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A Report From the Heart of the Board Games Industry
Ward Batty, writing for Gamasutra, attended the recent Essen International Game Days event in Germany. The beating heart of German board games culture, it's equivalent to Origins or Gen Con here in the US. Batty got to see firsthand what the future will bring for tabletop gaming - and how that might impact the videogames of tomorrow. He also offers up a few words looking back at the history of boardgames in the EU: "What distinguishes a Eurogame from a typical American board game? Unlike many American games which are net sum (you gain by taking directly from other players) in Eurogames players are generally competing against the game itself. They may compete for limited resources or the best action, but rarely do the spoils come directly from an opponent, but instead from the game itself -- usually in the form of victory points. German games are generally shorter to play, ranging from 20-90 minutes. There is usually a good social aspect to the game as well. Players are almost never eliminated from the game, for example."
Is there anything better than taking from the your fellow man?
I submit that there is not.
Future indie game developer of America (and possibly Canada)
I'm pretty sure that we invented THE GREATEST BOARD GAME EVER! So we win.
The Farewell Tour II
For an excellent example of what the article is talking about, go buy a copy of Settlers of Catan. It's incredibly simple to play, very fast, and there is no time at which you aren't involved.
"Is there anything better than taking from the your fellow man? "
You tell me?
"Yay, everyone's a winner!" </Simpsons>
Indeed yes, we play it in the pub regularly.
But there are many reasons why this game is so good, some of them quite subtle.
1. It is self levelling. In the fact that the simple penalty structure, robbers, 7 rolls are all biased to pick on the leader by simple social engineering. This means the losers get a chance to catch up and the leader finds it harder to win.
2. As a consequence of 1, most games all ends with everybody all "about to finish" - in this respect its commanding social game as nobody is left out and its normally a rush for the end.
3. There is a strong element of trading and persuasion in the game - this further enhances to social element of play
4. Statistics. It has been wonderfully designed - from the probabilities of the cards, the probabilities of the game to present a darn good game with numerous tactics you can use to win.
5. Simple. Its a game anybody can learn in their first game and be competent on their second.
If you have not played it there are stand alone player vs. PC versions around (a fantastic DOS version which puts up a fierce challange) and multiuser 'net versions notably Sea3D.
But best of all buy a real board version and play with some friends and a few good drinks, you'll be hooked.
Its called Diplomacy.
Just don't could on having any friends at the end
There's a world of difference between being found the loser at the end of the game, and spending the last hour of it twiddling your thumbs while the rest of the players continue to duke it out.
Although it's a matter of opinion which is worse. Personally I don't like having to play another half hour of a game I have already effectively lost. I'd rather go and make a coffee, browse the web a bit or read a book.
Worse still, defeated players remaining in a game often get to be kingmakers. Fine if there's some valid reason to pick one winner over another (such as hurting the player who ruined your chances earlier) but otherwise the exact opposite of social fun.
The board games I played as a child all suffered from the same problem, the choices to be made were important, but not as important as good luck. Obviously the worst example of this is snakes and ladders, where there are no choices at all, but Monopoly is pretty terrible on this front too as you have almost no control over where you land.
It was a refreshing change to be introduced to German style games where there is often much less random in a game (if any at all after the initial setup) so it really is down to strategy. Some of the people I play with are more interested in playing the players rather than the game directly, and with a lot of these games relying on trading or creating alliances or peace pacts this can be a vital element. My partner prefers games where other people can't mess with what you are trying to do too badly, and there are plenty of games where the players can help, not hinder, each other.
The Settlers of Catan is mentioned in the article and it is a very popular game but I think that it too suffers from too much random. There is an expansion pack that replaces the dice (worst game mechanic ever) with a set of cards in all the right ratios. I can't recommend this variant enough as it really helps promote the power of your choices over the power of the dice.
On the tactical scale, Tide of Iron is a great war game.
On the strategic scale, I don't know. I'm not a fan of chit-based games, which means no straight up war games. However, Twilight Imperium is a 4X board game and is fantastic.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
I picked up Carcassonne recently, and it's extremely fun to play. My regular gaming group and I find Settlers to be a little too random for our tastes, but we definitely like Carcassonne.
I've also found that Carcassonne works well at parties as it's very quick to pick up and since the games are short, it's easy to get new people to play.
A few options come to mind:
Twilight Imperium with the optional rules: good for 8-10 hours or so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Imperium
Civilization with Advanced Civilization: unfortunately both are out of print so expensive on Ebay, but with six players you could easily spend 10-12 hours on it. Worth every moment while playing it and worth every penny to buy it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(board_game)
Now there's an 18 player modded Civilization: should take a whole week to complete!
http://www.civproject.net/
There actually is a meeting like this in the US: next week will be BoardGameGeek's BGG.CON. I'm sure the fact that it follows closely after the Essen conference is no coincidence.
to move on from SL/COI. I do like ATS though, it's a bit easier than SL.
Do you ever head over to consimworld?
For a different version of Carcassonne, try using a snakes and ladders game as the score board. This way, you can really be mean to your fellow players by giving them a point or two, or finishing their city/road/whatever at the right time. Very fun. It changes the game a great deal.
As the points at the end of the game are collected in random order, don't use any snakes/ladders while counting them.
"he, who has quotes in his signature, is a douche" - unknown.
Civilization (not Sid's, the classic Avalon Hill).
Star Fleet Battles has more depth then any game I've ever played. The single biggest problem is finding people willing to learn the game.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
You want a game that lasts longer? That's easy. Plenty of games last for ages. Advanced Civilization is easily over 12 hours, for example, but the king is Empires in Arms, the grand campaign of which is reputed to last 200 hours. Pick an evening in the week, and play that evening every week for a year. One of my goals in life is to play that game some time. I just need 6 friends who are equally crazy.
Yes, but there are also many other, more mature, more historical tabletop miniature games. Find a historic wargaming group and ask what they play. If you want to play without miniatures, there are also plenty of historical strategy wargames that you play with cardboard counters on a hex board.
There's a whole, rich, unexplored world of boardgaming waiting for you out there!
Ah come on mods, that was pretty funny. Yeah, a bit of a sick path the thread is taking here, but funny.
This t-shirt from the Cheapass Games folks pretty much sums up German games. (Zoom in on the image of the back.)
> Players are almost never eliminated from the [German board] game[s], for example.
Unless they're...
oh, don't go there, girl!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Warhammer isn't really a long-term sort of game. You tend to have scenarios that resolve themselves in at most three hours (depending how how weasely/blitz-happy your opponent is).
There's a number of historical military games that would serve the purpose. Advanced Squad Leader pops to mind most prominantly, mostly because I'm not a huge fan of the military game genre and am not up-to-date on what's new and popular. It's still in print and actively supported (and the company is owned by Curt Schilling).
Unfortunately, most of the really good, deep strategy games are out of print, gone with SPI and Avalon Hill. (Yes, Avalon Hill is still around, but it's just a shell.) Previous posters have mentioned some good options, like Civilization/Advanced Civilization. Other games in that vein would be Age of Renaissance or History of the World.
My personal favorite of the Avalon Hill games is Dune (without any expansions), but that's also a bit hard to find. You might be able to import a translated copy of the French edition, which I think is still in print.
As for games in print, I'll put in a recommendation for Warrior Knights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_Knights) .
The box claims a playing time of a couple hours, but according to the designer's website, the publisher changed the printed rules so they could get a less-intimidating, shorter play time on the box. The recommended variant rules on the designer's page stretches the game out to a much more interesting four to six hours (or more).
Loved Star Fleet Battles when we could find players.
The main rules with expansions(once you put them in sheet protectors...everyone does that right?) took up two 2" D-ring binders.
A single turn could take 4 hours with a reasonable number of ships. We had 8' x 6' table with 1 inch hex maps setup for months at a time to get a single large scale battle complete.
I actually have a hardbound rule book that Stephen Cole allowed an avid fan to produce.I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
Power Grid
Tigris and Euphrates
Intrigue
Coloretto
For Sale
Modern Art
That's Life
and of course...
Bohnanza!
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
It's only since about 25 years that German boardgames have come to be the reference of quality they are. Before that it was just Checkers, Halma and Mikado plus some flashy stuff from Milton Bradley and Parker that came across the pond.
The German game publisher Ravensburger was iirc the first to regularly put a little more time and quality into their boardgames. Their first steps were sort of academic, one of the first German Boardgames of the year ("Spiel des Jahres") being 'Sagaland' ('Enchanted Forest'), a quite simple, non-innovative variant of Memory+Ludo but with a distinct quality of the artwork and game-parts. A year later came 'Scotland Yard', also from Ravensburger. It more or less went uphill from there.
The Game Fair in Essen is a very good place to go if you are a gamer. I live 20km away and while I haven't been there in the last few years a friend of mine always goes there all four days and stays at my place. He always comes back with a stack of prime-quality boardgames one better than the next. It's also nice to see how, after all these years, the Pen&Paper RPG scene is still fairly alive and kicking in Germany. DSA is one of the best RPGs available, quality-wise. It the only RPG I know of in which the quality of official maps rivals that of Harnworld.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Check out Arkham Horror, and Descent by Fantasy Flight games. Pretty good cooperative games, that tend to tend a very long time. There are expansion packs, but the core game is pretty deep as it is.
The snakes/ladders one below sounds awesome as well. One variant we play is that you have a 1 tile "hand", and when you pick up a tile you do so secretly, then choose between your hand and the new tile as to which to place. Gives a little more reward for foresight.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I actually find that the online versions are better than the real game because the anonymity really lends itself to allow optimized strategies. When you don't have to worry feeling guilty for picking on a friend too much or feeling sad for the friend who is losing, you can truly optimize your strategy and in the end, I believe this really takes the game to the next level.
A good example of this is the old monopoly trick. Trade a few of your resources for some other resource and immediately call monopoly on the resource you just traded away. You not only gain all the cards from the monopoly, but pick up a few extra from the trades as well. If you've ever tried this in real life, you know that it's fairly taboo.
Go is certainly an excellent game that I am very fond of, as are "Through the Desert" and "Hey! That's my fish!" which only have random boards, and everyone sees them before game play begins. I do enjoy randomness if it is done well and have seen some really good mechanisms for tempering it to a sweet spot for a game. For example in Power Grid the shuffled deck of power plants is fairly crucial but 8 of them are on display, and you can only buy one of the four worst ones so although there is an exciting chance of getting something seriously good, it isn't enough to throw the game out of balance.
Any good game should require an adaptive strategy, you are trying to outwit your opponents and vica versa, if they can't throw you a few surprises then the game is going to be pretty boring. An AC mentioned poker, saying that by my reasoning it too must be a bad game because you have no control of what cards you get. This misses several important points of poker, in most variations you get to decide if you want to continue before accepting another card so you do get some say, but above all in poker there is very strong player interaction and it is the other players you play, not your hand.
I think that mostly I just can't stand dice. Shuffled cards have some reliable properties, dice have none. Just the fact that it is possible to be out of a game of Monopoly without ever landing on a property you can buy puts me right off. If you are suffering from the ultimate unlucky streak you can literally have no choices to make for your entire game (other than deciding to throw the board on the floor of course).
One thing I see in the some of the games I have enjoyed the most is negative feedback - the better you do the harder it is to keep on doing well, and the worse you do the easier it is to catch up. It means that the players doing well have to be just as careful as anyone else, and even someone who has been having a mostly rotten game (might even have been out of their hands if the other players have been mean) can still be in with a chance if they can just pull off their highly rewarding move of pure genius. Close races are more exciting, so this is definitely something I would be looking at if I ever get around to designing my own game.
On the long, but not insane, front, I'd recommend both Here I Stand and Pax Romana from GMT Games (http://www.gmtgames.com/) as multi-player diplomacy / wargame / empire-building combos that play in a day to a couple of days flat out, or a lot of evenings. (I've been playing both by email over a number of weeks).
Catan is okay, but it's extremely dicey, and it's very possible for your initial setup to screw you over for the rest of the game through no fault of your own, which is, IMO, even _worse_ than elimination, as you're stuck playing a game for the next 30+ minutes you know you have no chance of winning. I found it was fun the first time I played it, but it got progressively less and less fun each time I played it afterwards, until I eventually just gave my copy to someone else. (And to note, I won more often than not, I didn't get rid of it because I "sucked" at it.)
Personally, I'd be more inclined to recommend stuff like Santiago, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, or Reiner Knizia's "Samurai" to start someone off in board gaming, especially Santiago or Ticket to Ride, as they're pretty well designed to keep huge disparities from existing between player skill levels.
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Backgammon is definitely one of the deepest strategy games, and it uses dice as the primary game mechanic. It's how you manage that randomness that is the challenge. Add in the doubling cube, and you've got an extremely nuanced game with very simple gameplay. It also makes for a great gambling game.