My Worst Plays

I am playing Root for the first time. There are five us and four of us are new to the game. It takes more than half an hour to learn the rules, which is mostly the teacher talking to one person at a time, since the rules are different for each player, while the rest of us stare out into space.

The game finally starts and each new player seems to just stare at their player board endlessly, confused. I figure out how to program the birds pretty quickly, but then I start nodding off as it seems like an eternity before my next turn.

Finally, when it’s not my turn I just leave the table and start talking to everyone else playing different games at that game day. At one point I catch up with two old friends who I haven’t seen in months and when I return play hasn’t even progressed halfway across the table.

The game comes down to a single die roll, but I don’t care about the outcome – I just want it to be over. Beyond the teaching time, the game lasted 4 hours, compared to the 60-90 minutes listed on the box.

Fifteen years ago, I play a game of High Society on a family vacation. It’s a tense game, and when it’s over the winner jumps up and down and yells out in triumph.

Irritated at their celebration, I mutter something about how even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. Something snaps in the winner, and they jump on me, cursing, beating their fists against my chest. They have to be pulled off of me.

It’s a major family incident and I’m both embarrassed by my classless provocation and spooked by the winner’s disturbing reaction.

Last week I play Res Arcana with my friend and podcast co-host Pat. Most of our games of this have been decided quickly, but this one is going down to the wire. I am a little bit ahead, and I realize that if I play this last round right I won’t be beaten.

I think carefully about every turn, planning everything carefully, particularly around one of Pat’s cards which is the only thing which can stand in my way. After a few very long moves, Pat stares at me quizzically, and says simply “Pass. I win.”

I stare at him strangely, and then say no you don’t. I look carefully at his card in question and realize I have misunderstood the text of the card, and have been playing very slowly for 30 minutes because of a complete misconception. I simply could have passed a long time ago and almost certainly won in the next round had I understood the card.

My face is gripped with frustration and I stalk around the room for a few minutes before I calm down.

It’s 20 years ago, and I’m playing in the World Championship of the Mage Knight Miniatures game at Gen Con. From the over 200 people which began the event, I have reached the semi-finals.

I am very nervous, as winning the tournament would grant prizes worth $5,000-$10000, and just reaching the finals would get me prizes worth $1000-$2000. If I can win this game, I feel confident about winning the finals as my waiting opponent is playing an army that is very weak against my own.

But first I have to get there. My current opponent is playing an unusual army, which is similar to mine only in that most of its value is concentrated into one very powerful figure.

My opponent ends his turn and my heart leaps. He has put himself into a position where his powerful figure can be destroyed by mine in one shot if I make the right move, pretty much guaranteeing me the win. I set everything up, and then all I have to do is roll to hit…and win. I need anything but snake eyes on the dice to hit.

I roll snake eyes.

I stare stonily at the table. In this game, whenever you roll snake eyes, you not only miss, but you take damage. I wound my own figure. My opponent then moves his main figure up to mine and virtually destroys it. I fight on, but I had lost two thirds of my army in one stroke. I come close, but I can’t overcome that loss – I barely lose.

Instead of the satisfaction of a championship and thousands of dollars worth of prizes, there is nothing.

It’s two weeks ago, and I’m playing Brass: Birmingham for the first time. Coal, our rules teacher explains, can only be transported via rail links. I look at him in confusion. Rail links can only be built in the second half of the game.

“Then why would you ever build coal?” I ask. “It could only be used by other buildings in the same city, which wouldn’t use enough coal to activate it. It would be a complete waste. And if you don’t have coal, how would you build these other things?”

The rules teacher said something about how in two cities there could theoretically be enough other buildings to activate a coal tile.

It still seemed awfully strange to me and the other new player. But we soldiered on, and no one built coal – and in fact no one build too much of anything without it – until the rules teacher, perhaps in an attempt to justify himself, built a coal plant near the end of the first age.

When we started setting up the second age, we realized something terrible. Without coal, no one had built iron plants, and the existing iron in the bank had been used up early on. No one had opened up second stage iron plants in their development, meaning that iron could never enter the game.

We’d locked ourselves into a situation where virtually no buildings could be built in the second age – we would simply pass the rest of the game.

Then we realized that if I sold my cotton mill, I could get a free development, which could bring iron back into the game, which would allow everyone to unlock their buildings. We were then able to continue the game. 

Although the second half of the game then proceeded without incident, both me and the other new player were underwhelmed by this supposed classic.

“What’s the point of the whole first age if you don’t have iron?” my friend Jon wondered.

Upon returning home, I discovered in a Watch it Played video that our friend had taught the game entirely wrong, which nearly resulted us crashing the game and ending the industrial revolution.

It’s 2018, and I’m so excited – we’ve planned a whole day of Gloomhaven. We’re going to play at least three scenarios. We’re playing a touch one, our first trip to the elemental plane.

We’re doing okay when our Spellweaver makes a huge mistake – they are the closest to a skeleton on the turn they are going to use their signature move to get back all the cards. The skeleton goes extremely fast, runs up to the mage before they can act, and rolls a critical hit doing a ton of damage. It’s just enough to make the Spellweaver discard a card, only they can’t because everything was in their loss pile which they were going to retrieve. 

They are out of the scenario and we aren’t even a quarter through it. We brave on, but it’s two hard to play through it all with only three of us. We come a turn or two short.

Confident that we can do better, we restart and for a while we are crushing it. We laugh as we march through room after room.

But near the end we get a couple of bad breaks, and a couple of players are out. We start to get more and more nervous. We realize there’s a small chance we could somehow lose.

And it comes down to our tank having to do one point of damage to clear the last monster and win the scenario. Easy, we think, as long as they don’t critically miss. They pull the card to win and they pull the one critical miss in their deck. 

We all sit there, stunned. A couple of us groan out loud. We spend another couple of hours sullenly playing through the scenario a third time, our day wasted.

The above true examples illustrate what I consider the basic categories of terrible plays:

1) The game takes far too long
2) The game is determined by very bad luck (“bad beats”)
3) The game has some acrimonious incident
4) The game is played with huge rules mistakes or misunderstandings

How about you? What have been your worst ever game plays, and do they fit into one of the above categories?

A Personal Journey

I am three years old, and my Dad has decided to teach my five-year old brother and I a simplified, proto version of Poker to see if children will naturally adopt a correct bluffing strategy. Each player gets one card – a 2, a 9, or an ace – and then a round of betting takes place.

My father says we did indeed intuit the correct strategy – bluff with a 2 one time for every two times we had an ace – though I have no memory of any of this.

I am six years old and my father is now teaching me chess. He is scrupulously fair – once I know the rules I am given queen odds. Once I am able to beat him without his queen, we play again and I get rook odds. Each time he sets the handicap so that the game is tight and tense.

I am eight years old and my parents have divorced, and I only see my father one weekend a month. On these pilgrimages to the Poconos where my father lives, it’s 48 straight hours of board games in a small breakfast room where my father chain smokes Lucky Strikes.

We start the weekend with Risk – I traditionally play the yellow pieces, and if I’m losing my father will sing ‘Yellow Birds…are going down the drain!’ to the tune of Harry Belafonte’s Yellow Bird. Often I’m eliminated long before the end of the game, in which case I play with my Dad’s fat and friendly golden retriever, and rustle up some donuts and sugary cereals which I’m not allowed to eat at home.

Other times, when my grandmother, Aunt, and Erhard (my grandmother’s wonderfully strange German manservant) are available, we will play Oh Hell, a particularly cutthroat trick taking game where one must make their bid exactly or score almost nothing.

Insults, whining, and jokes at everyone’s expense fly around the room. Oh Hell codifies our culture of disparagement by requiring each player to have a demeaning nickname by which they are referred to throughout the game. I’ve seen people nicknamed Stinkfoot, Urine, and Trail of Tears (for her partial Cherokee heritage). Once a nickname was given, it was never taken back. I was christened Loops for my prodigious Fruit Loops consumption, and I am still Loops today, despite not having eaten refined sugar for 40 years.

After a long Sunday bus ride home to my mother in New Jersey, she hugs me, and then wrinkles her nose, complaining of how I smell like smoke. These trips are a reason I have never smoked a cigarette in my life, and if I smell a Lucky Strike today, I am instantly transported back in time, with a strange nostalgic ambivalence, feeling both an immense love and disgust.

In my late teens and 20s, trips to Bear Creek, Pennsylvania to see my father mean Acquire. This classic stock game was modified by our family to allow more cutthroat maneuvers, such as being able to buy stock before playing a tile. I loved our endless battles, though woe to the outsider who joined our game. They would do well in their first contest as we gave them helpful advice – after that, we would destroy them. We wrote down our scores inside of the box to track them for all time.

We have slowly given up playing the traditional board games. I am to blame. In one game of Monopoly, a friend of ours has the oranges, and my father, brother and I must make a deal to get monopolies of our own to avoid losing quickly.

We are finalizing the deal when my brother says “You know Dad, we could make a deal and leave Tony out of it.” My father agrees.

“You could do that,” I say, “but then I’d have to sell all my property to the other person for a dollar.”

“You’d never do that,” laughs my Dad. “You’d have no chance to win!”

So I sell my property to the fourth player for a dollar and they won quickly. My Dad asks why I did it, and I said it was so that my blackmail threats would have credibility in future games. My own vindictiveness is too obvious to mention.

‘Credible future threats’ becomes a family joke and we never play Monopoly again.

I grow older and I don’t see my father and brother as often. I get into other games without them. Magic the Gathering is something of a revelation, but I don’t like spending so much money to be competitive in tournaments.

Instead, I play collectible miniatures games like Mage Knight, winning the first national championship. I win the first ever Heroclix tournament, winning a giant statue of Galactus.

I play Dreamblade, and then the World of Warcraft Miniatures game, flying across the U.S. to high value tournaments, which quickly disappear as soon as Blizzard stops throwing money around.

I move to Chicago and I’m bored. I love playing Blood Bowl online, but I want to do something with real people. I soon start playing Warmachine/Hordes, and build a bunch of armies, despite being a horrible painter. I play local tournaments, then national ones, as a friend and I travel around together.

But I’m eventually dissatisfied. I don’t like spending so much time memorizing every unit, and painting, which I hate. And the games are tense and interesting, but they lack camaraderie. And I’m getting burnt out, and wondering why I’m spending all my time and money on one game.

I gradually give up the game, and I realize that there’s a board game meetup only a mile from where I live, at a store called Dice Dojo south. I bring my dog Rocky to the meetups, and the store lets him stay with me as I play – a little old black Shih Tzu who sleeps on my feet. Without the Dice Dojo’s generosity in this regard, I might never have gotten into modern board games.

After a few months, Dice Dojo South closes, and a friend and I launch the Pilsen Board Games meetup, at a La Catrina Cafe a block from where I live.

I buy a game called Blood Rage. After a childhood spent playing Risk, a 7 hour whinefest, where players would be eliminated with five hours ago and the winning skill was being able to convince other players to attack someone else, an elegant strategy game that lasted 2 hours and rewarded subtle play is a revelation.

But I find my real love is eurogames. Discovering there are thousands of eurogames is like discovering a thousand Acquires. It’s like Christmas every day.

I go to conventions like Gen Con, but now instead of stressful competition, there is something like a joy of discovery, and the camaraderie I’d been missing. Perhaps I am growing up, though I certainly hope not.

I still bring intensity and trash talking on Monday nights to even the most placid euro, and I wonder sometimes if I take it too far. I never used to wonder that.

And now I visit my father in the Poconos for the first time in a long time. He’s in his 80s, and he seems frail and a bit forgetful. But then he takes me to the casino. My father has retired and now he plays poker most every day, carefully charting his (mostly) winnings in a worn notebook.

As he enters the poker room, he appears 20 years younger. Every dealer and regular player knows him. There’s a spring in his step, and his old joking banter is there – his wit has lost none of his sharpness.

One of the dealers shows my Dad his phone. My father can’t (or won’t) operate a computer or cell phone, and he gets his news about my brother from this dealer, who is a fan of my brother’s rock band and follows him on Facebook.

After he reviews my brother’s life on the dealer’s phone, my father guides me to the table. He puts his arm around me and proudly introduces me to everyone there. There is love in his eyes.

And then we begin to play. I’m up $100, which is good, but not as good as my father is doing. And then I notice that I keep getting raised by the two players to my left, who I gradually realize are the best two players in the game, other than my Dad.

I realize that he has seated me there on purpose, the worst seat in the game, in order to get an edge on me. Some things never change.

Hurts so Good

June 7, 2019

For those of thus who love games, there’s nothing quite so delicious as a painful decision. I’d go so far as to say that difficult, excruciating decisions are at the heart of what makes a game great.

If you are playing games to master their strategies (as opposed to playing for thematic or social reasons), these decisions are memorable, challenging, fearful, and engaging. I’m here to talk about excruciating decisions in a range of games, and in the process look at what mechanisms bring out that delicious pain.

Underwater Cities and matching colors

Let’s start with Underwater Cities, a game I’ve been playing obsessively over the last month. It didn’t take me long to realize that the game gave me far more angst than your average worker placement game.

This is due to a simple twist, which is chief conceit of the game: in addition to placing a worker at a location to take your action, you also play a card on your turn, which is either green, red, or orange. These card colors also correspond to the colors on the board at each worker placement location. 

The cards give powerful bonuses, in the form of either an immediate reward, a permanent ability, a sometimes reusable power, or endgame points scoring potential. The catch is, in order to get the benefit of the card, its color must match the color of the worker placement location. You can place a worker along with a card that doesn’t match, but in that case you just get the worker placement action – you completely ignore the card effect.

When I first read about this mechanism, I was unimpressed. It seems like it just added a bunch of luck to the game – if you drew card colors which matched the actions you wanted to do, you flourished; if you didn’t, you were screwed. 

While there is a bit of truth to this, this ‘unfairness’ in fact generates the wonderfully tough decisions in the game. Do you take the action you really want to take on the board, and play a non-matching card and get no card action? Or do you play a great card with a great action, but have to go to a worker placement spot which doesn’t fulfill your immediate needs in order to match the color of the card? 

If you play too much to the strength of your cards, you’ll get a lot of powerful actions but you won’t be able to follow a specific plan, whereas if you ignore the power of your cards too much, you’ll follow your plan but you won’t have enough power to fulfill it. Playing well requires being able to dance between the short and the long term – when you need to follow the long term plan now, and when you can detour off to grab some lucrative things you weren’t planning on taking.

All of this is exacerbated by the fact that you can only have three cards in your hand at the start of the turn. While there are plenty of ways to temporarily mitigate the card draw luck by drawing lots of extra cards, you are back in the same vise soon after after you discard down to 3. In other words, you can’t get around the color restraint by just stockpiling a ton of cards.

There are two things about this system which I’ve noticed are common to tough decisions in many strategy board games:

1) Difficult decisions are often provoked by constraints. Games which allow you to do a ton of different things may generate analysis paralysis by the breadth of the options presented, but those decisions aren’t exactly painful in the same way. In Underwater Cities, the color restraint combined with the three card restraint creates a straightjacket that you are trying to wriggle around every turn of the game.

2) There is almost always serious long term implications in most tough decisions; in fact, the decision is usually about balancing immediate needs vs. long term needs. A game which is purely or mostly tactical might be ‘difficult’ in that it’s challenging to calculate, but that’s merely a matter of trying to work out the best play and succeeding or not.

What I’m calling a ‘difficult’ decision is the kind where you second guess yourself for turns afterward. In a tactical game, you make the right choice or you don’t, but it rarely has long term implications which you could have foreseen which haunt you.

Underwater Cities exacerbates this short term vs. long term tension by throwing in lots of deadlines and goals in the game which give you the opportunity to choose between the short and long term. There are production phases which happen only after rounds 4, 7, and 10 of the game (which is 10 rounds long). You want to max out your buildings on the board so you produce the maximum resources and victory points during each of these phases.

There are also three mid-game goals, where the first player to reach each one gets a modest reward of point and resources. In addition to this scoring, production phase scoring, and scoring based on how well you’ve built your cities at the end of the game, including a personal goal which involves building tunnels to land cities to trigger, there are lucrative end game scoring cards, which are not communal, but first come, first serve.

What prevents a player from grabbing the end game cards early is that they are cumbersome – there is a significant cost to acquiring them and putting them in play. If you don’t put them in play they clog your hand, essentially exacerbating your hand size constraint. 

Take these cards too early and you will slow down your engine too much. Wait too long, and others will take the card you need before you get there. These are among the most excruciating decisions in the game. Can I hold out one more turn before grabbing that end game scoring card so I can build more buildings before the production phase? Or do I need to grab it now before someone else does? When someone takes an end game card just before you were about to, and you’ve been building up to taking that card the whole game, it’s like a punch in the stomach.

Playing the right worker placement spots you need is essential to win the races to mid game goals, end game scoring cards, and superior production, but you need to match colors on cards to build your engine up as well. It makes every round full of pressure and dread.

Race for the Galaxy and multi-use cards

Outside of the pressure element, one of the joyful puzzles of Underwater Cities is getting thrown a bunch of disparate cards and trying to make a coherent engine or strategy out of them.

Race for the Galaxy is perhaps the most famous example of this being the entire game. You are dealt a handful of cards, and you have to decide what direction you are going to take the whole thing in – militarily conquering planets, production and trade for points, etc.

Like quite a few other games, Race for the Galaxy relies on multi-use cards to generate many of the tough decisions, especially early in the game. In this games and others like it, cards can be both something you build, such as a planet or technology, or it can be used as currency to build a different card.

This leads to hard decisions about what cards to keep and which cards to build with. Being good at Race requires being able to throw away a card which will be good in the future in order to buy what you need to buy now.

Note that the tension here is again created by a now vs. the future decision, as well as a resource constraint.

Twilight Struggle and hidden information

The classic two player game Twilight Struggle also creates tough decisions in how to use your multi-use cards. But the game also has another element which creates tension based around imperfect information about which cards your opponent has. 

There are certain cards which are powerful to play, but are a disaster if your opponent is holding the appropriate counter. Players must figure the odds and consider how their opponent has played in order to try to guess whether their opponent is holding a key card or not which wreck a certain plan if executed.

Blood Rage and interactive drafting games

Uncertainty about what cards an opponent holds also ratchet up the tension in card drafting games, which bake lots of pain into making decisions right from the outset. The act of choosing one of 8 or however many cards to permanently build up your tribe (in the case of Blood Rage), while letting go of the others forever is hard enough, and it’s made worse by knowing your opponents are going to take the best of the cards you pass and use them against you.

Is your opponent using the Loki strategy and you’re holding the perfect card for them? You have to decide between foiling their plans and taking the card that’s actually good for you. Hate drafting decisions are some of the toughest. Sometimes you can take what you want and pass off the decision to the next player, but if the person who needs the card is right next to you, then the decision is up to you.

Sometimes card drafting games can create a run on a specific type of card – for instance in Blood Rage, if everyone takes quests early. Then you have to decide whether you’re going to take a card you want, or take a quest before they’re all gone.

These decisions are much more painful if they have long term implications or whether your mistake will stab you in the heart. Drafting games which are quick and tactical, such as a Sushi Go, aren’t too painful, in that the implications are all for the short term, and consequently they play much faster.

Blind Bidding and Rising Sun

Blind bidding is a mechanism which is justifiably criticized by gamers for being unfair and unforgiving – you have imperfect information, and if you guess wrong, you lose what you bid and get nothing. But while this isn’t always fair or fun, it can create drama and angst if it’s done well.

One of the only blind bidding games I enjoy is Rising Sun, or more specifically, the combats in that game. Each battle is not one but four blind bid auctions as you secretly bid for various combat advantages. There’s a lot to calculate, and moreover, because the war phase of the game is essentially a closed economy, you have to calculate how much money you’ll have left to bid in other battles in the phase.

When planning your bids for a battle, you might be thinking about 16 separate blind auctions at the same time, if you know you’re in 4 battles during that phase.

It’s no wonder that an otherwise smooth game can generate tons of analysis paralysis during this phase. But while the auctions can slow down the game, and they are ‘unfair’ and punishing, this is compensated for by being incredibly tense. I’ve seen players go back and forth 3 times on their bids before a battle. It’s slow, but delicious, as the bids are finally revealed, and cheers and groans ensue. It’s a polarizing system – some love it, some hate it – but few would deny that it produces painful, tense decisions.

And like the other games mentioned above, there are long term consequences – failure to choose correctly isn’t just the matter of a few points right now – it affects your board position for the rest of the game.

One point on constraint before I wrap this up: constraint itself doesn’t produce hard decisions. If players take all the spots you want in a worker placement game, that sucks, but it doesn’t produce a hard decision – you simply go to the next best spot for you. A game that leaves you with only bad decisions isn’t excruciating in the way I’m talking about – it’s just annoying. Excruciating decisions are always double edged – they leave you with the potential for great success and great failure.

So what games, types of games, and game mechanisms create that enjoyable pain for you?

Games Cause Downtime Too

June 7, 2019

Nothing is as much of a downer as downtime. It’s worse than any play experience, since it literally means that you are aren’t playing the game – you are just waiting for other people.

Universally hated, downtime is usually talked about as a player issue. “It’s not the game; it’s the player” goes the cliché. Player specific downtime, analysis paralysis, is complained about far more than downtime as a broader issue.

While AP and player caused downtime are of course real, lets discuss the other side of the coin – the role of games themselves in causing downtime. The most discussion this usually gets is that certain games are called ‘AP inducing’ because of their puzzly nature (note that it’s still about the player and their AP).

Game Issues which Cause Downtime

1) Solvability/Calculability

This is what is often meant when game is called ‘puzzly’ or ‘AP inducing’. The optimal move is calculable with enough time spent, though it usually takes a lot of time to do it.

Five Tribes, a poster child for games dubbed ‘AP inducing’, has calculable turns – spend 20 minutes or so, and a smart player can definitively figure out which of the many moves available to them will generate the most points on a given turn. A player is given the uncomfortable choice of taking the time necessary to choose the best move, and cause others to suffer through their long turn, or move quickly, and possibly lose the game to someone who cares less about the implicit social obligation of having the game be fun for everyone.

In games that generate less downtime, the right move is just too hard to calculate, and as a result, players will more willingly make a rough estimate of the best play in much less time.

2) Radically Changing Game State

This issue applies to games where the board state changes so much between a player’s turns that it’s not practical to plan one’s turn in advance. The ability to plan is the main reason downtime isn’t a bigger issue in complex games, but games which remove this ability force a player to start from scratch at the beginning of their turn.

Coincidentally, Five Tribes also has this issue, in that it’s rarely worth calculating the best move before one’s turn, since someone else is likely to do that move before it gets to you, and each move completely what’s available next.

Most eurogames keep a relatively stable board state, allowing a fair amount of planning. An action selection mechanism such as worker placement can lead to someone ‘taking your spot’ and causing you to rethink, but only sometimes, and even then most of the board remains stable, allowing a player to quickly switch to plan B.

In American style games or conflict games tend to have this issue of a changing board state, but they are rarely calculable, they don’t necessarily cause AP if the decisions are straightforward enough.

3) Many Actions on One Turn

Games that allow or require a player to take many actions on one turn lead to long turns as players have to not only plan a host of moves, but the options available multiply exponentially. 

Take Root, a multiplayer conflict game in which players can do things like build, move, attack, trade, and often several of these things on the same turn. One faction in the game, The Eyrie, works through action programming, wherein the this player plays a card and then activates all the cards they have put down through the course of the game (until one of the other players disrupts them, and they have to start over with a new chain of cards). This can lead to a huge number of actions on one player’s turn.

Other multi-player conflict games strictly limit a player to one action. In Blood Rage, a player can move, invade, attack (pillage), or play a card, but never more than one of these things in a single turn, which severely limits a turn’s length.

While many eurogames limit a player’s turn to one action, such as worker placement games, some, such as engine building games where a player chains bonus actions together, can lead to large numbers of actions on one turn – this is a major reason that engine building games are often simpler and shorter than other eurogames, since a heavy engine builder could lead to enormously long turns.

4) Allowing or Encouraging Too High a Player Count

Much of the downtime I’ve seen in games comes when the game is simply being played at too high a player count. A huge culprit here for complex euros are those 5 player expansions.

In other games, it’s well known one just shouldn’t play it at a high player count. Five Tribes, despite the issues mentioned above, is okay on downtime if one plays it with 2 players (probably its best player count). 

Game Structures Which Limit or Prevent Downtime

1) Simultaneous Action Selection

There are many games where players secretly choose an action, usually by putting a card face down, and then simultaneously reveal their actions and execute them. In many of these games, such as Race or Roll for the Galaxy/New Frontiers and Mission: Red Planet, the actions are actually resolved one at a time, but it almost feels simultaneous, since these tend to be simple actions which go quickly.

Fastest of all are simultaneous action selection games where the actions are actually resolved simultaneously. Card drafting games like 7 Wonders or Paper Tales
do this smoothly and effortlessly.

‘Bingo’ style game are another good example of this, such as Welcome To, Karuba, and my latest fascination, Tiny Towns. I’d argue that one reason for the roll and write game revolution of recent years is that they frequently have this kind of resolution, which keep everyone involved all the time.

One downside to ‘Bingo’ games can be that they have little player interaction – an action is given which all the players have to enact, and they all do so separately and privately on their own player boards. While Tiny Towns does have players resolve their actions separately on their own boards, it’s more interactive in that the player whose turn it is gets to say what action, or more accurately, what resource, gets resolved on every player’s board. This gives an opportunity for quick, simultaneous meanness that doesn’t feel like anything else – a player can call a given action and receive groans all at once from around the table.

2) Unstoppable Planning

What this means is that a player can do a significant amount of planning towards actions that are unpreventable by other players.

Take A Feast for Odin. While most people consider the major innovation of the game to be combining worker placement with a Tetris style personal player board, I consider its best move to be much subtler, and it is this:

When a player acquires a tile to place on their personal board, they don’t have to place it right away – it can just sit off to the side of their board as long as they like, which usually means until the income phase at the end of the round, when one is rewarded for tile placement. 

This ability to wait not only expands the possibilities of what one can do on one’s board, it more importantly allows players to consider different options and turn and play with their tiles throughout all their opponent’s turns for the rest of the round. If someone’s taking a long turn, no problem – you’re too busy fiddling around with Tetris possibilities to care. And because it’s your personal player board, you know no one can stop you from executing your plan.

Unstoppable planning is pretty common in multi-player solitaire euros, and is arguably a reason for their popularity. While some may reject their lack of player interaction, there’s no denying this very lack lowers downtime since one’s plans can’t be disrupted.

3) Limited Action Options

Ethnos has a deserved reputation for being lightning fast, even at 6 players, because not only do players only get one action, they have an extremely limited choice of actions – they can draw a card, or play a set of cards from their hand. Reef works similarly – you either draw a card, or play a card, and that’s it. A gateway game like Ticket to Ride, while following a similarly simple structure, is actually more complicated, in that it adds taking a long term goal (ticket) to the draw a card or play a set of cards mix.

It’s definitely true that more complex games aren’t don’t work with an extremely limited option set like this. However, even complex games can reduce downtime by limiting how many types of actions you can take. A worker placement game does this beautifully – every action is simply placing a worker, and taking the action at that spot. Or a game like Concordia, is always, every turn, play a card and take the action on that card.

While there may be a lot of different actions in these games, they all have the same structure. Some games have a host of different actions with a lot of different structures. Terra Mystica, for instance, gives you a choice of 8 different actions, most of which work completely differently from each other. It’s easy in a game like this to stop and ponder what one can do before one even thinks about what one will do. 

Part of the issue here is actually visual. Worker placement games and Concordia both show you visually what actions you can take, either through the iconography at action spots or written on the cards in your hand. Games can limit downtime by making the available actions one can take easily viewable in one place.

4) No Round Structure

Most eurogames (and some other types of games) have a round structure, and at the end of each round workers are retrieved, cards are replaced, tracks are reset, etc. This kind of maintenance creates some downtime for everyone which also disrupts the flow of the game.

Some recent eurogames such as Scythe, Architects of the West Kingdom, and Raiders of the North Sea, have done away with rounds all together and simply have a continuous flow of turns until some end game condition is met. Cards and resources are replaced immediately, and in the case of Architects and Raiders, ingenious systems of worker retrieval are baked into the game mechanisms rather than having to have them retrieved during end of round maintenance.

There can be other issues with roundless games, such as a first player advantage which shows up Scythe and Raiders of the North Sea, but it can’t be denied that these games reduce downtime by reducing end of round maintenance.

5) Timed Games

While it’s use is relatively rare, cooperative games that use an actual time, like FUSE, X-COM, and Magic Maze, obviously eliminate downtime completely. Some games have timed elements or optional timers, like the hourglass in Codenames, or the timed trading periods in Sidereal Confluence and Trade on the Tigris. [Side note: Trading with timer = tense and fun. Trading without timer is why many of us gave up Catan].

That’s all I’ve got for today. I haven’t even touched on one of the biggest downtime issues in modern board games: the slog of first plays. But that’s a subject for another post…

Originality is Overrated, Part 3

January 16, 2019

The final part of this series has proven the most difficult for me to write. I don’t enjoy criticizing games – I’d much rather extol the virtues of a design rather than criticize games that I know many people love. But I don’t think I could do my thesis justice if I only praised derivative designs and sub-genres. I do have to actually make a case here that originality in games is overrated.

Here are a few key assumptions that I’m making as I go:

1) By originality, I mean game themes and/or mechanics that are entirely 100% new. I don’t mean twists on old proven mechanics – that’s inside of the derivative design I’ve praised.

2) Originality and innovation is of course very important to the board game industry. Where I’m saying it’s overrated is as relates to the enjoyment derived from any particular game that is original, as defined above.

3) I’m purposely looking at new games that many people of BGG have heard of and which have been very well received. Obscure games make it both less likely for people to know what I’m talking about, as well as making the argument too easy – anyone can look up a hundred obscure, ‘original’ Kickstarter games that were disasters, for instance.

So I’m instead sticking to some of the most acclaimed original designs of 2016, keeping in mind that for every original design that’s acclaimed like these are, that are probably dozens that crash and burn. 

Here’s the other crucial caveat: my point isn’t to say any of the games below are objectively ‘bad’. There’s too much taste involved to say that about almost any game. If you love one or all of the games below, more power to you. My point is that truly original games have much greater design challenges to overcome than derivative designs, and as such, can often leave people disappointed because they didn’t fulfill on their promise.

Any more qualifications will only bore people, and since I’m bound to get folks telling me how wrong I am about these games no matter what I say, I might as well jump right in.

Millennium Blades: Original themes and mechanics aren’t for everyone

In case you haven’t heard of it, Millennium Blades has a mindblowing premise: duplicate the experience of months in the life of a collectible card game player and collector in one, two hour board game.

The game has two phases, a buying, trading and collecting phase, and a tournament phase where each player takes the cards they’ve assembled and competes against the other players in an actual card game. Each phase happens three times. Players also have variable powers which enhances their abilities in one or both phases of the game. Success in the tournaments depends greatly on building card combos through your drafting and trading, and having the right kinds of cards in relationship to what your opponents are playing – in other words having the right cards for the game ‘meta’, simulating a similar necessity in CCG metas.

When a game has a theme this unique, it immediately faces a hurdle: some people are not going to be at all interested in playing a game that simulates the CCG experience, in fact, some people will be completely turned off by the theme. Others will of course love it. Incredibly original theming is double edged.

A unique theme may also create a unique play experience that is also not what many people might be looking for. In the specific example of Millennium Blades, your buying and trading is done on a very limited timer. This is necessary to prevent the game from being endless as people examine the hundreds of possible cards to get and math everything out. But what this does is, like an actual CCG, give a big edge to players who know the card pool, which takes a lot of time. Come in fresh and you’ll be slaughtered by those who know the cards inside out and can effortlessly make devastating combos.

Again, this mirrors actual CCGs and actually makes the game more thematic. But it makes it less enjoyable for the people who don’t want to learn a huge card pool. Even if no one knows all the cards, the fact that there’s a ton of information out there to learn can be frustrating to people who like full information, or at least a good amount of information, when making their gaming decisions. Even if everyone’s in the same boat, it can sometimes feel like the player who wins is the player whose deck just happens to counter what the other players chose, rather than the player who was most skillful. And some people will hate this.

To be clear, I think Millennium Blades is an extraordinary design. It’s just not for everyone, or even close to everyone. While it’s target audience will love it, there’s also a large number of people who will play it and hate it, or more likely, will have no interest in the first place. And this is entirely because of the game’s originality.

What’s wrong with this? Nothing, really. It’s simply that when you see a reviewer rave about how wonderfully original a game is, it’s important to remember that wonderful originality doesn’t necessarily mean a game most people will love to play.

Mystic Vale: An original mechanic doesn’t necessarily give a fresh play experience

For those of you who haven’t paid attention to new releases this year, Mystic Vale put a whole new twist on deckbuilders: instead of just building a unique deck of cards, you are actually making unique cards, adding up to three different powers via clear plastic sleeves to each card in your deck. Instead of buying cards, you by the powers via the sleeves, and choose which powers to put them on.

The game also has push your luck, must mechanic where you ‘spoil’ and lose your turn if the cards you play have too many spoil symbols. Until then, you can keep drawing cards. You score points to win via cards with endgame points, cards that give you points each turn, and cards that have symbols that combine to give special powers, including points. The card art in this game happens to be gorgeous.

The challenge that this particular unique game faces, and make no mistake, card crafting is a completely unique mechanic, is that even if a mechanic is completely and undeniably new, the gameplay experience it produces isn’t necessarily new.

While the busting or spoiling mechanism is a new twist in deckbuilding, the card crafting itself doesn’t feel that different strategically from traditional deckbuilding games. Once you get past the first wonderful, tactile experiences of sliding the sleeves onto the card, and your flush of pride at having constructed a really powerful card, you start to realize as time passes in the game that the crafting hasn’t given you a dramatically different decision set from the regular deckbuilder. If powers combo together, well then of course you’ll put them on one card. If they don’t, then they could go on one cards or multiple cards, it doesn’t really matter. 

While some may argue for specific examples where this isn’t true, here’s what is true: every reviewer who has reviewed the game has said the game cries out for an expansion. And when one was just released, a little over two months after the retail release of the game, some people reacted like it was about time. If the card crafting provided a lot of interesting decisions outside of those required in regular deckbuilders, I suspect the reaction would be different. As I noted previously, pure deckbuilders often feel like they need an expansion relatively quickly, since once you figure out the card pool, there’s not much else mechanically to keep the game fresh.

And that’s what this game feels like: a typical deckbuilder with a small card pool. And while that’s not terrible, it’s also not the fulfillment of the huge promise some reviewers raved about.

Vast: The Crystal Caverns – an original design can create high barriers to entry, and a poor depth to complexity ratio

Of all the games I’m discussing here, Vast: The Crystal Caverns has the grandest ambitions of all of them. It creates a dungeon crawl, with five completely different asymmetric roles and rules sets: a dragon who is trying to escape the cave complex, a knight that’s trying to kill the dragon, goblins that are trying to kill the knight, a thief who’s trying to steal treasure from everyone, and finally the cave complex itself, which is trying to hinder all the players until it can collapse the caves, killing everyone.

If you haven’t heard about this design, it’s important to emphasize that this isn’t just any game with asymmetric powers. The five roles and rules sets share literally nothing in common (other than a few rules spelling out how they interact). They might as well be the rules from five different games. Knowing how one role works will tell you literally nothing how the other roles and the game as a whole works.

Right off the bat, this creates big barriers to entry. It’s a very hard game to teach and learn, since you have to learn five sets of rules to really know what you’re doing. A more practical solution is to have each person just learn their own rules, but even when you do this, you’ll still probably have a lot of AP and downtime, since players’ decisions are dependent on what they think the other players will do, and you can’t really know that without knowing their rules. And when the different roles interact, you’ll have to hash out how this works in the different rule sets.

Besides downtime, this game faces another challenge: balance. If the game is an interaction of five different rules sets, how do you make sure the game is balanced? This is obviously far harder than in most games. 

The game largely solves this problem via the cave. The cave player has a bunch of ‘take that’ powers which do things like create barriers in the map, move people around away from where they want to be, and even take away experience and upgrades of the other characters.

There are a few problems here. This isn’t a short, light game where some vicious take that play is to be expected. The bash the leader play of the cave does balance the game, at the cost of making each player’s choices along the way less consequential. If you get ahead in the game, the cave will undoubtedly bash you down. Losing? Don’t worry, the cave will ignore you allowing you to get back into it.

The problem with this kind of balancing is that it can make the game result seem arbitrary. The winner isn’t necessarily the person who executed a clever plan throughout the game, it’s the person who wasn’t being beat down at the game’s key moment. There’s a good game design maxim that says the longer a game, the less players tolerate luck based outcomes, and that’s what the cave can feel like – something that produces arbitrary results.

And this take that play exacerbates and combines with another issue the game has: for all its rules complexity, it’s not really that deep of a game. It doesn’t feel subtle so much as opaque. Simple rules, deep decisions is another winning design mantra, and, directly because of the game’s original design, it can feel like the opposite: tough rules and shallow decisions.

Bias of Reviewers and Veteran Gamers

I want to complete this series by discussing something I touched on at the very beginning: reviewer bias. Reviewers, and veteran gamers such as the sorts of people like you and I who read long blog posts on Boardgamegeek, have an innate bias towards liking original games. 

I don’t think this is arguable. Go listen to what the most prominent reviewers say about what they care about most in a game, and for almost all of them, originality is at the very top of the list.

Now, I don’t mean anything sinister or even negative by asserting bias. Everyone has biases. It’s impossible to avoid, and all it means is that we all have different subjective experiences. My point in mentioning this particular bias is that it can lead someone without these particular biases into getting games that reviewers like without realizing that the reviewer has a very different outlook than they do.

Reviewer bias towards the original isn’t surprising, since it’s there in almost every artistic genre. We get jaded with what we experience a lot of, and keep needing variety to keep things fresh. After playing 50 worker placement games in a year, a reviewer is praying that the 51st does something really different, and is more likely to notice what’s entirely fresh than what’s a subtly effective refinement of what’s come before. The reviewer, and some of us, play a game a few times, and then are off to the new hotness before we really get to the very bottom of a game’s potential.

It’s not all that different from movie reviewers who would rather see something experimental and new rather than the thousandth derivative action film. Critics of art sometimes praise things that the average person wouldn’t, because they see how it advances the field, while average person just wants a good movie/painting/game. Most people don’t care if a game resuses mechanisms from old games or is doing something new. They just want a fun game. You and I, we can have a hard time seeing a game as it is, because we can only see it in relation to all those other games of that type we’ve already played before.

And as such, we are forgiving of original games. ‘At least they’re trying something new, rather than just being yet another derivative, soulless xyz game’, we say of a design we want to love but we know doesn’t play as well as we hoped. We have more sympathy for someone who failed to climb a mountain than someone who jogged up a hill, after all.

Which is fine. The bias of a veteran gamer isn’t any better or worse than the bias of a new gamer or anything in between. But sometimes, I think, we miss the subtleties: the little things that make a well refined game great, and which we might miss in our first, fifth, or even tenth play.

Originality is Overrated, Part 2

January 13, 2019

In part one of this series, I discussed how ‘originality’ is considered by reviewers and veteran gamers as the ultimate compliment for a game, while ‘stale’ and ‘derivative’ are the kiss of death. 

I took on the proposition that subtle innovations in ‘derivative games’ are often more useful forms of originality that grand new designs or mechanisms, and I examined Islebound in particular and Ryan Laukat’s games in general as great examples of ‘subtle originality’ in derivative designs.

In part two, I’m going to dissect and praise another derivative game: Tyrants of the Underdark. If part one was a bit of a love letter to Ryan Laukat’s games, part two is in praise of entire subgenre of games: the deckbuilder (or poolbuilder) with a map.

In 2008, Dominion created an entirely new genre by having players create a personal deck of cards that changed and improved over the course of the game, with each player’s deck evolving to become more unique and powerful over the course of the game. Deckbuilders give a satisfying engine building experience in a much faster play experience than most euros can deliver, in that the entire engine is built into the deck.

In arguing here for the superiority of derivative designs, I’m arguing here that deckbuilders that give the added dimension of a map or board to manipulate give a huge new decision space for these games without adding much complexity, and add more player interaction into what can sometimes be a solitary genre.

‘Pure’ Deckbuilders

Let me be frank regarding my personal opinion of pure deckbuilders: I think they’re a little dull. Don’t get me wrong: I think the mechanism is one of the greatest mechanisms ever introduced into the board gaming world in allowing engine building with a high ratio of depth to complexity. But a great mechanism alone does not necessarily a great game make.

Because in the pure deckbuilder, the deckbuilding mechanism is literally the whole game, they can become repetitive after multiple plays once you know the card pool. Even the addition of additional resources like military power or buildings you can buy only prolong the novelty of the deckbuilding experience a little bit once the card pool is known and you’ve explored its possibilities.

This is why successful deckbuilders, always, without fail, have expansions. Dominion has survived and thrived for eight years because it’s churned out expansions with regularity to keep the card pool and the decision space (because in a pure deckbuilder, the card pool IS the decision space) fresh.

Even with expansions, I’ve noticed what I call ‘deckbuilder burnout’. You play a deckbuilder a whole bunch of times and it’s really addictive, and then you suddenly reach a point where you say enough – it’s not doing anything for you any more. The decisions, limited in dimension as they are, have become repetitive and stale once you are fully familiar with the card pool.

Here’s the point in the form of a metaphor: deckbuilding is like sugar. It’s sweet and addicitive, but by itself, ultimately unfulfilling. After you eat pure cane sugar straight out the bag for a while, the novelty wears off. 

However, sugar can be used to make all sorts of wonderful tasty treats that take sweetness and texture and give them all kinds of extra depth and dimension in cookies, pies, cakes, brownies and so on.

Deckbuilders with a map

Which is where the deckbuilder with a board or map comes in. Deckbuilders, like any card game, lack a spatial component, and often (though not always) are a somewhat solitary experience – the person with the best engine wins. Even in combat oriented deckbuilders like Star Realms, the interaction tends to be at best linear. Counter what they are doing or die. Get the best cards before the other player.

With a multiplayer board, the possibilities multiply almost endlessly. Before we get to our feature title, here are some other examples deckbuilders with a board or map that use the gameplay mechanisms provided by the map to create something new.

Orleans is perhaps the best known and most highly regarded of these titles, and yet perhaps the one least likely to come to mind in that it’s not a card game. ‘Bag builders’ do the same thing without a deck of cards, and Orleans is a bag builder that allows you to interact with other players to compete for resources and towns to put guildhalls out on a map. There are other boards where you compete with other players as well, a technology point multiplier track that gives bonuses to the first player to reach certain milestones, and other tracks that give bonuses for the first player to get a certain number of workers of a given type.

Thus the workers in your bag, your ‘deck’, are in essence your resources for competing in a point salad euro game. If you like point salad euro games and you like deckbuilders, this game is your dream, in that it scratches both itches and multiplies the possibilities of each.

Trains is a ‘map deckbuilder’ that hews close to the Dominion formula, using the same fixed card pools that change each game. The map allows you to play cards that build connected train tracks or stations, with stations in cities awarding a large share of the game’s points, but you can only build stations by linking tracks to the city. Interaction comes from the high cost of building a track or a station where someone else has already built their own track or station.

Clank is a deckbuilder where the map is that of a dungeon – the hybrid here is deckbuilding + dungeon crawl + push your luck to get out with the most treasure before a dragon kills you. It pushes the formula even further by bringing in even more varied mechanisms into the deckbuilding world (or the other way around).

There are many more examples of the deckbuilder with a map mashup. Automobiles combines bag building with racing cars around a track. A Few Acres of Snow brings deckbuilding to the two player conflict genre. Super Motherload combines deckbuilding with tile laying to collect resources and meet common objectives. Hyperborea combines bag building with a map to allow exploration, war, trade, etc.

While all of these games are derivative designs that have added a map or board to a deckbuilder, all of them feel very different to play. All of them have enough of what I’m calling ‘subtle innovations’ to feel like their entirely their own game.

Fight for the Underdark

Let’s focus in on Tyrants of the Underdark. Like Trains, this game combines deckbuilding with chaining pieces of your color to control areas. Unlike Trains, the game has actual conflict. You aren’t just paying more to go where another player has pieces – you actually have to kill other players’ pieces before you can place your own there. Set in the Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms unviverse, each player is the ruler of a Drow house that is scheming to take over the Underdark, which is a fitting theme for a cutthroat area control game.

It uses Ascension style, random market card buying to give you cards that have that familiar buying power/combat power split – buying power for more cards, and combat power now is for board manipulation. Each point of combat power allows you to place a troop, and three points of power allows you to kill an enemy troop.

Text specific card powers allow you to kill more troops, move enemy troops, place troops, devour cards (trash them), give insane outcasts (think wounds from Legendary or Trash from Train – useless cards you don’t want) or ‘promote’ cards out the game. This final mechanism is like entombment in Valley of the Kings, in that promoted cards are worth a lot more points, but by promoting a high value card for a lot of endgame points you are taking one of your most useful cards out of the game.

You’ll notice that most of the elements I’ve mentioned above are not new – this is clearly a derivative design that borrows shamelessly from other popular deckbuilders.

However, beyond the simple combination of deckbuilding with direct area control conflict on a map, there are a number of what I call ‘subtle innovations’ – rules twists that don’t wow you at first glance, but create a lot of opportunities for unique decisions:

1) There are neutral troops that serve as patsies and early game obstacles that players must eliminate in order to get points for many territories. This enhances the decision space in that there are cards that you can buy that are very effective at removing these neutral troops, and early in the game, they will give you a strong leg up in controlling areas. However, late in the game, as most of the neutral troops are killed off, these cards start to become dead weight. 

2) The game has a spy mechanism where some cards allow you to place spies in any area. Ordinarily you only kill enemy troops or place your own in locations where you’ve chained your troops to, but spies break this rule, allowing you to kill and place wherever you’ve placed the spy. Moreover, spies combo with some cards – there are effects where you can remove one or more of your own spies for a huge reward.

Beyond combo play, spies open up a way of impacting the action on any part of the board, rather than being limited to a static front.

3) While most locations are scored for control at the end of the game, some of them give you buy power and a point or two at the end of every turn if you control them. This gives a very focused objective to go after, and it also gives a very focused location for enemy aggression – players know if they go after these locations, opponents are likely to fight them there, since allowing someone to have these locations uncontested means they will rack up a ton of points (and buy power) over the long haul, and likely win the game, all things being equal.

By incentivizing these locations, both to control and prevent others from having control, it removes much of the effective randomness that can occur in multiplayer conflict games. Rational players won’t be just attacking someone for the heck of it, they’ll be attacking them to score immediate points, or prevent the other player from doing so. Players can then make interesting decisions on whether they want to fight for those points, or go for a more of a point buying or card promotion strategy.

While none of these little innovations sound extraordinary, they are completely absent from pure deckbuilders, since they all flow from the play on the board. And this is what the board does – it’s not something mindblowing or new – it simply multiplies the possibilities and the decisions available.

When you’re optimizing your Dominion deck, for instance, you are helped by a clear end goal – your deck is ultimately a vehicle to points, though it may sometimes take a circuitous route. In Tyrants, the optimal deck is less clear as this depends entirely on the board state and what you want it to accomplish. Pursuing card buys and promotion may be brilliant or terrible, depending on whether you have the freedom on the board to get away with it. In a pure deckbuilder, there is less interaction, so a deck’s ultimate worth stands more on its own. The interactive board muddies the waters.

None of this is to say that Tyrants of the Underdark is a perfect game. The random market, like in any Ascension style deckbuilder, may favor one player and cause runaway leader problems, which feel worse because losers are being hammered on a board and not just abstractly via point counting at the end. Even with the fun of the board, the four decks included are limited enough that the game doesn’t escape the deckbuilder need for expansions. And finally, the ho hum graphic design and relatively high price point may prevent it becoming a commercial hit.

However, none of these deficiencies have anything to do with its lack of originality. And the game makes up for them with ease of play, balance, and pure vicious fun that fits the Drow theme. It’s clear that relentless playtesting went into this design, which while not sexy or original, has served to take most of the bumps out of the gameplay. It’s not surprising that Tyrants’ design team also produced Lords of Waterdeep, a similarly playable and yet ‘unoriginal’ design, in itself probably worthy of a chapter in this series.

And while derivative games like Tyrants of the Underdark may not get the pulses of critics or veteran BGGers racing the way more ‘original’ designs do, ordinary folks will play and love them, over and over again.

Next time we’ll examine the opposite – some new, truly ‘original’ games that critics have raved about, and why they may not be entirely fun to play.

Notes

1) If you love Dominion and other pure deckbuilders that I’ve disparaged a bit for being one dimensional, more power to you. My main point isn’t to knock these games, but to show that by adding another main gameplay mechanism – in this case, area control – new dimensions of play and decision making are introduced, in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way. Look, the deckbuilding in Dominion is considerably more intricate and enthralling than the deckbuilding in Tyrants, but Tyrants acquires new gameplay dimensions simply by combining it with a different mechanism.

2) There are of course many, many other deckbuilder hybrids beyond deckbuilding with a map. There are tableau builder/deckbuilder hybrids, co-op deckbuilders, and games that have deckbuilding as one of many game mechanisms, to the point that it’s questionable whether it’s appropriate to call these games ‘deckbuilders’ any more. If you like some other hybrid breed of deckbuilders better, wonderful. The deckbuilder/map hybrid merely provides an easy way of talking about the benefits of derivative, evolutionary design.

Originality is Overrated, Part 1

 January 10, 2019

It seems like there’s no greater compliment than a reviewer can pay to a new game than to say it’s original. If a game feels fresh and new, that’s considered to be a great thing. The opposite is also true: there’s few insults more cutting than to call a game stale or derivative. Reviewers pound into our head the notion that there are so many games out there that games have to do something new or different to stand out from the crowd. 

Consider how many times you’ve heard a criticism along the lines of ‘this game does nothing to stand out from the sea of worker placement games already on the market’. It’s like the kiss of death, right? The worst thing you can call a game is boring, and unoriginal = boring is the unstated assumption of most reviewers.

I’m here to say that the reverse is true – that a very high degree of originality generally has a negative correlation with game quality.

Let me stop and say what I am not saying. I am not saying that originality isn’t important to the game industry. Originality is critical to the game industry. Without someone willing to venture out and try something new, we never would have had the first worker placement game, or the first collectible card game, or the first social deduction game, or the first area control game, or the first whatever. Originality is essential for the board game business to grow, thrive, and stay fresh and relevant.

However, this is completely different from saying that a large degree of originality is necessary or even helpful in creating a great game. What I am calling ‘a large degree of originality’ is a new mechanism or combination of mechanisms that feels entirely new – the game seems like nothing like it has been tried before.

Part of what I’ll be arguing here is that small doses of originality, what are often seen as refinements or small changes to existing mechanisms, are often the keys to great games, while sweeping inventions, while useful to board gaming, are not reliable for making a good game, particularly in their first iteration.

But enough with the generalities. Let’s look at a new game that doesn’t appear strikingly original at first glance.

The latest effort from Red Raven Games and its founder, designer and artist Ryan Laukat is Islebound. This is a game with a theme that will strike a seasoned BGG reader as standard stuff – each player is pirate/seafaring adventurer, moving their ship around an island chain, picking up stuff worker placement style, turning it into other stuff which then helps you take over the island towns, for gold which is worth points, and which you can spend on buildings which are also worth points, and give some special powers. Most points wins, of course.

I’m not going to turn this essay into a rules summary, but those who want a more detailed look at this should read Milena Guberinic’s excellent review.

The game has been fairly well received here on BGG as a solid, smooth, euro, though there have been some critics. Look at the negative comments and you’ll notice a common refrain in some of them – people who are disappointed because the game repeats many mechanics from Laukat’s earlier games, and at the same time, some complain that he doesn’t include the cutting edge storybook that was a major reason for the success of Above and Below. In other words, some folks saw the game as a step backwards for Laukat in terms of originality.

“Ryan’s games feel like he’s cruising with a well-known formula and art style rather than pushing himself to innovate,” reads one typical comment. “I’m getting a little jaded because the artwork and game mechanisms are so similar to Ryan’s other games, especially Above and Below,” says another. 

“I was disappointed,” said a reviewer on a popular podcast. “Mechanically, I think this is his best game…[but] I really wanted that story in there.”

While I would never dispute the validity of an person’s play experience, I would say that those who see this way are a small subset of players, in that they are basing their view of this game not in isolation, but based on previous experience of Laukat’s other games. While this is completely valid in the world of a person’s experience, it’s not a strong statement about the objective worth of a game, which doesn’t rise or fall based on what other games the designer has made.

Islebound has a bit of an identity crisis related to the designer and his fans. To overgeneralize, Ryan Laukat’s fans are looking for gorgeous new worlds and a sense of wonder. They’re not looking for the most polished euro design that Laukat has yet devised. And fans of polished midweight euros aren’t usually looking for a Ryan Laukat game. 

But that’s what this is. Expectations aside, this is a beautiful, smooth, compulsively playable and not particularly original game, at least in the larger sense. Yes, the game has things that people have seen in other Laukat games – the buying of buildings, the crew that you exhaust like in Above and Below, the control of towns via multiple methods that we’ve seen in Empires of the Void and City of Iron.

So what’s so special about the design? What’s wrong with calling it dull and derivative, even if it’s mechanically sound? Look carefully beneath the hood, and you’ll see several subtle, brilliant innovations that create unique gameplay inside of a familiar structure. Here are a few examples:

• The game has what the Dukes of Dice podcast brilliantly calls ‘Spatial Action Selection’. It feels like a worker placement game in how you move your ship around to take an action and collect a reward, and there’s soft blocking if another player is at the island where you want to go, but you can’t just place your ‘worker’ ship anywhere you want – you have to actually move it there. The game isn’t really a race in the way Istanbul is, but it requires you to assess the board in terms of being able to plan out your series of actions a few turns in advance. What might be the best place to go when viewed in isolation, might be the wrong place in when you consider your options on the following turn.

Some have called this a pick up and deliver game, but that’s not really it – there are no routes or contracts, you don’t get money for fulfilling something. You simply get resources that will eventually lead to you taking over towns, but that could be almost any town on the board, rather than some proscribed path.

This is classic Laukat – a mechanism that seems familiar at first glance, but is entirely its own beast. The mechanism of resource collection and conversion looks a bit like pick up and deliver but it’s not, and feels like worker placement, but it’s just one ‘worker’ ship and it’s moving around. As Daniel Thurot’s review of Islebound notes, Laukat makes ‘games that seem a lot like other games, but look and play almost nothing like anything else’.

What we end up with is a very smooth system of moving your system and doing something with it – collecting resources, swapping resources, or taking over a town – in a simple way that rarely leads to AP despite the plethora of choices about where to go and what to do.

• Taking over locations via diplomacy may look like something seen in other games, but the ‘diplomacy cubes’ one collects to pull this off have a uniquely public presence. Rather than collecting them on your player board, when you get one you place it on a public track that gives an increasing diplomatic value depending on where it is on the track.

The first cubes you get won’t be worth much – they escalate in value the more that are placed. So while diplomacy can be very powerful, there’s a mini game of chicken going on wherein each player wants somebody else to be the first one to get diplomacy cubes and place them on the public track so they can swoop in and get cubes that are increasingly powerful.Also, there’s a finite number of spaces for cubes on the diplomacy track, and once they are gone, none can be placed until one player takes them off to take over a town. You can be planning big move to get diplomacy cubes, and if someone finishes the track before your turn, there’s nothing you can do until the track empties.

The escalating value of cubes and the finite number allowed adds some of the most unique player interaction I’ve ever seen in a euro – you have to calculate not just your moves but those of your opponents, and attempt to anticipate the timing of their interactions. This is elegant, euro-style player interaction at its best, inside of a mini-mechanism that I’ve never quite seen the likes of before.

• One of the islands your ship can visit allows you to take a ‘brag’ action, in which you play one of two cards available at the location. The card gives you renown (points) for things you have done in the game – say, one point for each building you’ve built – but it also gives all the other players the same point bonus.

This leads to fun opportunities to focus on doing something very well in the game that other players aren’t doing and then come in and brag about it, though your opponents might focus on the same thing and thus diminish the effectiveness of that possible action for you, since getting a bunch of points isn’t worth much if other players are getting them too. This fun mechanism adds both planning and unique player interaction to the game.

• Islebound’s final innovation might be my favorite, and that involves the use of your crew. Again, at first glance, the crew looks like something we’ve seen before – they are exactly the same size and shape tiles as the workers you recruit in Above and Below, and they even have the same mechanism of exhausting them and taking a rest action to refresh them.

Appearances are deceiving. The crew in Islebound doesn’t actually work the same as in Above and Below, in which your people are your workers in the standard worker placement formulas.

Instead, your crew are actually ‘action enhancers’ – they either allow an action to be taken which would be impossible without them, they are exhausted to add a bonus to an action, or they give a static bonus. For instance, one kind of crew member gives, when unexhausted, a bonus to your ship’s movement speed. Others give you increased combat or diplomatic strength when you exhaust them. Others allow you to collect more resources than you would otherwise if they weren’t on deck. Another allows you to take an action where another player already has their ship (exhausting that crew member to ‘parley’ and take that action).

I’ve never seen a worker placement system quite like this. The ship is actually your worker, and you never have to expand your starting crew to do things, and in fact, you can go around and take many actions even if all of your crew is exhausted. But a better crew makes your actions better, and allows you to do many things you couldn’t do otherwise.

This makes the decision on how much to expand your crew wonderfully non-obvious. This isn’t a clichéd worker placement race to get more workers. It’s a decision based on whether the workers you get will sufficiently enhance the actions you plan to take.

Islebound has plenty of innovation; it’s just not the kind of originality that generates hype or breathless reviews. There is a lot that is new in this game, but it’s new in a way that I would call derivative – subtle twists on old mechanisms that give the game an entirely new decision space.

These subtle innovations are typical of Laukat’s designs. Many, even his fans, see the appeal of his games as based on their good lucks, thematic flavor and overall buoyant charm. And they do have that. But some reviewers and veteran games see his games as mechanically pedestrian, repeating certain simple tropes – buying buildings or crew in an escalating price row, for instance.

I think Laukat is criminally underrated as an inventor of fascinating euro mechanisms – while Islebound has many of them, his previous designs also have them in spades.

While most Above and Below as all about the marriage of a euro with a story game, and while this is new, it’s also a hybrid of two known game mechanisms. As Jamey Stegmaier pointed out, the overlooked innovation in that game was its scoring for resource accumulation, which also doubled as its generator of income.

When you got resources, you could lock them into the resource track, which would immediately increase your income, but resources that got locked in later would be worth far more points, meaning that if you locked a common resource early you wouldn’t be able to score nearly as much for it. This push and pull between short term income and long term scoring is at the crux of the decision making in the game.

In The Ancient World, the most commonly mentioned mechanism is workers of different numeric strengths which dictate blocking, but the most truly innovative thing in that game is an amazing combat system where soldiers need to be paid exponentially more each time you use them, but you can retire them and use their expertise to enhance the next soldiers you hire. The timing of when to hire more soldiers again creates a unique decision space not found in other euros.

And this is what great ‘derivative’ games do. They quietly carve out new decision spaces through subtler innovations than normally associated with the term ‘originality’.