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Busy Lives Prompt Speedier Board Games
BusylikeBum writes "Michelle Hastings admits she's sometimes cheated to get through a game of Candy Land with her 5-year-old daughter, Campbell. The board game can take just too long, she said. Disney Monopoly is another big offender.
'A game like that, it could literally take you days,' said Hastings, of Holliston, Mass. 'A lot of times, you don't play games because they take so long.' Board game makers are heeding pleas of parents like Hastings and introducing games tailored to busy lives and shorter attention spans that take only about 20 minutes to play." This is especially interesting to me, given the US adoption of more serious, lengthy German board games in the last few years.
serious, lengthy German board games in the last few years.
You mean such as Sprockets: Touch my monkey!?
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I wish the articles on slashdot were shorter. I only managed to get half way through this one before my busy life distracted me. Wow, is that a nickel?
Simpler games, such as UNO or Mancala, or even more complicated games, such as Rummikub, offer more entertainment for longer periods of time simply because a turn lasts at most 30-45 seconds.
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This is especially interesting to me, given the US adoption of more serious, lengthy German board games in the last few years.
Well, first, it is more than the past few years. Settlers of Catan was one of the earliest BIG cross over games. I was playing it since college, means the cross over started about a decade ago.
Secondly, I get the distinct impression that the original audience doesn't take these games nearly as seriously as US players. Settlers says on the packaging that its running time is about 1-2 hours (If I recall correctly, my original packaging has been lost to the sands of time), yet my games regularly run 3 or more hours, as trades and debates and discussions of beat-the-current-leader happens. This ratio of about twice-as-long seems to be consistent with most of the German Board Games my group plays/played.
(On the other hand, it could just be false advertising. Witness the order of the Stick game that takes ages to play, despite the packaging).
And I STILL can't find anyonre to play Kingmaker with me, and very few who play Magic Realm.
Don't know if they've changed the rules for Disney Monopoly - usually variants just change street names and graphic design - but Monopoly should never take days, unless players are deliberately buying property from each other at inflated prices to prevent anyone going out of the game. Or unless people are refusing to trade cards so that nobody can form a complete colour group and build houses, in which case it's stalemate and you might as well call a draw.
After an hour or two of Monopoly the board should be full of houses. At that point the game ends fast; the ASSESSED FOR STREET REPAIRS and MAKE GENERAL REPAIRS cards are ruinously expensive to a big landlord. As a result, money comes out of the game a good deal faster than it comes into it from people passing GO. All those fees go to the Bank, leaving players with less and less money to pay the ever-larger rents, and the game must end soon.
You could, I suppose, invent a new game in which money did not ever leave the game and return to the Bank - perhaps you could put the money from fines and fees and so forth into some jackpot, and designate a square such that anybody landing there would collect all the wealth accumulated there - but that game would last forever, become incredibly frustrating once everybody had so much money that they didn't care about landing on Mayfair, and would basically not be Monopoly.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Another thing that's more difficult to address is the inordinate amount of setup time that some games take. Witness Axis & Allies. Its a great game, but every time I want to play it, I realize that its going to take at least 30 to 45 minutes to set up, and the thought of that is enough to get me motivated to do something else.
That said, I don't see a way to address the issue without ruining the game. Part of the attraction of the game is the varied unit types, and its the very presence of varied units that makes setup so difficult.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Everything does take to long to finish in one sitting usually.
That is why I play chess with friends via correspondence.
I can use a program/site or just use IM/Email using chess notation. The site offers a ton of features, but after a while you should be able to play chess games without ever having to see the board physically. Instead you just read it with notation.
Of course, most games cannot be played via notation, but via correspondence, it is surely an option.
Edit: Average game of ~30 moves takes about anywhere from 3 to 30 days for me. Most finish within 3-5 days.
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what's this world coming to when you can't even take an hour or 2 to play a board game but you'll let your kids play video games unsupervised for hour. I understand what's it like to busy and i don't have kids but i have sisters that i'll devote days to them to their enjoyment. Just because i'm a hard core brother that way. I would think parents would do more to spend as much time with kids whether it's boardgames or video games
some people are a "glass half empty" some are "glass half full" i'm a "there is something in the glass be happy" person
Shouldn't we be pushing for longer, more cerebral games--chess, Go, backgammon, etc.--to counteract the attention problems? Seems the priority is not on the kid's mental development but on the parent's schedule.
Did anyone else misread this as:
more serious, lengthy German board games which last a few years
?
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
I thought I had a good game store here. The outside certainly looked all glittery and fun. When I walked in, it was very dark, and there was a sort of stage with these poles on it, and some scantily-clad females doing an interesting dance. "Oooh! Role-playing!" I thought, looking around for a dwarf wench with the grog.
Then I announced loudly that I wanted to find a game that would take less than 30 minutes. One of the girls looked at me and said, "Honey, you want one that will take less than 30 seconds," and then they all went "Mmm-hmmm!" in unison and did a head-bob.
I want to know where the hell you guys get your games.
"Takes too long" is a cop-out excuse by people who don't like Monopoly. If that's what they say, forget it, they wouldn't be good game partners anyway.
In my experience, if you play Monopoly RIGHT (by the official rules) and focus on the game instead of gabbing about other things the whole time, it can take two hours or less, sometimes as little as one hour.
Monopoly is also a lot more brilliant a game than most people think. Most people who "like Monopoly" don't have a clue what most of the rules are, and they insist on playing with house rules that completely mess up the game's economy and add too much luck (*cough* Free Parking Jackpot *cough*). Another offense is allowing as many houses/hotels as you want. The game has a carefully chosen limit of 32 houses and 12 hotels -- there must NEVER be more than that on the board. Many don't want to play with the auction rule, where all properties landed on that aren't immediately purchased must immediately be auctioned. Not to mention other silliness like trading immunities to paying rent for trades.
Hint: All "house rules" are bad, but the ones that run counter to the game's goal -- bankrupting every player but you ASAP -- will make the game last longer. Play it right and you'll fly through it!
If the game isn't well balanced in one way, or if the players' skill levels are mismatched, then one or more players are going to pull ahead while everyone else falls behind with no hope of catching up. This might be fun for the players in the lead, but it can get very frustrating to the others. _Especially_ if they're not as much into board games. This can make convincing non-board game geek friends or SOs to join you for a game very difficult.
If the game isn't balanced in another way then the results become based more on luck than skill, especially if it's possible for one player to jump up from behind suddenly at the end and wind up on top. This can be acceptable if the game is of a more silly nature, one designed to make everyone compete in crazy antics and the enjoyment is more in the journey than the goal, but not so much in a "serious" game. "Apples to Apples" is a good example of a game that manages to have a goal to compete for but which no one really cares a great deal who wins.
An ideal game allows players who are behind to catch up, but in a way that is at least theoretically foreseeable and preventable. Allowing ways for the players who are behind to gang up on the person in charge often helps with this. And often times setting alternate goals for yourself when it seems that victory is out of your grasp can be entertaining if you can maintain the right mindset. If you're already out of the running then sabotaging the person in the lead to give the game to the person who was second can be a fun goal (assuming you're playing with people who won't hold grudges of course =)
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Ugh. No wonder it would take hours.
Monopoly is also a lot more brilliant a game than most people think.
In the 1930's Monopoly was brilliant. In contrast with modern games, its flaws are thrown in sharp relief.
Game design:
1) It is an elimination game with a platykurtic expected duration distribution. If you are going to knock players out, you need a strongly defined endpoint.
2) Deal-making games are more interesting with more players; deal-making games with elimination get less interesting as the game progresses.
3) It has indeterminant length and lacks a fair withdrawal procedure. If the game can run overlong, players need a exit that doesn't throw the game.
4) The decision tree is sparse, and the most important decisions occur early. The endgame is not much different than the end of Snakes & Ladders.
Game mechanics:
1) 'Roll & Move' includes a completely unnecessary step. Customized dice could replace the entire token track.
2) Keeping score to four-digit precision serves no purpose when player decisions only have two-digit granularity. Player spend too much time tracking what they cannot control.
Components:
1) The gameboard wastes a colossal amount of space. Games that waste real estate can less easily be enjoyed at the players' convenience.
2) Paper money is inferior to plastic chips for the required transactions. Modern games with similar MSRP have a far greater production quality.
Monopoly is the Model T of boardgames, a revolutionary product that has truly earned a place of honor in any museum. You may enjoy driving antique cars, but you'll have little success convincing others they offer a superior ride than modern designs.
"Michelle Hastings admits she's sometimes cheated to get through a game of Candy Land with her 5-year-old daughter, Campbell"
there has always been a talk going about how story based video games take too long for working parents to be able to play them, and I can understand that perspective. It's hard to get time away from work and responsibilities of being a parent for that long when you work and have kids, but this seems to be a different issue entirely.
Seriously if your business life is so busy that you can't sit down with your 5 year of daughter long enough to play a game of candy land the problem is not candy land. It's time to rethink your priorities.
I'm one of those who enjoy Monopoly, but none of my friends want to play unless we use those house rules.
And I've successfully paid hotel rent on Boardwalk before, its easy when you own all the Red and Orange properties! People obsess about getting Boardwalk and Park Place, and are willing to trade you Red and Orange for way less than their market value should be. Statistically, they have the highest possibility to be landed on, and the orange properties have some of the best payout:hotel cost ratio on the entire board.
I'll absolutely confess that I don't like Monopoly. But that's because people make poor choices over the auctioning and mortgaging of properties, and most of all get into exchanges at silly vlaues cause the endgame to last ages.
In most games of Monopoly, it only takes two or three trips round the board for one person to be obviously in the lead, largely due to the luck of their landing. Then the next hour is just playing out that ineviatable result; usually quite some time after the first person got eliminated, too.
What I really found interesting, however, is how this is all talked about as a brand new development. The Lord Of The Rings Monopoly altered this a good couple of years ago, by introducing the movement of the Ring round the board. That gives a defining endpoint, and a count-up of the relative profits of each player, well before most people have been sitting around bored, waiting for the luckiest loser to hit the killer hotels.
But there you go.
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People play Monopoly because of:
1. The play money. Replace Monopoly's play money with something else and people will be like "hey, where's the play money."
2. The cute little tokens that look like various things. (Including the player tokens and the little houses and hotels.)
3. The concept of owning deeds to property.
In other words, with Monopoly the presentation is the point. The thing about Monopoly is, as you point out, it is a bad game. The presentation, however, is great and the actual game is "good enough" for the people who buy it. Yeah, it's all sizzle and no steak, but believe me, Parker Brothers knows what they are doing.
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