no longer available so it is going to be recreated anyway.

In the case of Schotten Totten and Battle Line both versions have been in and out print, but certainly when we bought our version of Schotten Totten both games were in print. Our copy of Schotten Totten includes the tactics cards, so there is very little difference between the two games apart from Battle Line's apparent homage to This is Spinal Tap by making the cards go just that one higher than Schotten Totten. Unfortunately this is one of the games that the lovely Melissa has not done a rules translation for, so I cannot confirm the tactics cards are exactly the same in function, but I believe that they are.

Why then change it from wild Scots in the Highlands to ancient warriors?

In this case I the the answer can be found by looking at the new publisher GMT Games and their main market. They are primarily a wargame company and thus the majority of their customers will be interested in wargames. The retheming would make the game much more marketable to their customers.

In the case of Revolution to Atlanteon I am not aware of any changes other than the theme. The theme has changed from Revolutionary Paris to Undersea Kingdoms. I think this is another case of the new publisher, Fantasy Flight Games in this case, targeting the theme to their customer base. Is it an accurate assumption or are the publishers guilty of dumbing down their own customers? Since they didn't sell both versions I suppose we will never know. Interestingly enough FFG let Senator out of the door with its historical, as opposed to science fiction, theme.

A case mentioned here at Gone Gaming recently is Tycoon to El Capitan. I played Tycoon for the first time only a few weeks ago and enjoyed it. The theme worked well for me - I thought that the cost of travel being so high because you are a tycoon flying around in your own personal jet with your potentially large entourage, so it does cost a lot of money to relocate from one city to another. Corporate tycoons must be out of flavour now, because El Capitan has shifted it to Tom Vasel's most reviled theme, Mediterranean trading ports. Sure this fits in thematically with more of the games released over the last ten years, but was it really necessary to change it? Will the sales be that much better than a straight Tycoon Second Edition would have been?

Dune to Twilight Imperium Universe Dune? is an interesting case. As far as I understand it, Dune is no longer licensed. If it was relicensed it could be reprinted, or a second edition released. The retheming is the outcome that would occur if nothing changed with the licensing situation.

Now I must admit that I have never played Dune, mainly because I have not had the opportunity. My personal feeling though is that theme is very important to this game. The Dune universe through the books has quite a history and people associate with that. Sure you could retheme it and technically have the same game or possibly an even better one, but would it be as engaging without sandworms and spice (even if they are just cardboard chits)? I doubt it.

Going from Schotten Totten to Battle Line is no great loss and there was no great investment with the Highland theme, but I can see that in going from Dune to something else there definitely would be a loss of investment for people familiar with the original. For people with no knowledge of the original it probably wouldn't make much difference, but would the new be as engrossing as the original was because of the history?

It sort of reminds me a little of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film. A very nice film if you knew nothing about the books or the radio show. However if you had listened to the radio show time and time again and read the books, the first twenty minutes of the film was excellent and the rest was, to put it politely, not.

For some things you just have to ask yourself, why did they change that?

Mmm meeples taste like...

A Short Rules Preview of History of the Roman Empire

2007-10-05T07:04:00.000-07:00

In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been doing so many rules previews lately (and I have no indication that anyone is interested in the slightest), it’s because scheduling conflicts have cut down on my gaming lately, and I can’t count on having Thursday nights free to write these blogs. It’s sometimes necessary to write these far in advance, and checking out some newly available rules is one way to stay in the blogging game.

This week’s rules are from History of the Roman Empire, an upcoming game from the Italian game company UGG (but which can be pre-ordered through the GMT website). History of the Roman Empire was designed by Marco Broglia, but I know nothing about this designer except his name.

The downloaded rules run only six pages, and that includes an index and moderately-lengthy bibliography. This not an overly-complicated game. Grognards looking for another Pax Romana should look elsewhere. The game system reminded me more of History of the World than anything else.

The board is a map of the Roman world divided into areas. The game doesn’t have real terrain other than resources, but forts, fortresses, and cities can be built. Roman factions can travel across seas to invade other areas.

Each player will control one Roman faction and one non-Roman group known as a People. Each turn, the player with the fewest victory points will draw a random counter to determine what People he may play for that turn. If he doesn’t like the counter (various Peoples have different reinforcements and locations), he may pass it to another player and draw another counter. In a similar fashion, players will draw counters to see what Roman Emperor they will play for that turn. The military abilities of the emperors vary greatly. It is this selection mechanism that reminds me the most of History of the World.

You can guess at the rest of the game mechanics, and you probably won’t be far wrong. Players use their Roman factions and their Peoples to capture new territories and amass victory points. In combat, the attacker rolls two die and the defender rolls one. Forts and fortresses add defensive bonuses in combat. A captured city may be looted to gain victory points, but a Roman faction may not loot a captured Roman city.

Each player starts the game with a hand of event cards (this also reminds me of History of the World), and may play up to two cards per turn. Cards can provide combat bonuses, create plagues or revolts, or give the player the ability to create an additional minor Kingdom for one turn (another steal from HotW).

There is also an area majority mechanism in the victory point scoring. The board is divided into colored zones, and controlling provinces in these zones can gain players lots of points. Having a presence in a zone gets a player the lowest point bonus. Controlling three areas in a zone doubles the bonus. And controlling all areas in a zone triples the bonus.

At the end of the game, players total up the points their Roman Factions and their Peoples have earned. Highest total wins.

History of the Roman Empire seems to be a light wargame inspired by History of the World. The rules seem to be slightly more complex than the earlier game, and gamers who are looking for something slightly meatier than HotW might consider watching out for History of the Roman Empire.

Making "Gateway" a Useful Term

2007-10-02T05:25:00.000-07:00

We have put out a few calls now for guest bloggers. Here is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts from writers who've not posted on Gone Gaming before.

Boris Dvorkin responded to one of my posts looking for guest bloggers. Strangely, it was a post in the "Women and Gaming" forum on Boardgamegeek which has netted the most interest. More strangely, perhaps, none of the interest has been from women.

I like the new twist Boris puts on this familiar term. Please comment on his post to inspire him to write for us again!

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What sucks worse than having an awesome game and no one to play it with? Lots of things. Getting hit in the nose with a mallet, for example. But most of us gamers don't even own a mallet, let alone someone who might hit us in the nose with it, so we spend most of our time bemoaning the lack of companions for our cardboard adventures. This is why some gamers are obsessed with the idea of "gateway games" — games that will turn their boozing socialite acquaintances into insatiable Puerto Rico fanatics.

Of course, most people realize by now that gateway games are a myth. Like all good myths, the "gateway" concept is built on a fleck of truth: outstanding members of a hobby can indeed generate widespread interest in that hobby. Chess participation skyrocketed in the 70's when Bobby Fischer became the first American world champion. But this burst of enthusiasm for chess was not accompanied by similar spurts in Go and backgammon. Fischer's phenomenal chess play only generated interest in chess. Thus, when you teach your friends how to play Settlers, a phenomenal board game, the best result that you can hope for is that they'll become interested in Settlers. Hence the common cry, "I taught my friends how to play Settlers and now they won't play anything else!" Well, duh. Serious gamers may accuse Princes of Florence of being multiplayer solitaire, but to the average Fred it seems more like multiplayer chess — bewildering, difficult to learn, and boring.

For most people, spending twenty minutes learning a complex set of abstract rules and then the next hour and a half perusing decision trees is torture. You have to be a very, very special kind of person to want to do this kind of thing in your spare time. I once taught Puerto Rico to a guy who had never played Settlers in his life, and he loved it. He was just that kind of person. Conversely, my Settlers campaign back home was so successful that a number of my friends bought their own copies plus expansions — yet they won't touch Puerto Rico with a twenty foot shark.

The result of all this is that the term "gateway game" is still being used in discussions but contributes nothing meaningful to them. People either cling to the phrase with dewy-eyed dreams that their sweater-knitting girlfriends will be brainwashed into adoring Caylus, or decry it as a hopeless folly and ignore all mention of it altogether. I think that's a shame, because with a bit of tweaking, "gateway game" can be made into a useful term.

Now, as an English major, I know better than to try to impose my will on the way that language is used. People are funny about language. If you ask them how important it is to them, they're likely to say "not much." And yet, if you tell someone that a word they're using is wrong, or that it shouldn't be used at all, and the person happens to disagree, you're likely to face such a brutal retaliation that a passerby will wonder if you didn't just try to shoot their dog. People are extremely attached to the way they use words, which is why attempts to regulate the language by prescriptivist linguists (aka Grammar Nazis) are usually utter failures.

But what the hell.

Here's how many people think of the term:

Gateway game: a game that can make non-gamers interested in gaming.

And here's how I prefer to see it:

Gateway game: a game that both gamers and non-gamers are willing to play.

The second definition makes down-to-earth, immediately useful discussion about gateway games possible. For example:

— Puerto Rico is a bad gateway game because the rules are hard and it requires a lot of thinking, so non-gamers won't like it.

— Cranium is a terrible gateway game because its 5.9 rating on BGG indicates that most gamers aren't thrilled with it

— Settlers of Catan is a great gateway game because many people who refuse to play any other remotely serious game, still play Settlers.

The above analysis may not seem very useful because everybody already knows intuitively which games are gateway games and which ones aren't. But the pie-in-the-sky vagueness of the first definition ("Will Ticket to Ride make my friends like other board games? Well, I don't know...") casts a pall of doubt on any game labeled as "gateway." With the second definition, there is no doubt — a game is either generally tolerable to non-gamers, or it isn't.

— Boris Dvorkin

Translating boardgames

2007-09-29T05:07:00.000-07:00

An out-of-turn post this week - because (for once) I had a post ready early, and Fraser has been busy buying games this weekend. Paradise at our place!

I've spent the last week or two deep in the world of rules translation. Now, I'm an amateur at this, but I thought a glimpse into the process might be interesting.

As an example, I will use Agricola, Uwe Rosenberg's new (Essen) game about agricultural development. This is a medium-to-heavy game (literally - it weighs in at over 2.2 kg or close to 5 pounds), with very detailed rules, as well as lots of theme - and in this context, "theme" means (among other things) 17th century farming terminology. That complicates things because, like most of you, I am not a specialist in historical agricultural practice (although all those trashy historical novels are finally coming in handy). Especially in German.

Agricola boxfront. Image courtesy of Boardgamegeek.com, uploaded by Uwe Rosenberg

In Agricola, players start with two family members, a 2-room hut and an empty farmyard. By selecting Actions (new actions become available in each round - players place a family member disc on an Action space to select that action), they can raise animals, plant crops, produce food, extend or renovate their hut and grow their family - important, because each family member can take only one action in each of the 14 rounds. They can also choose to play cards which allow them to acquire a range of abilities and equipment. The goal is to develop your home and farm as fully as possible while (of course) ensuring that you can feed your family after each Harvest.

The wide variety of cards (360!) ensures variety in the gameplay. It must have been a huge job to illustrate this game but the images and the design are simple, clear and attractive - kudos to Klemens Franz for taking on such a massive project. I see he claims to have had nightmares about the game - I can well believe it - I certainly dreamed about it while I was working on the translation!

I should stress again that this was an amateur translation, which I did for ~~fame and glory~~ fun. A week of fun. Several emails back and forth between me and the publisher to clarify teeny tiny details of fun. In other words, fun :)

I start out by reading the rules. It sounds obvious, but it's important. This isn't a detailed read - I don't take any notes - but it gives a sense of the flavour of the rules and also of their structure - what will I find where?

Next, I assemble my toolkit. My online dictionary of choice is http://dict.cc - mostly because I can put the word straight into the URL, if needed. The paper dictionaries I have are somewhat older - not really a problem for this piece - but still useful, even though they are less comprehensive and more cumbersome to use. Why? Because it's easier to scan the page for any related terms or variant spellings - and because sometimes they have a different range of terms than the online dictionary. I have a German-English/English-German dictionary as well as a German-German dictionary, which can be very helpful. I also have a very very old (early 1900s) English-German/German-English dictionary, which I thought might be helpful for some of the farming terms, but it wasn't quite old enough to be useful. Also, the old font made my eyes bleed.

The first paragraph of the rules is often the hardest to translate - this is the background story for the game. Often I leave it till last, although in this case it was relatively straightforward. I did rework it a couple of times, though.

It's helpful that most rules start with the components - this forces me to make some choices about which term to use for which bit of the game. In Agricola, there were some decisions to be made:

Anschaffung - literally, Acquisition. I started with Acquisition, although I felt it was a bit unwieldy - can you really picture yourself playing a game and talking about your acquisitions?
Ausbildung - literally, something like Training. The word has the sense of a skill that you have acquired through training or even an apprenticeship.
Stall - Stable. I wasn't sure about this translation, because these buildings can hold various types of animals (sheep, wild boar, cattle) and to me stables are only for horses. Fraser pointed out that that was probably the Australian climate talking, rather than my extensive agricultural knowledge.
Nährwert - literally, Sustenance value. I kept Sustenance for about a day before switching, with the full agreement of everyone who had looked at the draft rules, to the much easier Food. It just sounded too over-the-top in English - just picture yourself asking an opponent, "How many sustenance will this acquisition provide me with?" Ugh.
Anspruch - Demand. On my quick reading of the rules, I had missed what these were for. There'd be time to clarify later.
Acker - Field. These are planted with vegetables or wheat.
Weide - Pasture. For animals.

Because I knew that this was a complex game and the rules were long and detailed (14 pages in the original German), I started a separate file with a glossary table. This let me quickly see what term I had already chosen (and make sure that I hadn't already used a word for something else - but more on that later). I've uploaded this file as a playeraid, as it should be useful for non-German-speakers who are trying to make sense of a card or space, but originally it was just for ensuring consistency across my translation. I believe that translation software is available (for professionals) that automatically manages these internal glossaries.

As I worked through the rules, I found that some of the terms really didn't work. The first to go was Training - when I found out more about the cards, I felt that some of them were not really training at all. Skills seemed to fit some of them - Wet nurse, Travelling players, Vegetable seller, Rat catcher - but not others. I toyed with Specialist but, in the end, I felt that Occupation was probably the best fit - although it still doesn't quite cover "Chief's daughter" or "Lazy student".

Next to go was the Demand marker - Claim seemed much more apt. Certain cards allow a player to take any raw materials that are left on an Action space at the end of a round. These markers are placed on the space as a visual cue that someone may take some resources. This is a nice addition that enhances the usability of the game.

Now it was time to get creative. The German terms Phase and Spielphase translate directly as 'phase' and 'phase of the game'. Ugh. There are 6 Spielphasen in Agricola, each consisting of a different number of rounds. Each round, in turn, consists of 4 Phasen (with a Harvest at the end of each Spielphase). I needed a better term for an English-speaking player, to avoid the problems we often experience in Power Grid and other games with this many-kind-of-phase problem.

I went with Stage - easily understood and clear. So now we have a game that is played in 6 stages. Each stage consists of a varying (diminishing) number of rounds, and each round consists of 4 phases. There is a harvest at the end of each stage, and a total of 14 rounds in the game. Seems clearer now, I hope.

At this point, a friend pointed out that rounds might not be the best choice of word either. Every time the rules referred to "round cards" he expected to be playing circular cards, not rectangular ones (there are no circular cards in the game). I solved this problem (I hope) by capitalising Round cards. Compare:

Play the next round card. (play a card that is circular?)
Play the next Round card. (play the next card from the Round cards deck).

Better, I hope. This decision led to lots of capitalisation through the rules, for consistency - hopefully it improves readability rather than hindering it.

It was around now, too, that I search-and-replaced Acquisition, which I couldn't like. I've used Improvement, which I think captures the spirit of what these cards do - they improve your family's home and farm. Examples: Bee hive, Chicken coop, Herb garden, Holiday house, Fish trap, Turnip field, Writing desk, Watermill.

One of the challenges of translating a game like this is that so many of the rules are actually on the cards. With 10 Major and 136 Minor Improvement cards, for instance, it just wouldn't be practical to include the effects of each card in the rulebook. This won't be a problem for someone playing the game (and the icons on the cards should make it OK for non-german-speakers), but for me as a translator it was a bit tricky. There were some emails back and forth to Germany about how exactly a fireplace worked to turn animals into food, and when you could bake bread in the various bread-baking facilities - all answered with a look at the relevant card. Too easy!

Another example is the Beanfield Improvement shown to the right. (Image from Boardgamegeek - uploaded by the very patient Hanno Girke). While it may look a little daunting at first, all the information you need is on the card.

In the top left, we see the pre-requisite for the card: a player must have played 2 Occupation cards (2 Ausbildungen) before s/he can play this card. There is no cost to play the card (top right corner is empty). The number 1 in the gold circle shows that this card is worth 1 VP at the end of the game (scoring is only conducted at the end of the game) and the E indicates that this card belongs to the basic deck, important if players choose to play with only a limited number of cards. The highlighted text gives a brief description of the card: "Plant vegetables on this card" which is explained in more detail below: "When you choose the Seed Action, you can plant vegetables on this card as you would on a field (This card does not count as a field in the scoring). The icon, showing vegetable markers piled on a card, demonstrates this.

Once you understand how these cards work, and how they are laid out, it's easy to follow the rules.

This was where my OCD tendencies came in. As well as my glossary of game terms, I started a list of all the cards that were mentioned in the rules. This was important because I needed to make sure that I always used the same English term for the same German card - and that I didn't use the same English term for more than one German card! With so many cards, there are a few that can overlap - one example is the Fleischer and Metzger cards. Both words mean butcher - the only difference is in which area of Germany they are typically used. I didn't think that "Butcher (northern Germany)" and "Butcher (southern Germany)" would be particularly useful game terms, so eventually compromised on Butcher and Meat-seller.

Now, we were getting there.

Along the way, I had to make some formatting decisions. Although I never actually documented it, I essentially developed a Style guide, deciding how I would present the names of cards and actions and their German equivalents. Because this was an unofficial translation, to be used by English-speakers playing with a German copy of the game, I felt that it was important to include the German terms as well as the English translations. It makes the rules longer and somewhat more unwieldy to read, but I think it also makes them eminently more usable than if I had just produced an English-only document. Players will quickly recognise that Family Growth is Familienzuwachs on the board and on the cards, especially after playing the game several times.

I also had to decide how to deal with the gender issue. I'm just not comfortable using "he" for everything. Where possible, I avoided gender-specific terms or used s/he - and where longer text seemed to require more detail, I tried to alternate between she/her and he/his. I recognise that this will annoy some readers, but it would have annoyed me more not to have done this.

My rules document is not laid out like the German rules - it doesn't include the illustrations - but I have indicated where the page breaks are in the original rules so that anyone reading mine can refer to the illustrations and examples in the original document. A friend tells me that I need to produce prettier rules documents - at least using a serif font - and kindly tinkered with an early original - but in the end I couldn't bring myself to use his layout because it just didn't feel like the document I'd laboured over for the better part of a week. I never claimed to be rational about these things!

The rules didn't end with the original 11-page Word document, though. There was an additional Appendix (which runs to around 15 pages). This very useful document details the scoring and action spaces, and clarifies how the Improvement and Training cards work in combination with one another. Want to know how the 5 special ploughs work? Or what happens if you upgrade a Well to a Village well? Whether you can use a Market woman with your Market stand, or in what order to evaluate the Milking shed, Distaff (for spinning), Butter box mould, Milking stool and Weaving stool? How to use the Lassoo, or the Wood distributor? Whether you can combine a Stable boy and a Fence overseer? It's all here, and all spelled out in detail - based on what's on the cards. Not having the detail of the cards, I did have to fire off a few questions, mostly to do with interaction between the different players. Again, these were quickly and unambiguously answered with a look at the individual cards.

So what would I have done differently if this were an 'official' translation? Not much - I like to make my translations as good as I can, even if they are just (I hope) an interim step and planned to become obsolete - it would be great to see this game picked up by an English-language publisher. In the meantime, though, my goal is to make the game playable and unstressful for non-German-speakers - so it would be silly to cut corners.

I think the main differences are that for an official translation I would have had a full list of all the cards, which would also have needed translating, removing the need for so much to-ing and fro-ing about what the effects of a particular combination of cards might be. I'd also have put more detail into the names used for the cards - I think the terms I have are OK, but a book on 17th century agriculture might have clarified whether there are really such things as a Vehicular plough, Turning plough, Improved plough (OK that one might be a cheat), Furrowing plough and Hook plough. (Fraser is complaining that there's no Stump-Jump Plough -- maybe there needs to be an Australian expansion, with kangaroos, rabbit plagues, droughts and Jackaroos?) Depending on the publisher, I might also have to use US spellings (although that is perhaps better left for the editor to fix). A publisher might also have views on the personal pronoun/gender issues I discussed earlier.

Because my translation was for gamers, I didn't have to worry about some of the terms I used. I did eventually dump "Counter mix limit" (mostly, there isn't one, but there is a limit on the number of fences, stables and family members a player may have) as just toooo much jargon, but I have kept "orthogonally adjacent". I figure that anyone playing a German edition with a home-grown English translation is going to be a gamer, and gamers know what that means.

End result of the translation:

Rules (uploaded to BGG - currently in the Files queue)
Playeraid - glossary of game terms (uploaded to BGG - currently in the Files queue)
Appendix - scoring detail, clarification of interactions between cards, descriptions of cards (still proofreading)

At some stage, I hope to do a translation of the text of the cards as well, for the sake of completeness.

It's been interesting to chat briefly about the game with the lovely William Attia, who is doing the translation into French and who has encountered much the same issues as I have. Sadly, my French is almost non-existent (unlike his excellent English), which limited the opportunities to compare the two translations, but it was great to discuss the different terms that we were considering.

Thoughts on the game itself:

I think this will be fantastic. It is a deep, variable, well thought out and well-playtested game that is definitely worth a good long look. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should perhaps say that it seems on my reading(s) of the rules to be just the kind of game I like - role/action selection, development, limited number of rounds. )

I am unclear over how much interaction there is between players - I suspect this occurs mostly in the selection of actions in each round (any action may only be taken by 1 family member token, so there will be some competition) but some of the cards do seem to allow ~~stealing~~ a little more direct interaction.

The challenge is in building production to acquire other cards - developing a resource engine of sorts, I suppose - with the mix of cards that you have - thematically, making the most of your limited resources. You need to make new family members to help you with the work (Ha! I'm guessing the Rosenbergs don't have children!) but also to make sure that you can feed your family after each Harvest.

Players all have access to build the ten Major improvement cards which include fireplaces and cooking hearths for turning animals, wheat and vegetables into Food. In addition, each player is dealt a hand of 7 Occupation cards and 7 Minor improvements at the start of the game, which may be played as you achieve the required pre-requisites. Players do not draw additional cards during the game - you get what you're given - although a variant rule in the Appendix allows you to discard 3 cards from your hand and draw the (face-down) top card from one of the decks.

For non-German-speakers, the language barrier will be a hurdle initially, but I don't think it is anything like a show-stopper - with the clear layout of the cards, I don't even think that paste-ups will be needed. Obviously, it would be easier if it were in English, and it would be great to see this game picked up for an English language release <self-pimp>and I know a great translator who is very familiar with the game already</self-pimp> :)

The game itself offers incredible variety - I am not even going to try to calculate the number of possible combinations of cards - as well as a simplified "Family" game (no Minor improvements or Occupations) and a Solo game, where you are challenged to improve your score over successive games. Playing time is given as half an hour per player for the full game - shorter for a family game - and player age from 12 years or 10 for the family game. I'd be confident playing this with my 9 year old as well as with my gamer friends - from what I have seen, it has the range and flexibility to appeal to a wide variety of people.

A Short Rules Preview of Brass

2007-09-28T03:24:00.000-07:00

Martin Wallace is one of my favorite designers. And so it was with great pleasure that I discovered that Brass, a new Wallace design, was nearing completion this fall. And when I saw that the rules were debuting on the Warfrog website, I knew I would have to download them pronto.

Brass is a game of industrial development in Lancashire in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Players build coal mines, cotton mills, iron works, and shipyards in various cities, and try to connect these cities with canals (in the first half of the game) and railroads (in the second half). In fact, many industries cannot be built by a player until he connects the building location to his other industries by canal or rail.

Mr. Wallace has several mechanisms that limit players’ actions. First, each player has five stacks of industry tiles, divided by industry type. The tiles are arranged according to tech level, with the high-scoring high-tech tiles on the bottom of the stack. Players must build their less efficient low-tech industries before the higher tech ones become available.

Players also get a hand of cards to play each round, and each player may only play two cards per round. Cards allow the players to take the following actions: build an industry tile, build canals or rail links, remove the top tiles from their tile stacks (to get to the higher-tech tiles faster), sell cotton, or take a loan. The rules for cards allow players to combine the two cards they play each round into one action in order to get around some of the normal game restrictions. Card management seems to be a part of the game, but in most rounds players should have plenty of options.

Another limitation on growth is the need for coal or iron cubes to build certain industry tiles or rail links. Each coal mine tile produces coal cubes, and iron works produce iron, and players may obtain these resources even from tiles controlled by opponents. But if there are no appropriate cubes available on the tiles, players may need to purchase coal or iron from the game’s coal and iron demand tracks which may increase production costs.

But one man’s limitation is another man’s opportunity. When all the coal or iron cubes on a tile have been bought, that industry tile is flipped to its back side, and it yields income and victory points to the owning player. It seems that one strategy to the game is creating chains of industries that do not require outsiders to supply the raw materials for growth, and allows players to flip a maximum number of their own tiles to their profitable sides.

Another interesting twist is provided by the rules for selling cotton. There are no cotton cubes; when a player plays a sell-cotton card, all of his cotton mills that are connected to ports have the opportunity to sell their wares. But there is a cotton demand track that indicates how the price of cotton drops with every sale. Players may have to choose between using a valuable sell-cotton card now, or waiting to connect that final cotton mill to a port while hoping that another player doesn’t drive down the price in the meantime.

The opportunities for growth increase dramatically in the second half of the game as the rail era replaces the canal era. Each city can hold more industry tiles in the rail era, and there are some cities that can’t be connected to the others until the rail period is reached. Also, the canal connections are no longer operational in the rail era; players have to rebuild their network of connections using the new technology.

There are more rules, but this overview should give you a good idea of what the game is about, and the major mechanisms in it.

There are some posts on the Geek from gamers who are concerned that Brass doesn’t have much player interaction. But it seems to me very likely that competition for connections between cities and industry spaces (both are limited) should add a good deal of inter-player tension. Brass looks like another solid economic engine game from Martin Wallace, and it is one of the upcoming games that I am most looking forward to.

Adventure Games, Part Four: Talisman vs. Runebound

2007-09-27T09:00:00.001-07:00

As we near the end of September, the release of the new, fourth edition of Talisman is just a few days away, and thus I've decided to take the opportunity to return to an old series of articles that I've written on adventure games, and compare how the old relates to the new.

A Brief History of Talisman

First, a brief history of Talisman. Although it was by no means the earliest adventure game--that accolade probably going to TSR's Dungeon! (1975)--it was the first that was really, greatly successful.

Talisman's first edition was released by Games Workshop in 1983. It was shortly thereafter followed by a better quality, but otherwise similar second edition. These games had the same core ideas: you played a unique character who you could improve by gaining Strength, Craft, and items. You tried to get enough power to make your way to the center of the board, then kill all the other players through the magical Crown of Command.

Talisman's success was probably most notable because of the fact that it was very well supplemented. First up were the Talisman Expansion Set (1986) and Talisman: The Adventure (1986). Many others expansions followed, offering up new characters, new boards, new cards, and generally new adventures.

However by the early 1990s Games Workshop had been sold by its original owners, with ownership going to miniatures manufacturer Citadel Games (through a somewhat more complicated series of shared ownerships that's beyond the scope of this article). Much of GW's focus was thus turned to Warhammer miniatures and other bigger money makers. GW tried to release Talisman in a much revised third edition (1994) which better fit the "cool" new image of the company, but that soon fizzled out.

Fast forward a decade and Games Workshop is now moving back toward the roleplaying and board game industries that they abandoned. Thus a new fourth edition of Talisman is scheduled to be fully released in a few days. It is built largely upon the second edition from over twenty years ago, without much effort to update it, and a result, Talisman now stands as a great example of how much adventure games have grown in that time.

Talisman v. Runebound

In the 1980s Talisman was the prime example of a competitive fantasy adventure game. However, while Games Workshop slumbered for the last decade, a new company usurped their adventure game crown: Fantasy Flight Games. Today FFG's Runebound is thus the prime example of a game in the same niche for competitive fantasy (as opposed to cooperative fantasy, like HeroQuest or Descent).

Thus, comparing the two games shows how the genre has changed over the years. It also offers some good fodder for what adventure game designers should be thinking about when they create.

Character Modeling: Characters in Talisman were modeled by three elements: strength, craft, and life. Conversely characters in Runebound are much more complex. They are have 3 combat stats, not 2, and each stat further has its own combat results. Characters can also have specific skills, and besides life also have fatigue.

Unlike the other elements I'll mention, I don't consider this a straight win for Runebound. There is something to be said for both simple and complex modeling, particularly for games that are seeking to appeal to different audiences.

Randomness: Every adventure game is random. Encounters are usually randomly determined, and the results of those--depending on some sort of task resolution system--are usually random as well. However Talisman really cranked that randomness up a few levels more.

First of all, movement was largely random. You rolled dice, and then you moved the appropriate number of spaces clockwise or counterclockwise around the board, meaning that you typically had two choices. Runebound offers an interesting contrast here, because again you roll dice, but a handful of Runebound dice determines what terrain you can walk on. It's the difference between randomness limiting you to but two choices and limiting you to a half-dozen or more, between whether you'll be equally limited next turn, or whether you're setting yourself up for future play.

Second, the encounters in Talisman are hugely random. You draw a card which can be anything from a wussy 1-point monster to a 7-point dragon to gold or treasure to a talisman that you need to win the game. Compare that to Runebound where instead monster power levels are differentiated by four different decks of cards, which in turn lead to appropriate levels of gold or items drawn from a separate deck.

Power Differentiation: This leads to the second way in which Runebound has dramatically grown beyond Talisman.

In Talisman there was very little differentiation between creature encounter level. Wherever you were on the board, you could encounter any monster. There were only two exceptions: a few spaces made all monster encounter harder; and some tough encounters were printed on the board instead of depending on card draw.

Compare that to Runebound where, as already noted, different levels of monster come from different decks of cards.

However I also think that Talisman has one thing to teach Runebound here: pre-printed encounters can really add to the story of a game. I'm surprised there hasn't been much of that in the newer game.

Time: One of the surprising elements in the evolution of adventure game design is that the time element hasn't changed a lot. Talisman was a 3-6 hour game, while Runebound is more like 45-60 minutes per player, which probably averages 3 or 4 hours. In my opnion, they're both too long, and it's the primary problem with Runebound.

Talisman, mind you, deals with its time issues even worse than its more recent brethren: because characters can get wiped out and restarted and because players can more easily stop leaders, you can have an endgame that goes back and forth for hours. Worse, you can end up with everyone back where they started a few hours into a game. Runebound's newer design has eliminated issues of player elimination and brutal beat-up-on-the-leader sufficiently to keep the game's length from becoming totally unbounded.

(Meanwhile Return of the Heroes has proven that adventure games can be played quickly.)

Background & Story: Neither game has really learned how to tell a meaningful story through a board game. Talisman tried to model it by the set spaces on the board telling a story as a player moved inward, while Runebound tried to model it through randomly drawn event cards and the increasing levels of monsters.

An interesting element of Talisman is that it manages to get away with a pretty straight high fantasy background. Runebound instead turns to a more unique background of dark fantasy with evil dragon lords. This seems pretty common for the more recent adventure games: they're more unique and differentiated with their backgrounds, but thus they also lose some of the easy recognizability of standard tropes.

Conclusion

After my recent plays of Talisman I have no doubt that Runebound is a far better game and that Talisman was greatly hurt by its refusal to be updated for 20 years of game design growth. I think the randomness and the lack of power differentiation are the biggest strikes against Talisman--unless you're specifically playing with a non-gaming crowd who doesn't want to have to think about their moves.

Not that Runebound is the greatest shakes, mind you. It suffers from long games and repetitive play, but it also shows off how much games have improved since the 1980s.

If you'd like to see my earlier adventure game articles, click on the "adventure_games" label just below.

Princess of Florence

2007-09-24T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've always been a fan of Princes of Florence.

Over the years, it's proven to be an excellent game. It provides a little bit of lots of things, auctioning, planning, spatial layout, etc. All the different bits adding up to a complete package that has never struck me as painfully solitaire, scripted, or any of the other complaints I've heard. I enjoy the fact that the auction is very new-auction-person friendly because you must raise by exactly one step and the more you lose, the more likely you are to pay less money.

Over the years of many games of Princes, I've seen auction values solidify. The jesters are worth lots of money, the landscapes aren't. Building is a viable strategy, but only if the auction values are high. To sum up, there are several paths and choices to take in obtaining victory, and the best paths often depend on the auction value of jesters and recruiting cards. If those items are going cheaply to players who know what to do with them....

But that's the case with most games where an auction is used to balance disparate items. I've run through my thoughts in order to give you a background of where I'm coming from, since I've recently finished playing Princes of Florence with the "Princess and Muse" expansion¹.

It was great. Easily the best expansion for a game I've played all year. I wish I didn't have to play with the printouts from BGG. Why was it great?

It changed the game. Princess and Muse adds another auction to the game. After the standard PoF auction, players then bid on character cards. There are six characters that are auctioned in a Amun-Re/Evo/Vegas Showdown style. This means that all characters are auctioned at once, players can win at most one character, by placing their markers next to the cards on the amount they want to bid, taking markers off when they are outbid. Once each player has a winning bid on a character (or has passed), players pay the current bid and get the character they won.

I won't detail the characters abilities here (files available at BGG), but the abilities of the characters throw all the traditional auction valuation of PoF into disarray. To underline this fact to regular PoF players - in our game one player obtained four jesters. He came in fifth. Several of the characters have abilities that provide greater competition for Best Work towards the end of the game. Landscapes become more valuable. Hanging back in Victory points becomes a valid strategy. More prestige/bonus cards can enter the game. It changes a lot of things. All interesting.

In summary, it opened up new ways to win the game, and strengthened some older risky strategies. By doing this, the stronger strategies were weakened. It also feels like it increased the scores - the winning scores were about 10-15 points higher than normal. But that's hard to state with just one play.

It fit. The addition of the characters didn't feel jarring, and it didn't feel like a leftover idea. It feels like a fully developed add-on to the game. This is important to me - all too often expansions feel like the leftovers of design or development - ideas that get published after being rejected for the initial design. Princess really feels like a further development of the game.

But I would be remiss to not mention the drawback. There's one, which you could probably see coming. It adds time to the game. With the addition of another auction phase, our game took about 1.5 times as long. Part of this was obviously learning the characters, but I doubt a game of PoF with this expansion could be done in 60 minutes - something that was theoretically possible for a group of experienced players. So I wouldn't recommend the expansion become a permanent part of PoF - especially when teaching new players.

Two big thumbs up for Princess and Muse. If you like PoF, I encourage you to grab the translations from BGG and give it a try. The files aren't the best of quality - but it's good enough to play the expansion.

Aaron

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¹ A recent republication of Princes in Dutch shipped with three expansions to the more common Alea/Rio Grande version. The changes are: Two-player rules, the "Princess and Muse", and "Cooperative Building". I'd also like to try the Cooperative building rules, but haven't yet².

² And these aren't actually the first expansions for PoF. They are simply the first published ones. Kramer (the designer) posted a series of tweaks and changes to the game on his website several years ago. These tweaks are obviously less developed than the Princess expansion - my guess is that the newer expansions came out of his tweaking the game. I've never used any of the tweaks, though we kept planning to do so³.

³ Okay, enough already! But I also felt I should mention that we do use one rule tweak in our games of PoF, and we have since the dawn of time^(tm). That rule is as follows: "In a 4-5 player game of PoF, once there is only one profession card left in the deck, that card is turned face up next to the board. No player can buy this card, but it can be recruited as normal". This means that no player has an 'extra' profession card. Unless a player decides to forgo a profession card and another player snatches it. End of tiered footnotes.

Itchy feet, evil plans and enlightened self-interest

2007-09-22T03:59:00.000-07:00

Ah, Spring is here. This is the time of year when my feet really start to itch.

No, I'm not talking about some personal fungal problem set off by the warmer weather - I'm talking about the urge to travel. With new rules and other game information posted daily, it seems, it's hard for any gamer to ignore the siren song of Essen. Come October, I will be one of many people scouring the internet for those first reports of "What I did today" and thanking the many people who post those wonderful reports.

It's also the time when Certain People begin bugging me for rules translations. A friend and I joked yesterday that there's a whole new P500-style business model there - either taking GG donations to determine which game to (unofficially) translate first, or starting a translation and leaving it at a critical point, with an appropriate ransom note.

I am sorely tempted.

The Australian Games Expo next June may not be on the same scale as Essen, but it has its own attractions. Over the past two years, it has established itself as the premier event for boardgames in the country, and possibly the region. I'm excited about the Boardgames Australia awards, especially as game submissions are starting to trickle in. Not only are the awards a great step forward in promoting and raising the profile of games in this country, they also give me the opportunity to try lots of great new games. Enlightened self-interest is a wonderful thing.

I'm also excited about the Boardgame Designer event that we will be running in conjunction with the Expo next year. We already have one publisher who will be hearing pitches from game designers, and we hope to recruit more as publishers sign up to attend the Expo. There will be quite a few people from the Expo at Essen this year, so say hello to them if you recognise the "Australian Games Expo" shirts.

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Gone Gaming is looking for guest bloggers! Please get in touch or leave a comment if you would be interested in writing for us.

A Short Rules Review of El Capitan

2007-09-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what to think after reading the rules for El Capitan, the upcoming game from Wolfgang Kramer and Horst-Rainer Rosner and Z-Man games. Actually, it is a re-themed version of an older game called Tycoon, but I don’t know of anyone who has played the older game. Of course, maybe it’s just West Virginia that is out of the German gaming loop.

Anyway, back to first impressions. The rules seem simple and elegant, and experienced gamers could probably read the rules and start playing within ten to twenty minutes of opening the game. But it is also an area majority game, and on alternate Fridays I sometimes wonder if we haven’t had enough of these kind of games. Then again, I thought the same thing when reading the Midgard rules, and I ended up loving Midgard.

To the rules. In the game players are Renaissance-era merchants trying to dominate the trade in the Mediterranean. Players get cash for having the most (or second-most) warehouses in the various ports, for having fortresses in ports, and for having warehouses in a large number of different ports. There is a bonus for the first player to have warehouses in all nine ports.

The main decisions players make are based on assigning resources to one of three things:

Sailing cards (which move each players’ ships from port to port)

Warehouses (the main token of control that gets placed in each port city)

Fortresses (expensive tokens that guarantee a payoff of some kind)

I probably don’t even have to describe the game turn in any detail. You can imagine players using cards to sail to various destinations, and then spending cash to place warehouses and fortresses in destination ports. The overall description of the game reminded me a little bit of Winds of Plunder, but with more emphasis on placing tokens in ports and with less of the pillage-other-players aspect.

One of the little curve balls that the designers place on the area-majority mechanism is that new warehouses will eventually drive out old ones. After so many warehouses are placed in each city, the earliest warehouses are taken out of the city. This can create the need for players to return to cities visited earlier in the game to refresh their holdings.

Another odd twist is that players who can’t afford to do anything on their turn are forced to take a loan. Repayment of these loans can become expensive.

The rules also feature three optional-rules ports that players can add to the game. Each of these special cities is unusual in some way or has a unique power. One port adds a pirate ship to the game that players can use to collect cash from other players (and make the game a little more like Winds of Plunder). These optional ports certainly look like they can be added to the basic game without increasing complexity very much.

The Mike Doyle artwork will certainly make El Capitan a great-looking game. And I suspect that it will play smoothly. When the game appears in the near future, I will be very interested to see if the mechanics are original enough to impress the Appalachian Gamers.

Goodbye / Old Puzzler Answer

2007-09-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

Goodbye

Well, this is it. The last post for me. I’ve had fun posting on Gone Gaming for however long I’ve been at it. Thanks, Coldfoot, for the initial invitation and everyone else for being so welcoming and helpful.

After managing World Games of Montana for a year (now under the management of Jonathan Crummett; also known as Ksensei on BGG) and writing game reviews for the local paper the Missoulian for two years, I can’t help but see a bright future for board gaming. Dozens of people came into the game store who had never been in before, and a good percentage found themselves liking what they found. Of course, our best sellers never really strayed too far from anywhere else (Settlers, Ticket to Ride, Blokus), though I did my best to push Aquarius with fairly nice results. The board gaming hobby is getting a greater voice as more and more people find out about easy-to-play and fun new games.

As a reader of Gone Gaming, I have been so impressed with the other contributors and their public demonstrations of board games. This isn’t a hobby like stamp collecting or coin collecting. In our hobby, games are meant to be shared and played. The difference is fundamental. Our hobby is contagious in this regard, and it seems to me only a matter of time before our hobby becomes more mainstream. I really appreciate hearing about successful Game Days, conventions, and family game parties. We need more of them in more places, in my opinion. This pastime goes back thousands of years, and I see no reason why the masses would hesitate to adopt it in its current manifestation if they were familiar with its charms.

As Annie and I prepare for our West Africa trip, I want everyone to know that I intend to play games, games, games with everyone I meet. I want to become more proficient at 10x10 Canadian Checkers (or International Checkers) because that’s what they play a ton of in Guinea and any other games we encounter. And of course, we’re taking a handful of Euros and classic games, from Jambo (of course!) to Cathedral, as well as games like cribbage and chess. And don’t forget to look for a feature in Knucklebones about West African games about 10 months in the future!

So thanks again for allowing me to participate in this hobby from the inside out. Good luck to everyone, and may the dice and cards fall in your favor.

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Old Puzzler Q & A

Q: I took a common four-word phrase which is 25 letters long and deleted 10 letters from it. Without rearranging or reorganizing the letters, I simply changed the word breaks to form the new phrase: NED ATE STALE RICE. What was the original four-word phrase?

A: It was a government organization: UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE.

Balancing a game

2007-09-18T19:36:00.000-07:00

I recently misread a post over on BoardGameNews on the game called Age of Discovery. I thought the writer was talking about Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery, but it turns out Age of Discovery is a different game (although with enough similar terms to make me confused.)

In any case, the point of the article was about game balance and it got me thinking. There are clearly some games that have victory conditions that could have been better balanced. I can't believe this is a design choice when one of a few simple possibilities could have been added to the mix to better balance the game.

While that makes a fine discussion in itself, there are a few ways in which a game can be balanced but make me wonder if the game balancing mechanism is more of a cop-out rather than a well thought-out and thoroughly playtested mechanic. I'm talking here about Auctions, natural "pick on the leader" player balancing, and risk management. I'm sure everyone has their own opinion on these, as do I, but whether you like or dislike them I think an argument could be made that they are one of the simplest ways to balance a game that might otherwise have some problems in it. On the one hand, any of these could be added to a poorly balanced game to make it slightly better, but I wonder if some so-so games that incorporate these mechanisms might have made it to the "next level" had the designer found some additional ways to tune their game to rely less on these balancing options.

Lets take them in order. Auctions are found in so many games, and while I enjoy an auction game as much as the next guy I also think some are rather a cop-out when it comes to game balancing. As long as everyone gets a somewhat fair shot at whatever is being bid on it is difficult for an auction based game to become imbalanced. If there is a really juicy, powerful item to be bid on, players can simply bid it up high to make sure things balance out (can you say "Jester in Princes of Florence" - I knew you could....) The main drawback for this style of play balancing is that players simply must know and understand the value of what they're bidding on. Thus, a decent auction game is really only at its best after at least three or four games. Another example is the simple game No Thanks! I really enjoy the game as it is quick to teach and still has some decent decision-making going on. What players are really doing during the game is a sort of reverse auction by bidding on NOT taking cards. The first teaching game I play with people always acts quite strange as some players overvalue the chips and others undervalue the cards. But after two or three games most people settle quickly into a very similar valuation to cards and chips. The fun remains in the game due to its push your luck nature and the fact that it plays fast so taking a risk here or there doesn't doom a player to another hour of painful loss before the game can end.

Expanding upon the auction mechanism for game-balancing is when a designer leaves it up to the players to continue to balance the game as it plays out. Basically, requiring players to "bash the leader" or at least the perceived leader. While nearly every game has some mechanisms that allow players to interact some have very few and limited mechanisms while others have many and encourage lots of player interaction. One extreme might be Goa or other games of its ilk that are sometimes considered “multiplayer solitaire” (although I love Goa.) While the other extreme would be a wargame like Risk where nearly everyone can pick on one person exclusively if they so choose. In a poorly “balanced” game, player interactions can overcome a single player’s advantages but it always leaves a bad taste in my mouth to have to gang up on a person simply to take them out because they had a lucky draw or lucky starting position. Also, having players do your “dirty work” in balancing a game can make the game last a long time as each successive leader is beaten back into the pack until someone sneaks in a win. This can be fun, but since it often rewards the sneakiest or best fast-talker in the group, it can be annoying for others. (To keep my conscience clear I will admit I tend to be one of the better fast-talkers at most of my gaming tables… however, I like it best when I can claim superior play in addition to “good negotiation”.)

A final style of balancing a game (that I’ll be covering) is introducing an element of risk. (No, not the game.) While some players hate risk (and tend to call it “luck”) in their games, I am not adverse to at least some semblance of risk in my games. An example of this type of balancing could be done by comparing Puerto Rico to Age of Empires III. In both games, the end-game has upgrades (buildings in PR, capitol upgrades in AoE3) that help players score additional points in the endgame. In Puerto Rico the buildings are known from the game start and are available to the first player who can purchase them. While a couple of the buildings are usually slightly better than others, they are all quite comparable in the number of victory points they grant. In contrast, Age of Empires III has several capitol upgrades at the end of the game that add victory points but not all of those upgrades are going to be available in every game. Additionally, players have to vie for placement when trying to purchase them, they aren’t simply available to the first player who can afford them. They pop into existence (if at all) when the third age of the game begins. Thus, strategies that rely heavily on capitol upgrades (like most of the money-making strategies) may not always get the upgrades they need (or want). Just which upgrades become available may determine the game. So, while I think some of the money-making strategies are the strongest ones in the game, they also rely on getting good capitol upgrades and thus are more likely to suffer the whims of fate in the last few rounds. Thus, what some might call (me) “stronger” strategies are leveled out somewhat because they become slightly riskier. Push your luck types of games could be put in a similar category. Pursuing riskier strategies can provide larger payoffs, but are also more likely to fail in a big way. While I would have a hard time accepting a large effect of this type in a longer (an hour or two) game, it is perfectly acceptable in a shorter game.

How about you, are there ways you feel that games can be balanced (ie. The various strategies/cards/abilities) more than they are? Are there no-brainer styles of game balance (like just letting players take care of it themselves) that you find overused?

Duel in the Dark

2007-09-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

I first played Duel in the Dark back in June at the Australian Games Expo. It was just the one game with Zev from Z-Man games explaining the rules, I was quite taken by it.

Only a limited number of copies have hit Australian stores so far and Greg managed to get one of those. He has been playing it at lunchtime at work, but unfortunately he is now working in another part of the city, so I had to wait until Thursday night.

We played six games in a row. Three different nights with different weather and we played each night twice, once as the Germans and once as the British. We were playing the basic rules.

In a comment on a recent Gone Gaming post Larry talked about situational luck and resolutional luck. The former being this is the situation in front of you, i.e. the deal of the cards and now it is up to you to make the best of it and an example of the latter being where you have set up an event, e.g. an attack, and then a die roll is used to determine the outcome.

Duel in the Dark is a game that has no resolutional luck, but certainly has situational luck. There are four main aspects of situational luck that I can see and they are all quite thematic.

Firstly there is the weather. Is it clear skies? Full moon or new moon? Fog over the German airfields? Cloud cover or thunderstorms over the British target? What is the prevailing wind? All these things are are dependent on the weather card drawn and all can have an impact on both players. The British player would generally prefer not to have to fly over Germany on a clear night in summer with a full moon. Yes it does make it easier to see the target, but it also makes it easier for the night fighters to see the bombers. There are generally pros and cons to each aspect of the weather. The British see the weather and have to then plan the bombing mission taking into account the weather. The Germans then need to plan their air defence allocation based on what target the British may choose. There is an element of gambling or bluff here. If the weather looks like it is favourable for the British to attack Northern Germany, does the German bulk up the defences in the North leaving the South vulnerable only to find that the English player has gambled on the German doing precisely that and attacks Southern Germany? Trying to protect all cities equally can leave the German defences spread very thin. Even the wind direction can play an important part. In one of our games I chose the target city based on my plan to fly the majority of the way back to Britain flying directly into the wind which plays havoc with the German night fighters and their fuel.

As already mentioned, the second element is the British target and the route to and from the target. Will the British player go for the short, quick and generally safer but less rewarding mission? Or will it be to strike deep into the heart of Germany with a much increased reward but many more chances of being intercepted by the Germans? The British player must decide without knowing the layout of the air defences, but then again the German player then has to plan the air defences without knowing what the target city is.

The air defences themselves are the third element. The German player has forty items to distribute. As mentioned above, where to place them can be important. Also the mix. Radar units help night fighters, but not flak. Refuelling trucks can be very useful if you expect to be operating a lot of night fighters in the area, how many searchlights should you put in a given city? The questions and decisions go on and on. The British player cannot change the bomber's course in reaction to the air defences, however the Mosquito may be used to disable pesky search lights, damage important airfields etc. that may aid the British mission.

For the German player the fourth element is the Mosquito squadron. It is really an element of bluff on the part of the British player. Why has he moved the Mosquito directly in front of the bomber and knocked out one the searchlights in that hex? Is it because that is where the bomber is going and it is serving as an escort? Or is it because the bomber is about to veer to the South and he wants to lure the night fighters away from the bomber? Possibly the German can read the British player, or can deduce from the actions and the possibly target what the British intention is, but if the British player is mentally flipping a coin to determine between escort or lure then I would say there is an element of luck involved. Depending on the weather the German player can lose points when entering the hex with the Mosquito. If it is acting as an escort then these points should be made back with interest when intercepting the bomber, but if the Mosquito was just a lure then the sacrifice was for nothing. This decision point can be quite tense for the German, especially when the fighters are low on fuel and this may be their last chance of an intercept for a turn or two.

We played our six games in three to four hours. Each individual game can be considered a game in itself, but it is nice to play the reverse side and to string a number of missions back to back.

Whilst it doesn't scratch the same gaming itch that say a seven player game of Civilization does, it certainly does make for a very engrossing quite short game and scratches that gaming itch very well.

I'm looking forward to getting my own copy, moving on to the advanced rules and adding the expansion tiles I recently received into the mix and playing many more nights over Germany.

Mmm meeples taste like...

The Zooloretto Expansions

2007-09-14T02:43:00.000-07:00

No, it’s not a Robert Ludlum novel. The Zooloretto Expansions are free downloads that are available on Boardgamegeek.

I only became aware of Zooloretto after it won the Spiel des Jahres. Once it showed up on my radar, the award, the zoo theme, and the family-friendly aura of the game made it an easy purchase. Michael Schacht’s game certainly seems to be the kind of easy-to-play and low-complexity game that usually wins the Spiel des Jahres.

And that seemed to be the problem with the game for some of the Appalachian Gamers. After one play, they decided it was too simple. Not many tough decisions, not much strategy. Next game, please.

I almost agree. It certainly is on the short-and-simple end of the gaming spectrum. Usually I like games longer and meatier. But I played Zooloretto with the expansions, and they probably tipped the scales in Z’s favor. They added just enough decisions and options to keep Zooloretto from being shoved into my mental kids-game ghetto.

For those who haven’t played the game, I will just say that the object of the game is to collect zoo animal tiles and fill up your enclosures with these animals. Each enclosure can only hold one species of animal, and any extra species that you acquire that can’t be fitted into an enclosure causes you to lose points.

The main mechanism of the game is filling trucks with tiles, and then choosing one truck each round. Each truck has room for three tiles, and each turn a player has an option of picking a tile and adding it to a truck, or of claiming a truck. The trick is to get a truck with the tiles you need while sticking tiles you can’t use on other trucks. The problem is that other players may be sticking their unwanted tiles on a truck you want to claim.

Players also have a small amount of cash that they can use to rearrange the tiles they have already claimed, buy animals from other players, discard unwanted tiles, or to give themselves a fourth enclosure.

Perhaps the most fun part of the game is that some of the animals are marked with a male or female symbol which indicates that the animal is fertile. Get a fertile pair and they will produce one baby animal. Everyone likes the idea of a getting a free bonus baby, and fertile animals are always in high demand.

There’s a little more to the game than what I’ve mentioned, but not a lot more. As you can see, the game system is not very complicated. The game plays quickly, and I haven’t seen any serious cases of analysis paralysis (something that Appalachian Gamers are prone to when playing heavier games like Age of Empires III).

So what do the expansions add?

First, each player gets a two-space petting zoo enclosure. The petting zoo will only hold baby animals. The twist on the petting zoo is that unlike other enclosures, it generates cash but no victory points.

A second expansion adds three two-space enclosures that can be purchased for cash. Each of these three enclosures is coded to accept only one particular species of animal (panda, camel, and chimp). These enclosures can generate extra points for players, but they also create extra demand for these three species, and this can make it more difficult for some players to fill their enclosures with these types of animals.

A third expansion includes two pavilion tiles that can be purchased for cash. These pavilions can be placed in an enclosure in place of an animal tile, and thus makes it easier to fill up enclosures.

There is also a restaurant tile that can be purchased to increase the value of vendor tiles. But this is one element that I haven’t used when playing the game, and I won’t comment on it further.

These expansion elements are simple, elegant, and free. I believe Rio Grande is going to publish an official expansion to the game which may include more than just the elements I’ve mentioned. But I don’t know when it will be available.

Even with these expansions, a lot of gamers may find Zooloretto too light-weight for their tastes. But give them a try. The price is right.

Card Games & Randomness

2007-09-13T09:00:00.001-07:00

Recently my Thursday night gaming group has had the opportunity to play some top quality card games, among them Tichu and the German Doppelkopf. Comparing and talking about these games led to interesting discussions of the the element of randomness in card games, which I offer up here for additional thoughts and comments.

The Heart of Randomness

Our conversation got started with one of players saying that Doppelkopf was too random.

The thing is, however, that almost any card game is random. It's a necessary and implicit part of the process. You take 52 cards (or whatever) and divide them up among the players. For a standard 4-player game that represents 635,013,559,600 different possibilities. In other words, sometimes you're going to get a really bad hand and sometimes you're going to get a really good one.

That's life. Or at least a card game.

I know of a couple of games that try and modify this. The classic is Duplicate Bridge where multiple people all play the same hands of cards, and then how well they did is compared. Personally, I find this entirely at odds with how cards work: they're a purposefully arbitrary mechanism meant to divide resources in a random method. To make sure everyone has the same hands is not only tedious, but also suggests you're not using the right component.

Trump, Tricks, Game is a rare game that I saw that had a method to redistribute cards that wasn't random but that I actually respected. After the first round of play you play additional rounds with the cards that you won previously, thus creating an additional level of decisions in the game, where you must not just collect valuable cards, but also cards that will let you do well in future round.

Offsetting Randomness

Given that randomness is a core element of card games, the question then becomes how do you offset it to make the elements of skill more important than the randomness?

The best answer is time. A card game will best offset randomness through continued play of hand after hand. My general assessment is that games that allow for 10-15 hands of play are getting to point where the standard deviation is creeping down, and players have generally had the same amount of luck over a game.

(Though always there will be some games were someone's luck was just unbeatable.)

Regrettably, this is where a lot of Eurogames fall down. They've gotten so into the mindset of short, simple games that you have card games where you might only play one round, or at best a number of rounds equal to the number of players, and this just doesn't do it. If those games feel random, it's probably because they still are.

(And it should further be noted that a lot of Euro card games are light enough that they can't support more than that amount of play, meaning that the high randomness is unfortunately an implicit part of the game that can't be reasonably corrected.)

However the best classic card games have at least three other ways to offset randomness, and these are generally methods that Euro card games could learn from.

The first method is value assessment. This means looking at the hand of cards you were dealt and then determining how good it is. Most games like Bridge and Spades do this through bidding. Poker's betting accomplishes about the same purpose--at least absent bluffing, reading opponents, and other elements that confuse the core value assessment.

The second method is hand refinement. Games like Hearts and Tichu do this by passing and receiving cards from opponents. It's more meaningful in a game like Tichu where you're trying to create various card patterns then in a game like Hearts where you're mainly focusing on Hearts, Spades, and voids. The commercial game Havoc: The Hundred Year's War does it via card-drafting, as does the classic Coloretto.

The third method is card play. Or rather, good card play. If the way to play cards is obvious, you're not going to offset any randomness, but if a good card player can make much more clever use of his cards--even if it's just by quickly completing voids or learning to see how your cards can simultaneously match a few different patterns--then his skill will start to shine through, especially as more rounds of play occur.

Conclusion

Yes, card distribution is random, but good card games overcome that. You have to play more hands, and the game has to be deep enough to support it. However even beyond that I think you'll find that the very best card games offset randomness even more with card assessment, hand refinement, or some combination thereof.

Light Euro card games could learn well from these, and consider how these methods could be built into their own gameplay.

Wrestling with Long games

2007-09-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

How do you approach a complex game? Continuing my thoughts from two weeks ago, I'm debating how you can get games of a more rambling nature onto the table. Rambling in this case defined as games longer than 2 hours - which seems to be the point at which players start saying no.

The big question in my mind is if it is worth having the first session be a 'teaching' game. basically a game with a strict time or turn limit, with the stated purpose of teaching the rules.

Many people seem to espouse this approach, but it's never really felt right to me.

1) If the game is long by nature, then a shortened version doesn't capture the game.
A game like revolution is only 5 turns - at roughly 1 turn an hour. A two turn game has missed two-thirds of the game, and much of the benefit of a longer game (long-term strategy) is aborted. I'd argue that one of the key selling points of a longer game is the ability to choose to play for the long term. Taking short turn hits to position/income/whatever with the expectation to do better farther into the game.¹

2) Bringing the same players together for a second game is hard.
I consider myself lucky to have a smaller game group that's been meeting weekly for years. There's 5 of us, but with life being what it is, it is not uncommon for the group to be four. Invariably, if we play a longer game, one player isn't there. And the next time the game is brought out, they are. I can only imagine how much worse this would be with a large/more infrequent group. So, if rules will always be taught, why play an aborted game?

There are plenty of reasons for running a shortened game, but I've rarely managed to convince myself it is a good idea. This cropped up because last week I ran a shortened game of American Megafauna at EndGame. I wanted to try out third edition/SOS style play and AM is a game that is going to be at least 3 hours the first time you play. I decided to call the game after 2 hours of play, and ultimately it worked. American Megafauna² is a game that doesn't really call for a specific game length, so 'artificially' making a game timer trigger then endgame wasn't a problem. So a shorter game worked. Yay!

But I still don't think that it is the solution for all longer games. Mostly, I think the first play of longer games require players to commit to not worrying about victory. Yes, someone is going to win³, but the goal in the first play is to see what the game is like, and learn what tactics can survive through the mid-game into the end, and which ones are dead ends.

Unfortunately, giving up on victory is a hard thing to do - especially for a game that lasts two or three times as long as other available games. But the reward... well, that's for me to have more people who know how to play longer games.

aaron
--

¹Some shorter games manage this as well (usually the ones that last closer to 2 hours than one), but most shorter games are much more unforgiving of sacrificial ploys or delaying tactics. Some shorter games are good precisely because players must time everything 'just right' (ex. figuring out when to migrate from money to points in Puerto Rico) but don't permit players to play much beyond the current board position.

²Phil Eklund is the designer of American Megafauna. And the Lords of... series. His games are truly odd unweildy beasts, and I'll get back to you with my impressions of them eventually, but one interesting facet is that the games don't really have a specific endpoint. Sure, the rules tell you when to end the game, but then they also say "or when everyone agrees to stop".

³ And yes, the person who has read the rules/played the game has an advantage.

Pick the Piece!

2007-09-08T16:39:00.000-07:00

Time to lighten things up a little with another quiz.

But first, a message from our sponsor!

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We are looking for new and guest bloggers for Gone Gaming.

If you are interested, please make contact!

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What game are you playing if you use the following pieces/cards/tiles/game constructs...

Count bonus points if you get more than 1 game for an answer.

1. Shoot to Kill
2. Robber
3. Wheelbarrow
4. Cinema
5. Temple Guard
6. Jester
7. Phoenix
8. Garbage (Trash)
9. Giant Spider
10. Mosquito
11. Ra
12. Archon
13. Trade Tower
14. Conveyer Belt
15. Anne of Austria
16. Cube tower
17. Dummy
18. Caballero
19. Seer
20. Geese
21. Polyp
22. Silver Mine
23. Barn
24. Overseer
25. Trollwagon
26. Meat
27. Crocodile/s (you should get at least 3)
28. Sex
29. Vulch
30. Crown of Command

Hopefully they aren't too difficult - a relaxing activity for a lazy Sunday :)

Happy gaming!

Melissa

A Rules Comparison of Hellenes and Athens vs. Sparta

2007-09-07T06:17:00.000-07:00

This week, I noticed that two separate game companies have upcoming block games based on the Peloponnesian War, and both of these games have rules that are available for download. GMT Games may eventually publish Hellenes: Athens vs. Sparta, a game designed by Craig Besinque. Columbia Games hopes to publish Athens vs. Sparta, a game designed by Tom Dalgliesh, in the near future. I believe that Mr. Besinque’s game was originally going to be published by Columbia Games, but the backstory on the production of these games is of little interest to me. I just want to compare the rules, and note the similarities and differences.

Both games seem to be based or inspired by Jerry Taylor’s Hammer of the Scots system (although Mr. Besinque might say that it is based on EastFront or Rommel in the Desert—two of his earlier block games), and gamers familiar with the HotS will have little trouble learning these new games. Players get a hand of cards every turn, and then play these cards for their action point value or to trigger certain events. Card play also determines which player goes first in a turn.

RULES: The rules for Hellenes are nine pages long, and the rules for Athens vs. Sparta are eight pages long. The games seem to have roughly the same level of complexity.

MAPBOARDS: The mapboards of these games look remarkably similar. Hellenes has an area map and Athens vs. Sparta has a hex map, but the areas of Hellenes are about the same size as the hexes in Athens vs. Sparta.

SCENARIOS: Hellenes features several scenarios while Athens vs. Sparta only has one. The Hellenes card deck has some cards that are used only for certain scenarios.

GAME LENGTH: The Hellenes rules claim that the game can be played in four hours. The Athens vs. Sparta rules note that the game will last two to three hours.

GAMES TURNS: Turns in Hellenes represent a season, and there are special rules for winter turns. Turns in Athens vs. Sparta seem to represent a number of months, but the rules aren’t specific about what this length of time is. There are no winter turns in Athens vs. Sparta.

VICTORY POINTS: Both games award victory points for control of cities. In Hellenes, players can also gain points by winning battles or pillaging enemy cities. In Athens vs. Sparta, only control of cities gives players victory points.

LEADER CARDS: Hellenes features leader cards that remain in play from turn to turn and that give extra actions to players.

MOVEMENT: In Hellenes, all the units in a single area can be activated for movement. In Athens vs. Sparta, players must use action points to activate individual units. In Hellenes, units can attempt to force march, but they risk becoming weaker due to stragglers. In Athens vs. Sparta, units can double their movement allowance in a strategic move as long as the moving unit avoids enemy units. In both games, fleet units can transport land units.

COMBAT: Combat is remarkably similar in both games. Both use much the same system as Hammer of the Scots, except that both games have special rules for sieges and fleet combat.

CONCLUSIONS: Hellenes and Athens vs. Sparta are remarkably similar games (and you can probably guess the reasons why). You can preorder Hellenes from GMT at a price of $48.00. The Columbia Games website claims that Athens vs. Sparta will be available this month at a price of about $70.00. This would make Hellenes the bargain hunter’s choice, but there is no guarantee that GMT will get enough pre-orders for this game to publish it anytime soon.

Penultimate Farewell / Old Puzzler / New (and Last) Biweekly Puzzler

2007-09-06T06:13:00.000-07:00

My time with Gone Gaming is coming to an end, though I will continue to be a part of the on-line gaming community. This is my penultimate post, and as such, I will keep things on the short end so that this whole thing will be little more than a blip.

My partner Annie and I are moving to Guinea, West Africa, which is where we met in the Peace Corps over seven years ago (started dating six years ago). We have had little contact with our friends and family in Guinea during our time away, and we're excited (and have been for quite some time) to return.

But we have to move from our place in Missoula first.

We have been scrambling to sell things and get the house ready for the next tenant. I can't really remember cleaning the house this well, even for us. We've been really getting rid of things, clothes from high school, useless things we've lugged around. It's been nice.

But I had a little slip-up that I think many of the users here will appreciate.

I logged a decent table on Craigslist. I wrote the description fast and without really pausing to digest what I was writing. When I went back to proof what I had written, I found a glaring difference between what I wanted to write and what I actually wrote. I wrote.

"Moving Sale! Nice round table with leaf for $20! Table accommodates four players, six with leaf. Contact us now!"

Ah, this life with games. Is there any other hobby like it? I think not.

****************************************************************

Old Puzzler Q & A

Q: Name a word which uses the letters E, L, S, V. One letter appears four times, one three, one two, and one once. What is it?

A: (given first by Dave Peters) SLEEVELESS

****************************************************************

New (and Last) Fortnightly Puzzler

There are four words that are commonly seen together that I had to see a few times while we've been moving. If you delete various letters and put the remaining letters together WITHOUT REORDERING THEM, you get the following phrase:

NED ATE STALE RICE.

The word breaks are different, and the total letter count of the original is 25. What are the four words?

*As always, I enjoy hearing the answers via email. If you solve it, please refrain from posting directly on the site. If you feel the urge, write smattathias@gmail.com with the answers. I'll post the name of the first person to respond. Thanks!

Lightweight and feeling good...

2007-09-05T17:56:00.000-07:00

After a hiatus of far too long, I’m back and pushing my thoughts out there to the blog-reading community. After enjoying a visit to GenCon and then writing profusely about it it is time to wind down and collect my boardgaming thoughts. One such thought has centered around lightweight, fast-playing games. I do enjoy stretching my gaming muscles in longer games that take an hour or more to develop and finish, but I find a significant fraction of my gaming time revolving around gaming with relatively lightweight gamers. Thus, I have turned an eye toward finding a selection of favorite lightweight games.

In my book, a lightweight game needs to play fast. If I’m going to commit a chunk of time to a game I expect to get some nice, deep thinking about it. This is my main objection to Cosmic Encounter - it is great in theory and I love the “festive” nature of the game, but far too often the game can drag on past its initial welcome. If the game is going to have shifting fortunes and a significant element of chance I prefer it to land in the 30 to 45 minute mark so that a truly poor string of luck does not drag out for extended periods. However, I often find nonrandom, pure abstracts to be a bit too dry for my taste, so there has to be some sort of balance between luck and strategy.

Two games I came across at GenCon seem to meet both of my criteria: To Court the King published by Rio Grande Games and Owners Choice by Z-Man Games. They have a fair bit of luck (they both revolve around rolling dice), are simple to explain so that the game can start right away, take about 45 minutes or less to play, but still contain a decent number of opportunities for strategic decisions.

To Court the King can best be described as Yahtzee on steroids. Players roll dice in order to match the values displayed on cards set in the middle of the table. Starting out with only three dice, players can hope to roll a pair to get the Farmer card, granting an extra die in future rolls. Rolling three of a kind gets players a different card with different powers. As the more powerful cards require players to roll dice that add up to a total of 20 or more pips or roll five of a kind, players must therefore slowly progress up the dice “technology tree” gaining more powers and/or dice at the conclusion of each turn. When someone finally rolls seven of a kind, they win the King card and triggers the final round of rolling. In a sort of roll-off, each player uses the powers of all their cards one last time to roll the most of a kind on their dice. My favorite part of the game is in the various powers granted by the cards. Some focus on giving a player additional dice to roll, while others grant special powers to manipulate the numbers on the dice. Thus, there are two extremes in strategy, a sort of gather up all the dice you can muster strategy or one where players gain a few dice but have many special powers to manipulate them as needed. The decisions tend to be entirely tactical, trying to optimize the result of each series of rolls, this is increased for players who obtain several of the special power cards, creating a kind of miniature puzzle every time a turn comes around. In my game at GenCon I was able to claim the King card using several special powers on my cards. However, in the final dice-off I just missed claiming victory and had to settle for third place right behind an opponent who had focused more on claiming as many dice as possible. (For the record I think I had seven 4’s to his seven 5’s or some such thing even though I only had eight dice to roll and he had around eleven or twelve). As mentioned, the game can be explained and quickly started without too much preparation, an important consideration when trying to coax noncommittal boardgamers into a game. At a running time of around 45 minutes it strikes a nice balance of strategy, luck, and depth.

Owner’s Choice in contrast, is a very lightweight economic game. There is a central board and a single pawn is moved around the outside track one time and then the game is over. Players invest in one or more stocks (there are four types) with the highest shareholder of each company declared president. The president holds onto a special colored die representing the fate of that company. On their turn, each player moves the pawn from one to three spaces forward (their choice). It will typically land on a space matching the color of one of the four companies. If, for example, it is placed on red, then the president of red must pay $50 to the middle of the board and then roll the red die. The red company then suffers the result, which is typically a good thing. Each company has strengths and weaknesses, depending on the distribution of results on that color die. The green company slowly increases in price or pays out frequent dividends, the yellow company has very high variability, going greatly up or down in price, the red company tends to go up in price but might force the president to increase the price of a different color stock, and the blue company can increase but can also allow the president to cause other company stocks to fall. If a president doesn’t wish to pay $50 (or can’t) he or she must roll the black die. In most cases, this drops the stock in price one or two levels and awards the president with all the cash previously paid to the center of the board. After the pawn moves once around the outside of the board, the game ends. Since the board is not that large, a game can be played in 20 minutes or less, although typical games average more like 30 minutes. Since games rely on the vagaries of the roll of the dice, Owner’s Choice plays differently every game. While the dice are set up to favor net increases in the long haul, I have also witnessed games where nearly all the stocks fell in price and if a player had not bought any stock the entire game, they would have come out in a comfortable second place. I am still not sure if the luck of the game is overpowering, it definitely can be in any single game, but there seems to be enough room for strategic decisions so that good decisions will tend to be rewarded over the long-term course of several games. One friend remarked that he enjoyed the chaos aspect of the game as players are encouraged to make strategic, long-term decisions to mitigate the luck of the dice rather than what is found in many other games - tactical decisions responding to the luck of the dice.

While I currently slightly favor To Court the King over Owner’s Choice I am willing and eager to continue to bring either one to the gaming table. They’re not my first choice when I have an hour or more to kill and dedicated gamers to play with, but for my frequent bouts of gaming with more laid-back players, a quick game or three of a lighter weight game with meaningful choices is still a good deal.

Transformers Risk and some other things

2007-09-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

In general I am a believer in replaying games. It’s one of the reasons I buy games I like, so that I can play them again next week, next month, next year or next decade. At Gamers@Dockers sessions however, I quite often find myself playing new games, either physically new, or games that I haven’t played before.

On some occasions this is because it is a game that I haven’t played before, but I wanted to and because somebody was there who had the game and new how to play it I seized the opportunity. Sometimes it is because someone has just bought and brought a new game and wants to try it out. One of our members runs a OLGS so he often brings demo copies of new stock to play. Other times somebody just wants people to play their favourite game(s) and is recruiting people to play.

Transformer Risk fell into the ‘someone had just bought and brought a new game’ category. We had actually lined up a game of Fury of Dracula, but it had still not arrived at the building and Transformers Risk was there. REGGY sticks by his claims that he bought it to play with his ten year old son.

Four player Transformers Risk is team play, red and yellow versus purple and black. At this point I must admit that my knowledge of Transformers doesn’t go much past the words Megatron, Decipticon and robots transforming into vehicles and vice versa. Therefore I it is possible that I am unable to appreciate or convey the richly themed aspects of the game that some others may pick up on.

A quick run through the rules had us on top of everything with the possible exception of the spinning discs and the “secret” factories. C’mon people , you slide the region and it is written right there on the board “Secret Factory”, it is hardly a very well kept secret is it? The spinning discs were conceptually OK, but we could find no mention in the rules of whether they started open or closed. We opted for closed, or mostly closed in the case of Asia^H^H^H^H the green territory since it will always be at least partially open.

Mr Skeletor had never played Risk face to face before, although had played it on the PC. B5mith didn’t make any admission about his Risk pedigree, I used to play it a bit in my younger days, but the only time in the last five or so years would have been my one game of Risk 2210 at the same venue.

Fans of the original Risk may look at the map of the Transformers planet and remark that it looks an awful lot like the Earth. Obviously not I say, I mean there’s two paths into Australia instead of one and you can go North and South from North America to South America, I mean from the Red region to the Yellow region. Totally different! And let’s not forget the Secret Factories shall we? Or maybe we should, since they are meant to be secret aren’t they?

Anyway during the setup phase Mr Skeletor built predominantly in the Red region and I built mainly in the Yellow. We also branched out twards the other areas including some well garrisoned outposts in the middle of bad guys territory which caused them to waste more and more resources defending the neighbouring territories.

During the first turn Mr Skeletor and I consolidated our hold on the Red and Yellow continents and defended the approaches. We also caused some havoc from our outposts in enemy territory, especially against the secret factory (which was clearly marked on all our maps).

Since resources are scarce and you can only win a maximum of one card per turn, it didn’t seem worth over-extending ourselves. Where we were close together we operated in concert, for example Mr Skeletor softened up one of the bad guy territories in our area and then in my turn I cleared it out.

When day 2 arrived we each held a complete territory. This gave us bonus robots, not many admittedly, but every robot helps. We continued our attacks into their territories, picking of their large concentrations and keeping our home territory defended. I conducted much more reckless assaults from my base near the “secret” factory figuring that they were going to come and get me anyway so I may as well cause as much grief as possible before they did.

Our two pronged assault in to Asia was very successful and by this stage unless we were doomed to forever roll ones it was just a matter of time before we overwhelmed our opposition as we were probably producing three time as many robots as they were and could afford to drop them into the front line to use as assault troops.

Despite some spirited defence it was all over red rover by the end of turn four. Total annihilation of the bad guys had been achieved. I’m not sure if Mr Skeletor’s singing of the Transformers theme helped, but it did add to the theme.

To quote and old real estate expression, the important thing during initial placement is “location, location, location”. Our initial placements were much more consolidated and defensible and we took advantage of that.

The special areas are cute, but given that you will win a maximum of six cards in a game and some them don’t even have the ability to activate one of the areas, I am guessing that aren’t likely to be used very often. Especially if the alternative use for the card is to add one to any die roll for the turn.

This said, as far as my admittedly limited experience in Risk variants go, this is a good one. Limited resources makes it a more strategic game and the fixed or capped number of turns should keep playing time reasonable.

I also got to try Ahoy, Logistico and Factory Fun.

Ahoy is a short game and good strategy is reliant on memory. If you memory is faulty you will probably not go well at all. There is some strategy involved with the memory aspect, so elder children would probably enjoy it.

Logistico is one those games that is, for me, going to require a few plays to get a complete understanding of the different possibilities and strategies that may be there. Did we deliver too much early in the game for low rewards, or was that just safe guarding it from being exploited by other players for large rewards later in the game? I am not at all sure.

Factory Fun, is it a game or a puzzle? You are definitely competing against other players for the choice of machines. You either want the best machine (i.e. most valuable) or the one that suits your factory the best. You need to know what qualifies the machines in this aspect and then pick the appropriate machine before somebody else does. This is a very quick but tense phase. Where’s the machine with blue outputs but no brown input? Is there one, yes there it is, oh no wait that’s a blue input not output, ah there it is, drats someone else has taken it. Is my red reservoir still accessible because everything that is left needs red… etc.

When placing the machine consideration must be taken for allowing room for future machines, both leaving room for them and efficiently using the output of one machine as the input of another (which is greatly rewarded). Substantial rebuilding of your factory is allowed, but this costs money and you may not have enough.

We were all happy enough the first time to jump straight back in for a second play.

The highlight of my gaming month though was finally getting Melissa to play Formula Dé, we had seven players, six of whom hadn't played before. We played a one lap race on the Zandvoort 2 track and it seemed to go well.

Mmm meeples taste like...

A Short Rules Preview of Asia Engulfed

2007-08-31T06:15:00.000-07:00

This week I am taking a cursory look at the rules for Asia Engulfed, the upcoming Pacific theater wargame from GMT games that was designed by Roger MacGowan. I play a lot more euro-games than wargames, and I can’t compare it with the large number of pacific theater games that have been created over the years. But I own Europe Engulfed, and I can spot a few obvious things of interest.

The first thing I noticed is that the rules aren’t any longer than the rules for Europe Engulfed, the sister game of Asia Engulfed. In fact, EE--with all its complicated nation-specific rules—may be the more complicated game. This surprised me because the combined naval/land war in the Pacific theater has a habit of causing designers to generate complicated game systems (just skimming the rules of Empire of the Sun was a daunting experience for me). Asia Engulfed looks big enough for me to consider it a monster game (anything that takes more than a day to play is a monster game to me), but its rules may be manageable.

One of the first things that fans of Europe Engulfed will notice about Asia Engulfed is that Special Actions have changed. Special Actions are tokens that players can purchase to do extra special activities on their turn. The Asia Engulfed Special Action rules no longer support breakthrough movement, retreat before combat, special reinforcements, or counterattacks. Instead, players need Special Actions for essential amphibious invasions. The American player can also use Special Actions once a game-year for code-breaking. This gives the American player intelligence about the composition of a Japanese naval force in one area, and a bonus die roll modifier for intercepting this Japanese fleet.

Asia Engulfed has special new rules, especially for the Japanese player. The Japanese player must use transports points each turn to create a supply network across the Pacific. The Japanese may also need transport points for moving troops, although it may substitute oil points for transport points when moving Japanese marines.

The Japanese player is the only player who can increase his production capacity by capturing resource and oil hexes. Of course, this also makes the Japanese economy vulnerable to Allied advances.

The game has special rules for Kamikaze attacks, Banzai attacks, and for special Japanese elite units that begin on the board and that cannot be replaced. There are also rules for the faulty torpedoes that limited the effectiveness of the American submarine force in the early months of the war. The American submarines may eventually strangle the Japanese economy, but first they must work the bugs out of their torpedoes.

I found it interesting that there are no rules for the atomic bomb. The Japanese win a decisive victory if they capture Hawaii. The Allies win a decisive victory if they capture the Japanese island of Honshu before the end of the game. All other levels of victory are based on the numbers of victory point areas controlled by the Japanese at the end of the game, and the number of strategic air bases controlled by the Allies.

It’s hard for me to play monster wargames in a house filled with kids and cats. But
Asia Engulfed looks like it may join then list of monster games that I hope to try someday.

Arthur, Arthur!

2007-08-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Recently the folks over at Green Ronin Publishing published Hobby Games: The 100 Best, a book of essays about 100 top hobby games, be they RPGs, board games, card games, or wargames.

I was very pleased to have the editor, James Lowder, ask me to participate. I mean, any day when you get to write an essay for a book introduced by Reiner Knizia is a pretty good one. We talked a bit about what I'd write an essay on and we agreed upon King Arthur Pendragon, an Arthurian roleplaying game that's one of my favorites because of the veracity with which it represents the Malorian legends.

I highly encourage you all to check out the book via the link above. In the meantime, in honor of its publication, I've decided to dedicate this column to its publication by looking at the board game side of what I covered there: the Matter of Britain.

Generally the Arthurian legends were a big obsession for me throughout the 1990s. I gathered up whatever modern books I could find, from Jack Whyte to Bernard Cornwell. I struggled through the classics such as Mallory and The Vulgate. And, of course, I sought out board and card games about the legends.

Herein I'm going to talk about a handful of my favorites, a few of them classics that you haven't heard of. And then I'll list all the rest I've played.

A Few Top Arthurian Games

Excalibur (Wotan Games). This is an old game, long out of print. I think that the odds are high that I'll never play it again because it's a lengthy 1980s era wargame, but nonetheless if I did play this sort of thing, Excalibur would be one of my top choices.

The reason I like it is because the wargame system is overlaid with a serious economic system. Beehives, foresters, river reeves, and water mills can all increase income, which is further modified by who's at a manor and who collects taxes. There's also a written order system, a relatively rarity.

The Arthurian theming of the game is actually very poor. There are no real Arthurian elements here, except in the rules which say you're one of Arthur's knights. However the game offers up a great model of Middle Ages England, which is definitely an element of the Arthurian stories. (Wotan did at least one other Arthurian game which wasn't very good, but this one was a gem.)

Grade: B+.

King Arthur's Knights (Chaosium). This is a game truly from the dawn of the era of hobbyist games. You wander Britain on a beautiful full color map and have various encounters shown through a number of decks of cards. There's a lot of randomness in the game, but nonetheless it was colorful and felt Arthurian.

(The author, Greg Stafford, was also the author of the aforementioned King Arthur Pendragon RPG.)

On the modern market the components are terrible since most of them are hand-cut cardstock cards, so this is a game that I dearly wish someone would revise, redevelop, and reprint.

Grade: B-, but could be a B+ with modern components.

Shadows of Camelot (Days of Wonder). This is my favorite of the Arthurian games. It combines great components, great mechanics, and great theming. The game's all about collaborative play, and that creates a generally interesting gameplay element, even absent the possibility that one member of the Round Table is a traitor.

However, beyond that Shadows Over Camelot really feels like questing to me, as players sally forth from Camelot to defeat their foes, win prizes, and generally do knightly things.

Grade: A. Review.

Other Games in Brief

Other Arthurian games that I've played include:

Camelot Legends (Z-Man Games). Has the best color of any of these games, with tons of elements from Arthurian legends all printed with beautiful art. However I found some of the gameplay slow and/or methodical. Grade: B-. Review.

Im Auftrag des Konigs (Adlung Spiele). Another questing game, but this one with choices and variability minimized by a small deck. Overall, pretty successful, even if the theming is weaker than some others. Grade: B. Review.

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (Wotan Games). First you quest, then you fight. It seems to have the right elements, but the game was tedious. Grade: C-.

Quest for the Grail (Stone Ring Games). An Arthurian CCG that made no lasting impression on me, other than the fact that I vaguely recall the cards being nice. Grade: C.

Quests of the Round Table (Gamewright). Tedious, interminable, and almost unplayable card game. I even hated it before I discovered the quick elegance of Eurogames. I think that this is the only Arthurian board or card game that I've actively expunged from my collection. Grade: F.

Tom Jolly's Camelot (Wingnut Games). Very lightly themed, since you have 4 Arthurs trying to recover Excalibur. Its main notable element is that its a speed game, with players moving as fast as they can, and here it succeeds very well. Grade: B-.

Final Thoughts

In writing this up, I came to think about what makes a good Arthurian game. I think the two biggest elements are a system of quests that you conquer and great color from the legends. A number of these game qualify on one or both of these elements, but still don't totally win me over because they miss a third criteria: great, deep mechanics.

Thus far Shadows Over Camelot is the closest, but I still hope that something more will someday arrive, combining the good points of a game like Shadows with a deeper and more meaningful look at the legends.

But hey, we've already waited 1500 years since Arthur pulled that sword out of that stone. What are a few more?

Investment in gaming...

2007-08-28T00:31:00.001-07:00

It's been awhile since I managed a post. A short five-day vacation blossomed into illness and the requisite scrambling to catch up at work. It is often easy to ramble on, but I find the starting to be the hard part, and my posts just haven't been started recently.

I've had a gaming meta-question in my head for most of this year. I've come to no conclusions on it, but I'll take the time to ramble on the topic for awhile. Essentially -
"Are we (as gamers, specifically boardgamers) getting too passive in regards to our games?"

In a more wordy fashion - Are we too quick to discard games based on initial opinions? Are we playing too many different games? Have we lost the feeling of investment that seems to have been a hallmark of the early years of hobby boardgames? If lost, is that a bad thing, a thing to be expected, or what?

This ties into many other questions that pop up frequently, such as "Are there too many games coming out this year?" and in some ways ties into the American/European design differences.

Modern Hobby boardgames (as compared to Mass Boardgames¹) have borrowed liberally from the boom of Mass board games in the first half of the 20th century, but have mostly grown out of 3M/Avalon Hill/SPI and the later boom of role-playing. As such, board games have a number of different inclinations depending where they draw their primariy historical inspiration. The Role-playing and Wargame ancestors required serious investment of time. The Mass ancestors don't. In general, a best of breed game draws from both lines of development.

The generally accepted "Best of Breed" traits seem to have become brevity², ease of learning³, strategic⁴, and component quality. These characteristics encourage owning and regularly playing multiple titles. Early in the history of Hobby games many designs (especially on the wargame/roleplaying side) required extensive rules review and games lasted two+ times as long as the average game does today. As such, gamers owned fewer games (and yes, there were fewer titles produced), and individual titles received more plays.

I'm placing the label investment onto the amount of time and attention that a game requires. Roleplaying games require a maximum of investment. A packaged party game like Taboo requires a minimum of investment.

As the past few years of game design have been pursuing the above "Best of Breed" traits in board games, I think we've seen a secondary effect of reducing investment in individual titles. Truly special titles (PR, Ticket to Ride) have managed to gain investment⁵, but they are exceptions to the general trend. This reduction of investment in individual titles has aided the adoption of a gaming culture of 'newest'.

In counterpoint, there's been a recent swelling of interest in games that do require investment. Much of the successful Fantasy Flight lineup requires significantly more investment than other games, with Descent being the poster child of a game that rewards players who choose to play it repeatedly. Interest in longer wargames has also risen, with bridge-games (Twilight Struggle, Command and Colors, A Victory Lost) gaining traction with a wider audience. So while I think overall investment is decreasing throughout hobby boardgames, the growing knowledge of this change is causing a backlash of players who search out games that deliberately break the style molds that have developed over the past several years.

Finally: Is this decrease in investment a bad thing? While investment in individual titles has declined, investment in the hobby of boardgames as a genre of entertainment has risen. No longer compromised of ASL players, or Cosmic Encounter Players, boardgamers have gelled into a hobby genre that is larger than individual titles. This is in contrast to other forms of hobby gaming. Miniatures, Roleplayers, and Collectible gamers are still fastened together by individual games, with much less investment in the overall type of game than the specifics.

So. That's about where I am right now on this subject. I mourn the gradual loss of investment in titles while I enjoy the greater choice of game style, theme, and mechanic. And I enjoy a larger pool of players to draw from - players who weren't gamers when the only choices of titles required much more investment.

In the early years of this decade (and the prior decades) I would play the same game many times, while now I struggle to play more than several games multiple times (2007 = 390+ games played, 222 titles) And the more frequent titles represent casual fast games - not titles that require more investment to appreciate.

So it's my own little crusade to force clunky odd games onto our game table. Games that break the current "Best of Breed" stereotype. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But always different.

aaron
--

¹ If it needs to be clarified: Mass boardgames are generally published by Hasbro/Milton Bradley, but also by Pressman, Cranium, Cardinal, etc. Think the game section at Target and Toys'rus.

² Defined as: Playable by a group of new players in under 90 minutes.

³ Defined as: Playable by new players while reading rules for the first time, or with only one player having prior exposure to the rules. Rules should not be over 10 pages.

⁴ Defined as: Progress within the game is determined primarily by choices that are entirely within control of the player and are not blazingly obvious. i.e. Having meaningful choices.

⁵But most of this investment has come from services like BSW or the DOW Ticket to Ride website. I'd wager that the majority of the super high playcounts on Puerto Rico and Caylus has come out of BSW. Has anyone really played any single game in-person over 100 times in a year?

A Rules Preview of Galactic Emperor

2007-08-24T04:24:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote a preview of 1960: The Making of the President based on the rules that are now available for download. This week I saw that the rules for Galactic Emperor were available for download, and I saw the opportunity to do a series.

I like empire-building games, and within the past month I tried my first game of Twilight Imperium 3rd edition which seems to be the reigning monarch of galactic conquest games. But based on the rules, I’d say that Galactic Emperor has a shot at getting into the galactic throne room, if not actually deposing the king.

Like Twilight Imperium, Galactic Emperor uses a choose-a-role mechanic that seems borrowed from Puerto Rico or Citadels. Unlike Twilight Imperium, Galactic Emperor streamlines every aspect of the game so that most of the eleven pages of rules are taken up by descriptions of the roles players can choose. Everything in the game that players do is related to these roles.

The basics of Galactic Emperor will be familiar to anyone who has played an exploration-based space game. Players start with a home planet and a single space ship. Ships move out into the galaxy to find new worlds (when the explorer role is chosen) and to claim them (when the Marine role is chosen). These new worlds yield food, metal, and energy resources (when the industrialist role is chosen) which can be converted into new technologies (when the scientist role is chosen) and new space fleets (when the engineer role is chosen). Resources can also be bought and sold (when the merchant role is chosen). Eventually, players will come into conflict when they use their political influence to claim worlds (when the politician role is chosen) or when opposing space fleets meet (the Marine role once again). Roles that are unclaimed during a turn get a spacebuck placed on them to make them more appealing in future turns (another steal from Puerto Rico).

There is nothing particularly innovative here, but designer Adam West makes the details of some of these roles interesting. For example, at the beginning of the game, a number of space tiles are turned face-up. These tiles fit in the gameboard hexes and feature suns, planets, or empty space on them. When someone chooses the explorer role, each player can choose one of these tiles and place it on the board in a location where he has a spaceship. After the other players have each chosen a tile, the player who picked the explorer role gets to place all the remaining tiles, and he has the ability to place them on top of empty space tiles that are already on the board. Because one tile is turned up every turn and added to the supply, the number of tiles that will be controlled by the player who next chooses the explorer role will grow.

The player who chooses the merchant role gets to roll four dice. He then discards one die of his choice, and assigns the lowest remaining number to food, the next highest number to metal, and the highest number to energy. Players then can buy or sell these resources based on the dice-price. This mechanism gives some control over prices to the merchant player, but players will always know that energy will the highest priced commodity in the game.

There is some goofiness and ambiguity in the rules. When a black hole tile appears, the scientist role is eliminated from the game. I assume this means that players must grab technologies early in the game or risk not getting them at all. But I could not tell from the rules if technology cards give players an on-going special ability or are a one-time shot. Perhaps this information is on the technology cards themselves.

The biggest virtues of Galactic Emperor seem to be simplicity and a short-playing time. Presumably, the price of the game will also be less than that of Twilight Imperium or other orgies of plastic.

I get the impression from reading the BGG postings that Galactic Emperor is getting close to the end of its playtesting cycle. But I have no idea if that means anyone will be publishing it anytime soon.

I certainly am not going to proclaim that Galactic Emperor is a success just from reading the rules. But it does look promising, and it will probably have a playing time considerably shorter than a lot of empire-building games. I hope it is eventually published. You can download the rules yourself from Boardgamegeek.

Gaming events, big and small

2007-08-18T06:47:00.000-07:00

I was thinking recently of games events that I go to now as well as games events that I used to go to and games events that I either will or would like to go to in the future.

One significant impact on my attendance at these events has been, what can best be described as, which phase of life I am in. For me there have been three main phases that have been relevant.

a) Single
b) In a couple (for some people this would be in a couple with a gamer or with a non-gamer), but I have never really spent time in a relationship with a non-gamer so that's not an issue for me
c) Married with small children

Future intended stages include
d) Married with older children
e) Empty Nesters

As some readers may remember, my background in gaming can be summarised boardgames, then wargames, then roleplaying games and now mostly boardgames.

The types of gaming events are:
1) Home or group based games night
2) Club based games night (club being a formal group, i.e. not just a bunch of friends)
3) Home or group based games day
4) Club based games day
5) Home of group based games weekend
6) Club or convention based games weekend
7) 3-4 day group based
8) 3-4 day club or convention
9) Longer events

As a single I attended all of the above. Particularly when I has heavily involved in roleplaying. A group of us used to travel from Melbourne to Sydney and Canberra for three and four day roleplaying game conventions as well as run one of our own in Melbourne. On top of this there were regular games nights either board gaming, roleplaying campaigns. There were also the day long events, either roleplaying sessions or tournaments, or games of Diplomacy or Civilization. Amongst the group of friends from Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney we also had what could best be described as a mini gathering of friends. A place would be booked roughly halfway between Melbourne and Sydney and thirty or forty gamers would meet for around three or four days of socialising and gaming. We also had some regular Christmas holiday sessions down at a beach house and this involved ten or more people for anywhere up to a week or more of gaming interspersed with visits down to the beach.

I remember discussing this with one of the Canberra based gamers who said that meeting up three or four times a year for three of four days of gaming each time was a good way to run a friendship and it was a regular occurrence for around a decade.

When I became part of a couple, nothing really changed. Melissa has a similar gaming pedigree as I do, just without the wargames. We had both attended the same events and done the roleplaying games convention circuit before we started going out, so we continued to do it.

During those days most of the games conventions were primarily roleplaying games conventions, other games were more of a sideline. Canberra's CanCon was the only real exception to this, it had a large non-roleplaying component as well, although we only went for the roleplaying. To my knowledge boardgame only conventions, especially if you exclude Diplomacy and wargames, are a relatively recent concept in Australia. Ditto with trade fairs, i.e. conventions were there is a significant presence of vendors and/or publishers. Usually the most we would have was a retail outlet with a stall, it was all about the playing of games not so much the purchasing. The Australian Games Expo is the only event in Australia that I know that has a significant vendor or publisher presence.

The arrival of mortgage and children has curtailed both the amount of disposable income and free time that we can devote to gaming. I used to often travel interstate to a games convention and crash on the floor or a spare bed at a friend's place. When you are travelling with a family of four this is rarely a viable option, paid accommodation is required and suddenly everything has got much more expensive. Otherwise the options are leave the children behind (not something we are willing to do at their age), take them with us to the convention (also something we are not willing to at their current age) or arrange activities or babysitting. This makes travelling to a convention logistically challenging and we have only started doing this again last year. Locally based conventions are much more viable, but I don't think we are ready to go back to the solid three or four days of gaming that was the normal occurrence at roleplaying conventions. With the Australian Games Expo we travel with the children and bring along babysitting with us.

When the girls are older they may either be interested in attending such a convention or, more likely, could go off and stay at a friends house for the weekend. A roleplaying convention is still something I would prefer to be able to commit a large amount of time to. This is because there are normally up to ten or so three hour playing sessions that you can book for different games. A boardgame event is much different in that you are really only committed for a game at a time, unless you pre-arrange something. It is possible to drop in and play something, leave and come back later.

I find that, even if you are playing regular rolepaying sessions at home or at a friends or even a club, that a roleplaying convention still gives you an opportunity to play, or be exposed to, different games and styles of games that is difficult, if not impossible, to come by in other settings. With a boardgame convention this much less the case. With regular games at home and club based games night there are very, very few games that I would not be able to play if I wanted to play them. The other possibility is different opponents to play against, but again with home and club based evenings I have quite a large body of people to play with already. Thus, to me, they are not as necessary an event to be able to scratch that gaming itch as compared to a roleplaying convention is to scratch the roleplaying itch.

It used to be that everyone I gamed with was at some stage a roleplayer, however there are people I now play games with who have never roleplayed at all. I must ask them about the concept of two or three day conventions and if they have a different concept due to a different back ground.

Then there are also the fantasy conventions. Being in Australia it is hideously expensive to get to Europe or the United States (and in the case of the former it requires a whole day sitting in an aircraft). We would love to go to Essen and BGG.con to name but two. I wouldn't even say no to Origins or GenCon if I happened to be in the neighbourhood at the appropriate time. I hope you people with relatively easy access to these conventions realise just how lucky you are, for some of thus they are really nothing much more than pipe dreams. Especially since we are raising gamer children and it is not like they are going to let us go to an overseas convention without them :-)

So what is my current gaming fix?

1) Home or group based games night - Once per fortnight (every second week)
2) Club based games night (runs once a week, I usually try to make it every second or third week)
3) Home or group based games day (up to once or twice a year we would organise one of these)
4) Club based games day (there is a once a month regular event in Melbourne, we drop in when we can)
5) Home of group based games weekend (a thing of the past)
6) Club or convention based games weekend (there's a couple of these each year, depending on commitments we try at make it to at least one day)
7) 3-4 day group based (a thing of the past)
8) 3-4 day club or convention (restricted to the Australian Games Expo these days)
9) Longer events (a thing of the past or for the future)

A Rules Preview of 1960: The Making of the President

2007-08-17T03:39:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about games that the Appalachian Gamers were looking forward to. I don’t remember who put 1960: The Making of the President on the list, but I don’t think it was me. I had other priorities.

But Z-Man Games just posted the rules for 1960 (designed by Jason Matthews and Christian Leonhard), and I’ve become much more intrigued. The game seems to be fine combination of Twilight Struggle and Die Macher without being quite as complicated as either.

In spite of its presidential election theme, 1960 is derived from the card-driven wargame model that has been made very popular by GMT games. In this kind of game, players spend their turns playing cards either to activate an event on the card, or to use operations points (also listed on the card) to do various activities. Twilight Struggle (designed by Mr. Matthews and Ananda Gupta) was one of the first games to use this model in a game about a non-military struggle, and 1960 further demonstrates the adaptability of the card-driven game system.

In 1960, each player represents one of the two presidential candidates: John F. Kennedy or Richard M. Nixon. Players campaign by placing cubes in the various states; these cubes represent political support. Opposing cubes eliminate each other on a one-for-one basis, so that when a player adds cubes to a state, his cubes are first used to eliminate opposing cubes. Because of this system, only one player can have cubes in a state at a given time, and it will be very easy to see who controls each state’s votes.

The most basic decision built into the card-driven game model is whether to play a card for its event, or to use its point value. 1960 complicates this model by adding momentum points that can be used to trigger an event on a card played by an opponent, or to stop opposing players from triggering events on your own cards.

But I suspect what will really make the game shine are game systems that seem to have been inspired by Die Macher. Players can try to place their influence cubes on media spaces for the four regions of the game map. Control of the media in a given region gives candidates special abilities in that region.

Candidates can also place cubes on one of the three issues in the campaign: defense, the economy, or civil rights. Controlling these issues can earn players extra momentum points or important endorsements.

Another part of every turn is selecting a card to be saved for the televised debates. Late in the game, players will face off on TV and then use their saved cards to try to take control of the three issues once again. Cubes earned during the debates can be placed anywhere on the map.

Are we getting a sense of the multitude of decisions players face each turn?

Die Macher may be the best election game invented so far, and it will certainly remain one of the best election games to play with more than two players. But Die Macher is also a long game, and simply doesn’t hit the table very often. 1960 promises some of the smart design that made Die Macher great while cutting down on complexity and playing time.

Based on the game rules, I think 1960 could become one of the most popular two-player election games around. If you don’t believe me, download the rules and check them out for yourself.

A Roleplaying Interlude

2007-08-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

As I've written before in this column, my first love was always roleplaying games. Though I'm sure I played games like Stratego and Twixt before I ever touched an RPG, it's the roleplaying games that I really remember playing throughout my youth.

Dungeons & Dragons was the first, but there are many games beyond that, and even before I moved to Berkeley for college I played a decent share of them including the science-fiction game Traveller; Stormbringer and Hawkmoon, both based on the works of Michael Moorcock; and RuneQuest, a fantasy game that I found odd at the time, and that I've grown much more enamored of since.

In the last couple of years I've grown closer to roleplaying games again. My best friend and long-time gamemaster left the country, and so I stepped up to run a regular game, something I hadn't done in several years, and that rekindled an interest in me. Board and card games are still my largest recreation today, but RPGs are there every week, and they get an increasing amount of my enthusiasm.

So, with all those things said, I'm going to take a bit of time today and talk about RPGs--from the perspective of board gaming.

It's Not Just About Role-Playing

First I'd like to correct a misconception and say that roleplaying games don't entirely have to be about roleplaying(1). There can be as much chance for tactical and strategic depth in an RPG as in a board game. It all depends on what you play and in what style.

Roleplaying games, after all, did grow out of more strategic venues. Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax were both miniature wargamers when they designed Dungeons & Dragons; after playing with ideas of man-to-man battles they chanced upon the concept of each player playing an individual character. Thus their earliest dungeon delves were pure strategy that probably wasn't that different in feel from Fantasy Flight's modern Descent, with players moving their miniatures through dungeon maps.

After the release of D&D it was a while before companies could really define what was a roleplaying game and what wasn't. TSR, the publishers of D&D shortly thereafter released two more games of note: Boot Hill, a game of man-to-man Western combat, and Warriors of Mars, a miniatures war game set on Barsoom with some individual heroes. The first one is usually considered an RPG and the second not, but the difference is tenuous.

Admittedly, the roleplaying industry has changed a lot since the 1970s, and much of that growth centers on individualizing characters further and changing RPG adventures from dungeon delves into stories. In the 1980s these trends amped up even further with the advent of the "storytelling" branch of RPGs which really pushed ideas of collaborative storytelling over individual glory. But there are still strategic elements in many RPGs, while a few play them up notably.

Battletech is one such example. It's another game that I played quite a bit up through college. It was created by FASA, an early publisher in the RPG field, but it was a hybrid game. The core of the play was giant mecha combat on a hex grid, but there was also opportunity for pilots to improve from battle-to-battle and there was even an add-on RPG called Mechwarrior where you could have adventures outside of your mecha cockpit.

The modern edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which was published in 2000 then refined in 2003(2) is perhaps an even better example. I kicked off a new D&D campaign called The Savage Tide a few weekends ago and I'm playing it pretty precisely by the rules. That means all combat is done on a square grid with plenty of different maneuvers possible. It's a pure strategy game in the middle of a roleplaying game and I've been enjoying it quite a bit.

The Modern Market

Another interesting element of RPGs, when viewed from the board game side of things, is how different the market is.

With a board game you buy a game and you play it, and to experience something new you have to buy a new one. With a roleplaying game you can buy a game and play it pretty much forever if you're willing to come up with new ideas for stories or grids for combats (based on what sort of game you're playing). Granted there have been board games sold as "kits" like this, such as Icehouse, but I'm not aware of any that are large financial successes. Board gamers like to have their games handed them complete, which on the one hand makes sense in a more competitive environment, but also suggests a somewhat different clientèle.

Another interesting difference in the RPG market is the existence of virtual publishers. Since the turn of the century an increasing number of roleplaying publishers have put out professional products as PDFs, to the point where there are now a few different high-profile PDF e-stores in competition. Though I'm unconvinced that PDFs really grow the market because of their very small sales footprints, nonetheless it does seem that they've generated some new creative enthusiasm in the market. At the present this sort of thing is all but infeasible in the board game market, but it suggests that a virtual board tabletop, a concept that comes up every year or two, might provide some rapid growth in the industry.

Final Notes

There is, of course, a bridge between board games and RPGs: adventure games, of which I've written before, and which I'm going to touch upon again now that Talisman is back in print. Descent in particular is a pretty fine transition that's not too far removed from the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons. If you like that, don't be afraid to take the next step; ask if your local game store hosts roleplaying games too.

And if you're interested in learning more, check out RPGnet, which is the largest roleplaying site on the Internet other than industry leader Wizards of the Coast. It's full of forums, columns, reviews, and everything else you could want to read about RPGs, with a 10+ year history under its belt.

1. Since I first drafted this entry, this weekend, Ryan Dancy wrote a blog entry about how we should change the name from "roleplaying" games to "storytelling" games, which misses the point even more. There are storytellers in the industry and roleplayers and strategists and tacticians too. It's a big tent.

2. As they say, the times, they are a'changing, and thus another update since I drafted this article. Last night rumors started leaking that Wizards of the Coast was planning on announcing a new, fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, for release starting next May. RPGnet's d20 forum is currently full of discussions on the topic.

When the goal is to participate ...

2007-08-11T03:16:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting thread on the Geek this week about playing games with children, questioning whether the "my two year old can beat me at World in Europe" claims are quite what they are cracked up to be.

Earlier this year, I posted about playing Cluedo (Clue) with both the kids. We dealt cards to me, Fraser and Biggie, and played what was really a 3-player game, except that Otto rolled dice and moved her person, occasionally sucked one of us over into whatever room she was in, and was shown cards when she did. As I said at the time, by no stretch of the imagination was she playing Cluedo, but she was engaging in a family gaming activity (and loving it).

Over the past year and a half, I have been asked several times about games that a much younger child (or a disabled child) can join in and play with the family - even if they are playing by different rules.

Here are some that I can think of.

Carcassonne - this one stands out as obvious. The younger child can enjoy the 'co-operative jigsaw' aspects of the game, while the rest of the family plays. Add a random element by giving the smallest player Meeples to play with and making the rest of the family comply with the 'one meeple per area' placement rules, or just ignore their Meeples and keep going.

The Bucket King - we actually tried this yesterday, by request. "I want to play the Buckets game." Build your bucket pyramids, then each play cards in turn. But only the cards you play on your turn count. We played with hands of 7 cards and allowed play of 2 cards together to beat an 8. All stacking (and especially collapsing) rules applied. (This is a little different to the other games on the list, in that we weren't playing by the "real" rules either)

Make 'n' Break - children are surprisingly adept at building things with blocks. Don't worry about the time limit, of give your youngest one a little longer - depending on the child, they may just be happy to build and knock down structures of their own devising until the timer rings.

Ingenious - more pattern matching - don't bother keeping score, just take turns matching the patterns. Again, in a multi-player game, a very young child represents a random element but that can add attraction.

What other games can you think of? Remember, participation is the goal here.

-Melissa

What Makes A Long Game Good

2007-08-10T05:34:00.000-07:00

Last weekend some of the Appalachian Gamers tried our first game of Twilight Imperium 3rd edition. We finally abandoned the game after five hours when it seemed that Travis was certain to win. But although the game flirts with being intolerably long, some of us were eager to try it again.

During the week, I rediscovered Civilization, the Sid Meier computer game that is now in its fourth edition. Civ is another game that can last many hours, and yet it is extremely addictive.

And so I started thinking about what makes a long game good. None of my observations here are particularly origina--I think Jonathan Degann may have made some of these observations in his Journal of Boardgame Design--but I write about what I’m pondering at the moment, and long games are this week’s concern.

So what makes a long game good?

1) A variety of activities. You can get away with doing the same thing over and over in a short game, but you need variety of things to do in a long game. In his recent review of Before the Wind, Larry Levy mentioned that the game seems a little too long considering that players do the same thing over and over. In games like Twilight Imperium and Civilization, players often do a variety of things within each turn. They may produce military units, fight battles, improve their nation’s capacities, grab new technologies, or engage in diplomatic activity. It is choosing from the wide variety of possibilities that makes these games fun.

2) Improvement of capacities. In many long games, players grow their abilities throughout the game. In Struggle of Empires and Age of Empires III, players buy tiles that give them special abilities. In Twilight Imperium, players can snag technologies that are the equivalent of special ability tiles. In the computer game Civilization, players can research ordinary technological developments that are available to all, or build World Wonders that can be created only once. In Arkham Horror, players can acquire spells that can give them a variety of special abilities. Things that improve player capacities are among my favorite game mechanisms.

3) An endgame. Many of these games have mechanisms that focus or increase competition at the end of the game. At the end of Twilight Imperium, players are likely to be fighting for control of Mercatol Rex, the most important planet. In Age of Empires III, the struggle to grab the final special tiles that give bonus victory points can make the endgame more intense. In Arkham Horror, players often end the game with a final battle with the Great Old One. And you know you’re in the endgame of Civilization when other nations start building a starship. Having some special mechanism for the end of the game creates story arcs that make games more fun.

Long games are not for everyone. But the traits mentioned above can make long games more palatable, and make the required investment of time seem worthwhile.

The News in Reviews / Really Old Puzzler Answer / Old Puzzler Answer / New Fortnightly Puzzler

2007-08-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

A Negative Review of Gemlok

I usually don't write negative reviews. I like to encourage game playing through positive reviews. That is, I play several games until I find one I enjoy; then I write about it. Today, I'll break this pattern somewhat with a review of the game Gemlok.

A current Mensa Select winner of 2007, Gemlok is a dice game played with pawns and a game board. Produced by the folks from Pywacket Games (nice folks, by the way), Gemlok is the second product of PG to get the Mensa Select seal of approval. Their first game Keesdrow ('wordseek' backwards) is their first (and infinitely more interesting) game to win the award.

The object of Gemlok is to get the most points. The game board is covered with squares of varying values (1 to 9); each of the squares also corresponds to a gem picture (9 is a diamond, for example), though like any theme just slapped on, it doesn't ever feel like you're doing anything but look at the numbers. Land on the high numbers, and stay on them till the end of the game; that's about it.

Each player gets 8 pawns. With the dice, players move their pawns around the board, aiming to land on the high numbers. Players bump other pawns as well in an effort to be on the best spots. After 10 rounds, the player with the highest score wins.

The movement is the most interesting in Gemlok, and sadly, it gets old pretty quick. The two dice are six-sided and have various strange-looking arrows. On five sides of each die, you'll find arrows that go straight ahead and arrows that bend diagonally and combinations of both. On the sixth side of each die, you'll find the title of the game "Gemlok." When you roll an arrow, you must move one of your pawns in the precise pattern on the die. If you bump someone at the end of your movement, you may send it three spots away in any direction. When a you roll a Gemlok, you must flip one pawn over; this pawn is locked down wherever it is; it cannot move any longer but it cannot get bumped either.

Basically, players roll the dice to get a set of flexible instructions. If two arrows come up, a player must move either two pawns once or one pawn twice. If an arrow and a Gemlok come up, a player must do both in any order. If two Gemloks come up, two pawns must be locked, even if the only options are locking down pawns on worthless spots (the exception to this is the first turn in which case you get to roll over).

First of all, Gemlok only really works with four players. Playing two players isn't at all compelling, and playing three players seems too unbalanced. Second and most important, I didn't feel any connection with the game turns, including my own. Roll, move, bump, get bumped, Gemlok. There's just not a whole lot there.

If I have to play a dice game where I roll and bump, I'd rather play Sorry! or Wahoo (to name games along the same simplicity) than play Gemlok. To it's credit, there's a certain amount of fun in bumping people, but this is an old pleasure, hardly attributable to Gemlok. Yet in this latest iteration, the bumping is way too volatile. That is to say, I know what my chances are when trying to bump in Sorry! or Wahoo, and the game can get exciting. In Gemlok, you just take what you get and pass the dice.

I understand Keesdrow getting the Mensa Select award last year. While it uses old Boggle-style mechanics to make words, it's fresh enough to warrant closer study. But Gemlok? How in the world did this game get placed next to Gheos? Even the simple but elegant Quirkle is tarnished by being in the same listing.

Personal feelings aside, my bet is that even if you liked this game that you would probably like so many other games more that your money is best spent elsewhere.

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Really Old Puzzler Answer

The answer to the 20 Questions from last month was none other than Gemlok. I was curious if anyone knew enough about it to guess it, but I guess it just wasn't a compelling enough exercise to go forward.

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Old Puzzler Q & A

Q: Name a famous chessplayer whose name (three-letters long) is also the abbreviation of a famous radio program and a board game.

A: (given by Thomas Fulda) Mikhail Tal, This American Life, Take a Letter (although I had come up with The Amazeing Labyrinth)

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New Fortnightly Puzzler

I'm thinking of a word using the letters E, L, S, and V. One letter is used 4 times, another 3 times, another 2 times, and the last 1 time to make a ten-letter word. The letters may be arranged in any order. What's the word?*

* I appreciate all responses to the puzzle, but please don't post an answer. If you feel the need to respond and would like to get your name posted, be the first to get the answer and write to smattathias@gmail.com. Thanks!

Pirates and Culling

2007-08-05T05:20:00.000-07:00

On Friday night we played a five player game of Pirate's Cove . Three players were new to the game and one of them was relatively new to gaming in general.

The rules explanation went reasonably quickly, although as Melissa and I were dredging particular rules out of our collective memories, I figured that it had been quite a while since the last time either of us had played it.

On the first turn I went to cannon island and all four of the other players went to sail island where a length and destructive battle ensued. Amongst my trouble free loot was quite a bit of gold and Billy Bones' Parrot. This parrot allows you to always fire your total number of cannons, regardless of crew number. Needless to say, since I was already at cannon island I spent all my gold to raise my cannon to five.

Over the next two turns I was involved in battles with other players, but with the help of Billy Bones' Parrot I was able to quickly dispatch them to Pirate's Cove for repairs.

That was actually the last time that I was involved in a battle with another player. Through skill, luck or good fortune I managed to pick islands where other people did not go or were too scared to go. This meant that I had a steady stream of loot flowing into The Black Betsy's hold. I did have the Royal Navy sent after me twice, but on both occasions I was able to send them packing all the way back to Blighty.

Thanks to my five gun volleys, the few combats that I was involved in were relatively quick, all in my favour and relatively painless. Admittedly the two combats with the Royal Navy did damage my hull and I did have to throw some treasure overboard to stay afloat, after looting the island of course! The fact that I almost never had to make any repairs to The Black Betsy meant I was accumulating a lot of gold. In fact the gold was accumulating so much that on my second visit to treasure island in addition to burying nine chests I buried fifteen gold (which is an unprecedented amount in my history of playing the game).

The other unusual aspect of this game was that we actually exhausted the tavern card deck, which I don't remember doing before although some of our previous games were only four player. The tavern cards certainly weren't going through my hand though, I only had five or six card for the entire game.

We had two cases of people forgetting that the Legendary Pirate was visiting an island (even though his boat was there before destinations were chosen), although in one case the player in question did manage to defeat the Legendary Pirate.

On the last turn of the game it looked highly likely that Captain Melissa was intending to deliberately take on the Flying Dutchman at Treasure Island so, after consulting my Evil Play Techniques handbook, I played the Consort card to grab half her loot should she succeed. To my joy, she played some battle and volley cards and quickly dispatched the Flying Dutchman and I then grabbed half of what she buried to boost my final score a little bit more.

With the combination of three new players including one who is a little prone to analysis paralysis, the game actually took about two hours which is longer than normal. Every turn bar one had at least one combat and the judicious use of smoke screens did mean some quite lengthy battles which also helped extend the game length.

After the game I decided to check my theory that it had been quite a while since we had played by looking at the "When Did I Last Play?" statistic in John Farrell's excellent Extended BGG stats. Sure enough my gut feel was correct and it was actually a little over two years since I had last played Pirate's Cove. This is quite a while for a game that we like playing, although admittedly we usually go for slightly heavier games and Daughter the Elder obviously hasn't expressed an interest in playing it for a little over two years :-) (she was involved in that last play back when she was six).

I remember reading on BGG a while back of someone who used to cull (trade or sell) any games in their collection that had not been played for two years. I thought at the time that this was quite ruthless and I assumed that they either a) only played certain types of games regularly, b) only had a small amount of storage space, c) only wanted to keep a small collection or d) didn't want to revisit old games that weren't getting regular plays.

There are a number of reasons why I would not cull games based on how long it was since I had last played them
a) With a collection approaching four hundred games, even if it was assumed that we could play a game a day (to quote This is not Frank's Planet, "That's a mighty big if") then it would be over a year before any game would be due to hit the table for a repeat play.
b) I have found that there are certain stages of life where it is difficult to play long games. Having young children is one such stage. In the past I have played Civilization, Diplomacy, World in Flames and even War in Europe. I have not played any of these games in quite some years now. However, I do fully expect to play both Diplomacy and Civilization again in the next few years. I will admit that the chances of getting World in Flames or War in Europe to the table are slim and I will probably be looking at the five to ten year time frame at least, but I am still not willing to part with them.
c) I am a bit of a hoarder.
d) There are games in our collection that we have owned for ten, twenty or more years. They may not get played often, but they are still good games and are still enjoyed. Many of these older games would be particularly difficult to replace (think EON Cosmic Encounter). Quite a few of them are games that we had and played as children and are now getting to play with our children, and possibly in another twenty or so years may get to play with our grandchildren.
e) Unlike computer games, which can be sometime be dependent on a particular hardware platform, operating system or slower chip set than is still available, board games just need a table to play them. It doesn't matter how old they are, if you want to play them you still can. The physical game doesn't become obsolete, granted sometimes the game itself may become outdated in terms of mechanics or game play.
f) I try not to buy many games without doing any research, so generally if I have bought it there's a fairly good chance that I will like it. Therefore there's not a lot of dead wood in our collection.
g) The words "sell my game" have no meaning to me.

If our collection gets too much bigger we will have to do some serious reorganisation of space and shelves or possibly revisit some of the above, but for now there will be no culling of games in our house.

Mmm meeples taste like...

What We Are Looking Forward To

2007-08-03T05:58:00.000-07:00

Just out of curiosity, this week I submitted a list of soon-to-be-published games to the Appalachian Gamers, and asked them to check off which games interested them most. The list was mostly middle-weight Euro-games, although I included a few of the lighter wargames that I thought might appeal to our group. I let each person (including myself) only choose three games--which means that the list of games we came up with is smaller than it could have been. For example, if I had allowed myself to choose four games, I might have added Martin Wallace’s Brass, but with a limit of three games, Brass got left out.

Now, this is a ridiculously small statistical sample, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about the interests of the gaming community at large. But here is what we are looking forward to:

Great Interest

Tribune: This game of political competition in ancient Rome is due from Fantasy Flight Games in November. It is designed by Karl-Heinz Schmiel, and all you have to do is say “From the guy who designed Die Macher” to see the lights come on in the eyes of an Appalachian Gamer.

Tannhauser: Another game from Fantasy Flight which is due this fall (Pro Ludo seems to be publishing the game in Europe). This one is designed by William Grosselin and Didier Poli. As best as I can tell, this is a tactical combat game set in an alternate universe in which the nations that fought in World War I have gained alien technology and magic from a downed flying saucer. Okay…

El Capitan: We’ve been seeing the Mike Doyle preview art work for this on his website, and it sure looks good. It’s a redesign of Tycoon, a game from Wolfgang Kramer and Horst-Rainer Rosner. The American version will be published by Z-Man Games.

Race for the Galaxy: This card game about Galactic civ-building is designed by Thomas Lehmann and will be published by Rio Grande. Lots of good buzz on this game. Due to be published in September.

Good Interest

Starcraft: the Board Game: Another Fantasy Flight plastic-figure binge. Designed by Corey Konieczka from the popular series of computer games.

Great American Railroad Game: Rio Grande’s American-themed version of Reiner Knizia’s Stephenson’s Rocket. About time a version of this game showed up.

1960: The Making of the President: Another game from Z-Man, this one designed by Jason Matthews and Christian Leonard. Mr. Matthews was one of the designers of Twilight Struggle, and this game promises to be another card-driven political contest. The designers claim the game has a shorter playing time than Twilight Struggle.

War of the Roses: Another strategic block game about medieval warfare from Columbia Games and designer Jerry Taylor, the guy who gave us Hammer of the Scots. That says it all.

The Price of Freedom: Another card-driven wargame about the American Civil War from Compass Games, and designer Renaud Verlaque, the guy who gave us Age of Napoleon. That also says it all.

Commands & Colors expansions: More ancient combat from Richard Borg and GMT games. That says…well, you get the idea.

Rails of Europe: A Railroad Tycoon expansion from Glenn Drover and Fred Distribution. I don’t really know what Fred Distribution is, but they had me at “Railroad Tycoon.”

What are you looking forward to?