German-style boardgames are my favourite hobby. I've played probably 300+ different ones now. Perennial favourites include Agricola, Dominion, Ora et Labora (relatively new), Age of Steam and Titan (played this to death in the 90s, not so much now but I still love the game).
For me these games are a sweet spot between traditional family games (which tend to be largely luck-based and not very "deep") and the truly deep games of Go, Chess and even Bridge, probably even Poker. The former group is (for me) unfulfilling. The latter group is (again, for me) a massive time sink.
You can play a lot of games online now but honestly I don't like that. For me, it is both an intellectual and a social activity.
German style boardgames have been around for many years but they saw a renaissance that probably began with Settlers of Catan in the 90s that then exploded in the 2000s with Carcassonne and Puerto Rico and what came after.
It's a great hobby, particularly if you can find people to play with (physically) in your area, which doesn't tend to be a huge issue in urban centers.
EDIT: to clarify what a "German style" game is (commonly just called a "Eurogame"), it's basically a set of principles. Eurogames:
1. Tend not to be elimination games (all players generally are in the game until the end);
2. Tend to de-emphasize or eliminate direct conflict where your side or units or whatever directly attack those of other players;
3. Tend to minimize luck to varying degrees. Some games (eg Caylus) are perfect information games; and
4. Tend to take 1-2 hours to play;
5. Typically have a central board and a bunch of brightly coloured wooden pieces; and
6. Are often played by 3-5 players but can often be played with 2, occasionally 6, rarely more.
These are not hard and fast rules. Contrast this with what are called "Ameritrash" games (which isn't as derisive as it sounds).
Thanks for telling us about your favorite hobby, how many you have played, where it fits in your personal spectrum, that it has been around for many years, and giving us some titles!
> German style boardgames have been around for many years but they saw a renaissance that probably began with Settlers of Catan in the 90s that then exploded in the 2000s with Carcassonne and Puerto Rico and what came after.
I wouldn't call it a renaissance. At least in Germany it was just steady growth.
> It's a great hobby, particularly if you can find people to play with (physically) in your area, which doesn't tend to be a huge issue in urban centers.
Using a few gateway games, you can also recruit your own gamers.
Something I found quite nice was a web series by Wil Wheaton: TableTop (http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/) which basically consists of a round of people playing a board game, explaining the rules and generally having fun doing so. The nice part is that you can experience how the game is played and whether you might like it or not – much better than just with a verbal description or review on Amazon.
Of course, for cities that have such a thing, a dedicated board game shop where you can try out games is even better, but those seem to be rare, even in Germany.
Minneapolis has an embarrassment of riches on this front. We have game shops everywhere and dozens of public groups that meet regularly. There's also a monthly gathering that typically runs Friday to Sunday (16 hours each), and sells out its 90 person capacity almost instantly.
The groups are very newbie friendly, which is typical for this hobby.
What's interesting to me is new board games aren't just variants on existing games; there's noticable innovation in board game "technology". If you ever play board games from the 80s and 90s, they often feel dated and clunky, even more so than video games from the same era.
I recently went back and played some classic Avalon Hill games that were popular when I was a kid. I can't believe me and my friends spent so much time playing them when we were younger. Depending on the game, a full game might take 5 or 10 hours. For many games, the majority of the time is spent rolling dice, looking things up in tables, and moving stacks of counters around. And that's when you're lucky enough to have a chance to do anything -- there's often half an hour or more of dead time when you're waiting for other players to make their moves. By contrast, if you play a game of Dominion, it's possible to finish a game in 15 minutes. You'll have to make a larger number of important tactical and strategic decisions than you would in most six hour long games from the 80s and there's zero idle time [1].
Even with games that use modern game technology, you can see a noticeable improvement over time. Puerto Rico introduced a move selection system that allowed for serious tactical planning (10+ moves ahead) in a lightweight [2] game that could be finished in half an hour (with experienced players). But, the game wasn't perfect. One weakness was that the player turn order was fixed and very important. If you play a game with one weak player and three strong players, whoever goes after the weak player is almost guaranteed to win. Conversely, if you have one strong player, whoever sits down to the left of that player is going to get crushed.
Caylus fixed that by building a mechanism to change turn order into the game itself. Caylus was wildly popular for a year or two, but it's rare to see people play it now. Ironically, the game designer was too good at removing the element of luck for the game to be popular. If you ever played on BSW (an online board game service), you probably ran into 'Alexfrog', who had a record of something like 431 wins and 2 losses. You can predict, with very high probability, the outcome of the game based solely on who's playing, and most people don't like being crushed by the same players over and over again. Another issue the game had was that the gameplay was almost purely tactical. There were only a few viable strategies, so games all had a similar feel to them.
Agricola and Dominion fixed the problems Caylus had by adding significant randomization. Not only does that add strategic variety to the games [2], it also means that anyone can win any given game.
It would be fun to sit down and draw out a board game tech tree. It might hard to make a decent visualization, though, because of the huge span, plus a high degree of multiple inheritance.
[1] There may be some idle time with certain strategies on some of the newer expansions, due to the incredible amount of shuffling required. You can avoid this by playing here: http://dominion.isotropic.org/. I tend to play on isotropic even when playing face-to-face games because it's 2x faster normally, and there are some pathological cases where it's over an order of magnitude faster.
[2] I'm using 'light' to refer to how cumbersome and complex the game mechanics are. Examples of 'heavy' games are Enemy at the Gates (which has over 1000 counters) and ASL (which has something like 500 pages of rules).
[3] Both games do this by strongly randomizing the initial state of the game, and adding a small degree of randomization throughout the game. Technically, Caylus also randomized the initial state, but the initial random state in Caylus was minor; it was just barely enough keep you from pre-computing an opening book, the way you can in chess. Even in Dominion tournament games, where most players have played thousands of games, it's common to see wildly divergent strategies, because neither player has played on a board with a similar starting state, so they both have to figure out the best strategy in real time. I always cringe when that happens, and I realize I'm playing an inferior strategy. It doesn't really help that you can see what they other player is doing, because if you realize that her strategy is superior and try to switch, you'll be doing the same thing, but N turns behind, which is pretty much a guaranteed loss [4]. Your only hope, at that point, is some combination of superior tactical play and luck.
[4] Well, not always. A hybrid strategy can work in some cases. It depends on the strategies and the stage of the game. It depends is a safe answer to pretty much any strategy question, which is what makes it interesting.
Hardcore boardgamer checking in. Some random thoughts...
Our gaming group tends to binge on a given game; if we like it, we'll play it dozens of times and then burnout and never play it again. One game that's stood the test of time is PowerGrid. It's rarely anyone's first choice, but it's the second choice for a lot of us, so it comes out often.
Often, at the end of the evening when we're pretty tired, we'll play cards, usually Mu. Mu is an amazingly deep trick taking game that has the advantage of working really well for 5 or 6 players. Also, it's a partnered game, but your partner is not fixed throughout the course of the game, which gives it an advantage over spades/bridge (which can be a drag if you have a weak partner.) It also has some delicious elements of backstabbing and subterfuge. I highly recommend it if you like games like spades/hearts/bridge.
If you have a regular gaming group, interesting meta-gaming manifests itself. For example, we have one person who's known as the "crazy guy", who'll do something random and destructive just for fun. Or certain vendettas will arise, and someone will sacrifice themselves in order to sabotage someone else. You have accept that sometimes folks will be irrational and be aware of meta-game in order to do well in the long run...
Dominion lets you spend all the time making decisions rather than waiting for other people by having hardly any interaction between players; at times it can feel like a time trial race. I tend to prefer Tanto Cuore; while it's largely a direct rip-off (and the art puts some people off) it gives you more attack options, and the balance shifts to allow a wider variety of strategies (Dominion I find duchies are almost entirely irrelevant, and anything other than going for the high end rarely works). So it's an improvement, but it's so similar I suspect we're converging on the ultimate form of that kind of game.
While agricola does have significant luck in the inital game state, this is lessened by drafting the initial cards which almost all advanced players do. This ensures that at most players will only have 1 extremely powerful card, and adds another level of skill with managing the draft.
The game itself is extremely skill based, to the point that an experienced player with a poor hand should be able to beat a less experienced player with an awesome hand most of the time.
Unlike in caylus, the best players are only able to win 60-70% of the time
"""I think one of the very interesting things about modern single-player game development is that it creates exceptionally expensive content designed to appeal to everyone and be played exactly once for 8-10 hours. As anybody who plays European board games will tell you, making a game (read: the body of rules, the mechanics and dynamics) is cheap - all you need is creativity and a lot of playtesting. AAA videogames are entirely different, though - millions are spent on voice acting, scripting, graphics, etc. This is why I'm excited for moderate-budget games like Bastion that can publish interesting and challenging gameplay with a budget lean enough that it doesn't have to sell to absolutely everybody."""
Board games don't just innovate in the rules department. Everywhere outside the computer "game" world, games ARE the rules. Rules is how we distinguish one game from another. If Heroes of Might and Magic III was a board game, people would call it an expansion to Heroes II. It has nearly identical rules. It has 3 extra towns and some extra units and spells ? The same is true for Munchkin Cthulhu. But no one is silly enough to call it a sequel or a separate game.
As far as I'm concerned, 90% of the modern tacticool shooters are the same game, not similar games. They are played in the same way. Weapons and enemies are slightly different.
Board games frequently have mechanics unheard of in the world of computer games
> it also means that anyone can win any given game.
See, I play a decent number of games, and having this aspect in, say, Dominion, really decreases the fun factor. If I can lose/win just by the luck of the draw, I don't have a chance to have skill-based win (obviously with careful card selection in Dominion you can obviate this and drive it more into a build-your-deck game).
The other aspect of Settlers that makes it enjoyable is that it involves a very social aspect, the trading of resources. So you can't just drop out for when its not your turn, or you'll miss things. That always adds to the enjoyment for me.
> Agricola and Dominion fixed the problems Caylus had by adding significant randomization. Not only does that add strategic variety to the games [2], it also means that anyone can win any given game.
While Agricola and Dominion do a pretty darn good job of it, it's often a matter of individual opinion whether adding randomization is a 'fix' or not. I hate playing a game where I feel like I could lose by pure chance no matter what my level of skill is. There's a balance to be had between having guaranteed good strategies, too much of which makes a game feel stale, and real randomization, too much of which makes a game feel like glorified gambling to no effect.
What you really want is just some way of ensuring that you don't play the same situation twice, so that some mental exertion is always required, while keeping the playing field level. One way to go about it is to just devise a game with sufficiently complex positions that players are likely to create new ones on their own- that's what Chess, Go, and Hnefatafl do, despite being very lightweight. Another way is to find some means of randomizing positions that doesn't too seriously impact player standings- that's what randomized Nim does and what Backgammon tries to do. A third is to make game progression depend on player judgments/voting, which magnifies the social aspects of a game; it's a form of randomization, but fundamentally different from, say, rolling dice or drawing shuffled cards, and there are very few popular games I know of that make use of it (Dixit is the only board game I know of, though there are card games like Taboo and Apples to Apples). It seems to me that modern board games tend more and more towards the randomization approach (sometimes with good reasons to do so given the simulation conceits of the game- i.e., agricultural productivity in Settlers). This makes sense because its easy to do, especially in the context of trying to make games that play faster- randomizing starting conditions is a great way to save the first ten or twenty opening moves prior to interestingness that you'd go through in a fully deterministic Chess-style game, even if there's no further randomness- and especially if you're willing to be lax with the requirement to not obviously upset player standings by random chance. But I wonder if we're missing something by not doing more exploration of the space of "interesting" deterministic games.
Incidentally, Tsuro is an interesting edge case- as the board is built during game play, I'm not sure if that counts as randomized initial conditions, or continuous randomization. While Tsuro is the simplest example, there are several games similar to this, like Infinite City or Wasabi. I was recently introduced to a Tsuro expansion that added dice rolls that alter the previously-played board tiles, and it was pretty uniformly considered by the players to be inferior due to over-randomization destroying any real reliance on individual skill.
P.S. Most of my recent exposure to modern games comes from periodic sampling of board game events run by my university SF&F club, so it's entirely possible that there are filtering and selection biases in the kinds of games that I have seen. I would certainly not mind having my entire argument torn to shreds by being introduced to yet more new games that I was not previously familiar with.
Along the same lines, the game Innovation improves on Dominion by giving players different random decks, many more options for actions, a chance to come back no matter how far behind you fall, and yet still feels like skill is extremely important.
Caylus was wildly popular for a year or two, but it's rare to see people play it now. Ironically, the game designer was too good at removing the element of luck for the game to be popular.
Ah, yes. I had this experience with my card game, Ambition ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH... ). I came up with the concept when I was overseas (Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, fall 2003) and had left my German-style games at home, but wanted a low-luck card game (regular deck) to play. Building a trick-taking card game with minimal hand-luck turns out to be really hard, and involved a lot of statistical work, but I managed to get it down to a point where about 3-4% of the variance (in a typical 75-minute game) was drawn cards.
The problem was that it was over-optimized and too complicated and, being a theme-less abstract card game, it still didn't have a fully "German" feel in any case. So I ended up taking rules out and injecting small amounts of card-luck back into the game to make it more fun to play. Now it's closer to 5-6%, which I'm fine with. Scaling back the optimizations made it a better game.
It took some time, though, to convince myself that it's a feature that I (still probably the most experienced player) only win about 45% of 4-player games.
Worth noting the article's a couple of years old, as anyone who plays Dominion will realize.
I'm always amazed at how much innovation is going on. With board games you'd think that the best ones would all have been figured out decades ago, but it seems like more are being invented than ever.
Love this article. I think the end captures it perfectly - there's really nothing else that gets the same social interaction as board games.
At work we use board games on a daily basis for team building, usually play a 1-hour-or-less game over every lunch. It's amazing how quickly you get to know someone and how those relationships build and blend into your work as well. You can see how someone teaches a new person how to play the game, how they interact with alliances and respond to attacks from other people.
Some 1-hour games we play for reference, if anyone's interested:
We occasionally have a Saturday game day among friends for longer games, but these three are great less-than-an-hour games. Core Worlds is about an hour, the other two will get you 2 to 3 games in in an hour.
Similar situation where I work with a similar list of games but also including Carcassonne, Carcassonne Discovery, Kingdom Builder, Small World, Last Night on Earth (seasonally) and futile attempts to finish Robo Rally in under an hour.
Amusingly enough also in a Vancouver-ish software development office (Richmond area).
Could you suggest a good board game that is playable turn by turn? We are a group of friends in very different time zone, and playing a turn based game, about one turn a day works nicely.
We have played Tigris & Euphrates, and it works great, but would be looking for something different.
Don't get too excited. It strongly depends on the group you're playing with. I like silence and dislike disruptions. I hate people who won't shut up when playing a board game. Playing board games online can dramatically increase the fun factor of a game, especially if the game has a lot of score markers to keep track of (Seasons) or people don't say "end of turn". With many people, playing face to face is just a mess.
I absolutely love board games and card games. And I love to think about game mechanics. If I would not be a web developer I would love to work with this kind of game development.
I have developed a version of Magic the Gathering which is played with a normal 52 card deck (one deck per person) with much more simple rules and good strategy (better?) and less luck. I have played it around 100 times and the rules are finalized. I think I should translate the rules to English.
A note about Monopoly, the new card game Monopoly Deal is actually quite good as a family game with simple rules and around 20 minutes.
Monopoly Deal is definitely an under appreciated gem. It's a great way to kill 15 minutes with friends. Doesn't require a lot of strategy, but it still somehow fun (I typically enjoy a lot more strategy than luck).
I've done something similar to your Magic the Gathering game. It involved a chess board and using 52-card decks to give your pieces "abilities." I believe the Ace of Spades was a "Resurrection" card that would respawn any one piece you'd lost.
I'm very curious--is there a way for me to play this game? I'd love to get the rules from you and try it out. I loved the mechanics in Magic when I was younger, and I'd love to not have to buy all the cards and worry about building a deck, and just be able to play the game with my fiance without telling her it's Magic.
Yeah, for 5 bucks and fits in a pocket Monopoly Deal is great. It also has the nice property of having the strategy change noticeably as you vary the number of people which helps extend it's shelf life.
I enjoy Power Grid with a larger group (4+) people, but with a small group, the game really drags. This is unfortunate, because my usual gaming group consists of my fiancee and myself.
I love powergrid! I recall the last two turns require a lot of calculations. When I played with non-mathematically oriented people (most people in my life), they got frustrated.
Lately I've been buying some of my child board games like Monopoly, Cluedo, Hotel and such...
I noticed that people are going back at this type of games, and I can see it why. It's an awesome excuse to invite some friends to your house, setup a game, get a few drinks and just play, talk and have some fun.
You can't do this with videogames.
Also, you'de be amazed at how much a good strategy boarding game can reveal of someone's personality.
Not strictly a board game (nor German-style), but I'll just mention the card game Set too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(game)). It's quick to play, both adult and children can play together, and you can play against each other or work together to find the sets. We've brought it to a ski trip with two other families, and it was a hit.
I've always had this hypothesis that if a country has a strong cultural background in games people tend to have good critical thinking skills c.p.
The case study for this would be Germany.
Either way I'm pretty convinced playing board games with children is an excellent thing to do to foster their development (sadly in this day and age it almost seems spending any time with your kids puts you way ahead of the curve already as far as parenting goes).
It's fun, too.
Crowdfunding seems to work pretty well for board games btw. And I wouldn't be shocked to hear that passionate board gamers make good startup guys (poker players seemingly do)
The Ludemetic Game Generator [1] is an amusing, and often inspiring, fictional game generator. It randomly combines BoardGameGeek.com's game category and mechanics keywords to create a new game. Some random examples:
* Web Tycoon in Space: Categories: Expansion for Base-game, American Indian Wars, Mythology. Mechanics: Commodity Speculation, Hand Management.
My daughter has been an avid board-gamer for several years and just started the 3D board game club at the University of Alabama. Look it up if you're in the area and want to find a group to play with!
Junta is an example of a older well playing board game if you have 5-7 people. Especially good for a mature crowd and with appropriate props like hats and sunglasses.
If I'd do a ROI analysis on all my board games most of them beat out lots of other social activities.
If an average game lasts maybe an hour and you play it with an average of 3 players that's 3h of entertainment per play. 10-15 Euros per hour of entertainment seems very reasonable so most games actually tend to pay for themselves after just one play if oyu look at it that way.
Board games are discrete and closed, often in a well-thought-out and beautiful way. It's generally intended as a social experience, but the discrete world makes the game possible to take apart and analyze, so that if you want to dive deep into the game, you can. It's up to you what kind of experience you want to have. If you want to play today and forget who won tomorrow, that's fine. On the other hand, if you want to get analytical about why starting that external conflict in a game of T&E was such a good (or bad) move, you can do that as well. In a continuous, real-time computer game, you can't as easily reason "to the bottom" because the mathematical microstructure is hidden, and often emergent.
Germany, Hungary, and to some degree, France, have a really strong (tabletop) gaming culture, which is a really cool thing. I tend to think that games confer a lot of benefits not just for "weird gamer types", but for everyone. It's a lot easier to get to know people over a board game than when there is nothing "in the center" to talk about: can people really carry on a 2-hour conversation about the fucking weather? I'm a weather geek and even I would prefer not to (possibly because I know from experience that it bores most people).
I actually think there's space in the world for a "board game cafe" niche. Instead of board games being a fringe activity that require corralling people, I don't see why there couldn't be a revival of the culture where a person can walk into a coffee shop at any time and find a game.
Funny you should mention the board game cafe concept. In Toronto we have Snakes and Lattes, it's very popular and constantly expanding into adjacent buildings/floors. Fun place to go and hang out, have a beer play with friends. I think that somehow in last several years board games begun to be perceived not as a nerdy thing to do but something cool. I have seen people go on dates to SnL.
I love to analyze games and as a programmer there's quite a bit of neat stuff you can do due to the discreteness. Build DSLs for the game logic or strategy, the whole field of AI, modelling of games as FSM, Petri Nets whatever seems interesting.
There are quite a few of these cafes. They have game collections and you can rent a table+game and pay for the drinks. You can also bring you own etc. the atmosphere is usually pretty nice/relaxed.
[+] [-] cletus|13 years ago|reply
German-style boardgames are my favourite hobby. I've played probably 300+ different ones now. Perennial favourites include Agricola, Dominion, Ora et Labora (relatively new), Age of Steam and Titan (played this to death in the 90s, not so much now but I still love the game).
For me these games are a sweet spot between traditional family games (which tend to be largely luck-based and not very "deep") and the truly deep games of Go, Chess and even Bridge, probably even Poker. The former group is (for me) unfulfilling. The latter group is (again, for me) a massive time sink.
You can play a lot of games online now but honestly I don't like that. For me, it is both an intellectual and a social activity.
German style boardgames have been around for many years but they saw a renaissance that probably began with Settlers of Catan in the 90s that then exploded in the 2000s with Carcassonne and Puerto Rico and what came after.
It's a great hobby, particularly if you can find people to play with (physically) in your area, which doesn't tend to be a huge issue in urban centers.
EDIT: to clarify what a "German style" game is (commonly just called a "Eurogame"), it's basically a set of principles. Eurogames:
1. Tend not to be elimination games (all players generally are in the game until the end);
2. Tend to de-emphasize or eliminate direct conflict where your side or units or whatever directly attack those of other players;
3. Tend to minimize luck to varying degrees. Some games (eg Caylus) are perfect information games; and
4. Tend to take 1-2 hours to play;
5. Typically have a central board and a bunch of brightly coloured wooden pieces; and
6. Are often played by 3-5 players but can often be played with 2, occasionally 6, rarely more.
These are not hard and fast rules. Contrast this with what are called "Ameritrash" games (which isn't as derisive as it sounds).
[+] [-] yycom|13 years ago|reply
But, what is a German-style board game?
[+] [-] eru|13 years ago|reply
I wouldn't call it a renaissance. At least in Germany it was just steady growth.
> It's a great hobby, particularly if you can find people to play with (physically) in your area, which doesn't tend to be a huge issue in urban centers.
Using a few gateway games, you can also recruit your own gamers.
[+] [-] ygra|13 years ago|reply
Of course, for cities that have such a thing, a dedicated board game shop where you can try out games is even better, but those seem to be rare, even in Germany.
[+] [-] jdludlow|13 years ago|reply
The groups are very newbie friendly, which is typical for this hobby.
[+] [-] luu|13 years ago|reply
I recently went back and played some classic Avalon Hill games that were popular when I was a kid. I can't believe me and my friends spent so much time playing them when we were younger. Depending on the game, a full game might take 5 or 10 hours. For many games, the majority of the time is spent rolling dice, looking things up in tables, and moving stacks of counters around. And that's when you're lucky enough to have a chance to do anything -- there's often half an hour or more of dead time when you're waiting for other players to make their moves. By contrast, if you play a game of Dominion, it's possible to finish a game in 15 minutes. You'll have to make a larger number of important tactical and strategic decisions than you would in most six hour long games from the 80s and there's zero idle time [1].
Even with games that use modern game technology, you can see a noticeable improvement over time. Puerto Rico introduced a move selection system that allowed for serious tactical planning (10+ moves ahead) in a lightweight [2] game that could be finished in half an hour (with experienced players). But, the game wasn't perfect. One weakness was that the player turn order was fixed and very important. If you play a game with one weak player and three strong players, whoever goes after the weak player is almost guaranteed to win. Conversely, if you have one strong player, whoever sits down to the left of that player is going to get crushed.
Caylus fixed that by building a mechanism to change turn order into the game itself. Caylus was wildly popular for a year or two, but it's rare to see people play it now. Ironically, the game designer was too good at removing the element of luck for the game to be popular. If you ever played on BSW (an online board game service), you probably ran into 'Alexfrog', who had a record of something like 431 wins and 2 losses. You can predict, with very high probability, the outcome of the game based solely on who's playing, and most people don't like being crushed by the same players over and over again. Another issue the game had was that the gameplay was almost purely tactical. There were only a few viable strategies, so games all had a similar feel to them.
Agricola and Dominion fixed the problems Caylus had by adding significant randomization. Not only does that add strategic variety to the games [2], it also means that anyone can win any given game.
It would be fun to sit down and draw out a board game tech tree. It might hard to make a decent visualization, though, because of the huge span, plus a high degree of multiple inheritance.
[1] There may be some idle time with certain strategies on some of the newer expansions, due to the incredible amount of shuffling required. You can avoid this by playing here: http://dominion.isotropic.org/. I tend to play on isotropic even when playing face-to-face games because it's 2x faster normally, and there are some pathological cases where it's over an order of magnitude faster.
[2] I'm using 'light' to refer to how cumbersome and complex the game mechanics are. Examples of 'heavy' games are Enemy at the Gates (which has over 1000 counters) and ASL (which has something like 500 pages of rules).
[3] Both games do this by strongly randomizing the initial state of the game, and adding a small degree of randomization throughout the game. Technically, Caylus also randomized the initial state, but the initial random state in Caylus was minor; it was just barely enough keep you from pre-computing an opening book, the way you can in chess. Even in Dominion tournament games, where most players have played thousands of games, it's common to see wildly divergent strategies, because neither player has played on a board with a similar starting state, so they both have to figure out the best strategy in real time. I always cringe when that happens, and I realize I'm playing an inferior strategy. It doesn't really help that you can see what they other player is doing, because if you realize that her strategy is superior and try to switch, you'll be doing the same thing, but N turns behind, which is pretty much a guaranteed loss [4]. Your only hope, at that point, is some combination of superior tactical play and luck.
[4] Well, not always. A hybrid strategy can work in some cases. It depends on the strategies and the stage of the game. It depends is a safe answer to pretty much any strategy question, which is what makes it interesting.
[+] [-] msluyter|13 years ago|reply
Our gaming group tends to binge on a given game; if we like it, we'll play it dozens of times and then burnout and never play it again. One game that's stood the test of time is PowerGrid. It's rarely anyone's first choice, but it's the second choice for a lot of us, so it comes out often.
Often, at the end of the evening when we're pretty tired, we'll play cards, usually Mu. Mu is an amazingly deep trick taking game that has the advantage of working really well for 5 or 6 players. Also, it's a partnered game, but your partner is not fixed throughout the course of the game, which gives it an advantage over spades/bridge (which can be a drag if you have a weak partner.) It also has some delicious elements of backstabbing and subterfuge. I highly recommend it if you like games like spades/hearts/bridge.
If you have a regular gaming group, interesting meta-gaming manifests itself. For example, we have one person who's known as the "crazy guy", who'll do something random and destructive just for fun. Or certain vendettas will arise, and someone will sacrifice themselves in order to sabotage someone else. You have accept that sometimes folks will be irrational and be aware of meta-game in order to do well in the long run...
[+] [-] lmm|13 years ago|reply
I still need to try Agricola.
[+] [-] jgeralnik|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|13 years ago|reply
A great example of this would be the fairly recent game Trajan which uses a Mancala board as a core piece of the game mechanics.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|13 years ago|reply
*
2 points by b0rsuk 4 days ago | link | parent | on: Mining a 1993 game design for innovative game mech...
There's an insightful comment over here: http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2012/02/whether-they-l....
"""I think one of the very interesting things about modern single-player game development is that it creates exceptionally expensive content designed to appeal to everyone and be played exactly once for 8-10 hours. As anybody who plays European board games will tell you, making a game (read: the body of rules, the mechanics and dynamics) is cheap - all you need is creativity and a lot of playtesting. AAA videogames are entirely different, though - millions are spent on voice acting, scripting, graphics, etc. This is why I'm excited for moderate-budget games like Bastion that can publish interesting and challenging gameplay with a budget lean enough that it doesn't have to sell to absolutely everybody."""
http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2012/02/whether-they-l...
Board games don't just innovate in the rules department. Everywhere outside the computer "game" world, games ARE the rules. Rules is how we distinguish one game from another. If Heroes of Might and Magic III was a board game, people would call it an expansion to Heroes II. It has nearly identical rules. It has 3 extra towns and some extra units and spells ? The same is true for Munchkin Cthulhu. But no one is silly enough to call it a sequel or a separate game.
As far as I'm concerned, 90% of the modern tacticool shooters are the same game, not similar games. They are played in the same way. Weapons and enemies are slightly different.
Board games frequently have mechanics unheard of in the world of computer games
[+] [-] pnathan|13 years ago|reply
See, I play a decent number of games, and having this aspect in, say, Dominion, really decreases the fun factor. If I can lose/win just by the luck of the draw, I don't have a chance to have skill-based win (obviously with careful card selection in Dominion you can obviate this and drive it more into a build-your-deck game).
The other aspect of Settlers that makes it enjoyable is that it involves a very social aspect, the trading of resources. So you can't just drop out for when its not your turn, or you'll miss things. That always adds to the enjoyment for me.
[+] [-] gliese1337|13 years ago|reply
While Agricola and Dominion do a pretty darn good job of it, it's often a matter of individual opinion whether adding randomization is a 'fix' or not. I hate playing a game where I feel like I could lose by pure chance no matter what my level of skill is. There's a balance to be had between having guaranteed good strategies, too much of which makes a game feel stale, and real randomization, too much of which makes a game feel like glorified gambling to no effect.
What you really want is just some way of ensuring that you don't play the same situation twice, so that some mental exertion is always required, while keeping the playing field level. One way to go about it is to just devise a game with sufficiently complex positions that players are likely to create new ones on their own- that's what Chess, Go, and Hnefatafl do, despite being very lightweight. Another way is to find some means of randomizing positions that doesn't too seriously impact player standings- that's what randomized Nim does and what Backgammon tries to do. A third is to make game progression depend on player judgments/voting, which magnifies the social aspects of a game; it's a form of randomization, but fundamentally different from, say, rolling dice or drawing shuffled cards, and there are very few popular games I know of that make use of it (Dixit is the only board game I know of, though there are card games like Taboo and Apples to Apples). It seems to me that modern board games tend more and more towards the randomization approach (sometimes with good reasons to do so given the simulation conceits of the game- i.e., agricultural productivity in Settlers). This makes sense because its easy to do, especially in the context of trying to make games that play faster- randomizing starting conditions is a great way to save the first ten or twenty opening moves prior to interestingness that you'd go through in a fully deterministic Chess-style game, even if there's no further randomness- and especially if you're willing to be lax with the requirement to not obviously upset player standings by random chance. But I wonder if we're missing something by not doing more exploration of the space of "interesting" deterministic games.
Incidentally, Tsuro is an interesting edge case- as the board is built during game play, I'm not sure if that counts as randomized initial conditions, or continuous randomization. While Tsuro is the simplest example, there are several games similar to this, like Infinite City or Wasabi. I was recently introduced to a Tsuro expansion that added dice rolls that alter the previously-played board tiles, and it was pretty uniformly considered by the players to be inferior due to over-randomization destroying any real reliance on individual skill.
P.S. Most of my recent exposure to modern games comes from periodic sampling of board game events run by my university SF&F club, so it's entirely possible that there are filtering and selection biases in the kinds of games that I have seen. I would certainly not mind having my entire argument torn to shreds by being introduced to yet more new games that I was not previously familiar with.
[+] [-] SatvikBeri|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
Ah, yes. I had this experience with my card game, Ambition ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH... ). I came up with the concept when I was overseas (Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, fall 2003) and had left my German-style games at home, but wanted a low-luck card game (regular deck) to play. Building a trick-taking card game with minimal hand-luck turns out to be really hard, and involved a lot of statistical work, but I managed to get it down to a point where about 3-4% of the variance (in a typical 75-minute game) was drawn cards.
The problem was that it was over-optimized and too complicated and, being a theme-less abstract card game, it still didn't have a fully "German" feel in any case. So I ended up taking rules out and injecting small amounts of card-luck back into the game to make it more fun to play. Now it's closer to 5-6%, which I'm fine with. Scaling back the optimizations made it a better game.
It took some time, though, to convince myself that it's a feature that I (still probably the most experienced player) only win about 45% of 4-player games.
[+] [-] lmm|13 years ago|reply
I'm always amazed at how much innovation is going on. With board games you'd think that the best ones would all have been figured out decades ago, but it seems like more are being invented than ever.
[+] [-] d4rti|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic
[+] [-] RTigger|13 years ago|reply
At work we use board games on a daily basis for team building, usually play a 1-hour-or-less game over every lunch. It's amazing how quickly you get to know someone and how those relationships build and blend into your work as well. You can see how someone teaches a new person how to play the game, how they interact with alliances and respond to attacks from other people.
Some 1-hour games we play for reference, if anyone's interested:
Dominion - Already discussed in another post :) (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion)
7 Wonders - Drafting based card game where you interact with your immediate neighbours (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68448/7-wonders)
Race for the Galaxy - Card game where action choices enable other players (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28143/race-for-the-galaxy)
Lords of Waterdeep - D&D themed worker placement game (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/110327/lords-of-waterdeep)
Stone Age - Most "german" game of this list, worker placement and resource gathering with dice (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34635/stone-age)
Space Alert - co-op game where the main game mechanic is "communication" (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38453/space-alert)
Galaxy Trucker - fun tile-based spaceship construction game (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31481/galaxy-trucker)
The Resistance - 2 out of the 5 players are secretly spies (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/the-resistance)
I wrote this list out in a bit more detail on my website: http://rtigger.com/blog/2012/12/14/board-games-are-great/
[+] [-] peapicker|13 years ago|reply
Core Worlds ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98351/ )
Quarriors ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/91536/ )
Infinite City ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/46807/ )
We occasionally have a Saturday game day among friends for longer games, but these three are great less-than-an-hour games. Core Worlds is about an hour, the other two will get you 2 to 3 games in in an hour.
[+] [-] rpfennig|13 years ago|reply
Amusingly enough also in a Vancouver-ish software development office (Richmond area).
[+] [-] alphaBetaGamma|13 years ago|reply
We have played Tigris & Euphrates, and it works great, but would be looking for something different.
Thanks.
[+] [-] JimWestergren|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0rsuk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JimWestergren|13 years ago|reply
I have developed a version of Magic the Gathering which is played with a normal 52 card deck (one deck per person) with much more simple rules and good strategy (better?) and less luck. I have played it around 100 times and the rules are finalized. I think I should translate the rules to English.
A note about Monopoly, the new card game Monopoly Deal is actually quite good as a family game with simple rules and around 20 minutes.
[+] [-] archon|13 years ago|reply
I've done something similar to your Magic the Gathering game. It involved a chess board and using 52-card decks to give your pieces "abilities." I believe the Ace of Spades was a "Resurrection" card that would respawn any one piece you'd lost.
[+] [-] endersshadow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Avshalom|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itemshoppe|13 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4921146
[+] [-] mikeknoop|13 years ago|reply
Powergrid: Unique because there are no dice involved; a game of economics
Steam: Unique because there is a bank (partly tied to your score) that you can borrow against to build pieces faster
[+] [-] archon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway1979|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intinig|13 years ago|reply
Anyway I have to weigh in and suggest to try a game I produced with some friends (by co-founding a publishing company): Al Rashid (http://www.yemaia.com/al-rashid -- http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/127282/al-rashid).
I think most people with a development background are naturally disposed towards liking eurogames, and in my case to work on one :)
[+] [-] phatbyte|13 years ago|reply
I noticed that people are going back at this type of games, and I can see it why. It's an awesome excuse to invite some friends to your house, setup a game, get a few drinks and just play, talk and have some fun.
You can't do this with videogames.
Also, you'de be amazed at how much a good strategy boarding game can reveal of someone's personality.
[+] [-] henrik_w|13 years ago|reply
Maybe it is well known, but I hadn't heard of it until I read about it here on HN (Peter Norvig had simulated the odds of not finding a set, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1303797). Having played for a while, I ran my own simulations. The results differed a bit from Peter Norvig's. I wrote it up here: http://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities-revisite...
[+] [-] kriro|13 years ago|reply
Either way I'm pretty convinced playing board games with children is an excellent thing to do to foster their development (sadly in this day and age it almost seems spending any time with your kids puts you way ahead of the curve already as far as parenting goes). It's fun, too.
Crowdfunding seems to work pretty well for board games btw. And I wouldn't be shocked to hear that passionate board gamers make good startup guys (poker players seemingly do)
[+] [-] eru|13 years ago|reply
Planning. Simple arithmetic. Social interaction. Patience. Sure, that's going to be useful.
[+] [-] javanix|13 years ago|reply
Similar to software development in that you need constant iteration, much different in that it takes forever to implement and test those iterations.
[+] [-] cpeterso|13 years ago|reply
* Web Tycoon in Space: Categories: Expansion for Base-game, American Indian Wars, Mythology. Mechanics: Commodity Speculation, Hand Management.
* Popbid: Categories: Music, Territory Building. Mechanics: Auction/Bidding, Modular Board.
[1] http://kevan.org/ludeme
[+] [-] smoyer|13 years ago|reply
http://cw.ua.edu/2012/10/29/3d-board-game-club-introduces-ne...
[+] [-] anakha|13 years ago|reply
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/242/junta
[+] [-] PussyRiot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|13 years ago|reply
If an average game lasts maybe an hour and you play it with an average of 3 players that's 3h of entertainment per play. 10-15 Euros per hour of entertainment seems very reasonable so most games actually tend to pay for themselves after just one play if oyu look at it that way.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|13 years ago|reply
2. On http://boardgamearena.com , you can play several dozen board games for free. No flash, it uses HTML5 magic.
[+] [-] vampirechicken|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yycom|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RaSoJo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
Germany, Hungary, and to some degree, France, have a really strong (tabletop) gaming culture, which is a really cool thing. I tend to think that games confer a lot of benefits not just for "weird gamer types", but for everyone. It's a lot easier to get to know people over a board game than when there is nothing "in the center" to talk about: can people really carry on a 2-hour conversation about the fucking weather? I'm a weather geek and even I would prefer not to (possibly because I know from experience that it bores most people).
I actually think there's space in the world for a "board game cafe" niche. Instead of board games being a fringe activity that require corralling people, I don't see why there couldn't be a revival of the culture where a person can walk into a coffee shop at any time and find a game.
[+] [-] marekmroz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Adrock|13 years ago|reply
http://www.thebrooklynstrategist.com/
They seem to be doing quite well.
[+] [-] kriro|13 years ago|reply
There are quite a few of these cafes. They have game collections and you can rent a table+game and pay for the drinks. You can also bring you own etc. the atmosphere is usually pretty nice/relaxed.