Illuminating Games

2011 – The Year in Hobby Games, Part III: Wargames

2012-01-29T17:25:00.000-08:00

Trying to take the pulse of the wargame zeitgeist once a year, while entertaining to try to do, may not be the most productive use of time.

For one, it’s a small market. There are only a few publishers who reliably publish a few games a year (GMT, MMP, Columbia) supplemented by a wide variety of players that range from inconsistent to not-yet-proven to low-volume single-man operations (OSG, Academy Games, Compass, L2, Clash of Arms, and Simmons being a few that I buy from occasionally). While what to me seems a rather surprising number of wargames get published each year, a lot of it is clearly game-designing/publishing-as-hobby or labor-of-love type stuff.

Secondly, wargame companies have tried pretty hard, with significant success, to isolate themselves from the brunt of market forces. The widespread use of pre-order systems (as pioneered by GMT with P500) has allowed publishers to make a lot of games, but also to offload a lot of downside risk, with all the moral hazard associated with that. While GMT has been a great asset to the hobby, producing many games of very high quality, at the same time they’ve also been the poster child for preorder funding gone wrong, churning out a shocking amount of absolute dreck – games that aspire to be as good as Fantasy Flight’s biggest misfires. Far too many of their games still have an underdeveloped, unfinished feel.

Two years ago, I was pretty depressed about the state of wargames. GMT had just gone through a bad patch of printing a bunch of junk (PQ-17, Pursuit of Glory, 1805: Sea of Glory, Fields of Fire), MMP had recently published The Devil’s Cauldron with its interesting system married to a spectacularly bad rulebook and set of scenarios, Columbia was coming off the badly underdeveloped Athens & Sparta, and outside of ASL things were looking really grim for medium-to-high end wargames.

Then within two years, we’re getting Sekigahara, No Retreat! The Russian Front, Breakthrough: Cambrai, Battle Above the Clouds, Normandy ’44, and Bataan!, just to pick a few recent top-tier type games. So I’m out of the “where are we now” business. I’ll take what I can get.

My game of the year for wargames has got to be Sekigahara. I have a review on my blog here, cross-posted to BoardGameGeek here. It’s by far my most-played wargame (almost my most-played game of any kind in fact), has been well-received by everyone I’ve played it with, and is a brilliant game design by any standard. It has what’s been missing from the vast majority of eurogames of late: attention to detail and real artfulness. There are still a couple rough bits – Tokugawa may be favored significantly until you find the rhythm of the game and slightly after that, and it doesn’t seem to have quite as much range as one might, ideally, like. Still, it’s one of the most striking wargame designs in many years.

Let’s not stop there, though. There was a lot of good stuff this year, including many games that are playable in an evening and have 12 pages of rules or thereabouts.

No Retreat! The Russian Front is easy to underestimate both because it’s not that novel, system-wise, and because of its Victory Point Games heritage. It’s a really terrific, compact game that packs a lot of punch though, and like Sekigahara it gets a top recommendation from me. I think the key thing that I like about it is how well the card deck seems to have been designed. The capabilities of the events provide uncertainty, tension, and the occasional nasty surprise without being generally overbearing – all of which give the game some drama and make it a lot more than just a chit-pusher. Skip the always-uninteresting ’41 game and start with the short ’42 and ’43 scenarios, which are great and highly playable. I’ve played over a dozen times, had a ton of fun, and am yet to attempt a full-on game. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the GMT version has an unfortunate and unreasonable amount of errata, and you’ll need to get updated rules and play books from GMT’s site, as well as make a note of one card (General Mud) with an unfortunate mis-wording. Yeah, I wish they had done a better job and normally this would be a huge red flag. In this case, though, No Retreat! still plays very well and I hope later entries in the series will jump from VPG to GMT and get professional treatment.

Breakthrough: Cambrai is the latest entry in the area-impulse game genre from Mike Rinella, the current torch-bearer for this system. I like Mike’s games and am a fan of both Monty’s Gamble: Market Garden and Shifting Sands, even though both have a couple minor rough edges. Breakthrough: Cambrai feels like his best effort yet. It plays quickly, in 3 hours or less, and gives a really good feel for late-WWI-era battles, which feature a strange alchemy of lightning blows which rapidly gain a lot of inertia. The British player has to know when to chip away and when to use the sledgehammer. The battle is undeniably a British show and the pressure is on them to win, but available local artillery means the Germans will actually do more counter-attacking here than they do in Breakout: Normandy, or the Soviets do in Turning Point: Stalingrad. There is a pretty nasty one-game learning curve on this one, the British may well not get much past the start line the first time, but after that games are tense and go to the wire. This is another top tier game.

Nightfighter is a niche game as it’s a game where one player moderates and one player plays. I like it because it sets out to do something interesting, capturing the flavor of the air war at night both in terms of a cat and mouse tactical game and its technological back-and-forth. It works, it’s fast-playing, it’s quite playable. I have a review here.

Conflict of Heroes: Price of Honour restored my confidence in this series. Like Commands & Colors (and unlike Squad Leader, ASL, or ASLSK), Conflict of Heroes has a somewhat narrow range of types of scenarios that are going to work. With limited turn counts and punishing system-level penalties for destroyed units in both gameplay (command points) and in victory points (dead trucks count the same as dead King Tigers), the force disparities, scenario sizes, and unit quality ranges have to work in a somewhat constrained design space. Which is fine, but you do have to live in that space, which in previous games the scenarios have not always done. Price of Honour seemed to me to do a better job and brought me back on board with the system.

Speaking of C&C, Commands & Colors: Napoleonics was a really nice addition to the system, if you can get past the horrible rulebook and terrible player aids. I like the force asymmetries (the French powerful in melee, the British at range), I like the variety of units, and the way it models combined arms is as good as anything. Like all the C&C games, though, it’s hugely dependent on well-designed scenarios, something that every C&C game ever published has struggled with. There is a limit to what you can do with the meeting-engagement victory-by-body-count format. If you live within that format, you’re fine. Try to break out and it’s a slippery slope to boredom, frustration, and the flea market. C&CN is good, but the second scenario – Rolica (French Second Position) – is truly terrible and if you just run through the scenarios in order you can get a pretty bad impression. The recent The Spanish Army expansion is good too and has new and better – but still not good – player aid cards.

L2 reissued Breakout: Normandy this year, and while the quality of the reprint isn’t as good as it could be, this is still one of the best wargames ever made and it’s great to have it back in print. I like that they added color-coding to the counters, but the huge footprint on the new map isn’t great and the plastic X’s for disruption seem a little cheesy. I think I still prefer my original Avalon Hill edition. The rule changes are fairly minor but all to the good, I think. I still wish there were scenarios starting in week 2 or 3, though. Unlike the games I've mentioned so far, Breakout: Normandy is meatier and probably takes 5-6 hours to play to conclusion.

War of 1812 is a fun, nicely-flavored Risk-derivative team wargame. It runs a touch long for what it is, and operations have a lot of inertia once they enter enemy territory (admittedly faithful to the history), so the risk of drawn games is non-trivial. But, it’s got well-done asymmetric sides and the team aspect works. Not likely a lot of staying power, but fun for what it is.

With all that, I still have a large to-play pile, and some of it I'm really optimistic about – particularly FAB: Sicily, Birth of a Legend, No Retreat 2, Rommel's War, Shenandoah Campaign, Strike of the Eagle, and The Last Success. There were also two new monsters that I'm actually going to try to play in 2012, Decision Games' Axis Empires: Totaler Krieg! and Dai Senso!. I rarely buy Decision's stuff, and don't have much room for real monster games like this anymore, but I got sucked into learning these games because of their intriguing take on allowing the early days of the war to develop in different ways, and because they seem to have found a good scale. There are red flags, but I hold out hope.

Of course, not everything that came out this year was great.

A Few Acres of Snow is a bubble game for me. It’s clever, and I like the concept of wedding the popular deck-building idea into a wargame as a planning/command-and-control engine. A Few Acres of Snow just hasn’t really grasped the limitations of deck-builders, which can have problems when decks either get too small, or too large with respect to the complexity of the actions they are required to perform. Once your empire gets too large, it gets much too hard to get things done, and conversely the game is vulnerable to deck-pruning strategies. It also doesn’t have much to say about the period. This is an idea that if further developed has promise. As it is though, it shares the unfinished feel of most of Wallace’s games, even with the major rules revision released late in 2011.

I was excited to try King Philip’s War after getting a lot of value out of the designer’s Hearts & Minds, but it couldn’t get traction like the previous game did. An obscure topic that isn’t cleanly presented, gameplay that was surprisingly static, and some odd gamey tactics all combined to sap the energy of the game. It was fun for a play or two but didn’t live up to hopes.

Piercing the Reich from Compass was an odd game. I kinda liked Red Storm Over the Reich but it was too large and there were some odd ways the various movement phases played out. I thought Piercing the Reich might find a sweeter spot with a system I found fundamentally interesting. But too much seemed out-of-kilter. The Germans field units of wildly varying quality in this campaign, but their good divisions (like Panzer Lehr) oddly lack any staying power. There is a bunch of clunky design-for-effect stuff like Monty’s Blind Spot that constrain the game. This whole campaign is one that is really fought on three different scales: tactical for the breakout from the beachhead, an operational race game to the German frontier, then a strategic supply-driven slugging match for the final battles. No game I’ve yet played has managed to put all three phases comfortably under one roof.

Case Yellow was classic Raicer: a couple clever game mechanics which neatly capture important bits of the campaign, weighed down by a hugely excessive playing time. This would have been fun at 3 hours or so, but at the easily 6+ it runs, not so much. When combined with Piercing the Reich and Stalin’s War, I think Raicer has finally burned through his stock of goodwill from Paths of Glory and Barbarossa to Berlin.

Space Empires 4X is a totally mystifying game. The designer has repeatedly said on various forums that he understood the problems this genre of games has (do I really need to list them all again?), and then proceeds to design a game which still clearly has all those problems. This is a frustratingly bad game because it it seems like it just couldn't have been played outside of the designer’s game group, seems to have never really been in front of a critical audience. Tediously long, painful bookkeeping (which is also hidden and unverifiable), attritional combat that leads to endless indecisive slugathons, inability to accomplish anything ... I really wanted to like it and gave it every chance to work, but it just doesn’t at a fairly basic level. Everyone I played it with was even less charitable than I. There is absolutely no reason to play this instead of Eclipse.

Fighting Formations will almost certainly appeal to you if you are a Combat Commander fan. I’m not, but it had a chance to suck me in, but it didn’t – the order system is too abstract for my tastes, and the game doesn’t really have anything to say about platoon-level combat that hasn’t been said.

Sun of York would be fun I think at half the game length. It’s very nicely evocative of period combat, but I just don’t think it offers the players much of anything in the way of interesting decisions. Given that, I think it needed to play quicker.

Looking Back

Looking back at my 2010 piece, I’m pretty happy with my picks. Normandy ’44 has probably gotten more table time than Battle Above the Clouds or Bataan, but I attribute that more to topical draw than game quality. Julius Caesar and Stronghold have retained their pull and held up well.

Hearts and Minds is an easy game to like but a tough game to love. I’ve played it in 2011 but the feeling of problematic pro-NVA balance persists. The game plays very well but it’s hard to resist the feeling of inevitable NVA victory, not just on the battlefield but also on the victory point track. I still like the game, but will try starting in later years if I play again.

The outlier is Labyrinth. Apparently it got 5 plays this year, not bad for a game that isn’t “current”. On the other hand, it hit a wall after that. I am still fond of the gameplay, which is interesting in a lot of ways. I am less fond of how it treats its theme. For example, preemptively invading Iraq is a really good idea for the US, almost a no-brainer. The more I played the game, the more I got the impression it was an ex post facto rationalization of US policies and not a nuanced view of a tricky topic or a game with anything of its own to say. Then, the Arab Spring fully revealed the game’s fundamental misunderstandings, consigning it to being more of a historical curiosity that tells us more about the people who created it than about the topic it covered. And yet ... it’s still an interesting game, mechanically and narratively. I still rate it pretty highly on BoardGameGeek. You just have to get past the theme.

Finally, from 2009, The Caucuses Campaign is still going strong, with another 5 plays this year.

Wrapping Up

I felt really positive about wargame releases this year. We didn’t get any great medium-heavyweights like we did in 2010, but in terms of highly playable games 2011 was terrific, and there are (as always) several rather promising games I haven’t even had a chance to try yet. If we’re lucky, maybe it’ll be a trend.

Intermezzo: RPGs in 2011

2012-01-06T14:54:00.000-08:00

This review of my role-playing experiences in 2011 will necessarily be of a different character than my boardgame wrapup, since my time for RPGs is so much smaller and I make no attempt, generally, to be on the cutting edge.

I got back into role-playing about 10 years ago with D&D 3.0, which quickly became 3.5, which became 4.0. The arc of my story is one of mounting frustration with D&D specifically and d20 more generally. The question I always had was, what exactly is this game doing for me?

D&D, as a game, emphasizes resource management, which boardgames do much better. And tactical combat, which again, boardgames do much better. And power-combo-seeking, ditto. What’s left? Narrative? Boardgames like Beowulf, Tigris & Euphrates and Lord of the Rings do this rather well too, in most cases far better than a run-of-the-mill D&D adventure does. We’re left not with anything concrete, only with this elusive idea of roleplaying, of immersing oneself in an alternate world and trying to vicariously experience it.

So I spent many years trying to figure this whole roleplaying thing out, what it was and how it was different, how it was supposed to be fun, and how you actually did it. The various treatises on the subject are surprisingly unhelpful, as are all the boilerplate “what is roleplaying” bits you routinely find at the beginning of sourcebooks. It seems that your GM (or Keeper, or DM, or whatever) has come up with a story, and you need to find some way to play your character in the story in a way that meshes with the GMs vision, without actually knowing what that vision is or where the story is going. You need to come up with motivations for your character that will feed the directions your GM expects you to take, without knowing what those are.

If you take the whole roleplaying thing seriously, it can be a bit frustrating.

This year, I finally got it. From where I stand, this entire genre is misleadingly named. It should not be called “roleplaying”. It should be called “collaborative storytelling”. Obviously we can’t change it now, after 30 years, that would be confusing, but I found that when I just flipped that switch in my brain and viewed the whole exercise from a slightly different perspective, everything about why this genre is different, fun, and worthwhile clicked. Roleplaying can obviously be a large and fun part of collaborative storytelling, but it’s not primarily why we’re here and – interestingly – you don’t actually have to do any roleplaying at all for the whole genre of “roleplaying games” to work and be fun. You do need to do collaborative storytelling, however.

As always, the light came on only by running and playing in actual games. In this case the system was Kenneth Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu, built on Robin Laws’ GUMSHOE engine, and the adventures were from the excellent collections Out of Time and Stunning Eldritch Tales. The transition was rocky and I’m not sure if I’ve brought most of my fellow-players along, but for the first time in my many years of playing these games I feel like I’ve found a good spot and understand what’s going on and why the experience is interesting and different and worth playing in addition to my primary interest in boardgames.

GUMSHOE is confusing for many people I think because it is simultaneously very different from and very close to traditional RPGs. On the one hand, you can argue that systematically, the only difference between GUMSHOE and traditional RPGs like d20 or GURPS is a single die roll. In scenes where characters are pursuing the core activity of the system – solving mysteries – skill checks are automatically successful. That’s it. It’s a complete game-changer in practice though, because it makes the default expectation for core activities success rather than failure. Instead of thinking “I wonder what the difficulty level of that task should be”, the GM instead has to think “what information can I give them as a result of this course of action, and what are the consequences”. Instead of our first thought being about how the players’ ideas might be negated, we’re instead forced to think about how to move the narrative forward in a collaborative way. This is huge.

This of course opens up a whole set of ancillary questions for gamemasters: how to we encourage good, story-building ideas in our players? How do we set expectations, set tone, set parameters? These questions are not always easy to answer, but they are much more interesting, tractable, and amenable to reason than the frustratingly open-ended “how do I tell a good story in an RPG?”.

This brings me to my second discovery of the year, which is Graham Walmsley’s Play Unsafe, the best and most useful practical guide to good roleplaying (for both players and GMs) that I’ve come across. It’s a fast read – I finished the whole thing in a couple hours – and provides concrete and useful tips that anyone can pick up and put to use right away. The key insight here is that the techniques we should be drawing on for inspiration in our roleplaying are not from acting or narrative writing but are the skills and ideas of improv theatre. Once it’s properly explained it’s so obvious that one wonders how the hobby got this far without figuring this out and using it as the foundation for everything we do. The old and often-repeated conceit that the characters play in a world created and described by the GM is seductive but, I’ve come to understand, fundamentally misleading. In actual practice, the GM brings his or her idea of the story to the table, and perhaps it is the dominant one, but unless your GM is master-level everyone present is going to have in their minds a different idea of what the world is like, different ideas of the flavor of the story and how it will proceed. A good roleplaying experience will take these different ideas, weave together the good bits, and tell an interesting story. The best, perhaps only, way to do this is via the techniques of improv.

Bring these ideas together, and you’ve got an understandable, practical, working structure for how to really make RPGs fly. Two more pieces would help fill in the details and round out 2011 for me.

The first was Robin Laws’ book Hamlet’s Hit Points, which I wrote about at some length in August. I won’t say much more about it here – you can go back and read the piece, if you want – except to mention how clearly things clicked into place as I read it. Because of my background in music and music theory, I recognized immediately and correlated the technique of cycles of hope and fear, or tension and resolution. It was also clear how these same techniques were used in boardgames. Again, the default literary tendencies of my RPG creations were running up against the collaborative reality of how RPGs actually work, producing bad results. I needed to be much more adaptable and sensitive to story beats. Actually integrating the lessons of Hamlet’s Hit Points into my RPGs is what I’ll generously call a work-in-progress, but it was clear this was something to aspire to as part of a good roleplaying experience. It was also clear that the ethos of collaborative creation was the only practical way to accommodate it, and so GUMSHOE provided the structure in a way that traditional techniques did not.

The last thing I’ll mention from 2011 was Ashen Stars, the big new addition to the GUMSHOE family. The reason I am so excited about Ashen Stars is how it brings all this collective thought together and trains it on a game. We have the core GUMSHOE system, which is systematically based on this idea of collaboration which I have come to believe is absolutely core to fun roleplaying. The many useful, practical tips the book provides for players and GMs emphasize this. We have a backstory of a Star Trek-like universe fallen on hard times which is not only broadly accessible and incredibly creative, featuring fascinating species and a great mix of the familiar and unusual, but is also highly sensitive to the very specific needs of gaming. This is not just a cool or imaginative setting; this is a setting that is designed from the ground up to actually be gamed in. I love how the game prioritizes the practical details of interesting collaborative storytelling. The core activities are well-specified, with the tenor and tone of the game set within reasonable constraints the GM and players can work with. The character creation process has at its core a feedback loop which allows players and GM to negotiate the flavor of the game and how they will explore the world; this is key not just because it kicks off the process in a productive way, it also gives the players the important message that “hey, your ideas are important and you have a stake in the creation of this story”. I love the section on GM advice which gives specific, practical, actionable ideas that will easily have you up and writing good stories (and as an aside, these tips are extremely helpful for writing adventures of any kind – Kim and I have been using them for an Arcana Evolved adventure she’s working on and found them very useful). This whole thing is a terrific package which begs to be gamed, which hopefully I’ll have a chance to do in 2012.

So that’s the story of my total conversion to GUMSHOE as the most sensible solution to the practical problems of roleplaying, one that keeps the flavor of the stories we’ve come to love but allows you to actually game them. If, like me, you come from a long background of D&D, GURPS, Traveller, or even Call of Cthulhu, the conversion process may involve pain. Trust me, it’s worth it.

2011 – The Year in Hobby Games, Part I: Boardgames

2012-01-05T17:42:00.000-08:00

I’m going to break down my 2011 retrospective into 3 parts, the easier to fit in a blog and to deal with the three different market categories of hobby games: boardgames, RPGs, and wargames. On to boardgames ...

In years past – in fact for as long as I’ve been writing about games, over 15 years – I’ve been generally upbeat about the state of hobby boardgaming. This year is the first time I have ever felt fundamental disquiet about the broad direction in which things are heading, at least from the point of view of the sorts of games I like. I think there are a few reasons.

First, obviously, is the slow exit of Reiner Knizia, Klaus Teuber, and Wolfgang Kramer from the scene. Knizia is still doing a few games, but I count only one hobbyist’s game in his 2011 releases, Star Trek: Expeditions (a typically excellent design butchered by the WizKids production). He’s doing some great work on iOS games, but that space hasn’t quite developed yet into an alternative platform for hobbyist games. Teuber is limiting himself to a small amount of Catan-related output, which is fine – the remake of Rivals of Catan was very good – but even I, an absolute die-hard Catanophile, am willing to say the franchise is getting tired. Kramer had only the good but unremarkable Artus. In a hobby dominated by a cult of amateurism, these three seasoned professionals have been the go-to guys for good games that push the state-of-the-art for almost 20 years, and nobody as yet is stepping up to fill their shoes.

Secondly is the apparent implosion of Fantasy Flight, the most significant publisher of hobby boardgames designed and sold in America (other major US publishers in our segment like Rio Grande have very large percentages of their catalog made either in Europe or by European expertise; on the other hand, for Wizards of the Coast, boardgames are just a sideline). Fantasy Flight has always been a frustrating company for me, as in the past they’ve been able to routinely come up with good ideas and then routinely drop the ball on basic execution, but I kept hoping they’d learn to execute. This year, I flipped from hoping to writing them off. Their output is of course rather large – 2011 releases fill two pages of search results on BoardGameGeek – but everything I played this year was completely derivative and dire, well beyond even my jaded expectations of mediocrity. The Lord of the Rings Card Game is just an unimaginative retread of every other LCG they’ve done, devoid of thematic material and with major packaging problems. Mansion of Madness is a soulless dungeon crawl with tedious gameplay and painfully un-fun scenarios. Elder Sign is a confusing mess (subsequently ported to iOS/Android and made – almost unbelievably – even more incoherent). Rune Age is just every deck-building idea available thrown into a blender without any sense of taste or artistry, with predictably ugly results. These are not near-misses, or good ideas poorly executed. This is the result of someone playing at owning a game company. I am really not looking forward to seeing them mangle the Star Wars license.

Thirdly is the maturation of Kickstarter. I don’t like or dislike Kickstarter; it’s certainly the direction that things are going in general, and will benefit many. It’s hard for me to see the explosive growth of boardgame projects being pitched and receiving funding there as anything but a bad thing though, and potentially dangerous for our niche of the hobby in ways that are under-appreciated. Kickstarter can fill an important role, mitigating the risk of publishing narrow-audience or avant-guard games or helping establish companies that have a clear but untested vision. But we are already a boutique market that I believe cannot afford the pressures of a thriving vanity segment – a segment that was probably already too large before Kickstarter. The stuff that Kickstarter has funded so far has not been novel or risky. To the contrary, it’s been entirely derivative, conservative, and well-served by existing publishers, a veritable cornucopia of vanity projects. To the extent that Kickstarter is used to fund endless new worker placement or deck-building games, its sole function will be to offload risk from publishers to customers, and the primary risk being offloaded is that the publisher won’t do its job properly. What company in their right mind wouldn’t go for that deal? But what customer should? The result of this significant shift in risk and reduction of publisher “skin in the game” for generic eurogame projects is going to be invariably bad for customers, bad for professionals trying to earn a living, and bad for overall quality. GAMA should prove its value to customers by mandating a “funded by Kickstarter” box logo.

Look, I’ve been down this route. I’ve been a loyal GMT customer for almost 15 years, and this is how they do business. I can’t count how many times over that period I’ve wanted to get in my car, go down to Hanford, and throttle someone for producing a transparently dysfunctional game for which GMT bore comparatively little downside risk. I live with it only because despite the significant moral hazard it presents, I still believe it’s the only way that a variety of small-time, riskier games that I really want to own will get made. If you think I’m going to subject myself to this for some lightly-themed worker-placement or deck-building game, you’re sadly mistaken.

That’s a lot of doom and gloom, and to my mind, 2011 produced a shocking number of mediocre games. However, there are clearly still publishers and serious designers doing good work, albeit with varying degrees of consistency: Friedmann Friese and Martin Wallace serve their niche audiences well, even if those niches do not generally include me; Matt Leacock (as many of you know, a good friend of ours) has reached a lot of gamers and near-gamers with Pandemic and Forbidden Island; Uwe Rosenberg has had a rebirth as the designer of meaty euros; Phil Eklund at Sierra Madre seems to be really hitting his stride with High Frontier and Bios: Megafauna; Tom Lehmann has done great work with Race for the Galaxy; and Rob Daviau’s Risk: Legacy is one of the most fascinating new games of the last few years.

What it all adds up to though, for me, is a missing middle. Niches with specific and clear tastes seem to be well-served (of course, they aren't hard to design for). We have a fair number of highly-tactical, no-hidden-information, balance-is-for-suckers games for example, and RPG-crossovers who can supply their own narrative when the game fails to provide have a nice array of games to pick from. For those of us who like the traditional values of German games though, who want broadly accessible games of elegance and taste, and who value boardgames for their own unique expressive power and not just as an annex to some other art or as simply a vehicle to relive the joys of something else entirely, things seem to be getting squeezed.

At the end of the day, I have no pick for a hobbyist’s Game of the Year 2011. Sure, I could have picked something safe like Forbidden Island (robbed in the Spiel des Jahres, in my opinion: Qwirkle? Seriously?), Airlines: Europe or ... um. I like Quarriors quite a bit and ended up playing it a lot. Gnomes of Zavendor was quite good. Nightfall is a surprisingly impressive design. Star Trek: Expeditions would have been an easy pick if the graphic design hadn’t been so completely incompetent. Bios: Megafauna is pretty cool, if not as cool as High Frontier (but what could be?), but I haven’t had a chance to play it very much yet. But realistically, all these games are either too safe, too flawed, or in the case of Forbidden Island, a game I’m too personally close to (sorry Matt).

With all that Sturm und Drang done with, there were still a number of high-quality games this year. Here are my favorites:

My most-played new game was Quarriors, which is good fun despite production issues (hard-to-read dice and cards). It’s fast, it’s pretty simple, and it’s got enough variability to have some staying power. The balance is clearly not right – big creatures are too important while cheap creatures are rarely worth buying, and even beyond that several high-end creatures seem badly unbalanced – but fast-playing and exciting covers a lot of other sins. The first expansion (Rise of the Demons) has terrifically entertaining packaging but suffers from what seems like the first-expansion-curse of not very inspiring gameplay.

I was somewhat surprised, when checking my BGG stats, to see that Nightfall was one of my most-played games in 2011. I really like Nightfall, and I tried to break it out whenever I could, but very few people I played with stuck around for game 2 or 3. I think it’s an extremely clever design, with the chaining rules adding a very interesting layer of playing off of your opponent’s decks. It also works well in masking how many wounds people have and thus who is winning, a key aspect of these designs that has to work. Plus, it’s the first (and still only) truly novel post-Dominion deck-builder. At the end of the day, though, this is a king-of-the-hill, eviscerate-your-friends game, and as the people I play with get older this sort of thing is appreciated less. Like Thunderstone, Nightfall also suffered from a very uneven first expansion (Martial Law). The second expansion (Blood Country) seems better, but it’s recent and I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. Different numbers of players makes for a dramatically different game experiences here. Probably the best bet is 3 players. I like the chaotic, strung-out feel of 5, but I think it just takes too long if you’re not a committed fan.

Black Friday was a “gap” game, released (barely) in 2010 but getting a lot of play in 2011. It’s classic Friese – horrendous rules, fiddly setup, bad information communication, a lot of process, and if you screw up any of it even slightly the game easily goes off the rails in dire ways. Once you get it right though, this is a fun and flavorful game that is both an entertainingly cynical editorial and a good game of judging risks and timing markets. This idea has been tried so many times with so many unsatisfactory results, it’s cool to see it actually work. I think the game got hammered by bad early buzz due to its terrible rules, and I saw it being liquidated in various ways throughout the year which is a shame because this is one of Friese’s best offerings. He just desperately needs to outsource his rules-writing.

Bios: Megafuana was a late-year arrival that I’ve played a handful of times and only with 2 players, but I’ve been really impressed. It’s streamlined the somewhat ponderous American Megafauna down to a 1-2 hour game with almost no loss of detail at all. There are a lot of moving parts here, so it’ll be hard to say without a bit more play, but I’m very optimistic about this one.

Star Trek: Expeditions is a typically great Knizia cooperative game. As is so often the case, he gives us something that feels comfortable and yet is new in many ways, and also a game that nicely evokes the feel of the original series. There are two caveats, though. Firstly, the difficulty levels are not as well calibrated as they were in Lord of the Rings, to my mind. Cadet is really much too easy and will leave the game feeling flat. Captain is much better, but the tension will be over how well you score, not whether you succeed or not. Admiral level, on the other hand, is a very tight game which is hard to win and which I’ve enjoyed by far the most. The second and far more substantial caveat is that the graphic design and layout on this sucker is really hideous, worst I’ve seen in ages. Text is small, low-contrast, and unreadable, frequently making import decision-making information inaccessible. The clix are a bad solution to a non-problem and serve only to further obscure things. It’s actually kind of depressing. This is a very good game, one of my favorites of the year actually, but the presentation difficulties may be a backbreaker.

Ascension continues to grow on me with two excellent expansions, Return of the Fallen and Storm of Souls, aided and abetted by the best iOS implementation of a boardgame currently available.

51st State got a bunch of play and is another game that, while not without issues, has at its heart something interesting and novel. Much of the iconography is horribly confusing and the rules aren’t great, but the game still is very tight with Puerto Rico-like levels of early game tension as you try to get your fiefdom established and on the right side of the power curve. The choices between trade, conquest, and integration are always difficult. The game tension attenuates as the game goes on unfortunately, but still, this is a worthy addition to the San Juan/Glory to Rome/Race for the Galaxy family of games, if not exactly on par with those classics.

Gnomes of Zavandor is the latest addition to the Zavandor franchise, and while it doesn’t grab me quite as much as Mines of Zavandor did, this is still a tight, elegant, well-designed game that takes the core Zavandor ideas and presents them in a new light. I really disliked Outpost and was not that impressed by Scepter of Zavandor, but all of Phoenicia, Mines of Zavandor, and Gnomes of Zavandor have really hit the spot. If you want a traditional tightly-designed German game, this might be the best of the year.

Thunderstone continued on its roll, with several good expansion. The last one (Heart of Doom) was probably the best yet, but Dragonspire and Thornwood Siege were both great too. The base set and first expansion were, in retrospect, quite uneven but the game powered through for me by being novel and compelling in other ways. Fortunately things have tightened up, and new players should start with Dragonspire and skip the early expansions. There has recently been news that AEG intends to do something of a reboot of the franchise in early 2012, taking into account the things they’ve learned in the past 3 years, and I take that as a good sign for the future of the game. This is something Dominion is well past due for.

There isn’t a lot to say about Small World: Underground, other than it’s a worthy addition to the franchise. I’m continually surprised by Keyaert’s ability to add more interesting special powers to the game without too much duplication, given the huge number already out there. This is a little more fiddly than the classic game, and first-time players may find it more bewildering, but I quite liked it. The humor on the places and artifacts is a little tired and unthematic though.

Airlines: Europe is the latest iteration of Alan R. Moon’s Airlines/Union Pacific idea, and I think it’s substantially the best version. The added tension of managing cash makes the game more nuanced, and adds more incentives for incremental stock play which benefits the overall pacing and game tension. There are a few minor signs that the balance between the various conflicting forces might not quite be right, and like its ancestors it doesn’t scale all that well and really wants 5 players. Still, it’s one of my favorite of his designs. It hasn’t caught on much with people I’ve played it with though, and I’ll guess that it’s because Airlines: Europe is basically the same core idea and is the same game he’s been endlessly tweaking and re-tweaking since the original Airlines. That was in 1990.

Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon (Ravenloft actually being from 2010) surprised me by how much I liked them. Are they great games? No. They show Wizards' traditional looseness with rules-writing which is almost tolerable in RPGs but not great in boardgames – thankfully these are cooperative. Despite a general lack of imagination in the designs, they usually play in an hour or so, capture the feel of cheesy dungeon crawling D&D nicely, and are well-paced. I think Wrath of Ashardalon is the better game as it closes some gaps and generally feels tighter with better-managed threat. Given the number of horrible train wrecks in this category – Descent, Mansion of Madness – it’s nice to have one that basically works. I’m off the train though; I have no real urge to own The Legend of Drizzt.

Kingdom Builder is Donald X. Vaccarino’s latest post-Dominion effort, and it succeeds in bringing Dominion’s spot-the-combo hook to a short tactical positioning game. I’ve definitely enjoyed the game. I think, though, that it has the same flaw as Dominion: it embraces game imbalance as a design element. In a lot of instances there is going to be a single “broken combo” or key scoring element that you have to grasp immediately or you will lose, and often games are decided before the actual play has had much chance to develop. I think this idea of identifying interesting and powerful interactions is fundamentally appealing, but you can’t just throw out the idea of design balance like this if you want your game to live on. Powers and abilities should combine to reliably produce interesting games in interesting ways, and if they don’t – especially if the game is entirely front-loaded as Dominion and Kingdom Builder are – there will be trouble. Don’t get me wrong, this is a fun, light-ish game which I am still rather enjoying, but there is nothing fundamentally new here and it’s just not in the same league design-wise as Ascension or Thunderstone. I expect I will be done with it by the middle of 2012.

Eclipse is a late-year arrival that I’ve played only once but about which I am very optimistic, so you’ll probably see more on it on the blog in early 2012. It plays cleanly, at a good pace, with plenty of action, and seems to actually understand the reasons most games in this computer-to-board genre fail. I enjoyed this and am quite hopeful, but more play will decide.

I’ll close out with a brief retrospective on my 2010 article.

My Game of the Year pick for 2010 was High Frontier, and 2011 has done nothing but reinforce that as the right choice for me. I’ve logged 16 plays between the base game and the expansion, which is amazing for a game of its size and scope. This is a terrific game which, while it’s going to appeal to a somewhat more hard-core audience than most, is still remarkable for how elegantly it tackles its subject matter, how accessible it makes a complex topic, and how well it stands as a design.

Ascension stands out as a game that I didn’t really consider as game-of-the-year material at the time, but which has gone on to be played more than a lot of the other games on the list combined, and which I now consider a standard in my gaming collection.

Of the actual new games that came out in 2010, only these two – High Frontier and Ascension – have broken out to get regular repeat play.

Of the rest, the games that I have maintained enthusiasm for are The Hobbit, Take it Higher!, Mines of Zavandor, and Homesteaders.

On the other hand, Macao, Master Builder, and Railroad Barons are all gone from my collection after having failed to live up to hopes. Neither Master Builder nor Railroad Barons turned out to be very solid as games, and Macao was just boring. None were great picks in retrospect.

7 Wonders tanked, somewhat predictably. It was a fine game, but for me it was never going to achieve long-term staying power due to its inherent tension-management problems (too many high-stakes decisions made too early with too little information, too much tension draining out as too many endgame plays become automatic). The 7 Wonders: Leaders expansion was as good as could be expected and revived it briefly, but I expect it’s about done now.

I mentioned a few games that I hadn’t gotten to yet (Merkator, Poseidon, and Luna), all of which I have now played, but none made much of an impact.

So what’s the takeaway here? There were a fair number of good games this year, but I have real uncertainty about whether an important core niche I care deeply about – elegant, artful, accessible, and envelope-expanding boardgames – is going to continue to be productive. While I like High Frontier, Thundersone, and 51st State, it’s games like Settlers of Catan, Lost Cities, El Grande, and Modern Art that have been the key drivers in moving sophisticated boardgames from a geeky niche to a much more broadly accepted hobby. Importantly, these were all games that were designed for the geeky market segment originally, but because of their outstanding artfulness and quality, and because they pushed boundaries and in their own way told interesting stories, they jumped rails and went mainstream. We need designs of this form for our hobby to continue to thrive as it has for almost 20 years. I’m not declaring the form to be dead yet – Forbidden Island is certainly a worthy successor to those classics – but for the first time I have significant doubts.

Fortunately, I think that the way we tend to group games into boardgames, RPGs, and wargames is completely artificial. I don’t believe any of these traditional categories (and perhaps more importantly, market segments) of games are different in any fundamental way, and for me there were some pretty exciting developments in those areas in 2011 which compensated for the weakness I perceived in boardgames. Stay tuned!

Trail of Cthulhu: Playing Not So Quiet

2011-12-20T20:53:00.000-08:00

Pelgrane Press publishes quite a few very high-quality modules for Trail of Cthulhu, several of which are in the recent compilation Out of Time. The Black Drop is definitely the best Cthulhu adventure I've ever played in any system. But running these as one-offs presents certain difficulties, as does getting players up to speed with the style of Gumshoe. This piece is about my experience running one of the modules in Out of Time, Not So Quiet, both for my local players and at a local game convention. It's got my tips for running it and Trail of Cthulhu in general.

Needless to say, there are massive spoilers ahead for the module.

Here is the brief teaser for the module, copied from Pelgrane Press website: Bullet-ridden, bruised and bloody, the Investigators, soldiers and nurses in the Great War, are brought from the frontline to Military Hospital Number Five. Once the haze of morphine clears, they sense a brooding malevolence and they will soon realise there are worse things in this life than a bullet wound.

One of the biggest problems with running Cthulhu adventures is getting everyone on the same page with respect to style. People's RPG experience with the Cthulhu mythos runs a very wide range, from action-adventure thrillers to stark psychological nihilism. With one-shot modules, if players don't know what to expect, it's hard for them to know how to respond. It's terrific that Trail of Cthulhu supports a wide range of play styles, and has put some effort into defining "pulp" and "purist" both stylistically and mechanically. But players often need more. Not So Quiet is not really purist in the strict sense of the style, but is constrained (with only one real location, Military Hospital Number 5), psychological, and fairly dark. I would say it tends strongly towards purist. But when you tell a group of random convention players that a module is "purist" or "very pulpy", what some seem to hear is that it's "a little bit more purist/pulpy than what I'm used to", or "hmm, I wonder what purist means? Maybe I should ask? Nah, I guess I'll find out". The standard experience of Call of Cthulhu seems, in practice, to be well into Trail of Cthulhu's definition of Pulp, with boardgames like Arkham Horror or Mansions of Madness going further that way still. The more purist – and in my opinion much more authentic – Trail of Cthulhu modules are a rather different experience. Not So Quiet has very little action – it's easy to play through it without any action scenes at all – and the players are going to have to do some scary stuff and get hip-deep into the cult to succeed. I still haven't figured out a good way to strongly telegraph the style of the module without spoiling too much of it. I'm open to suggestions. Robin Laws recently wrote about the many disadvantages of premise concealment, so it may just be a matter of getting up in front of the players and saying "this module is darkly purist, has no built-in action scenes, and is going to require heavy use of your interpersonal skills". For one of these one-off modules, the messaging here is really important and I'm still figuring it out.

Along these same lines, supplied pre-generated characters with detailed backgrounds are often tricky. Both The Black Drop and Not So Quiet use them. In The Black Drop, the characters' backgrounds directly influence the story, which seems to be the default expectation of players. Chekov's Gun and all that: if my background says I want to visit Betsy Cove to make some astronomical observations, then trying to do that should drive the story forward. But Not So Quiet doesn't work this way. The players all have backstories that set them up to be in an emotional place to sympathize with the cult in the module. But none of the apparent plot devices are actual plot devices. This has really tripped up players I've played with. The Paul Remi player has inevitably spent a bunch of energy trying to track down his friend Paul LaFarge who went missing at the hospital, but there just isn't anything there in the module as written. And Hauptmann Ranaulf Keppel has always presented major problems. He's a downed German airman behind enemy lines trying to pass off as Canadian, and his player has always embraced this, spending time trying to keep a low profile, hoard supplies, or plot an escape – all of which can easily be counter-productive in terms of keeping the module moving in the right direction. His enemy-combatant status is entirely irrelevant to the story. Nobody is looking for him, and there is no chance he'll be found out unless he jumps up and down screaming "Ich bin Deutscher!". His background was really problematic even when I very explicitly told players up-front that they should let their backgrounds inform their characters' states of mind, but were flavor and not plot points in any way. If you have fewer than 6 players, I definitely recommend ditching Keppel. Otherwise, keep his game stats, drive (Ennui), and flavor but change his background. As written it's a completely irresistible time-sink. Paul Remi's background could also usefully be generalized to make his player less likely to get sidetracked.

The last big-picture issue I need to mention is the balance between gathering information via forensic investigation (looking for footprints, searching archives, testing chemical samples), and using your interpersonal skills to interview people of interest. The player advice section of the Trail of Cthulhu rulebook (largely common to all the Gumshoe games) mentions that many players prefer forensic investigations, and that you neglect personal interviews at your peril. That's great, but in one-shot modules or more casual play where people probably haven't read that, it's not much help. Plus, of course, groups have a preference to do what they find fun which may or may not necessarily be the easy or obvious way. In theory, Gumshoe as a system handles this by having a systemic bias for giving the players information if they have a plausible plan of action. It seems to me that Gumshoe modules should, as a matter of general principle, support multiple paths to important information so clues can come out either through library research or through talking to witnesses (say). Unfortunately this is not the case in Not So Quiet, and forensic investigation is going to dead-end very quickly. This is not to say that there aren't good reasons for this in this particular story; there are. But still. A lot of information exists only in the skulls of NPCs. If the players are to succeed, there simply is no option but to get out there and talk to people, figure out their background and motivations, and infiltrate the cult. So groups who haven't read the player tips section of the rulebook, aren't good at this stuff, or have a serious bias for forensic evidence are going to get quickly stymied. You can actually get something of a read on this pretty early. If the players strike up a conversation with, get some information out of, or show concern for "Cheery" Patterson in the very first scene for posted characters, that may be a good indicator that they'll "get" the module. If they ignore her or don't think she's important, get prepared to be much more aggressive about having your NPCs initiate the interactions with the players, and get ready to pull the trigger on some hard drivers. Don't overreact right away to one scene, of course – just start to prepare yourself.

Here are a few more tips to specific scenes in this module that I've picked up from running it a couple times:

The PCs are divided into two groups, posted and injured, and introduced in two separate scenes, one called Hate for the posted and a player-constructed flashback called The Last Thing You Remember for the injured. Hate is a good and purposeful scene, but the injured characters' introduction isn't providing an opportunity for the characters to bond. I'd suggest that instead of simply asking the players how they got injured, go with "how you got injured and ended up in the same ambulance with the other PCs" to let the injured characters both figure out their introductions and also come up with basic relationships. The module's splitting of the party into two groups at the outset is one of the more interesting elements of the module actually. I've told my players up-front that it's fine if the two player groups only come together late in the game. If that's the way they want to go though, they can't cordon off character knowledge from player knowledge as is the tradition to try to do in many RPGs. Don't duplicate the other half of the players' work because "that's what my character would do", or "my character doesn't know that yet"; use your player knowledge to choose something that both makes sense for your character and is interesting and supportive and moves the story forward. If the players are struggling with this somewhat unusual mode of play, don't mess around, throw the group together quickly.

The characters will almost certainly discover the outlines of the cult and the identities of several cult members basically right away, maybe 30-60 minutes into the game, in the Night Time Perambulations scene. This can be good or bad. If they use this as a stepping-off point to start talking to those people or otherwise figuring them out, that's great and the module will work the way it's intended. If they draw on their pulp experience to think of cultists as brainwashed zombies and immediately back off and start relying heavily on forensics, that's trouble. If so, you need to start throwing the interesting NPCs at them. Have them strike up casual conversations, be bunked next to them, whatever. Save one of the interesting and sympathetic NPC for the players to get to know before they find out he's a cultist. This may be hard; aggressive players willing pull rank may make take systematic and plausible methods to identify and quarantine all the current cultists, so you may have to go with a new recruit or someone just initiated who hasn't attended the ceremony yet. Almost anyone in the hospital could turn out to be a cultist retroactively. The PCs simply must find their way into the cult. That may require extreme measures, like introducing an NPC with a ret-conned backstory who knows one of PCs who tries to recruit him or her into the cult without any prompting. You need to be really adaptable here and prepared to wing it. It's very easy for the players to go off the grid, and keeping the story's flow going is much more challenging than usual because so much key information only exists inside various NPC's heads, and no amount of Chemistry, Art History, Forensic Accounting, or Library Use is really going to help.

In the Where is Pombal? scene, the Evidence Collection core clue should include some blood. This really bugged one of my players, that Pombal had his throat slit in his tent without there being any blood left behind. He had a point I felt.

In His Enthusiasm is Commendable, Dr. Watts is written as the red herring. I'd be flexible with this. As written he lacks the psychological profile of a cultist, but he's also been the one NPC my players have consistently found interesting enough to engage with, perhaps because he seems intriguingly crazy but obviously not a cultist. But he too could have a dark secret of some kind, perhaps a family member who is insane which drives his research, which might make him an additional access point to the cult if the players go that way. As an aside, there is a natural affinity between Watts and Keppel – Keppel has decent Electrical and Mechanical Repair to latch on to Watts or his equipment as a way to resolve his problems. This has some potential; I didn't figure out that was what the Keppel player was doing in one game until it was too late to work with it. But while it can be a fun roleplaying moment if it doesn't take too much time, and if Keppel (or another character) and Watts bond I think you could improvise a route into the cult there, ultimately this whole thing is a red herring as scripted so either activate it and hook it back into the mainline of the story, or don't let it get bogged down.

Throughout this, keep the player's drives at the ready. Another possible issue with the module is that since many of the characters are clearly and explicitly part of a military hierarchy, there is an obvious and entirely plausible option for them to try to get someone else to resolve their problems for them: report it to their superiors and get them to deal with it, or call in the military police. In the early stages, it's easy to rebuff this. It's a supernatural cult, after all, so you can go to the standard bored/uninterested authority figure. But as dead bodies pile up and military regulations are flagrantly broken, it gets harder and harder to keep things on track if the characters are insistent on following this honestly quite plausible path. Either you reflow the entire module, or the players are doomed to fail. As written it's possible to temporarily suppress the cult's activities by resorting to extreme measures via the chain of command. But this is not how these stories work, and from a practical story-telling point of view it's just not an interesting way to go. For the players to succeed, the cult needs to be stamped out, the only really good way to do that is through infiltration, and only the PCs are in a position to do that. As a consequence of all this, I really think you need to head anything off early, before the option even becomes established. If characters are faltering in their commitment to the cause, call hard drivers until they get the point: Ennui, Curiosity, Arrogance, and In The Blood on the pre-gens are all easy to work with. While ideally of course you'd prefer to not have to invoke the game mechanics associated with drives (other than to hand out stability points when players do the right thing and get into trouble on their own), you'll be far better off if you bring the hammer down earlier, at the first sign of issues, rather than waiting until after things have gotten well and truly derailed. If you're not sure how your players will react to the events, it'll pay to spend a little bit of effort ahead of time thinking about how you'll use the drives if players are not actively deputizing themselves to deal with the problem.

Despite the impression all this may give, I actually think Not So Quiet is a very interesting module. I like that it's dark and constrained, and the idea – that the cultists are just normal people who have suffered as a result of the war, just like everyone else, except that they truly think they've found a good way out – is great, and it both twists around the traditional narratives and gives the players difficult questions to wrestle with. It's a compact module that does what it sets out to do, and gives the GM lots of levers to control pacing. But it's also a difficult module to set expectations for, to get the players into the right frame of mind, and it's very easy for them to flail. None of the times I've run it has it proceeded anything like the way it's laid out in the book. The GM has only a few limited ways to plausibly move around the trail of clues, so the bottom line is you have to be flexible and potentially aggressive in how you use your NPCs. At the end of the day, this adventure is all about the NPCs, their losses and sacrifices. In your gamemastering, focus in on them as your primary tools and the key to telling the story.

Sekigahara

2011-12-07T10:57:00.001-08:00

We wargamers have this genre called "Card Driven Games" (CDGs). Back in the early aughts, this was popularized by GMT to mean "games vaguely based on the ideas in Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, a game we know many of you like a lot". But things have sprawled now, and the CDG brand – to the extent it means anything at all anymore – has come to encompass a lot of games which have little or nothing in common. The Kaisar's Pirates, Empire of the Sun, and Combat Commander all show up on GMT's "CDG" page, for example.

What has diluted the idea for me is our propensity, as gamers, to focus on mechanism rather than something that actually matters. Cards, activation points, and events are mechanisms, but if that's all you know, you really know next to nothing about a game. Adding in the topic – say, the First World War – doesn't help much. We're now at the point where "a CDG on the First World War" would be an essentially vacuous description.

What made Hannibal great and distinct was not that it used cards, although clearly that was a powerful design choice. It was that it was a combination of a game that consistently managed tension well, keeping the players in constant, high-stakes conflict, combined with card design as an effective means of portraying the flavor of the period in several dimensions. In the 2nd Punic War, the loyalty of many Italian allies was fluid and having this cleanly abstracted in the card deck is great. The players know Syracuse sympathizes with the Carthaginian cause in a way that neither Roman nor Carthaginian leaders had much control over, and the cards provide an abstract way to play that out. The cards provide reasonable trade-offs between (say) using your limited political capital to get a reluctant general to seriously campaign, and reaching out to Macedon or raising auxiliaries. The system also portrays the Romans, with their rancorous and still-vaguely-Republican Senate, as having more inherent political friction than their less-representative Carthaginian foes, at least until Rome goes all-in as represented by the arrival of Scipio Africanus. All this is easy for me to say, but it requires a lot of attention to detail to get right, especially in a game of the size and scope of Hannibal.

Sekigahara is the first game to come along in a long time that manages, like Hannibal, to deliver the whole package: an elegant, playable, high-stakes game combined with highly evocative player decision-making. It's a game where risky, high-stakes battles produce great tension, and where hidden blocks give a lot of opportunity for bluffing and hoping. It plays in 90-120 minutes of high-speed action with a ruleset that can be easily taught at the game table. But what makes it a great game for me is that at the core of the design, the cards that drive the action, is an abstraction that makes sense and is historically flavorful.

In Sekigahara, you command an uneasy alliance of factions in the quest for control of Japan. Each player controls blocks of various strengths and types from four different factions. The shifting loyalties are controlled by a deck of cards (one for each player), with each card having a symbol for one of the factions. Once battle is joined, to get a block from a given clan to actually fight you need to play a matching card. Card-play alternates back and forth, with whoever is weaker needing to commit enough strength to close the gap. Large armies can be paper tigers due to the lack of sufficient political leverage to control them, while small armies that consist of dependable troops can be potent.

Of course, this being the period that it is, we have to have treachery. Each player has Loyalty Challenge cards which can cause blocks to switch sides if a clan's loyalty is borderline (i.e., if after committing it to battle you can't play an additional matching card to resist the challenge). While these challenges seem to be hard to time and rarely successful, they do make you nervous every time you commit a block with your last card for that clan and are dramatic when blocks actually defect.

Another interesting dynamic is the way cards are cycled. After battle, you replace all the cards you spent. So there isn't a net cost in cards to fight a battle, but the overall loyalty picture of the various clans tends to significantly change. Who knows what happened during the battle to cause the shift – it's below the level of the game – but nonetheless a battle where reach deep into your hand to call on the loyalty of your Samurai is a significant event with hard-to-predict consequences for loyalty amongst your factions. You may lose influence with some of your allies while another becomes more committed.

The thing about Sekigahara is that this relatively simple system creates a lot of the subtle nuance that is the hallmark of a great game. The strongest army is usually a hard core of good blocks from a single one of your factions which you can back up with matching loyalty cards, but this can be risky as a battle that uses up your cards and doesn't bring good replacements can leave that army completely ineffective. Armies of diverse clans don't pack as much punch but there is usually someone in there you can rely on if your opponent seizes the initiative. Battles can be fought for the secondary purposes of determining clan loyalty. You need to know when to press your luck because in the last battle your opponent cycled a bunch of cards and may be looking at a weak hand. And you have to know when to take a deep breath, give up significant tempo, and repair alliances by using the discard and draw action.

The last important thing that makes Sekigahara tick is the geographical layout. The game revolves around 9 castles on the board; Tokugawa starts with 5, Ishida with 4. Both players start with strong bases on opposite sides of the board, and isolated castles strung out in enemy territory. Both sides need to be super-aggressive about taking out the opponent's armies that start in their territory and consolidating control over castles. Both sides face tough choices about how to balance aggression between marching on their opponent's core areas (and relieving pressure on their far-flung outposts) against leaving enough troops behind to clean up their own backfield. Both sides face a huge amount of pressure to take the battle to the enemy, which is great and keeps the game dynamic and moving.

The designer's notes to the game – which are recommended reading if you want to understand what Matthew Calkins has done here – talks about how important personal loyalty was to this conflict, and how the game was designed with that idea at the core. I think Sekigahara does a great job of both capturing something important and interesting about the period and conflict, and bringing it to the tabletop in an elegant, highly-playable, compelling package.

Communication Design in Boardgames

2011-11-27T13:24:00.000-08:00

I had a great time at BGG.con this year and got to play a number of new games. None of the new stuff really jumped out at me. Probably the most enjoyable was Kingdom Builder, and Power Grid: The First Sparks might have potential, but there was nothing I played that had me running over to the vendor area to snag a copy.

Instead, I found myself struck by something else: wow, the physical and communication design on many boardgames is appallingly bad.

Let me pick on one thing in particular – perhaps inspired by realizing that Steve Jobs was obsessed by fonts – that I think will be completely uncontroversial and yet remains the source of the most common, irritating, and inexcusably bad design decisions: font sizes. If you want to play along here, you'll need a decent metric ruler (I use metric because that system actually makes sense). The size I'm measuring here is the x-height, the height of the lowercase letters which are the bulk of the text.

Break out your copy of the base set of Dominion, and look at the Chapel. This has a text box roughly 3.5cm by 4.5cm. It's got a single line of text. That line of text is 1 (one) millimeter high. 1mm! For me, it's only clearly readable at half an arm's length even in the bright light of day. What nut job thought using text so small in a sea of empty space was a good idea? By far the most frustrating thing about Dominion's thoroughly terrible graphic design is that through 5 expansions and explosive popularity, they've refused to revisit a single thing about its physical design despite its clear unusability.

Compare this to a more sane game like Glory to Rome, where the font size is 2-3 times as large (text is 2mm high, keywords 3mm and usually highlighted). I can generally read Glory to Rome cards across the table, and can certainly see the important keywords. To heap insult upon injury, not only does Glory to Rome have far more legible text than Dominion it also has larger art. San Juan also thankfully starts at 2mm, although it could still easily be larger with no loss of aesthetics.

Deck building games are of course serial offenders here. Because it uses a slightly bolder font with more heft, Ascension's text is crisper and more readable and looks larger (I can comfortably read it at arm's length), but it sticks to the same paltry and unnecessarily small 1mm font size. Nightfall – I think we're seeing the pattern emerge here – 1mm. Nightfall uses small caps for everything, so it's a bit more legible, but still not readable at arm's length. At least they're using a larger percentage of the text box. On the plus side, Thunderstone seems to have grasped the apparently difficult concept that if you have more space to say something, you can use a larger font to say it more clearly. Unfortunately, they also start with the base borderline-readability of 1mm and work their way up to maybe 1.5mm which, while an improvement, is still no great shakes and still leaves many cards with the confusing combination of small text with lots of dead space.

Compare this to the font size in the book I'm reading (Jasper Fforde's One of Our Thursdays is Missing, if you're curious): about 1.5mm. Can you read your average book from across a card table? I hope so, because gaming font sizes are reliably considerably smaller than that.

The problem of ludicrously small font sizes is disturbingly widespread. Just to pick a few additional random games of various genres that are serious offenders: War of the Ring, Eminent Domain, the reference cards for Undermining and Pret a Porter, Kingdom Builder (given these cards must be viewed across the table), Castle Ravenloft, and Maria. I was surprised to find that a personal favorite of mine, Rivals of Catan, uses tiny 1mm fonts – and thin ones! – for the card text; I expected better from Teuber, Kosmos, and Mayfair. This inspired me to check Mayfair's 4th Edition of Settlers of Catan, and the fonts on the Discovery cards are horrible – tiny and low-contrast, white on green (fortunately Trails to Rails is much improved). Agricola also is a slave to consistency, using the same (you guessed it) 1mm font on all its cards, so the couple that run long will fit while the 95% that have only a line or two of text maximize their unreadability.

Now, take a look at Quarriors. By the (admittedly sub-basement) standards of these games, it's not so bad: the font size is over 1mm (just; about 1.2mm), and the font is strong, making it somewhat more readable than Dominion but not as good as Ascension, although the total choice is still obviously bad given the amount of wasted space. But, it's worse than that. Unlike Ascension, Quarrriors cards must be read across the table, not just in your hand. At those distances, more than say 50cm, the text is simply not readable. You have to go over everything at the beginning and then remember what the dice do, or lean over and peer every time you need a refresher. You can argue persuasively that in order to be able to enjoy Quarriors, you need to remember what the dice do, so if you can't remember, you're not going to enjoy the game anyway. OK, but this still misses the fact that there is no reason for the cards to be as unreadable as they are. There is plenty of space on most of the cards. And many powers could have been clearly explained with large friendly icons, although as Pret a Porter and 51st State demonstrate, incomprehensible and/or misleading icons may be worse than borderline-readable text.

All these games have made inexcusably poor and indefensible choices about their fonts. But I reserve my especial contempt for Star Trek: Expeditions, the rather fun and thematic Knizia cooperative game made borderline unplayable by miserable choices in graphic design. For an example of possibly the most poorly designed card in all of gamedom, check out the Captain's Log card The President's Wife. Can you read the Politics penalty for leaving the location without resolving the challenge? I can't. I'm guessing, because my eyes hurt just trying to make it out, but I think it's about 1.2 mm high, same as the other text in the box (which, by the way, is gargantuan - 3.5cm by a whopping 7 cm). Putting one line of text in a 3.5x7cm text box and sizing it at 1.2mm is bad enough. But then making part of it dark purple on black is the height of insanity. The Rebels track (yellow) is OK. Green (Environment or Energy, depending on who you believe) is borderline acceptable. But the purple is not good.

Now, in fairness, The President's Wife is substantially the worst card of a bad bunch – that dark purple on black doesn't happen to come up anywhere else. Still, if you want to play Star Trek: Expeditions, I recommend you do so during the day, when bright natural light seems to make most things in the game readable – by comparing the look of this game in the daytime vs. at night you can see how much brighter daylight is than the artificial light I typically game under. The raw font sizes, at about 2mm, aren't terrible if they're nearby, and the key information (type of challenge, skills required) does jump out at you.

The crippling problem with Start Trek: Expeditions is one of how the components are used. These are not cards sitting in your hand, where they would be acceptable. These are cards that have to lie on the board and be read by everyone at a distance of 60+ cm. And at that range, the small font sizes and low contrast with their black background is hugely problematic. It's like flying in the dark. You can see the challenge, you just can't read the consequences or benefits. While it's true that there isn't a ton of wasted space on the cards, nonetheless the choices here make the game much too hard play, solely because the presentation is bad.

This is not rocket science. People get it right, and oddly some small publishers seem to do better than larger ones. CGE's Space Alert uses a good card design with strong 3mm high-contrast text which is readable across the table. The aforementioned Glory to Rome from Cambridge Games Factory uses a very sensible card layout.

Perhaps I'm getting older, but I still win the "youngest player" starting condition in some of the groups I play with. My corrected eyesight is still good and I don't need near-vision correction yet. But I will at some point, probably soon – and don't kid yourself, once you get into your 40s you will most likely either need them or be happy to live in denial. Whichever way you go, many games being published these days will become problematic. Here's hoping that game publishers can figure this out and fix it before it's too late for us.

Eminent Domain, Kickstarter, and You

2011-11-07T18:47:00.001-08:00

Eminent Domain was an early product of Kickstarter, the web site that allows independent projects to crowd-source their funding. I've been following Kickstarter with some interest. When I first started hearing about it, I was dubious of its impact on the boardgame market. I felt it would simply allow a bunch of lousy games that couldn't find publishers – usually for good reasons – to get published and further dilute the quality in what is already a pretty diffuse marketplace. I honestly don't think we need more games published each year, we need better games. In which case, Kickstarter wasn't clearly going to help. But as Kickstarter has matured, I've become more optimistic. Smaller but still professional publishers are putting better-quality pitches up, and I've even backed a couple projects. I actually feel like I’ve been able to make more informed backing decisions than I can when, say, I decide to pre-order a GMT P500 game. So I’ve come around to the idea.

So what about Eminent Domain? Is it any good? And what does it say about Kickstarter?

When to borrow, when to steal

I took a wait-and-see attitude to Eminent Domain (I didn't back it). GMT has been using a Kickstarter-like publishing process for their games for over a decade, and history says that the single most important thing to take into account is the track record of the designer. This designer’s last game, Terra Prime, was a dog's breakfast: lots of ideas liberally lifted almost directly from classic games (Starship Catan, Starfarers of Catan, with maybe a touch of Merchant of Venus), but re-assembled in an only minimally coherent way. As is often the case, the re-assembly lost the less tangible aspects that made the originals great: tight pacing, good tension, and a working narrative arc. Terra Prime took forever to play and large chunks of it had no pulse.

The origins of Eminent Domain are clearly similar. It’s a role-selection deck-building game. The designer is obviously a fan of Race for the Galaxy and Glory to Rome, from which he has lifted quite heavily. And deck-building games are hot, hot, hot.

The object of Eminent Domain is to build up your interstellar empire and score lots of victory points. You do this first by surveying the galaxy for planets, and then adding them to your empire either through conquest or colonization. You can then use those planets either as a springboard to acquiring technology (which gives you game advantages as well as points) or producing and trading goods. You do all these things each turn by selecting a role: survey, warfare, colonization, produce, trade, and research. Sound familiar?

You start with a deck with 2 cards of each role (except warfare, for which you get 1). The new idea in Eminent Domain is that when you select a role, you claim a card from the reserve supply of that role and add it to your deck. When performing a role during your turn, you can then add cards from your hand to "juice up" the role and get bonuses (one ship per Warfare card played, for example). Then, other players can "follow" your role by playing their own matching role cards from their hands to gain the advantages of that role, sometimes in a reduced form, sometimes not.

Having written these last two paragraphs, I realize Eminent Domain is a lot harder to explain without just saying "it works just like produce/trade in Race", or "colonizing planets is a lot like building buildings in Glory to Rome", "dissenting is just thinking", or "planets with icons are just clients". In fairness, Eminent Domain is less of a straight microwave job than it first appears. Various aspects of the source material have been mixed up a bit, and none of the mechanics are straight copies of the originals. Still, the overall sense is that if you took the basic planet and role structures of Race for the Galaxy, implemented them with a Glory to Rome-like lead/follow card mechanic, and made it a deck building game, you'd end up at Eminent Domain.

This is only an overview of the systems, there is actually a bunch of stuff I'm glossing over here. The rules are available for download via BoardGameGeek, so check them out if you want more details. Read them closely before playing – the mechanics are all familiar but there are a couple pointy nuances (acquired research cards go directly to your hand, for example, and colonize icons on planets don't work the same as all the other icons) that are important.

The problem is …

Fundamentally, the problem with Eminent Domain is just that it’s really boring. What exactly has gone wrong is a little murky, but I think there are a number of things, all interrelated..

Firstly, I believe that there is some basic mis-calibration at work in the engine. For the game to end, the players need to exhaust the supply of one or two different roles, depending on the number of players. Remember every time you choose a role, you are adding one from the supply to your deck whether you want to or not, so that puts a cap on the number of times that role can be done before triggering the end. The problem is that to do anything, you need to acquire planets. You can't meaningfully research without two matching planets. You can't interestingly do produce/trade until you've got 2-3 planets. So if you've got 4 players, that's maybe 15 of those actions before you can do anything else interesting. There are only 16 Warfare and 20 Colonize role cards in the middle – a number which doesn't scale with the number of players – so you've draining a significant chunk of those roles before you've started, especially if players chose a preponderance of one or the other, as is likely to happen since there is an advantage to "drafting" off of other players role choices. So by the time you've gotten to the point of being able to start thinking about a research or produce engine, the game is well on its way to being done. A player who is going heavily into warfare just runs out the clock while you struggle to get something going. A meaningful mid-game or late-game phase to the game doesn't occur; you build the foundation, then you're done. Meanwhile, there are 16 Produce/Trade role cards, more than you could possibly ever need, and 20 survey cards, similarly more than you are ever likely to need. If a bunch of those cards had been moved to the Warfare or Colonization supplies, it's possible it might have extended the game enough to give trade and research a chance; but no. As it is, players doing Warfare or Colonize have all the control over how long the games goes while Produce/Trade have no leverage at all.

Secondly, due to the first problem, there is just no way for the players to differentiate themselves. You're going to have to settle or conquer a few planets to do anything at all. So you need to get a bunch of those cards into your deck. Then you can choose to do a little research, or maybe some produce/trade, but by the time you start into this there just isn't much time left, so you can never build an engine that might allow you to put some distance between you and your fellow-players. I kid you not, my last three games of Eminent Domain the scores were 20-20-20-19, 16-16-14, and 17-16-15. The players do lots of stuff – because settling or conquering most plants is likely to involve 3-4 steps of building colonies or fighters – but they never get traction with the game system.

Thirdly, because you add a new role card to your deck each time you take that role, it becomes too hard to pivot strategically. Which is doubly problematic, since the game forces you to start out doing warfare or colonization, since you have to add a couple planets before you can do anything else. After you've built up this core of planets, you need to decide whether you should pivot to doing produce/trade or research, or if you just keep going after more planets. It's true that getting points through colonization and conquest is harder than making and selling resources, but the problem is that your deck is full of warfare and colonization at this point and you have only your starting produce/trade cards. To pivot, you need to both get more Produce/Trade cards and cull your deck of all the excess Survey, Colonize, and/or Warfare cards. This inertial effect is quite damaging. It is additionally problematic if you're using the Kickstarter promo cards, which include several high-value prestige worlds which offer large rewards for colonization and conquest and so further skew the game in that direction.

Lastly, perhaps the most fatal problem with Eminent Domain is the lack of interesting card differentiation. What made Race for the Galaxy and Glory to Rome so much fun was not the mechanics of building buildings or colonizing planets, but all the interesting things built on top of those mechanics: the endless search for killer combos or mixes of capabilities that produced useful engines; the tension over whether you’ll complete your engine in time; the fear that you opponents are going to beat you the punch. All this is missing from Eminent Domain. Planets' special traits are very coarse (an occasional icon to boost a specific role – even the type of good they produce is immaterial unless you have one of two specific high level technology cards). All the individual role cards are the same. The first-tier research cards are just dual-icon cards. The second tier research cards offer some potential, but since they just go into your deck like everything else they are too hard to wield, and the game is simply not long enough for them to be interesting. You will likely only be able to acquire 2 second-tier research cards, or one third-tier card, typically just as the game ends.

All this means the game has no arc, no narrative. It's just a minimally interesting tactical exercise that is never allowed to develop.

Back to Kickstarter

So, Eminent Domain is what I fear about Kickstarter. It's a concept that is viscerally appealing to gamers: Deckbuilding! Space conquest! Mechanics “borrowed” from Race for the Galaxy and Glory to Rome! And we've got some great graphics! All these things are true, and if you take it direct to the traditional game consumer you can sell it. But this is a game the traditional gatekeepers – established publishers – hopefully would either have rejected, or would have forced more development work onto. They would have been fulfilling an important function, and by allowing someone with a seductive idea to bypass them and get a game published with greatly reduced financial risk, Kickstarter allows a game that is at best mediocre to suck up resources that would have been better allocated elsewhere.

But at the end of the day, that all sounds a little snotty. Traditional gatekeepers are dying in every corner of the economy where they are not protected by statute. Those gatekeepers, whether they were professional journalists, travel agents, radio DJs, or stock brokers, provided useful services but also controlled access in ways that weren't exactly problem-free either. As consumers, whether we are Kickstarter backers or not, we should expect to have access to more choices, which is good. It also means that we have to take a lot more responsibility for our choices, whether we want to or not.

Blast from the Past: Downtown

2011-09-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

In reference to my last post on Nightfighter, I dug up and moved my (now surprisingly old) writeup of Downtown from the old blog over here.

5 years later, I never played Downtown as much as I think I would have enjoyed. Maybe half a dozen games. It's just an expensive game to play, compared to the rewards. For me, Nightfighter does a better job of encapsulating the theme of tactical and technological evolution. Downtown has some of the same appeal, but you have to log a ton of hours with the game to really experience it. I need a 2-5 hour game to be a standalone experience, and for me, both Downtown and The Burning Blue were just too much overhead for not enough excitement.

Both games still tug at my imagination, though – Downtown more than The Burning Blue, perhaps surprisingly. Downtown is still a game I'd enjoy playing from time to time, but the practical difficulties imposed by the game's complexity are significant.

Nightfighter

2011-09-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

Nightfighter is a new game from GMT Games and Lee Brimmicombe-Wood, the folks who brought us the entertaining but rather over-complicated The Burning Blue and Downtown. It covers primarily Bomber Command's night campaign against German cities, although scenarios from many different campaigns (including the Pacific) are included. For players who were intrigued by Brimmicombe-Wood's previous games but daunted by the complexity, the good news here is that Nightfighter is highly playable with only a dozen pages of well-presented and intuitive rules to get started. I realize that even 12 pages may sounds daunting in some contexts, but it's not – I can generally teach players and have them up in running in just a few minutes.

Nightfighter is unusual in that it is a game for one and a half players. One player plays the night fighters, trying to find and shoot down the bombers in the dark. The other half a player plays the bombers. The game is single-blind, in that the bomber player has a map behind a screen with all the pieces on it and makes information available to the night fighter player as his radar and searchlight searches do their thing. While the night fighter player decides on his search strategy, the bomber player has essentially no meaningful game decisions. He is there so that the night fighter player can experience a thematic game, and will have fun in proportion to how much he enjoys his privileged position of watching the night fighter player struggle with the problem he knows the answer to.

The good news here is that the game plays very quickly – a single match can be done in 20 minutes even for new players. The bomber player enters bombers. The fighter tries to track them with a rather clever and fast-playing system for radar searches, and then vector the night fighter to shoot them down. It's nicely evocative and plays quickly. The bomber player then gets to turn it around and play the fighters. If it helps, think of it as a two-player I go-you go wargame where the turns take about 20 minutes. Or you can just accept that it is what it is, and that it works.

The thing about Nightfighter that may trip people up, and which I think the game could do more to help make clear, is that what I've just described is not actually where the game is. A single scenario of night fighters vs. bombers is not really going to be all that satisfying – not even if you play twice and switch sides, and especially not for many of the earlier scenarios. After the brief initial thrill of discovery, the search techniques are clever but just not all that complicated, and once you've seen a given configuration of radar, searchlights, and bomber and fighter tactics, the replay value of any given game configuration is likely to be basically zero. It also doesn't help that scenario difficulty is not always well-calibrated. My favorite scenario to introduce new players with is #3, The Kammhuber Line, because it's the first to contain a minimally sophisticated defense network of a fighter, radar, and searchlights and so have a little bit of texture. But even though it's rated as "normal" difficulty, it's almost impossible for the night fighter player to lose unless he gets outrageously unlucky and gets shot down by bomber defensive fire.

The game here is in the evolution of night fighter tactics and technology. The first scenario has the fighter pilot looking out the window, trying to see stuff in the dark. The second adds some ground-based radar. The third adds more and better radar, as well as searchlights. The fourth takes away the searchlights but adds airborne radar. The fifth gives the defender some high-performance day fighters but the only detection equipment you have is searchlights and eyeballs. And so on, as electronic warfare evolves (tail warning radars for bombers and interception of navigation radars for fighters, for example) and tactics change (increasing density of bomber streams, evolving fighter tactics, and eventually intruder night fighters). This is where the game is going to hook you, or not – playing a series of scenarios which depict the changing nature of the air war. To use the language of Hamlet's Hit Points, playing a single scenario of Nightfighter isn't going to give you much in the way of arrows. There just isn't enough going on. But play three different scenarios in a row that follow the narrative of the historical progression, and you've got something. Hope that a new set of equipment and tactics will be more effective than before, followed by the anxiety of facing an empty night sky with unproven techniques. And Nightfighter gives you a lot of different scenarios and variants to try out.

To that end, I think the satisfying way to play this game is to focus on Bomber Command's night campaign against German cities and treat the various Pacific and other scenarios as sidelines that it was nice of them to include but that are just not the main event. The satisfaction here is going to be found over multiple scenarios that have some narrative cohesion, which the other theaters don't really have. Play each scenario or configuration only once as the night fighter player (unless there are real rules problems, which there shouldn't be). Keep moving through the historical narrative.

I like Nightfighter – it's a clean, fast-playing game that nicely evokes the feel of the night air war over Germany. But I think you really need to treat it not as a 20-minute quick-playing game, but as a 90-minute game of 4-5 short episodes. If you play just one scenario and then put the game away, it may or may not come back off the shelf. If you give yourself a chance to experience the different environments, the game will have a chance to exert its narrative and emotional pull even when you're playing the bombers.

Hamlet's Hit Points for Boardgamers

2011-08-18T18:57:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading Robin D. Laws' book Hamlet's Hit Points. This is a short, highly readable book that I recommend for anyone interested in a little deeper understanding of how these games of ours grab and keep our attention and interest. It's true that the book is written primarily with role-players in mind, and will be invaluable for game masters, but the concepts and techniques discussed are 100% portable to the realm of boardgames.

The basic idea is this: the conception of narrative that you probably got back in school was one of escalating conflict and tension, followed by a climax and resolution, then denouement. This is also how I tended to think good games should feel. It has a lot of intuitive appeal, especially in the light of various practical problems boardgames usually have. Given that hobbyist games don't tend to get a ton of replay and mixed experience levels are very common, you'd like to give your players a chance to warm up with some lower-stakes conflicts early before proceeding to the high-stakes endgame. It also serves as a built-in catch-up mechanism since players who make poor choices or have bad luck early can still get back into the game with good moves later.

But as Hamlet's Hit Points makes clear, while this may be true on the macro level, this misses out on a very important key to how narratives keep and hold your attention during the moment-to-moment action. The book takes three classic plots – Hamlet, Dr. No, and Casablanca – and plots the action on a hope/fear axis. In each moment (or narrative "beat") your empathy for or feelings about the protagonist or other characters in the narrative are moving somehow: towards hope that things are going to work out well, or towards fear that they are not. Narrative tension relies on skillfully moving back and forth between these drives, not giving you too much hope without an injection of fear, or vice versa. In his analysis of Hamlet – an analysis I agree with – he finds that "down" (towards fear) or "up" (towards hope) beats in the story never cluster together in groups of more than about 3 in a row.

Bearing in mind that everything is obvious once it's been properly explained, this seems so clearly true, and so useful to GMs, designers, and people just wanting to understand a bit more about games, it's surprising nobody's said it before. Maybe they did, they just didn't have as clever a title or explain it as clearly.

Anyway, this simple concept has a great deal of explanatory power as to why some games work from a narrative perspective and why other, quite similar games don't.

Before starting, I'll stipulate a lot of boardgames don't necessarily succeed or fail based on emotional engagement or narrative. There is a branch of boardgames (let's call it the Caylus/Age of Steam branch) that fans like because of the pure intellectual challenge, and as such perhaps has more in common with a puzzle than a play or movie. Some players enjoy the lengthy period of frustration followed by the exhilaration of finding a solution. Having said that, let's also not make the mistake of associating "narrative" strictly with "thematic", or not looking at how nominally abstract games can engage us emotionally. Many successful abstract games, like the GIPF-series games or the classics like Chess and Go, do work with this pattern of balance between hope and fear.

With these caveats though, looking closely at the hope/fear beats of boardgames shows pretty quickly why some games are so engaging and some are not. I'll look at a pair of games, one successful, the other not so much: Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings and Arkham Horror.

The turn structure of these cooperative games, which is "do something good"/"do something evil", is clearly aimed at this modulation. In Lord of the Rings, the fear of what the tile draws from the bag are going to be is quite visceral. Looking at the structure of the events on the boards, which is what drives the fear of those tile draws, usually the events that occur early in each narrative are of the structure "meet some condition to receive a significant reward, otherwise suffer a significant penalty", which give the players hope for success but fear of failure. Later events tend then to get very bad, but at this point they are balanced against the hope of actually finishing the episode and moving on to the next, when the game reset involved in the episode transition gives the players a large jolt of hope as they move on to face the next challenge. Then when you get a chance to take your turn, you almost always receive clear, immediate, useful rewards that feed your hope of getting out of this mess alive.

So why does Arkham Horror not work as well as Lord of the Rings? If you think about it as an exercise in trying to move between hope and fear in reasonably tight circles, it's fairly obvious: Arkham Horror neither reliably rewards the characters to give them hope nor does it reliably put them in enough danger to be really fearful. Often you will visit a building with some hope of receiving a useful item or piece of information, but too often the rewards are minor, nonexistent, tangential to what you are trying to achieve, and generally not enough to inspire hope. The Mythos cards rarely have the dimension of meting out rewards or punishment that could inspire hope or fear, they are simply one-off events that the characters too infrequently can't do anything at all to anticipate, they simply respond. They are also too unreliable in their effects to get into any kind of cycle between hope and fear. An event that is not foreseen with at least some clarity can't inspire fear. The same thing can be said for character actions: too often there isn't enough you can do to give you hope, because clues are unavailable, you have to waste time in the hospital to recover health or sanity, and a route towards positive progress is not reliably open. Without some way to reliably make significant forward progress, we are denied the jolt of hope we need to keep interested.

This is not to say Arkham Horror can't get onto this virtuous cycle; sometimes the cards flow well and the situation develops in an interesting manner. But compared to the well-plotted structure of Lord of the Rings, Arkham Horror is relying on the luck of the draw to get into a good narrative zone. This is obviously not a great way to do this. As board gamers we tend not to like "scripting" in games, but scripting is obviously a mixed blessing. To the degree that it constrains player choice, it's not great. But narrative needs structure to work. As a recent convert to the GUMSHOE roleplaying system (designed by Robin Laws), I appreciate the book sections in the Esoterrorists book (also in Trail of Cthulhu) where he talks about railroading and the importance of giving the players the illusion of player control while keeping them on the narrative straight and narrow. These things are not contradictory.

While the comparison between Arkham Horror and Lord of the Rings is clear, you can see the logic here in tons of boardgames. For me, the difference between Dominion and Thunderstone in that Dominion is a fairly linear procession, while Thunderstone has some of this modulation. The flow of monsters up from the depths of the dungeon obviously helps. If you think of breach effect, traps, and treasures as hope/fear modulators and amplifiers, they make a lot of sense. Crucially, by giving you a set of characters with at least some personality that you can hope will advance in level and get more powerful while being afraid that they will die, Thunderstone helps you get invested in the game and actually feel something. Dominion gives you nothing.

There are plenty of other good examples in thematic games. Small World, where hope spring eternal when you draft a new race – and the personalization of the races and powers make a huge difference in our being able to identify with them – but gives way to fear as the race reaches the end of its rope and it becomes incredibly fragile in decline. Agricola is another classic manipulator, catching you between fear of starvation and ruin and the hopes that you have to build your farm, and thinking in these terms its tremendous popularity is easily explained. Classic games like Dune, Civilization, Titan, or Republic of Rome operate on longer time scales, but have amplified peaks and troughs of hope and fear, as anyone who has stared at their opponent across a combat wheel in a high-stakes battle in Dune can attest. Traditional games like Risk give you a lot of hope on your turn as your armies rampage across the board but then leave you to be very afraid of what your opponents are going to do to you once you pass the dice.

When you think about it terms of hope and fear, the visceral appeal of card driven wargames, especially the good ones like Hannibal, Successors, and Paths of Glory are likewise easily explained. Even titles which may not be as solid on game system merits (like Labyrinth or Twilight Struggle) can nonetheless be compelling because of the way they are always jerking you between hope for the cards you are holding and fear of what your opponent is going to do to you. Similarly, block games like Rommel in the Desert and EastFront manage this hope/fear balance, as they have the players playing in an environment of scarce information which is revealed in fits and starts, sometimes answering questions, sometimes creating new problems for you to grapple with, and giving you plenty of room to create your own hopes and fears.

Being about RPGs, one challenge that boardgames face that Hamlet's Hit Points doesn't talk about is how a narrative can keep this structure of hope and fear going when you play the game 5, 10, 15 times and know the general contours of the experience. This is not as much of an obstacle as you might think. The source narratives Laws analyzes are plays and movies which have survived a fair amount of repeat viewing. These emotional experiences the narrative aims to evoke are fundamentally manipulative. If you succeed the first time you can probably do it again.

This sort of modulation is obviously not the only way that narratives can be compelling. As mentioned in the book, rules are made to be broken, and some of our most compelling art comes from rules-breaking. But the lessons of Hamlet's Hit Points are extremely powerful as a tool to understanding what makes games tick.

Confusion

2011-08-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

One of the things I find cool about Stronhold's recent game Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War is how it develops interesting and severe information asymmetry as the game goes on. When you're making the final push to get the briefcase to your opponent's baseline, you get into a situation where you're using just a few pieces about which you know a lot because you've had to move them frequently to get them into that position. Meanwhile, your opponent is likely defending with a number of pieces about which he knows almost nothing, but you know everything. This makes for interesting opportunities to bluff and makes the situation very tense for the defender.

I like this particularly because Confusion goes through these very different game phases – development, dueling for control of the briefcase, endgame push – completely organically, without any explicit or coercive rules. While I like some 18xx games (1825 is my favorite these days), I've come to dislike the way it does phasing, with lots of rules and explicit game parameter changes as the trains are bought through. It's a fair bit of rules complexity which trips up new players. Power Grid is similar, although less severe. I now much prefer it when a game can go though its phases organically, as with Confusion, Diplomacy, Container, or Rivals of Catan.

Trail of Cthulhu, games as stories, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and why Mansions of Madness doesn’t really work

2011-03-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve finally had a chance to play the Trail of Cthulhu role-playing game, which uses Pelegrane Press’ GUMSHOE game system. The GUMSHOE system is very interesting, for both boardgamers and role-players. To explain why, I need to back up a bit and lay some groundwork.

What differentiates the sorts of games we like, be it RPGs or boardgames, from other sorts of games is that they tell stories. They may be boring, short, or thin stories, or the story may not be the most important element of the game, but if stories weren’t important, we wouldn’t get pasted-on themes, nice art, or miniatures. The story can be something that is more abstract and visceral, as in Knizia games like Ra, Through the Desert, or Ingenious, but these games still have a narrative arc of buildup, tension, and release that is the stuff of storytelling. Plus of course, there is a large segment of the hobby – which Fantasy Flight is trying to corner – for which the story the game tells is the key thing.

The Cthulhu Mythos is well-travelled thematic ground, with many board and role-playing games trying to capture the flavor of Lovecraft’s popular creations. As always, trying to take a literary story and re-tell it in game format is not an easy proposition, and failures vastly outnumber successes. To see why it’s hard, let’s look at one particular game system that, while popular, is to my mind clearly not a success: the RPG Call of Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu is, at a system level, a very traditional roleplaying game. Ever since D&D, the core of role-playing games has been a task resolution system. While the details may differ – the game may use a d20, 3d6, d100, or a pool of d6 or fudge dice – the vast majority of popular RPGs are set up such that whenever players interact with the world of the game, it’s a conflict or a task at which they succeed or fail with measurable probability. When a character wants to accomplish something, we pick a character trait to use, figure out a difficulty number, and roll some dice. The variance between the systems is in the choice of what skills to define and what kinds of probability curves to use.

This is great, but this core system of task resolution simply can’t tell a wide range of stories that people who play RPGs happen to like and desperately want to game. The most obvious are, unfortunately, mysteries, horror, and epics (I use the term “epic” as Stephen R Donaldson lays it out in his monograph Epic Fantasy in the Modern World).

The problems with telling mystery stories are straightforward, and fairly obvious if you’ve ever tried to run a mystery in Call of Cthulhu. The narrative structure of a mystery story is that there is a trail of clues that the characters must gather and piece together to figure out what’s going on. That trail of clues drives the narrative arc. The characters start out with a hint, follow the leads, and over time the truth is revealed. There are all sorts of conventions to the mystery genre which allow readers or viewers to engage with them, but this is the core. This is an incredibly common narrative format, used by H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen R. Donaldson, the X-Files, and Law & Order as well as many – probably the majority – of the episodes of Star Trek or Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Even the Harry Potter novels are, from the point of view of narrative format, actually mysteries.

The problem of course is what happens when acquiring a clue requires success at a task which the players repeatedly fail? What if there is a witness holding out on them and the players can’t make their Intimidation check to save their lives? Or if there are documents hidden in a room and the players can’t pass a search check? The GM then has to resort to ever-more-improbable ways to get the players the information they need to follow the trail of clues. OK, you blew your search, maybe the contents of the documents was known by an NPC and you can try diplomacy. Blew that too? OK, maybe the documents were in another location. Still not making that search roll? Eventually the documents end up lying in the middle of the road where the PCs trip over them. This is immensely unsatisfying because a) why are we rolling all these dice and jumping through all these hoops when the conventions of the genre of story we’re trying to tell requires us to get this clue?, and b) in the system we’re using, which is all about tasks and succeeding and failing at them, why are we not being punished for all these failures? Because the players are failing all these checks, they can clearly see the hand of the GM coming in and granting them the information they require. To look at it form a narrative point of view, you never have a scene in Law & Order where the detectives execute a search warrant and no information comes out of it. Searching the apartment was a scene in a sequence, and the narratively interesting thing is not whether or not the detectives’ skills were up to the task of finding anything, but what they found, how they went about finding it, how illuminating the information was in light of other clues already gathered, and what they do with the information to move the narrative forward.

This is not to say that good mystery stories have not been told by many talented GMs using the Call of Cthulhu game system. But their success in doing this is in spite of the system, not because of it.

To divert briefly into epic tales, you don’t have to go very far into Tolkien to find story elements that stymie RPG-standard tools of skill checks and difficulty levels (or traditional boardgame tools of resource management, risk, and positional tactics). The epic confrontation between Eowyn, Merry, and the Witch-King cannot be gamed using any sort of task-based system. Tolkien has just spent the last three books building up the Witch-King and the Nazgul as terrifying and powerful, so in gamer-land no rational player who can look at their character sheet and know their odds of succeeding at various tasks is going to resort to direct conflict to take him down. And if they do, and win, does it feel like a victory, or like the GM resorted to fiddling the dice or making stuff up to let them do it, a far less satisfying outcome given the entire structure of the game is based around tasks with predictable odds? There is something else going on here. This is an epic scene where characters go beyond themselves, tying in with previous plot hints, and as such is hard to imagine how it could satisfactorily be done in a games which are driven by probabilities and specific knowledge of capabilities.

To get back to the main topic of mysteries, the GUMSHOE system sets out specifically to tell mystery stories. It recognizes that to do this, a systemically different way to define characters and drive narrative is required. So it defines characters partially in a traditional conflict-based way (because mysteries have fight scenes), but simultaneously in a more narrative-focussed way. Your skill with firearms will be familiar, but your rating as a forensic accountant is different. If you have skill in accounting, the system says that you are sufficiently skilled that no narratively critical clue that can be unearthed using accounting will elude you. Your rating in these skills are not skill points, but narrative points, and reflects the importance of that skill to your character’s narrative. If you have some rating points to spend in accounting, your character can move the narrative a bit if the player can come up with a way of weaving the skill into the story. If so, the character can unearth clues which, while not the core clues that allow the players to solve the mystery in a baseline sort of way, will expand the character’s understanding of what’s going on and perhaps make piecing together other clues easier. It’s important to mention that the GUMSHOE system is not a collaborative storytelling system like Fiasco or Polaris; 3 points in accounting doesn’t give you narrative prerogative to skip the suspect interview and hit the books. But it does allow you to weave the storyline if the GM can figure out how to get you interesting information from your proposed course of action, the more detailed and persuasive the better (perhaps you could use Legal to get a search warrant for a suspect’s banking records, then Accounting to track down information that the GM had originally intended to come out via Intimidate or Reassurance in an interview).

Because it’s such a different way of looking at characters, and because task-based systems are so ubiquitous, this definitely takes some getting used to. A 3 rating in Evidence Collection is not more capable than a 1 rating in Evidence Collection. Instead, the character with a 3 rating has a little more latitude to expand the narrative – the rules refer to it as “spotlight time” – than the player with a 1 rating, if he can effectively weave it into the story. Either character will discover the clue that will get the group to the next scene, but the player with the 3 rating can spend some points to try to direct the narrative a little bit and gain information that, while not critical, will be helpful later or give more detail to the grand picture. So, for example, Evidence Collection may turn up three shell casings, some fingerprints, and a bloodstain, but a 1-point spend might additionally tell you (with some narrative associated) that that the shell casings have been sitting there for four days, even though the crime scene is only a day old. In both cases the players get the two critical plot hooks, leading them to identify the fingerprints or take the shell casings to the lab, but the player who had the spend has some information which may make the picture make more sense as it develops and will make the scene more narratively satisfying. So, we have a systemic way to develop the story in interesting ways that relies on player ingenuity in the application of their skills, but not on crude skill checks. This means that GUMSHOE is very good at the specific types of stories it is trying to tell. It focusses on information, how (and not whether) it is obtained, and what the players do with it, which is the stuff of mystery stories.

Boardgamers actually have had something analogous to this for some time: Tales of the Arabian Nights. In this game, the players choose what skills and traits their characters have – Appearance, Weapons Use, Magic, Piety – and then how to respond to encounters, whether by Negotiation, Robbing, Courting, and so on. Then through the magic of a lot of cross-referencing and a book with 2500-odd paragraphs in it, the narrative of the encounter emerges. Instead of choosing how to use your resources and abilities to navigate an existing narrative successfully, your choices (along with a dose of luck) define the narrative which allows it to be, at times, epic in nature. Like in Trail of Cthulhu, Seafaring is not going to get you out of an encounter with an angry Djinn if there is no water in sight, but your skills and your choices nonetheless help shape the story. This is what makes Tales of the Arabian Nights narratively satisfying, while Betrayal at House on the Hill just feels like a fire-hose of disjointed random events.

This brings us, finally, to Fantasy Flight’s most recent weighty box of plastic and cardboard, Mansions of Madness. I’ve only played it once, so I’m not going to judge too harshly. But, like Call of Cthulhu, Mansions of Madness is trying to tell stories that are narratively mysteries while using the standard boardgame tools of conflict, risk, and resource management. In my opinion, this is a case of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. The common core mechanics we have in boardgames (and RPGs) are simply not amenable to mystery stories, and Mansions of Madness ends up being a nail, in this case a glorified dungeon crawl. Which is fine, but all the trappings of mystery – the extensive intro text, the flavor of a path of clues – are squandered and can actually detract from the gaming experience, since they may misdirect you into thinking the story is something it isn't.

If we want to tell different kinds of stories, we need to expand our toolbox. Arkham Horror is not a tale of mystery or horror, it’s a tactical game of resource management with the narrative structure (to the extent it has any, which is not great) of an action-adventure with characters being led through set-pieces over which they have no control. By contrast, Castle Ravenloft – which is fundamentally the same game as Mansions of Madness – may not be a classic game, but it’s more narratively satisfying because the tools it uses are appropriate to the story it’s trying to tell and it gets the critical structural bits (pacing and tension management primarily) pretty much right.

Worlds like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and H. P. Lovecraft’s mythos are notoriously hard gaming problems, done badly so many times, and these are the reasons why. The very few great games we have work because they’ve limited themselves to portions of the story that can be told with the mechanics available. The brilliant bit of the classic CCG Middle-Earth: The Wizards was to focus on the years between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, when stories could be adventures of risk and reward and not epics. Knizia’s Lord of the Rings works in part because it focuses in tightly on the hobbits, who are modern characters who become immersed in an epic world which is not their own, and also of course because Knizia is a design genius who is keenly aware of how tension management and tight pacing can produce strong narrative structures in games. What success Lovecraftian boardgames have had, they have when they focus on the pulpier, action-oriented face of the mythos at the expense of the core stories that the readers love (it’s interesting to contemplate how much of the veering of Lovecraftian material into pulp is a direct result of a gaming fandom which lacked the conventions to tell the real stories). Clearly there is room for innovative new systems and mechanics that will help us tell these other kinds of stories in enjoyable and satisfying ways. RPGs are leading the way with serious, envelope-pushing titles like Trail of Cthulhu, Polaris, and Fiasco, all designed to tell specific types of stories that would be extremely challenging (at best) to do using more traditional systems. There is no reason these trains of thought can’t be extended into boardgames where the differences between the two blur.

2010 Year in Review

2010-12-26T21:19:00.000-08:00

I haven’t done a whole lot of blogging this year, but I can at least give you a year in review.

Hobby gaming, especially board gaming, has certainly exploded in the last 10-15 years in terms of the number of players and numbers of titles published. However, it still must be admitted that we are a small-ish, niche hobby, so it’s not surprising that there is a certain clumpyness to the quality of releases – some years you’ll see clusters of great games, then things will get a little thin for a while. For me, as a gamer who is involved in board games, wargames, and RPGs, 2010 was an oddity: we had a ton of really top-flight wargames released, many more than any year in recent memory. On the other hand, the eurogaming releases weren’t quite up to recent standards, in my opinion.

Chris’ Game of the Year – High Frontier

For me a true game of the year is not just a very good game, but also has a certain something: an addictive quality that leaves you obsessing about the game long after its over, a compulsion to play again, an immersive and engrossing narrative arc, and design grace. True, High Frontier is a Sierra Madre game, so you will at times struggle just to get a rocket off the ground and into orbit, and sometimes a management mistake will leave you passing for 10-15 minutes just to build your reserves back up again and get another mission going. But … exploring space is hard, right? Those asteroids are far away and it takes a long time. Everything else in the game is insanely brilliant, starting with the stunningly innovative map that makes complicated orbital trajectories thoroughly accessible without losing verisimilitude. The management of the fuel, mass, and thrust of your ships is mechanically straightforward but challenges the players in authentic ways. The different modules you can acquire for you ship – thrusters, robonauts, and refineries – are a diverse lot and yet seem well balanced, with different propulsion methods (solar sails, rockets, impulse engines) having different niches for different types of missions. While I won’t deny the game still has rough edges, and it’s a bit on the long side (figure 3 hours until you get a handle on it), still, this is the one game this year that really sucked me in in a way no other game did. It even has an expansion which I haven’t played yet. I have some tips for first-time players.

Chris’ Wargame of the Year – Battle Above the Clouds

It was a great year for wargames, with no fewer than three game-of-the-year-worthy games (this, Normandy ‘44, and Bataan!). But the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War system has a special place in my heart for its elegance, artistry, and evocative way it portrays the campaigns it covers. This move to the western theatre and the Chickamauga campaign has been long-awaited by fans of the system. It’s true that after 15+ years of circulation, the system has accumulated a bit of rules grit, both in that the core rulebook now includes all sorts of special rules for the various campaigns in the series and in that the Consimworld rules-lawyers have managed to bloat a 16 page rules set into 26. But, once you get going with the system, it plays cleanly and gives a really remarkable sense of the command challenges of the ACW. Battle Above the Clouds is one of the most interesting entries in the series, as the campaigns have an interesting mix of broad geographical scope with isolating ridge-line terrain. The included scenarios are both interesting and playable, big enough to show off the strengths of the system, and replayable. This is fortunate because the campaign games are pretty large (32 and 40 turns) – I haven’t attempted either.

On to the rest ...

As always, the “2010” label is a little lax, some late 2009 releases made their way in and some late 2010 games that I haven’t bought yet or gotten to (Merkator, Poseidon, Luna, Thunderstone: Doomgate Legion) have been missed out.

Eurogames

The Hits

Mines of Zavandor: The latest evolution from the mediocre early-90’s game Outpost, Mines of Zavandor seems like it’s finally nailed it. By using four different currencies instead of one, introducing a trading phase, and bringing the time to play down to an hour or so, the game is tight, interactive, and has greatly reduced the problem of bootstrapping and runaway leaders. It’s a nuanced, interesting gaming experience and this is one of my favorite games of the year.

The Hobbit: This is lighter than Beowulf or Lord of the Rings, but still somewhat similar in flavor mechanically and thematically. Like Beowulf, it blends flavors of auction (during travel episodes, you try to acquire experience) and risk (during adventures, you roll dice to acquire treasures), but does it quite differently. Like most Knizia games, it gets a lot of thematic and gameplay payoff on a clean, playable set of rules. In terms of intellectual challenge, it’s not in the same league as Beowulf or Ra, but it’s fun and engaging and no lightweight. There is also an interesting variant that introduces an element of cooperation for groups so inclined.

Race for the Galaxy: The Brink of War: Yeah, this is clearly the end of the line for this particular instance of Race. With all the expansions it’s a bit of a monster that’s hard to handle unless you are a dedicated Race player. It’s still Race though and I enjoy it quite a bit, although my enjoyment is tempered by the sheer impracticality of finding the right players to play it with. I am looking forward to the new arc of Race (rumor mill says sometime next year) which should reset it to a more manageable complexity level.

Macao: Well, OK, this was good, I enjoyed it. It’s got neat elements in the engine-building/card-power genre of Agricola, and the dice pool supplies action points in a way that gives it both interesting variability as well as a tension between maximizing efficiency and getting tasks done that you judge timely. Still, even though I liked Macao, Stefan Feld is wearing out his welcome on the alea label for me. His games are usually thematically weak, and Macao is below average in this respect even for him. He also doesn’t seem to have a ton of range. Don’t get me wrong; for me his games are usually worth a look. But hopefully we can start getting some other designers contributing to the line again.

Homesteaders: This is a neat game that got not just quite a bit of play when it first came out, but held on to get replay throughout the year. Like Puerto Rico, it falls into the “euro empire-building” category of acquiring buildings that have special powers and produce resources, managing workers and cashflow, and turning all that stuff into VPs. It’s a first-time-designer/first-time-publisher and has the associated rough edges, including an endgame that can be brutally calculational and not that satisfying, but overall it was still a good game that plays in a comparatively short time and scratches the same gaming itch as Puerto Rico and Agricola. Three players may be the sweet spot for this one.

Take It Higher: Take it Easy is a favorite game that’s very accessible, but it doesn’t have a lot of depth or repeat draw. Take it to the Limit is a lot of fun but it’s complicated in an edgy way. This game engine has always seemed to me like one Reiner Knizia should take a crack at, and now he has, as a co-designer with Peter Burley, and the result is a game that takes the elegance of Take it Easy and gives it depth and texture. Using octagonal pieces instead of hexagons makes the management of risk more nuanced (although it does also makes the game less visually clean). The tiered rules – basic Take it Easy on an octagonal board with octagonal pieces, then adding rockets, then gold/silver bonuses – provides something for most players, although I think the middle tier provides the best bang for the buck for most social gamers. I like the other two “Take it” games, but I like Take it Higher a lot.

7 Wonders: It’s smoking hot right now, so I find I don’t have a lot to add. It’s fast, it’s fun, it’s got depth for a 30-minute game, it lets 6-7 people all play one game at the same time, sort of. It’s colorful. It’s over-hyped. I honestly don’t think there is a huge amount of real game here, so I’d be surprised if it has much staying power. That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it while it’s hot though.

Settlers of America: The reason I like Settlers as a franchise - even though I don’t play it that much any more - is because each new installment really does try to change things up in interesting ways, instead of being more recapitulation (Ticket to Ride) or bolting more junk on (Carcassonne or Zooloretto). Settlers of America successfully delivers something the Settlers franchise has been trying to do for a while: a bigger, meatier game. It’s trickier than it sounds, since the core game idea has a natural length of about 45 minutes. But through clever parallel development tracks (settlement and rail-building) and through judicious fiddling with the probabilities, Settlers of America works quite well as a satisfying, large Settlers game.

Wacky Wacky West: This is a long-overdue re-issue of Drünter & Drüber, a classic Teuber game which I only played for the first time last year. It has a vaguely Fresh Fish-like feel, where you are building roads to try to bulldoze other players’ properties. It’s a euro-y take-that game, which means (like Colossal Arena or Quo Vadis) that it’s a trashing game, but actually fun.

Master Builder: This is a game that appeals to my quirks as a gamer. I like auction games. I like risk management games. And I like clever theme. So I love that in Master Builder, each worker has his own set of personality defects that may prevent him from showing up for work because he got into a fight, hates his boss, or couldn’t handle a co-worker’s abuse. Plus, the actual construction of all the little buildings into a diorama is fun. As a game it has a few issues holding it back, mainly that early-game bidding is too hard to do sensibly without some experience with the game, but for me the total package works.

Dominion: Prosperity: Back when the base set and Intrigue came out, I was impressed by Dominion and its fast play and “let’s play again” appeal, but I didn’t know how far the train was going to go. Now we’re at Prosperity, and it’s made it a lot farther than I expected. All the sets are distinct and have added interesting elements to the game, and a hand of Prosperity plays very differently from Intrigue or classic, and I enjoy it. That said, Dominion for me is hitting the same wall as CCGs hit eventually: the game-space gets so large and so complicated and new additions are impossible to sensibly develop for game balance such that it exceeds the ability of casual player to deal with it. Also, similarly to Thunderstone, the time-to-play seems to be getting bloated when I think Dominion really wants to be a 30-45 minute game at most. Unless some scheme comes along to help, this is probably where I get off. But it was fun.

Wings of War: Flight of the Giants: Wings of War is a perennial favorite of mine, although not one I get to play a ton. Flight of the Giants is a very clever expansion which introduces large, multi-function planes in a relatively straightforward manner. I enjoyed the scenarios from this set which seemed interesting for a change, and the Giants are more than just large slow-moving targets; some of them have interesting crew-management decisions, and the many different firing arcs make for interesting tactical decisions on maneuver. At first I thought that if this is the route the game was going to go, I would have much rather seen some B-17s and Me-110s from the WWII era; but after playing it maybe the quirky WWI planes really do have better gaming value. Regardless, this is a great addition to the Wings of War line.

Dragonheart: This is a light 2-player game in the card-playing/risk management mold of Lost Cities, albeit not at the level of elegance and subtlety as that classic. Still, it’s an interesting twist on the genre, and the very nice and well-integrated art on the board and cards helps support a mechanically thin, but present, theme. I enjoyed it.

1853: It’s funny to think that 15 years ago or so, back when Mosaic was the browser of choice and there were still raw FTP repositories, I had some significant 18xx cred. Now I hardly play it, other than the occasional games of 1825. Anyway, 1853 – with some relatively minor house-rules we had come up with almost 20 years ago – was always one of my favorites in the series, and now that I’ve turned away from the 1830 side of the 18xx family tree almost entirely, the 1853 reprint is a welcome addition to my collection. Of modest complexity, reasonably sensible length, with the much more dynamic 1825-style stock market that I favor, and interesting but not overblown tactical detail in the route-building, I still like the game a lot. Some of the Lookout additions are unnecessary though and you should not allow them to sucker you: in my opinion, there is no valid opening bid that includes shares in a minor company, despite the new rules to encourage it. I strongly recommend playing the “short” game your first time or two out. Like many 18xx games, it suffers from a chunk of up-front complexity in the opening bidding which is easy to screw up without familiarity with the game. So play the short game to see how those bids play out first. Once you get over the basic comprehension bump, I think the initial bidding is one of the less punishing systems in 18xx-dom. But still.

Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements: Thunderstone remained easily my most-played game in 2010. The first expansion was good … but it wasn’t a slam dunk. There are some dicey cards in there, from the weak (Blind) to the weird-not-in-a-good-way (Tavern Brawl) to the game-killing (the new Elemental – Nature monster set). Some of the good ideas seem underdeveloped (just one Champion? Just two distinct Traps – Death? Really? That’s it?). There is plenty of good stuff too, but the game as a whole is starting to require discretion on the players’ part when judging a set of cards for interest and taste – and that’s after just one expansion. Any set will be playable, but some combinations of cards aren’t great and some make the game take far too long. I recommend outright banning the Trainer and Elementals –Nature set. I also recommend that you realize that if you include the Traps – Death you’re playing a very different game.

Ascension: Dominion clones are starting to proliferate these days (Resident Evil Deck Building Game anyone?). The good ones, like Ascension and Thunderstone, take the deck-building idea and take it in a new direction. The fun thing about Ascension is that the cards on offer are constantly turning over as only six are available each turn from a large deck with limited duplicates. Because of this, unlike Thunderstone and Dominion which tend to reward laser-like focus, Ascension tends to reward more broad-based deck-building. You never know for sure what’s going to be available, so you want to be prepared. It’s also great that it plays in 20-30 minutes for 2 players. I like the game best with 2; each additional player makes the game a little more chaotic (not necessarily in a bad way) and means the game play rewards “instant” over “permanent” cards. I think it’s good at all player-counts, but people I’ve played it with haven’t liked the chaos of the 4-player game as much.

Small World Expansions: Small World has turned out to have more staying power and more fun in the package than I ever would have guessed. The two expansions that came out this year (Be Not Afraid and Tales and Legends) are both solid and add good new races and variety. Tales and Legends can get a little crazy at times – there are a couple cards in there I’m not a fan of – but that’s about what I was expecting. And you’ll never have to worry about whether or not you advanced the turn marker again.

Railroad Barons: First, the caveat: the rules in the box are unplayable. You need to get the new ones from Lookout’s site. But if you’re reading this, you can do that. My big complaint about most post-1830 18xx games is that they add length and complexity while often giving players fewer legitimate options. So a game billed as a short, less-complex 18xx card game was naturally intriguing. Railroad Barons focuses on one element of 1830, train acquisition and obsolescence, and intelligently develops just that theme and reworks the supporting elements into an interesting, engaging game. Railroad Barons is a little on the long side to make it into my regular rotation of 2-player games, but it’s by far the most successful “reductionist” 18xx that I’ve played.

Finally, some follow-up comments from last year’s piece. There are always a few late-year releases that don’t get a fair shake in these write-ups, and Priests of Ra was one. It has proved to be one of the most interesting and durable of the 2009 games, and I would now rate it as one of the best of the year. Likewise, with dice games being a bit faddish these days, alea iacta est has proved to have staying power and stands above the crowd. Dixit was a game that didn’t make a great first impression (perhaps because it’s sometimes billed as a storytelling game, which it really isn’t) and then it beat out our good friend Matt Leacock’s Roll through the Ages (which has also held up well) for Spiel des Jahres, so it didn’t get a lot of love around here. But I came back to it recently with this year’s expansion (Dixit 2 – I guess they’re better with pictures than with names) and have enjoyed it quite a bit. I needed to find the sweet spot in terms of how much description to try to give, usually just a couple words plus some inflection, and once I got it, it was good fun. Finally, Le Havre got back on the table this year. This is a game that I was on the fence about, going back and forth to the point of actually selling it once and re-acquiring it a year later. Yes, the route to victory goes through Coal and Coke whether you want it to or not. Yes, it’s a touch on the long side and the short game isn’t particularly satisfactory. No, it doesn’t work that well with five. But it nicely fills the niche of an empire-building economic game, and it’s clean, fast-moving, and dynamic. While I acknowledge Agricola’s many charms, that game never exerted quite the same hold on me that it has on gamers at large or the way Puerto Rico did. Le Havre doesn’t either, but it’s grown on me in a way Agricola hasn’t.

The Misses

Fresco: Somebody came up with the acronym JASU, “Just Another Soulless Euro” (maybe it was Brian?). This would be one. It’s colorful at least. I probably shouldn't be quite so hard on it, there is some clever stuff, but it can be an analysis paralysis trap for little purpose. It didn’t grab me at all, even though I’m sympathetic to the theme.

A Brief History of the World: Well, it is briefer than the back-breakingly long History of the World. But it’s still History of the World, which means it’s still all about jockeying for position on the last turn. If you’re in first or second, you get the US or Japan and are guaranteed to lose. Otherwise, if you get Britain and have managed to remain reasonably close up to that point, you probably win. This is a game that should have had the good sense to die back in the 90s when it was still good.

Loot ’n Scoot: I’ve been trying out a number of VPG’s titles this year, since I liked No Retreat! so much. Loot ’n Scoot is sort of a push-your-luck game, but since the decisions about when to stay and when to go are rather straightforward, it’s really just a silly dice game lightly themed. OK, but not at the length we’re talking about here. Or the pricetag.

Terra Prime: I liked Homesteaders, and whenever a new game company impresses me with their first game, I’m good for the second. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out in this case. Take a few great games (Starship Catan, Starfarers of Catan, Merchant of Venus) and put them in a blender. See what comes out. This is another in the long line of games that are killed by slow pacing. The inspirations are obviously good, but it takes too much process and too long to get things done in Terra Prime and too long for the arc of the game to develop. If you’re going to aggressively borrow from good games (not in and of itself a bad idea), make sure to pay particular attention to, and understand, the less-tangible good stuff like pacing, narrative arc, and tension that really makes a game hum along rather than just borrowing the obvious superficial ideas.

Defenders of the Realm: As long as we’re on the subject of aggressive borrowing, it seems like I might as well bring this one up. Wow. They totally ripped off Pandemic. At least, they ripped off the parts of Pandemic that you could rip off without falling into an ethical black hole, which is to say, they didn’t rip off anything really important. Defenders of the Realm is a lot like Arkham Horror: random, long, meandering, unfocussed, and it has good theme only if you bring an affection for the bad fantasy genre to the table yourself and can channel it through the occasionally nice-looking pieces and art. If you’re of the opinion that a game should not rely on its players to provide the theme, you’re out of luck.

Inca Empire: This was derived from Tahuantinsuyu, which had a modestly good reputation amongst people I know, so I was a little surprised by how boring and run-of-the-mill this was when I played it (I’ve never played the original). It’s too long, too hard for the players to exert control, and there is little opportunity for players to differentiate themselves tactically or strategically and therefore for their scores to be, like, more than a couple points apart. The efficiencies to be milked out of the system are too obvious, the play to constrained. And the theme isn’t that strong.

Constantinopolis: A themeless, overwrought economic cube-fiddling game extraordinaire. Given that there are a number of pretty good cube-fiddling games out of late (Agricola, Le Havre, Macao), there isn’t much room for a mediocre one.

Innovation: Chudyk’s previous game, Glory to Rome, was a game that walked a tightrope. Crazily chaotic, but fast-paced and married to a humorous good theme with just enough player control, it worked for me. Innovation didn’t. It’s crazily chaotic as well, but it lacks the theme, it would never be described as fast-moving, it has little sense of control, and it doesn’t scale well as the number of players changes.

Power Grid: Factory Manager: The economy of the game lacks the disruptive events or interconnectedness that tends to make economic game work. I like how it boils the essential decisions of Power Grid down to this very compact package, but the package ended up being too compact I think.

Alien Frontiers: A good try with a number of interesting ideas from first-time publisher Clever Mojo Games, Alien Frontiers just outstays its welcome by about half an hour. I wouldn’t mind so much about its other problems – there is a little bit too much arbitrary “pick on the leader” and kingmaking, and the gameplay is too damped with too many options that add up to about the same thing – if it came in at 45 minutes or less. At about twice that (the last 20 minutes of which is essentially everyone knocking down the leader so someone else can win), it’s pretty tiresome.

Myth: Pantheons: The game actually isn’t bad, but never before has such a potentially interesting game been so completely compromised to the point of unplayability by appalling graphic design. The components here redefine the floor on unusable, at least for a publisher who appears to be trying.

Campaign Manager 2008: This game had probably the fastest fall-off of any game I’ve played in recent times. After enjoying the first couple of plays,I felt like Jason Matthews and his co-designers might finally have taken the ideas first found in Twilight Struggle and brought them to a good spot, with balanced and dynamic game-play married to decent theme. But then I found myself with almost no desire to play it again. I think it was the thin theme which wore off after only a few plays. The states are completely symmetrical, and the decks for McCain and Obama are almost identical and have very limited range. One could forgive a voter in the Campaign Manager universe for being completely unable to tell the two candidates apart. Yes, Matthews finally gave us a pretty well-balanced game, but the price paid to the theme was extreme.

Wargames

The Hits

Bataan!: The battle on the Bataan peninsula, where American and Philippine forces were bottled up and reduced by the Japanese, might not immediately strike one as a promising subject for a game. But part of Vance von Borries brilliance as a wargame designer is identifying interesting features of less-well-known battles and campaigns and developing them into great games, as typified by his previous Roads to Leningrad. Bataan! is a siege of fortified defenders, but it’s not the same as the slug-a-thons that develop when armored spearheads are forced to tackle infantry strongpoints in Kasserine or his East Front Series; this is a vicious back-and-forth battle as the Allies have to frequently counter-attack to retake lost positions or risk losing entire lines, attacks frequently spearheaded by the elite Philippine Scouts. Positions are taken and re-taken and time wears on everyone. Being familiar with the core systems of von Borries’ operational games, on first impression I wasn’t sure the more siege-type warfare of Bataan! was going to be that interesting. Now I’m really looking forward to Barbarossa: Crimea (from GMT), which features the siege of Sevastopol.

Normandy '44: I’m on the record as being a huge fan of Mark Simonitch’s games, and Normandy ‘44 is more of the same understated brilliance we’ve come to expect after Ardennes ‘44 and The Caucuses Campaign (which was the only 2009 wargame release to get significant play in 2010 for me). It doesn’t use flashy mechanics and will be comfortably familiar to fans of his recent games, but it’s streamlined, clean-playing, and well-balanced, and with minimal fuss is very evocative of the campaign. Like Ardennes ‘44, the full scenario is a bit of a monster, but you can play the first week in about the same amount of time it takes to play the first week in Breakout: Normandy, and it’s a satisfying experience.

Hearts & Minds: I liked this game a lot and it’s my most-played non-ASL wargame of 2010 (granted, it’s pretty short). With a novel twist on the card-driven concept, simple yet evocative rules, and a 2-hour playtime, there is a lot to like here. Like Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, it’s a wargame in which political control is the real driver of the game in interesting ways. There is a caveat, though: my experience is that the game is very hard on the US player, who has a lot of difficult problems to juggle and tends to get critically in the hole before the NVA has to resort to Tet, while the NVA are easy to play once a few key concepts are grasped. Opinion on the net doesn’t seem to be on my side on this one, and discussion on BoardGameGeek has inspired me to get this one out again.

Julius Caesar: This is the first Columbia game in a while that I’ve really liked; they’ve had a bit of a dry run of late (Texas Glory and Richard III were both OK, Athens & Sparta had a lot of problems). Julius Caesar is back on form with a blend of stuff from Hammer of the Scots and War of 1812, combined with some interesting recruitment problems for both sides – troops have to be raised locally, creating an interesting dynamic that while the main action will be in Italy, skirmishes are fought across the board for key recruiting grounds. It plays quickly and fast, and the events in the Hammer-style deck seem finally to have hit the sweet spot for powerful, interesting events that aren’t game-breakers. Good stuff.

Labyrinth: The War on Terror - 2001 - ?: I’m still not quite sure if it’s a keeper, but it does a lot of good stuff: it’s very asymmetric in interesting ways, the Twilight Struggle “have to play your opponent’s events” model feels more thematically natural here, and the pacing and tension of the game seems to be solid (although the endgame of the shorter version isn’t terrific). It’s a modestly complex game with some easy-to-miss rules, but the game gets good mileage out of its complexity. On the other hand, there is some very swingy luck. The US has to check prestige when they invade a country; if they invade Afghanistan on turn 1 (as seems reasonable), the result of that completely random prestige check can have a vast impact on the game if it’s an outlier, with a bad result leaving the US painfully unable to act while a good result turbocharges their game. Ultimately, though, the real question most people will probably have is: how well has the thematic material been treated? It’s a mixed bag. A lot of things are done quite well, but many opportunities to make an edgy, really compelling game were missed. Labyrinth is unlikely to offend anyone who wasn’t predestined to be offended. Which, honestly, might be the problem.

Stronghold: Undead: This is my favorite sort of expansion, one that doesn’t just add a few new bells and whistles but substantially changes the original game. Last year’s Stronghold was a fine game, but it had a wrinkle: the invader’s position is much more tactical and constrained than the defender’s, and it could run a little long. Undead gives the invader a lot more options and flexibility, and caps the length of the game. Great for fans of the original, and even if you liked the idea of the original but the game as a whole didn’t work for you, Undead might do it.

The Obligatory ASL Comment: My single most-played wargame of 2010 remained ASL. It was a good year for new ASL stuff, with Action Pack 6 and its new style of geomorphic boards, the Blood Reef Tarawa gamer’s guide for those who want to tackle that fascinating monster. There was also great 3rd-party stuff, including a reprint of Heat of Battle’s long-hard-to-find High Ground, Bounding Fire’s Blood and Jungle, and LFT’s Operation Chariot. Long-time ASL publisher Critical Hit even got in on the act with Afrika Korps. CH has long been incredibly unreliable, and while Afrika Korps still has its ups and downs, it’s the first product from them that I’ve been pretty happy with. I’ve always been a fan of the desert battles, and with West of Alamein long out of print, it’s great that they’ve picked up the slack here. I think only one of the scenarios I’ve played from the packs so far has been truly awful, which, unfortunately, rates as an improvement.

The Misses

Stalin’s War: The initial buzz was all about broken gameplay that had Germans winning auto-victories by turn 6, but I think that was probably over-done, even without the later optional rules (I talk tactics here). The more serious problem is that the initial invasion of ‘41 is unstable and swingy, such that the conditions for an interesting game developing into ‘42 or ‘43 seem astoundingly low. Which would be fine if the game had scenarios starting in ‘42 or ‘43, but it doesn’t, all you get is ‘41. It’s not a terrible game, but there is so much good stuff out there on this topic.

Washington’s War: In fairness, I was not a big fan of We the People, and my tastes in wargames generally tend to run towards the more complicated, theme-heavy games (as evidenced by these lists). So an upgraded We the People was unlikely to grab me unless it incorporated major redesign. Washington’s War has definitely substantially upgraded We the People, but the core design remains intact, which 15 years later is unfortunate in some respects. One is the stubborn refusal to move to dual-function operations-or-event strategy cards (as in Hannibal), instead sticking with single-function cards but layering on a bunch of special rules to allow the use of event cards as operations or combat cards in limited ways, and to retrieve friendly events from the discard pile with operation cards, creating a nest of unneeded complexity which tries to get at the effects of dual-use cards without the elegance and without actually succeeding, leaving you to get bogged down in rules instead of theme. Washington’s War has 20+ pages of rules, and while it’s padded with examples and illustrations, that’s still a bit crazy for a game that really wants to have about 6. Given that the theme isn’t that strong, and is more narrative than fundamental, Washington’s War feels euro-y and lightly themed to me, and I would much prefer Blue Moon or Jambo or 2-player Race for the Galaxy instead. Or I would just play Hannibal or Rommel in the Desert.

Target: Leningrad: I was sampling VPG’s offerings this year after being impressed by No Retreat!, but I haven’t been very impressed with anything else. This is an OK 1-hour wargame with simple rules, but it turns on only a couple decisions and a few die rolls, so even the 1-hour playtime seems pretty bloated.

Roads to Stalingrad: This is a typical small-press first-release game, combining good ideas that were headed in the right direction with inadequate development. The pacing is too slow, the combat system is too fiddly and cumbersome, and the game seems designed to do the first half (the German attack) well, at which it succeeds, but the second half (the Soviet counterattack) doesn’t seem to work. The Soviet preference for retreats over step losses makes sense on defense, but on offense leaves them bouncing off of German defenses instead of pressing home the attack, and then it takes forever just to get slow-moving infantry back into position. Also, the restrictions on supply placement and the fact that relocating supply dumps is impossible combine to straitjacket the game as well. I’m fairly certain there is a very good game in here somewhere, but more development is required. Bellica apparently intends to make this a series of games, so maybe they can get there. The Gamers’ Operational Combat Series was pretty rough in its first incarnation also.

RPGs and similar things

I haven’t played a ton of RPGs this year, and most of it has been D&D 4E. I have to say, I’ve cooled on the latest iteration of the well-worn franchise; while the rules have been streamlined, we now have a huge proliferation of special powers which themselves make a large contribution to game complexity with almost no payoff in terms of tactical interest or thematic nuance. There are also serious questions in my mind as to whether the game is playable at all beyond about level 8 or so. While 4E is satisfying in some ways, it’s still not the answer. Probably I’ll be headed back to Arcana Evolved, although I’ve got a game of Trail of Cthulhu lined up for early next year which I’m looking forward to.

One product sold in the RPG section that I played in 2010 worthy of mention is Fiasco. This is a story-telling game as much as an RPG, as there is no GM and are no rules for conflict resolution. Instead, it provides a structure for the players to build out and tell certain types of stories, specifically, stories that end in disaster for those involved. The key to the game are the play sets with names like “A Nice Southern Town”, “Tales from Suburbia”, and “In McMurdo Station, Antarctica” which cleverly provide the elements for you to hook up your own personal train wreck. With the rules providing the outline of a narrative structure and keeping the pace of the game moving and finishing in under 2.5 hours, this is a great little system. It’s necessarily tailored to a specific type of story which the players have to buy into – the copy text says “a game of powerful ambition and poor impulse control” – but if you can get into it, this is a lot of fun. There are a bunch of additional downloadable playsets of varying complexity.

Wrapping Up

Any year we get a bunch of new games and a few of them are really good is a pretty good year in my book. As I mentioned last year, I think I am now officially overwhelmed. Far more stuff comes out in any given year than I can possibly keep up with, even if I restrict myself just to games I have a decent chance of liking! Still unplayed (or barely explored) games on my shelf include the new Kings & Things, Castle Ravenloft, Hansa Teutonica, World Without End, the new Republic of Rome, Conflict of Heroes: Price of Honour, Maria, Earth Reborn, Duel of Giants, Shiloh, and Command & Colors: Napoleonics. I still haven’t gotten to Barbarossa: Kiev to Rostov, Baltic Gap, or Hellenes from 2009. And I still have games that I expect to be very good rolling in the last few days of 2010, in particular wargames, as I expect good things from Storming the Reich, Across the Pacific, and The Coming Storm as well as Black Friday, Luna, and Poseidon.

2010 gave me a bunch of games I expect to be enjoying for quite some time: certainly High Frontier and Battle Above the Clouds, but also all of Mines of Zavandor, The Hobbit, Take It Higher!, Bataan!, Normandy ’44, and Fiasco will likely have serious staying power. Race for the Galaxy, Wings of War, Thunderstone, Small World, Command & Colors, and Catan continue to be durable franchises. So life is good.

2009 in Review

2010-01-10T23:07:00.000-08:00

Another year down, another set of games. Each of the past few years, I have made a resolution to buy and play fewer new games just because they look or sound cool, and try to focus on quality. Every year I have made some improvement, and been rewarded with what I felt like was a generally higher average quality of games played. 2009 was better, and I played many good, and good new, games. But – especially in the always problematic area of newish wargames – there is still room for managing the risks associated with new game releases more sensibly. So I hope to improve again in 2010.

Since I never did a 2008 Year in Review, a couple of those games have snuck in.

Game of the Year: Thunderstone

As with many years there were a lot of very good games, and to pick just one seems unfair. But we do these things, and the game that put its hooks into me the fastest and had by far the best “one more game” draw, even with a 1hr+ play time, was Thunderstone. In just 6 weeks or so it rocketed to the top of my “games played” chart for 2009. For me, it's Dominion with subtlety and nuance. The extra tactical and strategic details give it a significant edge in gameplay over Dominion, as well as the obvious advantage of a hugely successful theme. Also very importantly, at the same time as it has added depth, Thunderstone has done away with a lot of Dominion's fluff. A draw plays out quickly, with none of Dominion's fiddly tactical draw/search/action engine management which honestly isn't that interesting and involved more process than decision-making. There are many more interesting choices about how to build and maintain your deck, but once you've made those choices, playing the cards you draw is easy with a minimum of hassle. This, to me, is how it should be. It's too bad many gamers will be put off by the fact that it appears to be a Dominion knock-off; yes, it's a related game (OK, closely related), but it's not a knock-off. It's fast, it's fun, it has gameplay depth, it has theme, it has replayability.

The Year of Great Expansions

It seemed like there were a lot of great expansions out this year: Dominion had Dominion: Intrigue, Pandemic had On The Brink, Race for the Galaxy had Rebel vs. Imperium, Keltis had Neue Wege, Neue Ziele, alea had their Treasure Chest, Galaxy Trucker had the Big Expansion. And those are just the striking ones. We also had good expansions for Agricola, Tribune, Jambo, WWII Wings of War (finally!), and Small World. Hopefully this will continue. As a less active game consumer than I used to be, it's easier to buy and enjoy an expansion to a game I like than it is to figure out if a relatively unknown new game is worth the hassle. Of course, you have to be careful; Dominion: Seaside almost killed the series for me.

New Games that Stuck (in no particular order)

Alea Iacta Est: This is a clever dice game that I'm glad I got from Germany early in the year, given how much it ended up being delayed from Rio Grande (thankfully the early rumors that it would be re-titled turned out not to be true). I was a little surprised to see it amongst my most-played games of 2009, but maybe I shouldn't have been: it's fast, clever, not very complicated, and vaguely unclassifiable (is it a push-your-luck game? area-control game? category dice game? all of the above?). There is more depth than first appears, which reveals itself over repeated play. Not as good as last year's Wie Verhext!/Witch's Brew, but still good.

Race for the Galaxy: Rebel vs. Imperium: Race for the Galaxy needed an expansion to keep players coming back, and at first it actually looked like Rebel vs. Imperium was a bust - too many fiddly rules for takeovers, military looked like it had become too dominant, and playing Race with 6 is at best unwieldy. Then I realized that back in The Gathering Storm we had made a conscious decision to not use the Goal cards, because we didn't care for them much and didn't think the game needed them. That was fine for a time, but when playing Rebel vs. Imperium, it quickly became clear that leaving out the goals had a negative impact on the game. We put them back in, and everything seemed smoother and more balanced. I'm of mixed minds on the takeovers. If you take the rules' suggestion and play half the time with them on and half off, they'll never come up often enough and they'll feel like rules grit. I think it's better to use them in a few games, decide whether you like the whole idea or not, and then either ignore them or always use them. Personally, I like them, as long as they're always (or almost always) in. As long as you've come this far with Race, go for it.

Roll Through the Ages: Full disclosure, Matt Leacock is a good friend of ours and we helped out with this game. But I still quite enjoy this one post-release – with trading.

At the Gates of Loyang: Like Agricola and Le Havre, Loyang feels a little heavy-handed as a design, and perhaps just a touch derivative as it mixes flavors from other games (bits of Jambo, Antiquity, maybe Bohnanza). But it works and is fun, provides interesting management decisions, and luck plays an effective role in the game. For me, though, it's best as a 2-player game.

Pandemic: On the Brink: Again, Matt is a friend of ours, although we were not as involved with OtB. The great thing about this expansion is that almost all the additions add breadth or depth to the gameplay with negligible or zero cost in terms of rules complexity. The new roles and the virulent strain particularly are great and really cheap ways to add variety. Only the Bio-terrorist is a little more involved. I’ve played and enjoyed all the variants.

FITS: This doesn't score as highly as Knizia's other games this year, but no denying its simplicity and elegance, and I've enjoyed 5+ plays.

Ra: The Dice Game: In a year of mining old brands for new products, Knizia again uses the core structure of an old game but re-purposes it. Ra itself was an auction game that put a premium on evaluation and risk-taking. Ra: The Dice Game is a much more compact game that removes the auction element, but retains a similar flavor of evaluation and risk-taking, and allows the players to do a little more planning (because the probabilities are simpler). I generally have less use for lighter games than most, but this is one of those compact Knizia games that combines reasonable depth with accessibility, balances skill with luck very well, and I like it quite a bit.

Priest of Ra: Yet another Knizia tie-in! It seems to really hit the spot: the same auction system but with a completely different scoring from the classic Ra. Plays quite differently, yet retains the feel of the great classic. Simpler to teach and explain, but similar depth.

Samurai: The Card Game: Yet another instance of mining an older brand, this is another Knizia "card game" that stays remarkably true to the board game (as the Euphrates & Tigris card game did). In fact, the only major difference in feel from the board game is that the scoring is open – something we were quick to house-rule by digging up our old player screens from the boardgame. Your mileage may very, but we like it a lot better with hidden scoring, and I suspect the scoring was made open more to avoid having to include another component than anything else. With open scoring, for me it's a bit of an analysis trap that ends up taking longer than it should.

The BoardGameGeek Game: Caveat: I've played this with about 10 different players, and honestly, I think I'm the only one who thoroughly enjoyed it. But nonetheless, I did. It's got a quirky but successful theme, as gamers rush to buy new games of unknown quality and purchasing budgets simply don't enter in to the equation. Probably best with 5 players. Like many Breese games it can be an analysis trap, which is a legitimate complaint even though excessive analysis isn't really rewarded due to the inherent chaos of the system. But I liked it.

Dominion: Intrigue: I quite liked Dominion: Intrigue and felt like it was a more tactically interesting game than the base game was. I played Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue a fair amount in the first half of the year. Then Seaside came out, and the first four games we played all had the Pirate Ship in them, which when it’s out tends to dominate the game in really unhealthy ways. This single card resulted in the entire product line being essentially shot dead. Interestingly, it's thanks to Thunderstone that my interest in Dominion has been revived, reminding me that this game really is fun. Just not with the Pirate Ship.

Galaxy Trucker: The Big Expansion: It's a mixed bag (throw away the four Essen promo cards; they're horrible), but there is enough good stuff in here to keep Galaxy Trucker trucking and mix things up for fans. The new tiles, ships and Rough Road cards seem the best elements. The additional complexity does mean it should only be played with Galaxy Trucker veterans, however.

Stronghold: This seems like a great true blend of a wargame with appropriate euro mechanics. There is a lot of detail here, so it'll take a little while to see if everything is in order, but my half-dozen or so plays have been very promising. Like War of the Ring, the 3- and 4-player version feel a little tacked on, but the 3-player version may still be the best. There are elements of it which don't quite feel right (I wish combat on the walls were more attritional, and I fear there isn’t enough going on with the Battering Ram) but taken as a whole I've been quite impressed.

Modern Art: The Card Game (Masters Gallery): Modern Art without the bidding, which sounds terrible, but isn't – there is still the timing element of whether to hold paintings in the hopes that they will appreciate, or get out of the market. For what it is, I like it, but moreso than the other games it pales in comparison to its parent game. Unlike the Keltis Kartenspiel, for example, Masters Gallery doesn't present a twist or a variation on its parent, it takes just one or two elements of Modern Art and turns them into a standalone game. OK, but Modern Art is such a tremendous classic that without some theme and variation, Masters Gallery is bound to get hammered in comparison. This is the weakest of the many new Knizia games that I give the thumbs-up to, but if you can set aside comparing to its big brother, this is a fun, quick-playing game with some subtlety to it.

New Games that Stuck, Wargame Division

PanzerBlitz - Hill of Death: I wasn't a big PanzerBlitz fan even "back in the day", but the new edition has charms. It seems to strike a good balance between tapping into nostalgia for the old title while updating the mechanics. A solid, workmanlike game, I always enjoyed it and it's more evocative than more mainstream but comparably complex titles like Tide of Iron and Conflict of Heroes. Too bad about the rulebook; it's not as awful as all that, but no question it could (should) have been better.

The Caucasus Campaign: Again, this isn't particularly innovative or breathtaking, more of an evolution from Ardennes '44 and other work Mark Simonitch has done, but at a significantly lower complexity and time-investment level. I liked this as a low-to-moderate complexity game, much more interesting and compelling than the various SCS games or A Victory Lost with only a modest step up in complexity. And the campaign is an unusual and interesting one.

Conquest of Paradise: I freely admit that I like this game more than most people reading this are likely to. Perhaps the fact that it’s a lighter game than it looks can trip people up; even moreso than the successful Star Wars Risk games, this is more of a fun romp than a serious game. Still, as an entry in the category of king-of-the-hill conquer-the-world wargames, this does a bunch of stuff right: it’s relatively straightforward, sensibly short, conflict isn’t particularly bloody, and it’s thematically evocative. It’s still prone to the rich getting richer, but not at an alarming rate, and as I say, it’s over in good time.

The Year of the Knizia Cash-In

So, Reiner Knizia finally wins the Spiel des Jahre. I've played a bunch of Keltis and Lost Cities: The Boardgame (I generally prefer the latter), and have come to the conclusion that in gamer circles it's an under-appreciated classic. Give me this any day over other Spiel des Jahre winners like Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne. “Gateway Game” has become a justifiably derided term, as the label usually gets applied to games like Ticket to Ride which, while they may be fine games, are not “gateways” in the sense that they don't actually bridge the gap between traditional or mass-market games and hobbyist games. They really are going the “wrong” way: they are games that hobbyist gamers can enjoy playing with their non-hobbyist friends, not games that can hook casual or traditional gamers into the brave new world resulting from the boardgaming revolution of the 90s. Lost Cities: The Boardgame (and Keltis) is both a far better game than most Spiel des Jahre winners, and is also an actual gateway game, especially the US Lost Cities version which has a passable theme.

Anyway, in the last year we’ve seen a ton of Knizia games tying in to the Spiel des Jahre winning Keltis and the earlier Spiel des Jahre nominated Einfach Genial:

Keltis - Neue Wege, Neue Ziele: I liked this a lot, as it makes Keltis much more "gamerly". The accessible base game and the challenging (and radically different in texture) expansion make for a good matched set. Too bad there isn't a version for Lost Cities: The Boardgame, but the peril of having a plausible theme is that you can't just go around changing all the underlying dynamics and keep the game hanging together.

Keltis Kartenspiel: Keltis compacted and refactored even further; this is a great and distinct game in its own right, with a different mix of cards and a very clever rule for using pairs of cards of different suits. The types of decisions are the same, but the factors that go into them are obviously different enough to make for a distinct but not misleading game.

Keltis Mitbringspielt: Keltis again, but different again, this time the push-your-luck flavor has moved from being in the play of the cards to being in the draw of the chits. Clever and, again, a game with its own distinct flavor. In general the "filler" category of games is not one that has a lot of appeal to me; I play games to do more than just fill time. But this is a good, clever, short game that packs some punch.

Einfach Kartenspiel: The Einfach Genial scoring idea (your final score being your weakest category) is ported into a game with a different feel, and a clever tweak. Since the card game is shorter and the scores much lower, there are now several scoring tiers and you can't advance your top score farther than a tier away from your lowest score. This adds an interesting dimension to the risk/reward of scoring, which the shorter game (with lower scores) requires. This is a touch light for my general tastes, but once again, Knizia takes the base engine and changes it in interesting ways and makes it fit into a different package.

Genial Spezial: Einfach scoring with a connection-building theme, and a vaguely Through the Desert feel. This almost but didn't quite work for me; it lacks the subtlety of Ingenious. It has only four categories of scores instead of six, the color risk management is much less nuanced, and it's more about just building the connections - something Through the Desert does better and with more flavor. Not bad, but it may be on its way out of my collection.

Einfach Genial Mitbringspielt: A rare complete bomb from Knizia. There isn't a whole lot of game here, and there seems to be an endgame problem (not enough tiles) with 4 players. Very strange.

In general, I'm impressed with the tie-ins. When Coloretto, Ticket to Ride, and Carcassonne got endlessly remade, they usually ended up feeling like basically the same game in the end, or remakes attempting to fix scoring problems with the original. But all the different Keltis and Einfach variants have their own individual feel, all built on top of the two games’ distinctive scoring systems. For the serious hobbyist, none of these are likely to be breathtaking (except maybe Lost Cities: The Boardgame). But for my part, I hugely appreciate subtlety in games, and with the exception of the lesser Einfach tie-ins, these games deliver the subtlety that is Knizia’s calling card.

Games I Liked, but It's Still Early

World Without End: Only played once, and it appears to be a highly variable game, but the one play-through was interesting, fun, and tense. Good potential, and I’m looking forward to playing it again. Unlike the underrated Pillars of the Earth, it has a bit of potential to be an analysis trap though.

Dungeon Lords: Played twice. Still has the great, quirky CGE humor, and the simultaneous-worker-placement is a big win in terms of avoiding the strict serialization boredom of Caylus. But it's got a fair amount of fiddly complexity, and it feels a little truncated. It seems like the story wants to develop more, but, on the other hand, the game itself doesn't want to be any longer. It's also begging for some well-calibrated and judicious randomness; the determinism of the combat phase is thematically odd and may make it more of a brain-burner than it wants to be. I think this will be a good second-tier game, but doesn't capture the same magic as Galaxy Trucker.

Peloponnes: When I read the rules, it sounded like a by-the-numbers eurogame which would go straight to the trade/sale pile, optionally after having been played once. But I did actually play it and was rather impressed: fast, simple, clever, a good and different auction, and despite being fairly abstract it manages to evoke a nice civilization-building feel. Appears to be a great middle-weight, but some uncertainty over replayability and whether the playtime is quite quick enough keep it in this category.

Conflict of Heroes: Storm of Steel: They did some good stuff in the new edition, like allowing both players to have an active unit at the same time. But I also detect some of the exact same “feature creep” that really clobbered Squad Leader when it got to Crescendo of Doom, ultimately requiring the total re-work that became Advanced Squad Leader. No need to repeat the same mistakes, like trying to model snipers with individual counters.

Opera: This is a bit on the bubble. I’ve played it only once. It’s clearly rather derivative as elements and dynamics are borrowed from Puerto Rico, Age of Steam, and to a lesser extent El Grande. But, the game varies them and stitches them together cleanly into something new, and it’s got a lot going for it as a medium-to-heavy euro. But I am worried about the balance. It seems like cash is excruciatingly tight early, but too plentiful later on, and the restriction of buying just two scores per turn seems unduly limiting in the mid-to-late game. So I’m undecided but like to remain optimistic. Unfortunately, the rules are problematic. They’re all in there, but it takes a bit of puzzling to figure out what is actually a pretty streamlined game.

Promising Unplayed Games, Wargame Division

Baltic Gap, Elusive Victory, Barbarossa: Kiev to Rostov: I haven't had a chance to play these games yet but they are high on my list. They are all series games from my favorite wargame systems; they're just time-consuming and I haven't had the chance yet. Of course, Battle Above the Clouds will probably overshadow all of them in early 2010.

Hellenes: I played a lot of this during an early phase of playtesting, and felt like it was a solid game moving in the right direction. I like the changes that made it into the final published version, but haven't had a chance to get it onto the table yet.

Games that Didn't Stick

Space Alert: So close. But ultimately it just had too much of a learning curve, too much fiddly complexity, and was too difficult to play with players of mixed experience. Hasn't seen the table since an initial flush of play. I would like to play this more, but the practical obstacles are significant.

Container: The Second Shipment: At least it's cheap. And the “tournament” game (remove one additional container per player) is recommended as standard. The Gold containers variant is OK, but it only really gives good results with smaller numbers of players and can drag the game out. None of the other variants really work. Honestly, I'm happy to have it for the Gold containers which may come out occasionally, but it's a hard one to recommend.

Chicago Express: A promising first couple of games lead to disillusionment as there just didn't seem to be much game here.

Call of Cthulhu LCG: I was a fan of CCGs back in the day (especially the Middle-Earth CCG), and I had some hope the CoC LCG in its new, fixed-pack incarnation might bring back some of the deck-building magic. I enjoyed a few games but it just didn't get its hooks into me, given the other options available. Another game that could use some dice. I still have hopes that a little more time with it will give this one some legs, but it just didn’t grab me thematically or mechanically as much as I had hoped.

Witch of Salem: Another close one, but the transparently unworkable communication rules leaves you wondering what exactly the designer was trying to do, and if it was a good idea. There are clever bits here but the cooperative elements don’t seem to gel and they don’t add up to enough game.

Steam: Well, I like Steam, in a somewhat qualified kind of a way. I think it's as good as this particular game engine is going to get, and vastly superior to Age of Steam or Railroad Tycoon. The problem here really wasn’t me, it was that the previous games have so alienated many people I game with regularly that convincing them to play Steam is a tough sell. So it sits on my shelf largely unplayed, and even though I like it, the trade/sale pile beckons.

Supernova: This game really should have been good. It's not. It's really close, though. It's begging for an enterprising game designer to find the couple tweaks the game needs.

Galactic Emperor: This, on the other hand, is just a complete mess.

Automobile: Remind me never, ever to play a Martin Wallace game again unless I'm really sure I know what I'm doing. I don't know that Automobile is really as atrocious a game as I think it is. But it's really, really not my sort of game.

Steam Barons: I don't know if the maps play any better as strict 5-6 player Steam games, but as for the stockholding variant for Steam ... wow. This really felt completely disjointed and arbitrarily difficult. The stock market seems to have been bizarrely designed to explicitly mis-price shares so you make your money in game system arbitrage instead of something more interesting.

Endeavor: This seems well-put-together, but it's just so soulless and such an obvious blender job of mechanisms from other games. I can see it will have fans, and I would be happy to play someone else’s copy from time to time, but I’d still rather play the original Goa or Puerto Rico. There is a fine line between repetition and theme and variation, and for me personally, Endeavor is on the wrong side of it.

Planet Steam: The market in this game is weird; like Steam Barons, it seems designed to produce prices guaranteed not to be an approximation of a fair value, so once again we're gaming an abstract, unintuitive, complicated, and athematic market system.

Conan: Another game to which you can only say, "wow". A multi-player king-of-the-hill wargame in which inter-player conflict is extremely attritional and expensive? And where the economic benefits of capturing territory are dwarfed by the costs? Where do I sign up? This problem has been attacked in interesting ways so many times by now, doing a by-the-numbers microwave job like this is really embarrassing (not that that hasn't stopped people). If you can't do better than Risk (c. 1959) ... well, it's not a good sign.

Games that Didn't Stick, Wargame Division

Richard III: I dunno. I enjoyed this. It's a good, workmanlike game that I'd play again. But partly I think the whole Hammer of the Scots engine has hit the end of the line for me: the game doesn't get great traction on a wonderfully flavorful historical period for me, and I have some suspicions about game balance. And with the short duration, very abstract gameplay, and pretty high luck level, it's more of a medium-weight euro than a wargame and that's a tough category to be in. Crusader Rex remains my favorite in this whole line, and for a short, light, quick-playing wargame, and Command & Colors: Ancients has more draw for me.

War of the Ring: I have a couple friends who really got into the latest Lord of the Rings minis game from Games Workshop. I really tried to like it. I just couldn’t do it. For me, so much of the miniatures hobby is tied up with the enjoyment of painting the figures, and War of the Ring just requires such colossal numbers of them, numbers I have no time or ability to paint. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a really cool, or even just cool-ish, game, but it seems like you labor to put 120+ figures on the table, only to have them drop like flies in a game that just isn’t that engaging, and is decidedly odd in a few ways (the rule where a stand is eliminated when it’s down to half-strength has particularly odd implications for formations). Back to the skirmish game for me. For what War of the Ring does, I like the Battle of Five Armies system better.

Unhappy King Charles: I realize this game has a lot of fans. But for me, it's a by-now traditional GMT card-driven wargame in that it's held down by excessive complexity and then throttled by slow pacing, excessive length, and a lack of tension. The events are a fairly pedestrian lot, and if you don't get the ops you're just not in it. The objectives are too coarse to yield much in the way of excitement – the game is won and lost on control of five regions, but two of those regions are almost unshakably Royalist (Wales and the North) while one is impenetrably Parliamentarian (the East), and so the whole thing hinges on control of a very small portion of the board. So it lumbers along somewhat painfully until it finally ends. UKC! is OK, but I won’t be playing it again. This is exactly the sort of game I'm trying very hard not to buy (or spend time learning and playing) in future.

Pursuit of Glory, 1805: Sea of Glory, Fields of Fire, and PQ-17: These four games, all released in the last 18 months or so, have savaged my confidence in GMT. GMT has produced many fine games. But I found these four to be so awful, so transparently unworkable, that one would think that a simple sense of simple self-preservation would prevent one game like this from going out the door, never mind four in a relatively brief period.

Spartacus: As bad as those four GMT games were, this one is still my train wreck of the year. See this thread on BGG. Compass is another game company I won't be buying from again unless I really, really, absolutely know what I'm doing. Recent history has not been good for new medium-to-heavyweight wargames.

Changing Tack

Probably the biggest change in my gaming habits this year is that I finally went back to Advanced Squad Leader. I had been toying with getting back into it in 2008, including logging a number of hours on the Starter Kits which are good games in their own right. I started playing again in earnest this year, and it’s been a lot of fun. After years of struggling with whatever high-end wargames companies were putting out each year, only to find that most of them had a wide variety of problems, returning to ASL was like going back to an old friend. Yes, it’s complicated. But it encompasses a vast range. If you like the system, it’ll go a huge distance. ASL will never monopolize my high-end wargaming time like it did in the late 80s and early 90s; there are too many other good games out there now, like the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War series, the Operational Combat Series, and the Barbarossa Series, just to pick a few favorites. But I’m glad it’s back.

Wrapping Up

So another year ends and another begins. In just the first week of 2010 I got my copy of a new release about which I am hugely excited, Battle Above the Clouds. A long-awaited reprint should be showing up at my door any day now, Republic of Rome, and I look forward to logging some time on that old favorite. Thunderstone should be imminently available to anyone who wants a copy, and should also have an expansion before too long. Dominion may have two. I hear that Race for the Galaxy may have another cycle. Vance von Borries has what looks like a fascinating game, Bataan!, coming out in the next couple months. The latest alea big-box game, Macao, should be coming along to the US soon. I expect Reiner Knizia will probably design a game.

Should be fun.

Tales of the Arabian Nights

2009-09-13T11:11:00.001-07:00

I've been really enjoying this new game from Z-Man. You get to wander the world of the Thousand and One Nights, encounter strange people and customs, and try to make your fortune. There is a whole genre of what I think of as "experience games", games where you play to watch the stories unfold as much as anything else. Games like Arkham Horror, American Megafauna, maybe Britannia and Republic of Rome. A surprisingly large number of wargames, like Paths of Glory or Successors, and arguably a lot of games which are too huge to realistically play to actual conclusion, like Case Blue or Guderian's Blitzkrieg. I also feel many of GMT's games where you wrestle far more with rules and processes than you do with actual decisions fall into this category; Fields of Fire certainly, and games from The Burning Blue to 1805: Sea of Glory and PQ-17 also feel to me like they get filed here.

So anyway, back to the topic. I think what appeals to me so much about Tales of the Arabian Nights, apart from the great flavor, is that it is an experience game which actually works. Yes, the stories it generates as you have your adventures are usually great fun and the real reward of playing. But you also have to actually play the game. You can't just do stuff because it sounds cool or you want to see what happens; you have to play to your character's strengths, trying to use the skills you've been given or have earned to their best advantage. Courting the Wealthy Princess may sound cool, but if you don't have the Courtly Graces or Seduction skills, it's probably not a percentages play, either from the point of view of winning or generating an interesting story. You have to play to your strengths.

With this in mind, I think a key to enjoying the game is the right attitude. You can't come at it either trying to "generate cool stories" or getting too hung up on winning. I think you have to realize that the game is pretty random, and even if you play the best game possible you may well get hosed. On the other hand, if you don't play to win, you aren't going to generate the most (or even any) interesting stories. So take Knizia's advice to heart, and realize that you do have to play the game to win, but the actual winning itself isn't the important thing.

I'll finish with a couple more concrete tips and observations.

Firstly, on the question of how to choose your victory conditions of story points vs. destiny points: This is a tough call and it's unfortunate that the rules don't give you a little guidance on this, since it's an important decision that you make up-front with little to no information. My sense has been that Story points are a little easier to come by than Destiny, so that argues for favoring Story a little bit. A possibly more important factor, though, is that there is a fairly common status, Scorned, which turns all your Destiny points into Story points. There are also a few other fairly common Statuses that allow you spend Destiny for some effect, and Crippled (which doesn't seem that common) doubles your Story points. On the flip side, Story Point losses, spends, or conversion to Destiny seem very rare (I haven't seen any, but they could be out there). It's still a bit of a shot in the dark, but I think it pays to favor Story points. Scorned seems to come up a lot, and if your objective points are split close to 50/50, it can be a real back-breaker.

Secondly, some folks I've played with have griped a little bit about the early game, a gripe with which I am not unsympathetic. The first phase of the game seems to involve wandering around a bit a trying to make something happen, looking for a break. You're comparatively unskilled at that point, so it doesn't feel like you are able to exert that much control until you've gained some experience. Thematic, but it can make the early game a little unsatisfying. We were pondering minor variants you could use to tweak things a bit, and I think we hit on a good one: just allow the players to pick 4, or even 5 skills at start instead of 3. It seems like it would do no fundamental violence to the game and it would give you a better shot at managing the encounters in the early game, and would let you fit more action in to the same game length. We had a discussion about whether you could get one starting skill at Master level for the cost of two skills, but were undecided. Master level skills are a significant advantage in terms of guiding your destiny, and it seemed like something that should have to be earned. Regardless, personally I don't mind the early game of wandering in the wilderness, but I can see that overall this might improve the game for a lot of folks.

Lastly, keep the player count on this game down. The box advertises up to 6, but that just seems nuts. I'd say you should cap it at 4, and 3 is probably preferable. While you aren't the current player or the reader, Tales of the Arabian Nights is almost pure downtime. There is only so much fun to be had listening to other players' stories. Some, certainly – enough for a 4-player game, I think – but add more players and it gets pretty attenuated.

Bastogne SCS

2009-08-24T13:09:00.000-07:00

All right, let's see if we can get some momentum going here again.

I had a chance to play MMP/The Gamers' latest Standard Combat Series game Bastogne the other day. I have sort of a love/hate (well, maybe like/dislike) relationship with this particular series. I like that it's simple and I can play almost all the game 15 minutes out of the box with little to no frustration. I like the minimalism of the design, the fact that it's sort of a throwback reductionist system, with hexes, ZOCs, CRTs, and basically all the standard components of a 70s-era wargame. The series tries to take these absolute basics and use them in interesting ways.

As I played the first 4-5 turns of the full scenario, I was really excited about Batogne and felt like it did a lot of stuff right. The early game is awesome, with a mixed bag of Germans ranging from elite armored units to low-quality infantry driving into the teeth of American paratroopers and an armored combat command. They deal with constricted terrain and US artillery and lousy roads - sort of a microcosm of the entire Battle of the Bulge. SCS games like to be small to mid-sized, I think; the good games in the series have only moderate counter density and unit counts, like Afrika and Fallshirmjaeger. Bastogne does have a fair number of units, but the low stacking limits (a feature that seems to be popular with Bulge games recently) of only a counter or two in a hex keeps things under control. It's not quite in the ideal SCS zone, but it's close enough. The rules for road marches, which allow units to rapidly move across the map if not engaged, are terrific in allowing players to rapidly redeploy troops as was historically possible, while avoiding the worst of the problems of having units with immense movement factors as was the case in Crusader. They allow for reasonably surprising attacks, as well as forcing players to maintain reasonably strong and coherent lines.

But by the end, Bastogne had let me down. After turn 5, the game collapses under its own weight, much like The Mighty Endeavor did when it turned into a tweezer-fest in the final showdown on the German border. As is unfortunately so often the case with The Gamers-branded games, Bastogne falls apart on the player objectives. The Germans have to secure the cross-board roads on the last turn, but this turns into a mess of hunting down rogue US units (there are no supply rules, so units can exist in isolation in perptuity), working out all combinations of possible road march moves, and (for the Germans) grinding out the last few battles required to win, or (for the US) keeping a handful units in range to interdict the roads. After the major clashes of the first half, the second half of irritating cat-and-mouse securing is a serious letdown and I found it extremely tedious.

I find that I mistrust how The Gamers' games tend to do victory conditions. I've heard the terms "Design for Cause" and "Design for Effect" swirl around their games, but I really think of these two terms more as "the right way" and "the wrong way". Bastogne has several "Design for Effect" rules (or, in the case of supply, non-rules) which are basically arbitrary hacks to force the players to behave historically. For example, the US player receives reinforcements from TF Abrams, the lead units of Patton's army, coming up from the south. Historically, they were apparently used to try to relieve pressure on the besieged Americans, not to block the roads. So there is a special rule which says that these units don't count when determining whether or not the Germans control the roads, which means the Germans can "win" by securing a route paste Bastogne despite the presence of a large American armored formations on said road. The game would be silly without the rule - it would be extraordinarily hard for the Germans to secure the southern route, leaving them the northern route as the only viable way to win - but I'm not sure this is much of an improvement.

Too many SCS games have hacks like this to coerce historical play rather than to actually get at the roots of what is really going on. I refer you to Bowen Simmons fascinating and brilliant piece on Quiddity in his design diary for The Guns of Gettysburg. Obviously, the devil is in the details and maybe Guns of Gettysburg won't work out. But that's how you design victory conditions, and I anxiously await the new game.

It's easy to speculate on what might have been for Bastogne, how the victory conditions might be tweaked to make the game more interesting. If the Germans could win as soon as the roads are secure (seems reasonable), that might help - the US aren't getting any stronger as the game goes on. Or something more nuanced than "take and hold one of two roads plus some spare change" might have been good. Or some supply rules ... I disagree with the designer's notes on this, I think some supply rules would have helped to deter both unsupportable German suicide runs into Bastogne for cheap points as well as lone isolated Americans hunkering down off the grid for days in order to jump on supply roads right at the end.

All this is speculation though. Unfortunately, I think the second half of Bastogne just doesn't work very well. So for me, this is yet anther SCS game with a lot of promise that can't deliver. Gamers' games often seem to have these sorts of victory condition problems, and Bastogne seems to suffer more than most.

I'd be interested if anyone can, as a thought experiment, come up with a good answer for what the Quiddity was for the siege of Bastogne. All I can come up with is the somewhat unsatisfactory "as the Germans, you're hosed". This seems like a tactical battle that was lost at the operational level because the Germans never had the forces to win, in large part because they never had the forces to undertake the whole Bulge thing in the first place.

D&D, 4th Edition

2009-06-06T18:55:00.000-07:00

The Fourth Edition of D&D has been out for oh, about a year now, so maybe it's about time I got around to saying a few words about it.

4E is a major overhaul of D&D 3(.5), a system that was in desperate need of something along those lines. I had gotten to the point after 5 years or so of off-again, on-again D&D 3 that I simply didn't want to play it anymore (I might make an exception for Monte Cook's Ptolus). I like several d20 systems – Arcana Evolved particularly, but also Star Wars d20, but I had come to loathe D&D: the abusive feat combos, the broken weaponry, the endless puzzling over vaguely-worded spells, the ludicrously unbalanced classes with limited development choices, the power-gaming, the endless splatbooks, the incompetent low-level characters, the classic vaguely-Tolkienesque fantasy archetypes that had all the life sucked out of them. It was an incredible mess, and a sinkhole that I honestly just didn't enjoy and didn't want to get involved with again.

So, I was relieved to see that 4E tackled head-on many of the problems I had with 3E. Character abilities have been streamlined and the system complexity greatly reduced. A wider variety of fantasy archetypes can be played in 4E, some (some) life has been breathed back into the stale races and classes, and parties have greater latitude in composition instead of being forced to have a Cleric, a Fighter, a Wizard, and whoever else wants to come along. Non-mainline character classes like Paladins, Rangers and Warlocks are much more interesting, can be developed in a range of ways, and feel like core game elements instead of the bolted-on additions they were have been in all previous editions (I was able to play a decidedly ambiguous Paladin devoted to the Raven Queen as one of my characters). 1st level characters are much more robust and competent. While the emphasis in D&D remains monster-slaying, the new system of skill points and broader skills (Spot and Listen reduced to Perception; Climb, Jump, and Swim to Athletics; a bunch of stuff to Thievery; etc.) allow characters to be good at a variety of things and widens the range of challenges the DM can throw at them. Also, because all characters abilities have now been framed in similar ways (at-will powers, daily powers, and encounter powers), all character classes have interesting choices about when to unleash their powerful strikes, instead of having Wizards pore over their spell lists every round while Fighters just try to guess how much to Power Attack for. Also, as magic users now have decent at-will powers, they no longer have to worry about being completely useless after they've exhausted their few, precious spell slots.

All in all, I've been pleased with how 4E plays. It's cleaner, quicker, and appears better-balanced. While it's clearly aimed at players more interested in the violence than the roleplaying, it's full of good tips and helpful, if basic, roleplaying cues. Monsters are now easier to run for the GM without sacrificing much in terms of tactical interest, which is a big win. I no longer feel particularly drawn to D&D as a genre; I like Arcana Evolved much better as fantasy, Star Wars Saga Edition does the whole heroic angle better, and I've been recently been drawn to the Gumshoe system (Trail of Cthulhu and Mutant City Blues) for investigative-type games. But D&D is an institution, bad D&D particularly so, and 4E does a good job of trying to make it relevant again.

Which brings me to the thing I find most odd about D&D 4E. The one complaint I've heard often about 4E is that it's not D&D anymore, it's trying to morph D&D into World of Warcraft. Which is an odd argument to make, given that World of Warcraft is basically ripped off from D&D, from what I understand of it. To me, this seems beside the point. 4E is a cleaner system, which takes D&D 3.5, in which perhaps 90% of a character's abilities were devoted either to killing things or avoiding being killed by things, and brings the number down to maybe 80%. How many times have you been in a D&D game only to realize that none of your characters have any social skills because everyone has mini-maxed their Charisma down to 8 (Charisma being a generally worthless stat) and has too few skill points to focus on anything other than one or two core skills? 4E makes this scenario much less likely, and while most of your powers will involve killing things and taking their stuff, it's much less likely that your party will be powerless in the face of a slightly uncooperative NPC or a moderately steep slope.

I think the World of Warcraft complaint is based not so much on the system itself, but the fact that Wizards seems to be going with a decidedly retro angle to marketing D&D 4. Despite having developed a pretty good game system, they seem to be trying to go back to the days of AD&D in terms of game sophistication, which just happens to be about where World of Warcraft is. The off-the-shelf modules seem like absolutely classic bad D&D: dungeon hack-fests with random traps to give the Thief's life meaning and NPCs that are designed either to read exposition or to be killed. Good grief. Maybe this is what players like; but for me, not so much. I'm not into the extremes of "palace intrigue" or "cooperative storytelling" styles of roleplaying either, but I like some variety: a little humor, mystery, or intrigue between the bloodletting, some drama, some pacing. The same things I like in my boardgames. Not just clearing the room, then wondering what's going to be in the next room, and whether or not we should take a break to allow our encounter powers to reset. D&D is a much more flexible game system than this. Trail of Cthulhu has Pulp and Purist, and Paranoia has Classic, Straight, and Zap, all to help try to support different players who have different expectations. Even closer to home, the Star Wars Saga Edition has really had a quite brilliant strategy in focussing on providing sourcebooks for different periods in the Star Wars Universe (Clone Wars, Classic Trilogy, Knights of the Old Republic, Scum and Villainy) with very different flavors and styles for different players. 4E could really use something along these lines so that those who are into the whole straight dungeon-crawling experience could be happy at the same time as those of us who aren't. Maybe it's there, but if it is, Wizards' marketing isn't doing a good job of telling me about it.

Anyway, I like 4E. The core of 4E is a good game system that tries to make things much more playable, characters more competent with a wider variety of abilities and more development choices. The Players' Handbook II further develops the system with some great new classes and races that D&D desperately needs; it would be fun to play a party of characters drawn solely from the decidedly non-Tolkienesque races and classes in the PHB II, just to get some real variety. There is definitely a good game here. I'm just waiting for Wizards to support players like me before I get much farther into it.

Origins: How We Became Human

2009-03-29T18:19:00.000-07:00

My first exposure to Sierra Madre Games was about 10 years ago, playing Lords of the Sierra Madre; as a big Republic of Rome fan, I got sucked into it as a similar narrative-heavy game. My impression of it was that it was an intriguing, unworkable mess. As a result my second exposure to Sierra Madre Games did not come until last year, when I was once again intrigued by the fascinating Origins: How We Became Human. Now, three games later – and it's not a short game – I'm still uncertain what to make of it. It is undeniably clever. It's a solid enough game design to merit 3 plays, something too many of the 30-60 minute euros I play don't make it to. It's built on top of some fascinating scientific hypotheses, primarily those of Jared Diamond and Julian Jaynes. It's also got some rather suspect elements.

A quick summary: Origins: How We Became Human covers the evolution of humans from the days when there were multiple, competing early hominids (Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, etc) through to roughly the early Roman period (you can buy an expansion pack for Age 4 and get yourself some nuclear weapons if you’d like). You manage your innovation levels (which drives card draws), population (which drives on-board tactics), and elders, which allow you to bid on major “civilization” cards like the Pyramids, Writing, and Proper Names. As in Civilization, you have only one limited set of tokens, and they can be either on the board or in these various pools, and managing them is the key to the game. For the most part, your objective is to keep these tracks clear: fewer pieces on your innovation track means drawing more cards, fewer pieces on your population track means more population actions (although a greater risk of your culture entering chaos). The action of the game, and most of the ways in which you manipulate these tracks, are driven by the deck of dual-function action. One side of the card will be typically be dedicated to improving your civilization by advancing tech, domesticating plants, animals, or natural resources, generating new elders, or other similar actions; these typically come with a prerequisite or cost. The other half will typically allow you to manage your innovation and population tracks through Fecundity Decreases, which allow you to move units from your innovation track to your population track. The game proceeds through ages of growth and chaos, as you start in the Age of Instinct and try to increase your energy production capacity by domesticating some plants and animals to get into the Bicameral Age, where you then need to increase your productivity again through a plough harness or some-such before finally making it to the Age of Faith. For more details, I refer you to the excellent writeup at Spotlight On Games.

As we will soon see, I am more than a bit conflicted on Origins. But one thing I can say for sure, good game or no, it's not a game that makes itself easy to like. Despite being fairly straightforward, no more complicated than classic Civilization, it's long (5-6 hours for the full game), it's unforgiving, and it can feel extremely random and punishing in a way that makes In the Year of the Dragon look like a funhouse. I think I've had to find an almost entirely new set of fellow-players each time I've wanted to play, a big reason my play-count hasn't yet made it to 4. The rules give you some tips to try to help you with the pitfalls the game lays out for you, but I think they don't go anywhere near far enough in helping you enjoy your first game.

Still, I have to say I liked Origins: How We Became Human. Turns are short, so it moves along at a very good clip for this sort of game, and the system is clean and playable while at the same time having good narrative and reflecting a lot of the research that has inspired the game. There are serious caveats though.

Firstly, you really have to use the optional rule for Livestock Raids. Otherwise, advancing from Age I to II becomes a huge bottleneck over making a few completely random die rolls on domestication attempts, where rolling poorly can have your people relegated to obscurity with absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Secondly, you have to live with the fact that this is a Sierra Madre game and apparently one of Phil Eklund's many talents is not designing working victory conditions. As in American Megafauna, the game-end scoring here is silly. Firstly, the game ends when the first player enters the final stage of Chaos, exiting Age III. This player has, by entering Chaos, just lost most of his victory points, so he is essentially guaranteed to lose. That’s awesome. There is an optional rule to fix that, which is obviously recommended. Secondly, the final victory score is basically random anyway. You get points for the Public Cards that you’ve acquired throughout the game, but only the ones that match the objectives on your player card. This has two problems. Firstly, all the Public cards are so strong in terms of their in-game tactical effects that you’re going to want to acquire anything you can get your hands on anyway. Secondly, only maybe half the public cards are going to come out, so if you sit around waiting for one that you can score (as I did my first game), you may never see one. Thirdly, presumably to patch all this up, there is a mechanic for having your people revolt and swap victory condition cards with another player, which makes it even more random and unsatisfying. The whole thing is a complete mess. Unlike American Megafauna, where there was an obvious and fully workable fix for that game’s arbitrary scoring (just score before each calamity), there is no obvious fix for Origins. Clearly, it seems you need to have some sort of checkpoint scoring after each Age, or other incremental scoring of some kind, but what it should be is unclear. I'm not sure what to say on this. You probably want to play Sierra Madre’s games mostly for the narrative, but on the other hand, narrative requires an end, and if the end is dumb, why were we trying to get there in the first place? I can live with the game as it is, the process of playing and trying to win works for me even if the trying isn’t really rewarded as it should be, but that doesn't mean this part of the game works; it doesn’t.

As an aside, the most common complaint I've read about online is freakish climate change results ending up hosing one or two players, but I've never seen this, it doesn't seem very likely, and climate change is one of the things that makes the game interesting. One aspect of Origins that makes it tricky is that it’s a little unintuitive. Early in the game, population growth and expansion is to some degree actually punished rather than encouraged, so until later – when technology should allow players to skirt climate-change-related geographical difficulties – your empire hardly needs or wants more than a couple cubes on the board.

At the end of the day, even with the optional rules that have been added to make it more of a game, for these reasons I honestly don't think Origins: How We Became Human works strictly as a game. That doesn't mean I wouldn't still like to play it again, or that it isn’t an interesting synthesis and presentation of recent science on human origins, or that it isn't fascinating as a philosophical exercise as to what makes a game or how to make a game out of the ungamable. But still. Interestingly, I think where Origins trips up (other than the whole victory conditions thing) is not so much where it is chaotic, but where it is scripted. The transition from Age I to Age II essentially rests on succeeding at a domestication die roll; the transition for Age II to Age III turns on finding one of only a couple key technology cards one way or another. The game recreates the rise and fall of peoples and civilizations not organically, as it should, but by strong-arming you, mandating a dark ages at various stages in development whether you need it or not. If it had been really clever it would have perhaps linked greater innovation with greater chaos, and therefore perhaps made chaos more likely to follow rapid advances, but that is not the case; chaos is just something you avoid like the plague until the game tells you, "OK, now you have to do some chaos".

You can buy an add-on pack for Age IV, the Modern Era, and while I don't have much appetite for the 8+ hour marathon that an Age I through Age IV game would entail, I am intrigued by the possibilities of the "shorter" game option which starts the players in Age III and plays through Age IV. Age I is probably the most problematic age in that it has the smallest range of player options, the fewest choices, and the largest amount of gratuitous luck. It's possible that the Age III and IV game would be more satisfying for most gamers. If I ever get to game 4, I'd really like to give this a try.

But, ultimately, I think the reason I like the game is that while it’s far from perfect, it works well enough and it's based to a large degree on two fascinating books: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, and Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Both books pivot to various degrees around the clash between Pizarro and the Incans, and try to explain in their own ways how such a yawning chasm came between the two despite their common origin. Diamond looks at physical factors, like the availability of domesticable plants and animals, climate, and immunology. Jaynes examines the evolution of consciousness and the brain's "software", as it were, including the controversial but utterly fascinating thesis that true, full human consciousness – although he defines consciousness more narrowly than I think most people would intuitively – is actually a relatively recent development, perhaps dating from 1200 BC in Europe. Although I had read Diamond before I played Origins, I had never even heard of Jaynes, and the fact that the game inspired me to read this truly intriguing book means it will always have a warm place in my heart. I don't know if Jaynes has the right of things, but his thesis is arresting and his arguments convincing.

Interestingly, though, the very conflict that informs these two books will never actually occur in the game itself. The domesticable plants and animals that Diamond argues were available primarily in Europe are more fairly distributed in the game, while geographic and climate factors critical to Diamond’s arguments have to be ignored or the game wouldn't work at all. The Bicameral period of the game (Age II), before the evolution (Jaynes argues) of modern consciousness, isn't fundamentally different in game terms from Age I or Age III. And, in any event, it's very unlikely you'll see an independent culture arise in the Americas simply because expansion penalties to innovation don't really encourage that much expansion anyway; it seems there is enough space in Europe, Asia, and Africa for five players for much of the game.

So there you go. I’ll finish by saying that regardless of its issues, Origins is definitely worth playing at least once, both because there are interesting game mechanics, but also for the exposure to the ideas on which it is based. Unfortunately, there are a few tricks to playing the game which, if not grasped, can make your life miserable as you get stuck in Age I with 1 innovation action for an extended period and have little to do. Unfortunately, there isn’t much way to intuit these techniques and the guidance in the rulebook isn’t really adequate in my opinion. So, in the hopes of helping your first game to be more fun, here are the tips I’ve picked up.

1) I’m not quite sure where the sweet spot is, player-wise, but I’m pretty sure it’s at 4, not 5. It's a game where the downtime scales linearly with the number of players, so that argues for smaller numbers. But, you want some competition as well, and the board is pretty sparse with only 2. My best experience was with 4, and 3 was pretty good too, while 5 was OK but could drag at times. Also, with more players, the competition for Public Cards gets higher-stakes and more random, which isn’t great.

2) The Innovation track is absolutely crucial, and is the most important single aspect of the game. If you allow yourself to get too far down into the '1' action range, it will take forever to recover and you will be badly constrained, possibly irretrievably hosed, and certainly bored. You must not allow this track to fall too low. Do not pass up Fecundity Decreases for marginal, or even significant, tech gains if you are at risk. There are of course exceptional cases that prove the rule – Origins is nothing if not unpredictable – but you have been warned! Striving to maintain at least two innovation actions trumps virtually everything, and you can really kill yourself here by over-extending. A classic gotcha is in Age I, where clearing brain areas, which sounds like a great idea, can clog your innovation track. Upgrade your brain slowly, in time with moving the cubes from innovation down to population (or up to elders).

3) As a corollary to the above, do not needlessly expand your population just because you have population actions and nothing else to spend them on. If you blow an Age I Chaos die roll and end up with a bunch of units clogging your innovation track, you are thoroughly hosed (see point 2). Keep your empire small until at least Age II, when you have more tools to keep the innovation track clear and can save a double-fecundity decrease for a post-chaos recovery, or otherwise manage your return to golden times. It goes without saying, you do have to manage your various mandated descents into chaos. If your innovation track is already borderline, an untimely chaos can clog the track to the point that it may be many moons until you recover. Again, there are exceptional cases, like when you have a metallurgy advantage and can pillage cards from your neighbors as a substitute for innovation, but in the 95+% case the only reason to expand your population is to get more metropolises to allow you more elders. Even calamities afflict you only in proportion to your size, so expanding doesn’t help you weather those more easily and in fact makes them much worse, again by turning lost units into innovation track cloggers. It goes without saying that actually engaging in combat without a metallurgy advantage is suicide (again, there are exceptions, but they are extremely few), not so much because you lose the guys, but because those guys clog your innovation track.

4) The rulebook warns about progressing through the eras too quickly, but it doesn't mention that it's your innovation track (not to beat a dead horse or anything) that should guide you. Don't dawdle in Age I or II. Get your energy, get an elder or two, and move on. Likewise, in Age III, get your elders, buy your cards, and move on. Moving too fast can be a problem, but the Livestock Raids optional rule, which you more or less have to play with, mitigate this risk for leaving Age I (although losing the domestication action can hurt), and Age II and III really are bound by careful management of the innovation track more than anything else. Once you're in a good spot – you've got the prerequisites, a card in hand to mitigate the chaos, and the innovation track is in good shape – do it. There is no reason to stick around in any of the ages once you are legally allowed to progress.

4) Acquire any public cards you can (at least until Age IV). Just because it doesn't count towards your victory conditions is not a good reason not to bid. All the cards provide powerful strategic advantages, so I think until the final age, game-end victory points should be a non-factor in figuring out how much to bid on a card. You don't want to give them to other players cheaply just because you're holding out for one that'll score for you. The advantages of having administration, culture, and information are all quite strong enough to get regardless.

Knizia vs. K.622

2009-02-23T17:24:00.000-08:00

I'm not usually a fan of cross-genre comparisons. I remember a few years back there was a GeekList aiming to associate boardgame designers with their classical composer analogues. I'm willing to play the game, if somewhat half-heartedly, when we're talking Teuber or Knizia (I remember arguing without particular conviction for Knizia being kind of like Mozart), but when people start putting Martin Wallace and Franz Schubert into the same sentence, I rapidly lose interest.

Anyway, as some of you may be aware, I was at one point in my life - rather longer ago now than I like to admit - a clarinet player. In the last year or so, I've been practicing again, trying to get back in shape. I started out with the Concertino, by Carl Maria von Weber, primarily for nostalgic purposes; that was the piece with which I transitioned from being an average high school wind musician to being pretty good. Then the whole start-up thing kicked in, and I lost momentum. But I've recently been re-energized by Jasper Rees' wonderful book A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument (or "I Found my Horn: One Man's Struggle With The Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument" for our UK friends; I always find these sorts of subtle title changes between the US and UK fascinating). The book helped me realize that if you're really going to do this sort of thing when you're 40, you don't want to screw around with second-tier pieces. You want to go with the best. And for the clarinet, that would be Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, K.622 (Meyer) (Stoltzman) (Neidich) (Marcellus), one of the greatest concertos ever written, for clarinet or any other instrument for that matter. After all, unlike Rees, I was able to competently perform the Adagio of that concerto 20 years ago, so surely the whole thing would be a worthy, and doable, goal.

So I picked up a CD with an orchestral accompaniment of the piece. I was reading the included two-page notes when I ran across this passage that I could swear that if I haven't written, I should have:

"Here Mozart displays that most deceptive and difficult artistic feat, one that most lesser artists endlessly fail to achieve: that "less is more". A lasting work of art does not entail showing off one's talents, but rather capturing a subject's psychological essence - it's honesty - in as clear and simple a statement as possible. Mozart provides this again and again in so many of his compositions, and we are eternally surprised at his straightforwardness and lack of embellishment. And it is in this, his last concerto [the Clarinet Concerto, K.622], that Mozart's "art of simplicity" possibly finds its finest expression."

- Douglas Scharmann, notes on the Clarinet Concerto in A Major, KV622, for Music Minus One

You swap out Mozart and replace it with Knizia, and replace Clarinet Concerto with Beowulf or Modern Art or Lost Cities, and this could almost be re-used word for word. I make no claim that Knizia's genius is in the same league as Mozart's - I'd give up my entire game collection before I gave up Mozart's Clarinet Concerto alone - but still, that one could use almost identical language to describe their particular talents when compared to the artists that surround(ed) them, well, it's rather striking.

My amazement can perhaps be understood a little better with some context. Although the notes never mention anything specific, when Scharmann says the Clarinet Concerto "lack[s] embellishment" this was probably written with later pieces, perhaps von Weber's two very challenging clarinet concerti (Meyer), in mind. Later composers would latch on to the clarinet's agility as its most distinguishing feature, and write extremely technical pieces for it. Also, many concerti - including all of Mozart's magnificent clarinet and horn concerti - are written with a specific performer in mind, and performers like to show off their technique, and for the clarinet, that often seems to mean the ability to play the notes fast. Performances of even the very musical Weber Concertino evolved such that performers competed to play it faster and faster, past all reasonable bounds. Fortunately this is far less true today, but even so Charles Neidich, one of today's finest clarinet players, plays it at a tempo fast enough to needlessly cut into the pieces' musical virtue (in my opinion) in his recording with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Mozart, on the other hand, understands all the things that make the clarinet such a wonderful and versatile instrument: not only its agility, but its range, its purity of sound, its expressiveness, and its incredible dynamic range that allow it to play comfortably with any other instrument in the orchestra and has made it a staple soloist and member in virtually any musical group, including orchestras, symphonic winds, chamber music, band, jazz, folk, klezmer, film soundtracks, and even popular music until everything had to be amped ... once you start listening, you can start hearing the clarinet almost everywhere.

The topic of Mozart and his famous Clarinet Concerto is too vast to tackle in a blog. But for me, once considered, the parallels are so remarkable I feel little need to elaborate any further, and leave it up to you to explore.

Chicago Express

2009-02-14T11:45:00.000-08:00

When it comes to train games, it seems like there isn't a lot new under the sun. You've got the classic train games, Empire Builder, 1829, 1830, and Silverton, maybe Rail Baron. You've got the more modern (and far more abstract) Age of Steam, Ticket to Ride, and Union Pacific. Most things seem to start from one of these places.

Chicago Express borrows from both sides of the fence. You've got the realistic-ish stock certificates from 1825 merged with a variation of the abstract route management (without the silliness) from Railroad Tycoon or Age of Steam, and – in perhaps its most compelling selling point – a one-hour-ish playtime.

The core of the game is the stock evaluation (it's not really a market since stocks, once acquired, cannot be sold). Each of the 5 companies, the Pennsylvania, New York Central, B&O, C&O, and Wabash, have between 2 and 6 stock certificates available. One of the actions you can take on your turn, and the one that the game will turn on, is auctioning a share in a company (the other two involve improving the revenues of one of the companies you have stock in). The players then bid, trying to figure out what that share will be worth, with the winner taking the share and the company taking the cash, to use in future expansion.

The thing that makes Chicago Express different is that each share really is a share, and unsold shares don't exist yet. When the PRR earns $25, it is split evenly amongst the shareholders, with unsold shares simply not counting. So when you auction a share, you are not only acquiring a piece of a company, you are diluting other players' existing shares. This means that the number of shares available for a company to issue (3 for the PRR, 6 for the C&O) is a big deal. The first share of the PRR can't be diluted that much, while the first share of the C&O is a bit of a crap shoot.

Chicago Express is the sort of game I should like: fairly short, wide open, with an interesting auction, and decent theme. And I do, sort of. But I think it founders in a couple way.

Firstly, the valuations on the stock certificates are very hard to work out because everything is so wide open. It's impossible for a new player to make a reasonable guess as to what the first PRR share auctioned in the game is worth, and some of the valuation criteria are a little anti-intuitive (the weak companies with fewer shares available offer by far the best long-term per-share return on investment). At some level, I have a feeling that the difficulty of fairly valuing the shares is not supported by the entertainment value or repeat draw of the game as a whole, which means players are unlikely to play the game enough to get the experience required to do the valuations competently.

Secondly, the game has a cooperation dynamic that may trump all this anyway. If you and I split the B&O, and both work hard to develop it, and the other players lack similar coordinated action, one of us will win with the difference being decided around the edges by minority shareholdings. In a 4-player game, if 3 players have PRR and everyone spends a little time developing it, the fourth player is screwed. Furthermore, it seems like it is in the best interests of players to cooperate when the opportunity presents itself.

I dunno. When thinking about the game, I'm ultimately left wrestling with slippery inter-player dynamics more than with the theoretically much more interesting valuations in the stock auctions. I think in the end, who ends up owning what certificates ends up mattering more than what they paid for them, if opportunities for player cooperation develop – especially with the extremely valuable PRR. The C&O by contrast, with 6 available shares, is so easily diluted by friends and foes alike that it's an unattractive investment for either capital or expansion energy unless it can be had more cheaply than players seem to instinctively allow.

Which sort of brings me back to the valuations thing. Having played a couple times now, I sort of have a handle on what a PRR share is worth in the initial offering, probably north of $25. On the other hand, I still really don't have a good idea of what a C&O share is worth beyond not a lot.

I'm still not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. The first time I played the game I thought it was cool, I found the auctions and the wide-open nature of the play very appealing. The second time, with 4 players, the player who didn't get one of the three PRR shares was doomed basically from the get-go (and that was even with PRR shares being apparently fairly pricey, raising far more capital than the PRR could ever spend).

So while I do like the game, I'm skeptical as to whether the balance is really there. The opportunity cost of auctioning shares may be too high; the real value of shares may actually be significantly more than the cash available to players, making artificial cash management decisions a little too important; and some companies – notably the PRR, C&O, and Wabash – may be out of whack; and expanding cheap companies, like the C&O, may simply be much too expensive compared to the opportunity costs. But the redeeming virtue of the game is its relative brevity, at a little over 60 minutes. Any longer, and I think some of the suspect balance issues (whether real or perceived) would hit harder, as they do for me in Age of Steam. Even though the game itself actually seems like it might want to go a little longer, develop a little more, I think ending where it does allows Chicago Express to be a game of exploring the interesting decision space and game dynamics without overstaying its welcome.

On Rules

2009-01-11T10:52:00.000-08:00

I still want to do some kind of 2008 in Review article at some point, but one thing that struck me was that it was bookended by two very promising wargames with quite possibly the worst sets of rules I have ever seen - and believe me, as one who has ranted about game rules before, that's saying something. So I thought I'd take an opportunity to rant some more and maybe to offer some solutions.

The games in question are The Devil's Cauldron (MMP) and Pursuit of Glory (GMT). I had every reason to like both.

In fact, maybe I do. I almost can't tell. Because the #1 reason I threw up my hands in despair at The Devil's Cauldron was not gameplay, but utter, blinding frustration with the rule book. I could never remember the Assault Sequence, for example, and every time we needed to confirm some small detail we needed to wade through the rules' endless nattering before finding (hopefully – there is no index) what we were looking for. The insanely verbose and conversational style makes actually using it during a game to look stuff up an infuriating exercise.

Conversely, the Pursuit of Glory rules read more like a rough draft than actual rules. Spread over almost 50 sprawling pages, the rules are constantly re-stating themselves, presenting things out-of-order, clarifying the blindingly obvious, and getting bogged down in minor details. This game is almost certainly not be as complex as it looks, but with 50 pages of meandering and incomprehensible rules, I can virtually guarantee it will never be played around here. Nobody I game with regularly will look at that kind of page count and even bother to try, no matter how much one insists it's very like the modest-complexity Paths of Glory and the rules volume is due mostly to clarifications and keeping the most obtuse players on ConsimWorld happy. Page count may be a crude metric, but 50 pages = no go unless you're OCS or ASL. I take that back, even OCS has "only" 38.

Although these were by far the worst, there were plenty of bad rulebooks this year, particularly from repeat offenders GMT and Fantasy Flight. The Unhappy King Charles! rule book makes a moderately complicated game look daunting, Warriors of God uses opaque and non-standard terminology to make a simple game needlessly confusing, and Tide of Iron's rules turn a light wargame into a major undertaking, with the Desert Fox expansion rules being even worse.

Enough ranting. On this particular occasion I'm here not just to complain, but to offer some suggestions. I'll admit I've never written a rulebook. But I have spent a great deal of time explaining rules to people, and certainly have read more than my share. Some of this stuff seems very basic to me, but apparently it needs to be said.

First and foremost, I think it's important to keep in mind what we're trying to accomplish here. What we are trying to do is to build a model of the game in the player's mind. The player has to have a working model of the game in his or her head in order to weigh the options and make the decisions required to play it. So the goal is to build up these mental systems in a way not unlike you would assemble anything else.

The 100% Rule: When writing rules, one must bear in mind that there is actually a big difference between explaining rules and creating a working rule book. If I explain the game rules to you, I only need to get far enough for you to have a solid enough mental model to begin playing. Things that are initially either not relevant or negligibly relevant can be explained later. As an explainer, I can also rely on the players to ask clarifying questions when their mental models seem to have gaps. But to formally describe a game in a set of rules, 90% is not good enough, you have to have 100%. The same conversational techniques you would use to teach rules in person can fail to fully and concisely convey the complete details of a complex system when read. Sometimes catastrophically, as The Devil's Cauldron demonstrates. It has an acceptable 90% rulebook if you have access to someone who knows the game 100%. Unfortunately, such a person does not appear to be included in the box.

Short Rules Are Better: It's a fact of life that our brains' short-term storage buffers are small, and a rule has to pass through that buffer before it has a chance of being retained long term. Simple, straightforward rules can frequently be made vastly more difficult to retain through over-explanation. Rule 12.5 in Pursuit of Glory is a good example. This is a simple rule: All full strength regular units have to roll a die when activated for attack in certain situations, and if they roll >= the round number, they are reduced. But then when you spend 4 (short) paragraphs clarifying that means that reduced units don't roll, irregulars don't roll, that yes, “when activated” really is before combat, so you have to use your reduced combat strength, that rolling > 2 is more likely than rolling > 5, and that there might possibly be cards out there that alter all this, all of a sudden you've actually made the transition from page to memory far more difficult than if you had just bolded the word regular and been done with it. Plus you've completely broken the reader's rhythm. The simple version is perfectly clear and concise. If you feel you absolutely must preempt possible misunderstanding of an otherwise perfectly clear rule, put it in a footnote, side-note, or appendix. As a corollary, write your rules for the average reader, not some nut-job on ConsimWorld who is out to willfully misinterpret your rules or question your design decisions.

The Test of Context: I've talked about this a little on a recent thread about explaining Race for the Galaxy on BoardGame Geek. This gets back to the whole mental model thing. When you're trying to help someone build a mental model of the game systems, you want to build the systems in a logical order, such that a player doesn't have to do a lot of work to hook them up once the explanation is done. In many games, the sequence-of-play order is the way to go. But there are some dramatic examples where explaining things in that order actually makes it significantly more difficult, like Race for the Galaxy or Through the Ages, because understanding things that happen in the first phases requires understanding what's going on later - but the opposite may not be true.

For wargames, what this translates into is that you have to start with the victory conditions, because that is the overall context. Paths and Pursuit of Glory get this right; the victory conditions are up front. Unhappy King Charles! gets it wrong and puts the victory conditions right at the end, so you struggle through the rulebook with little understanding of what you're trying to accomplish and then have to retrofit your mental model when you find out the answer. From there, you might argue for explaining rules that are critical to victory before breaking into the sequence of play; for Unhappy King Charles! and Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage, for example, one might make an argument to explain political and provincial control second rather than in sequence of play order.

The other thing this argues strongly against is up-front terminology explanations, which have become distressingly common in GMT rulebooks. Pursuit of Glory has two dense pages of terminology up front which are almost totally incomprehensible since you have no context for understanding what they're going on about. Pursuit of Glory is actually a multiple, severe offender here. We get terrain effects on combat on page 4 before we've even gotten to the sequence of play. Detailed unit descriptions are on page 6 and 7 before we have any way of understanding what these unit distinctions actually mean in game terms, so the rules of course have to repeat everything again later, which itself becomes incredibly problematic. There is absolutely no reason to introduce a rule like this before the reader can possibly understand it.

You get or lose players in the first five pages or so, and almost definitely by page 10. If players can get get a running start on what the game is all about – if you get them a solid context to work with - they'll have hope, even if your game is complicated. If they're on page 8 and still haven't got past the component overview, as is the case in Pursuit of Glory, you're screwed. Put the glossary at the end.

Tell 'em Once: There is an old rule of business presentations: "Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em, tell 'em, and tell 'em what you've told 'em". Unless you intend your rules to be read by disinterested and bored people who don't really want to be there, this is terrible advice for rules-writers. If you're repeating rules (like the Blockade rules, repeated several times in Pursuit of Glory), you're re-building a part of the mental model you've already built. Unless it's absolutely unavoidable, do it once and cross-reference.

The Once per Game Test: Rules need momentum and continuity. You need to build up an understanding of the core game systems before you deal with flavor rules. Any rules that applies only once per game should not be in the main body. Unhappy King Charles! is an offender here, with a couple pages of one-off rules right smack in the middle of the rulebook, breaking up the coherency the game system explanation. One-offs should be at the end, in their own categorized sections, unless there is a compelling reason otherwise.

In the same vein, one of the absolutely critical strengths of these card-driven wargames is that they can put a lot of these sorts of one-off rules - which are great for flavor but hugely problematic in terms of increasing real complexity - in the cards without burdening the player with learning them up front or having to remember them (in fact, for many folks not knowing exactly what is in the decks is a desirable feature of the first few games). One should leverage this. If a card explains its effect(s) perfectly clearly, it doesn't need a rule. Pursuit of Glory is again a repeat offender here, including (for example) rules 7.4.1, 7.4.2, 17.2.2 & 18.2.2 which, while admittedly short, are still unnecessary.

The Less than Once per Game Test: Any rules that take effect less than once per game (on average), whether they are rules that cover oddball situations that rarely come up or are chrome, should also be removed from the main rules. If they are patching up the rules to cover rare but awkward situations they should be in footnotes or something similar. If it's a real rule that has an application of less than once per game, you should first consider if you really need it, then put it somewhere where it isn't going to bother anyone.

Bad Game Systems Make Bad Rules: If you're having a hard time explaining something, it may be the fault of the game system, not the rules. If, as in Pursuit of Glory's section 11.2.2, you find yourself apologizing that seriously, this rule is actually really simple and just hard to explain clearly, you have officially entered the swamp. Which Turkish and Bulgarian LCUs can't do, apparently.

Designer's and Historical Notes: I love designer's and historical notes. I don't love them when they break up the flow of the rules. Too often they just serve to provide historical rationalization for bad rules, and they rarely, if ever, serve to help learn, clarify, or remember things. Put them at the end as a serious piece, like Avalon Hill used to do. Alternatively, do what Columbia does and have a three-column format, two with rules, and one with historical notes, designer's notes, optional rules, and other interesting tidbits where you can both see them (if you're interested) without having to delve into the rules, and also delve into the rules without being distracted by them.

An Index: If you have more than 12 pages of rules, have an index. Seriously. It's not that hard these days, and it has the added bonus that if your index is a mess, your rules are probably a mess too. It's insane how many complicated games don't have indices. Like Pursuit of Glory and The Devil's Cauldron.

Write Rules: While a game may have a goal - to teach some history, to espouse a theory of mobile warfare, to explain why things happened the way they did - once you cross the threshold from light to medium-weight, the game’s rules’ only goal must be to build the player’s mental model. That’s it. The rules are not the place to defend your design decisions, put across your point of view, or explain the history. The rules must be designed to cleanly and clearly explain the game system(s), nothing more. The systems themselves are, after all, supposed to be the vehicle through which you do all that other stuff and should stand on their own. Anything else belongs in footnotes, Designer’s Notes, Developer’s Notes, Historical Notes, More Notes, Appendices, Further Reading, Historical Booklet, Further Notes, or whatever.

As I finish writing this piece, I realize my goal - of setting down some hard and fast rules for writing rules to more complicated games - is obviously bigger than I could hope to tackle. So I ask you to help me out here. What are the worst mistakes you’ve seen rules-writers make, and what would you do to correct them? What are some of the best rules styles you’ve seen? For my part, I think Ted Raicer does good job - his original rules for Paths of Glory and WWII: Barbarossa to Berlin stand as good models for card-driven wargames of this sort. Even though they’ve become a bit needlessly bloated in recent updates of the living rules, they’re still pretty good. Mark Simonitch and Vance Von Borries also do a good job. While I might sometimes quibble with the follow-through, I think Richard Berg knows how to do this stuff properly. I like Columbia’s format a lot for their higher-end games like EastFront and Rommel in the Desert. On the other hand, GMT’s line of card-driven wargames has a lot of entries with painfully bad rules.

Municipium

2009-01-10T12:07:00.000-08:00

Reiner Knizia's and Valley Games' Municipium is one of my favorite releases of 2008. It's a classic recent Knizia game, reminiscent of Blue Moon, Blue Moon City, Tower of Babel, and Beowulf in its ability to cram so many interesting decisions and so much flavor into such a relatively small set of rules and a relatively short but high-intensity playing time.

When I think about the overwhelming majority of games, I think about them having a couple or a few distinct game systems that interact in interesting ways. Take Agricola: you've got game systems for growing crops and maintaining herds of animals and playing occupations, but those game systems interact only lightly, in the sense that you have limited actions to spend on one or the other, but your farm and your herds are managed separately.

In Municipium, there is a lot of stuff going on – competition for citizens, the Praefect, building special powers, and turn order – but everything interacts heavily with everything else, and it's hard to pick out individual game systems. Even thought it might look like a worker placement or area control game, it's not; it seems to me really just a single large system which has some elements of both.

Which leads me to what is my biggest problem with Municipium, and that is how to pitch it when people ask you what you want to play. Games are easier to pitch when they are like something. The classic example for me is Agricola, which to some people can be sold as "a lot like Caylus, but actually fun". When a game fits into nice categories, like tile-laying or auction or negotiation or area-control, or more recently worker-placement or role-selection, it's easy to sell. You can get 80% of the way there using a few words to describe the basic idea, and then talk about what makes the game unique or unusual (like Agricola's asymmetric player positions and diversity of cards). This doesn't work here.

Interestingly, I've decided that the best way to sell recent Knizia games like Blue Moon City, Beowulf, and Municipium is to go directly to the theme and not try to pitch mechanisms at all. After all, the large majority of gamers buy and play games for their themes, however expressed, not their mechanical workings. Even though these recent Knizias are fairly simple rules-wise, the mechanisms are too involved or ambiguous to explain in a brief pitch. Trying to sell Beowulf as an auction game is not the way to go, even though the central driver sort of looks like it might be an auction, and the same goes for selling Municipium as an area-control game. But if you describe it as influence-gathering in Imperial Rome, talk about influencing the citizens or the Praefect or going to the Baths to hobnob with the rich and powerful or the Tavern to get your opponents drunk, that's something you can get traction with. And, helpfully, it's what the game basically delivers.

Battlestar Galactica

2009-01-04T13:56:00.000-08:00

I'm a little late to this particular party, but I finally had a chance to play the new Battlestar Galactica a few days ago. I was conflicted going into the game: the reviews had been good (they usually are), but Fantasy Flight Games' track record isn't always, and I love Lord of the Rings but hate Shadows over Camelot. I also wanted to like the television show, but couldn't.

So I was some combination of surprised and relieved when BSG was pretty fun.

The game actually makes a bit of a bad first impression, unfortunately. It beats you over the head with a lot of complexity, from the traditional overwrought FFG rulebook to critical references that should be in an easy-to-see place on the board but aren't (it's not like there isn't plenty of dead space) to a lot of critical rules detail that can only be found in tiny type on the board and simply cannot be seen if you lack a high-power spotlight, are viewing at a distance of greater than one foot, or are over the age of 30.

But, if you get past this, there are good ideas here. The foci of the game are the hyperjumps the Galactica has to make as they plot their course to Kobol. These are checkpoints where the board is periodically cleared of threats and the game timer resets, and it is a great way to segment the game and manage tension and ensure a semi-regular restart so the players don't get into a death spiral the way they do in Shadows over Camelot. The hidden loyalties are well-executed for the most part – dealing them out in two batches, at the beginning and mid-game, similarly ratchets up the uncertainty and tension and avoids some problems (and is true to the show).

Where BSG struggles, though, is with pacing. The game is just too long and gets too repetitive, is too much of a kitchen-sink type game and so has too many moving parts, and is too much at the mercy of the draw deck for its tension. Some stages will be terrific as Cylon raiders pile into the Galactica in waves while food shortages develop in the fleet and morale collapses. Some not so much, as you spend half an hour dealing with relatively uninteresting crises that never develop while waiting to jump. The system of crisis cards, where each turn the players draw a crisis from the show which they must resolve using skill cards, is clever but is simply not enough to reliably deliver tough and interesting decisions on its own. Things only really get fun when you have bad guys swarming and interesting crises going on at the same time, and for this to happen, you need things to come out in the right proportions, which they too often don't.

In general, there are just too many moving parts which are not tight enough. To be grossly general, to the extent that we're willing to call games art, they are the art of decisions. Music generates feelings and emotions through sound. Literature is the art of words. Painting is visual art. Games create their impressions, feelings, and emotions through the decisions they ask you to make. Every complaint people make about games ultimately boils down to a problem with the decision-making (i.e., too much luck = my decisions don't make enough of a difference; too much downtime = I make decisions too infrequently; brain-burner = the decisions are too hard; the theme is a paste-up = the decisions I make don't seem authentic; and so on).

In Battlestar Galactica, the players manage many more resources than they do in Lord of the Rings. BSG has food, people, morale, fuel, fighters, transports, dual-use skill/action cards, cylon fighters, cylon mother-ships, cylon boarding ships, cylon boarders, nuclear weapons, and political cards. Plus every player has a once-per-game special power. In Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, the players "only" have skill cards, action cards, ring tokens, life tokens, shields, and corruption. And despite the fact that BSG goes on for 3-4 times as long as Lord of the Rings, and even though it has so many more resource types, it still seems to manage to generate fewer interesting, really tough decisions than Lord of the Rings.

Now, part of this is because the players are secretly split into loyal Human players and Cylons, and much of the tension in the game is figuring out who is who. And that more or less requires a fair number of small decisions for the players to look at, so loyalties can be revealed over time. To the extent that the game succeeds - which is not insignificant - it does so in this aspect of it, as each decision is scrutinized for signs of treachery, and players banter around accusations, threats, and general paranoia. Not unlike in the show. But you simply can't create an interesting game out of a lot of uninteresting decisions, and here the decisions - whether how to resolve crises, or figuring out who the traitor is - are not reliably interesting, compelling, narrative, or evocative. At the end of the day, I can't help but think this game could be much improved if it were the euro that in its heart of hearts it really is, and wasn't trying to be the overwrought super-themey sort of thing FFG specializes in - stuff that always delivers a boatload of rules but doesn't always deliver a plausible theme or a plausible game. Usually less is more, and this applies to theme as much as anything else. Here as much as anywhere, a tighter, tenser game would be thematically far stronger than this kind of kitchen sink game.

---

As long as we're talking about BSG the game, I can't resist putting in my .02 on the show. One of the reasons that the new Sci-Fi Battlestar Galactica ultimately turned me off was it really only had one tone: grim. It completely lacked any emotional range. Real people are sometimes funny and crack jokes when they're under stress. BSG characters always take themselves so excruciatingly, painfully seriously. This was especially funny in context of playing the boardgame, where each character from the show is brutally, and totally effectively, boiled down to three traits, a characteristic, a special ability, and a flaw. When you put it like that, BSG the boardgame becomes a rich mine of humorous possibilities, and if only the show had been able to capture some of the humor we found in the game, maybe it wouldn't suck.

Toledo

2008-08-06T22:36:00.000-07:00

Toledo is Martin Wallace's latest game from Kosmos/Mayfair, and before I played, it was variously described to me as unlike other Martin Wallace games, or what you get when you give Martin Wallace a professional developer. I'm not generally a fan of his games, but a couple friends who are generally much pickier – and who like Wallace games less than I do – liked it, so it came out for a spin.

Toledo is well-put together and a decent game. It's light but fun. The two-phase game of setting up shops and then collecting materials and manufacturing swords is clever and ensures variety of play (the first phase is admittedly quite short). It feels more solid than a game from Warfrog and is certainly more attractive. But I think I finally figured out at least one big reason why Wallace has such a hard time selling me on his games; I figured this out because by chance I ended up playing Modern Art and Toledo back-to-back.

Themed games like this are about friendly competition, but if that's all we wanted we'd be playing Go or Bridge. Games are also about entertainment and story-telling, and as such require many of the same elements that other entertainment media require. One important thing is good management of tension, or pacing. We wouldn't be entertained by a James Bond flick where Bond whacks the henchman in the first 15 minutes, finishes off the big bad gun by the half hour mark, and then spends the remaining 90 minutes rolling up the lower levels of the criminal organization du jour. Or a romantic comedy where the couple gets married in half an hour and spends the rest of the film doing housework.

But this is essentially what Toledo asks us to watch. We're competing to build swords out of steel and pretty them up with some gems. There are a very small number of extremely high-valued swords that use a decent amount of steel and gems. Then there are a bunch of low-valued swords that use less of each (or are not enhanced with gems at all). The game is a mad scramble to build the couple big-point weapons right away, and then the rest of the game is spent building low-quality swords to fill out a few points. In our games, the players scored 75% or more of their points in the first half of the game.

This is not a reasonable way to manage tension. You want the stakes to increase as the game progresses for a ton of good dramatic and game-play reasons. I can see no good reason to justify stakes getting lower and lower as the game goes on. And yet, this is what many Martin Wallace games do. In Tinner's Trail, the big points are available on turn 1, not turn 4. In Age of Steam, the high-stakes decisions are made in the first few turns, not at the end where all reason says that they should be. Brass allows the tension to drain out of the game as late-game decisions become less and less relevant.

Compared to the skillfully-managed and escalating tension and pace of a game like Modern Art, the mid-game fall-off in Toledo seems particularly egregious. I actually kinda liked the systems of Toledo. I want to like the game. I even do, sort of. But I can't help but imagine a so much better game which is basically the same, but where the players start off as apprentices building simpler, lower-scoring swords and work their way up to the big points as they gain skill and experience, instead of doing their masterwork first and then inexplicably settling down to crank out schlock.

Warriors of God

2008-07-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

If I could use only three words to review all the entries in Multiman Publishing's International Game Series so far, I could do it: Too long.

Seriously, I think all of these games (Fire in the Sky, A Victory Lost, Red Star Rising) would be far more appealing if they could cut several hours off of their playing time (or, in the case of Red Star Rising, if it had some year- or campaign-length scenarios to go with the toys and monsters). All of these are clever, well designed games that just go on for way too long to ever get much, or indeed any, table time. So for me anyway, Warriors of God was as much about answering the question, “is this whole series doomed to excessive play time?”, as it was about finding out if the game itself was any good. Because if it carried on the series’ tradition in this respect, I could walk away from the whole IGS thing.

The short answer is, it isn't, and I can't. Warriors of God was pretty fun, and while it still is unquestionably a bit too long for the game that it is, the magnitude of the problem is far less than it has been in previous IGS games. Warriors of God runs about 3-4 hours when 2-3 would be more appropriate, given that it's chaotic and can become somewhat repetitive. Fire in the Sky ran like 10-12 hours but started getting tedious at around 6. Fire in the Sky’s length problem was a show-stopper. Warriors of God’s is not.

The basic idea of the game is that you play either the French or the English in the various wars in the 12th through 15th centuries. The main attraction is the Hundred Years War, but there is also a Lion in Winter covering the earlier period surrounding Richard the Lionheart. The tools you will use to win are the leaders the two nations have at their disposal, from the bad (a bunch of guys named some variation of John and/or Jean) to the legendary (Henry V, Joan of Arc, and Robin Hood, to pick a few). Leaders are rated for their rank, which limits how many troops they can command and who will be in charge when leaders fight together; the number of troops they can wield in battle, which limits the number of dice you can roll in combat; and how valorously they can lead them. The last is quite important as an advantage in valor gives a to-hit bonus to the possessing side, and since the basic hit number is a 6 on a 6-sided die, even just a +1 doubles the effectiveness of your troops.

The flow of the game is driven by the arrival and departure of these leaders. Every turn 6 show up (2 French, 2 English, and 2 neutrals, the last of which the players draft), and everyone who is already there checks to see if they croak. Basically, every leader in play rolls a die, and if the die roll plus that leader’s arrival turn is less than the current turn, that leader dies (or retires or whatever). Anyone who is left musters troops and campaigns against the enemy.

Really, that's about all you need to know about the game. There is some solid period chrome, from rules about longbows to gunners and sieges, but like Britannia, the real flavor of the game is in the flow of these leaders, good and bad. Sometimes you've got a great leader like Henry V and you need to make maximum use of him before he dies. Sometimes you've got nothing and you just need to hold out until someone competent shows up. This dynamic is fun, albeit fraught with chaos; some games Henry V will show up and promptly die, while some games you may get him for the full 6 turns. Obviously, being able to use the most awesome piece in the game for 6 turns vs. 1 is just a little bit game-altering. The uncertainty is obviously an important element of the game. But those leader death checks are some pretty high-stakes die rolls.

In general, the game doesn't make you pick up the die unless you're rolling for something really important. Sieges which decide the fates of armies are resolved on a single die roll, typically a 1:6 or 1:3 roll. The initiative die roll will dictate whether the turn has 3 or 8 impulses, and so how much time you have to utilize your just-received awesome leader. And you can only gain control of provinces at all on a 1:2 or 1:3 die roll.

This last thing actually is really the only thing that sort of bugged me about the game. Controlling provinces is the key both to winning, and to forming some sort of territorial coherency for your kingdom and therefore managing troop mustering and getting some sense of strategy beyond raw opportunism, and the difficulty of gaining control of provinces is kind of odd. You can only roll once per turn, which represents ten years, so it's possible to send a leader milling around somewhere for 30 or 40 years (assuming he lives) and never actually be able to control the region. For me personally, this was almost a die roll too far. I could live with the huge chaos involved in the leaders, battles, and sieges, because I felt like they added texture and the frustration they served up was at least in service of something historical and flavorful. But having to make further high-stakes die rolls every turn just to take control of provinces – even when the enemy was nowhere within a hundred miles – seemed gratuitous.

But the bottom line on Warriors of God was that I enjoyed it. I wish it were shorter; it's a very chaotic game, and although I think it's chaotic in a fun way, the buffeting winds of fate do tend to wear one out after a couple hours, and so I can't exactly see it getting a ton of table time. But it is flavorful, and fun, and unusual, and has that “epic sweep” flavor of Britannia as players enter and exit the stage. In sharp contrast to the route taken by most euros, a lot of the best wargames are about managing chaos, about looking for opportunities in apparently unpromising situations or rolling with the punches, and I felt Warriors of God managed to find a generally good spot there, giving you an unpredictable situation to deal with as well as the tools to try to cope with it. There aren't a lot of these low-end wargames that I like very much, and while it’s true Warriors of God didn’t exactly blow me away, I did enjoy it, and feel like it fills a niche in my collection for the time anyway.

Appendix I:

As a historical game, I feel Warriors of God does suffer a bit from being a “complete information” game, sort of like Fire in the Sky did. Everyone can see everything and know exactly how good the leaders are and how effective longbows are going to be, so some historical events just can't happen. Being fully aware of the power of the longbow, the effectiveness of Henry V, and the ineffectiveness of their own leaders, the French are just going to run away at Agincourt, which seems rather wrong. Obviously, all wargames suffer from this to some degree. But Warriors of God, in which leaders play such a crucial role, could benefit from uncertainty or asymmetrical information as to leaders’ capabilities. The game as it is is still a good game, but the way leaders come and go could be seen to have the dual properties of being both hugely chaotic (because of the death rolls) as well as highly scripted (because we all know when Henry V is going to get here and exactly how good he's going to be) in a way that is almost reinforcing, when usually a game introduces some scripting to reduce the chaos, or vice versa.

Appendix II:

Generally I cut MMP some slack on their rules-writing given that compared to their primary competition, GMT, they tend to have far less errata and more coherent rules in general. But recently I’ve been frustrated and annoyed with a number of their rules sets. Warriors of God isn't bad, but it isn't great either for such a simple game (the use of the term “contested area” is extremely non-standard and confusing, the rules for mustering units are confusing, the rules for placing leaders are easy to misplay, and there is already errata), and after struggling with the extremely problematic rules for Fire in the Sky and The Devil's Cauldron recently, I think maybe it's time for MMP to re-think their rules-writing process for their non-ASL games.

Around the Horn: Tribune, Wealth of Nations, Tinners’ Trail, Im Reich der ..., Wie Verhext!

2008-07-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

A few quick takes on euros I've been playing recently ...

Tribune: A new game from Karl-Heinz Schmiel (designer of Die Macher). This is becoming my favorite of the recent burst of stuff. Not because it's awesome, which I don’t think it is, or because there is any single design element which is an obvious magnet, but because it feels so solid and professional and well balanced. You can choose which goals you want to try to achieve to win the game; the various scenarios set goals in terms of money, a tribune, favor of the gods, faction control, military influence, or laurels, and you need to fulfill 3-5 of them, depending on the number of players. All of the goals can generally be achieved in multiple ways, so you have choices about how to get there as well. But there is also enough randomness to both add texture and opportunism and force you to reevaluate your plans from time to time, but not so much that the game feels frustrating. I think it’s landed in a really good spot which, honestly, Die Macher didn’t find despite its other virtues (for example, the polls in that game feel too random and high-stakes to me). Tribune's different flavors and game lengths imparted by the different scenarios you can play are a nice touch too. The “short” game was good but felt a touch too short for my tastes, but the “medium” game was just right for me. Another bonus: Tribune seems to scale well through its range of 3-5 players. I wasn’t hugely optimistic about the 3-player version, but it worked quite well.

Wealth of Nations: I've only played this once, so I'll just make a couple short comments. First, there has been some speculation on BGG that the loan system in the game – where the more loans you have the less money you get for the next one, but where you don't have to pay interest – doesn’t work. On reading the rules, I tended to agree. But having now played once, I think everything is OK in this respect, if not perfect. Regardless, this is another game with a punishing learning curve which, unfortunately, is coupled with a lengthy playing time (2-2.5 hours). You can make choices that are not obviously bad that will wipe you out of the game in the first 20 minutes or less with little to do for the remainder of the game other than struggle to keep your head above water. So, here are my tips, for what they are worth: industry tiles are more expensive than they look, and good returns more elusive than you think. The game needs to have a solid base of production for food, labor, and energy before higher-valued industries start to pay off. As in Container, you need to be risk-averse in the very early game while you wait to see how things are going to play out; if you're producing stuff you can't directly use, and for which there is too much supply and not enough demand, you're hosed. Everyone always needs Food, Labor, and Energy, and if you can’t sell those things, you can at least use them to grow your empire. Although Capital and Ore look tempting initially due to the high price of those goods, demand does not ramp up for a while, and if the early producers of Food and Labor are not given some competition, the prices on those commodities can become crippling for anyone not producing them. Wealth of Nations is clever, and I suspect a good and interesting game. But it may be too fragile in practice and possibly too punishing.

I will make one concrete criticism of Wealth of Nations, and that is of the game end conditions. This game does not end until you have been well and truly impaled on the fork: virtually all the industry tiles are played, the game board is used up, or one player is out of options. One of my cardinal rules, often stated (maybe I should make a page for them), is that games should end before they are over. Wealth of Nations could use a victory point or wealth target endgame trigger to go with the exhaustion of build options so that runaway winners don't have to spend resources to end the game just to put everyone else out of their misery.

Tinners’ Trail: This is Martin Wallace's first entry in his Tree Frog line. I enjoyed my one game of this, with some caveats, but I've come to distrust my initial impressions of Wallace games. Too much of his stuff has felt promising after one or two plays only to crash and burn, hard, because of out-of-whack game balance.

That having been said, Tinners’ Trail is a fairly straightforward, clean, well-paced and quick-playing game of mining for tin or copper in Cornwall. That’s all to the good. On the other hand, it's again on somewhat shaky thematic ground. The core issue here is that the cost for and opportunity to obtain infrastructure (ports, rails, adits, workers) plays out somewhat strangely – the supply of such improvements is extremely limited, and they have to be paid for with time (a là Thebes, vaguely) rather than money. The time cost is so negligible though that the decision is not whether to build an asset or not, but instead which of the starkly limited supply is the most underpriced and how to get good turn order so you can choose first and not get shut out. It is then doubly strange in that the one resource that is fairly plentiful and not likely to constrain you much – dirt in which to dig – is the one that is auctioned.

This is all a little strange, but in practice it does at least mechanically work reasonably well. But I think the thing that will ultimately undo Tinners’ Tail is the heavy-handed randomness in the market prices for tin and copper. You put a lot of thought into the game, but the uncontrolled swings on the commodity prices, which translate directly to victory points, make more difference than skilled play I think.

Regardless, I think Tinners' Trail does offer some entertainment and interesting decisions, does not outstay its welcome and is comparatively clean, and so I’ll be happy to play a couple times. But I can’t see it having any staying power. It also seems quite overpriced for what it is, which is a run-of-the-mill light-to-medium-weight German game. Oddly, the game it reminds me the most of is Guatemala Café. Both are abstract business games of development with pleasing production. I feel like I would have found both of them really clever if I had run into them 10-15 years ago. Today, not so much.

Im Reich der Jadegöttin and Im Reich der Wüstensöhne: These are two new games from Klaus Teuber, based on the old Entdecker game engine. By my count, these are something like his fourth and fifth attempts at getting it right (Entdecker, Entdecker: Discovering New Horizons, and Oceana having gone before), and in my opinion this is the first time he has nailed it and delivered the complete package. Part of this is improvements to the fundamental game engine; the ability to "store" tiles that won't fit for later play means blown exploration draws aren't as swingy, and the new movement rules, which allow you to get stuck in the middle of the wilderness if you press out too far on your own, make for interesting choices. I also think that thematically the archeology theme of Jadegöttin is more successful. Similar to what I found with El Capitan recently, Jadegöttin has an interesting cooperative-competitive dynamic: players benefit when others help them to explore areas of the map, but when push comes to shove, it's better for you to control the completed area than your opponents. The key in this sort of thing is getting the right balance of rewards for winning and for assisting, something which is not easy – Carcassonne, for example, doesn't capture as much of this as perhaps it should because its scoring rules are restrictive and punishing, making cooperation and therefore player interaction hard to justify. Jadegöttin (and Wüstensöhne) give points out much more generously to players with non-majority presences in areas, making the tension between helping others and striking out on your own much more interesting, and (in the case of Jadegöttin) more authentic for a game about archaeology. Anyway, I like both these games a lot. Jadegöttin is definitely the lighter and more chaotic of the two games, and more suitable for family or low-impact gaming, while Wüstensöhne is somewhat more sophisticated, with tighter resources and sharper decisions. Both ultimately weigh in towards the lighter end of things though.

Wie Verhext!: The latest alea game, this is a light and clever game that has grown on me. It's a vaguely role-selection based game like San Juan or Citadelles or Race for the Galaxy, but not directly analogous to any of them. The game has 12 roles, some of which allow you to gather the ingredients to make potions, some of which let you raise or spend cash, and some that let you actually make the potions. Each turn, you choose 5 of the roles you want to do. The lead player then picks one of those roles, say the Witch, and plays the card (“I am the Witch!”). Each player in turn then who has also selected that role must choose to either usurp the role (“No! I am the Witch!”), or settle for the lesser power of the role (“So be it!”). The player who ends up as the Witch gets to take the full power of that role (use the appropriate ingredients to brew a potion for victory points). Any player who was usurped gets nothing. The player who wins the role must lead. Obviously, leading isn't great, because there is a high chance of being usurped and you can't “duck” by taking the lesser power when you know it's going to end badly for you. But if you want the strong powers, you have to usurp, which means you’ll end up leading.

This is a game that’s easy to dismiss as a light, chaotic game when you first look at it, and maybe that's right. But as I got into it, I found there was more scope for bluffing, guessing, and second-guessing than you might think. While everyone starts with the same set of roles, ingredients, and money, the fairly strong role powers guarantee that holdings will rapidly and strongly diverge, and so you can get a pretty good read on what people would prefer to do, what order they might like to do it in, and therefore what roles they might be taking and how they might come out. From this comes a neat little game of planning, anticipation, and evaluation, both when choosing which roles to play, and in how to play them. It's not hugely strategic, but it is quick-playing and simple and there is more here than meets the eye.

At first I was a little annoyed with myself because I got this direct from Germany shortly before the US version was (finally) officially announced. But now that the English version has been delayed again, I'm glad to have it and have enjoyed playing it.

El Capitán

2008-06-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

I think it's the curse of being a game-buyer that you always end up with a few games that you like a lot but that nobody else in your game group(s) has any taste for. Some of my favorites that nobody around here likes much include Fifth Avenue, Mall World, Khronos, and perhaps to a lesser extent Candamir, Rum & Pirates, and Blue Moon. I remain a big fan of Settlers of Catan even though everyone else around here is burned out beyond return. And these days I wouldn't mind playing Monopoly a couple times a year, but after doing some arm-twisting to get in a few games last year, I don't foresee that happening again anytime soon.

For the most part, though, I'm sympathetic. I can see that Khronos and Mall World are a little weird, that Fifth Avenue is a little edgy, and I understand Catan burnout, even though I don't suffer from it. However, one recent game that I am a big fan of, and that has gone over like a lead balloon with most folks I've played it with, is El Capitán, and I'm not quite sure why. It seems like a game folks would like.

To me, El Capitán seems to have everything that a lot of popular economic games have, in a cleaner and tighter package: good cash and debt management, interesting route-building-like choices, and an interesting cooperative-competitive tension and dynamic. It's sort of a cross between Age of Steam and El Grande: you need to manage your cash and debt and plan your moves, while at the same time efficiently competing for markets which reward players both for cooperation and competition. To me, it's one of those endlessly fascinating games that manages to have fairly simple rules and systems that produce a game of some nuance and subtlety, unlike the much clunkier Age of Steam or Brass that have complex rules and systems that obscure fundamentally straightforward games.

But, it's been a more or less total bust with the folks I've played it with.

One complaint has been the graphic design. The game has a wonderful cover, but a number of the components have significant usability problems, the most serious of which is that the names of the cities on the board and on the cards are impossible to read due to the excessively florid script.

But the big thing seems to be theme, and I haven't come up with a great answer to that complaint. El Capitán does seem a little dry, and despite the significant role of cash in the game it does feel more like a compete-for-areas game than an economic game, and my sense is that compete-for-areas games aren't as gripping, in general, as economic games.

Anyway, this all comes around to an interesting interview I heard on NPR's Science Friday about eco-friendly cars. In the piece, one of the guests talked about how he welcomed competition from other car makers in the area of hybrid/fuel cell/electric cars, as they would help to grow and expand the market for everyone at this point. Which reminded me of El Capitán, and why I like it. If you think of each of the nine cities in the game as individual markets, in the early stages investors benefit from competition, as more investments mean a greater ultimate payoff: a player who comes in second in a contested market can do as well as a player who is the only investor in an uncontested market, while winning a contested market is much more lucrative than an uncontested one. But as time goes by, the dynamics change. Early investments are made obsolete by later developments, and payoffs go down as markets mature. It's actually an interesting, authentic cycle. Players who make early investments in markets are taking a risk, as returns will remain weak until there is some competition. But if you wait, you lose that first-mover advantage (in the game, the tie-breaker for figuring out payoffs). Once the early investments are made, players have to judge when and where to jump into developing markets that may be made more attractive by the aging infrastructure of the early adopters, or where cheap returns can be found for a second place because another player has already made heavy investments. And as everyone becomes flush with cash later in the game, cutthroat competition in many markets will see the return on investment drop dramatically.

To me, this is all clever and interestingly thematic. But, I guess if you didn't buy my argument for the theme in Lost Cities, this may be a tough sell also. And admittedly the mechanics of moving between the cities ("buying sea routes", in the games' unconvincing parlance – the old Tycoon’s jet-setting theme was marginally more convincing) is pretty abstract and not terribly evocative.

But taken as a whole, I rather like it.

The Devil's Cauldron

2008-06-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve had an on-again off-again relationship with “monster games”. One of my most enjoyable wargame experiences was playing a campaign game of Red Barricades, a monster game by any measure. I am a big fan of MMP’s Operational Combat Series. Then again, monster games are fraught with difficulties almost too numerous to list, not the least of which is the impossibility of seriously testing them for game balance, since they tend to run into the tens of hours to play, if not hundreds. For monster games to work for me, they also have to work as non-monsters – a great example is Avalon Hill’s and MMP’s Great Campaigns of the American Civil War, which is a tremendous game whether you are playing shorter scenarios or longer games, and even in that case the long games are not insane. I once played a full campaign of Grant Takes Command in a day.

So I spent a lot of time flip-flopping on whether to even try to mess with The Devil’s Cauldron. It’s billed as a playable monster, but everyone says that. It’s by a long-time gamer but first-time designer Adam Starkweather, and my general feeling is it might be a good idea to cut your teeth on something smaller your first time out. On the other hand, the whole Market-Garden campaign is an endlessly fascinating one, the grand tactical scale (units being companies) is intriguing, and the command system sounded interesting. A bunch of interesting-looking smaller scenarios were provided. So ultimately I cracked and have played a few times now, enough to pique my interest. Not quite enough, yet, to determine if it was money well spent.

The Devil's Cauldron is a chit-pull/activation-point based system; units in the game sit around until they are activated either by the draw of a chit, or through the spending of command points. Those units tend to be companies, which form up into either brigades, regiments, or Kampfgruppes, which are then parts of divisions. For example, the 82nd Airborne is made up of four Parachute Infantry Regiments, each of which has about twelve companies laid out as three battalions of four companies – but the battalion level of organization has no representation in the game. These four front-line regiments are supported by an artillery regiment and a "regiment" of division-level support assets, giving the 82nd six regiments in total. Each regiment has a chit, which can be added to an opaque cup at the beginning of a turn by spending the parent division's "dispatch" points, which accumulate slowly and somewhat randomly over time. When that chit is drawn, all the units of that regiment can perform actions – moving and attacking being popular options. Alternatively, the division also accumulates “command” points, which can be spent generically on a variety of things: allowing units to perform an additional action when activated normally, allowing units to activate when a "direct command" or divisional activation chit is drawn, and to automatically pass morale checks in some, but not all, circumstances (for things like forced marches or close combat assaults).

So, you've got two pools of activations points: dispatch points, which allow formations of units to activate as a group; and command points which allow individual units to perform a variety of activities including doing more when activated by a regimental activation, or doing anything when a higher-level activation chit (divisional or direct) is drawn.

Activation points are, from a game perspective, fundamentally a great concept. They introduce resource management, and force the player to make tough choices if need and scarcity are well-balanced. But The Devil's Cauldron is a sprawling wargame, not a concise euro, and so for me, the activation points have to make some sense in context and be at least somewhat representational and not just gratuitous micromanagement. We can tolerate a high degree of abstractness in euros because we can work through all the options pretty easily; but similarly, we don't just want, we need things to be more representational in big, complicated wargames because we can't play that way, we need to rely to some degree on our intuition based on knowledge of the subject matter or prior experience. For example, OCS's supply points are a good representation of the large supply requirements of serious offensive operations, so for me they work – we know armored divisions need fuel and artillery needs vast quantities of ammunition to be effective, and that's what OCS asks us to manage. On the other hand, the activation points you get through card play in Paths of Glory really are not representative of anything other than the designer's desire to have you make some tough choices. Paths of Glory works because the rest of the game is so good, and not hugely complex, but it would be nice if the activation points made some sense and it would be easier for players to figure out the techniques if they actually modeled something historical.

So with that long-winded intro out of the way, where does The Devil's Cauldron stand on this point?

The activation chits model the common theme of the difficulties in cross-command coordination, whether it be between divisions or regiments, and the vagaries of the decision cycle (you may want to attack, but the enemy's chit gets picked first, giving him some initiative). This is a tried and true technique which works pretty well for the most part (one might quibble somewhat with the difficulties of getting divisional assets like anti-tank guns to coordinate with lower-echelon units that they are assigned to and deployed with, but it's tough to get too exercised about it).

The dispatch points model command and communication difficulties, and the time required to put together plans. If you want Tucker and his 504th PIR to get his butt in gear and take Nijmegan bridge, you'll need to get on the phone, give him some specific instructions, spend some dispatch points, and get his activation chit in the cup so his units can move.

Well, sort of. This is where things start to get a little hazy. You actually have several ways to activate Tucker's units. By spending the dispatch points, you get his chit and can activate all his units when it's drawn, for free and without constraint; you can additionally then spend command points to activate those units a second time, albeit not for the same task (so they can move adjacent to some Panzergrenediers for free, then you could spend a command point to have them fire or assault; but if they started adjacent, they can't fire twice, although they could fire then assault).

However, each division also has a DivAct chit, which gets put in the cup every turn for free, without having to spend dispatch points. This chit allows units to activate for free if they are not engaged with the enemy and not doing combat activities, or you can spend command points to activate them without those restrictions. So, you could just wait for the 82nd's divisional chit to get pulled, then you can spend command points to activate any of the 82nd's units directly (including the 504th PIR).

There is also a direct activation chit that gets added each turn, also for free, which allows you to activate anyone you want, but you must spend command points.

So when looking at what these points represent about a division, I sort of think of the command points as the level of competence and initiative in the lower levels of leadership in the division. They'll allow you to execute your regimental-level activation chit more aggressively, or undertake actions even if the higher-ups don't have a plan (i.e., haven't spent dispatch points to put their chit in the cup). Dispatch points represent the quality of divisional leadership and staff work, how quickly the divisional leadership can plan and get those plans implemented.

For most of the game, this model seems to work and make sense. Most units in the game, like the 1st Airborne, the Guards Armored, etc., will accumulate a moderate number of dispatch points in a day (5-ish) and enough command points to do a few things, but not so many as to spend them frivolously. The lousy German units, like the Korps Feldt, get lousy command and lousy dispatch points, and those units feel appropriately sluggish and unresponsive.

The anomaly (on the Allied side) is the 82nd Airborne. They receive colossal numbers of command points – accumulating them at the fastest rate in the game – but a miserly quotient of dispatch points, ranking amongst the worst units in the game in this respect, as bad as some of the third-echelon German units they face. This is, on the face of it, odd. I'm not aware of any information suggesting General Gavin or his staff was out to lunch on this one, certainly not moreso than Urqhart of the 1st Airborne, who was caught behind enemy lines early in the operation (he still gets more dispatch points than Gavin).

At any rate, what this means is that the 82nd is run almost entirely off of their gargantuan pile of command points. They only get a little over two dispatch points in an entire day (on average), which means they put two regimental chits in the cup over a seven-turn period (there are some subtleties here that I'm glossing over). On the other hand, they get about ten command points each and every turn, almost enough to power an entire regiment.

This creates some issues, and makes the 82nd an extremely awkward and time-consuming formation to run. Unlike other units, which rely on dispatch points to make command-level decisions and then command points to supercharge those actions or take spur-of-the-moment stop-gap actions, every time the 82nd's divisional chit comes out of the cup, that commander has to sit down and micromanage the entire division. A division can't accumulate more than 19 command points, so the 10-ish that the 82nd gets every turn have to spent or they may be needlessly wasted. The decisions are not the command-level decisions of preparing or attacking, or picking objectives; it’s more like figuring out how many command points you have to spend, looking at everyone in the division who is proximate to the enemy and figuring out whether they are worthy of having a command point spent on their behalf. It makes the 82nd very potent. If there is something that needs to be done, or something that comes up unexpectedly, they can react very quickly. They can run rings around their opponents in the Korps Feldt. The huge pile of command points more than makes up for their shortage of dispatch points. But it also makes running them an exercise in micromanagement that really does not seem thematic or appropriate.

I like the theory of dispatch vs. command points, and it seems like more standard divisions like the Guards Armored or 1st Airborne, with their less-generous command points but more reasonable dispatch points, would be more interesting to play. I have to admit that in the games I've played so far, the whole command point system has skirted dangerously close to feeling more like micromanaging abstract resource points than like playing a tactical combat game. But on balance, I’ve enjoyed the game the few times I’ve played short scenarios, even though the situations aren’t great and I wouldn’t necessarily play them again (Little Omaha has a lot for the Allies to do, but the defending Germans mainly get to hunker down and learn the Opportunity Fire rules, while in The Empire Strikes Back the hopelessly out-classed German attackers mostly hope not to blow a few amazingly crucial die rolls while praying to get lucky and roll a few dispatch points). So far, while the game has been fun, my hopes for decent small scenarios have been unfulfilled, but at least they do play quickly, and I’m looking forward to trying some of the games in the 1st Airborne sector, where both sides have quality units and where, I’m hopeful, the situation will find a better balance.

I can’t leave the topic of The Devil’s Cauldron without commenting briefly on its system for opportunity fire, which is unusual. I'm not sure how it got from point A to point B, but it's identical to the system used in another game I play. The general idea is that you don't get opportunity fire when somebody moves into your zone of fire, but rather when somebody performs a movement action in, or leaves, your fire zone. So an enemy company can move adjacent to you and fire at you for a couple hours, and this never triggers opportunity fire. You only get the shot when that enemy unit later leaves, or moves from one adjacent hex to another, or tries to entrench or something similar while adjacent to you. This is, strangely, exactly the system used by Dungeons & Dragons and the d20 roleplaying system, but not by any other hex-and-counter wargame I am aware of. In D&D, they're called Attacks of Opportunity, and they drive people absolutely nuts because of the anti-intuitive rules and some of the strange implications. They work better here.

Manoeuvre, Glory to Rome

2008-05-11T22:58:00.000-07:00

I recently had a chance to play Manoeuvre, GMT's latest lightish, wargame/family game crossover attempt. In it, two armies of eight pieces each maneuver, chess-like, over a square grid and attempt to defeat each other. There are 8 different armies in the game, each from a different period and nation – Americans from the Revolution, British and French from the Napoleonic period, Ottomans, and so on. The nations have a different makeup for their eight units: the Ottomans have lots of cavalry while the Americans have none, for example. Each turn you must move one piece one square (two if cavalry), and then you may attack, if cards permit.

Those cards are the core of the game, with board positioning and whatnot being somewhat secondary. Each nation has its own unique deck. Most of the cards are unit cards which match the nation's playing pieces, and are primarily used to fight with those pieces – usually assaults, but also volleys and artillery, with different armies having different mixes (the Russians have lots of artillery, while the Brits are good at volleying). Also included are special actions like forced marches, supply, ambushes, and guerillas. These seemed to be a bit of a mixed bag; a lot of the events are generally useful, like the Supply Columns and leaders, while some sound cool, like Skirmish, but in practice seem to rarely come up. The game is fundamentally about managing these cards – cycling ones you don't need rapidly, looking for high-value combinations, and being willing to let go of a good card that you don't happen to need just now.

To the extent that these card management issues are interesting, Manoeuvre is clever and more subtle than it first appears. There are a fair number of factors that go into deciding the value of a card, when to play it, when to hold it, and when to cycle it. Maybe you have a leader card, which allows units to combine their attacks (among other things), so you have to balance playing it now for a modest attack vs. holding back to try to set up something really devastating vs. realizing you just can't set up that devastating attack anytime reasonably soon and just letting the card go or using it for a lesser effect just to clear it. Frequently you'll want to make lower-odds attacks just to do stir the pot and cycle cards and see what comes your way. On the other hand, since in this game you draw cards at the beginning of your turn, and since unit cards are valuable both on offense and defense, attacks which expend cards can leave you vulnerable to counter-attacks. Even if you're holding junk, just having 5 cards in hand will give your opponent some pause, while burning 4 in a coordinated assault will leave him more confident in his counter-strike.

All this is not bad, Manoeuvre is clever than it looks, and is an interesting little design.

There are three problems, unfortunately. And for me, one of them is a deal-killer.

The first problem is that clever card management and evaluation decisions are not terribly evocative of Napoleonic era tactics. Manoeuvre is basically abstract, moreso even than Memoir '44 and much moreso than Command & Colors: Ancients; I can't help but think of it as Advanced Checkers With Cards. It's not terrible, the nations are unique in ways that are somewhat representative, but even the Ottomans and British, historically armies at different extremes, just do not play that differently in the game. The game is constrained by random terrain, a constant and fixed number of units per army, a single meeting engagement style scenario, and the requirement for plausible game balance ... which just doesn't leave much wiggle room.

Secondly, Manoeuvre has something of a pacing problem, especially in the early game. The units start a fair distance away from each other and move only one space a turn. So the opening game of moving to contact just isn't all that interesting, as the cards don't really provide the same sort of tactical drive as the Command & Colors games. So you're moving guys one space at a time, maybe cycling cards, and the game takes a while for things to mix up and get to the interesting bits. The endgame can be a little protracted as well; since one victory condition is to destroy 5 units, you can get into a game of hunting down the last kill that isn't that compelling. Manoeuvre isn't a long game, fortunately, so this all isn't too bad, but the screws could have been tightened a bit here.

The deal-killer for me? Manoeuvre is a basically-abstract card management game. As such it's on a head-on collision course with a variety of games based on very similar card management and evaluation decisions: Blue Moon, Race for the Galaxy, and Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, just to pick a few. It's a tough space with quite a few brilliant games, and one in which Manoeuvre just isn't that competitive. It's arguably neither as evocative nor anywhere near as compelling as any of these games, and neither is it simpler or shorter.

I think a much better approach was taken by Cambridge Game Factory's Glory to Rome; thanks to Brian over at the Tao of Gaming for putting me on to it. Glory to Rome is in the same family of games as San Juan and Race to the Galaxy: you're trying to build your little empire of buildings with special powers, and do it efficiently and quickly. Glory to Rome has taken the basic San Juan model and layered on some additional levels.

Each card is used for currency or for a building, but now the roles are on the card too, and if you want to either lead or follow a chosen role, you have to play a matching card. Plus, there are more roles. There are more buildings. And there is more process; if you have a Marble in hand and a Basilica you want to build, you can't just pay for it as you can in San Juan; you have to lay the foundation for the Basilica, perhaps using an Architect; you have to put the Marble into your storehouse first (maybe with a Laborer) and then add it to the building (perhaps with a Craftsman). Or maybe you'll decide that the Marble would be better embezzled and the proceeds put into your personal vault (using a Merchant). The Basilica requires 3 marble to finish, so the game becomes a lot about the process of building – which is good, because that's what Glory to Rome is about, rebuilding Rome after Nero's fire.

Where Glory to Rome wins is in the almost out-of-control special powers associated with the buildings. Building buildings in this game can be time-consuming, so you are rewarded with fairly significant advantages: the ability to draw and cycle lots of cards, put cards directly to your storehouse, use cards as other cards, get multiple activations out of individual cards, steal other players' cards or special powers, or immediately end the game. A lot of these powers allow you to take shortcuts in building future buildings (using some stray Rubble in that Sewer instead of Stone), which is also nice in terms of evoking the feeling of working in a corrupt environment of lax oversight.

And so Glory to Rome careens from power to power, with players erecting powerful buildings and trying to maximize their impact. It's a very edgy game. Unlike San Juan or Race for the Galaxy, you can mess with your fellow-players directly, stealing cards from their hands (using the Legionnaire) for example, and buildings can extend and expand that power. It's a very dynamic, fast-moving game, and one that you can often feel just one powerful card combination away from winning, or live in fear of the next building your opponent is going to finish. To be honest, I don't think for a moment that the building special abilities are all that well-balanced. The Colosseum, which flays your opponents clients and throws them to the lions, is extremely nasty. But it's this edginess, speed, and sharp interaction, combined with flavorful and appropriately cartoony artwork, which makes Glory to Rome appealing. Where Manoeuvre seems to have assiduously courted game balance to a degree that seems to have sucked most of the interest out of the game, Glory to Rome seems to have worried about it only enough to get close, and produced something fast, furious, and fun.

While I’ve found Glory to Rome to be a very fun game, I think it's better with smaller numbers of players – 3 or 4 seems to be a better game than 5. My experience was that early games felt like they ran long; maybe around 90 minutes, and I think the game wants to be 60. Once I had played a time or two, that’s where it ended up, but Glory to Rome does have a learning curve which has an unfortunate side-effect of potentially dragging out the game (Race for the Galaxy is much better in this respect; it has a significant learning curve as well, but not knowing what you’re doing won’t make the game longer). So I'd suggest making sure that your first game or two are played with a smaller player-count, then once the game-play has become second nature and you can easily explain it to others, you can add more players.

Games, Theme, Lord of the Rings, and Lost Cities

2008-05-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

So, a hypothetical question:

Let's say you're a gamer, and you're trying to decide whether you like a game or not (I know, I know, how often does this really come up?). Let's also assume for the moment that games can be cleanly divided into two parts, theme and game-play. Which of these two halves is easier to get one's head around?

The answer I would have given, prior to last year anyway, was that theme is easier. You can easily tell if a game is evoking a certain feel just from playing it, right? What's so hard about that? It's almost not even worth thinking too much about. Most game discussions seem to me to spend far, far more ink on game-play than on theme.

Or is it really as obvious as all that?

If you step back a bit and think about it, it seems otherwise everywhere else. Literature, for example. Take the Lord of the Rings, a perennial favorite of mine and, it seems, of many gamers. It's easy to appreciate these books for their obvious craft: the use of language, the narrative flow, the easy and economical but exceptionally vivid characterization, the incredible attention to detail, the visceral struggle between good and evil. But to understand and appreciate the themes that run through the books requires digging deeper. What is the nature of the evil Tolkien is portraying? Is the Ring in itself a force of evil, or is it simply the power of it that corrupts even the stoutest of hearts? Tolkien uses the language of both, and that ambiguity in exploring the theme of good vs evil is what makes thinking about the book deeply rewarding, and gives the theme strength and subtlety beyond the Manichaeism traditional to fantasy. This is just one of the themes of the book that can be understood more fully only after appreciating the simple excitement of a well-told story.

And so it sometimes is with games, I've come to understand.

Take Reiner Knizia's classic Lost Cities. For the couple readers who may not have played this game, here is a game-play summary: Lost Cities is played with what is essentially a 5-suited but otherwise standard deck of cards. On your turn, you must play a card on your side of the table, onto one of five columns, one for each suit. You can only play cards in ascending order; once you've played the 6, you can't go back and play a 5. If you want to get that 5 out of your hand, you have to play it to the discard pile, but then your opponent can pick it up instead of drawing from the deck. At the end of the game your score is simply the sum of all the cards you've played in a column, minus 20. The face cards are not numeric, but are doublers: you have to play them before you play a numeric card, and they double your score for that suit (not always a good thing!).

Most players will be immediately struck by the constant, wrenching choices the game throws at you. There are rarely obvious plays; you might have a 2 to start an expedition with, but nothing to back it up, or a couple high cards and you have to decide whether to play them or hold them waiting to fill in some lower-valued cards. Figuring out where and what to play is never easy.

But is the game thematic? I think most players (including myself) would instinctively say no, it's just another basically-abstract Knizia game with a theme of pretty pictures and nice presentation. The game gives you no sense of exploration or adventure. You're just playing cards.

Well, maybe. But if you take a deeper look at the choices that drive the play of those cards, you discover that Lost Cities is a game of risk management. How risky is it to double an expedition given what you know about it so far, i.e., what cards you have in hand? Is it worth it to set out early and leave drawing the rest of the cards you need to chance, or do you want to wait and do more research, see what the draw deck gives you? Do you want to start an expedition which you know has a small risk of a negative score, but no chance of a big positive score, or do you take a risk on an expedition with a greater upside but also a greater downside?

Although I've never put together an expedition to a lost city personally, in my mind I imagine that it would be primarily an exercise in managing and mitigating risks – knowing when you've done all the preparation you can expect to do and it's time to get going, or when there are too many unknowns and more preparation is required. Knowing which expeditions have good prospects and which don't. And in the sense of getting right at that idea – of planning and managing risk – Lost Cities does, in fact, carry the theme wonderfully. And almost by definition this thematic success simply cannot be appreciated until you have fully grasped not just the rules, but all the subtle nuances of the game-play, and not just how to play but how to win.

So now I consider Lost Cities, along with a number of other Knizia games I hadn't fully appreciated before, thematically compelling. It's a different way of presenting a theme – not as visceral as being shot at in Battlestations or dodging incoming asteroids in Galaxy Trucker – but also in many ways arguably as successful.

This all came up recently because I played one of Knizia's latest releases, Keltis. This is basically Lost Cities with room for 3 or 4 players, and a few additional touches – there are now bonus points for reaching certain checkpoints in the expeditions before the other players, which introduces a race element and makes the game-play even more exciting and interesting. Alas, we've lost the theme of expedition, replaced with generic Celtic art and no plausible thematic tie-in that I can discern. The game-play is still there, maybe even more interesting than it used to be, but I don't see any theme to strengthen the story. Perhaps it'll take another 6 or 7 years for me to have the aha! insight that illuminates this one. For the moment, though, if such things matter to you, you might want to wait for Rio Grande's version of the game which will apparently stick with the original expedition theme.

Fowl Play, Pillars of the Earth

2006-12-21T23:26:00.000-08:00

Fowl Play: This is another limited release from Richard Breese and his R&D label, available for prices we'll generously call a little high.

The basic idea is that the players are foxes loose in the chicken coop, trying to catch various fowl (turkeys, ducks, chickens, and geese). The basic driver here is that you score points for catching a diversity of prey (a balanced diet, you see), but the different quarry set up in different corners of the map, so once you committed to bagging turkeys, say, it takes time to switch to head over to a different corner and start hunting geese.

At the same time as you are playing your primary role of a fox, you are also moving the fowl to try to evade capture. At the beginning of the game you'll be dealt a single target animal (fowl have three properties: type, color, and shape, for a total of 36 unique pieces – if this all seems a bit confusing, perhaps this picture will be worth a few words) which you are trying to keep alive, and you'll get big points if it survives, and slightly fewer points for animals that share one or more traits. Fowl actually move a little faster than foxes, but you are restricted in what you can move: each turn you play one card that both dictates turn order (via a number) and which fowl you can move (it's got a picture of one unique fowl, and you can move anything that shares at least one trait with it). You can move these fowl a combined total of 3 hexes; your fox only moves two hexes, so while you can't outrun an individual bird, you can outrun a flock.

So, foxes run around, herds of turkeys try desperately to evade, and a lot of fowl don't make it. The game it actually reminds me of, in a rather oblique way, is Titan: The Arena. In both games you have a hidden piece of information identifying someone you're trying to keep alive. But, in both games the tools you have to preserve that creature are quite indirect – you'll mostly be trying to make sure creatures you don't have any stake in don't make it, rather than trying to pump up your own guy, in general. The difference is, Fowl Play is played out as an interesting tactical game of chasing down quarry, while Titan: The Arena is much more of a management/strategic game.

Which brings us to the thing which will probably cause people the most grief about Fowl Play: the final scoring. If you found the indirect final scoring of some of Knizia's earlier games like Samurai a bit opaque, these are as nothing next to Fowl Play. Figuring out who won involves filling in a spreadsheet. You have to figure out who has the most of each the 6 individual different attributes of bird (circle, square, black, white, etc), then score for diversity within each category, then add up all the escapees ... it's a bit involved, and the most complicated part of the game. In general, having the most complicated bit be right at the end is probably not a good plan, from a design perspective.

But the truth is, even though Fowl Play's scoring is complicated, I think it can be boiled down to fairly simple heuristics. Capturing stuff is always good, unless it shares a property with your target. You always need species diversity, and this will be a major driver of your play. Don't worry about the individual categories too much and just go for the easy pickings early, and then build up those holdings later, if you can.

I imagine the design goal here was actually to make the game flow a little bit more easily by making the scoring involved enough that it can't be easily mini-maxed; but I think the same could have been accomplished with a more straightforward system by adding random or more important hidden elements. But, that might have ended up feeling arbitrary, so who knows. At the end of the day, Fowl Play is definitely a light-hearted, fun game with scoring so baroque that that it's going to be a potential issue for many gamers (many of Richard Breese's games share variations on this issue in some aspect of the game or another).

Far be it from me to make excuses for a game which has scoring that is probably too involved and which is a possible show-stopper for many, but still, I liked Fowl Play. I think it's nicely thematic (the birds move around in flocks as they try to avoid the foxes, the foxes hunt better in packs, and the artwork is charming and appropriately cartoony), I like the tactical details of actually moving the pieces around to corner and catch birds (or slip through the foxes' net). It's definitely a medium-weight game that can look like a brain-burner at times (and will probably wither on the vine if played too much that way), but played as a medium-weight with some depth, I definitely think it's fun.

Is it worth what it's currently going for, price-wise? If you don't already own it, probably not (and given that Boulder now has it marked down, perhaps even Breesophiles may have hit their limit on what they're willing to pay). But if someone in your group has sprung for it, it's definitely worth a go.

Pillars of the Earth (Die Säulen Der Erde): If Aladdin's Dragons was a simplified and streamlined version of Keydom, it might be said that Pillars of the Earth does the same for Caylus. Sort of. The situation is a little more complicated in this case, however: unlike Keydom, Caylus needed more than just stuff taken out. Caylus also needed another idea.

So that's sort of what we get. We're still building bits of a cathedral using resources we've gathered. We're still placing workers in areas where they gain special powers. The favors are gone, and the range of building powers is greatly reduced (which is good; too many buildings in Caylus were worthless). Resource generation has been completely changed though, and is now it's own sub-game: players have two different types of pawns, and place worker pawns first to claim available resources, and once that's done, they then place a much smaller number of overseer pawns to gain special powers. This is nice, because compared to Caylus, it forces you to play properly.

The big departure from Caylus, and the part this is going to cause the most grief for some folks, is the overseer placement. Instead of placing in strict player order, pieces are drawn at random (horror!) from a bag. If you're drawn first, you get good placement, but you also need to pay a high price – 8 gold I think it was -– or go to the back of the queue. Each subsequent pawn drawn from the bag pays 1 gold less, until the placements are free.

I'm somewhat undecided on how much I like this. It creates a sort-of auction, in that if there is a good spot on the board, it'll cost about as much to take it as it's worth. Unlike a true auction game, in Pillars of the Earth players aren't usually going to come to hugely different conclusions about the value of each placement. Who actually gets it at that price is obviously somewhat random, but at least they'll most likely pay a fair price, and it rewards good evaluation skills. It's always nice for a game to reward a variety of skills rather than being purely tactical, so that's good, and it's nice to get some of the interest of evaluation without the potentially quite time-consuming process of actually doing quite a few full-fledged auctions.

On the other hand, there definitely are a few times in the game when draw order will matter a lot. Players accumulate resources at a fairly constant rate, as more or less the same mix and quantity of resources are available each turn. You then need to acquire craftspeople – potters, sculptors, carpenters, and so on – to convert those resources into VPs. That rate of resource conversion accelerates rapidly as the game goes on, with early Stonemasons converting 3 or 4 stone into a VP, while later sculptors can turn 1 stone into a VP. Obviously, getting the key craftspeople, especially late in the game when the very few who can use metal become available, can be a big deal. And that can depend on getting picked from the bag at the right time, which can be ultimately unsatisfying, especially in a long-ish game.

Still, overall I enjoyed playing Pillars of the Earth. I think it engages on enough different levels (strategy, tactics, evaluation) for a big-box game, and it's thematically solid (and very well-presented). But I also got the same feeling playing the game as I did playing Space Dealer: it felt like I was being asked to make interesting judgments about the relative values of different options, and do interesting planning, but by the end it didn't feel like the game had a whole lot of depth. It felt like a couple run-throughs were going to give you about all you were likely to get out of it. The strict progression in the availability of craftspeople (and the lack of real variety), the limited variability in the resources cubes available each turn, and the samy-ness of each turn's feel all conspired to convince me that there wasn't a lot of replayability in the package.

The bottom line for me was that I enjoyed Pillars of the Earth, but it's not a game I'd queue up to buy. When it comes out from Mayfair, it'll likely be at the $50 price point, and for me, that's too high. I'm not sure what I would pay; I'm not sure I'd buy even if it were $30. I enjoyed it well enough, but it's one of those games I'd prefer to play on someone else's copy.

2011 Update on Pillars of the Earth: Pillars took a while to grow on me – over 5 plays – but it finally won me over, and I did add it to my collection. I think the random draw of workers from the bag is quite effective in both introducing some unpredictability and in generally fairly-pricing worker spots, giving the game a somewhat more nuanced evaluation process than similar games. And the process of building the Cathedral is legitimately evocative, unlike the pasted-on throw-a-few-bricks-together ting we get in similar games. In general, worker-placement is a genre which holds little appeal for me; Pillars is one of the few entries that I like (along with Agricola, Le Havre, Breese's Aladdin's Dragons that pioneered the genre, and probably at least one more I'm forgetting). It's not a game I'm ever going to play a ton, but it's kept its spot in my collection over the years. I like the expansion for its added craftspeople, but more than 4 players is not better.