Archive for Board Games
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
In which I rattle through my reactions to the nine (count them!) new games played over the past week. As in earlier episodes, I won’t formally review the games, but will instead just jot down what my designer’s eye made of them.
Glen More — Matthias Cramer (Alea, 2010)
First to the table at the weekend was this nice little tile-laying game which I’d always liked the look of. Martin warned me of the bizarrely game-breaking tile ‘Loch Oich’, and his prediction that whoever claimed it would eventually win was spot on. It does seem egregiously over-powered, and the speed with which the game accelerated to its end was unsettling.
The game packs a lot in, but felt like it ended, anticlimactically, just as we were getting to the good bit. I did like the tile rondel and the market, but the successive rounds of majority scoring were a bit predictable, and the (necessary) penalty for over-building an unsatisfactory hack.
Gilbert’s Unreliably Insightful Design Evaluation (GUIDE) rating: 3/5
Quarriors! — Elliot & Lang (WizKids, 2011)
We barrelled into this one with rather more enthusiasm than hope, and tried our best, in the face of faltering expectations, to enjoy it. The first game was (of course) random, and felt disappointingly one-sided — a victory of pure skill on Lucy’s part, of course! — but we immediately had a second game to see whether, with a little more care, it was possible to exercise a little more control.
And it was, but only a little. It’s hardly a surprise that a dice game should feel random, and the game does give players some tools to counter this, but without that randomness there’s little point to the game at all, so you just have to go with it.
We liked very much how the cards changed the characteristics of the dice, so there’s plenty of game here… for the right crowd.
GUIDE rating: 3/5
Oregon — Berg & Berg (Han im Glück, 2007)
A very clear and intuitive ruleset smoothed our experience of what is a very neat and engaging tile-laying and meeple-placing family game. The simple card-play and the surprisingly powerful joker and extra-turn tokens did keep things moving, and the way in which the game’s geography developed was fun. There weren’t, however, too many sparks; the game was simply a pleasant-enough journey through a pretty-enough landscape.
I do appear to be damning Oregon with faint praise, but all I can say is that it hasn’t really stuck in the memory.
GUIDE rating: 3/5
Hansa — Michael Schacht (ABACUSSPIELE, 2004)
I’ve always wanted to try this, and just like Oregon, the rules and gameplay are smooth and clear, and gave us plenty to think about. Hansa is certainly a game that does more with less, which is always a good thing in my book, and the game is quick enough that poor choices won’t survive long enough to be regretted too deeply.
Actually, our game was over a little too quickly, and the ending had the same sense of “Oh. Look. It’s over. How’d that happen?” that Glen More had, but I think more plays of Hansa would be rewarded with a better understanding of the game’s tempo, and hence a better feel for how to play the middle- and end-game.
Small, but perfectly formed, the game is an object lesson for any designer.
GUIDE rating: 5/5
Get Bit! — Dave Chalker (Mayday Games, 2007)
This one was a just-one-more-before-bedtime interlude, and something of a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting much — the cards, robots and shark all felt a little cheap, to be honest — but the game did deliver a dose of double-guessing fun which certainly never threatened to out-stay its welcome. And, cheap though they were, the plastic robots and shark did add a certain something (although quite why a shark would be nibbling a robot’s limbs is anyone’s guess).
GUIDE rating: 3/5
Takenoko — Antoine Bauza (Bombyx, 2011)
Despite playing one key rule wrong for the entire game (and by the time we realised, it was too late to make a difference) we all enjoyed this lovingly crafted and produced gem of a game. At first, though, it seemed almost too light to be interesting. Great bits, a fun theme and thoughtfully designed and helpfully explanatory player boards are all well and good, but where’s the meat? Where’s the meaningful interaction?
It wasn’t until we interrogated the distribution of the objective cards at the end of the game that we began to see how the game would have a bit more to offer, once you’d fully understood it. Having said that, there does seem to be the presence of a ‘hit and hope’ strategy at the end of the game, in which players can grab new objectives (specifically, those based on the existing placement of tiles) in the blind ambition of finding one that they can immediately score. This doesn’t break the game, but it has the possibility of rendering the end-game anticlimactic (something of a theme developing here, I think?).
GUIDE rating: 4/5
Emerald — Rüdiger Dorn (ABACUSSPIELE, 2002)
Though firmly in the territory of the family game, with a simple ruleset and clear objectives, Emerald nevertheless offers lots of interest, and would be an excellent introduction to more meaty tactical Eurogames for younger children.
The randomness of the card distribution will easily skew the outcome beyond the realm of strategy, and the capricious behaviour of the dragon will grate with more studious players, but taken for what it is, the game is a light, fun romp.
One thing I really liked was the effortless pressure the game puts on the players to ‘get on with it’. You can’t hang back indefinitely, and you can never retreat. The dragon sits in wait and, whether you like it or not, you’ll have to take your chances eventually. Remember, fortune favours the brave!
GUIDE rating: 4/5
Ora et Labora — Uwe Rosenberg (Lookout Games, 2011)
This is quite the meatiest Eurogame I’ve played in many a long month and though professionally curious, I was really not expecting to be so entertained and so engaged for the full 2½ hours that it took us to play. And yet, entertained and engaged I most certainly was! I am no Rosenberg aficionado, so cannot speak of how this compares to or contrasts with it’s cousins Agricola or Le Havre, but the received wisdom seems to be that with Ora et Labora the designer has continued to develop and perfect his very particular art.
Yes, the game has a multitude of rules and a boat-load of components, all sprinkled with an expansive litany of iconography, but once the game is up and running, everything flows incredibly smoothly, and is wonderfully supported by the excellent graphic design. Quite how any designer tames such a multi-headed beast of a game I am genuinely at a loss to know, but Uwe clearly knows his onions. And a wide selection of other animal-, mineral- and vegetable-based commodities.
What I particularly liked was the degree of player interaction, not something Eurogames are typically famed for, especially those in which players independently build their own tableaux. But through the simple and really rather cunning trick of allowing players to pay their opponents to do work for them, the interest in the affairs of others, and the ability to disrupt their plans, is increased enormously.
GUIDE rating: 5/5
Dragon’s Gold — Bruno Faidutti (White Goblin Games, 2011)
And finally we have this recently rereleased title by Faidutti, which stands or falls on whether you can stand (a) the direct, time-limited negotiation, and (b) the utter chaos of the magical item cards. This is by no means a bad game — although the miniscule numerals and dark, indistinguishable art and card colours of the recent edition are almost unforgivable — but this really is one of those ‘love it or hate it’ games.
I’m certain it will work brilliantly for some, but for others it will be the gaming equivalent of nails down a chalkboard. As one detractor on BoardGameGeek pithily put it: “Bickering in one minute chunks. No thank you.”
I didn’t think I’d like it, and I was right. But as ever, I’m glad I had the opportunity to find out!
GUIDE rating: 2/5
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
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.
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
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!
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
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!
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
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!
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
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
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
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!
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
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!
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
I'm going to try cross-posting stuff from my regular blog here on BGG, although the reformatting is a bit fiddly, isn't it? If you know of any HTML-to-BGG-forum-formatting conversion tips or tricks, do let me know!
Devotees of such things will no doubt have noticed that Days of Wonder have announced the twin winners of their Ticket to Ride Map Design Contest. Fulsome congratulations are due to the winners, who will see their maps published later this year: Ian Vincent of the UK (go Ian!), and François Valentyne of Canada. Readers interested in the delicious details of the new geographies offered in the forthcoming Map Collections can find out more on the DoW website.
When I first heard about the contest I, like many, many others, immediately set about the task of designing my own map, but before doing so publicly speculated on what Days of Wonder, in creating the contest, might be looking for. Ian Vincent read that blog post (without realising who I was, although we had previously met) and has, graciously, been kind enough to credit me in the rules for his India map.
Not, I hasten to add, for inspiring any specific part of his design, but rather, I think, for helping to articulate the nature of the Ticket to Ride brand itself. It’s genuinely gratifying to know that my words were helpful, and a geek thrill of another kind to see my newly minted nickname — Brett “Spiel” Gilbert (thanks Ian!) — up in metaphorical lights. Commensurately small lights, of course, but lights nonetheless.
But what of my own design? News of the winners has reminded me of how much I enjoyed the challenge of designing a map, and I thought you, dear reader, might be interested to see what I came up with — Ticket to Ride: Around the World.
The year is 1925. A quarter-century after our five old friends met to commemorate Phileas Fogg’s famous journey, they meet again. Within the past decade, great transport projects such as the Panama Canal and the Trans-Siberian Railway have opened up the world to the adventurous traveller like never before, and now, with the Roaring Twenties in full swing, and inspired by their dynamic spirit and industrial fervour, our friends agree to take on their grandest challenge yet — to recreate Fogg’s impossible journey for themselves!
That was my pitch, and the principle conceit of the map was that some routes would wrap around the left and right edges of the map, creating an entirely new geography and the possibility of true ‘Around the World’ tickets. These ‘long route’ tickets feature two cities as usual, but require them to be connected by a single, continuous, circumnavigational series of track. Other than that specific addition, the game preserves all the familiar concepts of the existing games and added no new mechanics or scoring bonuses.
I do wonder, of course, whether anyone else who entered had the same idea. It’s impossible to know, although since when I mentioned the contest to my maze-designing sister, herself a keen TtR online player, she independently expressed exactly the same idea, I can’t help but think that other entrants had it too!
Anyway, I began by looking at the different world map projections, and quickly settled on the Robinson projection as being a good fit for the standard Ticket to Ride board size. After that I roughly scaled the projection, overlaid this with a scan of the original Ticket to Ride map (of the United States) and, working in my favourite graphics package, began to pick out a selection of world cities that might form the basis of a workable map.
I deliberately set out to create a map which would have (roughly) the same scale and density as the US map, partly because I was looking to create a map that would similarly fill the rectangular board space, but also for pragmatic reasons. I knew the US map ‘worked’, in terms of its balance of route lengths and colourations, and I didn’t want to set myself the additional challenge of reinventing that part of the system. To me, the geographical conceit of the map was the key idea.
Soon enough I began to add routes to the map, using the background US map as guide to how large the train car spaces needed to be. If you compare the first two versions of my map you will see that I quickly ‘zoomed in’ on the Robinson projection, cropping the Arctic, Antarctic and Pacific regions as much as possible to focus on the main continental landmasses. This maximised the usable portions of the map and allowed more room for longer routes to be fitted between cities.
The overall form of the map began to take shape quite speedily, although many details remained to be worked out. I had to pick junction cities for the wrap-around routes, and work out how dense or otherwise all the ferry routes demanded by the abundant oceans ought to be. Inevitably, of course, I started to take rather preposterous liberties — What’s that? A trans-Atlantic tunnel between Africa and South America? — but I was still playing around with ideas and figuring out where more routes would be needed for the map to be suitably connected to support 5 players.
Ah, now things are starting to come together! This was an early attempt at colouring the routes, but established some useful conventions: Note the rounded lozenges for ferry routes, where dots indicate necessary locomotives, the heavy outline on tunnel routes, and the six differently coloured routes that span the board edges. Things would continue to evolve, but I wanted to make sure that the Pacific routes would be clearly readable during the game to avoid any confusion, so decided upon a limited number, all differently coloured, which would be as disparately located as possible: top, bottom and middle.
Here we catch the map in the middle of being re-coloured (something that I did repeatedly, each time trying to balance the mix and density of routes). Note that the routes within Africa and Asia have been visually tided up — I didn’t like all those kinks! — and that there is a new Iceland-Africa ferry route, that there is (at last) a ferry from Dakar to South America, and that some of the place names have now changed.
By now I had begun to think more carefully about the time and place of this map (the very thing I counselled readers about in my original post) and realised that I needed to pick a specific year and cross-check world place names with that era. I eventually settled on 1925, and so Brasília was out (not founded until 1956!), and Jakarta, Ulan Bator and Chennai all needed to revert to their erstwhile monikers.
Playtesting continued to reveal more things that needed to be fixed, such as relieving the congestion around Panama, and also demonstrated that simply forming a circumnavigational route was actually rather hard work! Not that that I wanted the map to make things easy for the players, but I did moderate the challenge by contracting key routes such as Tokyo-Panama, and completely removing the need for a trans-Pacific stopover in Hanga Roa (goodbye Easter Island!). Meanwhile, South America, which I had never been happy with, changed again to more accurately reflected the local geography of the cities, and elsewhere some of the tunnel routes shifted, again to better match the placement of large mountain ranges.
Rules mavens should note that the necessarily large number of ferry routes mean that the game is played using the ‘three card’ joker rule from Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries (where, when completing a ferry route, three matching cards can be played in place of a locomotive).
Another complete re-colouration of the routes and — at the very last! — the sudden disappearance of Beijing and appearance of San Juan (plus another nudge to South America) brought the map into focus. Personally I really enjoy both the detail and the whole, and was pleased with how the varied geography created different challenges for the players at different points on the map.
My favourite part (if I were forced to choose) is the array of routes in and out of Panama, which features regular, ferry and tunnel routes, and all 9 route colours (if you count grey as a colour, that is). That one city offers everything in the game in one place!
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
|
|
