Sekigahara

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

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

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.