Plastic Nazis

I'm not sure where game manufacturers get most of their plastic from nowadays, but wherever it is Fantasy Flight Games must be keeping them in business. It seems every major new release from that company has to come attached with tons and tons of little plastic pieces. And why not indeed since FFG is the premier publisher of Ameritrash games around and little plastic pieces is what Ameritrash fans seem to demand. So strong is this link between plastic and AT that a number of people seem to have decided that the presence of plastic miniatures is the defining feature of Ameritrash, rejecting commonly held older AT classics like Dune into the bargain. War of the Ring actually has "215 Figures" as a sales tagline on the box.

Now don't get me wrong - I have nothing against plastic. As an ex-miniatures gamer I can well understand what sculpted pieces bring to the table in terms of visual spectacle. AT gamers are supposed to be interested in theme and good miniatures can really add to the thematic appeal of a game - I can't imagine for example that Space Hulk would really be quite such an intense game if you couldn't see those many-armed monstrosities galloping down the corridor toward the marines. The fact that you can easily differentiate the armaments of your marines whilst still having them look like a squad is a big plus, and it's immensely satisfying when one of those big guns goes off on a room full of 'stealers. It's no co-incidence that Space Hulk is one of the few games for which I've actually bothered to paint the miniatures.

However it's important to understand that miniatures are only one part of the thematic appeal of a game. For the production quality to really add to the theme all the components need to be well produced and designed. Take the reprint of Conquest of the Empire for instance - comes with a ton of quality plastic components but I can't help but feel the board art looks cheap and tacky - and thereby reduces the visual impact of having all those little men and horses sweeping across the Mediterranean. In a recent podcast I mentioned that I thought one of the reasons for the long standing popularity of a number of GW titles was the fact that they were an early adopter of high production standards in boardgames and this isn't just down to miniatures, it's good design across the board (excuse the pun). Look at the pieces in the original Fury of Dracula - everything is dripping with late Victorian and/or horror theme and this is undoubtedly part of what makes it one of the most thematic games of all time.

Anyway, to get back to the point, what bugs me about plastic in games is the fact that it's now seen as such an essential part of the appeal of a game that plastic often gets used when cardboard might well have been a much better idea. I've just got me a copy of War of the Ring which, while a great game, is possibly one of the worst offenders in this regard. To find out why, let us compare a few instances of plastic against cardboard (and sometimes wood) and see where the card can come out on top.

The first point is information density. There's a reason why Grognards so love their cardboard counters and it's not because wargame publishers are on such tight margins that they can't afford to risk using plastic pieces. You can record a lot more information about what a piece can do on a cardboard chit than you can on a plastic piece. In fact we'll go further - you can record nothing about what a piece can do if it's moulded in plastic. Look at a player aid card from Twilight Imperium - all that stuff in the bottom right could've been recorded on cardboard pieces. Admittedly this is a pretty minor example but I'm sure that sometimes modern designers limit the amount of differentiation between units in a game because they know that they can't print different statistics onto the plastic pieces they need to include to sell the game. In War of the Ring the information could have included the country to which the piece belongs, information so vital that many WotR players have painted the bases of their miniatures with an appropriate colour. Sure, FFG could have moulded all the pieces in different colour plastic but this would have added massively to the cost of the game.

Which brings us nicely onto point number two. Plastic costs. Alongside War of the Ring I also ordered Twilight Imperium and its expansion which cost me a whopping sum of money. Most of this goes on the plastic miniatures included in the game and what really annoyed me is that I shelled out for the expansion where the bulk of the cost goes on another two sets of plastic player units that I'm never going to use - my gaming group doesn't even consist of eight people, let alone eight people I'm going to convince to spend the whole night playing Twilight Imperium. This made me so cross that I actually considered writing to FFG to ask if they I couldn't just pay to have them send me the non-plastic components from the expansion in a bag, since the cards and such from the expansion are considered pretty much essential to get the most out of the game. What stopped me in the end was the realisation that it'd probably cost them as much to have a staff member do this for me and ship it from the US as it would for me just to buy the bloody expansion in the first place - that and the fact I was behaving like an anally-retentive fool.

Another thing you can't do with plastic is stack a number of pieces in a small area. This is another major problem in WotR which has a number of small board spaces in which very large armies can potentially gather. Although the designers foresaw this and included a number of cardboard counters in the game the trouble is that each nation has three different types of units (regular, elites and leaders) and it's not uncommon for units of different nations to end up in the same space, plus room may have to be found for character figures, so the discs don't really solve the problem. This is probably the biggest problem for plastic in general. I've come across it in so many modern games that it'd be wasteful to finger them all - it's cropped up from time to time in just about everything I've played from FFG, Eagle Games and Days of Wonder.

Plastic is also very bad at recording hidden information. There's an old game called Survive! from the US which is now regarded as a family AT classic. It's become hard to find and fairly expensive. Over here in the UK the game was republished as Escape from Atlantis and a number of things were changed including replacing the wooden pawns from the original with plastic ones. As part of this change a hidden value on the bottom of each pawn was removed, resulting in a significantly less interesting game and one which is now common as muck and cheaply had off Ebay. I can't help but to speculate that this change might have had something to do with the fact that it would have been much harder to get this information onto the plastic pawns in a way that would have been both readable and hard to rub off - no such problem with wood. There are a whole number of games I've played in which the precise strength or nature of a piece is hidden from the other players through the simple expedient of turning a cardboard counter face down or stacking other counters on top if it - Titan for example, or an obscure but brilliant wargame called Air & Armour. This sort of thing just isn't possible with plastic and leads to an important and interesting mechanic being closed off to designers who want to produce AT games for the modern market.

Another thing I'm going to complain about in what has become a disproportionately long rant is that plastic can, instead of adding to the visual appeal of a game, end up looking naff. A disturbingly large proportion of modern plastic components seem to be made of a slightly rubbery compound instead of the hard, brittle plastic that we used to see all the time. At first I thought this stuff was being used because it would break less easily, but snaps seem to be just as common and long spindly bits on the figures, such as the gun barrels on all the types of figures in Memoir '44, bend and end up looking extremely cheap and silly instead. It's also easy to have badly moulded figures that not only look horrible but make the process of differentiating between pieces doubly difficult.

There's another point - the final one - differentiating between plastic pieces can be very hard. Again, this is the reason why WotR players feel the need to paint the bases of the figures from different nations. They actually look different from nation to nation but because they're the same colour and there's so many of them on the board at once, telling them apart in practice is a real pain. Anyone tried playing Talisman with unpainted figures? You'll have the same problem. I can remember being quite impressed with the idea that your playing piece in that game was a full-colour card of your character that stood upright in a little plastic stand. That conveyed all the thematic information that I needed for that game.

Anyway this has become far longer that I originally intended, especially considering that I'm not actually saying plastic is bad. This is really a plea to publishers and designers, please, please, please design and produce games with interesting mechanics and practical components first and foremost before you start thinking about the satanic lure of plastic.