Are the Origins Awards bad for the Industry?

This is a bit late, but I wrote most of it back when the awards were first announced.

I'll admit, it's a sensationalist headline, but I think it's a question worth asking.  As certain elements of gaming get more public exposure, people are going to be looking for ways to distinguish the good from the bad. One way they'll be doing that is to look for the most visible and established awards.

The Origins Awards have the unfortunate combination of being one of the longest running and visible sets of gaming awards while at the same time being an absolute joke when it comes to those categories most likely to be of interest to the larger public.  Specifically the awards dealing with board games.  For an example, let's look at this year's nominees and winners:


Best Board Game

Conquest of Nerath - Wizards of the Coast - Richard Baker, Mons Johnson, & Peter Lee
Automobile - Mayfair Games - Martin Wallace
Hibernia - Closet Nerd - Eric Vogel
High Noon Saloon - Slugfest Games - Cliff Bohm & Geoff Bottone
Pastiche - Gryphon Games - Sean D. MacDonald

Winner: Conquest of Nerath

Best Traditional Card Game

Cthulhu Gloom - Atlas Games - Keith Baker
NUTS! - Wildfire LLC - Matthew Grau
Red Dragon Inn 3 - Slugfest Games - Geoff Bottone, Jeff Morrow, and Cliff Bohm
Star Trek Deck Building Game - BANDAI - Alex Bykov
Struggle for Catan - Mayfair Games - Klaus Teuber

Winner: NUTS!


Best Family, Party or Children’s Game

BEARS! - Fireside Games - Anne-Marie De Witt
Faux∙Cabulary - Out of the Box Publishing - Matthew Nuccio
Get Bit! - Mayday Games - Dave Chalker
Scavengers - Zombie State Games - John Werner
Space Mission - Schmidt Spiele - Matthew Worden

Winner: Get Bit!

Best Board Game is Conquest of Nerath?  In a year where games like Eclipse, Ora et Labora, Mage Knight, and so many other better games came out?  In fact, at the time I write this, there are 67 games listed as coming out in 2011 that are ranked higher than Conquest of Nerath on BGG!

I'm not sure what their exact definition of traditional card game is, but the fact that Yomi isn't at least nominated pretty much negates the validity of the category.  The winner, NUTS!, has a 5.90 rating on BGG right now, where anything under a 6.0 is usually a poor game.

Best Family, Party or Children's Game... first, it's a terrible category that pits games of widely different suitability against each other.  Second, the winner here is the only game on the whole list I actually own, and I wouldn't have nominated it for anything!  It's just not that great a game.

So how does this potentially hurt the industry?  People who don't know any better pay attention to these things, go out and buy the games that win, and then come to the logical conclusion that if the piece of crap they just bought is the best there is, then board games must suck!

Honestly, if Origins isn't interested in improving the way they select awards, then I wish they'd just drop the board game categories and stick to the other areas where they still have some relevance.

Board Game Afternoon

Attended my first regular board game event since the end of BGN.  A successful get together of nine people total, only one of which I've played games with before.  I got to play in three games, including two I've really been wanting to get to the table.  The best thing about it was that I wasn't the one running it!   That means I can arrive late and leave early, or skip sessions entirely, without it wrecking the event.  Something that's important for me to be able to do.

The location is a bit cramped, but friendly.  Bears by the Maul Gaming Lounge is an interesting location that takes up a narrow two story section at the end of a warehouse.  In addition to the cramped gaming area in the basement, you have to go outside and around the corner to get to the restroom, and they're pretty much a CCG only shop in terms of merchandise.  On the positive side, the staff is friendly and open to our playing board games there despite their not actually selling anything we play, and their hours of operation are good.

They're also located close to the bypass, which makes it more convenient for gamers from the north to drive down to play.  BGN's old location in the center of Fayetteville made that harder for some people.  Another thing that makes it easier for those people is the time slot:  Sunday from 2 to close, which seems to be around 7 to 9 depending on how late the staff can stay.  This means people working regular 8 to 5 jobs don't have to rush to get to the event.

With a time slot like that, I should also finally be able to get some of my longer games to the table, maybe even Die Macher, finally!

Diana Jones Award 2011

I still haven't gotten around to doing my own analysis of what would make for a good gaming award, but I almost don't have to, because I can point to the Diana Jones Award.

Instead of being a popularity contest, the Diana Jones Award is chosen by a panel of professionals. As a result, both the list of nominations and the final winner are consistently deserving of the attention given, and this year is no exception.

The nominees were:

Catacombs, a board game

The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game

Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, a board game

Fiasco, a roleplaying game

Freemarket, a roleplaying game

These were all worthy nominations. I've played the three RPGs, and am familiar with the board games by reputation. While not all the nominees are my personal favorites, I can easily recognize the merits of them all.

The winner was Fiasco, and I think this was well deserved. It's been one of the most successful games I've played in terms of providing a consistently fun experience.

Congratulations to Jason Morningstar!

My Take on the Origins Awards

If you won an award at Origins 2011, then you should probably just move along, because I'm likely going to offend you and that's not my intention. This is meant as a criticism of the awards themselves and not those that won them.

I don't think there was a bad product among the winners, I just think that many either weren't the best, or weren't properly classified.

It's been about three weeks now, and I've had some time to digest the results of the 2011 Origins Awards. Listening to episode 215 of the Dice Tower helped both confirm and solidify my initial impressions: the Origins Awards are a joke.

I don't want to minimize the accomplishments of some of the winners, particularly the folks at Evil Hat for their wins with the Dresden Files RPG, but in most cases the best of those nominated did not win, and in several cases it was the worst that did.

Let's look at the winners, starting with the single most egregious in my mind: Best Historical Board Game. The winner of that category was Catan Histories: Settlers of America Trails to Rails. This game shouldn't have even been nominated to this category. Just because a game has a lightly pasted on historical theme does not make it a historical game.

Moving on, we see Zombie Dice winning the best Family, Children's, or Party game. First, the category itself has issues. A family game is different from a children's game which is different from a party game. Mashing them all together makes little sense. I suppose they are going for best "casual" game, but they need to rethink the definitions of the board game categories if that's what they are going for.

Zombie Dice is not a terrible game, but every other nominee in the category is better. If you tell someone "you can only have X number of games for the rest of your life" no one is going to choose Zombie Dice. At least a couple of its competitors in the category could conceivably end up on such a list.

The same could be said of the winner of the Best Traditional Card Game category. Back to the Future is not a game I've played, but it's pretty obvious that the only reason it won was due to the theme. I've not actually played any of the games in the category, but I've heard really good things about some of them. I've heard no one praising Back to the Future in a similar manner.

For Best Board Game, the apparent top tier of the board game categories, at least the winner is a good game. Unfortunately it's also the weakest of the nominees. Every game in the category is better, but Castle Ravenloft apparently wins because it's Dungeons & Dragons.

Moving on now to roleplaying. While I think Dresden Files is a great game, and a serious contender for best roleplaying game, I would have chosen Fiasco. Everyone I know who has tried it has made it one of their go-to games. It's simple and innovative, and consistently produces good gaming sessions.

Best Roleplaying supplement is a close one. Having run both Dresden Files and Pathfinder games I have found the Advanced Players Guide more generally useful than Our World, but am willing to admit this is probably the most subjective call out of a lot of subjective calls in this article. As such, this is the one category where I don't really have an issue with the winner.

Moving on once more, we come to Best Hobby Game Accessory. Our nominees include such wonderful choices as Color Primer: Dragon Red... really? People couldn't find better nominees for this category than a color of paint? At least it didn't win, but the winner was almost as bad: a Cthulhu dice bag. A dice bag won the Best Hobby Game Accessory. I guess the Crown Royal bag wasn't eligible. Unless the bag actually opens into an extradimensional space, I think a better candidate could have been found. In fact, I have one, actually an entire category: everything else nominated was a better choice, except maybe the paint.

Most of the problem here is the over-broadness of the category. Everything else was specific to miniatures painters or players of a specific game, whereas the dice bag is more generic. Never mind that it doesn't even look very practical: it's cute and has broader appeal, so it wins.

I would have given Best Gaming Publication to Hamlet's Hit Points, but I haven't read Shadowrun: Spells and Chrome, so I can't say it didn't deserve to win. I can say that a category that includes both gaming fiction and non-fiction is a poorly designed category.

Best Miniature Rules: Heroclix won this. I know a lot of people like Heroclix, but were the rules included in the Blackest Night Starter Kit significantly different enough from previous editions to warrant inclusion in this category? Also, a BattleTech technical readout counts as rules? This category needs to be tightened up.

I can't really comment on the Best Play by Mail or Play by Email game, except to point out that the very existence of this category really calls into question the thinking process of those behind these awards. It's 2011, you have ten categories to cover products in a vastly diverse hobby, and you dedicate one of them to Play by Mail games.

I do have to give them credit for the Hall of Fame entries, which was the one area of the awards that I could agree with 100%. Although, paired with the Play by Mail category, I think this just goes to show that the Origins Awards has a much better grasp of the past of gaming than it has of the present.

Of course, anyone can whine about the poor quality of gaming awards, but what would make for a more useful system? I have some ideas, but I'll save them for a later post.

Board Games I've Been Playing

It's been a while since I went over what board games I've been playing, so I thought I'd go over some of the games I've been playing most often in 2011.

7 Wonders: By number of games played, this is solidly in first place. I can see this getting old eventually, but it's still a lot of fun right now, and I don't even have the new expansion yet. Fast play time combined with sort of a civilization building theme gets this to the table fairly often. I highly recommend it as a short, moderately light card game.

Dominion: Still a standard with people around here. It didn't see much play earlier in the year due to a personal shortage of card sleeves for the two most recent expansions, but now that Prosperity and Cornucopia are both sleeved it's hitting the table fairly regularly. I'm not really that good at it, but I enjoy building my deck and seeing it run, even when I don't win.

Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft/Wrath of Ashardalon: While our weekly Board Game Night was still meeting at the now closed FLGS, these games were the ones most likely to catch the eye of people new to the event. I enjoy them quite a bit, but one of my regular gaming buddies despises them. That combined with the smaller tables at our new location make it less likely these will hit the table again any time soon, although I may just try it solo the next time I get an itch for some dungeon crawling.

Star Trek Expeditions: A fun cooperative game that's been getting a lot of play. So much so that I got a little burned out on it for a while, but I'm already starting to want to get back to playing it again. Does a decent job of capturing the feel of Star Trek in addition to being an interesting game.

Barbarossa: Although it hasn't gotten as many plays as the others listed above, this is probably my pick for favorite game so far this year. I really like where the designers took the Dominion mechanics with this game, even though it does make for a longer game. Unfortunately, while my regular gaming group doesn't dislike the game, they aren't as enamored with it as I am. I still hope to get it back to the table soon.

Combat Commander: I finally managed to get some more games of this in this year. It has been about three years since the last time it hit the table, so its return was welcome. I'd really like to continue playing this, but am not sure when that will happen. Possibly my favorite squad level wargame.

All of the above have had at least three plays so far this year. Lots of other games got one or two plays. I may go over some of them in a future post.

My Changing Preferences in Gaming

I'm going to muse a bit about how my hobby time has changed over the past few years. I'm not sure how interesting this is going to be to anyone else, but it was interesting to me, so here it is.

A while ago I discussed why I'm not playing many miniatures games anymore, and mentioned that my current "preference hierarchy" when it comes to games has changed. It used to be that miniatures games were near the top of my hierarchy, but they're now below board games and RPGs. I thought I'd go over some of the reasons why that's the case.

One reason is prep time. Miniatures games suck up time outside of actually playing the game. Assembling and painting models take me forever. RPGs also take a certain amount of prep time, especially when running them, which is one reason they're behind board games which take minimal prep time, but it's minimal when compared to miniatures games, at least for me.

Prep time wasn't really a factor when I was single. In fact, it was a bit of a bonus as if I didn't have anything to do I could work on miniatures. At this point in my life there's rarely a time where I "don't have anything to do," even though I technically have more "free time" right now then at many points earlier in my life.

Another reason is community. There's a couple factors involved here, and I want to start off by saying I don't mean to offend anyone in the local gaming community. They're mostly a great bunch of people, and I know at least a couple of them read the blog. The thing is that they're not the community I'm used to.

I first got talked into playing Warhammer Fantasy and 40K by a couple of my best friends from college. We had played RPGs and Battletech back then, and when years later I moved out to California they roped me into playing Fantasy and later I roped them into playing 40K. Our games were infrequent, but when we had them I was always playing with at least one guy I'd known for years. The games had their share of trash talk, but overall it was an extremely casual environment.

After the Warhammer group ceased being able to get together, I got into Flames of War mainly just to try painting the models. It was only later that I got the chance to play it. The guys I played it with weren't guys I'd known for years, but they were still very casual in their play.

When I say casual, I mean that we had no interest in tournaments. We played to win, but we didn't spend hours trying to put together the ultimate list. We played with armies we thought would be fun to play with. Although they were largely strangers when we first started playing, I count some of those guys among my best friends now.

The community here is different. Even though some complain about the lack of turnout at tournaments, it's actually incredibly tournament focused. The vast majority of the players around here play in tournaments. A higher percentage than I've seen anywhere else I've played (which admittedly hasn't been that many places).

I've never been interested in tournaments, and even if I was I couldn't do them because of my schedule. That leaves me with a community that I don't really fit into all that well.

Without an active community, there's a lot less incentive to keep up the level of work it takes to stay involved with a miniatures game.

The final reason is money. This isn't a huge reason for me. I still spend a lot of money on hobbies, just not on miniatures. Still, it is a factor. When I was single, if I wanted to spend a little extra on miniatures I could choose to not go out to eat for a while. For some reason my wife doesn't seem pleased when I tell her we're not going out to eat tonight because I bought some miniatures earlier in the week...

So, that's why miniatures have fallen back behind RPGs and board games. They have less prep time, I have a small but active community that plays them, and they cost less money (for the most part).

BattleTech

BattleTech was the first miniatures game I ever played, although I didn't realize it at the time. BattleTech is one of those rare hybrids between miniatures and board games (and at times even RPGs), and I always thought of it as more of a board game, even when I was using miniatures to play it.

The thing about BattleTech is that while it's a decent game, it was never the game itself that really attracted me to it, it was the background. The background of the Succession Wars that pitfive houses in a free for all fight to claim control over humanity had a level of realism and detail that the actual game seemed to sometimes lack, at least for a young history and politics nut.

I was hooked on the universe from the time I first bought the game (I think probably around 1986) right up until the appearance of the Clans in 1990. The appearance of the Clans (which I was not a fan of at the time), combined with my eventual graduation from college, led me to abandon BattleTech for a period of over 15 years, but then Catalyst Games took over.

I was impressed by the production value they put into the new starter box in 2006, although not enough to actually buy it at the time. I was equally impressed by the introduction of the Sword and Dragon Starterbook that went back to the roots of the game by bringing McKinnon's Raiders and Sorenson's Sabres back into the lore of BattleTech. These were units covered in two of the original three sourcebooks for the game, and personal favorites of mine.

This is all a long-winded lead-in to how I've been totally diving into the current line of products being put out by Catalyst Games. Their take on the rules has been impressive. The core system is the same as it was back in the eighties, but with more polish. The first book, Total Warfare, was originally published by Fanpro and contains the core rules for 'mechs, aerospace, vehicles, and the various forms of infantry available in the BattleTech universe. This book is designed as a reference manual, not a tutorial. It says right on the back cover to get the starter box if you're new to the game. This let them put out a solid reference manual that contains just the core, 'tournament legal', rules.

The second volume in the series of rulebooks is the TechManual. This book is slightly larger than Total Warfare, and is all about constructing the units that have rules in Total Warfare. This book is a gearheads dream. Battletech has always had solid unit construction rules, and this tradition continues with the TechManual. Together with Total Warfare this book makes up the core rules of the system. Everything else is advanced/optional rules.

There are three volumes in the advanced rules series, two of which have been released. The first is Tactical Operations, which covers advanced optional rules for ground combat. There are a lot of good ideas here presented in a modular format so that you can just add in what you want to, without having to take the whole batch.

The second is Strategic Operations, which does for aerospace combat what Tactical Operations did for ground combat. It also does a few other things. It introduces repair and salvage rules for use in multi-battle campaigns. It also provides the BattleForce rules for fighting larger conflicts where each unit is roughly four to five times the size of a unit in standard BattleTech. Finally, it provides rules for playing BattleTech without the hex grid, turning it into a more typical miniatures game.

The third volume, yet to be released, is Interstellar Operations. This is proposed to include rules for all the other scales above Strategic Operations, up to complete interstellar wars.

There's one more hardcover volume: A Time of War. This is the BattleTech RPG. As an RPG its mechanics are rather dated, but it does expand the coverage of scale in the BattleTech universe down to man-to-man combat. It also provides additional options for players who want to play a BattleTech campaign that tracks the development of their MechWarriors.

I was pleased to see that some of the advanced abilities available to MechWarrior characters allow them to duplicate feats performed in the BattleTech fiction that otherwise aren't modeled in the rules. This was always a big issue for me back when we were playing in college.

Finally, since I first rediscovered the line, Catalyst has put out a new version of the starter box that is an improvement over the old one. It includes enough cheap plastic miniatures to get you playing out of the box, as well as a couple of better quality plastic kits. It also includes the core rules you need to play along with a couple of mounted maps to play on.

While I will probably never get back into this game in the way I once was, it's nice to see that it now exists in a form that more or less like what I always wanted. Now I just need to invent a time machine and send it back to my college self.

Why Eurogamers Need to Take Another Look at Wargames

A while back I learned that my old FLGS has essentially stopped selling wargames. I found this surprising since the store's weekly board gaming event has grown quite a bit in attendance since I left the area, so I assumed that there would have been more interest in wargames, rather than less.

It turns out that it was only myself and a couple of other guys who bought most of the wargames, and all of us stopped doing so for various reasons. The people attending the store's weekly board game night are more interested in eurogames, and have little or no interest in wargames. The shame is that wargame designers have been taking a lot of lessons from eurogame designers, and there are a lot of designs coming out from wargame companies that might appeal more to the eurogamer.

There are still plenty of traditional two player hex and counter wargames coming out, but there are a lot of other types of wargames being produced as well. In fact, the number one game on BoardGameGeek.com as I write this is Twilight Struggle, a wargame from GMT Games! Also in the top 25 is another GMT Game: Dominant Species.

Memoir '44 and the other games in the Commands & Colors line are also wargames, although the most well known in the series have not been published by wargame companies. Most eurogamers seem to think that these games are the exception to the rule, and in the past they would have been correct, but that's increasingly no longer the case.

Twilight Struggle is arguably the best example of a type of wargame known as "card driven". Card driven wargames rely on the play of cards to drive the game, either in addition to or in place of the more traditional roll of the dice. This allows for both more control on the part of the player and more variation in the types of things that can occur in the game. It's been a very successful mechanic and there are several good games out there that use it, many of which don't even get a second glance from most eurogamers.

Part of the problem is that they are all two player games, and many eurogamers play in groups rather than pairs. Wargame designers have only recently started putting out more games that cater to this, but there have been a few such designs in the past as well. One older design that has recently found a new home at Dan Versen Games is the Down In Flames card game. This game features WWII aerial combat and can accommodate up to six players out of the box. The publisher also sells additional decks of cards to allow for even bigger games without having to buy the whole game again. I've found that most gamers willing to give this one a try end up liking it.

More recent designs have come from Clash of Arms games. Their "War Is Hell" series of card games allow for two to four players to refight famous battles in a reasonable time frame. I haven't actually played any of them yet, but have a copy of their Fires of Midway game that uses the system, and am looking forward to giving it a try.

Another reason that many eurogamers don't give wargames a try is the length of time it takes to play the game. Eurogamers generally want a game that at most takes a couple of hours to play. Traditionally, many wargames take several hours, usually lasting over multiple sessions to complete, but most of the games I've mentioned in this post come in at 90 minutes or less. The biggest exception is Twilight Struggle which comes in at three hours, which I've found to be the outside limit for the average game night.

One area where wargames haven't caught up to eurogames yet is quality of production. Dollar for dollar, your average eurogame is going to have higher production value than your average wargame. Most wargames still have cardstock or even paper boards, and cardboard chits that you have to punch out of a sheet, leaving little dangly bits on the corners. The original printings of Twilight Struggle were like this, and it was only the most recent printing that had a mounted board and more attractive counters. Despite this, most wargames cost as much or more than their eurogame counterparts. This is largely due to economies of scale where eurogames sell many more copies than do wargames.

Even this is starting to change though, especially for those games that wargame companies think can do well with eurogamers. I already mentioned Twilight Struggle being reprinted with higher quality components, and there are other games receiving similar treatment.

All of this means that if you are interested in the more complex eurogames, you may want to take another look at some of the games being published by wargame companies.

Project: Dominion

Ever since the Seaside expansion for Dominion came out I've been looking for a better storage solution for the cards. Rio Grande Games did a good job on designing the boxes to be useful, and if I were playing games at home then I'd probably just leave them in the boxes they came in. The problem is that I don't play at home, I take them to the store to play, and three or four big boxes are just too many to carry. Together, all four of the current boxes don't even fit into the bag I normally use to transport my boardgames!

I think I've finally found my solution: the Ultra Pro Portable Gaming Case. I had been thinking that someone must make a case for CCG players to carry around their cards with beyond just the single deck boxes I've seen. Back in the day we used cardboard card boxes, but they're not ideal for transport, and I knew someone had to have come up with a better solution since then.

Then the other day I saw this case on the shelf at the FLGS. It just happened to be on Magic night, and a couple of the players there already had one so they let me take a look at theirs. I realized that it would probably do the job, so I went ahead and bought one.

The next step was to figure out how to organize the cards in the case. The Rio Grande boxes have individual slots for each type of card, so I hadn't needed dividers. Fortunately, BGG came to the rescue, specifically with Neo42's vertical dividers. Unfortunately, he used Power Point to make them, and opening a Power Point file in Open Office never goes off without a hitch. It didn't take me that much effort to tweak things so they'd work for me, although they still aren't as pretty as the original files. What took more effort was cutting them all out, but eventually that tedious task was done and I finally started putting all the pieces together.

It ended up working out perfectly. I have just enough room to store everything, minus the extra sets of core cards from the Intrigue set. Now I have a far more portable way to take Dominion to Board Game Night!

...at least I do until the next expansion, at which point I'll either have to get a second case, or use a combination of this case and a box. I'll probably do the latter until there's been at least two more expansions.

Some notes on putting this all together: I've put the mini-boards from Seaside in the lid pocket along with all the rules. The tokens from that set are in the lower middle space, as you can see in the photos.

If I wanted to do this fancier, I could have printed out the dividers on cardstock, but I don't really care if they get ratty. I just need something to make finding the cards easier, so regular paper should do for now.

Warlords of Europe

It's not often that I get the chance to have a game demoed to me by the designer, so after Warlords of Europe designer Ken Griffin took the time to demo his game at Castle House this past Wednesday, I think it's only fair that I take the time to review the game he designed.

I generally like to start my reviews with the bad first, and then move on to the good points, and this review is no different. I emphasize this because while I am critical of some aspects of this game, I have a lot of good things to say too, so be sure and read it all.

I'll start by stating up front that the style of game that Warlords represents really isn't my thing anymore. It has its roots firmly in the "ameritrash" style of games typified by Risk and Axis & Allies, and I've come to prefer "eurogame" style games.

Two key elements of Warlords' design really stand out as negatives to me: player elimination and the lack of a timer mechanism to keep the game from going on for an extended period of time. These are pretty big red flags to me in the games I now choose to play, and will probably keep me from adding this game to my personal collection.

That said, if those aren't factors that are important to you, then there's a lot to like about this game. To start with, the game is pretty to look at. The map is beautiful, and the plastic pieces are well done. Like most games of its type, things can get crowded on the map as play progresses, but using the provided token chips helps keep things under control such that the overall visual experience is pleasant.

The mechanics of the game are fairly simple, but well implemented. Combat is a matter of both sides rolling a die for each unit against a target number determined by how good the unit is. A success makes the opponent remove a unit. The target number is always the same, but the defender may get to use larger dice if in defensive terrain, making it more likely that the attacker will take casualties. There are a few other factors that are involved, but that's basically it. A combat continues until either one side is wiped out, or the attacker retreats.

There's a basic economic engine in the game, where players collect money based on how much territory they control. Different types of territory are worth varying amounts of income. Players can also earn bonus income in certain situations, such as controlling all the territories of a kingdom. Money is used mainly to buy more troops, but can also be used for a few other things.

Players all take their individual turns moving and attacking before taking common turns collecting and spending their income. This keeps things from getting too Risk-like with huge armies being deployed and used before anyone else can respond. New forces are deployed by all players before any player gets to use their new forces.

One of the most interesting parts of the game is the three card decks: conquest, papal, and merchant. These cards all provide unique abilities when played, usually either being instantaneous or lasting over one turn. Players usually have the opportunity to earn one of each type of card per turn, depending on what they do. A conquest card is earned if a player conquers at least one territory that turn, a papal card is earned automatically unless the player has earned papal disfavor, and a merchant card is bought with money.

A lot of the strategy of the game is deciding when to use the cards you have. Used properly they can often turn the tide of a battle. They also provide a lot of flavor to the game through the descriptions of what is causing the mechanical effects the card describes, such as the outbreak of plague, the return of crusaders, or the uprising of peasants.

There are different scenarios based on how many players there are (the game allows for 2 to 4 players), and how long a game they want to play. We played a "shorter" scenario and three hours later we called it quits as it was getting late, and it was apparent who was most likely to win. It probably would have taken another hour to play through to its conclusion had we continued, so even the short scenarios can still be lengthy.

It reminded me of Axis & Allies in many ways, both good and bad, and if you like Axis & Allies, then I think you could really get into this game too.

Milestone!

We had our first Board Game Night where we had too many players for the featured game! I've been saying that this has been coming for a while now. I think it was Liz who even suggested that I was jinxing it by predicting it, but thanks to Seth bringing his wife and a couple of friends we finally did it!

This meant that we got to break out a second game to be played simultaneously with the featured game. While I explained the rules to Ideology to the main group, Jonathan set up and figured out the rules to Horus Heresy.

Liz ended up winning the Ideology game, while I proceeded to lose a game of Horus Heresy.

While I don't think this will be an every week occurrence yet, I certainly hope this isn't the last time that we have this many people! For those keeping score, eight people showed up, although once chose not to play.

Incidentally, I don't know if I'll do a full review, but I wasn't impressed by Horus Heresy. It wasn't because I lost, but how I lost. I think the odds were that Jonathan was going to win anyway, but instead of a hard fought game coming down to the wire, I saw all my hard work undone by a single random event card draw. Just about the worst way to lose a game in my opinion, and something I consider to be a serious flaw in the game. I may give it another try eventually, but where I'd been looking forward to giving it a try, now I'll probably have to be talked into it before giving it another go.

Two Hundred Best Games

I thought I'd reviewed Hobby Games: The 100 Best here back when I read it, but either I did not, or I simply can't find it now in my archives. In either case, now that I've just finished Family Games: The 100 Best, I'm going to go ahead and review both.

The premise behind both books is to get 100 people involved in the gaming industry to each review one of their favorite games. The first book focuses on the broad category of "hobby games" covering everything from RPGs, to CCGs, to miniatures games, to board games. The second book narrows the focus a bit to cover games that can be enjoyed by the "family" and covers everything from, well, RPGs, to CCGs, to miniatures games, to board games.

The nature of "family" is only vaguely defined, but can be loosely interpreted to mean games that can be enjoyed by casual gamers, while "hobby" games are more geared towards people who consider themselves more serious gamers. Where Hobby Games includes Dungeons & Dragons, Family Games includes Faery's Tale Deluxe. Where Hobby Games includes Magic the Gathering, Family Games includes Pokemon. Where Hobby Games includes Flames of War, Family Games includes HeroScape. Where Hobby Games includes Squad Leader, Family Games includes The Game of Life.

Of course, there's some overlap, and Family Games even has an appendix listing games from Hobby Games that would also fit the criteria for Family Games if they weren't already in the first book.

One interesting thing about the core concept of both books is how the context of who is doing the review can sometimes be as interesting as the review itself. If a designer of a game I really like has chosen to include a game I've previously dismissed, then I will probably take a second look at that game. Also, if someone who I haven't heard of before has included a game I really like, I'll probably at least take a look at what they've designed, as we obviously have at least some sensibilities in common when it comes to games.

Of course, this can work the other way too. The fact that Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games chose to include Monopoly as his entry for Family Games just furthers my impression of him as a designer of games I'm unlikely to enjoy.

Both books are good, but if you can only afford one of them, then I'd recommend getting the first one. Hobby Games simply had more entries that I found interesting than Family Games did, and I think this will be the case for most gamers.

Family Games is still a good read, so if you really enjoy Hobby Games and want more, then get a copy of Family Games as well.

I'm pleased to have both books on my shelf.

Game Nights Update

It's been a couple of months since I last talked about our Wednesday night board game night at Castle House Games. We continue to meet every week, and have increased the number of regulars. Including me, we now have around five players that are there on a semi-regular basis, along with one or two more that attend intermittently as schedule and interest permits. We're reaching the point where we can start thinking about having more than one game being played at a time. We're regularly maxing out the amount of players that the "featured" game can handle. Although we haven't been forced to pull out a second game yet, I think it's only a matter of time.

Magpie Gaming night, our RPG night, is pretty much a wash for May. A combination of factors means that we won't have another meeting until the 31st, although after that we should be meeting every Monday for either Magpie night, or Liz' Dogs in the Vineyard game. While the lack of activity this month is mildly frustrating, it appears to be a temporary thing, and not a real threat to the continuing viability of Magpie Gaming night. I'm looking forward to what we have planned with this group.

Self Analysis 101: What I Like In Games

Lately I've been thinking about why I like certain games more than others and I think I've come up with at least one reason I hadn't thought of before: I like building infrastructure. I thought I'd share this as a way to maybe help others to identify what it is that they like about games because the more you understand about this the easier it is to find games that you'll like.

After playing Finca at board game night a few weeks ago, I was wondering why I don't enjoy it as much as I enjoy playing Agricola. They are both farming games, so it isn't the theme. I tend to be more successful at Agricola, so that might be a factor, but that usually only comes up if I can't seem to ever win at a game, and I've won at Finca, so I don't think that's it. The game mechanics of Finca are fine and I enjoy playing it if someone else wants to, so it's not that it's a bad game.

Then I realized that I was building something in Agricola, but not in Finca. That got me to think that maybe I liked games where I built stuff, but I realized that building just anything didn't make it interesting for me. A game about building a skyscraper or a pyramid wouldn't necessarily catch my attention. Building up a company that builds skyscrapers, or a civilization that builds pyramids, now that will get my attention!

Building up a good infrastructure can be rewarding whether or not I actually win the game. In Agricola you're building a farm that produces crops and raises animals. You gather resources in order to build stuff. You're creating infrastructure. I think this is also why I like so many 4x games (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and civilization games. They usually involve building infrastructure. It also explains why I can lose interest in 4x games that are too focused on the combat, and why I tend to lose interest in real-time strategy (RTS) games so quickly, because while building your infrastructure is key to an RTS, the vast majority of the action is focused on combat, and that's not really what I'm playing the game for.

Taken further, I recognize that it's also one of the factors that attracts me to roleplaying. Over the years I've learned to appreciate the storytelling aspect of RPGs, but the development of a character in mechanical terms as you gain experience has also always been a big attraction: do things to improve your character so you can do more things, in other words, building infrastructure.

As I look at other games I've liked I see this as a pattern. It even applies to some of the wargames I used to play. I've always been a big fan of the Operational Combat Series (OCS) from The Gamers, although I haven't had the chance to break one out in years. The games are centered around combat, but you also have to manage the logistics to be successful. While the logistics model in those games is extremely simplified (actually they're probably appropriately modeled for the level of command the player represents, but that's something for another discussion), they do represent setting up a basic infrastructure before the player can take action.

Now that I recognize this trend in my tastes, I'll be keeping an eye out for games that include an infrastructure building element, and I suspect that I'll be more likely to identify games that I enjoy.

Board Game Night Update

Our weekly board game night at Castle House Games is still going. The regular group is just three of us, but I've been assured that part of that has just been that people have been busy with the holidays and other things. I also suspect that my often waiting to the last minute to post what the featured game is has had some negative effect on attendance, so I've been trying to post that information earlier in the week, and we have indeed had at least one extra player the last couple of weeks, possibly as a result.

We have been getting a good variety of games in, as you can probably tell if you've been checking the sidebar showing my "Recently Played Tabletop Games" as nearly all of the games that have shown up there, other than RPGs and miniatures games, have been played at board game night. I've been trying to encourage the other attendees to suggest games to play, but as the person with the largest collection of games, they seem to trust me to make that call most of the time.

For a while we were trying to stick to the idea of playing games at least twice in a row. I borrowed this idea from my friend Joe at Black Diamond Games. That was the method used when I played there, but the feedback I've gotten from the players here is that they'd rather not play the same game twice two weeks running. Instead I'm going to try to intersperse games that are new to the group with games that we've played before so that we still get at least two games in of each game played, just not always in a row.

For example, last week we played Dominion, a game that was one of the very first games played at board game night, and long overdue for a return. This week we played two games new to board game night: Conquest of Paradise as the featured game, as well as Sorry! Sliders as a filler game. Next week we'll likely play Finca, a game that we first played two weeks ago. We won't always alternate between new releases and old favorites, but something close to that will probably become the norm, rather than the two weeks in a row of the same game that I had originally planned.

By the way, I enjoyed both Conquest of Paradise and Sorry! Sliders, although the latter was probably the bigger overall hit. It's a surprisingly fun dexterity game, especially given that it's a mass market game. Not as good as Pitch Car, but not nearly as expensive either.

Why Monopoly Sucks

A friend of mine has suggested that Monopoly really isn't a bad game, but that it's the house rules that people play by that make it bad.

I disagree. It's certainly a better game without the house rules, but it still sucks.

It goes on forever even with property auctions and no free parking money, and once one player gets ahead the outcome is nearly always inevitable. The worst part is that one player often takes the lead as early as the halfway point, or even sooner! That's a lot of time wasted finalizing a result that has already been determined.

There are worse games out there, but none with the immense visibility of Monopoly. It's often described as the 'best selling' or 'most popular' game, which makes people think that it must be the pinnacle of board game design, and as a result they don't even try other games.

This is only now starting to change, a decade after eurogames started to penetrate the US market, and even now it's only changing in small ways. Pretty much every article in the mainstream press about board games starts with some variation of "there's more to board games than just Monopoly!" The fact that is still necessary speaks volumes about how the damn game holds back the entire genre.

Not that I have strong feelings about it or anything...

Games Played in 2009

Most of my blog readers are people who aren't in my regular gaming group now, so I thought it might be interesting to go through the board and miniatures games I played this year with a brief summary of my impressions of each. The order is chronological from the first play in 2009.

Battlestar Galactica: This is a fun game, although after three plays, and comments from those who have played more, it seems like the Cylons have an advantage. Combined with the fact that in the base game there's no way to decide ahead of time who is going to play the Cylons, this game slides a bit on my personal scale of desirability, although I'm still more than willing to play it if someone else wants to.

Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game: This is an interesting tactical miniatures game from GW. I played it a couple of times earlier in the year, but it's been gathering dust since then. The main draw of this game is the relatively low monetary investment involved compared to other GW games. If there was a community already playing it then I'd join in, but I'm not interested enough to build that community on my own.

Pandemic: Great cooperative game. Took a while to figure out how to win, and even then it still has great replayability with plenty of options to ratchet up the difficulty, especially with the expansion. This one is one of the few games to get on my BGG "fives and dimes" list with seven plays this year.

Small World: Another one of my few "fives and dimes" this one has become something of a staple with our group. The reasons for this are simple game play that's easy to teach, a relatively short play time, and lots of variation in the way that race/ability combinations turn up. It doesn't hurt that there's also a copy in the FLGS game library, which means I don't have to lug it along with me.

Warhammer 40K: I was big into this in the middle of the year, to the point where it's my most played game this year, but I burned out after a few months. Lots of reasons for this that I won't go into for now. I still think it's a good game, but I think there are games out there that are just as good, or better, that require a much smaller investment in both time and money.

Race for the Galaxy: My second most played game this year behind 40K, and one of two games to be added to my all time favorites list this year. This game has a great combination of theme and gameplay. The nature of the way the game plays results in little downtime, and it scales well as more players are added. We play this game now with the cards from both expansions, but have yet to use the new rules introduced in those expansions, mainly because there's almost always someone playing the game for the first time when we play.

Puerto Rico: My personal pick for the most overrated game prior to 2009. Not that I think it's a bad game, I just don't feel it deserved to hold the #1 spot on BGG for as long as it did. I've played about a dozen of the remaining top 20 games, and I'd rank all but a couple of them over Puerto Rico. I did get talked into playing a game earlier in the year and enjoyed it, but it's still not one that I'll suggest myself.

Dominion: Seems like a good game, but I haven't had the chance to play it much. I could see this becoming one of my all time favorites, but can't tell for sure yet. Hopefully I'll get a chance to play it more in 2010.

Space Hulk: I'd like to get to play something other than the 1st mission of this. A fun game, but I just don't get that many chances to play two player games anymore, and there are several on my list above this one.

Age of Conan: The Strategy Board Game: A decent game, but one that just never clicked with me. For some reason it seems to take as long to teach as it does to play, and it's not that short a game. That alone has kept it from getting replayed in an environment where there's almost always at least one player who hasn't played before. Still, it's something I'd recommend to anyone who enjoys good old Axis & Allies style conquest games. It's not really made in that mold, but it has elements from that genre combined with a shorter play time. Especially if you have a fixed group of gamers that only has to learn the rules once.

Agricola: The game that unseated Puerto Rico from the top spot on BGG, and deservedly so. The more I play this game the more I like it. The way the cards work make every game different. This is the second game on this list to make its way onto my all time favorites list this year.

Ad Astra: This game is a little too light for my tastes, but has been popular with others in the local gaming group. It does make for a nice space exploration/development game that's competitive without being cutthroat.

Marvel Heroes: This game has a great combination of theme matched to mechanics. It's a shame that the developers no longer hold the license, as it could have supported expansions. Instead, it's out of print. If it wasn't, our one play through probably would have sold a couple of copies.

Chaos In The Old World: This is another game, like Conan, that I can appreciate, but that just doesn't click with me. Nice mechanics, but I'm still having trouble developing competitive strategies in the game. I'll play it again, but probably won't suggest it.

Flames of War: My only play of this in 2009 was a demo game. I still love it. There's a good chance I'll be able to get back into this next year as it looks like there's a couple of locals that are finishing up their armies.

Memoir '44: Got a couple of plays of this using scenarios from the relatively new Mediterranean expansion. I still love the Commands & Colors series of games, but as I mentioned before, it's difficult to find opportunities to play two player games.

Bang!: Broke this one out one night when we had one of our larger groups and it was a big hit. A great filler game for larger groups.

Shogun: Finally got this one back on the table. I still really like this game, both the theme and the mechanics.

Wasabi!: Nice game, but makes me hungry. I've gotten it out of my system for now, but am pretty sure it will eventually make its way back on to my "want to play" list.

The Princes of Florence: One of only two games I played this year that I don't own. It's an interesting game. Reminds me a bit of Puerto Rico and other games in that genre. There's an auction mechanic and you build stuff. I'd play it again, but it's not on my wishlist.

Warhammer: Invasion: The only other game I played this year that I don't own. A surprisingly good card game from Fantasy Flight. Just playing with the cards out of the starter box has been quite fun. I don't know how well it will hold up in an environment where people construct their own decks. It suffers from being a two player game, although it looks like they intend to expand it out to more players at some point. The main reason I haven't bought this yet is that it's in the FLGS's library, and I never play it anywhere other than there. Also, the copy the FLGS has for sale is in a slightly damaged box, and the owner hasn't yet learned to send damaged merchandise back to the distributor.

Steam: I need to play this one at least one more time before making a final decision on it. It feels a little too cutthroat to me after the one play I had, but I'm definitely willing to give it another try.

Felix: The Cat In The Sack: Finally got a chance to play this one. Don't really care for it. Successful play seems to rely on card counting, which is something that is not fun for me.

Arcane Legions: The last game on this list. It's too early to tell if it will stand up over time, but I've enjoyed it so far. This despite my skepticism going into it. Expensive for a board game, but dirt cheap for a miniatures game. I still feel that the marketing is a bit off. I don't intend to treat this as a miniatures game, in that I do not plan on ever painting a miniature, but I will play it. How much I end up investing in it will be largely up to the others playing it. I don't plan on taking the lead with this one, but will try to stay competitive.

So that's it for 2009. With luck, my 2010 list will be longer.

Small World

Last month I mentioned the board game Small World, and how I liked the game but probably wasn't going to buy it because there was an open copy at the FLGS and I was unlikely to play it anywhere else. Since then I bought a copy at the FLGS.

I bought it from the FLGS because I was able to play it there, but my decision to buy it wasn't based on that play. My decision to buy it was made due to the podcast the D6 Generation. They've been raving about the game and how it was the first game in some time that all three hosts owned. More importantly, the wives at the D6 Generation were enthusiastic about it to the point that I thought I just might be able to get my wife to try it, despite not really getting that impression from my one play at the FLGS.

Fortunately, I took the risk, because I was able to get my wife to play it. The first board game she's played in several months. We've only played one game so far, but she's indicated that she's willing to play again some time when she's in the mood, which is about as much as I can hope for when getting her to game.

I mention this both to mark the relatively rare event of getting my wife to game, and in the interest of full disclosure given my earlier rant about how I wasn't going to buy the game. I still think that the point of that rant stands as this purchase was made in spite of, rather than because of, the FLGS having an open copy to play at the store.

Boardgaming in NWA

My wife's in Chicago through Sunday, which means I'm spending a lot more of my time at Castle House Games. I don't know if I'm just more sensitive to it now that I have less time to waste hanging around in game stores, or if it was different at BDG, but there seems to be an awful lot of talking about gaming, and not a whole lot of actually playing games going on at the game store, even thought there's plenty of available gaming space.

When I go into Castle House there's almost never a game being played unless there's a scheduled event going on. If I've got more than a few minutes, I always try to get one going, but my success rate is around 50%. When I do get people to play a game they always say something like "wow, it's good to get a game played, that was fun!" It's like it's a novel idea to actually play a game in a game store.

Fortunately, I have been able to get some gaming going the past couple of days. Thursday it was several games of Pandemic in a row as we struggled to finally pull off a win against the game. We started with a two player game and added a third player after our first or second attempt. After five plays we finally won one, and called it a day when I was unable to persuade anyone to play a game of Dominion.

The game itself was fun. I had played it solo before, and playing it with a group didn't offer any surprising new insight. It's a fun game that I can see pulling out again. The cooperative nature is also a good way to meet new gamers as no one has to worry about whether or not to crush a newbie, or what level of trash talk is acceptable.

Yesterday I went to the store expecting to play a game of LotR, but one table was full of hirst arts molding supplies, and the other had a game of 40K set up on it (I have a little mini rant on that game that I'll go into at the end). Fortunately, I wasn't actually that psyched for a game of LotR, and I noticed that the store owner had opened a copy of Small World for the store, so I suggested that we play it instead.

As we set it up we attracted a third player who was wondering what we were doing. This is actually pretty common. If I can get one other player interested in a game, then I almost always get another player or two who will join in. The trick is getting that first player.

The game was slow going at first as we got used to the rules, but was fun overall. I definitely want to get another game in, not least because I think I have a better grasp of the strategy involved after coming in dead last.

From a retailer perspective, my experience with Small World shows the potential danger of having too many store copies of games. I like Small World. I would normally buy a copy of Small World, and before playing it I was debating whether to buy it at Castle House or order it from BDG. The problem is that I will most likely only ever play it at Castle House, and now they already have an open copy available for play. Why, other than supporting the FLGS, would I now buy a copy?

As a gamer, I really like their policy of opening store copies of interesting games, but I've tried to caution the owner a couple times about being more selective in this policy. For example, he has an open copy of Agricola. Now, it is the highest rated game on BGG, having unseated the long time champion Puerto Rico, but it's also a rather hardcore eurogame that sells for over $80. I think I'm the only hardcore eurogamer in the area, and I'm not going to buy it anytime soon because I know my odds of getting someone to play it with me are close to nill, plus I now have an open copy at the store I can use if I do find an opponent, so I don't think he's going to get much of a return on that particular investment.

Now, I could see having an open copy at BDG, because there are several hardcore board gamers there who I could see buying a copy after giving it a spin, but that just isn't the case here. It's one of those examples of every store having a different set of conditions that it has to operate under.

One solution might be to restrict the use of the store copies to demo games and not allow them for casual play, or to divide them up into two groups: one available for casual play, and one only available for demos. That would let the owner and employees get familiar with some of the games, and show how nice they are, without providing a disincentive towards buying them.

OK, now for my mini-rant on the 40K game. When I walked into the store I saw a couple of regulars playing a 750 point game of 40K, but I wasn't too worried, we still had about an hour until my opponent would be off work and I figured we'd have time to get in a game of LotR after they finished if the owner didn't want to clear his hirst arts stuff off the other table.

I proceeded to spend my time talking and shopping until the owner was ready to do something. Then we came back to find the 40K game setup in mid-game with no one at the table. One of the players was standing off to the side and we asked him what was up, and he said that his opponent was taking a WoW break. Now, there was a lot of card gaming going on as it was Magic night, and I thought he was talking about the WoW CCG, which would have been bad enough, but then I look across the room and see the other player sitting at his laptop playing the actual MMOG!

You don't start a game on the only available miniatures table only to stop halfway through to go play a computer game! It's not just rude to your opponent, but to everyone else that might want to use the table. We let him know in no uncertain terms that he either needed to get his butt back to the table to finish the game or else clear his army off the table, and I think they went ahead and finished the game. I'm not sure, because it was at this point that we decided to play a board game instead, and while the 40K game was right next to us I really didn't pay much attention to it.

Conquest of Paradise

I've always liked 4X games on the computer (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate). There have been similar games available as board games since before there were computer games, but they tended to be long games like Avalon Hill's Civilization that often take six hours or more to play. They also tend to play better with more players. This combination makes it difficult for me to even consider getting them on the table.

Conquest of Paradise has changed that. This game shares a lot of similarities with traditional 4X games, but it plays just fine with only two players, and comes in at around two hours for a game between two inexperienced players (the box claims as little as half that time for more experienced players).

Unlike its predecessors, CoP features a South Pacific theme instead of the more typical Mediterranean one. It covers the period from 500AD during which the area known today as Polynesia was colonized.

The game is obviously a labor of love by the designer who includes a set of designers notes at least twice as long as the rules themselves, and contain mostly historical background. Unlike many other games that start with a historical theme rather than a set of rules, CoP achieves a great balance between that theme and playability.

The components are attractive, but not up to the quality level that people have come to expect from most board games today. The board itself is made of thin cardboard. It's Better than paper, but not as good as a mounted board. Counters are typical wargame quality cardboard chits. The cards aren't up to playing card quality, but are ok, especially since you only need to shuffle them once at the beginning of each game.

Each turn of game play consists of five steps. Each step consists of both players taking their actions before moving on to the next step. The steps are Turn Order, Exploration, Movement & Battle, Building, and Victory.

The Turn Order and Victory steps are essentially bookkeeping phases during which initiative and victory points are determined respectively. The meat of the game lies in the middle three steps.

During Exploration each player takes their explorer and proceeds to explore the map by entering unexplored hexes and drawing random chits to determine what is there. If an island is discovered, then a random island tile is drawn and placed on the map.

Players move their other units during the Movement & Battle step. These units consist of transport canoes, war canoes, colonies, and warrior bands. After movement is completed, units that have moved into a hex containing enemy units or villages conduct a battle during this phase.

After all movement and battle is completed the game moves to the Building step, where players calculate how many building points they have and use them to build new units and villages, as well as to buy cultural cards that can give victory points or bonuses to different activities, including exploration and combat.

Getting back to the four 'X's, the first obviously corresponds to the Exploration phase. The Movement & Battle phase corresponds to the eXterminate phase, although there probably won't be much extermination going on, as combat is usually pretty bloodless in CoP. The last two, eXpansion and eXploitation, are covered in the Build phase.

Compared to 4X computer games, there's not a lot of depth here. No tech trees or anything like that to go through, but that kind of thing is often better left to computers. CoP distills the most exciting bits out of 4X games so that the play doesn't get bogged down, at least not with the two player game. I can't speak for how well it works with three and four players as I've only played with two so far, but I suspect those games will be at least as fun as the two player game.

I can fully recommend this game to anyone who wants an entertaining and relatively quick playing 4X or civilization-lite style of game.