Eminent Domain, Kickstarter, and You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.