Tabletop Archives | Page 29 of 30

Cracked LCD: Fun-First Design

June 21, 2012August 2, 2020 Michael Barnes 21 Comments

In last week’s review of Abaddon, I very nearly undermined years of trying to write “serious” board games criticism. I attacked certain aspects of it before giving in to its “fun-first” design. Did you see what I did there? I more or less stated that the art and design part of games is irrelevant if you’re having fun. Noted Metacritic rabble-rouser Tom Chick believes that you can’t write about “fun” because it’s so subjective and that is true, but if we as critics are not writing about fun as part of the experience of games are we failing to speak to the core intent of the medium? Are designers that are developing games where mechanics, process, and depth are the focus betraying the purpose of playing them?

Abaddon isn’t a great design. It’s rudimentary, basic, and it’s a stick figure drawing compared to the baroque masterwork represented by something like Mage Knight or Labyrinth: War on Terror. I loved those two very complex games, and they were my picks for Game of the Year in 2011 and 2010 respectively. But in playing a game like Abaddon or other games that focus more on that notoriously subjective and to some indefinable quality of fun, I wonder if we’re actually getting closer to a state of pure intent and the essential purpose of the games medium.

Games are- well, they should be- fun. We play them with friends and family to have a good time, to enjoy ourselves, to laugh, and to interact using the game as a social centerpiece. If you’re playing games for any other reason, as I’ve always said, then you’re doing it wrong. Of course, what that fun happens to be is where it gets hazy. I do have fun playing Mage Knight and Labyrinth, but it’s very different than the fun I have playing Abaddon. The fun I have with those games is from the sense of discovery of strategic routes through the mechanics, how the mechanics describe setting and concept, and in the hobbyist notion of drilling down through layers of depth to get at those nuggets of entertainment. With Abaddon- and other games like Magical Athelete, Talisman, Chaostle, and the Really Nasty Horse Racing Game- that fun is much more at a surface level, not buried beneath rules and process. You don’t have to work at being the kid on the back of the box cheering.

It strikes me that there is a clear distinction between “fun-first” design and those designs where elaboration of detail and coordination of mechanics- in some ways the true technical artistry of game creation- are the primary focus. This division can extend to explaining one of the chief differences between so-called “casual” and “hardcore” games. In a “casual” game, you may have a single mechanic and the intent is to entertain and engage the audience without demanding commitment or that drilling-down action through layers of systemic rules. “Hardcore” games insist that the player work for the fun, and in fact that process of working for the fun often is the fun. The question becomes which of these kinds of games is fun to you at the time you’re playing them. I’ve come to always ask myself when playing any game, before any other consideration “am I having fun doing this?”

As much as I love Mage Knight, Labyrinth, Starcraft, Magic Realm, and other often terrifyingly complicated games, invariably the ones that my games gang always go back to are the ones that are the fun-first designs. We may talk a lot about wanting to play Here I Stand, but what we really want to play is more Cosmic Encounter and King of Tokyo. Because in games like that, the fun rises to the top almost immediately and there’s no buy-in or lead-in to get to it. I’ve come to treasure game designs that respect my time and practically guarantee that my table is going to have a good time. Fun-first designs also seem to favor heavy interaction, metagaming, and socialization, which is what I’m looking for when I get together with my friends for a game night.

Of course, a lot of what makes a fun-first design work- or a mechanics-first design for that matter- is how your group receives and enacts it. A table of six people that have all learned Here I Stand backwards and forwards is going to have a much shorter rules-to-fun distance than a table of six newbies. A table of milquetoast wallflowers is likely going to shun a rowdy, raucous fun-first design like Ca$h and Gun$. A rowdy bunch of drunk trash-talkers isn’t going to get anywhere near whatever fun there is in a Phil Eklund game. Subjectivity crashes the party again.

Regardless, I think that there are clear identifiers that separate these kinds of games. Other than the issue of experiential subjectivity (after all, some people somehow find Princes of Florence fun), there is a potential schism that presents itself in approaching how to critically evaluate these games. It’s hard to apply the same critical rigor and valuation that can be used to quantify what makes a game like Magic Realm or Up Front great to simpler, fun-first fare like Bohnanza or Heroscape. It’s like writing about an ABBA pop song and describing it in terms more suited to a Steve Reich composition or trying to evaluate the films of Lars Von Triers with those of Zack Snyder as the comparative fulcrum.

I don’t think that this means that we can’t speak and write intelligently or academically about gaming’s fun-first “pop” games, nor does it necessarily devalue the importance of the larger, more technical designs. But I do question which of these approaches to design are closer to getting at the core potential of games as a medium. I also question whether games truly have the capacity to be not “fun” in the same way that challenging or difficult music and films are, yet still demonstrate the value of the game format as an expressive media. No one gets together with five friends to sit around a game for six hours to contemplate death, drug addiction, infidelity, or the morality of war. Can games truly express these things without the veneer of fun, or does the medium fall apart when fun is not the focus at some stage in the experience? Or is the “fun-first” design that strips away the medium’s barriers and rigorous processes and entertains the purer, more culturally relevant expression of the games format?

I don’t have a complete answer. It’s not a simple question of genre or classification, and it’s not merely a “casual” contra “hardcore” argument. It’s a fundamental discrepancy at the heart of game design and game criticism. Take for example a game like Lords of Waterdeep. It’s abstract and derivative. Critically, it should fail- if we’re examining it under the assumption that its design goals are to tell a Dungeons & Dragons story, innovate the worker placement genre, or offer a fresh take on hybridizing American and European styles. However, if we approach the game as a fun-first design that has an agenda of stripping away rules, process, and inaccessibility it emerges as a successful game. In a field with Caylus, Agricola, and Dungeon Lords it fails. In a field with the D&D Adventure System games or classic German family games it works.

And then there’s the narrative issue. I’ve long argued that theme, setting, and story are critical points of valuation in assessing a design, even if those things are present only at the highest or most perfunctory level. Yet a game like Sackson’s classic Can’t Stop, which is just about rolling dice and pushing your luck, emerges as a totally successful fun-first design. Likewise, an example could be made of any number of simple dexterity games and those classic German family games that are not focused on expressing narratives because they’re pushing the “fun” aspect to the front. There’s a German game from 1982 called Millionenspiel that’s really just about betting where a pawn will land on a track (shades of roulette) and it’s one of the most fun and dramatic games I’ve ever played- and it tells absolutely no story and features zero sense of setting. Touching on Lords of Waterdeep again, nobody is fooled into thinking that the game “feels” like sending adventurers out to fight beholders- I hope. But in this example, the D&D window-dressing, nomenclature, and setting- no matter how lightly applied or how little story is told- is leveraged itself along with simplistic mechanics to generate and abet the fun-first concept, particularly for fans of the property.

It appears that identifying which games are “fun-first” and which are not is in some ways a matter of managing expectations and appropriately receiving the designer or designers’ intent. You don’t go into a film called “The Sorrow and the Pity” and expect a rollicking good time. You also don’t go into a game called “King of Tokyo” and expect brain-burning efficiency puzzles and gaming in quiet solitude. As the critical standards for writing and discussing games are more or less an ad-hoc, any-amateur-can-play free-for-all, it strikes me that those engaging in reviews or analysis should have a clear sense of when a game is simply telling you to have fun and enjoy yourself, and when it’s telling you to pay attention to its mechanics or process.

Lords of Waterdeep Review

June 15, 2012December 4, 2020 Matt Thrower 14 Comments

I don’t like worker placement games. It’s the most tired, overused and systematically abused board gaming mechanic on the planet, and while it has produced the odd important game in the past, the monotonous regularity with which new and entirely derivative games based on it continue to appear is beyond parody. It was therefore with some trepidation that I discovered Wizards of the Coast had decided to continue their triumphant re-entry into the board gaming mechanics by releasing a Dungeons & Dragons game using worker placement, Lords of Waterdeep. More so when I got sent a copy to review.

One of the signature issues with poor worer placement games is a startling lack of connection between theme and mechanics. There’s no particular reason that this should be the case: the basic principle of having a limited pool of workers and assigning them to carry out a variety of different tasks each turn would seem to have a variety of real-world applications. And clearly the people who designed Lords of Waterdeep understood this and went to a lot of effort to buck the trend. Each player represents one of the secretive lords of the greatest city in the Forgotten Realms, and sends agents into the city in order to accumulate resources such as gold and adventurers to complete quests that help keep the city from harm. It hangs together well as a cohesive whole, aided by sensible choices about the things needed to complete different tasks: recruiting for the city guard requires your agents to muster a few fighters together, for example, while exploring the caverns underneath the city to clear out a nest of Beholders requires a large, diverse and well-equipped party. Cards and other requisite materials are lavished with quality art and thematic quotes to help get and keep players in the right frame of mind.

So given the effort that has been expended on overcoming this oft-lamented obstacle in the genre it’s a shame to see that it’s largely wasted. All the right ingredients are there but the game portrays action at a level so much higher than the meat-and-potatoes of quest fulfillment that it tends to just get ignored. A player might need to send secretive agents into the city to recruit three thieves and two clerics in order close a portal into a nether dimension of unimaginable evil, but what he’ll actually say is “here’s three black and two white cubes, someone add twenty victory points to my track please”. If you can find a group of players who are deeply familiar with the Forgotten Realms setting, and enthusiastic enough about it to really put the effort into making the theme come alive (and Dungeons & Dragons has sufficient devotees to make this a plausible scenario) then it’ll probably work. But for most gamers, all that detail will simply pass over their heads.

I’m pleased to report, however, that similar ingenuity has been employed in other areas of the design to much better effect in pursuit of the apparent goal of attempting to sidestep or improve on pretty much every single criticism that’s commonly aimed at worker placement. For example, a frequent problem with games of this type is the repetitive deployment of the same tactics in game after game, leading to rapid disinterest and disillusionment amongst the players, almost as if the game has been “solved” in a mathematical sense. Against this, Lords of Waterdeep deploys the effective weapon of variety. It lifts a mechanic wholesale from another (and infinitely duller) worker placement game, Caylus, in which players can pay to create new buildings with a wide variety of different effects: new resource combinations, the ability to sidestep rules, the potential to swap resource types are the most common examples. If other players send their agents to these buildings then the owner gets a small bonus effect for free. There’s also a lot of variety to the quest cards. While the majority simply require you to pay adventurer cubes and gold in return for victory points some are labelled as “plot quests” and give you a permanent bonus for the rest of the game such as bonus victory points for certain quest types, or the ability to get bonus resources when you take particular actions. In two cases the reward is an extra agent which can be a game-breaking power-up if acquired early on, although this is rare. But for the most part these innovations work together to make sure that the strategies the players need to employ to win have to be changed from game to game to make best use of the available buildings and plot quests, and thereby stop the game from getting jammed in a tactical rut.

Another frequently-cited issue with these sorts of games is that there’s little meaningful player interaction. In the name of trying to ensure that players can’t gang up on one another and unbalance the game, interaction in worker placement tends to revolve around watching other people’s developing positions carefully and blocking their access to key resources by taking them yourself. And again, this is certainly something you can do in Lords of Waterdeep, although the availability of different buildings and the limited number of different resource types (five: four different kinds of adventurer and gold) means it’s less effective than in some other titles. But the game makes up for this, and more, by adding intrigue cards.

Intrigue cards are perhaps the very best thing about Lords of Waterdeep. They have a wide variety of effects which range widely across the interaction scale. Some of them give you useful extra abilities, like the chance to assign an agent to a space already used by an opponent. Others give you free resources but allow the other players a smaller freebie of the same type. Some permit you to discard or steal the resources of other players, sometimes giving them the option to swap these for victory points. There are mandatory quests, irritating low victory point tasks that you can assign to other players to complete before they can finish their existing quests. In short they offer a huge variety of small ways you can screw with your fellow gamers, into which is mixed more tactical choice and none of which unbalance the game. There’s even an interesting mechanic used when you play them: you have to assign a worker to do it, which seems steep just to lay a card, but you get to reassign him again at the end of the round, adding all sort of interesting issues around tactics and timing to the mix. They’re a brilliant, yet very simple innovation, and it highlights the staleness of the genre that no-one else has attempted to add anything similar to worker placement games in the past.

Indeed it’s possible that from this review so far you’ve got the impression that Lords of Waterdeep is a complex game. Not so – the rules are actually very simple and it’s very easy to learn and teach. It also plays in around an hour, with 90 minutes being the absolute maximum with a full load of slow players. Scales well too: more is generally merrier, but it’s still fun with just two. So you might well think it’s a suitable family game and indeed some players have reported that it works well in this role. Me, I’m not so sure. In common with a lot of games that manage to thematic and or reasonably deep off the back of a straightforward set of rules, Lords of Waterdeep pulls the trick of moving most of the theme and mechanics from the rulebook and onto the cards. Whilst the mechanical actions you go through in a turn are easy for anyone to grasp, actually playing the game in even a vaguely effective manner requires players to simultaneously digest and remember a fairly large amount of inter-related information regarding their quests, other player’s quests, available quests, a hand of intrigue cards and the available buildings. It’s a breeze for anyone who’s used to playing modern European-style games, but it’s a world away from mass market titles, and non-gamers are likely to still struggle for several sessions before they get the hang of it.

Lords of Waterdeep battered at my inbuilt prejudices regarding the genre and eventually won a hard-fought victory. It helps that addressing common complains about the mechanic seems to have been a guiding principle behind the design and that, for the most part, the solutions employed have been successful in producing a relatively thematic game that allows enough player interaction and variety to continually keep things fresh and interesting while still retaining most of the balance and strategic depth that are the hallmark of worker placement games. It’s still worker placement at heart, of course, and occasionally things drag a little, but on the whole it’s a solid and enjoyable design that should offer something to gamers of pretty much every stripe. Someone asked me recently what my three favourite worker placement games were: in point of fact I could only think of three that I would bother playing, but when he asked the question, Lords of Waterdeep was the very first name that came to my lips.

Cracked LCD: Abaddon in Review

June 14, 2012December 4, 2020 Michael Barnes 9 Comments

Abaddon is the new game from Richard Borg, a designer best known for his semi-mainstream work in the 1990s (Mutant Chronicles: Siege of the Citadel, X-Men Alert) and his ultra-light wargames in the 2000s (Battle Cry, Memoir ’44, and the rest of the Commands and Colors lineage). It’s also the latest issue from Toy Vault, who didn’t exactly set the world ablaze with the misfire that was last year’s licensed Godzilla game. It’s also a game that’s on the vanguard of the current resurgence of interest in Battletech-inspired mech games, a staple genre that has lain rather fallow over the past decade.

Digression. As a games reviewer, there’s often a moment when you’ve received a review copy from a graciously willing publisher or designer and you’re afraid- if you’re an honest reviewer- that you’re going to have to repay their kindness with a critical thrashing. It happens. It isn’t pleasant, it doesn’t make you feel good about your role as an opinion writer. When I opened up Abaddon for the first time, I was afraid that it was heading in that direction.

I didn’t like that there were only four unit types- three mech (sorry, “Link”) classes and infantry- with the only differences between them being movement, hit points, and which die they throw in combat. I didn’t like that the setting was incredibly bland. It seemed like a missed opportunity that the three different terrain types had no game effect other than to block line of sight. I thought that laying the combat cards on the board pointing at the target was a pretty lazy and poorly implemented way to manage the sometimes simultaneous fire/counterfire battle system. And I hated removing these little “power crystal” counters from the bases of the Links to note their damage.

But while I was running through most of the included scenarios- which I was also initially disappointed with since they don’t feature dynamic, compelling objectives other than kill the other guy- Abaddon started to reveal its agenda and design goals to me. Not in a way that deeper, richer games with intricate strategy and complex mechanics often do. But in a way that made me remember the games where I first encountered Mr. Borg’s design sense in the 1990s. In a sense Abaddon is an old fashioned game, the kind of accessible, entry-level hobby game that doesn’t worry so much about impressing internet forumistas into clucking about how clever the mechanics are as it is does about just being fun.

Abaddon is in a class of games like Star Wars: Epic Duels and Heroscape, although it lacks the strength of setting, concept, and implementation of those titles. It’s a fun-first design that focuses on basic mechanics of movement, line of sight, cardplay, and dice rolling to describe lumbering giant robots, on fire and blazing away with anti-missile missiles. It’s basic and uncluttered to the point where many modern gamers might find themselves wishing for more detail or complexity. Truth be told, it could probably support some advanced rules but I like that it focuses so intently on the prime directives of moving, shooting, and occasional awesomeness.

Setups are provided for two to four players, but it’s really a two player game. One key advantage this game has over Mr. Borg’s previous light wargames is that it doesn’t take a long time to set up. Once your Links and their infantry support are fielded on the grid-based map and the cardboard terrain stand-ups are in place, first player rolls dice that are color-coded to activate specific unit types and also with faces for “Command” (wild, draw a Weapons System card, or drop a Doomsday Bolt on an enemy unit) and for drawing more Weapons System cards. When a unit is ordered, it can move and shoot at something five spaces away in strictly eight-directional line of sight. Positioning and coordination are critical. Complain all you want about the random activation, there is strategy here and it matters.

Ranged combat is performed by playing a Weapons System card, which gives a number and sometimes a special damage bonus based on unit type. The unit being targeted can respond with a Weapons System card, effectively counterattacking, or just let the shields try to soak the damage. Dice are rolled on both sides and added to the card values with the highest value winning. Double the loser’s total and you hit twice. If either player rolls a one, it overrides the sum to score a critical hit and the recipient also gets to draw a Wild Fire card, which can incur status changes like requiring additional dice to activate, special damage, or blowing your Link all the way back to your baseline in a gravity distortion.

Close combat is similar, but there are some strategic considerations. Units in close combat can’t counterfire, so tying up your opponent’s heavy Links with Recon units or infantry is effective. And infantry get to roll two dice and pick the better in close combat. Add in some indirect, artillery fire Weapons systems and the result is a quite robust and complete combat system that’s simple and effective. Yeah, it’s hugely luck-based. But this is also the kind of game that really should have pictures of kids playing it and cheering on the back of the box.

It’s easy to expect too much out of Abaddon given its genre and Mr. Borg’s reputation. I did this myself before I really dug into it. Once I sloughed off not only what I wanted the game to be when I first heard friend-of-a-friend rumors that he was doing a mech game but also the assumptions of what makes a modern game good or great, I realized that I was happy just having fun playing this outstanding, imminently approachable game. And really, is there any other reason that we should be playing games other than to have fun?

Now, where did I put that No High Scores High Score award? Oh, there it is.

Cracked LCD- Empires of the Void in Review

June 7, 2012November 19, 2020 Michael Barnes 9 Comments

Ryan Laukat’s Empires of the Void is a very solid, very smartly considered but derivative space conquest-themed 4x game that’s been recently Kickstartered and released into the wild. It’s a handsome production with charming, cartoon illustrations that are very welcome in a genre that tends to go for stiff and sterile or grit and grime. It’s big on the table with tons of counters but not a whole lot of rules bulk or complication, and although it doesn’t have the scads of plastic miniatures these kinds of games usually feature, there’s still multiple ship classes to play with and lots of dice to roll at them.

The problem with the game isn’t the game itself, which I would absolutely recommend to tabletoppers looking for a smoother-playing, lightweight game in the Twilight Imperium (or Master of Orion) mold. It’s that it’s coming so soon after Eclipse, one of the best games in its genre. Not to mention that Twilight Imperium is still widely played and considered by many to be the last word in building cardboard space empires. Then there’s games like Ascending Empires, Space Empires, and any number of other jumped-up Dudes on a Map games with tech trees and other 4x gameplay elements.

So this game has got to stake a claim and state its differentiators up front. When I first got my review copy, courtesy of Mr. Laukat, I was initially worried that it was going to miss this mark and suffer the same fate- mediocrity followed by obscurity- that Galactic Emperor did a few years back. That was the first game that made a play for the TI-lite crown. After a couple of games, I’m not ready to mothball Eclipse but I think there is definitely a case to be made for Empires of the Void.

These games are kind of like falafel joints. One might have the best hummus, but another has better Baba Ganoush and grape leaves. Then another has the best falafel. TI3 has the epic, sweeping scope and detail down pat. Eclipse has the economic and technology angles completely cornered. With its finger-flicking combat resolution, I’d have to give the combat edge to Ascending Empires. But Empires of the Void, so far, has the best Star Trek sense of diplomacy, negotiation, and politics.

The setup is standard. Everybody gets a race and a home planet from which they send ships out into the titular void for typical 4x goings-on. There’s a bunch of races, more than the four players the game supports. Races each have advantages and different start-up material. The map is a modular, point-to-point thing with a couple of roadblocks in minefields, asteroids, and tentacle monsters (dubbed “ancient defenses” for reasons unknown). It looks more like Merchant of Venus than TI3, and the presence of specific and very different alien races on each of the planets on the map makes the game world feel more alive and vibrant than other games where the planets that are little more than resource numbers.

As players head out from their home planet with fleets of Diplomat-class ships or war vessels ready for battle, the idea is that you can lay claim to these populated planets either through diplomacy or violent conquest. Diplomacy requires you to spend some Culture actions to draw cards. Each race has a particular disposition- Militaristic, Capitalist, Scholarly, and so forth-and the more matching cards you have, the lower the die roll needed to sway them to fealty. Make friends, and you drop an Ally token on their card and they give you access to any resources (needed to build some technologies), income, influence in the victory point-generating Galactic Council, and a special ability. It’s a cool touch that some races do things like give you access to special ships that you otherwise can’t build.

But if you don’t want their junk, you can just blow them up by rolling a combat success against them, which makes them enemies and a subjugated people only willing to share their money and materials. I didn’t care for fishing for cards to get the matching sets at first, particularly since you only get three actions per turn and it felt like a waiting game. But thematically, it makes sense at an abstract level. You’re negotiating, finagling, maybe learning about their culture to influence them, and bartering. And there are technologies that give free Culture draws and increase hand limits. But you’ve always got the quicker nuclear option, which is not only viable but also advisable for certain races.

There’s also an interesting- and subtle- concept regarding the cards. Over the course of the game, as planets are claimed their utility actually changes. Every card has an effect, activated by turning in two or three sets of matching cards. So by the end, they almost serve a completely different function.

I don’t like that the tech tree is so short and shallow, with particular techs all but required to be competitive. Actions do feel somewhat restrictive, with the Move action initially only moving one ship at a time but there again, with those must-have technologies it ramps up over the course of the game. The combat is somewhat ho-hum, with the standard Axis and Allies-style order of battle. It definitely feels like the work of a first-time designer, and I do not necessarily mean that as a perjorative- there’s a great sense of heart and passion on display here that smooths over some derivative and sloppy design moments.

I love the event cards that send Space Pirates out to hassle the galaxy or start crises that happen on planets that areresolved and affect political positions. These narrative events occur without bogging the game down in tracking devices or “effect creep”. I like that there’s so many different aliens in the game and a sense that this setting has personality beyond spaceships and endless warfare. And I really like that there’s loose trading rules so that players can swap money and resources along with threats, bribes, and promises.

Overall, Empires of the Void’s biggest and most important differentiator is that it has sense of fun and simplicity that these other space 4x games do not have. It’s a spirited if not completely original design with some smart streamlining that cuts a little close to the quick at times (that tech tree), but manages to retain its scope and design goals admirably. It’s a fun game with minimal hassle, which is exactly what I like playing these days. It can still run a little long, but the four player cap seems to keep a two hour and change game from being a four hour and change game.

It is definitely a situation where those with limited gaming budgets (of time and/or money) may find themselves asking if Empires of the Void delivers anything unique or compelling in competition with similar titles. Those looking for the hardcore all-day-a-thon game may be better off sticking with TI3, those looking for a more serious, balanced, and intricate design would be better served by Eclipse. Empires of the Void is best positioned as an alternative, “indie” version of this kind of game.

Neuroshima Hex Multiplayer is Live…ish

May 21, 2012November 5, 2020 Michael Barnes 9 Comments

Be! Excited! B-E excited! Be! Excited! B-E excited! The long-awaited Neuroshima Hex multiplayer update is now live on IOS, bringing with it the async and simultaneous multiplayer the game should have had all along. Thanks, Big Daddy Creations!

Oh…wait a second. Cheerleaders, pipe down for a second…um…is anybody able to get in to create a game? Looks like Neuroshima Hex took a wrong turn into the bad part of Crash City.

So yeah, it’s apparently live in the same way that Diablo III went live last week. Crackedlcd75, when it’s working. Back to Storm of Souls…