Posts filed under 'Board Games'
(Vacation is over, as is my enormous, soul-sucking “day job” project, so I can finally sink my teeth into a few posts I’ve been looking forward to writing about for a while.)
Some good friends came to stay with us for a couple of nights while we vacationed in a cabin next to a small lake in Vermont in August. Hanging out with them really was a wonderful change of pace. They’re far more educated, sophisticated, and smart than many of the people we know locally, so we had the pleasure of carrying on serious, adult conversation and activities. (I don’t mean to disparage the friends we see more often, but they fulfill a different friendship niche.)
After my daughter went to bed, our friends expressed interest in trying a game. Looking through what we’d brought, we opted for the least geeky offering: Settlers Of Catan
. Without the expansion, we couldn’t all play. My wife opted to knit and sit in as professional, equal-opportunity kibbitzer.
And then I started explaining the rules. I like to think I do a good job explaining rules. I work as a technical writer in my day job, so I’m no stranger to explaining technical specialized concepts to a non-specialized audience.
So I wasn’t prepared for the downright hostility. One player in particular hated everything she heard me say about the game. It sounded too complicated, too strategic (”It’s like chess!”), too competitive.
This woman is no fool. She’s a high-powered lawyer who has a ready grasp of any topic you can think of. She reads widely and achieves everything she sets out to get. She’s also extremely nice.
But as I realized that, I realized the root of her hostility. She didn’t think the game was too complicated, strategic, or competitive. She was too competitive. She liked explicitly non-competitive games but bridled at the possibility of a game she might lose.
She did not want to lose.
A little gentle ribbing on this point got us through the rules explanation and into play. And alas, she fared very poorly. She lost badly, even though I deliberately made a few bad strategic decisions that I knew would go in her favor.
But the friendly atmosphere, the good humor, and the inherent fun of the game won her over. She was the first to ask to play again (everyone was amenable), and even though she didn’t win that time, she wanted to play one more time.
Our three games kept us up till two in the morning, and even though we had trouble keeping our eyes open, we had a grand time.
So what did I learn? That a game can’t be appreciated without being played. That personal relationship skills come into play even before the board is set up.
And most importantly: that “non-gamers” may be non-gamers for want of opportunity and gentle introduction rather than because they wouldn’t like that game.
I have some other friends (somewhat more geeky but not by much) who I’ve been courting to play a roleplaying game (Buffy The Vampire Slayer
seems like a good choice, as they’re big fans of the show). I’ve been cautious and hesitant, not wanting to scare them away.
I think now it’s time to get over that. When they try it, they’ll love it.
August 27th, 2007
Just a quick mention of an episode of the Heroscape ScapeTalk podcast featuring a twenty-minute interview with Heroscape designers Chris Nelson and Craig Van Ness. If you enjoy the game and you’re interested in hearing some thoughts from two key designers, be sure to check it out. They mostly talk about the upcoming Heroscape Marvel Edition, but there are a few other useful details in there . . . and a funny quiz.
July 27th, 2007
Today, Tobold wrote about what may be the death of turn-based strategy games, pointing out that even though technical limitations don’t force game developers to opt for a turn-based model, in some cases a turn-based model can offer greater depth of play.
Attempts to move tabletop gaming online have mostly failed. For instance, I ran a campaign in Neverwinter Nights that didn’t work for two key reasons. First, it took an enormous amount of time for me to create the game world between sessions. Even if I’d had more and more time to practice developing the world with the provided toolset, I’m sure I would always be spending more time creating scenarios than running them.
Second, as soon as combat began, the players were hopelessly outgunned. I kept lowering and lowering the difficulty of the fights in the game, but the players couldn’t keep up. Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games are designed to simulate combat to some degree of accuracy, but the all depend on a turn-based model.
Sure, this means a few seconds of battle can take an hour to play out. Sure, in a real fight people don’t have time to make such decisions. But it allows people pretend they actually have combat skills. No one’s ever penalized for not remembering a keyboard shortcut and losing because her war-hardened combat veteran character forgot to raise her shield at the right moment.
(Neverwinter Nights actually was a turn-based game, though by default set to simulate real-time action. In a multi-playered, game-mastered game, though, allowing all players to pause was impractical. It simulated D&D reasonably well for the solo campaign, but failed for group play.)
Porting board games to computers has been more successful simply because no one’s trying to change the rules. No one wants to play speed-Monopoly, with button-mashing magnates making a Trump-like killing in the real-estate market simply because they can roll their dice the fastest. (Okay, maybe that’d be fun, but only in a weird way.)
But something breaks down with roleplaying games. Computer RPGs are an almost completely different genre than tabletop RPGs, even if they’re built around the same ruleset.
I asked before (in the context of voice chat) about non-MMO online roleplaying. But I’m thinking about it even more, now, ’cause I’ve got a friend from college who wants to start a campaign up again.
How can I get the tabletop roleplaying experience with remote players? Now that video conferencing is effectively free, we can at least talk to one another. And I’ve mentioned Gametable before, which provides a shared map and die rolling.
But are there any tools that really take advantage of web-connected computers to simulate the game itself while still giving the richness of turn-based play? Any tools that can handle the intricate interplay of a multi-character fight—with positioning, fancy moves, conditions that persist from turn to turn, all the number crunching—while still giving the players freedom to choose at (at least moderate) leisure their characters’ next actions? If so, I very much want to hear about them!
Has anyone successfully moved a tabletop campaign online? If so, what tools did you use? If it failed, what didn’t work?
July 26th, 2007
Last weekend, I finally got to give the Game of Thrones board game
a try. (I’m only just now getting to write about it because it’s been a darn busy week of utterly un-fun work.)
I played with my wife and another couple, so we had to play a four-player game. The game is specifically designed for five players, so this meant turning House Greyjoy (one of the competing sides) into a set of neutral forces. I suspect that the game is still not perfectly balanced, but with a game like this, that can be part of the fun. How well you do as a losing house can, for the right player, be even more interesting than winning as a house with an advantageous starting position.
Once we figured out the rules, the game ran very smoothly. Because (as is always the case) I was the only person who read the rules, we had at least one or two major rules questions every turn.
Because of these rules questions, everyone made major flubs every turn. For instance, one player gave support orders to her units thinking, for some reason, that they would let her move the units.
Most confusion centered around how controlling areas of water allowed a player to treat different land regions as adjacent. When I read the rules, I found I understood this feature quite easily, but either I explained it poorly or it isn’t as intuitive as I thought. I said, paraphrasing from the rulebook, “If you control an area of water, you can treat two landmasses as if they’re touching, as long as they border that area of water. And you can extend it, in theory, as far as you can control water areas.” Or something close.
But it didn’t stick. One player, twice, gave a ship marching orders because he wanted to move units to The Arbor, when it was his units on the mainland that needed the marching order.
I think part of the confusion is that the physical shape of the regions makes for some surprising connections by water. The connection between Widows Watch and Crackclaw Point via The Harrow Sea may be one of the most strategically important things for the Starks, but the Stark player in our game didn’t realize the connection existed until everything was almost over.
Despite the inequalities, the game played fairly well. Lannister didn’t do too well, but even she might have made a comeback if we’d finished the game. We only got to the end of turn Six, though, when my two-year-old daughter decided to wake up from her nap. The game does allow for comebacks, I think.
The random element—the order in which cards come up—is just heavy enough that a player could conceivably be victimized by a series of bad draws. But it’s light enough that this is very, very improbable. I wouldn’t consider removing the random element. I very much like the feel of uncertainty it brings, and if I want to play a pure strategy game, I’ll opt for chess, go, or dvonn.
We played without any alliances, backstabbing, or vendettas, because we were busy getting a feel for the rules. I wonder what it will be like once everyone really knows the rules . . .
In any case, the others weren’t too gung-ho to revisit the game when my daughter went to bed, so I didn’t get to try it again. I’ll be bringing it on my two-week vacation in August, though, and I have a feeling there are enough geeky adults that I’ll get to try it a bunch more times.
July 16th, 2007
| I don’t just like games; I’m a foodie as well. On Fridays, I publish drink or cocktail recipe that I enjoy as an accompaniment to some sort of game. These aren’t necessarily drinks I’ve invented, but they are superior potations that gamers who tipple are liable to enjoy. |
| And, what with all this talk of addiction here on the blog, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that the drinking of alcohol should always be done in moderation. And if you’re going to operate any sort of heavy machinery or vehicle while drunk, make sure it’s a mecha or X-wing in an computer game! |
A classic drink, and possibly the first to be called a “cocktail,” the Old Fashioned is quite simply my favorite mixed drink. Heck, this drink has a whole category of glassware named after it, so it’s decidedly seminal. A touch of sweet, a touch of bitter, and a splash of water to ease everything down.
Whisky drinks seem, to me, to belong next to a finely polished wooden game board with alabaster and onyx chess pieces arrayed and ready for battle. But chess has never been geeky enough for me. Instead, I prefer to layer strategy games with fantastical—or at least narrative—elements. So I recommend an Old Fashioned (my favorite version is below) in a nice, heavy Old Fashioned glass, with a leisurely Game of Thrones.
As Cersei tells Ned, when you play the game of thrones, you either win . . . or you die. And either way, you’ll want a stiff drink.
Old Fashioned
Ingredients
- 50 ml bourbon
- Angostura bitters
- 1 cube of sugar (or a light teaspoonful if you don’t have cubes)
- water
- 1 maraschino cherry
I like this best with Maker’s Mark bourbon, although I think it’s probably quite good with other good-quality whiskies. If you opt for cheaper whisky, you’ll probably want to garnish it more heavily, perhaps with two thin slices of orange. For the water, I just use the filtered stuff that comes out of my refrigerator.
Instructions
Put the sugar cube in the bottom of an Old Fashioned glass and put one or two dashes of bitters on top. Muddle with a spoon, then add a splash of water to further dissolve the sugar. Add a few cubes of ice (I like to fill the glass), then pour the whisky over the ice. Garnish with the cherry and enjoy.
I note that some people top this off with soda water. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to take a perfectly nice drink and turn it into a bizarre, whisky-flavored soda.
July 13th, 2007
I love me some Catan, so this little application strikes a chord with me. Especially since I’m convinced the dice that came with my copy of the game are far from fair and roll fives far more often than any pair of dice should.
Of course, the frustration of true but unfair randomness in games like Settlers of Catan is also part of the fun. And, in fact, essential. Because if you find yourself in a slight losing position, you have a reasonable expectation that quirky dice rolls may turn the game around for you. If the dice were purely fair and all probabilities exactly as expected, players in a losing position after turn four or five might find that the game becomes, basically, a hopeless chore.
Still, a very fun thought. If anyone ever does play Catan with “fair dice,” I’d love to hear how it goes.
July 9th, 2007
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