Boardgame News

German publisher GameHeads will release Michael Nietzer’s Unter Geiern – Among Vultures – in May 2010. (2-6 players, ages 10+, 30 minutes) In the game, players are vultures on the search for food in the desert. Since you are a vulture, naturally anything dead or decaying will do – the problem is that once you spot something, everyone else will swoop down for a peck, too. Claim thirty prey points before any of your ravenous rivals, and you’ll be the king carrion chomper.

GameHeads has started posting details of Unter Geiern on its website, with one section available now detailing what the various cards are and how to set up the array of desert cards based on the number of players. More chapters to follow in the weeks ahead…

The sixth Swiss game designers’ meeting takes place May 1-2, 2010 at Le Musée Suisse du Jeu – the Swiss Museum of Games. Designers Niek Neuwahl and Kris Burm will be the guests for this year’s event, so as co-organizer Sébastien Pauchon writes, “part of the disussions will be about abstract games, as you can guess.”

All game designers, whether Swiss or not, are welcome to attend the event and have their prototypes critiqued by a peer group of designers. For the cost of the event and schedule of activities, along with application details, visit this information page.

Cyril Demaegd of Ystari Games has passed along images from the company’s new version of Michael Schacht’s Industry to show off the new look. Note that both the cover and gameboard are still works in progress. As for U.S. distribution of the game, Demaegd says that nothing has been finalized as of yet but the game will be released outside of Europe.

Hi Miss Meeples, I run a game group and I’m noticing that one of the members isn’t quite keeping up with more complex games --- he mainly likes party games and doesn’t seem to take to more “complex” games like Through the Ages or Battlestar Galactica. Any time he plays such a game, he really seems to be struggling and doesn’t seem to enjoy the experience and takes a VERY long time to make decisions, to the point of it being painful and uncomfortable for the other players. At the same time, he doesn’t seem to notice that his not keeping up is becoming a liability for the other players and won’t bow out or say “this is just not my cup of tea, I’ll wait for another game that’s more my style”. Most of the time we’re diplomatic and just put up with it, and we don’t want to hurt his feelings, but is there a better approach to this delicate situation? Thanks…

Complex games can easily break down into very slowly moving affairs, making them last a long time and convincing people never to play these types of games again just because of the time involved.  I think that it’s important when you are playing these kinds of games that you explain this experience beforehand, and ask that people try to move the game along before playing. If this doesn’t work for this particular player, then you can explain to him privately that a certain pace is expected while playing more complex games and that unfortunately he’s not keeping up, making the other players uncomfortable. If he still doesn’t get it, then I think you’ll need to suggest alternate activities, depending on your situation. For example, I’m having a meetup this weekend for 90+ minute strategy games. If someone whom I thought couldn’t handle the complexity wanted to come, I’d suggest a different gaming venue for him or her. Now not everyone has this luxury and if you don’t, then you will have to be firm with the person, asking him not to play.  If the situation is such that he’s one of four or so people who are invited to play, and there’s no other alternative game for him to play, then you’ll need to decide how much you need him. If he’s the fourth for a game of Tichu you will be stuck. You also want to avoid him being the only one not playing because that is not fair or comfortable for anyone involved.

I realize this is a lot of if’s and I also realize I could have written back to clarify the exact situation. However I wanted to discuss different scenarios so that others may get some help too.

A comment from my last column:

….. the fact that no one out of the 99 boardgamers at this group is willing to accommodate [a problem person] after two meetings.  From my experience, a group that is only a fraction of that size already has quite a range of people with varying levels of social skills.  In an open gaming meeting, that is often the price you pay, if you look at it in terms of your own personal enjoyment.  That is why many people I know host invitation-only gaming at their homes.

My only two regular gaming nights are both open to the public, and that means that sometimes I game with people who are not the types of people with whom I would normally enjoy spending my free time.  Does that make those people truly “harmful”?

In my experience, when a player is dragging things down or exhibiting inappropriate behavior, the best way to deal with the situation is speaking with him about it (preferably not in front of the group).  Either that person will want to change to continue to be part of the group, or you have grounds to discontinue the invitation. 

Confrontation is by no means easy, especially when it deals with personal issues (such as “Would you please take a shower before you come to the game night"), but again, that is one of the responsibilities of an open gaming group organizer.

I do appreciate this person’s honesty in struggling with the question, and his clear concern for both the 99 and the 1.

For me, these types of situations require 1)healthy boundaries, 2)when necessary, confrontation in love, and 3)sometimes sacrificing myself--and the 99--for the one. Posted by Jeff Allers on Feb 26, 2010

I agree with most of Jeff’s posting. I’m not sure though how much real difference there is between an ‘open’ gaming group at a game store or other semi-private place and a home though. For those of us who are running meetups in our homes, yes, it’s ‘invitation only’ but it’s usually pretty easy to get an invitation (which is why we use meetup.com). Also the game store that I’m most familiar with has some pretty clear social requirements for gaming there.

What concerns me most (and I had mentioned this previously in the comments) is sacrificing people for a single person, despite the issues that person may have. A couple of months ago, I found myself spending a lot of time with a particularly problematic player in my group. I thought about it later, and realized that I wasn’t being fair to the other players who had attended the meetup and that I was ignoring them for this person. You can never assume that just because someone behaves ‘normally’ that that person doesn’t also have major issues in their life and they are playing games to help them get through what’s going on in their life. To subject these people to someone who is not following the rules, is testing the boundaries, and is generally annoying, upsetting, or immature is not fair. And I won’t do it. I’ve said this before, but in the end you can only play board games if others are willing to play with you. It’s your responsibility to make playing games with you a pleasant experience. It’s not other people’s problem to put up with someone who is outside of the boundaries. No one has to take that on.

Now if there’s someone with obvious issues, and you (as an organizer) ask people if they will work with that person, then I’m fine with that because people can say no. But when you seat these types of people at a table with others who don’t know what’s going on, that’s just not fair nor social and will generally cause resentment. Note I’m not saying that’s what Jeff would do. Resentment can lead to people not coming back, which would then make the whole situation worse. 

Enough for this week! Comments are welcome! Questions for me to answer in the column are needed too!

Z-Man Games has posted a game page for Daniel George’s Road Kill Rally with pics of the components and a release date of June 2010. (3-6 players, ages 12+, 60-120 minutes, $60) Here’s a brief description from the publisher:

2035 – The Road-Kill Rally becomes a worldwide phenomenon, attracting contestants from throughout the world. Ratings exceed three billion for the Rally Cup Finals, making it the most watched spectacle in human history.

As a driver in the Road-Kill Rally, you are racing against opponents eager to destroy you with guns, rockets and flame throwers. But the big points come from scoring pedestrians: running them over or blasting them out of the road. After all, you have three billion viewers to satisfy.

Think of this as Car Wars meets Death Race 2000.

The page includes a rules link (PDF) for those who want more details. This game has been updated on Gone Cardboard.

Z-Man Games has also unveiled the logo for a future release, Earth Reborn, that apparently features a world littered with metal, bullets, blood and eyeballs. No other info at the moment.

Lookout Games has announced a new title for release in June 2010 – although the game might slip a month later or arrive in May at the Spielwahnsinn ("Game Madness") event in Herne, Germany. The new game is Die Minen von Zavandor from designer Alexander Pfister with graphics by Lookout regular Klemens Franz. (2-4 players, ages 10+, 45-90 minutes, ~€35)

Die Minen von Zavandor is set in Lookout’s fantasy world of Zavandor, but otherwise has no direct connection to Lookout’s The Scepter of Zavandor. In this game, which has a bidding mechanism at its heart, players are dwarves who try to equip their mines with buildings and people that will prove useful during the game, in addition to earning them points at game’s end. In his blog, Pfister describes (in German) Minen as being less complicated than Scepter. He also says that the bidding mechanism doesn’t feel like a classic auction: “The minimum purchase price of the buildings / artifacts is 3 gems – but with a starting income of 2-3 gems, the question is usually not how much you should offer, but whether you should even make an offer.” Bidding is handled simultaneously, he says, so the game has little waiting time and plays smoothly.

Update, March 10, 2010: Lookout Games’ Hanno Girke has said that negotiations for an English edition of the game are still underway. In his words, “There are several options – you can safely assume that there will be some kind of EN edition, but it’s just not quite sure what logo you can find on the box.”

Z-Man Games has announced that it will release the Stefan Feld title Die Speicherstadt in English under the name – wait for it – The Speicherstadt. (2-5 players, ages 8+, 45 minutes) As Z-Man’s Zev Shlasinger writes on his sneak peak page, “cause Warehouse just ain’t exciting.”

In case you missed this March 2010 item about eggertspiele’s release of the game, here’s a brief description of game play:

Players have three workers that they allocate to the available cards each round, with one more card on display than the number of players. Once all the workers have been placed, cards are sold from left to right; the player owning the first worker in line has the first option of buying the card at a cost of one coin per worker in that line. If the player passes, he removes his worker, thus dropping the price for the next worker in line. After each round, each player receives one coin, with those who bought no cards receiving two coins.

Ship cards contain three randomly drawn goods. The other cards available include clients who want particular goods, firemen, buildings that provide storage or a way to convert goods to money immediately, and cards worth only victory points. Four fire cards are mixed into the deck, which has sets of cards arranged in particular layers. When a fire is drawn, the player with the most firemen earns VPs while the one with the fewest loses points. The game ends with the fourth fire, then players tally their VPs.

This game has been added to Gone Cardboard.

Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve talked about the kids and gaming – but that’s because I’ve been so busy working on games that I haven’t been able to spend as much time playing games with the kids (or other adults for that matter!) However, the kids’ birthdays have recently come and gone, and the immediate aftermath of the celebrations are a closetful of new boardgames for the kids.  And, with this new stack of games comes the daily requests for me to teach them new boardgames.  The funny thing is – they don’t want to learn the games that they were given… They want to learn the games off MY shelf!  So, as I am starting to prepare for a spring filled with teaching games to the kids – I’m reviewing my guidelines that I try to follow when teaching the kids any new game.

1) Only teach the kids a game that they want to learn

I’m a proud parent, and like most parents, I think that my kids are smart.  They can understand concepts in games that I would never guess that they could grasp.  While they often don’t see advanced strategies or subtle points in games, their young minds are able to pick up the basic idea of most games quickly.  That being said, if the kids aren’t interested in playing or learning a game, not a single idea will enter their minds.  I’d have a better chance of teaching our new guinea pigs a game than a disinterested child.  Therefore, I will only try to teach a game to my kids once they ask about it or ask to learn in.  I’ll admit that I’m guilty of conspicuously leaving games in places where the kids will “run into” them and hopefully become entranced by the cover art so that they will ask me about it – but this has to be the first step.

So, much to my surprise, the kids have been asking all week to learn Dominion.  Which I was thrilled to hear because I’d been waiting for about a year for the kids to ask again.  They had tried to learn last summer, but the game proved to be a bit too much for them at that time.  I’ve been wanting to try to teach them again, but I had tried to wait them out until they asked.  And, this week – they finally asked!  They have also recently asked me to teach them Clue F/X, FITS, and Risk Black Ops.  (They weren’t thrilled with my answer that Risk Black Ops was not to be opened!)

2) Start with the basics

Well, many of the games that we play can be complicated.  I find that the methods that I would normally use to teach other gamers simply don’t work with a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old.  Most importantly, I find that I can’t just rattle off the entire ruleset at once and have the kids follow me along.  Usually, I have to break the game down into different parts and go over each part until they get it.  This might lead to a few aborted turns as we learn portions of the game, but I’ve found that this is the most successful way to go about it.

So, for Dominion, I’m going to start first by giving them a pre-built deck.  I’ll show them the 10 cards they always start with and go ahead a throw in a few easy Action cards (say Smithy, Village and Woodcutter).  We’ll just start playing the game with me explaining how to draw a hand, play an Action card if it comes up, and then redrawing a hand at the end.  This scenario will also help me illustrate how to buy a card, how much those cards cost, etc.  It will also let the kids figure out how and when they need to shuffle their discard piles.  As we start, I’m not going to worry about telling them about victory point cards or game end conditions.  I just want the kids to get a basic grasp for what goes on in each turn.

3) It’s OK not to teach them everything at once!

Once we’re good with that, I’ll likely move on to explaining the different action cards.  Again, I’ll likely take a stepwise approach to this – probably starting with 5 or 6 cards from the starting 10.  At this point, we’ll try playing a few rounds again just so the kids can get used to the different cards.  In addition to Smithy, Village, and Woodcutter, I might add in Workshop, Militia and/or Moat.  Once the kids are comfortable with these cards, I think it would be a good time to finally introduce the victory point cards and the game end conditions.

4) Try to shorten the initial games to keep their interest high

At this point, I think that we’d be ready to play a game.  Well, not a full game – while I’d like to keep the endgame conditions the same (Provinces gone or any 3 piles) – I have had a lot of success with non-gamers in cutting down the size of the piles.  Maybe 5 cards in each of the Action card and Victory card stacks.  Yes, this totally cuts down the length of the game, but that’s what I’m trying to do here!  I’m fairly certain that the kids’ decks will be chock full of actions and/or Estates, so this will be a way to make the game run a bit shorter while still giving them the flavor of the tension of the game ending with three piles gone.  Until the kids get a little better idea with what they want to do with their decks, I’d likely keep to the smaller card piles to keep the length of the game in a range where they won’t lose interest. 

5) Finally move onto the full game as they master the smaller parts

After a few of these games, it’ll be time to move onto the full set of 10 Action piles, and then give the kids a few games to learn the new cards… And hopefully, before I know it, we’ll be able to play the Starting 10 in a full game!  After that, we can swap out two or three cards at a time so that they can learn the rest of the cards in small doses. 

So we’ll see how this works, as I’ll be trying it out with the kids over the next few weeks – of course, trying to find time amongst the multiple soccer practices, playing with the new pets, and all the other things that keep us busy each day!  We’re around step 3 right now, and things are going as I have foreseen… Bwahaha!

Scrabble Puzzle Answer –

No new puzzle this week, it’s been too busy at work to come up with something suitable for here… But, here is the answer to the Scrabble challenge from a few weeks back…

My high score of 267 was created with the following words

STORMED – 33
OXEN – 38
QATS – 52
BEATINGS – 72
LIPOID – 36
FOAMING - 36

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

One item that’s been on my to-do list forever is to transform Gone Cardboard into a sortable list along the lines of this Xbox 360 release calendar on IGN.com. I’ve tried a couple of things, but have been unable to discover the right set-up for the Expression Engine blogging software behind Boardgame News. If anyone wants to email me to offer programming advice, I’d be grateful, especially since I want to expand GC coverage beyond North America in the near future.

French website Jeux sur un Plateau recorded a number of game descriptions during its trip to the Nuremberg game fair in February 2010, including one of the forthcoming alea title Glen More, designed by Matthias Cramer. Here’s a short game description from a Jan. 2010 item on BGN: “Players are members of Scottish clans who want to increase their territorial holdings, whether to enlarge pastures for their sheep and cattle (to be sold later at market), to cultivate corn (and perhaps later transform that into whiskey), or to develop ideal locations along lakes or near castles. Success comes down to making the right decision at the right time.” For more details, watch the video below.

Glen More should be in German shops by the end of April 2010, according to alea’s Stefan Brück, with the German rules available for download in mid-April.  (2-5 players, ages 10+, 45-70 minutes, €22) Thanks to JSP editor Olivier Arneodo for permission to repost this video on BGN!

Jeux sur un Plateau : Glen More (Alea)
Uploaded by jsp-mag.

The International Abstract Games Organization (IAGO) has set up a leaderboard that pulls game result information from igGameCenter.com, Super Duper Games and Games.WTanaka.com, then compares players across similar games. Dozens of games are included on the leaderboard, from traditional games like Fanorona and Hex to modern designs such as Cannon, Amazons and Pulling Strings.

The leaderboard is still in the testing phase at this point, says IAGO’s Rich Hutnik. “All of this is automated from a data feed from the partner sites, so there’s no manual entry of data. Players who register at the IAGO site will be tracked this way… We will be looking to add the Arimaa site next, then we hope to get more sites on later.”

Néstor Romeral Andrés has released a new title of his own design from nestorgames: Way of the Dragon. The game marries the die-rolling mechanism from Yahtzee – roll five dice up to three times, rerolling dice as you desire – with a Chinese theme and a racing platform. After a player finishes rolling dice, she chooses one or more dice that show the same element and moves a playing piece of her color forward in that element’s column a number of spaces equal to the number of dice on display. Alternatively, if each die shows a different element, she moves a piece forward in each of the five columns. Each space can be occupied by only one piece, and while you must move if you can, in some cases you might be out of luck.

The final five spaces in each column are numbered 1-5, and once a piece lands on a number it stays there for the rest of the game – unless a player rolls four or five dragons, in which case she can swap two pieces in the same column. When one player places all five pieces in the scoring zones, the game ends and players tally their score by summing the numbers on which their pieces stand.

Complete rules for Way of the Dragon, along with special player powers for an advanced game, are available on the game’s page on the nestorgames’ website. (2-5 players, 30 minutes, €27)

From the BBC comes this story about the purchase of the 1941 game Adler Luftverteidigungs Spiel in an auction for £600:

“I’ve been looking for this particular game for over 40 years,” said the [House on the Hill Toy Museum] owner Alan Goldsmith....

“When [the Allies] bombed Dresden and burnt the factory down all the games went with it, other than the ones that were sold before them, so they’re extremely rare.”

He added: “You have 88m guns and one person is defending the Fatherland, the other person is the English bomber pilot.

Sounds like a good description of Friedemann de Pedro’s Duel in the Dark. Interesting to see game settings repeat like this over the decades…

From a Ryan Bradley article in The Atlantic:

1. Pick up the abalone. This may require prying the abalone from its hold, and using a stainless steel putty knife is recommended.

But let’s back up for a minute, because maybe you’re wondering, What is an abalone? Or, Isn’t it a board game? And maybe, Why should I care about the sex of a board game you crazyperson? To answer: It is both a sea snail and a board game. But you can’t sauté the board game in butter or sell it for $50 a pound in Japan. People don’t form international smuggling rings or get themselves eaten by great white sharks over the board game.

Au contraire, Mr. Bradley – everyone knows that the easiest way to slide those marbles down your windpipe is to coat them liberally with a beurre blanc. As for becoming a shark meal out of desire for a board game, well, maybe someone else can speak to that…

I already wrote about Klaus Teuber’s Settlers of America: Trails to Rails in my 2010 NY Toy Fair coverage, but now publisher Mayfair Games has released the cover image and clarified a few other details, so here’s the publisher’s description:

The 19th Century has arrived and Americans are heading west. Wagon trains are forming up and heading out to settle new lands and build new cities. These new cities will need railroad lines to bring in new people and necessary goods. Some head west for the adventure, some to start a new life, still others to find work.

Look west to make your fortune. As the population grows, resources will dwindle and the smart money seeks new sources and new markets. Finance your settlers as they head west to build the cities of tomorrow. Link these cities with rails of steel and operate your railroad to supply the townsfolk with goods. To the west lie lands to settle and fortunes to be made!

Settlers of America: Trails to Rails utilizes the familiar Catan hex-tile grid to present a map of the United States. Players collect and trade resources, in order to purchase, migrate and build settlements, forge railroads and acquire locomotives. Railroads are used to distribute goods to the interconnected cities. As westward locations are settled, old sources of resources deplete. The addition of gold adds to the depth of play and increases options for the players.

As I noted previously, Settlers of America will be available only in English from Mayfair Games with a release date of June 2010. No other edition is planned at this time. (2-4 players, ages 10+, 60-90 minutes, $55)

At least that’s what Alliance Game Distributors is announcing in a recent game solicitation to retailers. I’ve poked game designer Tom Lehmann about providing another designer diary about the game’s background, as he has done so ably for the previous Race for the Galaxy titles. Fingers crossed…

I’ve played a trio of new games in the past couple of months that have the unusual quality of featuring two games within the same game: Mystery Express, Cornucopia and Martinique. How did these mash-ups turn out? Anyone recall a David Cronenberg flick from the mid-1980s?

Let’s start by looking at the new Days of Wonder title from Antoine Bauza and Serge Laget. I’ve played an advance review copy of Mystery Express three times now, and feedback from players has been all over the board. (I’ll post a complete review in the next couple of weeks, prior to the game’s general release.) The most damning criticism has come from two people who have refused to play the game again due to one aspect of its design. What’s more, a third player skipped game night this past week because I had expressed a desire to play Mystery Express again that session.

What’s all the fuss about? Most of Mystery Express revolves around the familiar “find the missing card(s)” mechanism of Clue, a deduction game staple that also shows up in Alibi, Black Vienna, Mystery of the Abbey and Martinique (described below). In Mystery Express, each deck of cards – Suspect, Motive, Location, Modus Operandi – consists of pairs of cards, with one card being removed from each deck at random. The remaining cards are shuffled together and dealt to the players, with a few cards being introduced into the game in later rounds. By peeking at cards, passing them and stealing them, your challenge is to find the singleton card in each deck among all the pairs.

The second part of the game requires players to identify when the murder took place, and this aspect of the game runs parallel to the first but on a separate track. A deck of 24 time cards shows eight different times – 4:00, 4:30, 4:45, etc. – with each time appearing thrice on numberless clocks. At the start of the game, one card is tucked under the board and players must identify which card appears in the deck only twice. Unlike all the other cards, the time cards are revealed three times during the game in three different ways:

1. The active player flips over the cards one by one into a single stack at whatever pace she wants.

2. The cards are dealt into as many stacks as there are players, with each player receiving a stack; the active player calls “pass” whenever she wants to change hands, with each player looking at each hand only once.

3. As in the first reveal the active player flips over the cards one by one, but into three adjacent stacks.

Thus, the analytical, highly interactive deductive aspect of Mystery Express is paired with a solitaire-ish pattern recognition challenge that frequently devolves into a race to look at the cards as quickly as possible. In one game, for example, a player managed to deduce the proper time in the first pass through the deck. (He said that he paid attention to a few particular times and happened to get lucky with his choices.) Turns out that he was the active player for the second pass through the deck, so he picked up his stack, skimmed the cards for five seconds, called “pass,” skimmed the next batch, called “pass” within seconds, and so on just to verify his findings – which resulted in no one else finding out anything and all of us cursing him.

When I read the rules, I knew that certain people in my play group would hate this aspect of the game, and their facial contortions upon hearing the rules described proved me right. Playing the game did nothing to change their opinion either. Hence, the boycotts. One player said that he enjoyed the rest of the game a lot, but his hatred of the time mechanism was so intense that he was still complaining about it days later!

Thankfully, if you or your fellow players despise the time mechanism in Mystery Express as much as some folks do in my group, you can play without that aspect of the game and lose little in terms of the overall challenge.

I already discussed the “two games in one” aspect of Cornucopia, designed by Carlo A. Rossi and Lorenzo Tarabini and published by FRED/Gryphon Games, in this January 2010 column. To recap, on your turn you choose how many cards to turn over from a deck of fruit and vegetable cards, then you turn over those cards one by one to see whether you can fill one of five baskets with five items following various rules. Penalties or rewards follow as appropriate. When it’s not your turn, you can bet on whether the active player will succeed or fail in filling the basket.

This second action has no relation to the first other than that you’ll earn or lose a few points through betting and that might affect your chance of winning the game. The real importance of the second action is to make you care about what other people do on their turn. Without those bets, you’d simply be staring at up to four people flipping up to a half-dozen cards each. Booooring!

While the betting system somewhat works to keep you involved on each turn, players tend to shuffle a ton of chips to and from the bank with little effective gain. Busy, busy, busy. What’s worse, as I wrote in my earlier column,

...the bidding feels superfluous in the two-player game. With two players, you’re alternating card draws so the bidding on success/failure feels like an interruption of the main action. At best, between active turns you win or lose a point, which is a distraction from the bidding cards and rewards for filling baskets. With five players, though, the bidding can net you four points between your “real” turns, so it becomes as important (if not as interesting) as the main game.

I published a preview of Martinique in Sept. 2009 that summarizes the game play with quotes from designer Emanuele Ornella. To summarize: Players move over an island composed of treasure tiles and map tiles with their four pirates. Whenever a pirate leaves a tile, it moves 1-3 spaces depending on the number shown on the tile it leaves, then it claims that tile. Map tiles show the letters A-H and numbers 1-8, while treasure tiles show different symbols; whenever a player collects treasure tiles that match one of the three small treasures available, the player must discard those tiles and claim the small treasure.

Once all eight pirates have finished moving – often because they have no tiles on which to move – players take turns placing them on the location where they think the Lost Treasure is located. This location is identified by the one letter and one number tile removed at the start of the game. Find the Lost Treasure with one of your pirates, and you win; if no one wins this way, whoever claims the largest value in small treasures wins.

So you have a deduction game married with a set collection game – but in four playings someone has always won by finding the Lost Treasure, which makes all the time spent finding other treasures seem meaningless. Each player usually nabs a roughly equal portion of the 14 available map tiles, and leaping over an opponent’s pirate lets you peek at one of the opponent’s map tiles, an event that has happened a couple of times each game.

Thus, both players have a lot of information available, and once a player starts placing pirates on suspected buried treasure, you reveal even more information to the opponent. In my most recent game, for example, I placed one pirate, then the opponent placed three of hers. (Pirates guess the treasure in the order they left the board.) By chance, I placed my pirate in a number column that she didn’t have, so she plonked her pirates within that same column on various letter tiles, hitting the winning location along the way.

You can bluff by placing a pirate on a location that you know isn’t valid, but with only four pirates to place, bluffing seems like a risky option. Arguably, however, I should have done just that in my last game since I had a larger share of the small treasures. Better to have misled my opponent by choosing a number column in my possession than possibly give her real information about where the Lost Treasure was located. A lesson for the future, I suppose.

Martinique works fine aside from some graphics issues, and all of the information other than the map tiles is open, so players can ponder a lot over the “if I move there, then you can move there” type of plays found in such games. With better play, perhaps the twin aspects of the game would merge for me into a more acceptable whole, but for now I’m still seeing the stiff hairs emerging from Seth Brundle’s back and recoiling…

I’ve been waiting to play Conflict of Heroes for a long time. The idea of a relatively lightweight yet demanding World War 2 tactical game really got me excited and the only reason I didn’t dive in right away was because the historical background of the first game didn’t interest me much. I almost bought Storms of Steel but eventually passed on that because it looked like what I really wanted, a Normandy campaign iteration of the system, was coming up next. So until that time I was reliant on a friend getting a copy to try the game. Someone eventually came up trumps with Awakening the Bear and I sat down to get my fill of squad level Operation Barbarossa action.

Whilst listening to the rules explanation, something starting nagging me slightly at the back of my brain, but it didn’t dare come forward until we were properly stuck in to the carnage. The game reminded me a lot of something, and not just Eastern Front history. It reminded me very closely of one of the many dubious prototype games I’ve had the misfortune to attempt to design during my years of gaming. There really were a lot of similarities in the basic system: both CoH and my own design were tactical WW2 games which revolved around the use of individual action point tallies for units and a generic pool of action points that could be used to react to actions by the opposing forces and which went down as units (and their command structures) were destroyed. My game was simpler, focused more on generic unit types and had a different combat system built around the principle of fire concentration, but clearly I’d had a lot of the same basic ideas as Uwe.

So when I went home that night, the thrill of my hard-earned victory was tinged with a vague annoyance that if I’d worked at what I had a bit harder I might have been able to build something just as lauded as the CoH series and I might have been a rather more self-satisfied and marginally richer human being. I awoke the next morning a rather humbler and marginally wiser human being instead.

During the night I’d been thinking about what made CoH different from my design, rather than what made it similar. And what struck me was that that list of differences included virtually everything that made CoH an innovative and entertaining game to play. My game didn’t have the clever red/blue system that makes armoured versus non-armoured combat in CoH such a breeze. It didn’t have the activate unit or pass element that adds such a deliciously tricky timing element to the game. It didn’t have the cards and the added interest and tactics which they provide. It didn’t have the historical research to back up the scenarios or the unit statistics in the game. It didn’t make a point of trying to streamline rules and play by shoehorning as much realism as possible into those unit statistics rather than the rulebook. In short, it was nothing, and the crowning indignity was the realisation that virtually every historical gamer that has ever played Tikal or something similar must have had the basic idea of trying to use a Euro-esque AP system in a war game.

What I’d unwittingly taught myself was one way of telling the difference between a great game and an ordinary game without actually playing it: look at the basic idea the game is based on, ignore it, and look at what’s built on top to see what gives the game a distinctive edge. Imperial would be dull if you just look at the military rules and the stock market rules: what makes it a great game is the fact that each rule set has subtle knock-on effects to the other. Twilight Struggle would be a rather lesser game if it just mimicked basic CDG principles without the innovation of triggering your opponents events. Titan would look a lot like any other dudes on a map game if not for the tactical/strategic split and the cunning way in which loosing creatures (usually) gains you Angels and a better Titan. 

This is important. It’s important because it seems to me that adding some sort of extra level of coolness on top of the basic game concept is exactly what the designers of any number of faceless, forgotten games have failed to do. It’s important because that extra level is the reason behind the failure of quite a lot of hotly-anticipated titles which didn’t manage to live up to the hype. Take Kingsburg for example. About a year ago it was the bees knees, with fans crawling all over it, endless discussion of relative merits and strategy and much excitement over an upcoming expansion. Now where is it? Largely forgotten. And when you look at it, the reason becomes perfectly clear: Kingsburg doesn’t actually do anything particularly interesting that another Euro-dice game doesn’t do better. It has nothing that Yspahan or even Stone Age don’t have except a fairly meaningless, bolted on “final battle” to give a vague illusion of co-operative gaming because that happened to be fashionable around the time it was released. Stone Age, even though I actually enjoy playing it less than I do Kingsburg, is clearly a deeper and more inventive game in the way it mixes dice-rolling with the tediously ever-popular worker placement trope. Yspahan, on the other hand, was one of the original wave of games that bought a welcome return for dice to the Euro genre, and even though it’s substantially older than Kingsburg now has a subtantially better rating over at BGG.

This in itself illustrates an important point. This is about building blocks of design. Twilight Struggle is a great game partly because it does something that no other CDG currently does. But of course you can follow the design history of CDGs back into the ages and for each of the most memorable games you’ll see it did something different from it’s predecessor. We the People started the whole design trend, Hannibal began the now standard approach of mixing events and operations on the same card, in Successors it became multi-player and in Paths of Glory the basic concept got a brand-new rules makeover. And so far those would pretty much be most people’s pick for top CDGs - I think it’s no coincidence that the less succesful games in the series are those which have taken the same basic rules and concepts used by an exisiting game and done nothing but change the history and the setting. So Yspahan follows the trend because it stood out by being new and fresh when it was released and it still sticks in the mind - but Kingsburg did pretty much the same thing differently and has been largely forgotten.

The point of all this is that I think it illustrates nicely an argument I’ve always made in the past, which is that genuine innovation in game design is overrated. Board and card game design is inherently limited by what’s on offer to construct a game: paper, card, plastic, dice and the players’ imaginations. The idea of mixing electronic media into gaming as in something like Space Alert is all very well but one reason I’ve never played Space Alert is because I play a lot of games in the pub where I’m not sat next to a personal CD player, and as long as computers remain larger than mobile phones, and media remains bulky and of mixed types, this is going to be a problem. The best way to innovate something in game design is to build on what has gone before rather than trying to strike out boldly into the unknown: and the best way to build on what has gone before it seems is to take something that impresses you and see what it is that you can add, in particular, that makes it genuinely better and not just just different.

There’s no other great conclusion to draw here, I’m afraid, except that designers - especially amateur self-publishing designers - could do a lot worse than to try and look at their games from this angle and see whether or not what they’ve created has that extra angle, that extra thing that makes is special and if it hasn’t, keep working at it until that extra level is there. And for us poor game-buying public perhaps we could learn the same lesson so that when we’re buying blind we have an extra tool in our inventory to make sure we’re picking up games that are likely to be, and to stay, the cream of the crop instead of rapidly becoming yesterdays’ has-beens.

Lewis Pulsipher, designer of Brittania, floats the following argument on his blog:

Many people worldwide have talked about a maxim related to any kind of manufactured goods, or to projects, that runs like this: For production in general, “fast, cheap, good – you can have two out of three.” ...

In boardgames, the maxim is something like “short, simple to play, richly detailed. In boardgames, you can have two out of three,” but almost never three out of three.

Oddly, he then suggests that “[g]ames using cards are more likely to be able to achieve all three, I think, with Magic: the Gathering being an example of the many collectible (and sometimes non-collectible) card games that achieve all three.” While certain games of Magic would be simple to play – ones in which the preconstructed decks consist of few special abilities – I’d suggest that most games of Magic would not meet that standard. Cast “Warp World” in a multi-player game for a bunch of creatures with “comes into play” abilities and simple is out the window.

How would you formulate the “two out of three” maxim for games? And do you think it holds true?