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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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Things have, I admit, been a bit quiet here at BrettSpiel Towers of late. But worry not, dear readers! There has been lots going on — I’ve simply been neglecting to write about any of it. So, what’s new?
Oracle Pathway: Le chat est sorti du sac
The Big News is that Oracle Pathway is coming, and it’s coming fast! I can’t tell you (yet) what it’s going to be called or very much about the theme, but I can tell you that Asmodee are doing a top-notch job. The publishing contract was only signed last September, but since then the team at Asmodee have been working flat-out to get the game ready to show at Nürmberg in just a couple of week’s time. And, as a way of teasing out the big reveal, Asmodee have so far published two ‘behind the scenes’ articles (in French) documenting their development of the game. Your French may be better than mine, but if not then you can at least enjoy Google’s entertainly odd interpretations…
* Behind the scenes of a game — Chapter 1: The prototype [original]
* Behind the scenes of a game — Chapter 2: Towards a theme [original]
There is some information in these articles about the exciting thematic direction Asmodee have taken, but the main visuals are all of my original prototype. (The only clue to the new look is the little ‘eye’ graphic connected with the second article.) I have seen all the key component artwork and, just this week, the first sketches of the cover artwork; I hope to be able to share some of this soon. I just need clearance from Asmodee HQ!
’Twas the season to be gaming!
Just in time for Christmas I took delivery of a big shipment of lovely new games, which represented part of my spoils from last year’s Concurs Ciutat de Granollers de creació de jocs — the very contest that put Oracle Pathway on its path to publication. While I was away with my family I was able to try out some of the new games, which meant repeated plays of HeckMeck Barbecue, Zooloretto Mini, Level X and The Spiecherstadt — plus our first experience of the curious delight of Geistesblitz. In the New Year I also picked up a cheap copy of Fast Flowing Forest Fellers (thank you: The Works!), so my collection continues to grow. Alarmingly.
I was pleased with all my new games, and although switching from the regular HeckMeck mindset to the new demands of Barbecue was a little jarring at first, the game certainly grew on us. The components are wonderful and the gameplay rather more subtle than it at-first appears — the cunning Doktor does it again!
Zooloretto Mini was a hit, but I am now curious to try the original. There was quite enough game for us in the Mini version — does the bigger box really deliver anything more? Level X played less well with the others, although I rather enjoyed it’s simple brand of combinatorial dice-based tactics.
The Spiecherstadt was a step up from the other games, but went down surprisingly well with my mother and sister, with whom Pickomino has gotten the most plays in the past couple of years. I wasn’t sure the little Stefan Feld brain-burner was really going to hit the spot, but they were both up for the challenge and more than capable. (I, with all my gamer sensibilities, floundered about and lost both times.)
Geistesblitz was a lot of fun, although somewhat bewildering at first — I would love to see how kids play this one, since I think we were all a little too sober and cautious. And Fast Flowing Forest Fellers delivered a suitably speedy race game, with plenty of good-natured but ungentlemanly pushing and shoving thrown in.
Saturday 7th January: Gaming at the Grad Pad
The monthly board game meet in Cambridge’s well-appointed University Centre (do come along on the first Saturday of each month if you fancy it!) was another great opportunity to play games old and new. I avoided getting pulled into anything too heavy, and instead stuck to lighter fare: Carcassonne: Hunters and Gathers, 7 Wonders (including Leaders), Dixit and a furious round of Bohnanza to finish.
Given all my Carcassonne experience I was expecting great things, but in our 4-player match, I came last (albeit by a slim 6 points). And, just to compound my defeat, all three of my competitors managed joint first!
I did rather better in our 6-player 7 Wonders match, pulling off a rather stunning, although highly unexpected, win. I’m no 7 Wonders aficionado, having only one previous play to my name, but I was lucky that my Leaders gave me a hint at a strategy which, largely thanks to my demilitarized neighbours, paid off handsomely. I do really like both the base game, and the clever way that the Leaders expansion has been slotted oh-so-neatly into it, but the fact that in a 6-player game I only really ‘played’ with my immediate neighbours, and even then tangentially, is curious. Games that can scale to 7 players are good news for gamers, but I’d rather see them deliver more of a genuinely communal experience.
I’d always wanted to try Dixit, and now that I have I can say that it certainly deserves its success. Because of its openness and creativity, it’s a game that will adapt to almost any group, and the tension and interest created by its scoring design does an excellent job of keeping all the players involved in every round. And it has small wooden bunnies, so what’s not to like?
Bohnanza is another very well-known game that I have played only a few times, and then only with adults. Playing a 4-player game with two experienced under-10s was, in contrast, a delightful revelation. Their own approach to the subtle art of negotiation turned the game into something more akin to the raucous brawl of Pit — and the game was quite the better for it! There was no chance to carefully consider other player’s positions; no time to deliberate on the mathematical consequences of any particular trade. I simply had to brave the storm, knuckle down, up my game, and learn to play by their rules.
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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Last week I went along to the London Educational Games Meetup, and the event proved engaging, enlightening and thoroughly worth the train fare, so thanks must first go to organiser Kirsten Campbell-Howes. Props are also due to the good people at My Note Games who sponsored the event, and oiled its proverbial wheels, by supplying wine and beer.
There were around 50 people at the get-together, primarily computer game makers and educationalists — although I am not sure that those terms really do justice to the breadth of skills and backgrounds in the room — and Kirsten had found some great speakers to entertain us.
First up was Phil Stuart from the game studio Preloaded, who gave a presentation based on his post on the studio’s blog: Games that are ‘about’ something. If you want a primer on the studio’s work, their approach to game creation and the meat of his talk, go check out the blog post! Phil spoke about some of the studio’s work in term of four game ‘shapes’ — abstraction, metaphor, simulation and narrative — and gave examples of each. He also introduced their latest game, a commission for Channel 4 called The End, which is a game aimed at 14–19-year-olds designed to engage with some of the moral and philosophical aspects of death and mortality. Quite a heady mixture, and hardly obvious territory for self-identified ‘casual’ game makers.
Phil’s talk was excellent and debate-worthy and it was great to see examples of the studio’s work explained in terms of their pedagogical intent. Phil’s blog post begins by stating that Preloaded “make fun games, with a purpose” and in his talk Phil spoke about how getting the balance right between the two — between fun and purpose — is (not surprisingly) a tricky business. The studio begins by interrogating and understanding the education goals and content of each commission, and then works out from that point to create a learning experience that can be delivered in the form of a game.
The (open) question — and I sincerely hope that I am neither misrepresenting the tenet of Phil’s presentation nor the reaction of the audience — is how overt those educational goals can be before you start to lose the fun, and commensurately how effective they are if their purpose is too well hidden? When does play become work? When does a game become a test?
I shall leave those questions as open as I found them for now, because next up was primary school teacher, mother, gamer, geek and all-round educational evangelist Dawn Hallybone, who spoke with enough enthusiasm to fill a very large assembly hall about her experience of using computer games in the classroom. What I thought was striking about Dawn’s presentation was her seemingly heretical (in the circumstances) rejection of so-called ‘educational games’, or at least her observation that her own students often rejected games that were too obvious or preachy about their educational content.
Dawn, in contrast, makes creative and inspiring use of computer games as diverse as Mario Cart and Myst as a launchpad for all sorts of curriculum-driven outcomes that her (very lucky) primary students clearly have a great time engaging with.
To hear Phil and Dawn speak, one after the other, was fascinating. They stand at different points on exactly the same path. You might say that Phil (to borrow his own phrase) makes games with a purpose, and that Dawn (to paraphrase) uses games for a purpose. That shared purpose is indeed education, but I am left wondering whether the games in either case should really be called ‘educational games’ — and (importantly) I don’t think that either Phil or Dawn did so!
Are we not learning something every time we play? Are not all games inherently educational?
I’m not saying don’t make ‘educational’ games, nor that games can’t encapsulate and deliver deliberately ‘educational’ goals; I’m just wondering aloud whether labelling any such experience as as ‘educational game’ might be counter-productive. The language seems to carve off some games at the expense of others, instantly valuing (or devaluing) one apparent class of game against another.
Both Phil and Dawn spoke eloquently about the value of games within education — and more power to their collective elbows! But it seemed to me that there was a palpable tension between their approaches that the evening left unresolved. If all games teach, then how and why do some games designed to teach succeed and others fail, either as games or as educational tools? How similar or distinct are the essential natures of learning and play? And is an ‘educational game’ a tautology, or a contradiction in terms?
I don’t know. I’m still learning.
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
Mon Nov 21, 2011 10:57 pm
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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This post has been cross-posted from my BrettSpiel game design blog.
Sun Nov 13, 2011 12:20 pm
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us: the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path…
— Joseph Campbell
This year was my first-ever Essen, and as a true SPIEL neophyte I was fortunate to have the guidance and wise counsel of John Yianni and Rob Harris. Without them I might still be lost in the abysmal depths of Hall 8 — which, I maintain, wasn’t even there for the first two days, since only that can truly explain its surprising discovery on day three! The SPIEL halls did seem to bend both space and time, and even after four days there was so much left unseen and undone. Here’s to SPIEL 2012!
Pile ’Em High: Rob introduced me to the wonders of the Heidelberger stand, and we gamely joined the procession of people circulating amongst the jumble of boxes, all looking for that elusive bargain. And we made sure to go back every day, just in case!
7 Wonders: Something, surely, that the world needs more of — giant card games!
Dominion: Things seemed to be getting pretty tense down at (what appeared to be) the Dominion tournament. And it looked like these two brave ‘Dominioneers’ were the last men standing. Not that we waited to see the victor crowned; it would have been just too thrilling to witness!
The Unknown Labyrinth: After a whole day not actually playing any games, this was our first: Sidibaba. It felt like an old-school computer game realised in cardboard, and the combination of cooperative play, a ticking clock and the true sense of being lost in a maze meant we all really enjoyed it. This game also marked the beginning of John’s seemingly effortless winning streak, that continued for pretty much the whole fair.
The Labyrinth Revealed: In the cold light of day the geography looks rather less impossible than it felt from the inside. The tricky crossroads was a source of repeat confusion, as was the sneakily placed rockfall, which was only one of the weapons in the ‘dungeon masters’ arsenal. We did get out, just in time, but the Hurrican employee was being awfully nice to us!
“Brett”, “Britt”, “Brett”, “Britt”: We joined Alex and crew from Productief and their friends from The Game Master for dinner at a local hostelry. More drinks, please, barkeep!
Don’t Panic!: Our first game of day two was Panic Station, which had been getting quite a lot of buzz (we had wanted to play Village, but that’s another story!). In the end we dispatched the enemy with relative ease, slowed only by some misplaced paranoia! I was pretty sure about the culprit from minute one; Rob thought it was me — the cheek!
A Vote of No Confidence: Day two passed in a blur (and with little photographic evidence) but we did get in a game of Lancaster at the Queen Games booth towards the end of the day. I felt the game punished me (rightly) for a few poorly made decisions at the beginning, and I never did get the hang of the voting (which, by the end, I was actively beginning to hate), but the others all seemed to enjoy it, so don’t listen to me griping on about it.
A Little Nugget: Back at base camp, John, Rob and I tried a hand of Michael Schacht’s Gold! (a bargain at €4 from the good folks at Burley Games!). This is a twisty little card game for 2 or 3 players in which, interestingly, all cards in play at any time are face-up on the table. We all enjoyed it (did John win again?) and retired earlier than the night before, ready to face day three!
Those Cats Won’t Save Themselves: We were through the doors earlier than the majority of the crowd, but still not early enough to catch a free table for Village. However, directly across from the Eggertspiele stand was Flash Point, another game getting good buzz, even though our expectations were middling. However, this turned out to be a great cooperative game with a really strong sense of actually doing what the game is about: rescuing hapless victims (including cowering cats!) from a burning building, all the while with the risk of the building collapsing and the team failing. We beat the game, but were only playing the ‘family’ version, so our victory was nothing to feel too triumphant about.
Dig for Victory!: Rob and I tried out a quick round of Jurassik at the Ilopeli booth. Colourful and nicely produced, if feather-light, but I liked how the cards were progressively ‘dug up’ which added a little tactics.
Bleasdale’s Better Half: Over at the bustling Surprised Stare Games booth both Tony Boydell’s Paperclip Railways and Sebastian Bleasdale’s On The Cards were attracting the right sort of interest. We sat down for a quick round of the latter, as ably and enthusiastically demoed by Caroline (immortalised in the excellent box illustration as Mrs Spade!).
Timing Is Everything: The good folks at DGT were showing off the intriguing Cube and Pyramid game timers. John stopped for a chat; I got a free Pyramid (for which I am very grateful).
All’s Fair: By this point in the proceedings, the Fairplay rankings were beginning to settle down, although The City (of which, more later) was still inexplicably up there at No 9. Compared to the Geekbuzz list, these rankings seemed more stable and more meaningful, and both Tournay and Trajan had good word-of-mouth throughout the fair.
Standing Room Only: Saturday was the busiest day, which led to some tight squeezes at times, but Essen stalwarts suggested it was not quite as busy as previous years. There were certainly lots of families and children, but almost every demographic was well represented. Where in Britain would you see four teenage girls sitting on the floor to play Dominion?
Not Waving But Drowning?: The bargains on offer were, at times, spectacular, at least to my dark-adapted British gaze. It was a constant scrum at the Spiele-Offensive stand, and I had to repeatedly resist temptation, but the Essen-mania was beginning to take hold within me…
It’s a Jungle: It was starting to become difficult to take in any more information, so although this chap on the Sit Down! stand tried very hard to explain Wiraqocha to us, I’m not sure now that I really understood a word of it. Lovely artwork though, and some nice dice play (I think).
A Nice Sit Down (But No Cup of Tea): At the large Amigo stand we found a table (huzzah!) and were keen to try out The City. The game takes one part of the successful Race for the Galaxy, and (apparently) tries to condense it for a family audience, but the distillation process has been so severe that there is hardly anything left. It felt completely ruled by the luck of the draw and had an obvious runaway leader problem. And yet there was all this tedious and repeated bookkeeping to do, no interaction, and no sense of building anything, let alone a city. Nil points.
A Reversal of Fortune: Luckily, the next Amigo game we tried was 23, which is reminiscent of the excellent No Thanks!, but does something interesting and new. Its workings were a little opaque at first, but I think there would be lots to enjoy with repeated plays. It’s not as elegant as No Thanks! — which really is a thing of beauty — but it was certainly a blessed relief from the formless morass of The City.
RAWR!: John broke out his new copy of King of Tokyo in the evening and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. The game has great artwork and production values, a fun mix of dice play, power-ups and push your luck — and the phrase “slap the Meka Dragon” will live in infamy.
All Roads: We elbowed our way into the halls as early as we could manage on day four, so that we could guarantee a free table to play Fortuna The core action-card-swapping mechanic was clever and interesting, and we enjoyed our game. However, a clear-headed rereading of the rules reveals we made several key errors (I benefited far too much from my early wedding, for example!) and even misread how the scoring worked (although I actually rather liked our misreading!).
Best Till Last?: Here’s what you need to know: Sticky Stickz, presented on the Korean stand by publisher Happy Baobab, is unalloyed joy, which had deservedly sold out by the time we discovered it on day four. It is an example of the grail of games: a great idea brilliantly executed. We laughed our heads off (and, I think, screamed a little too) while playing, and probably caused a bit of a ruckus, and what better endorsement for any game could there be?
Triangulation: Next up at the Korean stand was Rich Assets (sorry, no link), a (sort of) triangular take on the classic game Acquire. It looked more interesting than it turned out to be, but we were only playing the base game, which was tile-placement without the bells and whistles.
Dominos + Memory=Domory: Domory is the brainchild of Silke Kegeler (pictured), who was at Essen to show off her fascinating and colourful 3D game, although it seemed just as much a work of art or visual design, so perhaps the word ‘game’ doesn’t do it justice.
Rome Demands Coffee!: Over at the Cambridge Games Factory stand, Wakefield Carter was showing off samples of, amongst other things, the ‘black box’ edition of Glory to Rome.
No Man Is An Island: Another game that was getting a lot of buzz was Vanuatu, and we stopped by the stand to get an explanation, I believe from the designer himself (may be wrong on that). Now, I really was starting to lose a degree of intellectual grip, so the game made little sense to me (to be completely fair, I did wander off!), but reports are good.
Of Smugglers and Coves: Our last game was a quickly snatched play of Cargo Noir on the Days of Wonder stand. For a big box game, the mechanics seem simple (too simple?) but DoW’s trademark excellence in terms of production values definitely lifts the game. And it’s nothing to be taken too seriously. Indeed, by the end we were on our feet (well, I was) cheering on our new German friends as they attempted (quite literally) to pull a win out of the bag. That a one-hour-plus game could all come down to a round of lucky dip may seem absurd (and you’d be right), but we did have a good time of it!
And So It Comes To An End: In the gloaming of a German evening, we finally retreated, our four days of gaming adventures at an end. Inside the fair was immediately folding itself up into nearly nothing — while forklift trucks whizzed about amongst the stragglers; the Germans, clearly, have no truck with nanny-state health and safety nonsense! Farewell, Messe “Place of Events” (as the posters put it)! To the next time!
…Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence, and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the World.
— Joseph Campbell
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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Late last night I got back from my first-ever Essen, having had my mind thoroughly blown by its scale and glorious absurdity. I’d spent almost the whole four days at the fair, but there was still so much that I’d not got a chance to see or do. Fortunately, my more experienced comrades, John Yianni and Rob Harris, shepherded me through the fair’s more obscure rituals and byways, and I cannot adequately express my gratitude for letting me join them.
I shall post more news of our time at the fair shortly, but for now I’ll just take a quick look at the sizeable amount of gaming schwag I returned with. Not that this paltry amount in any way compares to what some other fair-goers must have returned with! You could have spent, spent, spent, and then happily spent a whole lot more. And some were clearly doing just that!
But, without further ado, and in no particular order, here’s what I got (total spend: €38.90, less than the price of your average big box Euro!):
Bought games
* Kontor, Michael Schacht — Goldsieber Spiele (€5)
I’d always liked the look of this one, and €5 for a decent second-hand German copy seemed too good to pass up. I think (details are now blurry) that this was my first purchase, up to which time I had protested (too much, you might say) that I was not going to buy any games.
* Mozaika, Adam Kałuźa — Kuźnia Gier (€2.50)
I’m a sucker for tile games, and this little box (brand new) with such a little price appealed to me.
* Deukalion, Arno Steinwender & Wilfried Lepuschitz — Parker Spiele (€2.50)
This one is a curious historical artefact: evidence laid down in the boardgaming strata of Hasbro’s short-lived foray into Eurogames. And it’s none-too-shabby either! Great graphic design and components — the 40 meeples alone are worth more than €2.50 — so tempting, indeed, that all three of us bought a copy!
* Hab & Gut, Carlo A. Rossi — Winning Moves (€10)
Like Kontor, this is another game that I had always hankered after, so how could I pass up a brand new box for €10? It turned out I ought to have done since we saw it going for €8 the very next day! You live and learn.
* Gold!, Michael Schacht — Abacus Spiele (€4)
Schacht’s quirky little card game for 2 or 3 players packs, it turns out, quite a pleasing punch, so was definitely worth the cash.
* Medievalia, Michele Quandam — Giochix Edizioni (€2.95)
Half-remembered details about the card play made this one a relatively blind purchase, but the nice art direction and a quick scan of the rules suggests I’ve not entirely wasted my money.
* Circus Maximus, Jeffrey D. Allers — Pegasus Spiele (€3)
Allers has a pretty good reputation as a designer, so the €3 price tag seemed all-too reasonable. Plus, it came in a rather swanky tin!
* Tatort Themse, Reiner Knizia — Pegasus Spiele (€3)
Knizia in a tin. Going cheap. Kinda hard to resist.
* Carcassonne: Das Gelfoge, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede — Hans im Glück (€2.95)
I love me some meeples, so six funky transparent ones packed into an equally funky larger red transparent one was a no-brainer!
Promotional items
It took me a while to tune into the whole Essen promo malarkey — small expansions for existing games that are often simply unavailable elsewhere — but you can’t really argue with ‘free’ can you? (Or a small charitable donation, for that matter.) I was pleased to get the Mr Jack Pocket expansion, and, of course, am always happy with more Carcassonne tiles! I don’t have a copy of Dominion, but am sure I can find a good home for the cards.
* Gold! promo (free) — scoring variants postcard
* My Jack Pocket: Goodies (free) — new tile and character card
* Red meeple baggie (€3 donation, in aid of Rainbow Over Ghana):
— Carcassone: Die Schule expansion
— Dominion: Carcassonne expansion
Personal gifts
And everything else, as they say, is gravy!
* On The Cards, Sebastian Bleasdale — Surprised Stare Games
Alan Paull insisted I take a complimentary copy of On The Cards with me since I had helped him and the team at Surprised Stare with the rules, something I had been only too happy to do as a way of repaying a little of all they’ve done for me during my fledgling game design career. Many thanks, then, to Alan, Charlie, Tony and Sebastian!
* DGT Pyramid
Here’s the thing: John Yianni, along with being a highly successful game designer, is an all-round nice guy who knows lots of other nice people at the fair. This means that, if you are not too careful, said nice people give you free stuff, principally because you happen to be standing next to him. It was rather humbling, to be honest. Thanks, then, go out to the good folks from DGT!
* Logan Stones, John Yianni — Productief BV
See above! Alex, one of John’s Dutch distributors, gave me a copy of Logan Stones in the dying minutes of the fair as we were chatting and playing on the Productief BV stand. If you don’t know the game, it’s a great little ‘filler’ abstract with beautiful pieces: Check it out! So thanks are due to Alex and his team!
* Die Pyramide des Krimsutep, Ralph Sandfuchs — Krimsus Krimskrams-Kiste
Pete Burley is another gent of the boardgaming world, and he was at the fair this year with his sons Johnathan and Freddie. I am interested to give this little game a go (once I’ve sourced the English rules). It was great to meet you, Pete: Thanks for everything, and good luck at Nuremberg!
* Junkyard Races, John Yianni — Gen42 Games
John wouldn’t let me leave without giving me my own copy of his latest game, a new edition of a game he first published way back in 2003. I played this back in June at the UK Games Expo and is was a blast! Thanks again, John!
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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In which I take a very quick look at the games I played on Saturday at the monthly games day at the Cambridge University Centre — that’s the Grad Pad to you and me!
All four games were new to me, and the first two always appealed, so I jumped at the chance to try them out. I won’t give you the low-down on the rules, just what my designer brain made of them, good, bad or indifferent.
Stone Age — Bernd Brunnhofer (Hans im Glück, 2008)
I really enjoyed Stone Age and would love a chance to play again. As usual from this publisher, the components and artwork are first class. Set-up isn’t fiddly, the gameplay is immediate and intuitive, and because all the choices are public, it’s easy to get going because you can openly discuss other player’s choices without genuinely prejudicing your own.
It’s clear from just one play that competing for the cards is crucial, since they can generate substantial end-game bonuses. I played a 4-player game with Pete, Ray and Robin, and Pete’s victory was crushing, partly because he’d gone after the cards aggressively at the beginning.
The dice keep things lively, and introduce a nice element of ‘push your luck’ where it’s possible to take a gamble in some turns, spreading yourself thinly in the hope that a plan might just come together. Reading the intentions of other players, and trying to pre-empt them is important, as is reacting to tactical opportunities, so the player-engagement is high. This is something else that dice add to any game, because it’s always fun to share the agony and ecstasy of another player as they roll high or low, or to speculate before a roll about exactly what’s coming. For the same reason, I really liked the cards that gifted resources to all players in turn, based on the roll of a set of dice.
Stone Age is deserving of its popularity: a solid 8/10 for look and feel, playability and fun!
Troyes — Dujardin, Georges & Orban (Pearl Games, 2010)
There are lots to like about Troyes. The style of the artwork is excellent, and a welcome break from the familiar, slightly soft-focus magic realism of games such as Stone Age. In contrast, Troyes has a schematic, hard-edged, gothic precision, and it’s clear that a great deal of thought, effort and skill has gone into rendering the complex set of actions and outcomes into a coherent and elegant set of visual cues and icons. The user interface design is really well done!
But Troyes is a much harder nut to crack than Stone Age, so requires more attention from the newcomer and a greater willingness to accept a larger number of restrictions and non-obvious interactions. The dice play creates a really nice core to the game, but there are a lot of dots to join up on the periphery and, in comparison to Stone Age, there is a much greater disconnect between the player actions and the notional narrative of the game.
The game will reward perseverance, so I would certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a heavier eurogame. But the rules do not easily resolve themselves into intuitive gameplay — Exhibit A: The number of rules queries on BGG! — and the designer in me wanted to see fewer “You can’t do that!” moments. I’m not saying, just to be clear, that I preternaturally know better than the game’s designers; I would not be so presumptive. But throughout our game we needed to consult the rules — often to discover our desired action forbidden! — and this suggests to me that the game’s logic is a little too difficult for the casual player to map. Players have to make sense of any game before being able to play it fluidly, and Troyes, for better or worse and for a variety of reasons, does not make this cognitive leap easy.
Troyes is definitely recommended, but with provisos: 7/10 for intrigue, potential and novelty.
Ascension — Justin Gary, et al. (Gary Games, 2010)
On twitter, and as an immediate reaction to my game, I gave Ascension a one-word review: “witless”. And I can’t say that my opinion has changed. Whatever you think about the deck-building genre, it’s clear that designing a good deck-building game that’s as good as Dominion — which remains the first, best example — is hard.
Successful game mechanisms do not, in and of themselves, make successful games. You can’t simply deconstruct a good game, reconstitute some (or even all) of its parts and hope that an emulation of its creation will lead inevitably to an emulation of its success. There’s a little bit more to it than that.
Dominion succeeds because it limits players’ actions and allows for meaningful choices and genuine strategies. Ascension, in contrast, seems random and futile. Players may have options, but they don’t have choice.
I’ll summarise by giving Ascension three words instead of one: “not for me”.
Factory Fun — Corné van Moorsel (Cwali, 2006)
Last to the table was Factory Fun, which I certainly enjoyed even though I played very poorly. But there’s no getting around it: this is the epitome of multi-player solitaire. The competitive puzzle-solving genre is popular, and Z-Man’s upcoming new edition of the out-of-print and hard-to-find Factory Fun is likely to be well received (the updated tiles and graphic design look excellent), but the game is no more than a quick, light ‘filler’, and a relatively lonely one at that.
The principle of the game is clever and engaging, but there are plenty of clever and engaging fillers out there that engage more through player interaction than private intellectual activity, and I think I’d rather play those.
But Factory Fun is definitely good for the right crowd: 6/10 for being a nice idea, well executed.
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather,
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burn’d like one burning flame together,
As he rode down to Camelot.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’
This isn’t a post about anything very profound; I just wanted to interrupt your regular viewing to report on the entertaining but doubtless unintentional similarities between two new board game cover designs: Donald X. Vaccarino’s Kingdom Builder by Queen Games, and the new edition of Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms by Fantasy Flight.
The illustrations share so many cues — a red-cloaked knight overlooks a gleaming white citadel amongst an impossibly mountainous landscape — that I couldn’t let them slip by unnoticed. Both are prime examples, I would say, of a familiar mythic representation of the age of chivalry, rooted in Arthurian lore, that directly evokes “the saintly days of yore” (as Poe once put it).
And when I say familiar, I really mean it! It took me five minutes on BoardGameGeek to find the examples below, so there are probably plenty more out there. When it comes to chivalry in board games, it does seems as if there’s a lot of it about.
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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Yesterday I had the honour and privilege of attending the playtest group organised by Rob Harris (@playtestuk) in the unassuming corner of a London pub borrowed from the London on Board crew. Rob and I were joined by Jonathan (@joffwarren), Chris and Brian, and after drinks, a light lunch and some introductory banter, we got down to business.
And first to the table was my own prototype Mēxihco, the new take on my old tile-laying game Terraform, now with added LEGO. The game does take rather longer to fully explain than I would like, and it’s not a game that lends itself very well to a ‘learn as you go’ approach so start-up time is relatively long for new players. But since this was the beginning of the session Rob, Chris and Jonathan were alert and patient and took in most of the rules (at least the ones I actually remembered to explain!) with sage nods.
The game mixes card drafting with tile laying and area control, so is likely to seem relatively familiar to the average eurogamer in terms of structure and mechanisms. This means that most players will come to it with a number of expectations mapped from other games, and it’s only, of course, where these expectations conflict with the game that things can get tricky.
However, overall the playtest was a success and I think everyone enjoyed the game, but that’s not to say there weren’t plenty of interesting wrinkles and keenly made observations from the playtesters. Was the set-up a little too fiddly? How necessary was the split of the tiles into two phases? Could the card drafting be made less frustrating? Can you clarify the scoring — for example with a player aid — please? Should the variable game-end timing be made, well, less variable? And finally, why did the game forbid the player from taking (apparently) reasonable actions?
That last one, for me, was the most interesting, although the others are certainly no less important. Players lay tiles to create and expand territory, but can also (in certain circumstances) overlay tiles, meaning that territories once created are not necessarily immutable. Players can (again, in certain circumstances) protect some of their territory, but in doing that territory becomes ‘locked down’ and, in the words of the rules, “cannot be enlarged or reduced by any player”.
I thought my rules were clear, and that they accurately reflected both the law and the spirit of the game. But — rather excellently — Chris was, in one turn, in a position where two apparently possible and equally desirable moves directly challenged both of these concepts. My intent, in formulating the game, was to render a protected territory inviolate. Players are able to choose to protect their territories and stop others from interfering with it, but the ‘cost’ of this choice is that any further expansion is explicitly forbidden. Hence the phrase “cannot be enlarged or reduced”. That seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?
Well, as it turns out, not so much. Or rather, it is a clear instruction, but it is not one that completely describes the intended limitation. There is a loophole! At the end of my post Game Spaces: Why Everything Not Forbidden is Compulsory, I explained the nature of loopholes as follows:
In this case the possibility of moving outside of the game space is neither explicitly forbidden nor allowed, rather the rules have created a ‘grey area’, a crack in the boundary drawn by the rules through which players can choose to play. Often players themselves will veto expanding the play space in this way by reasoning that to do so would break the ‘spirit of the game’, but there will always be others who seize the opportunity and point out, correctly, that no rule forbids it.
What is the loophole? You may be ahead of my here, but saying that a territory “cannot be enlarged or reduced” says nothing about the legality of an action that leaves its area unchanged. And, as it happens, there are very good reasons why a player might seek to do this and Chris quite rightly asked why he shouldn’t be allowed to. Much discussion ensued!
At the same time — in the very same turn — another possible move highlighted how explicitly preventing “any player” from enlarging or reducing a protected territory, though unambiguous, directly challenged the spirit of the game intuited by the players.
The intent of the rule was to draw a very clear line around these inviolate territories, and everyone accepted that it did indeed make perfect sense that expanding your own protected territories ought to be forbidden. But what about expanding a protected territory belonging to another player? Did it make sense to forbid this when there could be circumstances — as aptly demonstrated by Chris — when to do so was the consequence of an entirely reasonable and desirable move? Much discussion ensued about this one, too!
Chris’s turn, which probably created a 15-minute hiatus in the game while all the options, expectations and ramifications were closely scrutinised, only goes to show how difficult it is to create truly bullet-proof rules and why, as a designer, you need to take into account not just what your players can and cannot do, but also what they would, all things considered, wish to do.
All games might be said to set up a series of playful obstacles for the participants to overcome. Rules codify these obstacles, and are therefore primarily designed to stop players doing whatever the hell they want whenever they want to. When people choose to play they enter into a contract: they agree to play their game by your rules. And I think the designer has an absolute duty to make a fair bargain in return: to respect and reward the player’s faith in your game by demonstrating more than a little faith in your players.
And so, when Chris challenged my game — challenged me, indeed — to defend the logic of its internal law I found that I could not, in all good conscience, do so. I could not wag my finger and deny his entirely reasonable and reasoned request, and so we agreed that the move — which safeguarded his own territory while expanding Jonathan’s — should in fact be allowed and played on.
The game ended with a surprisingly close win for Rob: 26–25–25–23, and the dissection of its vices and virtues continued. Exactly how variable the variable timing of the end of the game should be, and what mechanism should be used to achieve it, remains an open question. My first playtest last week resulted in a 400-to-1 ‘play till the bitter end’ result; yesterday’s was a more modest 7-to-1 result in the other direction that led to a shorter-than-average game. But was it too short? That was the question! I need to go back to the maths on this one and make sure I really do know what I am letting myself (and my players) in for. Personally, I don’t mind the idea of unpredictability, but I appreciate that it won’t be to every player’s taste.
I won’t dissect the other games we played in quite so much detail (you will probably be relieved to hear), but next up was Rob’s London Game, which I have played before and which, delightfully, continues to defy obvious categorization. Is it a deduction game? Possibly. Is it a casual or gamer’s game? Both. Are there meaningful strategies? Perhaps. If so, what are they? Ah, well, now you’ve got me! Is it, in the final analysis, even a game? Yes. And possibly no, depending on what you mean.
You see, it really is the most mercurial of animals! We played twice. And I won twice. But I couldn’t tell afterwards if I’d played the game, or if it had played me. Don’t get me wrong: I like it, as did the others, but exactly what ‘it’ is remains shrouded in mystery.
Finally — provided, that is, we don’t count my other prototype, Rumba, and I would prefer not to — we played a round of Hung Out To Dry, a prototype designed by Jonathan in collaboration with his trans-Atlantic design partner Rebekah Bissell. This was a very neat and nicely thematic set-collecting card game, designed for children and families. We all enjoyed it, but agreed that it was over a little too quickly with four players. Jonathan already knew this, and Rob confirmed that in with two or three players the game allowed more time for the more interesting aspects of the game to emerge. There was a lot to like about the game’s theme and colourful artwork which will both definitely appeal to children, so I wish Jonathan and Rebekah all the best with the game’s continued development.
I did get Rumba to table, but it was a rather inglorious and disappointing experience which I, Rob and latecomer David endured rather than actually played. Somewhere this design has got lost, and every attempt to take it forward has failed (yesterday was no exception). It’s not that there’s nothing there, it’s just that I haven’t figured out what it is yet. The latest prototype was just too fiddly and ungainly and inescapably dull. There’s too much of it, and it collectively delivers far too little. Less said the better, to be honest.
Does any of that sound like fun? (Apart from the last bit.) If so, and you are either a game designer with a prototype in need of playtesting, or a gamer willing to suffer the slings, arrows and outrageous fortunes of unfinished and thoroughly rough-around-the-edges gaming experiences, do keep an eye on Rob’s website for details of future get-togethers and feel free to come along.
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
Mon Sep 26, 2011 11:06 pm
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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Mēxihco is a strategy tile game in which you play the part of Aztec rulers, competing to develop and protect districts of maize and bean crops, irrigation ponds and city precincts during the rise of the Aztec empire in the Valley of Mexico.
So reads the introduction to my newly written and wholly revised ruleset for the latest incarnation of the game that started out as Terraform (of which more can be found in the BrettSpiel archives). It’s always been a favourite of mine, and I have returned to the design often over the past few years. There are absolutely nothing wrong with Terraform in its final form, a form which Jackson Pope of the erstwhile Reiver Games seriously considered for publication, but the more I went on to design other prototypes, the more I realised that Terraform could be and do something more, and I have since tried out various ideas to elevate and enliven the player experience.
Yesterday was the first playtest of the new Mēxihco and as playtests go, it was a pretty satisfying and reassuring experience, even if probabilistically arresting — but more of that in a moment.
The idea of shifting the theme to something more Earth-bound was the beginning of this process, and the first thing to change was the name. The play involves landscape building and definitely classifies as an ’area control’ eurogame, but the game itself — the core of it — is actually rather more combative than the average eurogame and is really one of constant brinkmanship. My earlier attempts to ‘fix’ the game missed the mark, serving only to stab at its very heart, injuring the thing that made it interesting in the first place: the cycle of tension and resolution. Never forget the good stuff when attempting to exorcise the bad!
Another key aspect of change — which I discussed at length in my Game Design 101: What Are The Odds? article — was changing the timing and tempo of the game by introducing an (appropriately constrained) degree of unpredictability into its progress. The game has a stash of tiles, which the players claim and place to build the landscape. Terraform simply ended when these ran out, which led to flat and anticlimactic endgame. My solution, as discussed in the article although now implemented slightly differently, is to add a small population of special tiles to the main stash. These tiles emerge randomly, but once they’ve all been played the game is over.
With a little bit of combinatorial and permutational maths you can work out the likelihood of any particular number of tiles turning up before the game can end. I’d done the maths and thought I knew what to expect. But the Universe, it seems, likes to solve its own equations and yesterday delivered a result that was roughly a 400-to-1 long-shot. Thanks, Universe!
In a way, this result only goes to show how careful and respectful the game designer must be when dealing with our old friend Lady Luck. Since just one playtest has the capacity to deliver even the most aberrant of outcomes, any game designer without a meaningful understanding of the maths could be easily deceived into thinking either the best or worst of their creation. I am confident I have a handle on the numbers, but to experience what an edge case actually feels like was very useful.
As I said in my original article, when you hand over any aspect of your game to chance you can no longer rule out the genuinely shocking outcome — ‘Everything Not Forbidden is Compulsory’, remember? — but actually, that’s part of the fun. And last night’s playtest managed to reinforce that message while highlighting the value of an almost Orwellian ‘ignorance is strength’ credo. Let go the reins a little and learn to love the chaos!
Plus — and this was a very important aspect of the playtest — my little LEGO Aztec temples did the job very nicely, thank you very much!
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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In the past couple of days two articles came at me on different vectors, and both of them were about Gabe Zichermann.
A friend emailed me this interview with Gabe on Publishing Perspectives (‘the BBC of the book world’ no less!), and over on Twitter @tiedtiger tweeted this review by Sebastian Deterding of Gabe’s book Gamification by Design.
The interview is short, but quite long enough to tell you everything you need to know about Gabe Zichermann. And the review, though long, is absolutely worth the read, since, as a byproduct of dissecting the book (of which — spoilers! — Sebastian is not a fan), it gives an excellent overview of the entire subject, and includes lots of pointers and references to other material, all of which is hot sauce for the game designer.
And when I say that the interview is ‘quite long enough’, I mean that it contains this singular quote from Gabe:
“The question I posed myself was: Can games be more than mindless entertainment?”
Right. OK. So… you kinda lost me there, Gabe. I mean, what, exactly, is a ‘mindless’ game? Truly, what do you mean? Now look, I’m not saying games can’t be trivial or ephemeral or ‘merely’ entertainment, but mindless? Really? Seriously? That’s what you’ve got? That’s where you started? That’s the predicate for your whole design philosophy?
It’s like wandering through the Louvre and announcing, after having actually stopped long enough to consider your surroundings, “I wonder if art can ever be more than just paint on a wall?”
So I was not — how shall I put this? — predisposed to take up Gabe’s cause when I came up against Sebastian’s book review. But I wasn’t expecting such an exhaustive and well-written take-down either. There’s lots to enjoy in the review — including a shout out for BoardGameGeek! — and I urge everyone who might be reading this to read it too. For one thing, its author is far better read.
I shan’t rehearse Sebastian’s arguments, but here’s my take on them and, by extension, on the tenet of Gabe’s book and on the nature of gamification as a discipline.
Gamification, at least within the terms chosen by those who currently most vociferously define it, seems to assume the smallest, least imaginative reading of human behaviour — and of game design too — and then proposes to do as little as possible to engage with it. Sebastian highlights in his first paragraph that gamification’s been called an ‘inadvertent con’. That’s generous. And I guess it would be a con if it wasn’t so bloody obvious.
I’m no marketer, but I am a consumer, and you know what? I, like the majority of modern consumers, ain’t no fool. Gamification may call upon the cosseted semantics of words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘engagement’ (and these notions are entirely valid metrics for the marketer) but so-called loyalty schemes aren’t really loyalty are they? — not when they’re just an elaborate form of financial coercion. And it’s hardly genuine engagement if it simply relies on behavioural inertia. By all means try and sell me stuff that I don’t want, but let’s not pretend that I am anything less than wholly complicit if I actually turn round and buy it. And if I do, it’s not because I’m acting against my best interests, it’s because I’ve reconfigured my own notion of my best interests to include something previously alien.
Here’s the failure at the heart of gamification: It assumes you can take something that’s actually work — something apparently against my best interests, something I don’t want to do (but that the ‘gamifier’ does want me to do) — and render it a game simply by wrapping it in the language of play. And that then, as if by magic, my relationship with it will be, quite literally, transfigured. And that suddenly, that which I did not want to do — principally: give you money — I shall find myself doing! Not because I want to — no, I shall do these things quite in spite of myself! — but because, well, you know, now it’s a game! Look, it’s got badges and points and scoreboards and everything! And suddenly this thing that I don’t want to do is fun! (It must be, it’s a game!) Oh, look at how much fun it is! Oh happy day!
I’m not that dumb — and I’m optimistic enough to believe that the majority of other people aren’t that dumb either. So if that’s really what gamification is predicated on, if it’s really a ‘price of everything, value of nothing’ proposition, then it’s all just lowest common denominator stuff and (almost) beneath my contempt. It’s an abuse of language, an abuse of intelligence and fundamentally cheap.
And, which is just salt in the wound, it’s got nothing at all to do with game design.
Gamification: Even the word itself has the most grating and inelegant of syntaxes. But it tells you everything you need to know. It tells you that the process is not about creating something actually playful, but about deconstructing something that isn’t, and then artlessly rendering it mechanically similar to something that is. It’s not about making something fun, but about making something that looks like fun. But that’s the huckster’s best offer, I guess; indeed, that’s all they’ve got. It’s snake oil. It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s a pig in a poke.
Scratch that: This time around there’s not even a pig! Gamification is nothing, hidden in plain sight: It’s the emperor’s new clothes.
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
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