Intense elegance
Thi Nguyen
United States
Los Angeles
California
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THE MYSTERIES OF INTENSELY ELEGANT MULTIPLAYER GAMES, DISCUSSED, EXPLORED, AND YET STILL MYSTIFIED BY
There is a quality I truly love - a kind of severe elegance. I don't mean relative elegance, like, say, Hannibal, which has a hell of a lot of rules, but a good rule/complexity ratio. I mean games with a hard, ultrasimple ruleset. Maybe two minutes to explain, maybe, at tops, 4 minutes.
Some games, like, say, El Grande or Puerto Rico, as you read through the rules, you tend to get a sense of what's coming. Not all the details, but where the meat is, where you're going to do all you're thinking. It's there, in the rules, you can see it. You're braced for impact.
Other games - like, for instance, Intrige, you hear the rules and think, "Alright, this is gonna be dull," and then in play, you get shocked to hell. Because somewhere in the interaction of those 5, 6, 8 rules, some sort of bizarre, mysterio-magic happens, and the game sits up off the table and eats your soul.
So I want to look through some of these games - games where some weird spitfire magic happens from a very simple ruleset - and figure out where the hell the magic came from.
One note: I'm only looking at multiplayer games, here. Two player abstracts are too easy. I mean, go - that's like the definition of intense elegance in games. But it's too easy. You can see where the complexity comes from. There's some veyr large decision space, some geometric interaction between the pieces, possible future geometric decisions - and blammo, depth, intensity, perhaps majesty. It's pretty easy to see how a set of geometric movement rules or a set of geometric placement/capture rules spawns complexity and interest.
I'm interested in the other stuff.
What I'm not interested in, though, is simple rules -> simple play. Kardinal & Konig is a likeable game, but there's no sense of *take-off* for me, of a system of choices and nuances suddenly assembling itself in midair from a minimal ruleset. With Kardinal & Konig, a low-complexity system with some tension is loaded into your head with the rules, and then you play it out. Fun, but not magic.
Most of my favorite multiplayer games - El Grande, Taj Mahal, Tigris & Euphrates - don't fall into this category. But I always savor the ones that do - half out of love for play, half out of a sense of their rigorous beauty.
Please add.
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Thi Nguyen
United States
Los Angeles
California
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Dorra is a minor (or maybe major) master of this sort of thing. Intrige is my boiled-down alliance game of choice - a kind of gorgeous, spare thing, about one minute to explain.
You are both employer and paterfamilias. You put your siblings into the houses of your fellow players' houses to jockey for employment, you give their potential employers bribes, and they choose one employee. Then all the employees get paid. It goes round and roudn again and then it ends.
WHERE'S THE MAGIC?
I think it's in the system of interdependencies that build up. You're *employing each other's siblings.* So you immediately have power over one another - you hire my brother, I'll keep your stupid goddamn slob of a cousin as my accountant, even though he's a good for nothin'. But if you give that job to that scumbag Pelli's good for nothin' son...
Some people make out like Intrige is a nothing game, just a platform for negotation with nothing but an amusing theme. It isn't. The system provides the bare minimum to give you a vibrant network of growing interdependencies between the players, and then turns you loose to fight it out.
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Thi Nguyen
United States
Los Angeles
California
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Chuckles, where are you? This game will knock your socks off.
I just played Marracash for the first time last night, and I had to sit around in awe and wonder at the beauty and majesty of the rule-set.
Here's another Dorra game, that you can teach to somebody in about two minutes, and then weird magic starts to happen on about turn 3. You auction of stalls of various colors and/or move tourists of various colors through the city. When a tourist paces a stall of his color that's owned by a player, the tourist goes in. The player owning the shop gets money (more for each further tourist in that same shop).
THE MAGIC
First, I think there's some very intelligent map design in it. The odd limitations on how far the tourists can move is really right - but that's not mysterious, that's probably just work and lots of playtesting.
The inspiration between the system is, I think, again, like Dorra's Intrige, a growing system of interdependencies. Some are obvious - like the cutbacks. if you move tourists into another person's stall, you get a cut. The meat, though, is in the subtler, less mechanical interdependencies.
Different owners with shops close to each other will start to cooperate, for purely selfish reasons. They'll start directing the flow of traffic towards those shops. And that's where the heart of the game lies - detecting the flow of traffic, people's intentions, and then setting up shops so that people will start helping you with every move they make. Or subtly changing the flow of traffic.
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Thi Nguyen
United States
Los Angeles
California
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A game with maybe three movement rules for cars. And yet - captivating fun.
THE MAGIC
Like a lot of Kramer games, weird magic happens partly because of the complexity stored, not in the ruleset, but in the hardware. Here, we're talking the deck of cards. The cards are odd, if you haven't played this game. It's that you end up with a set of cards, most of which will force you to move many cars forwards, including your oppoenent's.
I think the real force of the magic comes from one particularly subtlety: that you get your cards *first*, then you try to buy some cards, and that you get *all* your cards.
So instead of a raw simple turn-by-turn decision process based on what cards you happen to have in your hand, you get to make a grandiose scheme for the whole race - and hopefully one that's flexible enough to deal with the meddling of your oppoenents.
That impresses the hell out of me - that out of three movement rules, and the little touch of giving a person *all* their cards at the beginning, you get serious longterm thinking, even for as sweet and light and delightful a game as this.
(I'm convinced, by the way, that a lot of the savor of El Grande emerges for the same reason - that you're given a set of power cards from the very beginning, all of them, and you have to keep the whole tempo of power struggle in mind at every point. Kramer, more than any designer, loves this thing I think - giving you something all from the beginning. Think of the master version of Torres - even think of each round of 6 NIMMT.)
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Thi Nguyen
United States
Los Angeles
California
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Modern Art is extraordinarily easy to explain. The scoring is, unlike a lot of Knizia, dead simple - make money. There are four auction types, which are deadly easy to explain. There's the build in scoring, and that's it. On this list, this might actually be the one that takes the *least* amount of time to explain.
It looks, on the face of it, deadly calculational. But instead, you get serious psychological interplay, figuring out of intentions, high possibility for telepathy, bluff, and all of that. And aching, aching drama.
THE MAGIC
Two things, I think, are primarily responsible.
First of all, serious drama from the buildup of prices across seasons. There is a very simple mechanism in play by which prices amp up - and a pretty dramatic one. With cutoffs. I mean: there's a magic cutoff, where a single misplayed card (or well-placed screw) can change the value of a card in one round from a huge amount to nothing. So you get massive drama, climactic builds in value, and major turning points in play.
Second thing: though the game is played in four rounds, and you do get some extra cards at the beginning of each round, you get almost all your cards in the beginning. This, I think, builds majorly off of the first thing above, the amount of drama that's under your control. Because then you can *plan*.
So out of simple auction rules, and a simple score-building rule with a dramatic cutoff, and the fact that you start with most of your cards in your hand, you get - an hourlong tussle of long-term market manipulation, big plans, failures, successes, turnarounds.
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5.
Board Game: Acquire
[Average Rating:7.43 Overall Rank:99]
Thi Nguyen
United States
Los Angeles
California
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THE SOURCE OF MAGIC (at least one)
Acquire, more and more I realize, is the spiritual grandaddy of so many of the games I love.
This is the game, I think, the genuinely solved the problem of serious multiplayer gaming. (This may be completely wrong, I ain't no historian, so somebody tell me if what I'm about to say is poppy-rubbish, and let me know the real sources.)
The problem seems to be that most serious games before this were geometric. Multiplayer geometric games rarely work, not with any intensity. I'm never quite sure why. I think they tend to rely on a long-term rigid calculational aspect that really gets destroyed in multiplayer game.
Multiplayer chess variants all suck hard. (When you're on the same board. Bughouse is an odd and fascinating solution.)
But Acquire is the first game I think that took the complexity out of a geometric space and pushed it over to a more abstract, less physical space - a stock-market model.
There's a board, but the board is, in the end, pretty minimally interesting. It's just the base. And notice - there's no geometric complexity at all to the board. No one spends there time studying all the possible plays-counterplays on the physical space. Sackson destroyed that possibility with the ultrasimple geometric rules and random tile draw.
The board reduces to: which companies are big, which can I build, and which ones are likely to merge. It's an abstraction of business conditions, it's an easy visual way to represent certain likelihoods, but IT IS NOT THE INTERESTING PART OF THE GAME.
The complexity is all pushed into something non-physical - a money market. A place where you have a vague sense of who owns what, are trying to figure out who would increase the value of what when they could, and a constant competition over ownership.
That's the neat thing - ownership, pushing stock values up - those are essentially non-geometric, and essentially multiplayer-happy concepts. It's a sort of space that everybody has equal access to, in a way.
It's frickin' magic.
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dani simon
Spain
alicante
alicante
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this one it's the multiplayer image of intense elegance as you describe it right now.
My group is really hooked up with this one. We are looking for more games of Martin Wallace as this is the only one we own right now.
If you are looking for intense elegance I strongly recommend you to give this one a try.
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Mary Weisbeck
United States
Black Hawk
South Dakota
Even virtual dice hate me!
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I believe this game fits the type of game you're looking for. When I first got it (as a gift), I read the rules and set it up to check out alone. Boring. Not my thing at all. And put it on my trade list. But a friend borrowed it and played with his wife then brought it back and said, "you've GOT to play this". So I gave it a shot and was truly taken with the mechanics which, being Colovini, are totally unique.
Reading the rules or explaining them do not begin to reveal the depth of this game. The ability to move, remove or rearrange a stack of pieces is the most powerful rule in the game; the cards played are left showing so there's minimal hidden information; the play is done vertically but the scoring is horizontal.
An excellent Colovini game (abstract with a thin veneer of theme).
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Brodie Hodges
United States
Auburn
Washington
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Diplomacy has to be on this list.
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Tom "Snicker Daddy" Pancoast
United States
Richmond
Virginia
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When I saw this list, I thought of Through the Desert. I have yet to see any multiplayer game with such simple rules that lead to such varied decisions without inducing brain lock.
The magic in this game lies in the fine balance between strategy and tactics. The effect of each placement is both subtle and powerful.
You only have one or two camels to place each turn. You only have four or five areas to consider for placement. Each placement changes the board, but usually not enough to throw all your plans into chaos (barring an oversight), so the thinking you did on previous turns in not wasted.
You also can't just pick a plan and continue with it until the end. There is an ebb and flow that means you might have to set your plans aside to defend your largest caravan, or to block someone else. If you stick doggedly to one strategy, then you are missing opportunities or creating them for you opponents.
For me, intense elegance is how the simple rules lead to a Zen-like balance in this game.
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Joe Gola
United States
Redding
Connecticut
Eleven.
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When I think of elegance & magic, I think of Reiner Knizia. One of the best examples, in my mind--well, THE best example is Schotten-Totten, but Thi's limited the scope to multiplayer games--is Flinke Plinke, a.k.a. Quandary, a.k.a. Loco. The rules and components are absurdly, even childishly simple, and yet it is an incredibly clever and timeless game, without a doubt the highest bang-per-word-of-rules I know of. Sure, it's on the light side for serious gamers, but even so it has an interesting deduction element to it and so there is a little more there than first meets the eye. When you start to see how much game Knizia can get out of such a little idea, it becomes a lot more understandable how it is that so many of his bigger games are just so damn good.
Other savagely elegant Knizia multiplayer games are Einfach Genial, Drahtseilakt, High Society and Royal Turf, though of course the stripped-down nature of these games means that they are are going to be on the light end of the gaming spectrum.
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Steve Gross
United States
Unspecified
Michigan
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On first reading of the rules (which took 60 seconds) for Cartagena I thought "Candy Land for adults." But it's much more. This game defines elegant mechanics for me. Spend cards to move forward. Move backward to get cards. That's it, but it provides a lot of replay value in my gaming group.
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Paul Boos
Spain
Falls Church
Virginia
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Kanaloa (which has a 2 player equivalent - Kahuna) seems to fit this category. The magic happens with the ripple effects of when you bring one bridge down it may take out a whole bunch more. You can snatch victory away from the jaws of defeat - literally...
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Jorge Rodriguez
Spain
Madrid
Madrid
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2 Page Rules ( in 5 languages). After reading them, you think- " interesting, simple limited resources auction card game, very nice game components. Could be fun lets give it a try”
The you start playing and suddenly, as if by magic, you are transported to Ancient Rome and you become a Senator debating on the future of Rome, and competing for the position of Cesar. Intrigue, Diplomacy, Negotiation, Manipulation, Backstabbing and Assassinations come together in a intense gaming experience.
But how? Just from 2 page rules and some cards can this happened ( and a little imagination from the players of course). Well first you have very limited resources (cards) that represent your influences. Each player has only one assassin. And there are a lot of Agendas for debate. Everything is open so you know what cards the other players have and the agendas they have won. The game is full of interesting and tense decision. Should I spend influences on this agenda, or should I pass and save my influences for later ( but would I get a Chance to use them)?. Should I use the assassin? How can I manipulate others to use up their Influences?
Soon you find out that getting to many agendas of a same kind puts you in a risk of loosing all you have worked for and the only way to protect yourself is by winning the Consul. And last all agendas give the winner a special ability to use.
For me the magic comes from all the interesting decisions you have to make, and the interaction with other players trying to manipulated you to use up your resources for the good of Rome.
One of the things I enjoy the most is to see the face of the player who realizes all others have left him alone with the responsibility to stop the wining player and that he has to spend his resources while the others just sit and watch (smirking) as they destroy each other.
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BAWK BAWK BAWK BAWK BAWK BAWK
United States
Bozeman
MT
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Invented by john nash and friends. Very much like intrige. Spare, perfect info., negotiation, and the magic comes from the same place: the complicated web of deals and contingincies that grows throughout the game. LUDICROUSLY simple rules, like an order of magnitude simpler than even intrige. I think it is especially easy to squeeze deep play out of simple rules for negotation games, since the players themselves invent many of the terms of play. I think some people disagree, since it at first seems like the ability to backstab makes all the deals sort of meaningless. But I don't think so. Just like in real life, the best negotiators are those who manage to craft terms that they don't have to violate; for example, deals that become void under certain conditions, etc. Players who never backstab get more deals coming their way and on better terms, and they do better as a result, just like in real life. It's usually better to lose a game by playing honest than to win with a stab, because you'll build a reputation that will help you win future games. You're overall record will be better than those who go for the stab. Therefore, these games really shine when played in series, under competetive conditions.
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hello Damian and Rachel 
