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Graphing Thirty Years of Gaming Collaborations

Posted by Zonk on from the i-can-see-my-house-from-here dept.

ShannonA writes "The world of designer board games, including such classics as The Settlers of Catan and Modern Art, is full of creative collaborations between designers. In a new article, Six Degrees of Collaboration, Shannon Appelcline traces these collaborative connections across a half-dozen countries and over thirty years of time." Interesting to see how relatively small a part of the table-top gaming industry really is.

3 of 12 comments (clear)

  1. Am I missing something here? by The-Bus · · Score: 2, Informative

    The chart is interesting but it seems to focus on a pretty specific subset or group of subsets of the table-top gaming genre. This would be akin to talking about fantasy writing and then just mentioning people who worked on Forgotten Realms books.

    Much to my chagrin, Settlers of Catan is mentioned in the summary, but not actually charted. TFA doesn't even mention that game or Klaus Teuber. Ravensburger publishes some of the best games I've ever played. The problem is only a very small fraction of them ever makes it to the US. For those who like easy-to-pick up games that are never the same twice, may I recommend The Amazeing Labyrinth which is sort of a treasure hunt game where the board changes every round.

    --

    Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.

    1. Re:Am I missing something here? by KDR_11k · · Score: 2, Informative

      Interesting that you mention Teuber and Ravensburger but not Teuber's publisher, Kosmos.

      Also, I'd suggest Puerto Rico as a great title from Ravensburger, it takes a bit to learn it but after that it's a great game with very little luck involved.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    2. Re:Am I missing something here? by ShannonA · · Score: 2, Informative

      Germans seem to have a much lower incidence of game design collaboration than either Americans or French, and so they're much more poorly represented on the chart. Klaus Teuber, the designer of Settlers of Catan, has only one pseudo-collaboration. He did work with others on a mixed set of Settlers supplements called _Atlantis_, but that branch ends immediately because all of the people he worked with are new designers who have done zero or one games of their own, with no additional collaborations. If any of them become successful, we may be able to link Teuber in in a year or two.