Originality is Overrated, Part 1

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’.

Next: In part two, I’ll go over another ‘unoriginal’ game that’s been a quiet success this year, and I’ll look at why critics pay worship at the cult of the original.