Persistent Worlds

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.


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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.

Adventure Games, Part Four: Talisman vs. Runebound

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.

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

A Roleplaying Interlude

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.

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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.

Adventure Games, Part Three: Dungeon Delving

In 1974 Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published the first ever roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons. It grew naturally out of the wargaming industry. In 1972's second edition of the Chainmail miniatures game Gary Gygax introduced all sorts of fantasy critters--including wizards, heroes, hobbits, dwarves, balrogs, and ents--to the world of medieval wargaming. Dungeons & Dragons was just the next step. It gave players the opportunity to take the individual roles of some of those heroes in smaller-scale skirmishes.

I use the word "skirmish" purposefully because that's what the earliest Dungeons & Dragons games really were. A look at the earliest D&D supplements reveals that they were little more than tactical exercises, where players moved from one room to the next in a dungeon, cavern, or other carefully keyed location--and fought whatever they found within.

Roleplaying games matured slowly. There were a few village adventures early on, which offered some ability to interact with people other than at the tip of a sword, but they were scattered and far between. It was at least 1984, and the release of TSR's Dragonlance before people started to realize that roleplaying adventures could tell stories too.

Which is all to say that it's an entirely modern bias.

A Brief History of Adventure Game

Which brings me back to a topic that I've covered in two previous columns: adventure games. I previously discussed how Fantasy Flight Games is recreating the genre (in part 1) and how card games have also advanced the genre (in part 2). This week I want to talk about a second major player in the genre, Atlas Games, but first I want to finish up that history of the genre that began with those early roleplaying games.

Adventure games have generally been very closely tied to the RPG genre. Dungeon! (TSR, 1975) was one of the earliest examples and it really wasn't that different from the Dungeons & Dragon game which had released the previous year. Both allowed the play of individual characters whose main purpose in life was to wander a dungeon and kill monsters, and neither was really that much about roleplaying. Magic Realm (Avalon Hill, 1978) was another game that tried to be a board-based roleplaying game. Afterward the adventure game genre cooled down a bit, and a pen-and-paper model of roleplaying started to dominate.

There was a lot of experimentation in the 1970s and early 1980s, but the previous hey-day of the adventure game really ran from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s.

Talisman (Games Workshop, 1983-2003) used a similar model to those other early adventure games. Players each played a specific character over the course of a game and tried their best to meet their goal--arriving at the center of the board. It's main difference from an early Dungeon or Magic Realm was that it was massively supported. New characters and boards kept the game lively up through 1988, then the game enjoyed a brief resurgence with a new edition and a few supplements in 1993. A few years ago Games Workshop released a grossly overpriced fourth edition, then promptly announced that they were done with the line.

Arkham Horror (Chaosium, 1984) wasn't well supported at all, but it continued the trend of early games like Dungeon and Arkham Horror by explicit connections to an actual roleplaying game (here, Call of Cthulhu). We again see the ties between RPGs and adventure games, because Richard Launius was genuinely trying to produce a board game version of Chaosium's horror RPG.

HeroQuest (Milton Bradley, 1989-1993) was the other hit adventure game of the previous golden age. It offered the closest simulation yet of an RPG, with a gamemaster who laid out rooms in accordance with a scenario and individual characters who could actually improve from adventure to adventure (by collecting money, then improving their lot with better items). Several supplements each offered new "adventures".

Since the demise of the two major 1980-1990 adventure game lines, the genre has been pretty empty. We've had the near-adventure card games that I mentioned in my previous article, plus many others like Munchkin (Steve Jackson Games, 2001). Foreign publishers have gotten in on the genre with games of various sorts from Return of the Heroes (Pegasus, 2001) to Candamir (Kosmos, 2004)

But there's nothing truly notable until you come to 2003 & 2004. In 2004 FFG really kicked off a new era of adventure games with their first Runebound (FFG, 2004) and their Doom (FFG, 2004) boardgame. But the year before that another strong adventure game would appear, and one that was uniquely a card game: Dungeoneer (Citizen Games, 2003). The result has been another golden age of adventure games, with continued and well-supported releases from FFG and a whole new set of Dungeoneer boxes from their second publisher, Atlas Games.

So, adventure games have a long, though sporadic history. One of the really striking aspects of adventure games is how closely they match the aesthetics of early RPGs. Just like the original D&D (and that early Dungeon!) they continue to be about storming through some mapped lairs and improving the abilities of your characters while killing stuff.

On the flip side, adventure games haven't really grown a lot since their debut almost 30 years ago. HeroQuest's style of gamemaster-based gaming was a big innovation as was their idea of a continuing campaign. Though some of the modern FFG games use gamemasters, the idea of campaigns seems to have largely been lost.

Though it hasn't yet reached its full potential, I think that Atlas' Dungeoneer is another adventure game which offers the opportunity to stretch the boundaries of the genre.

Dungeoneer: Quest for the RPG

Dungeoneer is uniquely a card game that's also a true adventure game (unlike all the pseudo-adventure card games that I discussed last time). You use some of the cards to lay out an actual map of a dungeon (or wilderness), then explore that dungeon with characters, avoiding tricks and traps and trying to pick up items and complete quests along the way.

One of the flaws with having a dungeon master in adventure games is ultimately that one player tends to have less fun or more responsibility (depending on how you measure such things). Dungeoneer does away with that by effectively having everyone be the dungeonmaster. Each player gets to sick monsters and bad events upon the other players depending on how much peril those players have collected. Likewise each player gets to participate in laying out the map for the dungeon/wilderness by laying down a card on his turn.

The most unique element of Dungeoneer (and the place where it can outpace some of the adventure board games) is that over a half dozen card sets have been published for it, and they're all compatible to various degrees. You can mix multiple dungeons together without problem. You can use wilderness and dungeon decks in parallel. (Each wilderness deck has numerous "portal" cards which can lead to dungeons.) Only the newest deck, "epic dungeoneer" is a little less compatible because it offers an adventure at a different level (levels 4-7 rather than 1-4).

The result is an always variable adventure game that can be fine-tuned for the exact adventure that you want.

I've said elsewhere that I think that adventure games miss a few notable elements of RPGs, namely: roleplaying, storytelling, and campaigns. Though Dungeoneer doesn't yet support them, I think the current system is versatile that it could expand to include them.

1. Roleplaying

This is the hardest element to include any official support for. The main problem is that a board game is, out of necessity, entirely objective. Conversely roleplaying is entirely subjective. It takes an unbiased observer (the gamemaster) to determine the success of roleplaying in RPGs, and the model for adventure game gamemasters thus far has mainly put them in the role of biased participant.

Thus I don't see much opportunity for true roleplaying in adventure games except as a natural outgrowth of the game's theming and color, and therefore a side dish rather than a main course. Dungeoneer does have decent theming and color, but so do most other adventure games. Though its tightly concentrated card decks, Dungeoneer might get a slight leg up, but not much.

2. Storytelling

Likewise storytelling is a somewhat hard sell in adventure games. The only way to really accomplish it is through a coherent story told via the game components--which Dungeoneer provides.

However, one of the advantages of a totally modular system of the sort that you find in a card game design is that you can always mix and match cards as you see fit. Thus a player could, if he wanted, create an arbitrary mix of cards which told the precise story he wanted. The most recent release, Epic Dungeoneer: Call of the Lich Lord also showed how to extend this card-based storytelling by including certain quests and monsters which are laid out at the start of the game, and through an "event" which has a permanent effect upon the game until it's resolved.

Fixing cards doesn't require any new components. Likewise, writing an event that takes place doesn't actually require a card to do so. You could write it on a piece of paper. Thus, it'd be pretty easy for a player to create some unique stories with the cards of Dungeoneer.

Which leads me to another idea that I've discussed before: scenarios. Atlas Games could easily release a set of scenarios for Dungeoneer as a gaming book. Each scenario would require one or more decks of cards to play, and might be composed specific cards from those decks. More importantly each scenario would have special events and special quests which existed only in that scenario writeup and which would have various notable effects upon the game.

3. Campaigns

The idea of campaign adventure games, where players use the same characters over multiple games, has only been well-explored by HeroQuest. However, Dungeoneer is tantalizing close to this ideal. Especially as I look at the new Epic adventure, I consider ways in which a player might raise his character all the way up from level 1-7 (or 1-10 when Legendary Dungeoneer) is released.

Here's one method I envision.

Each game is played as a competition, but players don't actually increase their levels during the game. (They just collect their quests, and use those as victory markers.) So, you play a level 1 game, then a level 2 game, etc. Each time, you still have to complete three quests, and whoever does so first is considered the "winner" of the game. At the end of the game each player marks down a number of items & traits that they had at the end of the game (probably a number equal to the level of the game they played or maybe half the level). When the next game starts they get to keep those items & traits.

Thus, you get a campaign of 10 games (by the time Legendary Dungeoneer comes out), with continuity of character and slowly increasing power throughout the campaign. Each week you play in a different wilderness or dungeon (probably iterating from one to the other, to represent the traversal of geography).

Here's another method I envision:

Players set out a huge map with a wilderness and three linked dungeons (for heroic, epic, and legendary levels). The wilderness also has global quests for all the levels of play, so that at any point a player can choose to try and complete wilderness adventures or else dive into the appropriate dungeon. You make sure to keep the decks for each locale separate, to preserve the feel of each dungeon.

Players thus level up from 1-10, through a massive interlinking set of plays.

The downside of this is that it'd be a very long game. A Dungeoneer game can last 1-3 hours, with Epic seeming to go a bit faster than the original. If that power curve continues, you're probably talking 5-8 hours for a full 10-level Dungeoneer game, plus a massive amount of table space.

But, it's possible. And if you could figure out ways to preserve your state (say with special electrostat boards which could maintain the layout of a set of cards even when put away), this would become much more reasonable timewise.

Given that there's only one Epic game out thus far, and no Legendary decks, this is all a flight of fancy, but I think it's a good one, and I look forward to see how it evolves officially in the future.

Conclusion

Adventure games have a long history, but they haven't grown as much as they could have over that timespan. I think that Dungeoneer if well-expanded and developed, shows part of the potential of the gameplay style, and it's something that I hope will continue to grow.

Adventure Games, Part Two: In the Cards

Last month I posted an article about Fantasy Flight Games and their recent emphasis on adventure games. However, the adventure gaming genre is a lot bigger than just Fantasy Flight. As I mentioned in that article, the genre has been around for a while, with classics like Milton Bradley's HeroQuest and GW's Talisman. I missed out on Candamir, but it's clearly a German entrant to the genre.

And, the adventure gaming genre is a lot bigger than just board games too. There have been a ton of card games that meet some or all of the criteria of the adventure game genre. This week I'm going to concentrate on a lot of also-rans, or not-quite-adventure card games, that nonetheless meet a lot of the criteria of the genre. Then in a couple of weeks I'm going to return with a third article in this series, covering a card game that's just as much an adventure game as Runebound or Arkham Horror, and that's Atlas Games' Dungeoneer.

Before I get going, I'll offer a reminder of my basic definition of adventure games: they're board and card games built on the same model as roleplaying games. They center on characters, and tend to have two core mechanics: a model for character description and a task resolution system. Inevitably, one of the basic tasks tends to be combat (though that's not a requirement). Most adventure games also have you controlling a single adventurer and completing quests, but that can vary, and some of these near-miss adventure card games clearly show alternatives.

The Near Misses

Following are a set of four card games that almost meet the definition of adventure card games. Though they don't entirely meet my definition, they nonetheless have some interesting characteristics that true adventure games might learn from.

Illuminati (1983). In the last couple of years we've seen products like Candamir and Return of the Heroes, but for the most part, adventure games have been an Anglo-American phenomenon. That's not too much of a surprise, given that they've generally been published by roleplaying publishers, a genre of publishing that blossomed in the US.

Illuminati offers is a fine early example of a near-adventure game by a U.S. RPG publisher (Steve Jackson Games). It shares some a few characteristics with full-fledged adventure games, but deviates pretty widely in the details. Instead of characters you have organizations, but like adventure-game characters, they're entirely unique. Each organization is defined by a few basic characteristics--power and income--and each has a special power too, which is another common element in adventure characters.

There isn't a full-fledged task system, but the game system does include a few different tasks (taking controls of groups and destroying them) which use the same basic mechanisms, and which include various modifiers to a die roll, typically based on characteristics, just like an adventure game does.

So, this is pretty far from an adventure game, but it also is an interesting early ancestor. And, it's been built on itself, with variants including Hacker (1992) and Illuminati: New World Order (1995).

You could find a lot of other early games which include some of these same characteristics, but from here I'm going to jump straight on to some more recent cards games which are much closer to the genre.

Portable Adventures (2002). There's a distinct subset of adventure games where, instead of controlling a singular adventurer, you instead control a whole party of adventurers. This is one of them (along with cousin game, Battle of the Bands). I think controlling a party puts you further from the adventuring ideal, because you don't get the same feeling of personal connection with someone that you're playing, but they still have similar mechanisms.

Conversely, Portable Adventures use an entirely common adventure-game mechanic for victory: you complete quests, and those quests give you victory points, and those victory points eventually give you the game.

However, the Portable Adventures are weak in my core definition of adventure games. The characters aren't well modeled: each just has a value and a special power, nothing complex. Likewise, the task resolution system is very weak. It's only used for completing adventure, and you just add up character values, with a single chance to roll a die and take out some opposing characters.

One of the neat aspects of Portable Adventures is that they're multigenre. There are two of them, Lair of the Rat-King and 8th Grade and they're totally compatible. This points to one of the advantages that adventure card games offer over adventure board games: they're much easier to expand; the Portable Adventures show a really wacky and expansive way to do so.

Camelot Legends (2004). Camelot Legends is another game in the precise same mold as Portable Adventures. You have a group of characters and you send them around trying to complete quests and gain victory points.

The difference is that Camelot Legends has much more thorough modeling. Each character has a full six different attributes, plus a special ability. Now the attributes are functionally identical, they just affect different quests (and potentially different characters). However having those differentiations gives that much more individuality to the characters. (If anything the characters are actually too diffentiated. With each player having a small party of characters it's pretty hard to keep track of who can do what, a danger of the multi-character adventure game.)

The task system is entirely one-dimensional and simple, much like that in Portable Adventures. Each quest has a target number and you have to add up the values of the appropriate attributes for your character to meet it.

One of the other game elements found in Camelot Legends is that it has locations, sort of. There are initially three different places in the game, marked by cardstock sheets, and more can appear. Each character is at one of these locations at any time, and can (abstractly) move between them on his turn.

I'm not certain that locations are entirely necessary for a true adventure game, but they certain add a lot to the experience.

Im Auftrag des Konigs (2004). In recent years there have been some European adventure games, including Candamir and Return of the Heroes, they're just rarer than their Anglo-American brehtren. This German Arthurian card game came out the same year as the American Camelot Legends and is striking for how different it is.

Really, Im Auftrag des Konigs is a role/action system that's somewhat like more recent games such as Antike and Siena where the action roles are located on a roundel that you have to move around. Here, much as in Siena, the roundel represents locations, here 8 total. There's a Camelot location where you can do Camelot actions and a number of wilderness locations where you can take on certain quests.

Each player plays a "knight", but there's actually no difference between them. That's an attribute shared by another German adventure game I mentioned, Candamir. The European adventure games haven't really caught on to the idea of widely differentiated characters. You can train your characters in Auftrag, but it provides cards rather than any actual intrinsic gainm, another difference from more Anglo-American games.

It's mainly the theming that makes me thing of Auftrag as an almost adventure game, but the quest system helps. One of the ways you get victory points is through quests. You satisfy them by going to a certain location and having certain values, but here it's the values of cards rather than the values of characters. And that gives you victory points.

I suppose you could see Auftrag as a hybrid Euro/adventure game.

My Reviews: Camelot Legends (B-), Im Auftrag des Konigs (B), Portable Adventures (B)

Charting It Out

With all that said, what characteristics do these various pseudo-adventure games have, what characteristics do they lack, and what interesting elements do they offer to the genre? I have, of course, created a chart to detail this:

	Illuminati	Portable Adventures	Camelot Legends	Auftrag
Stats	Power (attack). Resistance (defense). Income.	Character Points.	Combat. Diplomacy. Adventure. Cunning. Chivalry. Psyche.	Strength. Skill. Courage. Wisdom.
Equipment	No.	Cards.	No.	No.
Board	Abstract network.	No.	Abstract Cards.	Circle of Cards.
Movement	No.	No.	Abstract.	Move around circle based on horse card selected.
Victory	Create a network.	7 Adventure points from "quests".	Most victory points from quests.	Most points from quests, court, and tournaments.
Unique Systems	Characters are actually organizations. Core tasks aren't simple combat, but have more nuances.	Multiple genres that can be combined. Many cards have two values for rightside up and upside down, an easy method for character fatigue.	Characteristics differentiated only by tasks they affect, not what they do. Characters differentiated by notable, "take-that" type powers.	Very German. Characters take communal "roles" for actions. Skills modeled as expendable cards rather than permanent gains.

Conclusion

One of the most interesting reasons to look at not-quite adventure games like this is that they aren't stuck in the standard molds, and thus they show how the adventure game could grow and expand themselves. I'd love to see more full adventure games with German mechanics like those in Im Auftrag des Konigs, for example, or to put more thought into different sorts of tasks, like Illuminati offers.

And that's it for card-based adventure games this week. In two or three weeks I'll be back with Atlas and Dungeoneer. Next week, however, I'm going on vacation (all I ever wanted). I'll see you then.

Fantasy Flight's Adventure Games & That Old Time Roleplaying

Last month I chanced into a game of World of Warcraft: The Board Game. It's really not the sort of thing I usually play with my various board game groups, if for no other reason, gamelength, but it's the exact sort of game my roleplaying group likes to play if we're not roleplaying on a particular day. We've actually played a number of Fantasy Flight games in that group. Besides World of Warcraft there's also been Runebound and Arkham Horror.

On my first game of World of Warcraft I was struck not only by its similarities to the other two Fantasy Flight Games we'd recently played, but also its differences. At first I thought that FFG might just be retreading these same ideas, but then I realized that something different was going on ... Fantasy Flight is actually creating a whole new subgenre of board games: adventure games. Granted, we've had these adventure games around for a while. Arkham Horror was originally published in 1984, and it shortly followed on the heels of another adventure game classic, Talisman (1983). The same era would later see Milton Bradley's HeroQuest (1989). However, with one publisher now putting out so many games, there's an opportunity for something new.

Adventure games have always been board-based role-playing games. Each player has a character that he slowly improves through play. Monsters appear either randomly or as part of a predetermined layout and by fighting them players get loot and experience. Most of the games, unlike traditional RPGs, don't require a gamemaster, with HeroQuest being a notable exception.

Fantasy Flight is acting differently than the 1980s adventure-game publishers by putting out a whole line of these games. Each of Arkham Horror, Runebound, and World of Warcraft is a very different game, with different mechanics and different designers, and thus they together form a central spine for Fantasy Flight's entry to this new genre. Arkham Horror is the classic, originally designed by Richard Launius and then revamped by FFG's Kevin Wilson; Runebound is a Martin Wallace design, refined by Darrell Hardy; and World of Warcraft is a Christian T. Petersen original (based, of course, on the MMORPG).

(Doom: the Boardgame and Descent, by Kevin Wilson, meanwhile, push the old gamemaster v. the players design. Since I haven't played them, and they offer a slightly different gameplay methodology, I've kept them out of this article. Really, it's mainly because I haven't played them.)

Fantasy Flight is supporting the heck out of these titles with one World of Warcraft supplement, two Arkham Horror supplements, and four-hundred and eighty-three Runebound supplements scheduled for this year alone. If they work out, I think we may be seeing the blossoming of a whole new subgenre of gaming, which will doubtless be expanded upon by Fantasy Flight and replicated by other publishers.

My Reviews: Arkham Horror (A), Runebound (B+), World of Warcraft (A-)

Difference & Similarities

What I find intriguing about this new wave of Fantasy Flight games is how they're similar and different, together showing some of the possibilities of this potential new genre of gaming.

	Arkham Horror	Runebound	World of Warcraft
Counters	Stamina. Sanity.	Life. Stamina.	Health. Energy.
Combat Stats	Fight.	Mind. Ranged Damage. Body. Melee Damage. Spirit. Magic Damage.	Ranged (blue). Melee (red). Defensive (green). Reroll. Attrition.
Other Stats	Speed. Sneak. Will. Lore. Luck.	Various skills.	None.
Equipment	Lots of types. Can be found, bought, or sold.	Lots of types. Can be found, bought, or sold.	Lots of types. Can be found, bought, or sold. Private powers work like individual items.
Experience	None other than Clues and very occasional Skill card bonuses.	Gain XP to improve Mindy, Body, Spirit, Stamina, or Life.	Gain XP to "level up", improving Health and Energy, granting a new talent, and giving access to new equipment.
Skill Resolution	Roll a number of 6-sided dice equal to stat. Each 5 or 6 is a success. Usually only one success is required. Clue tokens can give bonus rolls.	Roll 2d10, adding Mind, Body, or Spirit, and optionally a skill. Equal or exceed a target number.	None except combat.
Monster Creation	Event cards create new monsters in certain spaces each turn--and move them.	Adventure counters mark spaces where monsters can be found.	Quest cards place monsters on specific spaces on the board.
Combat	A Fight skill test, adding in Combat items, and subtracting the monster's difficulty. 1-4 successes may be required, else the monster does damage and combat continues.	A sequence of three skill tests: mind, body, and spirit, some of which are offensive and some of which are defensive. Failures result in the monster doing damage.	A complicated system involving rolling a handful of blue, green, and red 8-sided dice, with successes exceeding a "threat" target number from 4-8. Successful blue dice take effect immediately, and if the opponent isn't dead yet, its "attack" stat faces off against red and green dice, possibly doing damage. Successful red dice and attrition are then moved up into the damage box. If they plus the blue dice exceed a monster's health, it's dead, else they're saved for the next round.
Movement	Move your Speed in spaces each turn.	Roll dice to move each turn.	Move 2 spaces as an action.
Events	Each turn a new event is drawn.	Events are mixed into the encounter deck.	On some turns a new event is drawn.
Teams	Everyone versus the game. Destroy the Big Bad.	Everyone for himself. Destroy the Big Bad first.	Two teams compete. Destroy the Big Bad first.
Unique Systems	Sanity system allows monsters to drive characters insane. Stats can be increased or decreased with "focus".	Movement dice show terrains that can be moved into.	Wars and bounties encourage interplayer combat.

As an old roleplayer, I'm particularly struck by how close these new adventure games reflect older roleplaying games. They don't have the same depth of original storytelling, clearly, but in mechanical form they match my basic definition of roleplaying games: they feature modeled characters and skill resolution systems. Further, there's some depth and careful design evidenced in both. Given that Fantasy Flight is a roleplaying company that's moving much more toward board and card games, I have to wonder if they see this as an evolutionary step.

However, these new adventure games still miss at least two major aspects of roleplaying game. One, as already mentioned, is the idea of original storytelling. Runebound, Arkham Horror, and World of Warcraft can all show off theming of various depths, but they're still missing stories that can involve you and can touch your heart. However, I doubt an adventure boardgame will ever be able to accomplish this aspect of gaming without either human or computer oversight.

Another missing factor which is within the grasp of adventure gaming is the idea of a campaign, where you can play the same characters from adventure to adventure, improving them as you go. The old Milton Bradley game HeroQuest did this. Atlas Games meanwhile is trying this concept out with their new Epic Dungeoneer, which allows you to transfer your old characters up to the next level.

Whether it'll become a possibility in some future Fantasy Flight adventure game is an open question.

Conclusion

It's always the hardest to see trends when you're still on their leading edge. However, I think we might be seeing a new one with the blossoming of adventure games at Fantasy Flight Games. By looking at their various releases we can see there's a lot of opportunity for variety and thus for growth in this new niche gaming. Whether they can eventually match more of the gameplay of RPGs, with real storytelling and campaigns remains a question for the future.