Fortress: Ameritrash

Fortress:Ameritrash Has Moved

2010-03-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

Please join us at: http://fortressat.com/

The number you have reached is no longer in service....

2008-01-28T08:29:00.000-08:00

But we live on, bigger and better than before at:

http://www.fortressat.com/

The Last Post

2008-01-11T00:58:00.001-08:00

Cue bugle music

As Ken and others have intimated recently, we’ve been making some big decisions behind the scenes here at F:AT of late, under the auspices of the mysterious Gabbo. I’m now in the privileged position to be able to tell you what, exactly, is going on.

We’ve decided to kill off the Fortress Amertriash blog.

I missed out on being the first one to post on this blog when it opened (that honour went to Malloc) so I’m sure as hell going to get the last post in now that I’ve got the chance. Being a person of precious little imagination I couldn’t think of anything better to do with this illustrious space than to spend some time reflecting on what F:AT came to stand for during its existence.

Well, it stood for Fortress : Ameritrash for one thing.

Beyond that it’s sometimes difficult to see what united us all and what common threads there were running through the material we posted. After all, even within our shared embracing of the term “Ameritrash” for our favourite games there was some extraordinary diversity – look at Mr. Skeletors top ten games and contrast with mine if you don’t believe me. I’ve always viewed this as a great strength because the result was a blog which varied wildly in terms of style, content and coverage and as a result had broad appeal and the potential for lasting interest. But we’ve had our little fights behind the scenes as well – I’m sure you’d expect nothing less from people who like conflict-heavy games about backstabbing and treachery. All the infighting is one reason we’ve decided to wind down the blog.

So what’s left? Is this a blog about theme-heavy games, as many people have suggested as the unifying factor behind the AT badge. I don’t think so – we’ve had some great gossip columns on the general gaming scene, some wild raves about subjects only distantly connected to games and even devoted space to wider trash culture.

So maybe we don’t have much of a shared reference point at all, as a number of critics charged when the AT phenomenon first took off. But, inevitably, I don’t think that’s true. I think that out of the smoke and chaos that accompanied the birth of F:AT something very clear and very important has emerged – a growing group of people who want to help everyone remember that games, gaming culture, talking about games and playing games are, above all, supposed to be fun.

This realisation hit me when I noticed that there were a small group of die-hard Eurogamers who were using the comments here on the blog and many other channels to voice the message that hey, they might hate our style of games, but the tone of what we were posting was still striking a chord with them. They remembered that a lot of the early Eurogames – the games that helped change the face of our hobby for the better – were basically light to medium-weight games with simple but appealing themes and which mixed traditional mechanics based on randomisation and strategic movement with more novel, inventive, tactical rules. Games which are still considered classics by fans of many genres today – Settlers of Catan, Tigris & Euphrates, El Grande and Ra. How the hell, they seemed to be wondering, did we go from simple design principles such as easy rules and short playing time to a world where theme is considered sinful, lightweight or random games are held in disdain and grown men spend inordinate amounts of time fussing and fighting, often with quite stunning levels of personal venom, over trivial analyses of balance and symmetry?

I’m well aware that what one person considers “fun” can be another mans’ tedium but the term here is meant broadly as in “not serious”. We don’t think games are an art form. We don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying we don’t like a game because it’s hard work. We don’t care if other people think that sci-fi and fantasy games, books and films are for children. We don’t care about being judged just because we go all weak-kneed over a box full of brightly coloured plastic toys. We don’t care if games involve pretending to be violent, or pretending to be immoral or pretending to be treacherous and backstabbing your friends because we know that it’s just pretending. We don’t care if people think that we’re being rude, disrespectful, sexist or divisive because we like to swear or speak our minds about things or people. We don’t care because in spite of the inordinate amount of time we lavish on our favourite games and our favourite themes we know that in the grand scheme of things they don’t matter a rats’ arse. They’re for having fun, not for taking seriously and so no amount of insults or rude words traded over them should be remembered or taken to heart. We can be serious adults if we want to or need to. After all, there are many, many things in the world which need serious consideration and serious solutions. But games aren’t one of them, and they never will be.

We maybe started to take F:AT too seriously, which is another reason why we chose to wind the site down.

So that’s my take, in a nutshell, on what bought us together as a group and what F:AT was all about. So now it’s time to sit around the campfire for a while, crack open a bottle of good (Scotch) whiskey, toast some (vegetarian) marshmallows and sing sad songs until the dawn, in between drunken reminiscing about the good old days that we all spent together.

Or instead we could keep the whiskey, say fuck to the rest of it and break out some kick-arse monster games to play way past the dawn and right into the point where people start collapsing from exhaustion and alcohol poisoning. And at that point, I’ll stagger up, raise a glass and lead everyone in a toast:

“F:AT is dead. Long live F:AT!”

http://www.fortressat.com/

Oota Goota, Solo?

2008-01-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

We're talking about a very delicate, intimate matter over at Gameshark.com this week- playing with yourself.

Now, just go ahead and admit it. You get that new game but game night is 4-5 days away. It's 12:30 AM and you've read through the rules, punched out the pieces...so you make sure the front door is locked and think "I'll just set it up to see what it looks like". Then you think "I'll just play a turn or two to see how it goes. Before you know it, you're playing the game by yourself.

Don't worry, it isn't nearly as shameful as watching scrambled porn channels or subscribing to Maxim Magazine.

I wonder how many BGGers had "their first" soloing AGRICOLA?

For those of you who haven't been following the comments sections...

2008-01-08T12:38:00.001-08:00

No, we're not dead. We're not "giving up"--in fact, most of us are more fired up right now than we have been in a long time.

So here's a little thread to let everyone know that

SOMETHING BIG IS COMING FROM THE FORTRESS....AND VERY SOON

Look for our sentimental send-offs to the old girl to start soon. And stayed glued to this space for details...things are about to get VERY interesting.

And another belated thank you to everyone who has checked out our blog over the past nine+ months. Your patience and interest are hopefully about to be rewarded in spades.

"Gabbo". The "Blue Harvest" of Ameritrash boardgaming.

It's coming.

I Fail at Press Releases

2008-01-07T10:04:00.001-08:00

So anyway, Jeremy at FFG is kind enough to send us a very cool Press Release for featuring on our blog.

Unfortunately, he sent it to us on December 17th, and it fell into the void known as "Fat Man Jolly Days" and "We are Working on GABBO right now, please bugger off."

As I said, I fail at Press Releases.

-----------------------------------------

Fantasy Flight Games currently shipping Confrontation: The Age of the Rag'narok
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Editor's note: Oops)

Roseville, MN (December 18, 2007): Fantasy Flight Games has shipped the starter set for Rackham's Confrontation: The Age of the Rag'narok to distributors and retailers and has declared a street date of Wednesday, December 19 for this highly anticipated game.

"We're very happy to get this game out right before Christmas," said Jeremy Stomberg of FFG.

"Rackham and FFG, working together, have gotten a beautiful, fun game to retailers just in time for last-minute gift givers to put another present under the tree."

Confrontation: The Age of the Rag'narok is a medieval fantasy skirmish game featuring highly-detailed pre-painted plastic miniatures. It is the newest version of the wildly popular Confrontation miniatures game that has been a staple of Rackham's line since 2000. The new game is fully compatible with Rackham's metal Confrontation figures, with decks of game cards featuring Age of the Rag'narok stats available in stores and for free download online.

To promote the game, FFG's media division, Landroval Studios, has created a promotional video available on their website at http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/confrontation/video-lg.html (Quicktime required, available here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/).

New miniatures featuring well over a dozen different armies in the game's universe will launch in early 2008 and will continue with monthly releases into the future.

About Fantasy Flight Games

Based in Roseville, Minnesota, Fantasy Flight Games has been designing and distributing hobby games for over a decade. Founded by Christian T. Petersen, FFG produces games based on computer games such as World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Kingdom Hearts; games based on written works like J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories; and many original properties such as Twilight Imperium and Descent.

About Rackham

Since its creation in 1997, Rackham has specialized in the designing, manufacturing and marketing of miniatures strategy games based on imaginary universes. Confrontation was the first game released by the company. Simulating conflict in a medieval fantasy universe, it rapidly became a success and continues to evolve as a game and as a universe.

# # #

Contact information:
Jeremy Stomberg
jstomberg@fantasyflightgames.com
651-639-1905
Marketing Associate
Fantasy Flight Games
1975 West County Road B2, Suite 1
Roseville, MN 55113

Desperation Morale

2008-01-03T07:36:00.000-08:00

So yeah, Atlanta gaming legend, Black Metal tastemaker extraordinare, and my former employee BILLY MOTION and I have started playing ASL. OK, it' s just the training wheels "Starter Kit" version but it's still enough to make "hardcore" gamers who think 12 pages of rules are too much cry softly in fear. There is rules complexity, but more significantly the range of decisions, possible outcomes, and potentials for creative use of resources make PUERTO RICO look like Tic Tac Toe.

ASL is amazing. I never thought I'd say that, particularly after years of being conditioned to think that it's completely unplayable, inaccessible, and that playing the game will cause you to immediately sprout a beard and a middle-aged paunch. Truth be told, Billy has become a little more hirsute around the chops but I chalk that up to his finger-on-the-pulse fashion sense than any ASL side effect.

So move on over, cover-to-cover, to Gameshark.com for this week's Cracked LCD where we go where even gamers fear to tread. Special thanks to Bill Abner for making me look like I knew who the hell Curt Schilling was beyond "the guy that runs Multiman Publishing".

The 2007 Trashies!

2007-12-29T15:23:00.000-08:00

OK, get your tuxes ready everybody…it’s time for the 2007 Trashies! Now, I have to admit, that I wasn’t going to do Trashies this year…mainly because they were really about BGG and the culture over there more than anything else. But when edit-monger Bill Abner tasked me with doing a year-end list for Gameshark.com, I started writing and I realized that I was basically writing the 2007 Trashies Awards. And since I didn’t want Bill and Co. over there to get hit with lawsuits or anything like that I decided to send them the “good guy” version. F:AT gets the uncensored, Renegade Version- yes, just like HIGHLANDER. Now, if you don’t like what you see here or you don’t feel like something was represented that you feel that ought to be, by all means add it in the talkback.

I think it really does say a lot that being away from BGG has made these awarda more about games and less about the bankrupt “culture” over there.

Anyway, I think I see Matt Thrower’s 1986 white Lamborghini Countach pulling up to the red carpet so let's do this thing.

The 2007 PT Barnum Sucker Prize for Excellence in Board Game Marketing

BATTLELORE

BATTLELORE came out last Christmas with the promise of hordes of expansions that would somehow (according to the ad copy) bring old D&D players and fans of MASTER OF MAGIC into the hobby along with providing the total newbie with a great entry point in the form of a $80 retail game with a 80+ page rulebook and the need to purchase further components. The game as shipped was certainly beautifully appointed with great production and a proven system and it looked like 2007 was going to be the year of BATTLELORE. But then, early this year, the expansions started to come out and it didn’t take long for me and many others to realize that they added very little to the game and what’s worse, some felt that the game wasn’t complete in the box and that Days of Wonder simply broke off chunks to extend the sale date, so to speak. What’s more, with the “missing” pieces in place the game was still several notches below the vastly superior COMMANDS AND COLORS: ANCIENTS, which uses the exact same system but somehow provides a much, much better game. But hey, hats off to Days of Wonder for getting folks who turn their noses up at miniature gaming and collectible card games to engage in the same buying practices.

The “At Least It Ain’t Rush” Award for Best Board Game Soundtrack

Every Board Game Ever Released With the Exception of LAST NIGHT ON EARTH

A shocker! Somehow, the _only_ board game released with a soundtrack this year didn’t get the nod- instead, the tabletalk, color commentary, bad language, and rules explanations that serve as the aural environment we generally play games in wins the award. It’s definitely better than the amateurish, embarrassing, and totally un-zombieish CD gimmick that jacked LAST NIGHT ON EARTH’s retail price up $5-10. The funny thing is that if they had included Fabio Frizzi’s soundtrack to ZOMBI it would have worked a hell of a lot better and I wouldn’t be bitching.

The Big Board Game Stink ’07

TIE- Mayfair Games Announces "Price Fixing"/Alliance with Satan and DUEL IN THE DARK

Of course, if you’ve ever read any of the popular (not as in the “cool” or “attractive to girls” sense) boardgaming webpages out there, you’ve probably gathered that it doesn’t take much to send hobby gamers into a state of extreme underwear unction. There were a couple of things that went down this year, like the time I told a glorified webmaster that he was “full of crap” that caused seismic shockwaves throughout the boardgaming community, but nothing made boardgamers lose their minds quite like Mayfair’s announcement that it would protect the endangered mom-and-pop, brick-and-mortar retail stores that have supported the hobby for decades by enforcing a policy that would limit deep discounting by online retailers. The sheer thought of having to pay $3-4 more for a board game sent many into fits of absolute lunacy and I’m sure there was at least one suicide. Of course, online boardgaming wisdom tells us that dirty ol’ Mayfair doesn’t produce any games worth playing anyway- the entire SETTLERS OF CATAN series for example. But this one is a tie, because opening the mold-encrusted copies of Z-Man Games’ otherwise pretty good DUEL IN THE DARK made me really kind of scared, like I should call someone to have the game abated or something. It smelled like a combination of death, Waffle House, and China.

Biggest Jumped-Up Piece of Shit That I Played All Year

COLESSEUM

Good gravy, Days of Wonder scores again in another category they ought not be trying to win. COLESSEUM was pretty close to the worst game I played all year, a completely enervating exercise in all the worst excesses (if you can call them that) of European board game design. Now, I do have to say that this game is freaking beautiful when it’s laid out and the production is just fantastic. I was genuinely excited to play it because I liked the theme (you’re show promoters in Ancient Rome) and I thought the mechanics sounded familiar but they might be fun with the right setting. So what you get is nothing more than GERMAN AUCTION GAME TEMPLATE B with a bunch of bells and whistles. Call ‘em wheezes and grunts, because this dog isn’t fit for show. Days of Wonder’s strategy of making games so pretty that no one realizes how shallow and boring they are hits the jackpot once again- or did it? Has anyone in the world played this game since September?

The Bloody Listern Knife for the Best 2007 Family Game About Eviscerating Hookers

MR. JACK

Nothing says family fun like a game with cutie-pie artwork about Jack The Ripper- but you throw cocaine addict Sherlock Holmes into the mix and you’ve got a recipe for wackiness! So while Holmes is doped up over by the wrong street lamp, Saucy Jack turns another victim inside out. “Pretty sneaky, sis!” MR. JACK won this one by default, but rumor has it that at least five other Eurogamer designers are rushing to design their own Ripper games using mechanics such as blind bidding, card drafting, and role selection to recreate in an extremely abstract fashion the events of 1888.

The Mother Theresa Blue Veil Chastity Prize for the Game with the Tightest Box

DUST

Last year’s blowout winner was of course MISSION: RED PLANET which caused much consternation among quick-to-shoot, angry BGGers who demand smooth opening, easy-access boxes that don’t even require a glass of wine to pry apart. This year, DUST, a really cool game that is getting almost no publicity whatsoever rather than the “World Map=RISK” notices takes the prize. Using carefully calibrated scientific equipment designed in response to the MRP Box Crisis of ’06, I gauged that it took me nearly 200 PSI of force to remove the box and it required 4.3 seconds. Somebody page Randy Cox and get him to come up with a statistics table so we can accurately track this growing problem. Note to board game publishers- please continue to make those sticky, slick boxes with bottoms slightly larger than the tops. I love that.

Board Gaming Event of the Year

THE REVENGE OF THE SON OF THE BRIDE OF THE HOUSE OF BILLY AND MIKE CON ’07: THE REVENGE IN 3D

Why so sad? You didn’t get invited? Tough shit. You missed out, and I’m not even going to tell you what games we played because it’s MEMBERS ONLY, thank you very much. You’ve got to go on BGG and rate MILCH UND GHERKIN through the roof and continually kiss my ass online and in blogposts, podcasts, and to the high heavens in order to get an invitation. Next year, we’ll be joined by none other than STEVE WEEKS.

BEST TRICK PLAYED ON EUROGAMERS

Mac Gerdt’s “Rondel” System

Ho ho! Including F:AT whipping boy HAMBURGUM, that’s score _three_ for Mr. Gerdts! Whodathunk that simply taking the arrow off a spinner and letting folks choose to spend a couple of ducats or whatever to pick the spot they want would turn out to be such a beloved and “innovative” mechanic? I’m convinced that Mac secretly just wanted to get a bunch of stick-in-the-mud snobs like Clearclaw to play games with spinners.

Most Softball Board Game Review by Someone regarded as and Authority on the Subject

“CUBA” by GREG SCHLOESSER

If there’s anything people like Rick Thornquist (R.I.P.?), Tom Vasel, and Greg Schloesser have brought to the field of board game criticism and evaluation it’s the amazing ability to generate not only repeatable, soft-touch platitudes but also the ability to say absolutely nothing interesting about a game whatsoever in the space of a review. Mr. Schloesser has made an art of the confusingly noncommittal review, and his review of CUBA (really just a précis of the rules with a vague “it was OK” sort of statement) had me wondering if “Greg Schloesser” is really a codename for a piece of boardgame review-generating software. Here’s an example of the hard-hitting, cut-to-the-quick insight this titan of boardgaming discourse offers us:

“Whether one needs another game of that breed in their collection is a matter of choice that some will answer in the affirmative, while others will decline. For now, I fall on the “affirmative” side of this question.”

Wow.

The Jimmy Carter Commemorative Peanut Cup for Pan-Euro/Ameritrash Friendship Outreach and Understanding

MR. SKELETOR

From his stunning performance as an Australian on Steve Week’s ULTIMATE PODCAST to his willingness to share intimate details of his sex life with doomed pop debutante Britney Spears, no one did more to promote the healing of wounds this accursed civil war has caused between Ameritrash fans and Eurosnoots and like a boardgaming Martin Luther King, Jr. “The Man” keeps trying to shut him down through a rotating series of bans from the Leading Board Game Site. Much like the famous song by Chumbawamba, he gets banned, but he gets on again. Mr. Skeletor’s efforts have helped many gamers weed out the cool Eurogamers (like Chappy) and the wankers (like Drew) and his unwavering commitment to being a skull-faced antagonist of cartoonishly sensitive post-teenage males is truly remarkable.

The Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Area of Fun Murdering

JC “CLEARCLAW” LAWRENCE

This is a very special award folks. It’s the first time I’ve handed out a Lifetime Achievment Award but I think this special someone deserves not only the award for Excellence in the Area of Fun Murdering but heretofore this award will be officially called “The Clearclaw”. JC Lawrence, or “Clearclaw” as he’s known the boardgaming world has taken funmurdering to entirely new heights- from his faux-academic prosletyzing to his bizarro-world insistence on playing games like EL GRANDE without the tower and leaving Christmas presents unwrapped to avoid unexpected drama and surprise. Games to this man are just mathematical equations transferred to cardboard, he hates movies, and his moving narrative of a game of THROUGH THE DESERT showed the world that stories don’t have to be any fun whatsoever. He’s the Charlie Manson and Adolf Hitler of fun murdering. Of course, since these awards are fun, I’m sure he’ll decline to accept it.

The Robert Martin Memorial Award for F:ATtie of the Year

TIE- TOM HANCOCK/BRADY SEVERN

Folks, I gotta tell you…the stuff Tom and Brady are doing for F:AT is just fucking amazing. I mean, it is literally the best boardgame writing I’ve ever read and it really has set the bar unrealistically high for the rest of us. Who can forget that amazing roundtable discussion Tom had with Reiner Knizia, Rudiger Dorn, and Wolfgang Kramer where Knizia broke down in tears over the admission that he really does just pull themes out of his ass and Dorn wound up punching Kramer in the stomach after the latter called the former a “god damned copycat”. Brady’s behind-the-scenes expose on how German games are being used to distribute subliminal neofascist messages of compliance and conformity was truly shocking and I really can’t believe that child labor is still being used to hand-paint those boards. It’s really too bad that most of you can’t read these articles because you haven’t accrued enough F:ATbucks to gain access to the members-only EXCLUSIVE areas of the site. Remember this next time we have a supporter drive.

BEST USE OF THE WORD “FUCK” IN A RULEBOOK

NEUROSHIMA HEX

I’m sure the milquetoasts were “concerned” when they cracked open the rulebook to one of the sleeper Euro hits of 2007- the pretty good Polish game NEUROSHIMA HEX. Here’s a few excerpts from this R-rated masterpiece:

“…Screams and howls of the wounded mixed with overwhelming roar of cannons were the Jingle Bells of 2052. Fuck Christmas.”

“Motherfucker was blasting off full auto like a machine gun, punching holes with the massive cannons. Was it really happening? Was that thing real?” When you’re fucked, you’d believe in the weirdest shit. And that was weird shit.”

“But I was alive, and no fucking robot was going to get me now.”

Funny thing is, I’ve never seen anyone else comment on it…and remembering the scandal last year where PARTHENON showed Poseidon’s penis on one of the most famous statues of the Classical era, I’m kind of surprised.

And now…the 2007 Trashie Award for the Best Game of the Year

AGRICOLA!

I haven’t played it, but man, it must be great, right? I figured selecting AGRICOLA would be the best for the community and since it has such a high rating on BGG it’s obviously good. It’s the best game since sliced bread, I’m told, and I think you even get to slice bread in the game. I’ll be sending a stack of 2007 Trashies stickers to Hanno to label future editions of the game featuring the slogan “It’s dying-while-eating-shit good. Tell your ma!”

That’s it for 2007- barring Armageddon we’ll do it again in 2008!

The 2007 Cracked LCD Awards

2007-12-20T08:39:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's time. Over at Gameshark.com I've posted my year-end awards list. For my part, I will say that this is probably the only list you won't see AGRICOLA, RACE FOR THE GALAXY, or AGE OF EMPIRES III on when all is said and done. But hey, go look and come back here to argue. But Mike, say you, what about the 2007 Trashies? That's next week, and they're a F:AT exclusive. Gotta protect Bill Abner and co. from any litigation.

Guest Report--Behind Enemy Lines

2007-12-17T14:14:00.000-08:00

F:AT reader Jonathan Yonce sent us a great after-action report of his Ameritrash-fueled invasion of a very snooty-sounding "EuroQuest". What follows is a tale of plastic, beer, tears, and a distressing lack of nutrition during his stay.

_____________________________________________

Behind Enemy Lines
EuroQuest V

I'm no solider. I have no training. I'm getting back into board games after four beer-soaked years of collegiate neglect. Axis & Allies, Magic, Settlers, Ameritrash-- That's my story. What makes them think *I* have the fortitude for this mission? Reconnaissance deep behind the arid trenches into one of the main outposts of euro games, where themes lie asphyxiated by gas and cubes march stoically in lockstep. What makes those chuckle heads at F:AT think that such a neophyte should venture so close to Mount Doom just to see what the Burning Eye is up to? Oh, wait. That's right. I volunteered. But I was lucky enough to recruit a good friend and gaming buddy, Greg who would serve as my wingman. We were supposed to head up that night to rendezvous with Agent Malloc, but sadly my wingman was detained and didn't get to my place til late. We did however end up going out for drinks with old friends in town - the perfect conditioning for dealing with dry games.

Here follows my pieced together recollection of my encounters in Timonium, MD (which, surprisingly, is *not* on the periodic table of elements) November 11th and 12th - home of EuroQuest V.

SUNDAY Morning:

0700 – Alarm goes off. Why is Maryland so far away?

0745 – Leave.

0800 – Leave again. This time with directions. My wingman proves his worth.

0815 – Gas up and find out how effective a 7-11 Bacon, Egg, Cheese Croissant is against a slight hangover. Not very. Bacon bits do *not* equal bacon in my book. Like "combat" in a euro, these bacon bits were a sad substitute for real meat.

0950 – Arrive at Days Hotel. As far as the rooms go – it turns out that I *can* in fact judge a book by its cover. Serviceable, though, and economical. No matter - I'm here to game.

0955 – Get pre-registration badges. Discover I traveled 120 miles to be there. Nothing compared to the eventual Puerto Rico tournament winner who came all the way from California. (You'd HAVE to win for that trip to be worth it!) There are free snacks and drinks – most impressive.

1000 – Not wanting to rouse suspicions, Wingman Greg and I try to fit in with the euro-natives by cracking open Shogun (which we found in the MASSIVE game library there). Armed with memories of playing Wallenstein in high school, we cobble together our two player variant. I crush him. I revel in the victory only long enough to discover that had one action been different, he would have won. Good start. I mean, we're playing with cubes, right? Who'd suspect us (unless of course, they spotted me eyeing the library's untouched copy of Twilight Imperium)?

1230 – Meet Zev of Z-Man Games. Very nice and impressive businessman. Wish I could produce and sell board games for a living. Buy Prophecy.

1300 – First heat for Settlers of Catan tournament. The format here is interesting and used to speed things up: your second placement is a city and you get TWO resources for each bordering hex. I play against two former 2006 finalists and some nice kid. Take the lead with around 5 VP and one player takes it upon herself to inform everyone of my slight lead. She plays her robber on me. I bite my tongue – biding my time. She builds her fifth connecting road but conveniently forgets to claim the 2 VP Longest Road tile so I kindly remind her and point out that *she* is now the new target. She's at 9 VP and the trade embargo ensues. I come back because no one's trading with her. I steal her longest road for the win.
Wingman Greg loses. I taunt him so he can better channel his rage into victory.

1440 – Rendezvous with Agent Malloc, who dared enter the belly of the beast with a small child in tow. I could only assume the little tyke served as a canary in the euro-mines. All too soon I see first hand the deadly effects of cube confusion as the small one goes limp. Malloc doesn't have much time. He introduces me to Phil and King "Caylus" Putman who is apparently decimating all euronerds in his path. Malloc reports of missed Arkham Horror and describes TI3 (which I've yet to play). I question my fortitude as I see him depart.

1445 – Check in at front desk. Overhear a phone conversation between the front deskman and a woman who wanted to know the following: Where was the Days Hotel? Was there a bar? Could she have as many drinks as she wanted? Hmmm… Another Ameritrasher coming to EuroQuest?

1500 – Regroup with WMG at Chili's. Eat one of the only two *real* meals I consume on my journey.

1615 – Scout out an appealing game demo. Play Amazing Space Venture with WMG and the designer, Steven LaShay. One of the best games I've played in a while. Read a more detailed debriefing here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/240844.

1830 – STARCRAFT! Holy Hell in a hand basket had I been wanting to play this! Let's just say the game topped my own secret agenda at EuroQuest. A gentleman was setting up a game with 4 players already seated and asked if WMG and I would like to play. Immediately, I answered in the affirmative. The game had already been set up with starting units, cards, and orders placed so we could learn the rules. It was great fun playing though - despite the obvious euro gamer at the table who couldn't get past some timing issue when resolving combat. I tried to explain to him that Zerglings rush, kill, and die - there are no timing issues.
Serious hats off to our teacher, who turned out to be none other than Doug Epperson-- BGG profile: "I play games to have fun!" He wasn't lying. Doug created this Brood War scenario ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/file/info/27773) just to teach others how to play. A guy who loves games, clearly.

2030 – Second Settlers Heat. With WMG this time. One guy (William, I think) runs away with the game and we finish in about 40 minutes. Considering about 15 of those minutes were spent setting up and placing – that's one fast game. I place second. I chat with my "friendly competitors" a while, then wander away, consumed by thoughts of die rolls and theories about how a game that uses soldiers needs rules for attacking.

2130 – Mosey back into the main hall and see WMG sitting down to a game of God-knows-what with two other guys. I sit and listen in on the rules. The game turns out to be Battue. First, it's a gorgeous game. Simple rules of moving onto city tiles and rolling 2D6 + number of your barbarians versus 2D6 + tile defense. Get loot, conquer city tiles, card play to boost attacks and mess with others, but overall pretty simple – too simple. I take out the big palace objective in the center of the city and hold it while I lost other tiles. Eventually I strike out to try to just end the game. Ugh.

2400 – One guy from the Battue game and one of his friends are interested in playing another game. He tells me and WMG to pick something out of the library. WMG picks Thebes. We lay it out and I worry about the board. It looks boring. Just a handful of European and Mediterranean cities with dotted lines connecting. There's a scoring track around the board and a damn stupid looking hatted-meeple man. The rule explanation begins.

MONDAY MORNING

0045 – After deciphering three long, colorful pages of rules, we're just about to start. Turns out our score isn't being measured by times around the board– we're actually fighting for the title of in-game time spent. Clearly, this is not a game about time travel-- but that mechanic would make this game immeasurably cooler. All in all I had Starcraft's rules explained to me more quickly...

0315 – Playing an extra 1/3 of the game (we find out later) has us all feeling as though Thebes might have worn out its welcome. Eye my F:AT-issued cyanide tablets more than once. Overall a nice euro but when I'm an explorer and I *can't* jump my fellow archeologist to steal his loot but I *can* transport from London to Israel instantly with a zeppelin – something's gone wrong. I never *did* get my hands on this magic, time-warping zeppelin either.

0330 – Up to our room to sleep off the day's *real* excitement: Seeing Cuba, Agricola, and Race for the Galaxy all played in one room. Yippee?

0745 – Alarm goes off.

0815 – Walk around the abysmal continental breakfast bar. Scoff at the sad display of cereal, coffee, honey buns, and bagels. Think back to the guy at the front desk who only yesterday informed me of the hotel's "fabulous continental breakfast." Clearly he has crap for standards.

0820 – Wander around until someone unlocks the main hall doors.

0830 – Realize that WMG and I roused ourselves a half an hour earlier than necessary. Apparently, the third heat wasn't scheduled to begin until 0900.

0831 – Break out my beat to Hell copy of Magblast. Win two games to WMG's one game.

0900 – Heat Three. With WMG once more – I come from behind to win putting me in the top six with eight advancing.

1100 – Semis with top two from each game advancing. Game saving moment: Two other players orchestrate a six for one trade so one can build enough roads to steal the Longest Road VPs from the fourth player who would've won that turn (confirmed by him later). End up jumping out and pulling down the win. Sweet. WMG is taking another crack at Thebes and wins.

1230 – Finals. Based on points thus far I'm second. We switch now to playing vanilla Settlers and apparently my brain can't cope, leaving me to score a paltry 5 VP's to my opponents' 7, 7, and 10. I learn later that the winner helped program AI for Settlers on Xbox. Super.

1400 - Quick, tear-soaked burger from Chili's does nothing to ease the sting of defeat. Seeing a beautifully presented game of Descent (3-D dungeon, painted figures, the works) that I can't stay for does little to help.

1430 - Back on the road to make it home before the traffic gets bad. Still alive after dodging some close calls and no worse for wear - ready to write up my surveillance and report back to the Fortress (uh, eventually).

Mass Market Games Featuring Sea Monsters

2007-12-13T08:17:00.000-08:00

No, silly...I'm talkin' 'bout SURVIVE! over at Gameshark.com this week. But I did have the game above when I was a kid and thought it was pretty cool. Look, it was the 70s, OK?

It's a good time to bring up SURVIVE! because we've been talking a lot about types of interaction and the game features my favorite kind of interaction- where you do bad things to other players and they respond in like coin.

Fischer's Law

2007-12-12T11:10:00.000-08:00

My reading material at the moment is Daniel Dennett’s book on evolution – Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. It’s a fantastic book dealing with both the philosophical and scientific aspects of Darwinism and ought to be mandatory reading for anyone obtuse enough to doubt the very real fact of evolution, or to try and substitute some form of creationsim. But enough politics; in a footnote in the book I found, oddly enough, a very interesting gaming reference.

The author claims (with what veracity I do not know) that a popular tactic of the famous US chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer was to deliberately make moves with no clear purpose in order to confuse and bamboozle his opponent. His hope was that by doing this, the other player would take much longer than normal in making his move whilst he puzzled over the meaning of Fischer’s’ play. This would eventually tell on the chess clock, either forcing rushed moves later in the game or even potentially run them out of time completely. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that for those of us who play chess at a less rarefied level, pulling off a stunt like this has the potential to yield rewards without having to rely on the artificial limitation of the clock.

What struck me about this particular piece of unorthodox genius is that there are a wide range of modern games in which this particular tactic wouldn’t work. Interestingly enough there is also an ancient game where it would have little or no application either – Go. Since many, many moves in a Go game have no obvious and apparent purpose anyway – I have been told that a good Go player should “feel” his moves as much as he thinks about them – trying to confuse an opponent with a random play is just wasting a stone.

On further reflection it occurred to me that allowing for the deliberate confusion tactics in the mechanics might actually be a worthwhile marker of what I would consider a game worth playing. I call this formulation “Fischer’s Law of Game Quality”. It can be crudely summarised thus – “Good games are those which allow a player to gain an advantage through making suboptimal moves by confusing his opponent(s)”. So what does it actually mean if a game doesn’t meet the rather rough specification of Fischer’s Law?

Firstly it means that the game has little, if any, social interaction associated with the game itself. Any game which has social elements combined with hidden information has set up bluffing as a viable strategy, and as long as bluffing is a viable strategy then the game obviously comes under auspices of Fischer’s Law. After all, what was Fischer attempting to pull off in his games if not a gigantic bluff?

Secondly it means that the game has to have limited player interaction. The definition of player interaction itself is pretty vague but for my purposes it usually means that a game has to have pieces on a board which manoeuvre and can contest control of board space with pieces from another player. The manoeuvre bit is important – Chess would qualify but Go would not – because without it it’s possible to be placing things on a board that don’t interact with those of your opponents. The vague definition of “control” is also important because it widens the definition beyond just direct confrontation combat games to include other mechanics such as area control and area majority.

Thirdly it means that the game cannot be one in which making optimal moves at every turn is important for play balance. If that deliberately provocative move is obviously deliberately provocative or if, in a multiplayer scenario, it hands a clear advantage to another player down the line then you’re just going to end up loosing and looking like an idiot. There are various ways for a game not to end up breaking this knock-on prediction of the law. One of them, clearly, is for the game to have enough random elements in it to make your sub-par move look like a gamble or an honest mistake instead of the clever sucker-punch it really is. Another is for the game to have a complex enough decision tree to make the analysis of whether it was really a poor move rather difficult and this of course is where chess falls in to line.

As I write this it’s suddenly occurred to me that what I’ve done is simply taken the three things I’ve previously identified as the markers which can differentiate a good Euro from a poor Euro and turned them on their head, identifying them from the other direction. However, Fischer’s law still serves a wider purpose. Firstly it encapsulates those principles much more neatly since from a one-line statement you can deduce the marginally more complex thoughts I had on the subject. Second it allows me to cast my net wider and identify bad Ameritrash games. The reason for this is that the law has a fourth aspect which I’ve yet to touch on – games with excessive random factors will fall foul of it because too much chaos means lack of meaningful strategy. And without a meaningful strategy it’s not possible to make a deliberately non-strategic move for the express purpose of confusing everyone else at the table. And of course, as I’ve long lamented, over-reliance on random factors is the biggest bane of the genre that we love.

There are also very important exceptions to Fischer’s Law. Dexterity games ought to be exempt, as should party games and games based almost entirely on gambling. We should recognise this because these sorts of games are often awesomely entertaining! The other exception is to recognise that there are certain games which can fail to meet the demands of Fischer’s Law and still be excellent games – Puerto Rico is a great example which escapes by virtue of it having made the branches of its fairly simple decision tree fiendishly difficult to pick and choose between (and that’s the unique virtue of the game if you ask me). But there’s always an exception that proves the rule.

At this point I probably ought to point out that I’ve taken a vague notion that occurred to me while reading a complicated book late at night after too much wine and spun it out to a quite ridiculous degree. There are obvious problems with it not covered by my exceptions above, such as the fact that it in no way relates to the way in which the inclusion of an appropriate level of randomness can vastly improve an otherwise dull game. So have I wasted blog space? I hope not. I think that even if the idea is fundamentally fairly unsound it’s kicked up a few issues worth mulling over.

So. Chess, anyone?

Ultimate Podcast with Mr. Skeletor!

2007-12-10T06:58:00.001-08:00

So Steve Weeks has finally gotten around to interviewing the elusive Mr. Skeletor. Hear all the fun at Steve's website: www.league-radio.com.

The F:AT bloggers are sort of like Pokemon...soon Steve will have collected 'em all. Say, Steve, any chance you could post a special wing on the league-radio website devoted to the F:AT interviews you've done? I was a blockhead and didn't save mine.

Anyway, be sure to check it out--Frank is outspoken on the web and he doesn't disappoint here. Great interview and worth a listen.

Interview with a Game Publisher: Kevin Nesbitt (Valley Games)

2007-12-07T13:03:00.000-08:00

I have been a little busy with the typical end of the year stuff that tends to get in the way of my normal slacker self at work. As a result this post took a lot longer to come together, but finally i had some time to post this interview I conducted with Kevin Nesbitt of Valley Games.

ENJOY!

Malloc: Lets start this with the usual questions about your formative years. How did you get into gaming?

Kevin: Like most kids, I started out with some classic children's games. I can remember playing "Pay Day" with my siblings, for example. When I was still quite young, my uncle bought me a copy of "Panzergruppe Guderian" which I loved to play. It was then that I knew boardgames
were for me.

Malloc : What types of games do you currently enjoy playing? Any favorite titles, or game you think.. "man I wish we had been able to do this."?

Kevin: It's a bit funny; since Valley Games began, I've found my boardgaming time reduced to a large degree. Often when I do have time to play, it will be for playtesting or trying out a new prototype.

Of the games that I do get to play, I'd have to say that I like Card-Driven Games most. Specifically, I enjoy 1960: The Making of the President (Z-Man), Barbarossa to Berlin (GMT), and Liberte (formerly Warfrog, soon to be reprinted by Valley Games!). Yes, Liberte isn't generally considered a card-driven game, but I consider it a somewhat "euroized" version of the same mechanic.

I would have liked to have seen Valley Games do "1960: The Making of the President". Z-Man did a wonderful job producing that game. Overall, I think that's a very pleasing game from both a production and design standpoint, and your readers should consider purchasing the game if they enjoy the CDG's as much as I do.

Malloc: Who are the folks involved with Valley Games? How did you get involved with them?

Kevin: The other two guys at Valley Games are Rik Falch and Torben Sherwood, also known as the "Hardest-working-guys-in-the-game-business". How I became involved is actually a very interesting story. Rik and Torben owned a game store before opening Valley Games. One day I called in looking to purchase a *lot* of games for my game group, and I spoke to Rik. After several months of purchasing games, I suggested to Rik that they should consider printing games as well, and I knew of one such game worthy of a reprint: Die Macher. It just so happened that a friend of mine in Germany was a friend of Karl-Heinz Schmiel (the designer of Die Macher), so the situation was a somewhat favourable one. Honestly, I have no idea why Rik and Torben listened to advice from a person they had never met, but within a few weeks Die Macher had been secured and Valley Games Inc. was born. Rik and Torben requested that I help out with some of the details of the print run, and I was happy to assist.

In starting Valley Games, it was important to us that it needed to be a company run by gamers. Because of this, our attention has always been focused on quality: both in production and design. It simply followed logic then, that we wanted to seek out games that had a proven track record for quality in design.

Malloc: What games does Valley Games Currently have in production?

Kevin: At the time of this answer we have 3 of our own products for sale: Hannibal, Die Macher, and Container, though Container is technically a week or two away. In production we have more than a half dozen, each at varying stages of production. The four that are the closest to "finished" are Titan, Municipium, Big City, and Such a Thing.

Malloc: What process does Valley Games follow when making the decision about what games to produce?

Kevin: This is the really fun part; there are no set rules for production. The general principle is that if all three of us like a game, it will be produced. This is true of both our reprints and our new games. Of course, it doesn't hurt that our reprints are already popular with gamers. That makes our decisions much easier, generally.

Malloc: Valley Games separates their products into a few different "lines", please talk about these lines and what the reasons for the separation are.

Kevin:
We have three basic lines: Modern, Classic, and Tactics. There's no real secret formula here; if a game is a reprint it goes into the "Classic Line". If it's a new game, or a game that was only available in extremely limited quantity previously, it goes into the "Modern Line". If the game is generally considered a wargame, or has elements of a wargame, it goes into our "Tactics Line".
The reason we split our games up like this is to allow our customers to differentiate our games for our customers. Certainly there will be some people who simply want our products regardless of their designated line. But for customers who want to find a way to quickly sort through what will eventually become a plethora of different titles, these line designations are meant to make finding that perfect game a little bit easier. Plus, because the games in each series are bookshelf-numbered, it's an easy way to track just which games you're missing.

Malloc: Your company is publishing older reprinted games in addition to new titles. How does the development process differ when reissuing a game compared to doing development for a new game.

Kevin: It's not all that different. In both cases, we have to put in the same amount of production effort and time. The only real difference is that the expectations for a reprint game are higher, especially from fans of the original edition(s). Because of this, we do need to research the previous editions, and then make certain that we make a product that we feel is better than the original, whether that be higher production values, or even a ruleset that benefits from years of critique from veteran players.

Malloc: What are some common challenges that VG confronts when it starts a new project?

Kevin: The biggest challenge is time. We have to make sure that we have room on our calendar to make the project happen. The next biggest is simply logistics: Who will do the artwork? Which factory will print the game? How will we get it from the factory to our customers? These questions all seem easy to answer, until you actually have to answer them yourself. In our experience, the "grand vision" for the project is actually the easiest thing to accomplish. Making it all happen is another matter.

Malloc: Valley Games has made a name for itself in obtaining the rights to reprint games that were thought unobtainable. Describe how you managed to get a hold of the license for Hannibal.

Kevin: Hannibal was a tricky game to obtain. As many people know, Hannibal was seemingly lost to the "sands of time" because of some issues with the company it was formerly licensed to.
When we first looked at this problem, we ran into the same stone wall that I'm certain other companies did; a flat out "NO!" from the previous publisher. It wasn't that they were dead set against the project necessarily, just that there were some legal barriers that appeared unbridgeable. But we went back and did our research, consulted some professional advice, and found out that a loophole existed which allowed for us to go ahead with the licensing. In the end, it was a real joy and privelege for us to be able to inform the designer that we could print his game, rather than the other way around. By comparison to Die Macher, well, there simply is no comparison. Karl-Heinz Schmiel welcomed our reprint and went out of his way to make it happen for us. It just goes to show that there's no one way to license a game, I guess.

Malloc: Can you Give me more info about the loophole that let you reprint Hannibal? Was this some sort of legal lawyering, or a unexplored contract provision... blackmail, extortion... anything?

Kevin : Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot that I can talk about here. Let's just say that perhaps Valley Games was willing to be a little bit more aggressive in our pursuit of Hannibal than other companies may have been in the past.

Malloc: How have the customers reacted to the game? Does VG consider it a success?

Kevin: Absolutely, we're thrilled the way Hannibal has turned out and is being received. We've received many happy emails from people that have the game, or have seen it at their local store, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, the game has received so much attention that we're already very nearly sold out (a little "inside information" for your readers)!. Who knew a game could go back out of print so fast?

Malloc: Valley Games has promised to supply a set of plastic Generals to use instead of the stand up cardboard generals that come in Hannibal to all the gamers who per-ordered the game. Any updates on when these generals will be available?

Kevin: Yes, our latest report from our factory tells us that we should have them to our customers in January. This has slipped just a little bit, unfortunately, but we're confident that the generals themselves will justify the added wait.

The first thing I'd like to point out is that the version the customer's receive will not be in green. They will be a more neutral color. In addition, this sample picture does not include the stickers for the base, which will be one "wrap" sticker for the bottom, and two smaller stickers for the general's stats on the small square placards at his feet.

Also, as is evident from the picture, yes, there is some assembly required. The headdress of one of the Roman generals needs to be put in place (and glued), and each general needs to be mounted onto his base by gluing his feet onto the respective pegs of the base. The only things that will be needed to complete this assembly is some glue and a few minutes of time. The assembly of these figures was a production necessity, as the figures are very complex in their creation. It is very unusual to have a figure with a base that visually overlaps the feet of the figure, and this was what created the need for the separate base production.

I think our customers will love these generals. The chess-like look of the generals was important to us, because it conveys the scale and importance of the topic and gives a "grand strategy" feel to the game.

Malloc: Can we comment a bit on the whole Essen/Shipping controversy that blew up on BGG. Personally I feel you did the right thing, but I think I would be missing something if i didn't ask about it. If you would rather skip this, thats fine too.

Kevin : There has been a lot said about this issue, so I won't go into too great of detail here.

It is important that our customers understand that Valley Games is a small company. Because we are such a small company, each expenditure we make needs to be done with careful consideration. In planning our Essen show (back in January 2007) we expected that our copies of Container and Hannibal would be done and already delivered to our preorder customers before the Essen show. When this proved to be unlikely, we faced a decision: Sell the games and cover the cost of our Essen show, or don't sell the games and take our chances financially. In the end, we had to make the small company decision and sell our games. Our company has always been about being "gamers first", but to make the decison not to sell our product at the show would have been the same as making the decision to close our doors. Certainly in this context I'm sure our customers would agree that we made the right choice.

Malloc: What has the process of development for Titan been like. Are there lessons learned from doing Die Macher/Hannibal that you are deploying for the release of Titan?

Kevin: Titan has been a little bit more slow-and-steady in the development stage. The reason is that the game is quite old, and so we are forced to ask ourselves what we can improve on without damaging the classic Titan that everyone knows and loves. Additionally, some comments from "veterans" of the game gives us pause while we think about the validity and practicality of the advice. Of course, just the fact that we're reprinting TITAN is enough to ensure that we take very careful steps in the development stage.

But our lessons from Hannibal have been learned in regards to the production process itself, and this is where Titan should pick up a lot of time savings. We've worked with our printing facilities to streamline and improve the way we interact, meaning that the delays from Hannibal should be largely a thing of the past. Chalk it up to a little more experience on our part, I guess.

Malloc: How do you guys go about establishing relationships with Game Designers and Artists.. How did you get together with Mike Doyle/Kurt Miller. What about the relationship with WarFrog and Martin Wallace?

Kevin: It's quite a mixed bag of experiences. Often designers will approach us, and sometimes we will approach them. It's really like any other business in that regard, I think. It just depends who knows who, and just how willing they are to talk to us. In my experience in talking with designers and artists, though, these are some of the nicest people you could hope to meet.

We met Mike Doyle after seeing his Die Macher box he posted online. I pointed it out to Rik and Torben, and Rik contacted him immediately. It was a pretty funny situation; Mike felt bad about posting alternate artwork for a game that we had just published, and we were wanting to ask him to do some artwork for our future projects. Despite the unusual situation, Mike was more than happy to take on many of our projects, and has been invaluable in offering us creative and challenging ideas for our artwork.

Kurt Miller has been a real workhorse for us. We contacted him after seeing some of his earlier work, and we liked what we saw immediately. He is able to do some pretty amazing things, and I can't even begin to understand how he produces some of the images that he does; they're simply awesome.

Martin Wallace has been a good friend to Valley Games since the start. We formally met him when we sent Torben to the Essen show in 2006, and he helped us out a great deal. Agreeing to reprint Liberte has been personally very satisfying for me. In my opinion, it's one of the finest games ever made, so to be allowed to print it again is a real treat.

Malloc: What about finding a printing company? Are there lots to choose from, or is it a small set of companies that do this type of thing?

There are lots of printing companies to pick from, with more breaking into the business each year. Generally speaking, we ask for the printer to show us what they can do before we accomodate them with a print run. In the end, it's Valley Games who receives the criticism if something has gone wrong, so we are very careful when going somewhere new.

Malloc: How does the process go after a product returns from the printer? Who assembles the games, shrink wraps them and ships them all of the world?

Kevin: When we get a product shipped from our factories, it goes straight to our fulfillment company in Stone Mountain, Georgia (USA). They unpack everything and dispatch a small shipment of the game to us here in Canada, so that we can serve our Canadian preorder customers. Then, with exceptional efficiency, our fulfillment company begins shipping to all of our preorder customers wordwide, except for European-produced games which are shipped from within Europe.

Once all this is complete, we begin shipping the games to our distribution partners, and then on to retail stores from there.

Assembly, shrinkwrapping, and all our other production-based concerns are normally taken care of at our factories.

Malloc: Is there any news about future VG titles that you would like the F:AT readers to hear?

Kevin: Despite all the attention we've generated over the last few months from our signings of hard-to-find classics, Valley Games will remain committed to seeking out titles that are in demand by fellow gamers. Expect to see a couple more big announcements in the coming weeks!

Malloc: Kevin, thank you very much for your time.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Do Anything

2007-12-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

In honor of Yehuda Berlinger and all this high-minded art talk that's invaded F:AT lately, the art image to the left depicts my visual representation of the fun player interaction you can experience in a game of RACE FOR THE GALAXY. I hope it along with this week's Gameshark column touches your soul and makes you contemplate the foibles of human nature. Because the game sure as hell won't.

Imagine if Captain Kirk & Co. never had a chance to frolic with any green skinned ladies or tussle with Khan on their five year voyage. Or if the NOSTROMO never landed on LV-426 and the Colonial Marines showed up just to secure the colony's output of novelty goods. Think about what would have happened if the Rebels and the Empire quietly did their own thing and never bothered each other with all those Star Wars. Or what if WARHAMMER 40K was about the economic administration of the empire and you never got to see Space Marines hosing down greenskins with heavy bolter fire. Yep, that's pretty much the sum of RACE FOR THE GALAXY.

It's a damn shame, because it's actually not a half bad Euro-style card game that could have been a really cool, streamlined 4X style space exploration game...but since the designer didn't bother to evolve the PR system any further by making it something fun, dynamic, and interactive it turns out that this much ballyhooed, hotly anticipated game is just another disposable title worth about two plays before heading out the airlock and on to Ebay.

Fortress: Ameritrash Super Happy Fun Time 200th Blog Post

2007-12-04T19:01:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I don't have any confetti to mark the occasion. Feel free to tear some Post-Its with great vigor and toss them in the air about you. Make gutteral noises when your co-workers stop to stare at you.

So we've made it to post 200 of Fortress: Ameritrash. A lot of folks said we'd flame out in a month, and to be honest we all attacked this thing in the beginning as though we were on pace to do just that. Matt had the prescience to make this a team effort; a lot of gaming/hobbyist bloggers take off into the blogosphere on their own only to burn out for a short period of time...during which their readership promptly forgets about the blog entirely. Fortunately for us, we tend to take things in waves, covering for each other when some of us are burned out or just mulling over what our next blog entry should be. And we've had a lot of great reader contributions (like the "mostly" weekly Snapshots) that also keep things hoppin' around here.

Personally, I'm at a weird equilibrium right now...that burning ember to keep acquiring games has subdued, and I'm left staring at a pile of games that I really ought to get to know better. I've got some holiday vacation time coming up and I intend to do just that...the guys have vowed to fit in a massive Twilight Imperium session the week after Christmas, and we'll have our traditional Mall of Horror game at my brother's Christmas party. Mall of Horror is just one of those games that seems to be a hit with everyone we've played it with. It's a great combination of plastic, theme, backstabbing, and yet nicely approachable rules that don't take half an hour to explain. Of course, we've talked that one to death on this blog already, so we'll just leave it at that...but if you don't have a copy of this, get Santa to bring you a copy.

Speaking of "Santa", one of the local stores just got Starcraft in, and it taunts me. I'll have to get this very soon. I'm so behind on 2007 it's really crazy. Then again, I try to think of how far just a fraction of the games I own now would have carried us through high school. Hell, even first year college where we played Nightmare (aka Atmosfear) almost weekly.

It is really weird when you hit that "collecting plateu"...you sort of 'shut the door' so to speak and really take inventory of what you've gotten yourself into. Then you open your War of the Ring, pour plastic figures all over you, get drunk on cheap rum and then start calling all of your ex-girlfriends in alphabetical order, telling them how you'd like some of their "Lembas Bread".

The holidays are always a crazy time, so I don't expect to post too much during this month. I'll keep posting Snapshots if you guys and gals send them (fortressat at gmail dot com). I wanted to put together some web comics, but after taking blurry picture after blurry picture of Ameritrash game bits in various compromising positions, I had a newfound respect for those folks who take those crystal clear photos you find on BGG. Turns out it ain't as easy as it looks! I've also got another interview or two that are taking forever to wrap up, so maybe after a gaming-heavy Christmas break I'll be back in the saddle again.

So Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Groovy Hannukah, Krazy Kwaanza, and whatever to all you'uns. And here's a tip: stepping on a War Sun with your bare foot HURTS LIKE A MOFO.

The Fun Murderers

2007-11-30T13:14:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, the stars just line up.

Today, the erstwhile Ken B. posted that image of CUBICOLA which of course pretty much sums up the arbeit macht frei ethos of the Eurogame design paradigm. Then I read this post over on Boardgamenews.com where Yehuda Berlinger offers his eloquent yet completely preposterous thoughts that games, somehow, aren't "supposed" to be fun, that the medium itself does not specifically require fun although every definition in the entire world in every language indicates that games are an amusement device. I've already ranted about this in the CUBICOLA post but it dovetails nicely into the sad events that transpired last night at my usual gaming get-together. But first, let's frame the story.

There's been this new guy coming around recently...I'll call him F. F is a middle-aged guy, probably has some kind of IT job but I don't know. He's the kind of guy who wears white Reeboks and would likely make fashion guru Tim Gunn throw up in his mouth. Probably lives alone and does well enough without a man or woman in his life. Definitely a longtime gamer, a veteran of who knows how many wars and auctions. Now, I usually have a strict policy that I'll never play games with somebody I don't know except under very specific circumstances- running a retail store with in-store gaming teaches you a lot of hard lessons that way. But a couple of weeks ago, I let F in on a game of STARCRAFT which included my best gaming buddies Duke, Billy Motion, and the elusive Robert Martin. What I didn't know at the time was that F was a Fun Murderer.

F spent the whole game, which he had played once before, informing us all of what our best moves were and how we should proceed with our turn. When I placed an order on top of a giant pile of Billy and Robert's orders, he notified me with impeccable elan that I was making a stupid and suboptimal move. I politely replied that I was simply fucking with Billy and Robert simultaneously and therefore I considered myself to be the winner of the game prior to any actual decision. We're talking a nearly constant steam of condescending rules lawyering, folks. To top it off, F happens to have one of those voices that is somehow louder than everything else at all times. Kind of like a Motorhead song.

So the next week, it was time for STARCRAFT again. I'm setting it up to play with a family that I've been gaming with for a couple of years that folks affectionately call the Rock n' Roll family for a number of reasons that don't matter here. Billy was promised seat #6 in this game. So I'm setting it up and F immediately inculcates himself into our game. So I very politely tell him that Billy is slated for the very seat he has taken command of and I even told him that if we play a second game I'd let him in on it. I lied.

So now we have a context for how F, one of the Fun Murderers out there who will stop at nothing until all fun is exterminated from gaming, and I ended our brief relationship last night over a game of WAR ON TERROR. When I arrived, the Rock n' Roll family was already there (and had brought REVOLUTION, a game that I really like but never get to play) and I pulled out my new copy of the now-domestically-available WAR ON TERROR, one of the silliest, stupidest, nastiest, and just plain fun games of recent years. I knew they'd dig it because they like big map, kill-em-all sorts of games with lots of negotiation. Me too. It really needs six, so when F came running up to once again insinuate himself at our table I didn't resist even though I knew I should have.

It actually went pretty well for the first 3/4 of the game despite F's repeat performance as a bar-approved rules lawyer. It was his first game, but he was no shrinking violet about telling everyone else how to play the game or what their best moves were. I told him at least five times that you can't make a terrorist attack with a "War" card yet he continually told everyone that they could. I refused to defer to his innate understanding of the rules which he had never read. F turned terrorist at that 3/4 point and then declared that the game was pretty much over- which is, in a game of outrageous fortune like WAR ON TERROR, very far from the truth.

Things came to a head when F decided to throw a fit directed at the youngest member of the Rock n' Roll family. He's a great kid, very smart and a pretty damn good gamer but he's very loud, outspoken, and he's well, a kid. So The Kid asks a rules question and F, in a very unfriendly and uncomfortably loud tone responds "Maybe if you'd pay attention to the game you'd know what you were doing. You're sitting there yelling the whole time it's no wonder you don't know what's going on."

Now, let me point a few things out here. One, this is a middle-aged man yelling at a child. Two, this is a middle-aged man yelling at a child while he's sitting next to the child's father, brothers, and a friend. Three, this is a middle-aged man yelling at a child while he's sitting next to the child's father, brothers, and friend while playing a board game that has no other purpose in life than to entertain us, make us laugh, and give us a fun social experience. And to top it off, this guy is louder than the voice of god and he's calling this kid out for yelling?

So the garrulous, goofy tone of the game was suddenly replaced by awkwardness, weirdness, and silent, Chuck Norris-level silent rage. The father, hoping to maintain an air of dignity, said nothing but his smile spoke volumes of wickedness and imagined cruelties. F just kept on, narrating every turn and completely oblivious to his gross social malfeasance. The kid played a card to steal something from F and we were, once again, treated to a monologue about how it was a suboptimal move and so forth and I said "You know, he probably did it because he thought pissing you off would be fun, which is the point of this game in the first place." We passed around a secret message and all agreed to turn terrorist just to end the game, which was no longer fun despite any number of nukes.

I know it's a long story, but it's leading up to something larger. I start packing the game up, and F gets up and grabs the rulebook. He thumbs through it and then says- in reference to a rules question that happened like an hour prior and that was already corrected- "Look here it, it says blah blah blah blah blah." At that, I was beyond the breaking point- which I have never, in all my years of gaming been at because I never take games that seriously and if I'm not having a good time then I know I just need to pack it up and do something else. I snapped at him, saying "I'm sick of your rules lawyering and aside from that you're not going to sit here and yell at my friends. We come here to have fun and enjoy ourselves and you've completely ruined that with your attitude so you're not ever going to play another game with me again." He was shocked. I kind of was too, because I've never had to just put the boot down like that.

He sheepishly started helping to pack up the game and I just said "No. I don't want your help, just fucking leave now."

In retrospect, it was kind of harsh and I do actually feel kind of bad about it. But the problem is that our styles of play simply didn't match up, and it took a volatile situation to get past the politeness and "hey, we're all gamers here" folderol to get to that truth.

And the truth is, that some people just murder all the fun out of gaming. It doesn't matter if you're playing the best game ever published or something like WAR ON TERROR that's specifically designed to be a fun, light affair if you've got one of these Fun Murderers on board then the game is in trouble. I've played the most dirt-dry Eurogames with fun loving people and had a great time even if the game sucked. And I've played really awesome games with fun hating people and had the worst gaming experiences of my life.

So who are these Fun Murderers? They're people like Yehuda Berlinger, who argues that games aren't meant to be fun for whatever pompous and psuedo-intellectual reason he argues (I'd love to see him follow up the article with "Fish Aren't Meant to Swim" using that same tenuous connection to a Woody Allen quote about Ingmar Bergman). They're the people who want to tell us that playing EL GRANDE is somehow a fundamentally different activity than playing CANDYLAND. They're the people that tell us games and toys are mutually exclusive. They're the rules lawyers like F who turn even the loosest, simplest rules into a nightmare of logic and overinterpretation. They're the designers who have thrown out fun in favor of "elegance" and "efficiency". They're the people who play ARKHAM HORROR but don't read the adventure cards out loud. They're the people who got into gaming to satisfy some other unfulfilled need, dream, ambition, or missing quality in their lives. They're the folks who have changed the definition of games to include things like "systems", "mathematics", "balance", and "mechanics". They're the ones who think playing games about elves and robots is below playing a game about farmers and builders. They're the gamers who think that playing TICKET TO RIDE somehow demonstrates a degree of intellectual superiority to the "Sheeples" having a great time playing MONOPOLY. They're the ones who take this hobby way too seriously and make every type of gaming look like the refuge for awkward, anal, socially inept, borderline Asperger Syndrome suffers that are into it for something other than amusement.

I guess it comes down to taking this hobby too seriously. And you know, I think that I've realized that the ultimate reason why hobby gaming will neither ever be mainstream nor grow beyond certain parameters is that there are, for whatever reasons, a high population of Fun Murderers involved in it at any given time that take everything way too seriously. The world, outside of Yehuda Berlinger and the Fun Murderers, play games to have fun. When outsiders to the hobby see people taking games of any description seriously, they automatically want to have nothing to do with it because it really demonstrates a lack of perspective as to how games fit into our larger lives and a disconnection from, well, reality. And I can't blame them. It's just like how when I see football fans taking things so seriously, I immediately don't want to be in the same room with them. I love BATTLESTAR GALACTICA but when somebody starts talking to me about minute fan crap I immediately want to put the DVDs up on Ebay.

I know what the chief counterargument here is- that people's idea of what "fun" is varies from person to person and I completely agree. If your idea of "fun" is playing a game like CAYLUS and figuring out how to squeeze the most points out, then that's fantastic and I completely stand by your enjoyment of the game even though I despise it and can't find a lick of fun in it beyond making fun of it ad infinitum. But if you're playing CAYLUS for any other reason than to entertain yourself then you are a Fun Murderer and should be subject to the death penalty where applicable. Even if by "fun" you mean digging around in the ASL rulebook or playing one of those accounting exercises packaged as 18xx games, there is simply no other justifiable or valid reason to play games.

The punchline to all this is that the next table over was playing a nice, quiet game of AGRICOLA. And having fun.

The Weekly AT Snapshot, 11/30/07--Now with 100% More Games About Dull Professions!

2007-11-30T06:17:00.000-08:00

"Cubicula where you have to work in a cubicle making white cubes (paper) into grey cubes (reports) then give them to impress your boss for VP's! This 8 hours (not including playing overtime) allows you to experience the life of an office worker! Optimize your grey cube delivery for the best score! "

Today's image and write-up come to us courtesy of Geert Heijnen, aka LilRed. Thanks!

______________________________________

If you've got a great image that just screams Ameritrash, email us the image or a URL. It can be an image you created or an image you found on the web. We don't care!

If it meets our strict quality standards, we'll publish it in The Weekly AT Snapshot, instantly making you an undeniable global celebrity.

We'll even pimp your website if you send us the URL for that. Send all submissions to fortressat@gmail.com with the word "Snapshot" in the subject line.

Hey, I brought you a Christmas present. Step out of the car please.

2007-11-29T08:07:00.000-08:00

Nothing captures the spirit of the holiday season quite like a cattlegun to the front of the skull. Except maybe those ubiquitous gift guides where some jackass tries to tell you what you ought to get your ungrateful relatives who likely already have a special box in the basement where they store all those "stupid foreign board games" you foist on them at every gifting opportunity.

So cue up that haunting, funereal Charlie Brown christmas dirge that sounds like an acapella Cocteau Twins remix...I whipped up a little holiday gift guide myself to ease your shopping obligations.

300: The Board Game

2007-11-27T19:59:00.000-08:00

It was over quickly, and I enjoyed it ... sort of.

A gamer friend once told me, " Being an out of the closet Ameritrash fan means never having to answer the question 'What were you thinking when you bought that game?'" I'm going to answer the question anyway. It has Spartans. Other than that, my expectations were not particularly high. Reading between the lines of the description, I figured that it was a tactical game with a high luck factor, that could be played by two players in under an hour. In other words, about 45 minutes of chucking dice and quoting the movie in deep theatrical voices. Not much to ask. 300: The Board Game simultaneously exceeded expectations and disappointed.

Andrew Parks has done an exceptional job of creating a world in which players can immerse themselves. There are many well thought out touches that bring this game to life. I have a minor quibble with the legibility of the counters, due primarily to the use of movie stills, rather than icons to indicate unit type. However, this choice is understandable and excusable. The one thing that really prevents 300: The Board Game from being a really great, trashy, beat the crap out of your opponent game, is the use of an outmoded, arithmetic heavy battle resolution system. With a sleeker battle resolution system, such as the ones employed for Memoir '44, Nexus Ops or Monster Mash I, 300: The Board Game could have been that elusive, fast, light, exciting, 30 minute, two player game that would have saved me from another round of dull Euro fillers.

Out of the box, the game looks tasty. I almost ripped the board upon removing it. The board fills the box right to the very edge. Probing with my fingers, I found the fold and pulled. The board lurched. Much to my surprise, I had only grasped half the board's six panels. The other half swung free. I quickly lay the board down to prevent ripping it. The board was huge. Size does matter. I love the epic proportions, and the sense of place the map conveys.

The board is larger than it needed to be for a two player, column battle. Essentially, only the 6 Coastal Plain and the 6 Hot Gates spaces are necessary for game play. The rest of the board is there for thematic impact and convenience. The board is well thought out, providing everything needed to play, plus a nice clear space in the middle for rolling dice. There is a glory point track around the outer edge for keeping score. Two player aids, the Round Order and Battle Chart are printed on the upper corner. Player aids on the board are always a plus. The Persian and Spartan Camp spaces hold reinforcement tokens, so no need to worry about piles of tokens in front of players getting knocked off the table. The game lasts for 6 rounds. However, rather than having a generic turn marker, Ephialtes, the hunchback, moves one space along the goat path at the end of each round. This nice thematic touch not only keeps players in the world of the game, but also makes it easy to remember to move the marker (remember, we are the people who forget to move cars, so remembering to move a turn counter is a challenge). The only thing that I don't like about the board is the "300" written across the middle. It's like "Who the hell tagged the cliffs?" [insert lame Vandals joke here]

There are two decks of battle cards. One for the Persians, and one for the Spartans. The cards are printed on the thinest card stock ever. I think I have received greeting cards printed on thicker paper. I guess they blew the budget on the board. The cards are battle or movement modifiers. They are pretty typical - add to your attack, add to your defense, cancel the effect of your opponent's card, cancel wounds, immediately kill off some of your opponents units, etc. Most have some criteria that must be met to be used, such as a specific unit or leader must be in the battle. Each card also has a still from the movie and a quote. The rules actually state that you must read the quote aloud when playing the card, although it does not stipulate that you must read it in a deep theatrical voice. So points for providing us with the quotes, and points for pictures of hot Spartans.

The Spartans and Persians units are cardboard counters. They are about the size of a quarter and are round, and thick, and glossy. They aren't minis, but they do feel good in your hand, and there's a certain tactile satisfaction when sliding them around on the board. The Persians also get two war beast counters which are about the size of a half dollar. This sizing is, like the board, well thought out. For stacking and attack limits, each war beast is equal to three regular units. The larger size token takes up about as much room on a space as three regular sized counters. This makes it easy to not screw up the stacking limit. Another nice touch is that Xerxes, the God King of the Persians, is worth 20 points to the Spartans if killed. Dilios, the storyteller, will subtract 10 points from the Spartans score if killed (he's the only Spartan with a glory point number). This provides incentive to the respective players to have these two characters survive the battle.

Each counter has a still from the movie, as well as unit type, an attack number, and a defense number printed on them. The Persian units also have a glory point number. One side has the starting stats, with a blue boarder for the Spartan units and a yellow border on the Persian units. The flip side has the wounded stats, and is bordered in red for both the Persians and the Spartans. Here is where the design stumbles a bit. If you are sitting on one side of this huge board, looking out over your army at about a 45 degree angle, you know what you see? Yellow or Blue ringed counters with a big blur in the middle, reflecting light off their glossy pictures. You have to stand up, and bend over, with your face perpendicular to, and no more than a foot above the counters, just to distinguish one unit from another. Once a bunch of units are wounded, you can't even tell which counters are yours. Don't even think about playing this game with someone over 40. They'll be hanging four inches above the board, whipping their glasses on and off and swearing. You'll be like, "Get your fat head out of my way, I can't see my dudes." After a couple of beers, forget about it. You'll both be leaning over, and smacking your heads together, and there will be real blood on the board. Okay, that's an exaggeration. We didn't bleed, but it hurt like hell. After that, we used glass blobs to mark our units so we could tell what was what with out injuring ourselves. Fortunately, there aren't that many different unit types, The Persians have Infantry, Cavalry, Immortals and four leaders. The Spartans just have Spartans and five leaders.

Finally there are 6 "Battle Dice," which are just standard six sided dice. These dice are used as follows. You determine which of your dudes are involved in the battle, and add up their attack numbers, being careful not to whack heads with your opponent who is doing the same thing. Then you look up your attack number on the Battle Chart printed on the board, to determine how many dice you roll. Then you and your opponent simultaneously roll your dice and add up your totals. That's your damage number. The Persians have to kill off dudes until the defense numbers of the dead dudes add up to the damage number that the Spartans rolled. Then you add up all the glory points on the dead Persian dudes, and the Spartans score that many points. The dead Persian dudes get reincarnated as reinforcements and are put into the Persian camp. The Spartans then kill off dudes until the defense number of the dead Spartan dudes add up to the damage number that the Persians rolled. The Spartan dead dudes are just dead, and get tossed out of the game. Additionally, if the total of your defense and the total of the damage doesn't work out all nicey nice, you flip a guy to his wounded side. So for example, if you had three units with a defense of 10, 4, 2, and your opponent rolled an 11, you could kill off your 10, and flip your 2, or you could kill off your 4 and your 2 and flip your 10. Got that? Actually it is not difficult, it is just tedious.

So here's how the game works. The Spartans have to earn 100 glory points before goat boy makes it to the Persian camp (i.e. earn 100 points in six turns). The Spartans earn points by killing Persian dudes, and by taking ground. The Persians win if they prevent the Spartans from earning 100 points (i.e. if the Persians don't die too much) or by fighting their way through the Hot Gates and taking the Spartan camp (i.e. moving onto a row's last space, which is adjacent to the Spartan camp). There are 6 rounds. Each round you draw battle cards, march, battle, and finally move the hunchback along the goat path.

During the March phase, you move in your reinforcements. Each Persian unit can move one space forward. Each Spartan unit can move either one space forward, or one space sideways. There really isn't a lot of movement choices, and most of the time the choices are a no brainer. You just keep pushing your dudes forward. I like that this mirrors the movie and gives you a sense of men constantly surging forward. It is particularly evocative when playing the Persians. You get a real sense of the frustration of having so many men, but not being able to push them through to the front line.

The real game play is in the battle cards. We have been playing with the "gamer" variants, which gives you a starting hand of 5 cards, and allows you to pick two cards at the beginning of each round. Additionally, you can use a card to add one point to your attack number, rather than use it for it's specific purpose. This allows you to burn your useless cards, such as those that require a specific hero to be in a battle, when that hero has already been killed off. Typically at the beginning of each battle you have a hand of about four or five cards, so you have some choices.

During the Battle phase you chuck dice and kill dudes.

So here is how the game plays. The initial set up is dictated, so there is no over thinking how to place your guys. You don't even have to decide what guys to move into battle. You begin face to face, and immediately start hacking at each other.

The Persians: [throwing down a Battle card] I would gladly kill my own men for victory! I add two to all my attack numbers and subtract 1 from all defense numbers.

The Spartans: [throwing down a Battle card] Here we stand! Plus one to all units defense.

The players grab the dice and face off, but wait. Stop. First we must do some arithmetic.

Spartans: Okay, I'm 8 plus 6 is 14 plus 4 is 18. Look it up on the chart, I get three dice.

Persians: I'm 3 times 2, so that's only one die.

Spartans: Don't forget your card.

Persians: Oh yeah, Okay, I get 2 dice.

The dice are thrown. And it is time to do a little more addition to determine your damage number. Then some subtraction to figure out which units get killed off. Don't forget your card modifiers. Then some more addition to calculate Glory Points. In total, seven little addition/subtraction exercises are required to resolve each battle and track points. Gee wasn't that an exciting battle.
And that was only the first row. Now reapeat the above to resolve the second row.

Move the hunchback along the goat path. Pick some cards. Push your tokens forward. A couple of movie quotes, and it's time for three minutes of grammar school arithmetic again.

This is Sparta! This is not grammar school. Battle resolution should be immediate, visual and visceral. Arithmetic is not exciting. Counting things is not exciting. Bookkeeping is not exciting. When I have to pause to add/subtract seven different strings of small numbers to resolve one battle, the game just loses momentum. I am pulled out of the world created by the game. The forth wall is breached. My suspension of disbelief is broken. I get flashbacks of my cubicle at the office.

The amount of work required: depth of game ratio is just off. For me, getting that balance right is the heart of a great game. Unfortunately 300: The Board Game was so close to being an amazing, trashy filler, and then just blew the balance.

On the other hand, the man likes 300: The Board Game. He says if I let him play the Spartans, he'll play in costume, so I expect we will be playing again, just not at Game Club.

Interview with an Artist: Mike Doyle

2007-11-26T06:42:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of things that go into making a memorable board game, and we here at F:AT spend a lot of time talking about things like Theme and Mechanics, but the look and feel of a game can often contribute greatly to the overall experience of playing a game. With certain games, the artwork almost makes the game. I don't much care for Carcassonne, but I must admit that the little cartoon-like cities were part of what attracted me to the game when i bought it, and are what get people like my wife and in-laws to play it.

So I went out to try and get some perspective on what it is like to develop the artwork that goes into the games we all love to play. I was able to get Mike Doyle, to respond to my emails and what follows is a conversation I have with him overs several days.

Malloc: Lets get started by going over a bit of your personal history. How did you get interested in art and graphic design?

Mike Doyle: Well, I’ve been interested in art as long as I can remember. Certainly around 4 or 5 I was drawing like crazy. My parents tell me even then I was hoping to be an artist when I grew up. In second grade I remember there was a poster sale at school. Most of the kids bought fun posters. I got a bunch of old master Dutch still life posters. That's where my heads always been. Eventually, my parents paid for oil painting lessons when I was around 16 or so and I got into that pretty seriously for time.

Malloc: How about Board Games, were they something you played as a kid or was your introduction to them later?

Mike Doyle: The same goes for boardgaming. I can’t remember not loving games. Growing up, I played as much as my sister and neighborhood friend would tolerate. I loved all the typical stuff, including Masterpiece –for obvious reasons. In junior high and high school my youth pastor got a group of us into Risk, Acquire and
Diplomacy. He also loved wargames and had things like Panzer Leader, Blitzkrieg and other AH titles which I played a few times. So, I began visiting the shops (this was in the early ‘80s) and picked up a couple of random titles like Arab Isreali Wars, Conquistador, Civilization, War and Peace and such. By the time I got in college though, I had dropped the games and found computer and Nintendo titles. I didn’t pick up boardgames again until years later (perhaps around 2000). A few years earlier in ‘95, I remember visiting the Complete Strategist
(a nice boardgame store in NYC) after moving in the area for a job. This was the first time in a decade that I had gone to a boardgame store. I bought a few titles including Republic of Rome, but didn’t have anyone to play with. There were probably Euros there as well, but I must have passed them up in favor of
my old familiar brand Avalon Hill. I had always loved the orderly way their games sat in the shelves. My wife and her family liked games so around 2000 we got into that through a R&R game called Sold!. I began looking for more like it and found Settlers and then followed the usual addictive path to the state I’m currently in.

Malloc: What about education, did you study art in school, and had you planned on making a living with you artistic abilities from the beginning?

Mike Doyle: In terms of my professional career, I graduated from Pasadena Art Center College of Design majoring in Graphic Design and Packaging. From there, I went straight to the branding agency in NYC where I have been for 14 or so years. I’m a design director here and have a staff of talented designers that work on
branding and packaging initiatives of all types and sizes. Some are large and mass oriented like recreating the packaging for Pepsi cans/bottles worldwide earlier this year or the identity for the power company of NYC (Con Edison). Other projects are smaller and more upscale like a full identity and packaging program of a high end cigar for Davidoff called Zino Platinum. Currently, we are creating a new identity, wayfinding and full program for Fontainebleau hotel in Miami, which will be an upscale affair. All are fun in their own ways and require focus toward getting a proper aesthetic and read to the right people in order create appeal and drive sales.

Malloc: It is often said that artists, be they visual, musical or literary, view their medium differently than those who do not practice that profession, when playing games does the artwork affect you in anyway? Will a bad art design ruin an otherwise good game for you? Name some examples of games where exceptional artwork has helped the game. what about games that you think the artwork gets in the way of things.

Mike Doyle: On one hand, I am pretty critical of boards as I can see what could be done to improve. On the other hand, I’m pretty forgiving as I understand what it takes to get it done –which is a lot. Critiquing what is done is much easier than creating it in the first place. I don’t know if art has ruined the experience ever. For excellent design, I look for things of beauty that inspire and awe as I look at it. If I can play the game fine with it, then that works for me. Recently, Pillars of the Earth and Taluva have drawn me in because of the artwork – especially Taluva.

The old Medici is one of the poorest examples of graphic design that I can think of as it really gets in the way of playing and it doesn’t look good at all – a double whammy. We still have lot’s of fun playing it, but the design causes quite a bit of stumbling and confusion.

Malloc: I believe the first work I noticed of yours was your PR redo (thanks BTW I made a copy and that was my first attempt at making boards and counters, something I do now a fair bit) what inspired you to start redesigning games and updating artwork? did this lead into professional design, or were you doing that anyway? Also any chance of you finishing that redo of Dune?

Mike Doyle: I think it was a natural thing for me. I love to design and I love gaming. I love information design as well. Charts and graphs are quite fun for me to do – the “Tufte way”. Games are part information, part experiential or atmospheric and part branding. I’m very drawn to this combination. I think the goal from the beginning has been to work for publishers though I continue to create my own pieces as well. Dune is one of my most requested “could you finish this please?” pieces. Perhaps I will as it was great fun to do and I like the look
of the leader tiles. Though I would do something a little different with the
board, I think.

Malloc: When designing for a game, is there a technique you use when getting started, or is each project a new process? What would you say are elements that you include as a Mike Doyle fingerprint? What other game artists are your favorites and what do you tend to like about each of them?

Mike Doyle: I don’t know if there is a technique. Each situation is unique. However, the more games I design, the more challenging it gets as I want to do something different than before. I usually start by visually researching an era or event and styles of illustrations that I can mimic. Also, knowing the weight of the game and how strong the theme matches the actions can help. Many times it starts with an idea. For Caylus, I wanted to have the principle goal of the game – building a castle – to be in the center of the game with the hustle and bustle
of activity around it. For Tigris and Euphrates I had wanted to replace the map (which was just for atmosphere) with something that felt as if the game might have been played thousands of years before.

In terms of a fingerprint, I think the thing that I look to is to make the game different and stand out in some way. Whether it be the cover or the board, I look for opportunities to separate the game and give it an iconic presence. Just as gamers are put off by games that play “samey”, so too a samey look can bore or communicate, “just another one of these”. Additionally, for covers I much prefer them if they look like they are for an adult –they need a level of sophistication. I don’t see this being done at all in the industry and is a big
opportunity to upscale the market and redefine the game. Just as game designers have redefined what a game is, so too should the package communicate that this is something different. Geeky preconceptions need dispelling.

I also am fascinated with game boards that look like games. For instance, with El Capitan, no effort was made to make the board look like land masses, water and buildings. Instead, I went with areas that look mini wood playing boards sitting on crumpled cloth. Another approach could have been made like Pillars of the Earth or Cuba, where you have a "realistic" portrayal of the situation. Nothing wrong with that approach, but my inclination is to do something a little different here and have things sitting on things which feels like a
physical game somehow.

I very much like a rich look to my games as well. Very often (particularly with Euros) theme is but ambiance. That’s not a bad thing –it just is. Medieval this, reniassance that. It’s all fine because it feels good. So too, a board should contribute to that rich atmosphere that we take in when playing. After all, you are more likely to spend time staring at a board than that pretty picture that has been hanging in your house for years. Eye candy and beautiful bits are a big part of the experience. Games should tickle our brains and caress our eyes.

Michael Menzel is my favorite artist. Pillars of the Earth, Thurn and Taxis, Cuba, Jambo and Thief of Bagdad are a few of his. He’s very talented. I always enjoy his boards as they have that richness that I look for. They play just fine and provide me with something that can transform the experience from a collection of rulesets into something I can gaze at and even take pride in as I share my hobby with others.

Malloc: On your blog, http://mdoyle.blogspot.com/, you focus on the role of game art in invoking the theme in eurogames. You mention how in these game you think more about mechanics then the actual theme of the game. Please talk about how this provides a certain level of freedom for the artist to evoke the mood for a particular game.

Mike Doyle: I strongly believe that theme in Eurogames is, for the most part, simply ambience. It makes us feel good when playing. This as opposed to a nonthemed abstract which has little ambience aside from the bits or a Ameri- or Wargame where ambience is woven tighter into the play itself. Sometimes it is clear a Euro has been crafted from the get-go to act out a certain event. Tempest and T&E are two such games for me, though the Euro dictate of simple rules smoothes out thematic immersion. Most of the time though theme is pure flavor. This is not to diminish these games at all as the flavor is a huge part of the experience and Euros are trying to accomplish something else with their play. Given that most Euros are not trying to recreate events but use them as flavor, it is not imperative that the artist recreate the event with such specificity.

For example, in Caylus Premium Edition, I chose to make the tiles little images that appear as if from an illuminated manuscript (all relating to each respective building). A few remarked that it makes no sense to put a worker on a chicken! The thing is, when playing the original Caylus, I don’t feel a castle being built or workers moving to a farm or to a tailor and I don't feel the activity of picking up goods needed to build the castle. What I feel is a lot of tense play working to get –pleeeese lord let me get –that one more pink cube or whatever it may be. I also feel "medievalness." Picturing a building on a tile will do absolutely nothing to immerse me into the meaning behind that action. The play and mechanics are simply too abstract for that. My brain understands it, but my heart does not feel it when playing. Additionally, after awhile all those buildings start looking alike and bore. However, by expanding on the medieval language of illuminated manuscripts, I can provide a lovely atmosphere that is unique and iconic –it is the mood, not the individual specificity of the activities themselves.

In the same way, I find many Euro covers get caught up in this manner by getting overly involved in actions implied by little wooden cubes and a couple tiles. When playing, do I really get the feeling of the hustle and bustle of a port with merchants and ships unloading and loading in Hansa? Is this supposed to fill the gap between the theme and those disks or the ship with the highly programmed movement? In the end, it can be a little let down that the game is not the picture at all. Don’t get me wrong, I love the game. But it is not trying to deliver an account or recreation of shipping in this era –just a general mood of it as ambience (much like lighting and background music might do in a restaurant). What I want from the cover is something that promotes the mood that I can expect from the game or theme and hopefully something that satisfies me as a “sophisticated” adult (read: it does not look geeky but has a bit of style to it). Unfortunately, the general dictate is to recreate the event
and implied actions with less than sophisticated imagery. Consequently, the packaging is a bit embarrassing.

Malloc: When designing for games with more integrated themes, Ameritrash or Wargames for example, what do you think the role of the art design is? How are the challenges in designing these types of games different than the challenges present when designing euros.

Mike Doyle: I think, in the end, it is the same role or "has the same functions". I believe the function of art in all boardgames is four fold:

1. Information design - clarity and comprehension

2. Aesthetic needs - attraction and ambience

3. Thematic needs - enhancing the story

4. Branding - the creation of a unique look for a branded property (not "samey" looking)

All these functions need to have the right balance according to the game. Ameri- and (particularly) war games, generally have more information that a player needs to access. So the balance can shift to more charts or the clear display of complicated information. Even so, charts can look beautiful with proper typesetting. In terms of dealing with theme, in games that provide richer, deeper play, it can be more appropriate to have thematic detailing be more direct and literal than more abstract games (like Euros).

What I look for in a final product is a game that catches the eye, looks really fun to play and plays well. Many who post on various forums get overly fixated and hung up on informational detailing, pronouncing "art getting in the way of play" when a detail does not reach their impression of the highest level of readability. Sometimes this can be true but most of the time such individuals are really missing the point. Games (and Euros in particular) are mood based. Yes, a scripty font might be harder to read in some cases. But does it detract much in the play or add more by virtue of mood? In some cases, the add to mood is too costly an informational sacrifice (like
Indonesia and Medici). In others, yes a board may not read quite as well, but it works just fine and adds greatly to the mood. The hallmark of good design here is recognizing the value of the contributions and merit of all elements and to what extent to the various functions (not just informational) they add.

Malloc: I personally like the work you are doing with QWG's Masterprint series box redesigns, the overall feel reminds me a lot of the 3M bookshelf games, what was your inspiration in making these, what were you trying to accomplish by changing the box art, and why were they limited to this and not a total redesign?

Mike Doyle: Thanks very much! For QWG's Masterprint series we set out to create a strong branded look that could have great appeal. Old books seemed a nice idea that is warm and inviting and allows gamers to accessorize their house with games. I really hate the fact that boardgame boxes are such that they need to be relegated to the closet. I would much rather have a set of games that look so good, they can be displayed with pride on the coffee table or fireplace mantle. Game boxes should be beautiful enough to displace the coffee table books and
reach places of status in gamers' homes.

We live in a world now where it is relatively easy to access foreign titles. They'll be more expensive with the shipping, but they're often easily gotten. Additionally, with Euro titles, language independent components are more common then they used to be. For those titles whose rules are available online, it almost becomes a matter of style. Publishers can style their products/boxes to attract outside of their market on the basis of this. If your market has a style you like, that's great. If something looks really nice outside your market for a title that you really care about, there is an alternative. In the case of QWG's MP series, the print run is very small with them, so each one is a bit rare which can be a draw as well.

These have been compared to the 3M series a few times. I don't think we ever thought of it this way, though I was raised on the old AH titles which always impressed me from a set point of view.

As for why not restyle the entire game, that is only a cost issue. The cost of art and design would factor in. Also, for language independent boards and cards, costs can be reduced significantly to have all the publishers run them
simultaneously in one print run. For the limited Dutch market, it would not make any sense to redo an entire game, I'm afraid.

Malloc: What about new games like Supernova and Container, was it easier to work on these project since there were no preconceptions as to the look and feel? Is this more or less rewarding as a professional than working on a title that may be more constraining like Hannibal or Titan?

Mike Doyle: Here I’ll speak generally on new verses rereleased games. For new games, the information design and ordering of the elements on the board, cards, etc are brand new. So everything needs to be thought out from scratch. For the information design on games already released, one only needs to look at what is working or not or could be improved on from what exists. So this is much easier as some of this research has already been conducted. Additionally, for the rereleases, I look for opportunities to make the board look better than before so that it can generate a lot of appeal and be considered a worthy upgrade for some. The constraints are that a certain level of continuity needs to be maintained so that one used to the old, can adjust to the new. For example on Titan, certain icons were maintained as well as the basic geometry of the board.

In the end, the reward is overcoming the challenges to create something fun and gorgeous to look at. While the challenges are different for a new game than an old one, both types are very interesting to do. If pressed to pick one or the other, I think I would rather recreate a game than from scratch. As said, much of the information research has been conducted so it is all a matter of improvement from there.

Malloc: How did you get involved with Valley Games? They are releasing some very ambitious (some may say slightly suicidal) titles. Describe, if you can, your involvement, (i.e. what specifically is your work) and how that whole process evolved from ideas to finished product. What was it like working on the re-release of a grail game such as Hannibal, knowing that the final product would be forever compared and scrutinized in comparison to the original.

Mike Doyle: Rik of VG had contacted me after seeing my blog. Actually sort of funny. I had posted a Die Macher cover on the blog. Now, I'll be the first one to admit, I was wrong to do this knowing that the game was about to come out and I have felt bad about this ever since. I debated whether to post it or not, but was
very keen on the idea of this cover so I did. The next morning I got an email from Rik to call him. "Oh crap," I thought. "This guy's pissed and is going to sue me, threaten me or something." We talked and it turns out he liked it and wanted to talk about future work. That's the kind of nice people the guys are at Valley. They are always very concerned about their final product and take the creation very seriously.

As far as their releases go, I think it's pretty smart to release these titles. These rereleases have a mystique and legend about them. They are regarded highly and impossibly expensive on ebay. Also, I know for myself, that the more I play Euros, the more I am drawn to certain kinds of old style games which are heavy and rich with theme. So, it could be their popularity could rise as other Eurogamers' tastes shift.

For Hannibal, I worked on only certain parts of the game as needed. These were the box design (Kurt Miller did the art), the charts on the board (not the map itself), the battle cards, card backs and rules. The cover was the first one for Valley since I've been with them, so we established here a look and feel for their brand. This was the "letterbox" format with name and designer's signature on the box. The logo position was established after this game but it basically is in the same spot on the box. One of the challenges with their box was its proportions. The box is a rectangle that is approaching square. As such, it lacks a proportion that is dramatic. Narrowing the image area allows for a sweeping, more dramatic presentation and helps to establish a strong signature for them. I'm very pleased with the way the brand is shaping out as a family.

I'm not too interested in the comparisons that are made with high profile games such as this. Mostly, I'm looking for the challenges that come up and working toward making the productions "must haves" for many who wish to upgrade. Also, compared to other productions, my involvement with Hannibal was pretty minimal as mentioned above. I recently saw the real thing and it turned out nice, so I was pleased by this.

Malloc: What about the process for Titan? While I personally like the work you have done on the board and the legion markers, I know there has been some poor, reaction to the CG unit art. (not your work i know) Are these types of reactions inevitable when dealing with something as popular as a game like Titan? Are there pressures like cost, delivery time tables etc that have an effect on final artwork decisions? How do you as an Artist, try and minimize the affect of these inevitable facts of product development on your personal contributions?

Mike Doyle: For the counters, I did lay out the artwork that was done of the monster onto tile designs as I had mentioned on my blog, so certainly some of the criticisms are for me. :)) As for reactions of people, while some points were made, I am thoroughly disappointed by the conduct of most posters. This goes far beyond Titan nonsense and more to the tenor and tone of the Geek in general. Though to say it a Geek thing is unfair as I think this is simply an internet thing and you get this in any boardgame or other hobby forum. Perfectly nice people can turn into the opposite when on the keyboard – a click away from posting semi-anonymously. Certainly emotions do run higher with games that individuals are passionate about (like Titan) and have a long term relationship with. This causes discussions that tends to be less informative and more emotional and personal in nature. My personal believe is that posting in the forums is as much to do with ego and the impression of knowing more than the other guy than anything else. Consequently, discussions get fixated on unimportant details detached either from reality or out of proportion to the merits of all the good that surrounds products/projects in question. Little bits and parcels of knowledge are used for and blown into full fledge critiques of game and art. Additionally, criticisms also tend to run higher on higher profile subjects (whether game, designer, artist or concept – like game ratings). Oh well. I think it is better not to get involved with Geek, BGN or other forums as it just contributes to the atmosphere. Even if I add rational contributions based on professional experience, it will get inevitably get buried in the rubbish and give fuel to it.

I love games, love to laugh and love the company of others enjoying similarly. For me, games are a celebration of life and positive in nature. These hobby games we play are complicated expressions of this – both in terms of design and in terms of production. An incredible amount of thought, passion and talent goes into these productions. I know in the case of what I do, I bring to bear a lot of professional experience (as a director of large hard core design projects) and personal passion to create works of goodness. The forums, whether Geek, BGN or otherwise seems to attract individuals who distort the goodness of what has been created with their own narrow – typically black and white – visions of right and wrong. It is certainly not in the spirit of why I game and dampens the spirit and energy I bring to my work. Again, for me, it's better just not to be involved in it altogether.

As for production, yes, there are lots of decisions made according to cost which is handled by the publisher. I have certainly requested things and the publisher generally has always looked into costs and even upgraded to those suggestions.All the publishers I’ve worked with have been great that way. At the same time – as we
all have heard over and over – there is not that much money to be made. Lots of capital is needed to produce a game. Anything that is not the usual - like a custom bit - will add to costs, so all this must be monitored closely by the publisher. Want a card that bleeds off the sides? That will cost you quite a bit, as a for instance. This being said, the publishers are gamers too. They want to see their product look like they would want a game in their collection to be. Since there is not that much money in it, there is that emotional component as a driver – which is huge. They're driven by this pride to see a high quality product that they, personally, can be proud of. In the end, all these faceless companies are really just a couple guys each, generally really nice, working really hard to create something they will really love.

Unfortunately making games is very complicated. There are lots of different parts and pieces that need to come together. This complicated manufacturing process can lead to crazy unpredictable things that happen along the way. Communications with the printer can be problematic at times too. Given that a huge percentage of games are printed at the same time for the same show (Essen), at times, printers can be less than responsive with getting back to publishers/artists due to their overload. This can cause last minute changes that can effect the final production and can be one of the most frustrating things in the process, actually. In one case, we wanted a special bit, but the printer never got back to us on costs or if they could make it properly. Months went by with no communication despite countless emails. Everything was due to print – rules, box, everything. What do you do? Do you simply pull the bit –forget it, we’ll use stock – to insure the image is correct in the rules and on the box? Maybe, but the stock piece doesn't happen to fit on the space on the board so the board will have to completely be redesigned at the last minute. Or perhaps we should not picture this custom bit in the rules and use
some abstract icon in the event it changes? Or perhaps will they come through? (In the end, they came through.) Here is the thing that bugs me with the forums and conversations in it. Individuals make comments based on what would appear to be logical assumptions. The real world and operations is completely illogical at times. Things happen based on the craziest circumstances. In this case, needless communication breakdown. Logically, things might seem to an outsider as if a publisher or artist does not know what they are doing. In reality, stuff just
comes up. On the positive side, though, looking at the general quality of games, it is good to see the high level that is being achieved compared to what I grew up with in the 80's. Given inflation, I think there is good value in all these productions and is something for the industry to take pride in. These games are truly exciting products growing ever more sophisticated and masterful in design and execution. I'm very positive for the future of gaming!

Malloc: Mike, I would like to thank you for your time and for providing us with some vision into a side of game development that many gamers know very little about.

Mike Doyle: Thanks for your interest!

The Flywheel and the Doom Loop

2007-11-22T10:49:00.000-08:00

All this business about Agricola has completely passed me by of late. I’ve never been one to hang around the BGG forums, so the first I heard of this “controversy” was right here on F:AT. However, the responses it generate did interest me, since they kicked up the dust again over what a lot of people see as kneejerk anti-Eurogaming sentiment on this site.

It’s true to say that we do seem to spend a considerable amount of column inches telling everyone what we don’t like, and what we don’t like usually seems to be Eurogames. I, for one, have already admitted that I sometimes do this far more than I should do, and of late I’ve tried to ease off a bit. Whether I personally have succeeded is not for me to judge but regardless of my contribution I wouldn’t say that the bulk of content in this site is anti-anything, or even overly negative. I think the perception comes because we have some contributors here who are extremely good at being vitriolic, so much so that when they hit the target people tend to remember it. That’s not a bad thing – it’s just being perceptive and writing well and often it’s all meant to be taken with a pinch of humour in any case.

Now I can’t speak for everyone who contributes to the site, but I suspect I’d be right if I said that when we’re being negative, what we’re standing against is poor games. That’s how I feel – indeed it’s what I opened my account here with. It’s true that most of what we feel are poor games happen to be Eurogames, but they’re not the only targets; they’re just the ones that get most attention because numbers of other gamers seem to think that they’re great. So naturally, when we see them being hyped we feel the need to respond with what we see as a big old fashioned dose of realism. Truth be told I’m pretty sick of all this game-labelling anyway. Whilst I must confess that I do like the fact that my favourite games now have a label after having been outcast into the wilderness for so many years, good game design has now become so much a matter of just borrowing across genres that most major new releases are, in some sense, unclassifiable crossover games in any case.

But surely what you see as a “good game” is just personal taste isn’t it? To some extent this is obviously true. But there are certain features of current game design that I see as being profoundly negative. In essence, these can be summed up as being bad for re-playability – I value a game that I can play over and over again and keep enjoying. It matters little that I don’t have the time to play my favourite games as often as I’d like, the fact is that others gamers might have the time and they deserve to be presented with games that can keep on going and going and going. I can remember the amazement I once raised in a BGG thread because I queried some guy saying that he thought getting twenty plays out of a game was exceptional value for money – to me a game should probably go twice that before burn-out starts to set in. The fact that people will accept games that run for less plays is a shame, and detrimental to the hobby. It might be that some gamers prefer a situation where they like to have a game challenge them for 5-10 plays before they start craving something new, but I find it hard to see that that could possibly be a majority viewpoint or a desirable state of affairs. Wouldn’t most of us prefer it if we could play games with good re-playability all the time?

I see two major reasons why the bulk of the games that I see as being guilty of this phenomenon are Eurogames. Firstly, the fans of these games seem to like games which are non-random and which require maths-like skills in order to play well. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but as I’ve commented before, it does tend to lead to game designs which have limited decision trees. This leads to a situation where there are “best” plays for most given situations in the game. These might not be obvious, and they might take time to tease out, but once they’re out in the open the game is usually pretty much dead. Where’s the fun or challenge in making decisions from a script or a flowchart? The second reason is that Eurogamers seem to want multiplayer games which run on the same principles as two player classics such as Chess and Go. These ancient games often work well precisely because they’re two-player and making multiplayer versions is extremely difficult. So when someone finds a novel way of doing it, it becomes a template for a slew of other copycat games which, for obvious reasons, usually have nothing like the replay value of the game they derive inspiration from.

What’s so frustrating about this is that good designers have shown time and time again that you don’t need to fall into these traps to design a good game that appeals to Eurogamers. There are a large number of Eurogames that I’m happy to say don’t fall into my “poor game” trap whether I actually like the games or not, and it’s no surprise to me at all that they’re amongst the most highly lauded games in Euro circles. Puerto Rico, Age of Steam, Settlers of Catan, Tigris and Euphrates – I could go on. It’s also worth noting that there are a number of AT games that also fall into my “poor game” trap, for different reasons – usually over-reliance on random mechanics, or vastly excessive chrome – although it has to be said that most modern AT designers have recognised these dangers and work hard to guard against them. So this really isn’t about one genre being “better” than another. It’s more about trying to inject some sort of sensible assessment into the hype when a new game comes out. So how did we end up in this situation where gamers are willing to accept shallow games and are happy just to keep on buying, playing and discarding new stuff before moving on to the next “big” thing?

When I started my current job, I was given a book to read – Good to Great. I had no prior interest in reading books about business theory but I must say this one seemed to contain a lot of sound advice, based on solid research and empirical evidence. One of the concepts in the book is the “Doom Loop” – the spiral of decline that companies go into when they launch new initiative after new initiative and end up being able to focus on nothing at all. I have a nasty feeling that the modern boardgaming world has got into a Doom Loop of its own, and it’s about time we recognised it and put a stop to it.

I don’t go to conventions. They tend to have more than their fair share of weird, creepy people and whilst I like meeting new gamers I’m of the old school of thought that prefers regular opponents for games. That way you can build up some sort of history together which enriches your gaming experience, you can get to know each others’ play styles and hell, you can actually have enough of a relationship to chat about something other than the game as you play. While not everyone might see things that way, the fact is that playing lots of games against strangers isn’t the key reason most people go to conventions. They go because they get the chance to try, and sometimes buy the latest games before anyone else does.

This, combined with the internet, creates a situation where games get an awful lot of pre-release hype based off the back of a lot of people who’ve played the game just once. In the day and age of mobile internet this hype can build with astonishing rapidity so that a game played on the first day of a convention can build momentum and sell like hot cakes on the last day. But we all know that one play just isn’t enough to really get to grips with a game – a game would have to be a real stinker to not even be worth trying a second time and oftentimes the very best, deepest games require multiple plays before they really start to shine. So we get a situation where instant-satisfaction, low re-playability games often sell by the bucket load while better games with greater longevity sit in the shadows. BGG isn’t to blame for this – if it didn’t happen there then it’d happen somewhere else. The blame lies fairly and squarely with the people who are willing to hype a game after just one play. I won’t usually buy a game that hasn’t been out for at least six months, I wouldn’t usually give a game a nine or a ten over on the ‘geek until I’d played it 3-4 times, and I absolutely won’t review a game I haven’t played more than five times unless it strikes me as being obviously dreadful.

Game designers and publishers know very well this is how it works. However much we might idolise our favourite designers and however much we might evangelise about a game because of how we feel about it, the fact is that these people are in business, and in business all that really counts is profit. In a thin-margin industry like gaming I doubt it takes long for the harsh realities of economics to strip away whatever idealism a new designer or publisher might have. So they jump on the bandwagon and start trying to churn out games which have that instant-hit value which will ensure good sales. And as long as gamers keep creating and falling for their own hype, designers and publishers can keep being lazy and churning out crap. This is the gaming equivalent of the Doom Loop and it’s what we need to escape from.

So it’s down to you. In good to great, the positive equivalent to the Doom Loop is called the Flywheel – something it takes effort to start but which builds momentum until it becomes unstoppable. If you want out of this circle, stop hyping games; stop buying on hype and demand games that have the depth to last fifty plays or more – it’ll take effort to start with but it’s effort you need to put in. Because after all, to borrow a truly excruciating advertising slogan, you’re worth it!

FFG to Do Television Ads

2007-11-21T07:29:00.000-08:00

Just read this on ICV2.com, a sometimes interesting industry site, and thought I'd share:

November 21, 2007

Fantasy Flight Games has announced that it is running a TV ad campaign in select markets for the Kingdom Hearts TCG. The campaign will run four weeks, from November 19th to December 16th, in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Baltimore, Seattle, and Atlanta. It will air on Cartoon Network, Toon Disney, Sci Fi Channel (including the Battlestar Galactica movie), and Spike TV.

Retailers can also obtain copies of the ad to run with their store information at their own expense or using FFG co-op funds.

Of course, this is for a CCG with a pretty big license and there's always been TV adverts for CCGs...and we've even seen those awesome HEROSCAPE ads that features kids playing and enjoying the game with youthful gusto. If FFG is looking at doing this kind of advertising for its CCG lines, then what do you guys think the outcome would be if they put a couple of STARCRAFT or even TI3 ads up on the Sci Fi channel, G4, Cartoon Network, Spike, etc.? Conversely, what would the outcome be if Hanno put up ads for AGRICOLA on the Farming Channel, Manure TV, or in a German scheisse film?

I also think it's cool that they're supporting the FLGS by allowing them to add their branding/information- that's really cool, and provides a great opportunity to bring folks into the stores.

I think it's pretty cool news.

Moving on, Ti3 newbies game

2007-11-20T07:23:00.000-08:00

A while back when I put out the call for F:AT Invitational players, some folks expressed interest in playing in a beginners game.

I have setup a 4 player game, Thadd has a spot reserved that leaves open 3 more spots.
please post a reply to this if you want to play. If I get enough folks interested inplaying i will run more than one game. Also those interested in learning and not playing will be invited to follow along in the forum for the game.

So if your not too busy playing that new porno plotted euro game and want to learn how to play a real game then post away.

In order to be invited you need to PM me an email address on BGG.

-M

Extending the Olive Branch of Friendship

2007-11-20T00:02:00.000-08:00

Poor old Hanno. All he wanted to do was bring the joys and wonders of the farming life to the gaming crowd. Yet due to some lousy pranksters (not us, we swear!) his game went from 61 to the shocking position of 161, a ranking only fit for those inelegant Ameritrash games.

It really disappoints me that there were people who actually impeded Angricola’s right, nay it’s duty, to hit the top 10 5 minutes after it came out. I mean how are people to know that they simply must purchase a copy without it being up there? Besides, if it doesn’t hit the top 10 right now, when is it going to get there – in three months when everyone has moved onto the next Eurofad and Agricola is marked down for sale on Tanga en masse? I doubt it.

Unfortunately we here at F:AT, being the uncouth sheep we are, got in on the act too, and several of us caused much unfair stress too poor old Hanno, who gives so much to the Board Game crowd and asks for so little (we are lucky he doesn’t move his voluntary services to helping the children of Africa or something.)

I have however recently been reflecting upon the time when Aldie extended the hand of friendship to Barnes after they had their falling out, and felt inspired. So I too say let us all stand up and extend the olive branch of friendship to Hanno the magnificent, for it was not a prank that was perpetrated on him my friends, but truly a crime.

In order to express our deepest sorrow and shame, and in an attempt to rebuild those bridges we so unceremoniously burned by not rating Agricola a 10, we would like to invite Hanno to personally come down for dinner and sup with us in the trash cave.

Here is the main course.

And yes, you may bring your mother along.

In Agricola, you're a farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else

2007-11-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

Wow that sound like the plot line for a Porno Flick, certainly not an interesting game.

It looks as if the ladies over at BGG got they panties all balled up over this game getting some obviously bogus (i.e. done as a joke) ratings over the weekend. I have to ask What the fuck is wrong with people when something as asinine as this can cause this much controversy.

I have never played the game, I probably never will. Why? well because the theme looks not only bolted on but about as enticing as a root canal. Not to mention it looks as if it is yet another euro that will offer players either:

A) 10 useless option and one good one per turn that they will have to sort through in a competition to compete with the other players as to who can figure out the optimal path the fastest.

B) 10 relatively equal options that will drive all the players blindly to an endgame where scores will all be about the same and someone will win based either on some inherited advantage.

So anyway, I am sure all th eurosnoots will love every bit of this game and more power too them. But unless someone tells me I can send my brucellosis infected cattle to my neighbors farm, light his fields a flame or "work" his wife while he is "working" the fields, the snoots can keep this one to themselves.

Edit:

I really do not believe in rating games I have not played, or even giving a needlessly low rating to a game (for example I do not like Caylus and I think i gave it a 5) but some of the actions by this games publishers were IMHO too harsh. So it gets a 1 until I play the thing (may be a while) out of protest.

-M

The Weekly AT Snapshot, 11/16/07: Viewer Discretion is Advised

2007-11-16T05:39:00.001-08:00

Chappy hits us with another beauty...however, in the interests of a safe and decent society, I need to warn you that the following article has been rated

Small children, grandmothers, and that guy who bitched about "Magic Girl" being a highly rated BGG pic are all advised to leave the room immediately.

Now...on with the show! Apparently, we've found Michael Barnes first photographic review of the latest FFG offering.

Thanks, Chappy--still the only "cool" Euro gamer on the planet. Never change, baby.

__________________________________

If you've got a great image that just screams Ameritrash, email us the image or a URL. It can be an image you created or an image you found on the web. We don't care!

If it meets our strict quality standards, we'll publish it in The Weekly AT Snapshot, instantly making you an undeniable global celebrity.

We'll even pimp your website if you send us the URL for that. Send all submissions to fortressat@gmail.com with the word "Snapshot" in the subject line.

No Video Card Required

2007-11-15T07:55:00.000-08:00

So do board games go obsolete? For all the "90 minute CIV" squawkings, the "FANTASY GAME X is better than TALISMAN" folderol, and this whole idea that games get replaced by newer, jumped-up versions I don't think they do. And this week's Cracked LCD column is about these thoughts. Plus you'll be treated to a special guest appearance by The One True Leatherface.

Completely unrelated- LAST NIGHT ON EARTH is a bona fide smash. It's in the top 10 list of every major hobby distributor and it's one of the top 3 best selling board games right now- and that with fairly limited distribution. That puts it in company with SETTLERS, CARCASSONNE, and TICKET TO RIDE.

The Ultimate Interview - Quest for the Dragonlords' Robert Johannessen

2007-11-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

If you know me, you probably figured this was coming eventually. Yeah, that's right. It's the Dragonlords, baby. Forget that Starcraft foolishness that Barnes has been hyping as the greatest game of 2007. He'll move on to Laser Squad or some crap like that when it comes out next week. We're talking about the ultimate board game EVER CREATED here. So without further ado, here is the man himself - Robert Johannessen (AKA DLord Slayer).

robartin: I'm speaking with Robert Johannessen, designer of the Quest for the Dragonlords board game. Thanks for speaking with me Robert.

DLord Slayer:: Thanks for the opportunity - I enjoy it.

robartin: Let's begin with a brief description of your game for those that are not familiar with it.

DLord Slayer:: It is a fantasy game of adventure and world conquest. What I tried to create was a game that fast and exciting to play. I also felt that it is important to have much eye candy, many playing pieces and colourful artwork to create a rich atmosphere when playing.

robartin: You definitely delivered in that department. I remember the first time I ever saw Quest for the Dragonlords on the shelf.

DLord Slayer:: What made you buy it?

robartin: The dark artwork and that crazy foil embossed box really made the game stand out next to the games about selling mushrooms and auctioning powder puffs. Your game has a "renegade" look to it and that's what sold it for me.

DLord Slayer:: I wanted to give the impression that you have found an old relic where you have to blow the dust off to get to the treasure inside. On the flip side though - it may have been a mistake. I received much critism for it from retailers though. They felt that the symbol was an evil pentagram. Some retailers actually put the game on the shelf backwards to hide the evil facade. So we printed the second edition with a more appropriate cover to reflect the contents of the game.

robartin: That's actually an interesting point because although I love the first edition box it does have a sort of malevolent look to it. While the game inside is about as family friendly as Lord of the Rings.

DLord Slayer:: The symbol actually represents the blessed cursed ignored concept found in the questing.

robartin: Let's take a step back for a moment - although a lot of people are quite familiar with your game, you are a bit of a "mystery designer". Tell us a bit about yourself and what led you into game design.

DLord Slayer:: This could take awhile. I have loved playing games my whole life. I used to enjoy the Avalon Hill games - Panzerblitz, Luftwaffe and a Napoleonic campaign game. I also enjoyed Risk and Axis and Allies. These are what inspired me to create Quest for the DragonLords. However, the one point I disliked about these games what the steam roller effect - whoever had the largest army won. I wanted to make a game where this was not the case - a game where there are no walls to hide behind. A bit more about myself... I am actually a tool and die designer. My buddies and I actually made the molds for the plastic figurines. We had never made anything like that and the first edition shows just how inexperienced we were. We tried a new process for the Crystal of Power expansion and the second edition.

robartin: I have to admit, one of the more humorous reviews of your game talks about how the first edition miniatures look like they had been chewed by a dog.

DLord Slayer:: Hehe. It was our first attempt. Some people actually asked me if we did that on purpose to add to the flavour of the game.

robartin: On that subject, your game is self-published yet unlike most self-published games, the material in your game is amazingly deluxe. You included all of these miniatures, full color cards, gold pieces, and even a CD-ROM. How did you manage such an extravagant first production?

DLord Slayer:: Thanks a lot! We really wanted the first edition to be special. It really was a labour of love. The idea of actually making money printing games never really entered the picture until it was time to pay for the production. Hehe.

robartin: American style (what we have lovingly dubbed "Ameritrash") games really hadn't come into their own when your game was initially released. This was during the height of respect for the "Euro" style game. Your game took a lot of heat on certain websites for being too "luck based" or "unbalanced". How do you react to that?

DLord Slayer:: Firstly I want to say - that I am honoured to be apart of the Ameritrash club!!! As far as unbalanced or luck based...quite frankly it pissed me off! But as always we responded to the criticism and made some significant changes for the second edition. I must point out that this game was designed for the whole family. I wanted to make a game where a kid could beat his old man. About this heat...I feel that Dragonlords were attacked by another game company who were in the process of manufacturing another fantasy based game!

robartin: Wow, a board game conspiracy... Do you feel that they were successful in their efforts?

DLord Slayer:: It definitely had an effect. I watched the whole thing happen in slow motion. The reviews that first appeared were all positive. QftD was a whole new idea. Nobody had manufactured a fantasy game with plastic miniatures before us. Then some negativity began to appear from people in southern Europe. Then that was it...we were tagged with imbalance and too much luck factor issues...

robartin: I think what you've really got is a bunch of armchair pundits that get a much bigger ear than they deserve because of the internet. Your game was released at a time when Euro game sensibilities were what all games were judged against. This was a time before Ameritrash games really had the voice and respect on the internet that they enjoy today.

DLord Slayer:: You got that right! It is actually hilarious to meet some of these reviewers at the shows...They walk around like they were gods. They actually look down at small game manufacturers.

robartin: The whole Euro vs. Ameritrash meltdown that occurred on had a lot to do with this gaming cult of personality.

DLord Slayer:: What do you think of the gaming cult?

robartin: While in a sense it's just a game for those of us wasting time on the internet I think it's important to realize that this armchair punditry really does have an effect, especially on smaller publishers.

DLord Slayer:: It really does...It really is a much smaller community than people realize. News travels fast. Once you have been marked, it is difficult to overcome.

robartin: I think your Second Edition game has been generally very well received. I personally feel that the ideas you were pioneering with the First Edition really gelled in the Second Edition. Can you talk a bit about the Norwegian influence that made its way into the second edition?

DLord Slayer:: Thanks Robert! Sure...I am a Viking at heart. Lord of the Rings was based on Norwegian folklore. We wanted to go back to the beginning and look closer at what inspired the greatest book of fiction ever written. We re-created a story that was believed to be true by the Vikings about Ragnarok and the apocalypse. We then added dragons to the mix. When I started to research the Viking folklore, it was very amazing how close our story behind the first edition was to legends found in Viking mythology.

robartin: Recently you announced that you will be producing an online version of Quest for the Dragonlords. Can you tell us about that?

DLord Slayer:: Sure. Let me first say that it will not be a 30 million dollar production. What we want to create is place where fans of the board game can meet and play the game. The video game format will allow us to pursue concepts that you simply can not do with a board game such as random events. Imagine a ship on it way to conquer another player that gets attacked by a sea serpent. Now that would be cool. Since we do not have a 30 million dollar budget, we hope to make a simple game that is cool to play.

robartin: Well your fans on certainly looking forward to it. We'll be looking for your online game. Any other products in the pipeline you can tell us about?

DLord Slayer:: We are working on few other projects, such as another expansion game for Quest for the DragonLords called the King's Wrath. We are also looking at manufacturing plastic units for the advanced game system. I also want to release the pewter miniatures as well. These were not well received but the DragonLord miniatures made in pewter are very cool. But we have to see how well the on-line game is received.

robartin: Great, well it's been great speaking with you Robert. Thanks for taking the time.

DLord Slayer:: Thanks for asking. It was my pleasure.

Frank La Terra's Agent Was Unavailable for Comment

2007-11-12T11:30:00.001-08:00

Reader Mike Miller sent this one in to us (and made us wonder what sort of websites he has been frequenting, exactly):

Muscle-Man Vs. Skeleton Man: A Love Story

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/112292.html

"Two readings of Muscle-Man vs. Skeleton Man: A Love Story. . . the musical will be presented in November at Chelsea Studios.

"Directed by Richard J. Hinds, the readings will be held Nov. 5 at 6 PM and Nov. 6 at noon at the West 26th Street venue. The cast will include Brian Charles Rooney as the Sorceress, Adam Pellegrine as Prince Hector/Muscle-Man, Ginamaria Trello as Skeleton Man, Jalynn Yvonne Steele as Shaniqua, Richard Binder as Man With 4 Arms, Steven C. Rich as King Crusty/Harry and Sarah Bolt as Queen Butt/Evil Annie with Briana Carlson-Goodman, Andrea Dore, Kelley Faulkner and Dustienne Miller as the Greek Chorus.

"Muscle-Man was penned by Richard J. Hinds and Ginamaria Trello. The musical, according to press notes, is described as such: "Evil lurks in the mythical land of Queerternia, a peaceful territory full of glitter and dreams. Skeleton Man is on a rampage, terrorizing citizens. No one can stop him… until Sorceress grants Prince Hector special powers, transforming him from a puny weakling, into a heroic, powerful Muscle-Man. As Skeleton Man and Muscle-Man battle to rule Queerternia, they realize there is a thin line between love and hate. Can two sworn enemies find happiness in the sculpted arms of one another? Is peace possible for Queerternia?"

"The creative team for the musical, which is billed as "a hilarious and thrilling satire of the fantastic worlds of our youth," also includes Albin Konopka (music supervisor), Rachel Coffman (musical director) and Walter Shepherd (stage manager)."

Frank's been telling us all along. We just didn't listen.

The Weekly AT Snapshot--November 9th, 2007

2007-11-09T07:46:00.000-08:00

FINALLY!

A HYBRID YOU CAN SINK YOUR TEETH INTO!

Today's image was submitted by "The Monkey Man" himself, Mike Chapel. Thanks, Chappy!

______________________________

If you've got a great image that just screams Ameritrash, email us the image or a URL. It can be an image you created or an image you found on the web. We don't care!

If it meets our strict quality standards, we'll publish it in The Weekly AT Snapshot, instantly making you an undeniable global celebrity.

We'll even pimp your website if you send us the URL for that. Send all submissions to fortressat@gmail.com with the word "Snapshot" in the subject line.

FFG to All Other Game Publishers- "We're In Ur Base, Killin Ur Doods"

2007-11-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

If there's any doubt that Fantasy Flight Games is the iconic, premiere publisher of board games today than STARCRAFT should lock that title down for them. At this point, I think FFG is actually outdoing "glory years" Avalon Hill in terms of releasing consistently great games that will, mark my words, be regarded as the classic games from this era in the hobby's development that people still play and enjoy twenty years from now. Their commitment to reintroducing past classics and developing respectful games based on high-profile licenses puts them head and shoulders above much of the competition and their best-in-business in-house development team just can't seem to stop turning out amazing work (WORLD OF WARCRAFT notwithstanding). Of course, the quality of their productions is on a level that no one else can touch and if I were a publisher I'd be doing everything I could to keep up with the high standards they're putting out there- you can say it's because they have more money or better resources, but the fact of the matter is that FFG started out very small doing pretty spartan productions and look where they are now thanks to smart business practices and raw, unbridled ambition. They're getting to the point where only firms like Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast are any bigger.

So all you guys over at FFG- I salute you. Even Bexley, the guy filling in for Thaad while she's away at her little video game event who corrected a gross figure imbalance in my box.

As for my STARCRAFT review over at Gameshark.com? Best game of 2007.

Harry Potter and the Interminable Blog Post

2007-11-06T09:31:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago I finished the final Harry Potter book. Kids’ literature and all that, I know, but I couldn’t help feeling a certain sense of loss. After all I’d spent seven books with these characters; I’d watched them grow and develop and shared a little in their adventures and it seemed a little dispiriting that I wouldn’t be able to read about them any more. There was once a friend of a friend of mine who moved to Hong Kong; I didn’t know the guy very well but it seemed kind of weird to think I’d never see him again. Finishing the books felt like that.

So, being the good gamer that I am my immediate reaction was to check out and see if there were any good Harry Potter games I could pick up as an extension of the books. I was completely unsurprised to find out that there weren’t. After all, games based on books and films don’t really have a very glorious history. They are, for the most part, crap. Why?

Well one obvious answer is that a goodly proportion of them are cash cows. They’re designed and produced quickly, with little regard for quality on the presumption that most of the people who buy them will be fans of the film/book and will buy them anyway regardless of how good they are. Sadly enough this presumption has been repeatedly born out by the sales figures for any number of poor-to-average tie-in games over the years.

But I think it runs deeper than that. The basic problem is that the requirements for what makes a good book or film are radically different from those that make a good game. Although they’re all entertainment commodities the basic premise of each is fundamentally different. In a book or film is you’re a passive consumer, whereas in a game you’re an active participant. Were that not bad enough as an initial design hurdle the bridge from book to game is also inherently unstable. The book tells me a story – as a fan, much of my enjoyment of that book comes from the long, slow revelation of that story and when the book is finished what I yearn for is its continuation. However, if I turn to a game for that continuation I’m going to be in for a disappointment. If the game just re-tells the story then it’s a poor game for sure, and if it doesn’t then while I might have a good game it isn’t going to give me the immersion that I crave.

So, is this problem insurmountable? Clearly not, because there are a tiny handful of incredibly good games which are book/film tie-ins. The majority of these cast off any pretence of trying to mirror or continue the story in the original and just use the world in which the book is set as a basis for building a thematic game. While good, we can ignore these for the present discussion because they don’t offer the entirety of what we’re looking for – a game which can truly feel like a continuation or re-telling of the story we fell in love with. These are much, much rarer but when a designer gets them right, the results are often breathtakingly good. I suspect I only need to mention the titles of the few games I felt belonged in this category to make my point – War of the Ring, Dune and Fury of Dracula. So I figured it might be a worthwhile exercise to sit down and look at what these games had in common, to see if we could tease out the recipe for designing the perfect game-from-story formula. Of course, if I were doing this properly then I’d have to have some sort of control games, rubbish ones, to make sure that what I’d identified didn’t exist in those games and was truly unique to the good ones. But that’d mean playing rubbish games, so clearly I’m not going to do that.

Besides, this is a blog post, not a PhD.

The first thing that leapt out at me is that they all asymmetrical setups in which the abilities and/or goals of the various factions in play are different. More importantly, a great deal of time and attention has been given to the mechanical design of this asymmetry to ensure that the broad style or feel of play associated with each faction ensures that their behaviour in the game mirrors that in the story without cramping room for creative decision making. In War of the Ring the shadow player must rely on military might to win, forcing him to attack aggressively against the higher wisdom of hunting the ring, just as in the book. Similarly the free people’s player relies on stealth and misinformation to win, distracting the shadow player from committing resources to the hunt whenever possible. Take some of the Dune factions – the Harkonnen player is the one who must rely on treachery to succeed, the Guild and the Imperial factions both rely on huge income gained from the expenditure of other players and the Fremen must rely on their innate connection to the environment of Ariakas. In Fury of Dracula of course the play mechanics around the two sides are completely different – Dracula moves secretly while he watches the hunters move and is much more powerful than his adversaries. This re-enforces the feeling from the story that the hunters are in a desperate search for a creature much more powerful than they, and only by banding together can they succeed. The count, meanwhile, can weave his nefarious plots across Europe because he’s in possession of powers and information the hunters do not have.

The second thing that I thought was a commonality between the games was that they all had a very careful eye for what elements of the story were really central and which were just window trappings, no matter how flashy they might be. The central elements needed direct representation in the mechanics of the game while the others could either be ignored or represented in an oblique reference, decoupled from the mechanics. The best example of this is the Balrog from War of the Ring. Everyone remembers the Balrog (even if most people seem to have fake pictures of a winged Balrog in their heads, including Peter Jackson). However, does the Balrog make an appearance in War of the Ring? Not in the base game, certainly. Instead his presence is relegated to the extra corruption point the Fellowship accumulates if it chooses to pass through Moria. This, if you think about it, is entirely in keeping with the central point of the story which is the gradual disintegration of the fellowship. The Balrog is merely an agent through which this is accomplished in the story and so can be mechanically ignored in the game. In Dune, the key theme of the story is the diplomatic and violent confrontations between the factions. Everyone remembers the Sandworms from the book and the film but they’re not actually central to the plot, they’re just an agent used to further it along. So, appropriately, they’re relegated to a card event which mechanically has nothing to do with sandworms – instead they’re just a token which allows the opening of negotiation between players. In Fury of Dracula the central plot theme is the hunt and chase for Dracula. However, the game does manage to work in a large number of other minor plot themes directly into the game through the creatures and event cards. However, wider plot themes about the investigation into the background and powers of the Count that are present in the story are properly ignored in the game. This teaches us a final important lesson about this aspect – plot elements to be dropped need to be ignored because they might mess up the flow of the game, not simply because they’re not central. I guess this is something that only playtesting will tell you for sure. However a lot of tie-in games have suffocated under the thematic weight of trying to include pointless-but-cool elements right there in the core mechanics of the game.

The remaining items all seem fairly obvious, but the number of crap tie-in games on the market attests to the wisdom of spelling them out. The most obvious is that taking the above steps isn’t going to save you if your game design is crap in the first place – in other words, don’t throw the basic principles of good design out of the window in the effort to make your game tie in to the theme. Another is that the core mechanics of your game need to make some effort to reflect the situation present in your inspirational story. The reason that the idea of Star Wars Monopoly inspires such extreme revulsion isn’t just because it’s another Monopoly clone. No, extra horror is added to the concept because it should be obvious to anyone who’s seen more than 10 minutes of one of the films that the story has nothing to do with property trading, making this an especially cynical cash-in.

I thought it worth mentioning that there might actually be other games worthy to wear the mantle of a genuine story continuation tie-in game. One I have never played, even though I own a copy, is A Game of Thrones. I’d be interested to hear from fans of the game whether it ties in with the criteria I’ve identified.

So now, armed with my perfect set of criteria for a cracking storytelling game I’m off to design the official boardgame to be based on the final book of the series. I’d let you in to the secrets, but of course I’m desperately concerned that you’ll steal my ideas off me. Well actually I’m far too lazy to bother doing the real work but the concept is there and explaining it would involve far too many plot spoilers for the book than I’m willing to risk revealing to potential readers. If that’s enough detail to convince any would-be publishers to get in touch, then please post in the comments thread :).

A Moment shared Among Geeks

2007-11-06T06:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, November 5th 2007, hundreds of geeks in north America came home to find a medium sized white package, with the colorful logo of a national delivery company stamped on the side, had been delivered to their home. Inside this package was perhaps the most highly anticipated reprint of the year; Hannibal, Rome VS Carthage.

Valley Games had delivered on their promise and reprinted a game who's grail status had passed legendary and was approaching the ridiculous. On that day in November, hundreds of strangers were grinning as they near simultaneously opened packages. VG did not let us down. The new version of Hannibal, at least upon initial inspection, does not disappoint. The art (as subjective as this is) IMHO is great, well done but also staying true to the look and feel of the original. The units are made of nice think cardboard, and the cards are well above average quality card stock. The jigsaw puzzle map is better to the 3 piece original with its very large fold valleys.

I have seen a few nay-sayers making comments about this that or the other minor grip with the reprint, but these people for the most part are jackasses who deserve to be tarred and feathered and cursed to play nothing but Caylus against KingPut until the end of time. If you don't like the new version go pay top dollar for the old one on eBay or shut the fuck up.

Valley Games has done a wonderful job. I am excited about the other classic game reprints that are available for order. They are the most promising game publisher to show up on the scene for some time now, and I certainly hope they can keep producing high quality, long out of print game like this.

Now that this classic game is back in circulation will it get the respect it deserves? Was it all nostalgic hype and does it's age show? I think not; but time will tell. IMHO this is the game that should be at the top of that silly list on BGG. Not some half broken, thinly and poorly themed, slavery dodging, game that plays alright if you do not have an idiot at the table. Maybe now that a larger number of people will get a chance to play it more eye will be opened to what a real deep strategic game is like. More folks will figure out just how shallow even the deepest of euro's are.... well probably not, but I certainly am glad I have a copy.

-M

Ubergames of 2006

2007-11-03T21:52:00.000-07:00

So everyone has been coming out with their game awards, and Best of 2007 lists. I find some of the criteria for these lists bewildering. For example, the award is for 2007, but the games were published in 2006 except for those that were published in 2007, unless the games were published earlier and weren't readily available in the U.S. until 2006, or they were originally published years ago, but were reissued in 2006. I think I need errata for this rule. Of course, there is always the debate over what is a Family Game, and what is Children's Game, and is Battlelore a War Game or a War Themed Game.

I decided to just make my own list. The criteria for the Ubers is easy. The game must have been published in 2006. I get to decide the criteria for each category. It's a Family Game if it is playable by three generations of my family, including flaky grandparents, ADD in-laws, and normal, non-gifted, non-geek kids. It's a Children's Game if typical children can play it with other typical children without my having to grab them by the scruff of their necks to separate them. If nothing exceptional was published in a category, no Uber will be awarded. Only one person gets to vote - me.

Fury of Dracula - Ubergame 2006.
This has already reached the status of Classic in my mind.

Marvel Heroes - Uberslugfest 2006.
A strained marriage between Euro mechanics and AT sensibilities, this game is clunky, fiddly, complicated, and the rules are a mess. However, it is still a damn fun game to play. Don't over-think it, and for heaven's sake, never, ever play with any over-thinking, AP-prone person. Just go out there and kick the crap out of the bad guys.

California - Uberfamilygame 2006.
Alhambra-like with a sense of humor, and no boring scoring. It's accessible; it's fast; it's tense; it's easy to teach; it's got just the right amount of passive-aggressive "screw-you." Plus it has the hot chick.

Blue Moon City - Uberabstract 2006.
Despite the so-called theme and pretty artwork, this is an abstract game. For some inexplicable reason, Blue Moon City triggers a Talisman sense memory. Maybe it is that it is a race game where we run around, picking cards and hope for the best, and accumulate dragon scales, like dead enemies, for points. Then when we are ready, we "go-up" to the center of the board.

Warrior Knights - Uberwarthemed 2006.
This game has it all - theme, player interaction, tough choices, negotiation, a touch of chaos. A game where players get so immersed and invested that by the third turn they are threatening vengeance - that is one awesome game.

Cleopatra and the Society of Architects -Uberboring 2006.
See also Masons.

Leonardo da Vinci- Ubercrap 2006.
See Also Cartagena II, Thurn and Taxis, & Tempus.

"Essen" Means "To Eat" in German

2007-11-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

What can I say? I had my Essen editorial already in the can over at Gameshark.com before the news about the Mayfair decision broke so I didn't write about it. Yet, somehow the rampant consumer feeding frenzy that always follows in the wake of Essen is still relevant in the discussion. Are Eurogamers willing to pay full price for CONTAINER, KINGSBURG, and fucking HAMBURGUM? Probably not.

Its official: According to BGG, Euros now suck

2007-10-31T16:58:00.000-07:00

This blog’s not so secret origins lay in the fact that my fellow FATies and I got tired of hearing the trumpeting of the BGG ‘masses’ about the Euro revolution, the new enlightenment in gaming spreading like the word of Christ from Germany that was set to change the world of cardboard forever. Plastic trembled in its spurs as African rainforests were felled en masse in order to create the new messiah of gaming – the meeple.

Now according to those same people, Euros are suddenly not worth the money.

Yes, I am of course referring to mayfair’s decision to put a 20% floor price (also known as “price fixing” to intellectual simpletons who don’t know what price fixing actually is) on their games.

Let us take a quick look at the basic three gamer groups and their buying habits:

Ameritrashers probably have the most expensive games of the three; we like lots of stuff, and we don’t mind paying for it. FFG’s epic boxes seem to be big sellers, we are forever forking out into expansions, and our subgroups such as collectable card/miniature games and table top games are known as money pits in the wider gaming world. The out of print market on ebay is very strong, classics like Warhammer Quest, Dune and Magic Realm command a pretty penny, and each year more reprints of such classics as Talisman and Titan are announced to a hungry audience. Ameritrashers love their games and are willing to spend on them.

Wargamers are possibly worse. At least when we ameritrashers pay top dollar for a game we get top shelf stuff. Wargamers pay top dollar for a few paper maps and some thin cardboard chits for some game they will probably have to play online anyway! Not only that but they pay for these games months before they even come out! Certainly they are mad, but no one can deny that there is a deep seeded love there.

Now finally we come to Eurogamers, who will evangelise the hobby ‘till the cows come home, build new rooms to store their exponentially growing collections and try and fit a dozen different games into their schedule every game night. Then they boycott a company because they can’t get 35% off.

What the hell?

So let me get this straight – Settlers of Catan, Pillars of the earth, Modern Art, Tigris And Euphrates, and every other game these geek gold whores have been pimping since the moment I first logged into BGG are suddenly not that great because you have to pay full price. Let me repeat that – you don’t consider these games, which you have wasted reams and reams of bandwidth on, worth their full recommended retail price?

Get the fuck out of here you fickle bastards.

These games are not games are going UP in price (which would piss anyone off,) all that is happening is that these “fans” are now going to be expected to pay the normal price, actually not even that - 20% less than normal price. Yet this move is enough to apparently cause people to jump off the bandwagon. I really have to wonder why there aren’t more gay guys in the Eurogame scene with all of the big tight asses that are there.

Then again maybe if I was buying games with the mentality that a dozen plays is “more than I’ll get out of any game” I’d think RRP was a rip off too. Thankfully AT isn’t that disposable.

The biggest irony of course is that all of the people who are outraged because they have a right to 35% off, and who don't perceive games to be worth their RRP, are demonstrating the exact reason why Mayfair is doing this in the first place.

The net conclusion is simple – if Eurogames are only worth buying if your getting a hefty discount then they can’t be that great to begin with. Ergo AT and Wargames, whose fans happily pay full price for (notice StarCraft is selling out everywhere even though it doesn’t have the normal hefty discount,) are superior. You Euroclowns who were attempting to shove your “not worth RRP” shit down our throat for years can express your apologies bellow, starting with Monkey-Man.

Happy Halloween from Silver Shamrock Novelties

2007-10-31T11:39:00.000-07:00

AMC is showing HALLOWEEN III as I type...what a nutty movie. The Silver Shamrock song is pretty much always playing in my mind at any given point in my life.

Anyhoo, Steve Weeks sent out a notice a couple of days ago...the Ultimate Podcast is resurrected for a special Halloween show. Love him or hate him, you know you're gonna listen.

And if that doesn't scare the Eurogamers off the lawn, just put up a FLGS sign and tell 'em they gotta pay full MSRP.

Wicked Thoughts on Games by Ubarose

2007-10-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

When forced to play Euro auction games, pretend you have Tourettes. During the bidding yell out a random word or phase such as "Holy jump-a-mum-mum" or "underpants" or, if you prefer, words that cause your e-mail to be intercepted and quarantined by corporate IT security.

When forced to play a game with one of these, suddenly say, "Oh. I have to remember to pick up C batteries on the way home." Then write yourself a note so you don't forget.

When forced to play Leonardo da Vinci, carefully study the backs of the cards throughout the game.

and have a Happy Halloween.

A Case of the Mondays

2007-10-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

The Cracked LCD Halloween Special

2007-10-25T08:50:00.000-07:00

With Special Guest Star Frank Branham
as
"Branham"

I rarely write fiction but when I do, I generally rip off H.P. Lovecraft as much as possible. Which means, of course that I am vicariously ripping off Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen, right? Steal from the best, I always says.

Anyway, this week's edition of Cracked LCD is the Halloween special. And yes, it is a "very special" Cracked LCD. We, along with "Branham" learn a few very valuable lessons about "supercollecting" and obsessing over German board games.

Rumors of my Demise have been Greatly Exaggerated

2007-10-24T05:24:00.000-07:00

As a typical disgruntled Englishman, I have an inveterate dislike of American cultural Imperialism. Not so much American culture itself, you understand but more of circumstances when annoying aspects of your culture thoughtlessly overwrite lomh-cherished bastions of Englishness. Such as the fact that your bastardised dialect of our fine language is now known throughout the world as “International English” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.

Bearing this in mind, it is with a heavy and grudging heart that I have to admit that one thing Americans do better than we do is Halloween. Halloween is of course originally a Celtic festival, and I grew up in Ireland where it’s still celebrated passionately, and I learned to love it. I mean, a night of the year when the boundaries between worlds become thinner, magic is more potent and the dead are supposed to walk … come on, how cool is that? On arriving in England for the first time I was appalled by the off-hand manner in which it’s treated by everyone except young children. Seriously – over the past few years I’ve made a point of searching the terrestrial TV channels for horror-themed films or programmes shown on or around the 31st of October and there’s never, ever anything on. I don’t remember the last time we had trick-or-treaters at the door, even though I religiously stock up on sweets beforehand so I can reward anyone who is out celebrating the festival (and of course I get to scoff them all myself over the ensuing weeks when no-one turns up). Christian or otherwise, this is a seriously big chunk of our cultural heritage we’re missing out on.

Most gamers seem to love Halloween and no small wonder – many of us who were raised on the Ameritrash classics of yesteryear got into the gaming hobby precisely because we loved ghouls and goblins and all that fantasy stuff. I’d be curious to see if the younger generation who were raised on Eurogames have the same passion, but that’s an aside. The time-honoured way for a gamer to celebrate the festival is, of course, to pull out and play a bunch of horror-themed games. Witness, as evidence, the cavalcade of “games for Halloween” type lists that appear on Boardgamegeek around this time every year.

I’m no exception to this trend. At the same time as stocking up on sweets I always plan to spend the evening playing some horror games from my collection. Since I actually own very few horror games (for reasons we’ve discussed previously on the blog). I occasionally use it as an excuse to buy another one. And then the same thing happens every year: I call up my gaming friends and say to them all “You up to play some games on 31st October?” and, roughly five years out of every seven they replay “That’s a weeknight! No way! I have to go to work the next day!”. These people aren’t sleep wussies either – we used to have regular Titan sessions on a Monday night. It’s just the usual English apathy about the festival rearing its ugly head again.

My gaming friends are usually willing to compromise by having a horror game session at the nearest weekend instead. I am not. I have a firm and unshakable belief that if you’re going to celebrate something, you ought to do it on the specified date or nor do it at all. Would you celebrate Christmas in late January just because it suited your schedule a little better? Of course not! So why pay lip server to less well regarded festivals like Halloween? Indeed it seems to me that of all the yearly celebrations Halloween is perhaps the one which is best celebrated on the actual date. It’s a mystical event in the calendar: on this night and this night only the spirits break forth to terrorise the living. Come Friday night they’ll be gone, so what’s the point of trying to appease/commune with/exorcise them then? So, sad as it may be, I’ve managed to organise just one Halloween game that I can recall.

Because of this fashion for horror games on Halloween night, it ought to be absolute pig-in-mud time for Ameritrash evangelists because it’s the one occasion on which even the most dyed-in-the wool Eurogamer might be persuaded to sit down and trawl through a session of Fury of Dracula. Why? Well, to misquote Bill Clinton “It’s the atmosphere, stupid!”. For the one night of the year everyone can just put aside everything they think they know about “good” and “elegant” game design and just get down and dirty and enjoy the haunt. What they’re enjoying, of course, is what those of us who love our AT games any night of the year usually refer to as “theme”. They’re discovering that a game can be fun to play for the value and quality of the theme and narrative alone, and that in these sorts of games, strategy and elegance are just icing on a cake which is damn tasty all by itself.

So, come Halloween when you sit down to the smorgasbord of horror games that have been prepared for you, remember that the value you’re getting from your play is the value that Ameritrash gamers hold dear. Remember it well, and recall that feeling the next time you’re inclined to mock us for enjoying our pointless, luck-filled, over-chromed games and think carefully before offering an opinion.

Otherwise, next year, we’ll send the Hunting Horrors after you.

Human Sacrifice, Dogs and Cats Living Together, Mass Hysteria

2007-10-23T06:16:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard, yes, it's true--Fortress: Ameritrash's own Mr. Skeletor is currently Boardgamegeek's resident "Geek of the Week".

You can see the thread here:

Mr. Skeletor's GOTW Thread

Here's a rare opportunity to find out everything you've ever wanted to learn about Mr. Skeletor--such as his favorite games (hint: some were published by Fantasy Flight Games) and also his favorite Golden Girl (hint: it's the slutty one.)

F:AT Invitational.

2007-10-22T07:36:00.000-07:00

Ok So I have the 8 players for the game and I will be inviting 2 replacement players Just in case.

They are:
Will Kenyon
Mr Skeletor
Markball
Brewmiester
Krizman
Big A
Joshbot
Johnny

Replacements:
Bryan
gudo13

I need everyone to who has not done so already to send me their email addresses. Either message me on BGG or email them to buccheri at gmail.com

If i do not hear from you by 5pm on Tuesday the 23rd I will replace you.

-M

The Weekly AT Snapshot--October 19th, 2007

2007-10-19T05:36:00.000-07:00

Little Timmy has just received a Candyland set for his third birthday! He and his buddies tear open the box and sit down to play.

What game could be more appropriate for these overexcited, sugar-filled little scamps?It is a long, long journey, but Timmy has successfully navigated the lollypop woods, escaped from the molasses swamp, evaded the gooey gumdrops, and reached the final purple space. He draws his very last card...

(Unbeknownst to Timmy and his parents, the evil Michael Barnes has recently infiltrated Milton Bradley's printers, furthering his dastardly plot to insert the Horrible Black Void into each and every board game known to man.)

Today's photo and write-up come to us again from Mark "NeonPeon" Wrynn. Thanks, Mark!

___________________________________

If you've got a great image that just screams Ameritrash, email us the image or a URL.

It can be an image you created or an image you found on the web. We don't care! If it meets our strict quality standards, we'll publish it in The Weekly AT Snapshot, instantly making you an undeniable global celebrity.

We'll even pimp your website if you send us the URL for that. Send all submissions to fortressat@gmail.com with the word "Snapshot" in the subject line.

This Glaive Kills "Discerning Gamers"

2007-10-18T09:36:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's the Glaive from the film KRULL. Hop over to Gameshark to read about KRULL and a little game called...TALISMAN.

I was hoping we could use the feedback here to discuss the probability ratios and Bayesian statistics that reveal how TALISMAN is in fact, not a strategy game and that there are no meaningful decisions in it. Perhaps we, as "Discerning Gamers", can come up with an explanation why the game has been perennially popular for over 25 years and has outlasted many highly regarded and more sophisticated games. Certainly it's just nostalgia, right?

Fuck that, TALISMAN rocks.

First Annual F:AT Invitational TI3 game

2007-10-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

The time has come to crown a champ. We here at F:AT play a lot of games. You, our sometimes faithful readers, play a lot of games; someone has to rise to the top and claim the prize as the most bad assed gamer ever to read an article written by Michael Barnes.

Thats right! it is time to put your strategy cards selections where your collective mouths are. It is time for the Inaugural Fortress Ameritrash Invitational TI3 game. This game will decide who among us will have the title of Ti3 Bad Ass '07.

Now I know you are asking yourselves "How the fuck can I get in on this action?" Well it is an invitational, so you need to be invited. But this is not some sort of inner circle Gathering of Friends type thing. No no we don't play like that here at the Fortress. I personally will be picking the players based on who proves themselves most worthy of competition. How do you do that? well the only guideline is that it must be done as a reply to this blog. So convince me that you are worth inviting.

Note: that you must be prepared to play Ti3 on the wiki site (www.ti3wiki.org). You have to be familar with the game. Sorry but no newbies can be crowned Bad Ass. In addition there will be some House Rules for this game that change things a bit (thanks to the folks who I ruthlessly stole these ideas from.) You must be willing to play the game online, this requires checking the Google group/wiki daily Monday - Friday. Also be prepared for a long game, these thing can take months to complete so be ready for the long haul.

So post up your reasons as to why you deserve a shot at the title. F:AT bloggers (save myself) are eligible to play. I will post up the players shortly as well as periodic accounts of whats happening in the game for all those weenies who don't make the cut.

The Winner of the game will be the F:AT Bad-Ass for the next 12 months. This entitles you to post replies that say things like "fuck off- I am the F:AT Bad-Ass", along with other "Fringe" benefits like getting all the hot chicks at the bar, that promotion at work and winning the lottery.

Good Luck

-M

Official F:AT Essen Coverage (for Mike Chapel)

2007-10-17T07:04:00.001-07:00

Here that lonesome, pensive gorilla-like bitching? That's F:AT regular MIKE CHAPEL complaining about the lack of Essen '07 coverage here. Now, of course, we do have EXCLUSIVE Essen coverage if you pay me a nonrefundal $25 paypal "membership fee". That's where you get EXCLUSIVE coverage on all the exciting games being released there, like HAMBURGEN, KINGSBURG, and so on. Bur for our freeloading members, I did a Google image search to round up some material for our very own Essen slideshow. Here's just a little taste of what those crazy "Spielfrieks" from all over the world are experiencing right now- even as we speak!

Impromptu Mailbag--Filling in for Skeletor

2007-10-17T05:33:00.001-07:00

There's a good letter in the bag still left for Skeletor, but I had to take this one, BEFORE IT WAS TOO LATE...

__________________________________

Good Day, Please Read.My name is Mr.Song Lile i am the director of operation in Hang Seng Bank Hong Kong.

I have a business proposal in the tune of $19.5m. After the successful transfer, we shall share in ratio of 30% for you and 70% for me.

Should you be interested, please contact me through my private email (LIKE I'M GOING TO SHARE THIS WITH YOU GUYS! --Ken) so we can commence all arrangements and I will give you more information on how we would handle this project.

Please treat this business with utmost confidentiality and send me the following.

Full names:
Private phone number:
Current residential address:
Occupation:
Age:

Kind Regards, Mr. Song Lile.

______________________________________

Well, Mr. Song....you've just made my dreams come true! 19 MILLION?! Dude, that's a lot of coffin-sized FFG games right there! With those proceeds, I can buy the FFG crew some serious "Thank You" gifts....for Jeremy, a Slave Leia costume....for Thaadd, a "Game Designers Journal" to help her keep her myriad design projects safe...for Kevin Wilson, an autographed picture of me...the list goes on and on and on. I can even buy Mike Chapel a giant codpiece for his monkey genetalia. My altruism shall know no bounds! MY LEDGERDOMAIN SHALL BE KINDNESS AND LOVE!

I mean, I'm not sure how you got my email address Mr. Song, I'm assuming it's because you read my "Geek of the Week" posts on BGG and were so impressed you had to contact me right away. Believe me dude, I totally understand.

Here are the details you need:

Full Names: Michael Hunt
Private Phone Number: (555) 555-1212
Current Residential Address: 420 Paper Street, Wilmington, DE, 19886
Occupation: Male Stripper
Age: A lady never tells

Anyway, it's been fun writing for you guys, but now that I'm rich, y'all can bite me.

The Weekly AT Snapshot--October 12, 2007

2007-10-12T05:49:00.001-07:00

"Gee Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky - try to do...uh...whatever the hell it is that's supposed to be going on in this game."

Man, I hate abstracts.

Today's image was brought to us by Simon Mueller. Thanks, Simon!

__________________________________

We'll even pimp your website if you send us the URL for that. Send all submissions to fortressat@gmail.com with the word "Snapshot" in the subject line.

LAST NIGHT ON EARTH Fails to Deliver Zombie Vs. Shark Action

2007-10-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

Sadly, Jason Hill/Flying Frog's LAST NIGHT ON EARTH completely fails to bring us anything nearly as badass and amazing as this scene from Lucio Fulci's ZOMBI 2...instead, there's plenty of rural hick versus zombie action, which I think is boring. Give me the urban apocalypse of DAWN OF THE DEAD over the farmhouse follies of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Anyway, it's a pretty darn good game and probably the best zombie game out there regardless of the fact that it isn't as different from ZOMBIES!!! as internet opinion seems to suggest it is. In fact, if you took ZOMBIES!!! and added scenarios, character abilities, and tweaked the combat system you'd have the same game but with someone controlling the zombies. You still wander around and search buildings for cards and roll a bunch of dice. BUT IT COMES WITH A CD!

I guess that's why it's "cool" to like LNoE but not ZOMBIES!!!...I give a good review and think overall it's going to be the next BETRAYAL- an easy to play, but not that mechanically great, horror-themed game that will have a lot of crossover appeal.

Speaking of zombies...just watched 28 WEEKS LATER. It's fucking great. Top shelf all the way and better than DAYS.

BTW, it's my birthday and none of you bastards got me all those SUPREMACY expansions I wanted...make up for it by going on to Gameshark now.

REALLY Deep Thoughts About Gaming...

2007-10-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

So I was writing next week's Gameshark column (which is going to be a "Games from the Crypt" installment about TALISMAN) and I had an epiphany. There is one simple mechanic, one singular card, that could save the Eurogame fad from complete extinction while also making even the lamest games suddenly more thrilling.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...the HORRIBLE BLACK VOID.

Imagine you're playing a game of say, PORTOBELLO MARKET when all of a sudden one player is sucked into the Horrible Black Void by an unlucky card draw. All of a sudden, a dull game about selling mushrooms (I guess) becomes dramatic and interesting and in the players' minds a narrative develops about how this mushroom merchant prior to the game's events crossed some wicked sorceror who cursed him to go sailing into infinite doom- how's that for profits being "in the black"?

Of course, the bitching and whining about "the luck element" and the gnashing of teeth that an hour or two was completely and totally wasted since the player's strategy didn't pan out will follow...but that's OK, because rather than monday morning quarterbacking why they lost it's real fuckin' clear- they fell into a Horrible Black Void.

I can't think of a single game that wouldn't benefit from a Horrible Black Void card. It should be a mandatory inclusion in every game just to keep people on their toes. Imagine the excitement it would bring to even the most boring auction game like MODERN ART or AUGSBURG 1620- the HBV turns up and players have to bid to avoid getting sucked into it and being kicked unceremoniously out of the game. Or a game like TICKET TO RIDE when a player's entire train line is immediately '86ed due to pulling the Horrible Black Void while trying to complete a set of green cards.

That's really the key to making it work- the player has to lose EVERYTHING and be put immediately out of the game so they can either fetch snacks and drinks for everyone or go home early, having wasted their entire evening.

I always thought the second person up there ought to be able to catch that guy's Talisman and helmet...

Burnout: Taken Down Edition

2007-10-10T06:43:00.000-07:00

I've been debating writing this for the past several weeks or so. First of all, why should you care? Secondly, is this what the blog is about?

But then again...we've been posting here for six months, and most of us have babbled about whatever seemed important to us at the moment, and you guys (and gals) have kept reading. So...here goes.

What do you do with boardgame burnout?

Right now, I've got it wickedly bad. Not to the degree where I don't want to play, but to the point where I do feel like I'm going through the motions. A few weeks ago we had a get-together to game; we ended up playing half a game of Original Trilogy Star Wars Risk before abandoning it to watch football and play Bioshock.

I thought that maybe it was just a bad session, but a couple of weeks later we tried Siege of the Citadel one of my favorite games. The energy just wasn't there. Somehow one of the best shoot-em-up boardgames ever designed didn't even inspire the type of excitement it should have.

Maybe it was to be expected. For the past two-and-a-half years I've done nothing but eat, breathe, and sleep boardgames. Time not spent playing them was spent reading about them. Time not spend buying them was planning on what I was going to buy. Time not spend trading them was spent meticulously figuring out what and when I could trade.

Problem #1 is that I'm one of the primary enablers of my boardgaming friends. For the most part, if it is going to get played, I have to buy it. I have to teach it. I have to help schedule it. Rules pile up in my brain like a freeway crash as I try to keep rulesets for a 100 games in my head. This of course fails miserably and our sessions grind to a halt as pages are flipped, rules are consulted, and the pace of our games slow to a crawl.

Problem #2 is the inertia of a larger board game collection. This poses a problem on many levels. First, you start to look at your collection as having certain areas "covered". You think, "I already have a game based on global conquest, one based on dungeoneering/adventuring, one on sci-fi shoot-em-ups, etc."

Also, and this is more maddening, you end up with the backlog. Gaming time just can't keep up with the acquisitions so you end up with a laundry list of games you were excited to get but just can't seem to get table time with all the heavy competition. Getting burned like that makes you hesitant to look into getting new games. You start to see them as "One more to add to the backlog."

Problem #3 is the demon temptress of video games. Like most board gamers, I'm a multi-hobby geek. I may own 170+ boardgames and CCGs but I own 13 consoles and nearly 350 games for them. In years past I'd always cycle between my hobbies; I'd be heavily into video games for a few months before drifting back into CCGs and after that it'd be back to buying movies and DVDs. Somehow I managed to avoid that during the past two+ years, even though I'd dabble again in dead CCGs or more games my primary interest was boardgaming. We'd game at lunch, we'd game at work, we'd plan monthly gaming sessions, we'd excitedly list off 10-20 games we'd like to squeeze in "sometime soon", the list goes on and on and on.

This has been reflected by the fact that I don't own a next generation console yet. Since having an Atari 2600 as a child, I have owned a new console that I wanted within a year of its release. Now, I'm starting to feel that as I play my brother's new Nintendo Wii or my cousin's XBox 360. If I took the money from the last few boardgames I'd purchased, I'd have one of these systems already.

Some of you have noticed that my contributions have diminished, and have rightfully called me out on having lower quality posts than in the past. The bit I wrote on theme vs. mechanics wasn't terribly inspired and something I cobbled together so I could contribute something. I was invited to write for Boardgamenews.com to bring some Ameritrash flavor to the place, and what have I done with that? Nothing. I just...can't...think of what to write about that's of any interest.

(Unless they want a review of Bioshock. That's a hell of a game.)

The scariest part of all was looking at my closet last night and thinking what else I could be doing with all that space. And the sudden urge to flag half the games I have for trade on BGG (though what would I trade them for? More games?)

I'm hoping things will pass, and I think they will. There have truly been some great Ameritrash stuff released this year. Whereas Euro games seem to be stuck in even more of a rut than I do, a lot of energy is going into bringing us better Ameritrash games with clean rules (though still complex enough for flavor!), insane production values, and great themes. Look at Last Night on Earth--a game I do need to get, as it might be just the ticket to light the fire again.

Anyway, I just thought I'd put that out there. What do you guys do when you experience burnout? Can this gamer be saved? And are boobies on Boardgamegeek a bad thing?

Deep Thoughts on Games by Ubarose

2007-10-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

A group of people who can not remember to move out the car at the foot of a driveway, before attempting to back out the car at the head of a driveway, should not play fiddly games unsupervised.

Play responsibly. Appoint a designated turn marker mover.

The AT Weekly Snapshot--October 5th, 2007

2007-10-05T06:39:00.000-07:00

Setting: 15th Century. The principality of Wallachia employs unique processes that serve the dual function of deterring outside invaders as well as entertaining the royalty.

The prince has personally contracted the players to maximize process efficiency, through acquisition and utilization of resources. Among these resources are food, peasants, pikes and Turks. The prince will hold unexpected feasts at random processing sites - the players who can quickly lay out food and the proper atmosphere will receive the prince's utmost admiration. Players who fail will instead feel his piercing disappointment.

Today's snapshot and write-up comes courtesy of Mark Wrynn. Thanks, Mark!

_______________________________

If you've got a great image that just screams Ameritrash, email us the image or a URL.

We'll even pimp your website if you send us the URL for that. Send all submissions to fortressat@gmail.com with the word "Snapshot" in the subject line.

A Night at the Opera

2007-10-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

In honor of my gaming buddy Lyman Hurd, who often eschews gaming in favor of going to the opera (join me in heckling this bourgeois top hat-and-monocle mentality, won't you), I would like to present my review of TANNHAUSER. It's not about nazis. OR IS IT???

Big Game Event in Atlanta

2007-10-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all...my gaming buddy Steve "Tanktop" Avery asked me to post this here...this is a pretty big gaming event we're putting on in Atlanta so if you can make it, do so. I'm not responsible for the contents of this post, so any guarantees he makes are not guaranteed. Come help us make this something more than yet another gaming event featuring 30-40 middle-aged men sitting around quietly playing THURN AND TAXIS. Won't you please? Of course, he tried to bait Mr. Skeletor and get a jab in at me but he failed to put a date on it- it's the weekend of October 19th.

I would be remiss if I did not post the details of the Mercer Game Extravaganza here on Fortress AT. Why? because there's going to be more ATgames there than you can possibly indulge in playing. and if that weren’t enough – there’s also prizes and chili. Ok, I don't know where the chili fits into this but I *promise* you that if you make it down to the ATL you'll have a good time. In fact, I'll guarantee that if you don't have a good time, then I'll buy the first round of drinks at the Hispanic strip club around the corner.

Some highlights:

We'll be flying in Mr. Skeletor to engage in hand to hand combat with our own Rob Martin. Skeletor has size speed and skill but Rob fights dirty...It should be a good fight.

We'll be hanging a life size piñata of Barnes that will spout real blood when you hit it. It also ridicules lesser board games on any genital hit.

and of course ...we'll be doing shots of tequila every time another piece of clothing is removed during Strip Ca$h n Gun$. Enough skin to make beached whales jealous.

Don't take my word for it...read it for yourself here:

http://mercergaming.wetpaint.com/page/Mercer+Gaming+Extravaganza

Steve"Shill"Avery

Ameritrashers are Leaders. Eurogamers are followers.

2007-10-02T07:02:00.000-07:00

It has been said that there are 2 types of people in this world, those who lead and those who follow. I have a different way of thinking, a slightly more cynical boolean classification for the worlds population. The two types of people in Malloc's worlds are Creeps and Assholes.

So I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and we got onto the topic of gamer types. Why does this guy like Eurogames, why dose that guy like Ameritrash. It was clear that there were distinct personality types that favored each style of game. Eruogames with their passive aggressive nature, clearly defined mechanics and relatively short playtimes attracted one set or personalities. While AT titles with their in your face, heavily theme influenced rules and relatively long length appealed to others.

Now, I am sure my sample would not satisfy even the loosest of scientific standards, but I tended to notice that the people I would consider to be creeps, you know the kind of fella who is usually quiet, sometimes complains and gets his way through manipulation tended to favor eurogames. On the other hand those who I consider to be Assholes, brass individuals who never stay quiet when the opportunity to offer an opinion is concerned and tend to get their way via direct confrontation, these folks love a good AT game.

Now I am not condemning or condoning being either a creep or an asshole, remember we are all one or the other. (often this changes in different situations) I just wanted to get an idea of what you all consider yourselves when you are gaming. For the record, it should be obvious that I consider myself a total asshole.

-M

Ameritrash--Theme or Mechanics?

2007-10-02T05:47:00.000-07:00

Here's today's thought...is Ameritrash defined more by theme, or mechanics?

On the one hand, it's pretty obvious that it's theme that gets you in the door. Science Fiction and Fantasy are the two main themes that you'll find in most Ameritrash games. It's also why there is debate over what fits and what doesn't--"But...but it has Terminators riding Dinosaurs!"

Think about it--games with Zombies, or Cyborgs, or Dragons, or potty-mouthed Clerics...where is your first impulse to classify these? "Pff! That can't be Euro. It's got friggin' Pirates!" That's an actual train of thought when attempting to classify Pirate's Cove.

This often bounces right into the mechanics portion, and based on how European gaming influences have bled into American-style games--"cleaning them up" if you will--this adds to the confusion. Is Shogun Ameritrash? It has cubes and a highly abstracted combat resolution system, but it is about war, combat, and conflict, about duking it out on a Risk-style map.

What about individual elements of Ameritrash games? Dice? The first thing people hit you with is, "well, Settlers has dice." Yes, yes it does. Randomness in general? I've determined that Lost Cities is about as random as it gets, so much so that even if I played 200 games of it I still wouldn't feel comfortable putting money on any individual game. Plastic figures? Game manufacturers have figured out that plastic figs have a genuine appeal to a segment of gamers so it's not uncommon to see plastic figures in games that are not essentially Ameritrash. This adds to the confusion in games such as Bootleggers or Age of Empires III, which at a glance have all the plastic eye candy you could ever hope for but feature game mechanics that are not immediately at home in your typical Ameritrash game.

Mr. Skeletor doesn't like the term, but I can't help but think that the lines will further be blurred as each camp borrows heavily from the other. Euros seem to want to get out of their "pasted on theme" box and are trying very hard to give us games with crossover appeal, such as Arkadia or Pillars of the Earth. We're seeing American-style games incorporating more in the way of threaded turns, simultaneous actions, role selections, and auctions. We're seeing ambitious American-style designs coming from game makers the world over, including things like Duel in the Dark and Tannhauser.

Theme is going to continue to be important. I mean, imagine Risk, just like it is, but change the theme to ameobas battling it out in a petri dish or something. Imagine that Cave Troll is actually about a cave-in (oh wait, it almost was).

Just ask yourself--"would it seem out of place if this game included sharks with laser beams mounted on their heads?"

STARCRAFT- Corey K. Interview

2007-09-27T08:32:00.000-07:00

Take that, Ken B., I've scored my own interview with an international boardgaming celebrity designer. You got pwned, I'm in ur base killin ur dudes, and so forth. So here's a little email interview I did with Corey over at FFG regarding the STARCRAFT board game, which as we all know Frank already has and we don't. Of course I don't own a copy of SHEER PANIC so I guess that balances everything out in the end.

OMG Zerg Rush on over to Gameshark.com!

The Vault...

2007-09-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

Lets face it, if you read this blog, and or familiar with the boardgamegeek, or comsimworld websites then chances are you are probably certifiable when it comes to buying and well hoarding games. Now if you are single and live on your own you can allow these prized collections to just sit about on whatever horizontal surface will support them. However, if you somehow like me managed convince a member of the opposite sex to marry you, then your ability to use boardgames as home decor are probably limited. Not to mention that if you somehow managed to spawn with the aforementioned member of the opposite sex then you have to consider the destructive properties of your litter when storing games.

Now I consider myself lucky, my wife is somewhat reasonable. She granted me sole possession of a small room 10' x 10' or so in the basement. complete with a lockable door. (If you look closely you may be able to see the infamous crotch jewelry)

I am in complete control of what goes on inside what I refer to, in my best Dr. Evil Voice, as "my lair'. A place my wife convinces herself doesn't exist on the same plain of existence as she does, and a place my children believe holds within all the wonders their little heads can imagine.

The cold Truth is that my obsession hardly fits inside these walls. Between my many hobbies, yes board games are but one of too many distractions, I have filled this space nearly to the point where it ceases to be useful.

Big Gun RC Warship Combat is cool, but requires space.

My problem is that I am not content to just store the games in a safe fashion. They must be displayed in a way that is both useful for finding, and aesthetically pleasing to me. (Perhaps also to a few of you. ) Lets face facts here, regardless of how much one loves and plays any one game, these objects of our obsession spend the vast majority of their lives sitting on a shelf. My thoughts are that they should be a site for all to see, unfortunately aside from a select few games that are for some reason interesting enough to be kept on the family room built-ins, my spouse disagrees. But I am not so easily defeated, even though the lions share of my collection is kept in its own secluded sanctuary, I strive to make the place impressive to even the most uninitiated bloke who wanders in.

This is the main set of shelves

Now I know that my collection is modest (about 200 games) by some peoples standards, but even at this number I have more things than I really can ever play on a regular basis. I have these dreams of my kids getting older and wanting to play Europe Engulfed or War of the Ring... but more on that later. Still there is an overflow section.

Overflow

So thats the state of my game room. I have designs on expanding to the entire basement. These have actually started in that I have furnished the "Play Room" with plenty of shelves. What would we gamers do without IKEA? Currently games nights are allowed upstairs, mostly due to their relative infrequency, we enjoy playing games in light and open spaces like my sunroom. If they ever become more regular then my guess is we will be banished to the darker, damper recesses of my home. When that happens I will have to expand "my lair".

Feel free to post comments about how it is you like to store games, or the negotiations required to get that closet under the steps away from your spouse's wicker basket collection.

Until next time... have some fun gaming, drink some good beer and enjoy life.

-M

StarCraft the Board Game: Under the Havok Staff

2007-09-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this game for free (though not necessarily for review purposes.)

Fantasy Flight Games love affair with Blizzard continues with its fifth coffin boxed game, StarCraft. For those who never encountered the hugely successful game (and I have found there are a surprising number of you), it was released around a decade ago as a spin off to the WarCraft series. The real time strategy game was set in space and featured 3 very different races – a bunch of redneck humans called the Terran, a swarming alien race who use living technology called the Zerg, and the powerful but expensive religious race called the Protos.

You can read the rules on FFG’s website here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/starcraft_support.html. I’m assuming you have at least skimmed through them in this review.

Not much room left on that bottom shelf

Comparisons to the Video Game

It was always going to be interesting to see how Fantasy Flight Games tackled this property, as they already had designed a game for the very similar WarCraft franchise, which was not their most successful design. Indeed it appeared that this game went through some growing pains, with the title being delayed over a year from its projected release and apparently changed designer at least once (interestingly Kevin Wilson who supposedly worked on the game originally isn’t mentioned in the design credits at all.) The final result is a board game that doesn’t slavishly recreate the video game as War Craft the Board game did, but instead is its own beast.

While it has the basic flavour of the computer game, and certainly apes it’s theme well, it feels less like its computer game parent then World of WarCraft does. This may disappoint some, but the game is all the stronger for it as it doesn’t inherit any of the weaknesses that would have gone hand in hand with a direct translation. In fact I would say any thoughts or feelings you have for the computer game will not affect your opinion of the board game at all, and people who don’t have any experience with the computer version will probably enjoy this game as much as the fanboys do (if not moreso since they don’t have any pre-release hangups!). Where experience with the computer game does come in handy is in the learning curve for the different elements. For example those who are already familiar with the StarCraft universe will know that Terran spaceships can turn invisible, whereas players new to the setting will only discover this when they are attempting to blast those ships out of the air.

Components

Whereas I was a little disappointed with the amount of content within the previous big boxed game, Tide of Iron, I am back to being very impressed here. There is certainly a lot of bang for your buck.

The miniatures are fantastic, the best FFG have created yet. It may be because I grew up with Games Workshop games (who still hold the award for gold standard in board game miniatures in my opinion) who love their exaggerated biology, but I often find FFG miniatures to be a little skinny and meek. That is certainly not the case here with the sole exception of the Ghosts, who look like catwalk models in desperate need of a sandwich. All the spaceships and other units are nice and chunky. Another nice feature is that the spaceships come on clear stands, which looks great and really helps them to stand out. Unfortunately the stands come glued to the miniatures, which is a problem for 2 reasons. Firstly they are made of hard plastic, which means there is a good chance you will find a few snapped upon opening the box – I found 5 broken ones. I reglued them using plastic cement which worked a treat. The second problem is that if you want to paint the miniatures you will have to mask the stands, especially if you undercoat with spray paint as I do, which will be a pain in the ass. Hopefully in future if they use the clear stands again they will come separate from the miniatures to avoid these issues.

The cardboard is the typical nice thick stuff that comes in all FFG games. There are a lot of tokens and map pieces, but not an excessive amount as found in Descent or World of WarCraft.

Many people will be happy to know that all the cards are of the standard size. Personally I wouldn’t have minded if some of them were half size in order to save table real estate, especially the planet cards which contain no text, but this is a minor nitpick.

There are no dice in the game so there is not much to say about them.

Overall it is a very impressive package, not quite as impressive as World of Warcraft but certainly on par with Descent.

The Boastings on the Box

The board is modular and its size scales depending on how many players you have. Each individual’s play area does take up a fair chunk of real estate as well, so while you can get away with using a small table for a 2-player game, you’ll need a good sized table for 6.

The game scales wonderfully amongst the full range of player numbers. The 2 player game does feel different; it’s more aggressive and nasty, and requiring a different tactical approach that 3+ player games which have a little more breathing room. Games from 3 – 6 players have a similar feel so player numbers won’t be an issue.

I’d estimate an experienced group should be able to knock a game out in around two to two and a half hours. The game moves at a quick pace with little downtime, but it does suffer from what I call “World of WarCraft” syndrome – that is new plays really drag the play time out as they sit there reading all of the card in their technology deck while it is there turn, scratch their heads in dumbfounded confusion while deciding what to buy, and generally don’t think ahead until it’s actually their go. For this reason it takes a few plays before you start to get a proper feel of the game unless your group are AT veterans.

Now you really know what was in Marsellus Wallace's case

Game Play

There are two things one will notice about the board very quickly into their first game if they want to survive. Firstly, the board scales so that there are 2 planets per player, which isn’t much at all, so if you want territory you are going to have to fight for it even in the very early game. The second is that due to the Z-axis navigations, ‘corners’ don’t tend to exist – wherever you are on the board, you will be next to several opponents and you will be fighting on multiple fronts. Don’t expect to be able to pull a “take Australia and move out” RISK maneuver here!

This is a capture territory game, and all of the options and mechanics help you toward that end. There are no politics or trade or anything like that here; everything boils down to attempting to get advantages over your opponents in combat. This is a very bloody game, and unlike games like Nexus Ops or Twilight Imperium 3 where the first 3^rd of the game is simply scripted exploration and preparation, the bloodshed and heavy action starts from turn one. The game encourages aggression like you won’t believe.

You have a total of 3 orders to choose from each time it is your turn – build, research technology and move and fight. You have to preplan your entire round in advance similar to A Game of Thrones, but with some big differences. With only 3 very flexible options to choose from you will be able to do everything you want in a turn, so it doesn’t have the agonizing choice of orders AGOT has. Instead planning orders is all about spoiling your opponent’s plans as much as possible, while avoiding them spoiling yours. One of the most interesting things about this game is that everyone really does fight everyone – the normal pairing off of enemies you see in most Ameritrash just doesn’t happen here. It’s pointless to hold a grudge against someone for hitting you, because everyone will be hitting everyone by turn two. In fact I have seen games where two players are fighting each other over one planet on one side of the board while the same two players have a temporary alliance on the other in an attempt to pincher a third player. The wheeling and dealing I have seen with this game is odd to say the least, and it all stems from the fact everyone is in each others faces from the very start.

Building

Building costs resources, and the whole building mechanic is handled in a very clever and, dare I say it, ‘elegant’ way (don’t shoot me Barnes!) Because you don’t ‘get’ the resources in the form of goods, you can’t save resources up between turns, meaning you may as well spend everything you can each turn. On the other hand like all good games involving resources you never have enough each turn to do everything you want, so a lot of tough choices lie ahead. Workers tend to be the limiting factor at the start of the game, since you can’t spend more resources then you have workers. You want to amass more workers as quickly, but the game never gives you the breathing room to do this – spend your first turn building up workers and you won’t have a second to use them in. Instead you just have to squeeze extra ones in whenever you can, ditto with transports.

Buildings are essential as they give you access to new units, and believe me, you want new units! It takes a lot of discipline to be able to get to the stronger units in a timely manner, but if you can get access to them before your opponents have done the same, you will find yourself at a big advantage. While it is possible to ‘build up’ to any unit you like, what you wont be able to do is build enough buildings to have access to every unit for your faction, so you are going to have to decide early on what types of troops you are aiming for. I really like this aspect as not only does it add real decisions to the game (unlike games where you’ll have access to everything by the end) it also means you see different forces on the table each game. The balance seems pretty spot on – swarming with cheap units can work, but so to can concentrating on building fewer high powered units.

Modules are the only area of the game that I am a bit disappointed in. Most races have 3 (Zerg 2) different types of modules to choose from, and they do the same thing for each race. While the three you get to choose from are very good, I would have liked more to choose from, with different races having access to different modules. This is the only area of the game which kind of screams ‘wait for the expansion’ to me, which is a bit disappointing. Well nothing is perfect I guess.

Research

Research helps stuff your hand with combat cards, as well as allowing you to customize your combat deck. This aspect feels similar to building a deck for a CCG, as you select technologies that will form the basis of your combat strategies; the main differences being you build this deck throughout the game instead of prior to it and these cards cost you resources instead of your lunch money.

Most of the combat cards you start with are very straightforward, so you are going to have to research to get the cards with the ‘wrinkles’ that will help you pull of surprise moves and combinations against your opponents. Research is also important as it adds combat cards to your hand, so you are going to want to research before going into battle. The downside is research is tied up with the event deck, meaning if everyone starts going crazy with research the games clock is going to run out very fast. Of course if you are set to win, going mad on research is a winning strategy – not only are you bringing forth your victory sooner, but you are also gaining cards that will help you fend off your opponents who are no doubt ganging up on you!

Tide of StarCraft

Combat

Fighting is the raw heart of the game, and while it can be a pain in the ass to teach, I’m happy to say the combat system works a lot better in person that it reads in the rulebook. In fact I’d go so far as to say this is one of the best combat systems I have encountered, it grants the participants a lot more control then the typical dice fest while still remaining tense and exciting to watch unlike other more dry combat systems such as that found in Dungeon Twister. It also plays out pretty quickly, so those who were scared it sounded a lot like Age of Mythology’s ‘stop the game’ system need not fear.

The issues relating to combat are actually the inverse of what one would initially expect. I remember reading a lot of comments to the effect that it was in your interest to build up a diverse portfolio of troops so that combat card management became easier – after all the more different troop types you have the higher the chance that the cards in your hand will be of use to you. In fact the opposite is true; because you draw a lot of combat cards in the game (I have yet to see a players hand run dry), organizing you hand so that you have a fist full of marines and firebats is easy. Hand management actually becomes more of an issue as the game wears on, as suddenly you have five different types of units on the board but have to discard down to a hand size of six cards which isn’t enough to cover them all, so you have to decide what units are in important enough areas to keep cards for, and which units you will leave defenseless.

It’s almost enough to stop you from diversifying your troop types, but sticking to only a few unit types has its own problems. Much like the computer game, matching opposing units with the correct counter units is the key to victory. All the Zerglings in the world won’t help you if your opponent is building up an air fleet. When reading the rules for combat I was afraid that all of the units would feel the same, but I’m happy to report this is not the case. Between the different matrixes of what can hit what and the different technologies that each unit can buy, the units all have their own unique flavors and nuances.

Broadly speaking you can group the different units in two types – what I like to call the direct hitters and the spoilers. Combat, especially at the start of the game, is very calculable. With basic units 4 times out of 5 you can correctly guess the outcome of the battle, meaning attackers who know what they are doing will win more often than not. Direct hitters are units that rely on combat card numbers, and winning combats with them involves simply overpowering your opponents either with bigger forces or more powerful units. These types of units keep combat predictable which is advantageous because you’ll know what fights to start, but disadvantageous because your opponents will know the same! At the opposite end of the spectrum are the ‘spoiler units’, who tend to be the units with lots of technology upgrades and are often assist units. These units add a controlled chaos to the combats, bringing in different combinations of effects to mess up the best-laid plans of your opponents. Card management is more difficult with these units, but often simply the presence of these units is enough to give your opponents pause. After all, your opponents have no idea what cards lie in your hand, so he’ll be hesitant to risk his expensive units when a queen is floating around “just in case” you have that Broodling card in your hand.

All in all I love the way combat works; it provides lots of strategic flexibility, many different viable approaches, enough control to feel fulfilling while maintaining enough chaos to ratch up the tension. It really is the crown jewel of the game.

The End Game

Each player has his or her own unique victory condition, which isn’t anything new amongst the world of AT. What is unique is the designer’s approach to these victory conditions, which are written in such a way that every player will end up being a knife’s edge away from victory. This really causes the endgame to be an incredibly tense and exciting affair, with the ‘lead player’ changing hands several times a turn causing all the players to pull out all stops. In fact rare is the game in which a player is in a position where he feels he can not win, as players who fall too far behind tend to be eliminated. Make no mistake, this game does have player elimination and unlike most modern games you will see it happen.

Fight, fight for Blizzards love!

Comparisons to Other Games

I have heard several comparisons made between this game and others currently on the market, here are my thoughts on them:

Twilight Imperium 3: TI3 is much more epic in scope, with politics, trade and diplomacy featuring heavily. StarCraft is much narrower in its focus; it’s all about victory through force. The two games are very different.

Nexus Ops: Both games share theme and scope, but from there the similarities end. Nexus is a much lighter ‘beer and pretzels’ affair, with a much higher dosage of luck. StarCraft is a lot meatier, with many more choices in strategic options, much more variety, and a lot more planning and thought required. Basically it’s more of a ‘gamer’s game’.

A Game of Thrones: AgoT is more concerned about diplomacy, positioning, and out planning your opponents. StarCraft concerns itself more with managing resources and getting the job done. Whereas in AgoT you often hold back waiting for the right time while attempting to set into place the events that will set your victory into motion, in StarCraft you’ll be on the attack from the get go.

Overall

StarCraft is a very refined, clean and thrilling game that offers its players a challenging and fun experience. There is a hell of a lot to like here, and very little to be critical of. This is one of FFG’s best designs to date, and easily justifies its hefty price tag. I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t end up being one of the best received games this year. The ameritrash hall of fame better start making some room.

Recommended for those who:

Want to experience how far AT design has come since the 80s.

Want a clean, smooth moving game with a host of options and a lot to think about that still boils down to beating the living shit out of your opponents.

Want to give their life for Aiur.

Not Recommended for those who:

Start crying when their mates attack them.

Still think trading cubes for VP is cool.

Only buy games to play 3 to 4 times before moving onto the next purchase.

A big thanks to Mike Z, Thaadd, Jeremy and the rest of the FFG crew for the early copy of the game.

Deep Thoughts on Games by Ubarose

2007-09-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

Teach Ca$h 'n Gun$ to six children between the ages of 8 to 12 years old. Take side bets on how long before a gamer dad needs to intervene.

The "Ever Increasingly Misnamed" Weekly Snapshot: 09/21/07

2007-09-21T10:34:00.000-07:00

"Including a total of over 180 mini booze bottles and dozens of drunk types, Barcraft: The Board Game features an innovative modular bar of varying sizes which guarantees a new experience each and every binge. An exciting card driven puking system allows drinkers to modify and upgrade their belt notches with a wealth of powerful whores. Players can unleash a Yuengling rush, use powerful Prairie Fire shots to halt an sober enemy, or even send cloaked Zombies out to guide uncontrollable piss missiles to the fake plant in the corner."

Today's image and write-up comes to us courtesy of the ever-mysterious "Powdered Toast Man." Thanks, Toast!

_________________________________________

If you've got a great image that just screams Ameritrash, email us the image or a URL.

We'll even pimp your website if you send us the URL for that. Send all submissions to fortressat@gmail.com with the word "Snapshot" in the subject line.

Let's talk about Eurogames!

2007-09-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

Well, since we seem to have a lot of "visitors" lately from the link a noble Dutch AT'er posted over at the Leading Board Game Site, why don't we talk about Eurogames for a while! Maybe that'll get 'em to stop bitching. So, SETTLERS OF CATAN. It's on Xbox Live, and has no expansions. What a shame. In this edition of Cracked LCD, I talk about the CATAN expansions and why they rock. SETTLERS is the one true Euro, and the only one that at the end of the day really matters.

Let's all go over to Gameshark.com!

The Golden Age

2007-09-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

A year ago today- September 19^th, 2006- a crude nuclear device was detonated at the very heart of the online board gaming community at Boardgamegeek.com. There were many casualties, measured chiefly in wounded and shaken Eurogamer sensibilities, and a breach was opened whereby the glorious Ameritrash games of the past, the present, and future would return to prominence alongside the countless non-confrontational, family friendly Eurogames that had seized control of the hobby for nearly a decade- the era we know now as the Eurogamer Occupation of Hobby Gaming (1996-2006). The incident was a rallying cry for those who never gave up on TALISMAN, DUNE, AXIS & ALLIES and the like in favor of penguin games and train games with rules that could fit on post-it notes. It was a call to put down the meeples and pick up the dice, to beat the plowshares back into swords, to stop bidding and start kicking some god damned ass.

Of course, this act of revolutionary terrorism was disguised as a Geeklist, and that Geeklist was Robert Martin’s “A Tribute to Ameritrash”.

It’s hard to believe now, looking at the current state of the Leading Board Game Site, that something so volatile- as well as vigorous and vital- happened there. It was something different, something that was a lot more meaningful and relevant to the state of the hobby and where it was going than the usual suggestions for “girlfriend games” or “games I like to play” fare that populates a huge percentage of the online discourse there. People who had rarely posted- like myself- suddenly became regular participants in discussions and overnight the conversations became intensely passionate and increasingly irreverent. We talked games the same way we played ‘em and found out that some of us didn’t really belong- or want to belong- in the politically correct, “friendly” society there. It was interesting, exciting, and most of all fun- even if during the course of it all we found out just how deadly serious some people take their boardgaming.

Looking back on it, I think the most thrilling part of watching the aftermath of Robert’s list was seeing people come out of the woodwork to say “Hey, this list made me realize how fed up I am with playing PUERTO RICO every week!” or “This list has helped me find my identity as a gamer- an Ameritrash gamer”. It was also terribly amusing to see the Eurogamers and other Ameritrash detractors wander into the threads and proceed to play directly to the “Eurosnoot” stereotypes we were mocking all along, lobbing personal attacks with enough frequency to somehow completely blind the administration there from taking any action as they lodged their passive-aggressive comments about everything from the Ameritrash name to my avatar. I think the list revealed a lot of things that weren’t really talked about before, like the bias against Ameritrash-style games that had existed from the site’s very beginnings and subtle double standards that existed in a community that had intimate beginnings but had grown to something much larger.

I remember going to a game event sometime late last year as BGG and its old guard of “familiar avatars” were still scrambling to to adjust to a shift in the zeitgeist and a revolutionary change in tone. I heard these guys- none of whom I had ever seen before in my life- talking about how a game they were playing was definitely “Ameritrash”. At that point, I knew that Robert’s list and everything it precipitated had made an impact on board gaming culture. It was a little odd, to be honest, to hear strangers referencing something that was rooted in kind of an in-joke between Robert and I- we had a laugh about this customer of mine who called me an “Ameritrash apologist” and thus the concept for the list was born. That Ameritrash- despite all the dense-headed literalists unable to grasp the concept of irony flustered over the “negative” connotation of the word “trash”- is a significant marker in boardgaming history. That it matters, is significant, and important. Whether you like it or not.

So here we are now a year later and Ameritrash style games are everywhere, and publishers are eager to bring back canonical AT games via high-profile reprints. Thanks to the innovations brought about by Eurogames Ameritrash titles being published today are every bit as good as- and in some cases better than- 20 and 30 year old classics that we still play and love today. Enthusiasm for the latest Alea game or whatever mediocre crap Hans Im Gluck is cranking out for Essen is the lowest it’s been since middle-aged hobbyists gave up on model trains and got into ELFENLAND back in the late 1990s yet excitement over the Fantasy Flight production schedule is high while publishers of games like LAST NIGHT ON EARTH are enjoying great success with hardcore and casual gamers alike. Even at BGG, the front page shows a lot more interest and content related to Ameritrash games than the typical Eurogamer fare. People are still stepping up to voice their frustration with the stagnate state of Eurogame design and more and more people are discovering both new and old AT titles. The Ameritrash badge is everywhere, the games are everywhere and being played by gamers of all persuasions, and despite the desperate “can’t we all just get along” pleas of gamers who foolishly believe that there’s no fundamental difference between a game like NUCLEAR WAR and one like DUCKLING DANCIN’ the Ameritrash genre has come into its own as a permanent fixture of the hobby gaming environment.

So it's a year on from Robert’s list and considering both all that has passed in its wake as well as the direction that our beloved hobby is heading, I have to say that I truly believe that we have witnessed the first year of an Ameritrash Golden Age. Let the nukes fly.

When Dice Attack!

2007-09-18T01:26:00.000-07:00

To a gamer of any stripe, the humble dice remains an object of near mythical levels of awe and reverence, a potent symbol of what it means to be a gamer. Proof of this is absurdly easy to come by - however the Eurogame crowd might style themselves as shunning random mechanics even for them the dice remains a staple in shared names and images - witness "the cast are dice", "the dice tower" and the ever-popular images of big piles of dice on BGG.

Those of us who are happy to enjoy our Ameritrash and Wargame classics need not worry about being proud of this particular piece of symbolism because our games are rife with dice and we know well how much drama, excitement and variety they can bring to a game. But we've been there before and we know there's a suprising variety of mechanics you can employ to make good use of dice to add to a game.

However, it would be foolish to proclaim that "dice are good" without qualification because there's a whole host of dice-based games that aren't worth the plastic it takes to make the little universal hexidirectional randomising cubes including in the box. Snakes and Ladders for an obvious example, and much as it pains me to say this, an uncomfortably large swathe of instantly forgettable AT games from the eighties. In the brave new world of the Euro there are also designers who've gone back to the beloved dice without shame with mixed success.

The first and most obvious thing you need to know about dice is that throwing lots of them evens out the luck over the course of a game. Spreading out fate in this way is a good thing because it means you get all the joy of chucking dice across the board but you can still retain a satisfying level of strategic play in your game. Most game designers seem to have got this point now - there are few, if any hobby games released in the past ten years that hinge on using small amounts of dice. What doesn't seem to have quite got through yet is that in order to get away with using this old-fashioned but still popular approach to dice, you need to make sure that the game points in which you employ dice don't vary hugely in importance, otherwise you're back down to a long, drawn out luck-fest again.

Consider the recently re-released AT treasure Talisman. A fine game in its day but nowadays I have to join the ranks of the naysayers on this one if for no other reason than the whole theme has been done much better by large number of other games. Talisman makes heavy use of dice - to the detriment of good decision making, but that's another story - for movement, combat and resolving non-combat encounters too. However, the actual impact of a good or bad dice roll in the game can vary enormously - if you're fighting a very powerful creature, or hanging around trying to hit the space which leads from the outer to the middle ring then the outcome of the dice roll is much, much more important than if you're up against something weak or just making an early movement roll to start finding things on the board. That's a bad use of dice - effectively the outcome of the game can be decided by a relatively small number of dice rolls.

I'm going to contrast this with my old favourite, the soon to be re-released Titan. In Titan, combat almost always involves rolling so many dice that combat outcomes which hinge on a small number of dice results are fantastically rare. It can happen - if you've got a round or two of dice rolls to finish off a Titan piece for example - but these occasions a few enough that they simply make memorable gaming experiences rather than a dull game, and making memorable gaming moments is one of the maky cool things that dice can do in a game. The movement mechanic is rather less prone to the standard distribution curve however because only a single dice is thrown each turn and this can make a big difference - you might get a good recruit, a poor recruit or not recruit at all, or you might be able to attack a weak enemy stack or avoid a strong enemy stack. However, the movement and terrain rules in Titan have a much bigger impact on where you can or might want to move than the dice roll - so, again, you're left with a situation in which you've got the excitement potential of a good roll making a big difference but where good decision making is a surer way to win the day.

A more recently fashionable way to utilise dice in game, and a particular favourite of mine, is to employ some sort of mechanic whereby fewer dice are rolled but the distribution curve is built in to the mechanics of the game so things tend to even out over the long run. Apart from anything else this is good because it reduces the chances of some ham-fisted idiot like me rolling dice across the board and knocking all the pieces over. And yes, I know about dice towers but following the little buggers across the room and then having big arguments about whether a given dice is "cocked" or not, or whether it counts if it's been retrieved from under the sofa is part of the charm.

The obvious game in the distribution curve category is, of course, Settlers of Catan. The dice in Settlers work well for a number of reasons - the dice get thrown a lot, the outcome affects all the players and there's an inherent balancing mechanism for a slew of bad luck known as "trading", although you'd never know this from the number of social rejects who chime in and complain that negotiation is Settlers is all a matter of dry mathematical odds and the dice impact is far too random to make it a game worth playing. However, the nice thing about Settlers is that it embraces a large number of play elements - negotiation, analysis, positional play and luck - and balances them well so that no one aspect is allowed to dominate. So if you do get screwed by the dice it's really doesn't rankle too much.

Another recent title to jump on this particular bandwagon is Yspahan. Yspahan has a slightly crazy way of utilising that distribution curve which is very clever and in no way as obvious or intuative as that employed by Settlers. It's kind of hard to explain if you've not played in the game but in effect it makes more common rolls less useful, and less common rolls more desirable. It also throws in a tantilising little mechanic whereby the player rolling can up his chances of getting what he needs by buying more dice that no-one else can use. So far, so good. Now Yspahan isn't a bad game but it's no favourite of mine either because beyond the dice (and cards) the bulk of the game is cold, hard analysis. And this leads to a problem encountered by far too many Eurogames that have attempted to cash in on the average gamers love for dice - building random mechanics into a largely analytical game makes the two aspects of play clash badly. If you've been working hard playing a game with requires you to crunch the numbers to get an edge, being cursed by the Random Number God is utterly infurating. If the game you're playing has a balance of elements (like Settlers and many AT games) or is unashamedly based on randomness or gambling then you're much more inclined to take it in your stride and just relax and enjoy the ride.

Another factor which deserves mention is the small number of Eurogames which offer the player a choice as to how much they want dice to influence the game. A good example is Traders of Genoa. While this is primarily a negotiation game - and thus has one of those built-in balancing factors for bad luck - it also makes cards which allow a player to forgo the dice roll and pick a space instead easily available. So if you're fond of riding with lady luck you can try that, or if you prefer to impose your will on the game then you can do that too. Each has their place and each is a valid path to victory in Traders - because if you're picking up special powers cards then you're not picking up goods, messages or contracts.

Finally I have to make mention of the humble Combat Resolution Table so beloved of the Wargamer. the CRT is a fantastic idea because building in odds to the equation is an easy, satisying way to ensure that you get all the fun benefits of random dice rolls without allowing luck to dominate or the need to throw buckets of dice. What I find startling about the CRT is that with the exception of a few old fantasy and sci-fi wargames it's a mechanic which has been shamefully ignored by AT designers. I even know of one Euro which has a (admittedly absurdly simple) CRT - the dinosaur evolution game Evo. So get your thumbs out, AT designers, and let's see if you can borrow and improve on some old favourite wargame mechanics in the same way you've brilliantly improved and integrated some Euro favourites into modern AT games. Diversity is our strength!

It is with some regret that I have to announce this is going to be my last column for a while. I'm about to start a new job and until I've settled in to the extent where I can be comfortable surreptitiously typing out blog posts in Word and then pasting them and posting them at home there will be no more posts. I do mean to return, sooner rather than later and hopefully I can use the break to come up with some interesting ideas for discussion and debate. So, see you when I see you!

This week, Matt has been:
Reading: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Watching: The Cider House Rules
Drinking: Gilles Bouton 2004 St Aubin "En Creot"
Playing: Citadels, Ra and (on the PC) Championship Manager 4

speaking of hello kitty

2007-09-14T08:08:00.001-07:00

This is the Universe Barnes is Dreaming of:

Boardgamers' Love/Hate Relationship with "The Mass Market"

2007-09-14T07:03:00.000-07:00

"Sound advice, except for the 'giving money to the (evil) Wal-Mart part...."

Does this seem familiar? If it doesn't, you haven't been spending enough time in the boardgaming forums. For whatever reason, gamers seem to have a tangible hatred for "The Mass Market".

Why is this? I have no idea. It probably has something to do with that "us against the man" vibe that runs through many hobby communities (though I don't see this as much from video game communities--and even if I did, it would be laughable...what, don't buy from Wal-Mart but Amazon.com or Gamestop instead? Yeah, Gamestop only owns *every videogame store outlet* there is...buy from them, that will show "The Man!")

Personally I've always gotten the warm fuzzies when any game that could be deemed "geek-worthy" finds its way onto mass-market store shelves. And if people really cared about the hobby as much as they claimed, they'd cheer too.

I can't tell you how many times I've been browsing the boardgame section (such as it is) at the local Wal-Mart when I'll see someone--maybe a young couple, or maybe just an older guy--hobble through the aisle. You can see it in their eyes; a listless but at the same time relentless, hopeful search that SOMETHING is out there that will catch their eye. You see them pick up game after game, showing it to one another, but maybe with a slight shake of the head put it down again. And who can blame them? I don't doubt for an instance that these folks have bought a game blindly in the past from these very same shelves, only to be wildly disappointed.

Still, that something...that urge...brings them back. There has to be more, right? Maybe they've heard or seen some of our "geek" games out there and are puzzled when they can't find such things on Wal-Mart or Target shelves. And very likely they don't have an online resource such as BGG...they probably haven't the foggiest clue that such a thing exists!

How do I know this? I used to be that guy. Of course, I'd seen great games like Space Hulk in the past, but still I would browse the store shelves looking for something like that. And part of me still does that. I still catch myself looking over those tired shelves hoping that something "geeky" has punched its way through.

That's probably why I celebrate games that do make that breakthrough. I sing the praises of games with a geek pedigree such as Battleball or Epic Duels or Heroscape...probably disproportionally so. Sure, they're good games, but you cut them a little slack because they rise above the muck such as Spongebob Monopoly or High School Musical: The Game or even Failed Party Game Where People Shout Words at Each Other #3718. Seeing a game like Crossbows and Catapults or Laser Challenge mixed in with that lot of rubbish is cause for celebration.

For a lot of people, that's the only hook into our hobby that they'll ever have. They've seen the "Game Store" but shy away because of (mostly wrong) stereotypes of mouth-breathing CCGers and bespectacled D&D nerds and old men carrying big tackleboxes full of Warhammer figures painted with frightening detail. (I said mostly). They just don't think that such a place holds anything for them. And to turn the tables, the same would apply to you if you weren't into a particular hobby; imagine not being much of an outdoorsman and having to entertain thoughts of going into a Hunting hobbyist store filled with live bait, expensive gear you couldn't possibly tell one apart from another, and orange-clad "Good Ol' Boys" chewing tobacco and talking about getting up at 3 am and covering themselves in Deer essence just to get the drop on an unwitting Buck. Stereotypes RULE!

So where does that leave our potential "normal" would-be gamers? Shuffling the aisles of Wal-Mart. Or Target. Or whatever. Looking, endlessly looking.

I don't usually take it upon myself to be an evangelist, but I can't help myself in such situations. One time when doing my own Wal-Mart shuffle, I noticed a man and his young son pick up the Heroscape box. It was obvious that the man was interested--his son doubly so--but the price tag of $40 was certainly scary on an unknown entity. Still, Heroscape grabbed them, peering out with its attention-getting large shelf profile, indicating its dominance over the weaksauce titles that surrounded it.

"It's a great game," I said to him. He turned to me. "Is it really?" he said. "Yep. Your kid is going to love that."

And that was enough, that gentle nudge, that assurance from someone who seemed to know what they were talking about. Now, I would've never talked this guy into going to a hardcore hobbyist store, but the bait was there in a place where he would find it...and ultimately, he took it. Did he and his son become boardgamers for life? Eh, not so sure about that. But this was the only shot for that to ever happen.

So I'll keep on shopping those big store shelves, looking for new champions of worthiness among the drek that's out there. And yeah, I'll cut it a bit of slack...and more importantly, I'll buy it from a big store too. Even though I'm just a datapoint, hopefully I'm one that says, "More, please". So I'll buy Heroscape stuff at Wal-Mart. So I'll buy Travel Blokus from Target. I'm probably naive, but maybe we can shape "Mass Market" into our own image, or at least enough to hook in another father and his son into a lifetime of memories.

Hello Kitty, Please Come Back...

2007-09-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I actually like CARCASSONNE...the funny thing is, I thought it was just a silly puzzle game until the expansions made it a very nasty silly puzzle game. I thought it might make for a good article to let the Xbox Live CARCASSONNE adopters in on what we've had available for years now. Next week, I'm doing the same thing with SETTLERS.

So y'all line up now to take a shot at me for championing the game that launched a million unbelievably lame t-shirts, pictures, icons, coffee mugs...how in the world a hobby that used to rally around Avalon Hill succumbed to the cult of cute is beyond me...it's like Hello Kitty worship for paunchy, middle-aged folks.

Anyway, have at it. Special Guest Star- Christopher Lee.

Happy Birthday to Me

2007-09-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

Although I didn't recieve any boardgame gifts today, I did recieve Prophecy from KingPut a few weeks ago (early b-day gift). My trade arrived today - Mare Nostrum. Mordred should arrive eventually. Al says since I got so much other loot for my b-day, he may have to hide Mordred away until Chanukkah. I told him "NO WAY, plus Mare Nostrum doesn't count since it was trade, not a b-day gift"

Other cool b-day loot includes the Harry Potter Lego Castle, a black lace shrug, and a pair of black peek-a-boo stilettos.

Editing to add: In case you are wondering why this incredibly dopey post is on F:AT, I accidentally posted it here instead of to my personal blog. Also, thanks everyone for the birthday wishes.

Yeah, but the commute to Mordor is still a real bitch

2007-09-07T09:47:00.001-07:00

Thanks to isirotin for providing today's image.

---------------------------------

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Return of the Kings

2007-09-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

So it's old news now...but it deserves repeating. FFG is reprinting EON's best games. Imagine if THE WHITE ALBUM or LONDON CALLING had fallen out of print for almost 30 years and were suddenly coming back into circulation. Yeah, it's that signficant.

Which is why, I think, the DUNE debate matters the most- not necessarily because it's DUNE, but because most people want the game available in its original setting. Just take a look at that petition and all the incredibly intelligent, grammatically correct, and insightful comments people made on it. How could the Herbert estate resist comments just short of "DOOD DUN3 ROX"?

But I didn't write about the DUNE debate for Gameshark.Com since board game politics don't mean much over there. I thought it would be more beneficial to write up a little primer for those who might not be aware of how awesome these games are and why we should be out in front of FFG HQ holding a candlelight vigil until they release them.

The Games of Eon

Foreign Exchange

2007-09-05T02:44:00.000-07:00

Whatever you might think of individual Eurogames, or the Eurogame in general there's one thing that AT fans everywhere ought to be thankful for - the fact that Eurogames revitalized the stagnant boardgaming hobby in the late nineties and lead indirectly to a new wave of games in other areas of the hobby. What these new games had in common was that they had learned some lessons from the lean, mean design paradigm of eurogames.

For a long time there didn't seem to be much traffic the other way. This is hardly surprising - the Euro was a pretty new concept, at least to those of us outside Germany, and we hadn't yet seen where those sorts of designs might have the shortcomings that we've discussed ad-infinitum before. Besides the fact they were new meant they had plenty of potential for exploration and play before people started to get a little jaded and look for something new. Eventually some Euro-American hybrid games started to appear and as regular readers will probably know I, for one, am immensely enthusiastic about their future as the next big thing in the gaming hobby.

We're all perfectly well aware that these sorts of vague categorisations are fairly meaningless. People like to categorise - as an ex-biologist who's sat through the vagaries of a number of different taxonomy systems I can well attest to that. But the fact is that the concept of "new wave" AT games and Euro-American hybrids have such immense crossover as to make the terms virtually interchangeable. Twilight Imperium 3 is often given as an example of the former, and War of the Ring as an example of the latter. When it comes down to it, aren't they both basically wargames that have imported wholesale a variety of mechanics first seen in Eurogames?

Amongst the AT fan crowd there also seems to be a slightly ridiculous attachment to old school games from the eighties, many of which were in fact pretty crap. Sure there were some absolute gems to come out of that time and which are still completely worth playing today - and most of them either are being or already have been reprinted by FFG or Valley Games! But people still harp on about how great it was to stay up until four in the morning playing game X, when in reality a play of game X now would probably reveal it to be a massively overlong turkey with virtually no worthwhile decisions in it. Nothing wrong with highly random games, but they need to be short, short, short to engage the attention of the modern gamer. I suspect what people remember is that playing game X provided a fantastic social framework in which you could sit around with your friends, drinking, smoking, chatting and generally having a good time to which the game contributed very little apart from a talking point and a reason to stay up until the small hours of the morning. That's how I remember most of my university-days games of Risk in any case.

So, with all this in mind I thought it might be interesting to make a list of all the useful things that AT designers learned from Eurogames, and all the things that I feel Euro designers ought to learn - and are now starting to pick up - from AT games. Well do the latter first.

Engaging game play is all about meaningful decisions

Far, far too many old AT titles were essentially overlong gambling games without any real decisions to be made or even any sort of framework on which to hang a strategy. I have no doubt at all that this is largely the fault of Talisman - a game beloved largely because it allowed RPG fans to recreate some of their favourite genre in a boardgame and whose recipe was copied ad-infinitum by far too many games at the time. Too many mechanics basically came down to either risk management or passing over the important aspects of the play to a dice roll. This just doesn't wash anymore - random mechanics are good and an important inclusion in modern games but they need to take something of a back seat to good decision making and strategic planning. I reckon that a good game should be decided by random factors no more that 20% of the time - and 10-15% is probably a better mark. Less than that and you start to loose much of the value that randomness adds to a game.

You can do good theme without a ton of pointless chrome

I have a big, fast nostalgic soft spot for a fantasy wargame called Dragon Pass - it's the game my bat-counter avatar comes from. The rulebook is some 32 pages long but the actual core game rules take up about six of those pages. The remainder is dedicated to the bewildering variety of "exotic" units that break the base rules in any number of colourful ways. Although this makes the game bewildering it also lends a lot of flavour to the play and indeed is partly what makes the game worth playing. But consider - amongst said exotics is a column of rules dedicated to a character called Hungry Jack. I've never seen Hungry Jack appear in a game of DP: he's not very powerful and you need to temporarily send a dragon (which is a powerful piece) off the board to collect him. In other words the rules space and playtest time dedicated to Hungry Jack are completely wasted. This is the sort of thing I'm talking about - too often old school AT games were so into implementing the theme that they forgot about what effect it had on the play experience. A number of Euro designers have shown that it's possible to have a satisfying level of thematic integration and still keep the rules size down. This has resulted in games like TI3 which, although "bloated" with different concepts, is not "flabby" like Dragon Pass - in TI3 almost everything potentially serves a purpose as a strategy lever to help progress the game. In DP, there's lots of stuff in the rulebook that doesn't.

Movement round a board isn't the only way to make a game.

Virtually every boardgame I can think of that I played as a teenager involved manipulating playing pieces on a board which was intended to represent a stylised version of a physical space. I assume this came from miniatures games and to the popularity of family roll and move games and although this basic premise does allow for an awful lot of variety in terms of mechanics and strategy, it eventually because just as limiting as any other self-imposed paradigm design goal, like keeping things fast and simple for instance. In fairness it has to be said that this remains the dominant way in which AT designers choose to approach their theme. What they've become much less shy about though is utilising mechanics borrowed from other games to represent supporting aspects of the game play, and having a much more innovative approach to using different mechanics to go about representing the space in which the pieces move. There are also a number of hybrid games, Bootleggers for instance, which have managed to move away from this entirely and either jettison the board or use it for something completely different - in Bootleggers it's used mainly for record keeping and area-majority play. The result is that modern AT games have become much more diverse, and as a result, much more interesting, than they used to be.

And on the other hand, when it comes to Euro designers, I'd say ...

Mathematical strategy needs to be balanced by something else

There's a variety of places on the internet where you can play puzzle games that involve moving various board elements in accordance with simple, logical rules to effect a "win" scenario - escaping from a maze or having a laser hit a target or somesuch. I usually find these games to be engaging for a short while but they quickly get tedious for me because the approach to solving the puzzle is often the same in every case. There is, in effect, a scripted "best" approach to the problem. I've explained before in this blog how I feel that reducing a game to the simplest possible rules results in gameplay which is essentially logical and mathematical in nature and games which have been reduced in this fashion tend to have the same problem. They reveal that there's a single best approach to the decision making and/or they end up feeling the same after every play. There's plenty of ways to counter this problem without resorting to randomness such as positional play on a board, piling on the variables until analysis becomes virtually impossible or allowing some sort of trading or negotiation metagame to take place. Indeed, Reiner Knizia has some particularly ingeneous solutions to this and I don't doubt that that's partly why he's such a highly regarded designer. But many Euro designers keep on turning out games which are, in effect, logic puzzles and which have correspondingly low replay value.

Random mechanics have value in largely strategic games

Amongst the Eurogame fanbase there seems to be a lot of love for the old-fashioned two player abstracts like Chess and Go. This is hardly surprising since they conform well to the basic Euro design paradigm - nonrandom games in which deep strategy flows from simple rules. The problem is that most gamers enjoy multiplayer games and when you export those same design paradigms into a multiplayer scenario it plays havoc with game balance as the decisions of the third player start impact more positively or negatively on one opponent than on the other. Euro designers have recognised this and struggled manfully to solve the problem and, in most cases, they've succeeded in making more problems like the left/right player binding in Puerto Rico. The obvious answer, as far as I can see, is to stop trying to emulate non-random two player games and just allow a bit more chaos in, as properly handled, a little entropy can actually help balance a game in the long run and doesn't need to frequently, if ever, trump skill in deciding a winner. It's also a potential solution to the problem mentioned above as it stops players relying on scripted techniques for problem solving and keeps them on their toes as well as providing a variable seed to ensure that games turn out differently each time. However, the glut of vastly random family games around seem to have made "random" a dirty word in the Euro community.

Simplicity and short play times shouldn't be design goals in themselves

This one probably needs some justification - what I'm really trying to say here is that while it's okay to take a game and try and work down to the minimum possible play time and complexity for your design goal, having that swiftness and simplicity you crave as a goal in itself too often results in poor, empty games. There's plenty of places to start your design - you might want to try an unusual mechanic, you might want to implement a particular theme, you might want to take the basis of a game you've played and throw a new element into it to improve it. But far too often it seems that in the cry for quick and easy games to play the original goal gets forgotten and indeed often gets trampled and destroyed by the ruthless slimming-down process resulting in a fast game that just isn't very interesting to play.

So there we go. I hope people will feel these are fair and interesting points on both sides of the debate. But then again, if you did there wouldn't be any debate. So come on and shoot me down!

R.I.P. FFG Floppy

2007-09-03T17:05:00.000-07:00

The observant and not so observant among you may have noted that my contributions to this blog have rather dried up as of late. I do assure you I have had very good reasons for this occurring:

I moved house. And by “moved” I mean every weekend I was transporting stuff from my old location to my new one because I was too lazy to get boxes and pre-pack everything.
I discovered that living on your own means that you have to do everything around the house. I have yet to come home and find the lawn mysteriously cut or a phantom did the dusting.
I am now much closer to drinking establishments than I was previously, meaning every weekend has been spent hung over.
I brought the entire series of Farscape on DVD and have been quickly working through them.
In anticipation of the boardgame release I started playing Starcraft on the PC. I’m nearly finished the zerg missions.
I was devastated after being suspended from BGG and so walked the desert for 40 days and nights in self reflection, living only on a diet of goanna testies and Kangaroo milk.

So all of this shit has been sucking up my time, plus I have been rather lazy. Despite that, I broke my silence to bring some tragic news which no one else has reported.

I made the discovery last night when I opened up my copy of Starcraft the board game. Hidden amongst the miniatures and cards I was shocked to discover the following:

That’s right, the rulebook is rectangular. The square floppy rulebook is no more.

Now we have seen this rulebook before in the last in-house game FFG released, Tide of Iron. At the time when quizzed about it by yours truly on the site that Barnes is not wanted on, Christian T Peterson wrote the following:

“There is so much stuff in TOI (many molds, etc) that we needed to cut a few corners to keep the game sub-$80. Also, there is pretty much an even split of customer preference between standard and square (I prefer square myself!)
"Sad but true!"
cP
FFG”

This made it sound like the switch was temporary, a one off forever condemning TOI to be the bastard stepchild in the FFG range, cursed to look forever at his brothers with envy at their nice sexy big square floppy rulebooks. But now the starcraft rulebook is also rectangular, and evidence in the form of a PDF suggests the Burning Crusade expansion to World of Warcraft will also be rectangular.

My friends, I think it is time to come to terms with the shockingly obvious, Christian and his cronies have taken the square floppy rulebook out the back of the chemical sheds and done away with it, without so much as a granting them a going away party or a gold watch for its' years of dedicated service. Let us mourn it’s passing together.

FFG Square Floppy Rulebook

2003 – 2006

FFG Square Floppy Rulebook went missing under mysterious circumstances late in 2006. Though you may have been unwieldy, and often spilled the pieces on the board when you were handed around the gaming table, and sometimes whored yourself out to Euroes like Beowulf and Blue Moon City, we love you still. I will never forget the times we spent together in the toilet, keeping my mind of the chilli I ate the night before. Or the mornings I woke to find you sprawled across my chest opened on page 10 because I tried to cram in a reading before the next night’s game. Your three column page layout and super big example diagrams will be sorely missed. Closing the box lid will never be the same again.

"Does this impress you, 'Master Builder'?"

2007-08-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

OK, so this week I've written about...a video game! Oh no! Have I sold out to Gameshark.com? Have I become one of those "sheeples" or "dumb fucks" who can't possibly comprehend the sophistication and elegance of modern board gaming? Is it a BIOSHOCK review? Oh no gentle readers, it's a review of ARMAGEDDON EMPIRES, an indie PC game that is pretty much an electronic board game complete with dice and cards. I think it's pretty swell, and if it were a physical board game (with a couple of modifications to make it actually playable face-to-face) it'd be a contender to join the ranks of the AT canon. Unlike board games, you can check it out before you commit thanks to a demo- if you dig PANZER GENERAL, MASTER OF ORION, HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC, and that ilk you ought to check it out.

ARMAGEDDON EMPIRES REVIEW

Dragon Con is this weekend...any F:ATers going? I probably won't play a single game...I pretty much spend the whole time making fun of 16 year old girls dressed like 12 year old anime characters or shielding my eyes from 175lbs+ women attempting the Leeloo "bandages" costume from THE FIFTH ELEMENT.

"The Next Epic Duels"

2007-08-29T10:48:00.001-07:00

Blah blah blah, due to the holiday and con season the blog has stalled, so let's put some content out there....

I joined BGG during the height of Star Wars: Episode III madness. My brother and I had been playing the hell out of Clash of the Lightsabers and of course Star Wars: Epic Duels. It was a search for more games as good as those two that led me to find out about this other incredible Star Wars game I missed (some little game called Queen's Gambit or something like that). From there, BGG.

Epic Duels was just this crazy good game that was stupidly affordable, *completely* opposite of what you'd expect to find. You've probably heard everyone say how they picked up a copy for $5, and in the same breath wonder why Hasbro didn't follow up with an Episode III version (hint: stores don't buy things that only sell when they finally go on clearance).

In today's environment I doubt this could happen--just look at Heroscape...I think if that was released before there was a real AT renaissance and awareness on the web in any significant numbers, it would've had a base game that bombed and that would've been that. I don't think the web-aware boardgaming hobbyists would let games like Epic Duels go unnoticed again.

Funny thing, though, is the aftermarket success of Epic Duels spawned the catchphrase, "The Next Epic Duels". Gamers started talking like speculators. Sure, we're all collectors, but for any of us who lived through the speculation-mad crash n' burn of the comic book industry, that sort of thinking makes you a little wary. People were looking for that cheap game that would make them a hundred bucks after dropping only $5 on it.

Battleball for a long while was considered one such game; people mentioned buying five copies or more from Kaybee Toys. Battleball actually has a lot in common with Epic Duels; it's a mass market game that had a great bits per dollar value that went largely ignored by the gaming public. Probably for very different reasons, of course...video games have bled the notion that licensed gaming properties suck (hence Epic Duels bombing out), and Battleball has probably THE worst "game in action" photo on the back of the box I've ever seen:

...just stay the hell away from me, kid

Seriously, who could slap that thing down on the counter and expect to have any semblance of dignity? Who freakin' greenlit this thing? It's like the kid on the right just discovered his dad's Playboy stash and has been hit by a uncontrolled burst of hormones.

I like Battleball okay...we just played it yesterday in fact (I lost a humiliating 2-0, and *four* of my guys were critically injured by halftime). It has a lot of the same things in common with Epic Duels--nice bits, great price, fast and easy gameplay...it even fills a niche of super-easy to play sports boardgame, a not terribly crowded field.

However, it will never be "The Next Epic Duels".

Why is that? I'll tell you...it's just like something I heard once: "Anything that says 'Collector's Item' on it will NEVER be worth anything." If you've got people buying up cheap copies hoping to sell for a huge profit, but everyone is proclaiming a hot item sure to appreciate in price, who's going to buy it? See anybody willing to fork out $30 for Battleball? $20? $10 is more like it, if you're lucky. Not because it's a bad game, but honestly, who are the speculators going to sell it to? Each other? They were all able to pick up their fill of copies without a hassle...I could still have picked up an extra copy for many, many months after I scooped up mine, and most Toys R' Us stores had a glut of them that took awhile to work through their clearance stock.

Just like comic books, y'know? Marvel printed eleventy-billion copies of X-Men #1, and speculators gobbled them up only to find they had no one to sell copies to at inflated prices. Same deal...supply AND demand.

I had written off the "Next Epic Duels" phenomenon as being a thing not likely to be replicated. Queen's Gambit sells for a decent chunk of change but it was considerably more expensive to begin with...time may see that one increase, but unless Lucas gets his stuff together I doubt we'll see another Star Wars-induced gaming frenzy.

And yet....

The "Next Epic Duels" came and went, didn't it? That's right, it was "Betrayal at House on the Hill". There's another game where the desingers are probably due reparations from the savaging that Betrayal received--and to be fair, some of that was likely deserved thanks to the egregious misprints and rules omissions, monsters without proper stats, underground lakes on upper levels of the house, you know the drill.

Even just prior to this holiday season Betrayal was selling for $20 as Toys R Us was desperate to get rid of their "New and Improved" Avalon Hill stock. But then a crazy thing happened; all the copies in the retail channel dried up, and the price shot up (copies now close for $50-70, and a few for even more than that). And this time, we don't have movie hype to explain it away...more likely, it was a game people meant to get "someday" and when they saw that the game was getting harder to find, they finally got off their butts to get a copy...but for some of them, too late.

The speculators are there, though...there are a couple of Ebay sellers with $100+ copies, if you're interested (ah, Ebay...the home of eternal optimism). But it's possible that this one will continue to rise unless Hasbro decides it's worth reprinting--no one wants to make more copies of something that should sell for $40 but ends up on clearance shelves for $20.

So for all the hawkish claims, Betrayal slipped under the radar...how long 'till we hear, "Hey man, this might be the next Betrayal!"

Trashfest 2008

2007-08-25T17:03:00.001-07:00

Today I received an email from KingPut, who, as readers of this blog may remember, is the ex-second-best Caylus player in the world and my brother. He is planning on proposing TRASHFEST, a wildcard tournament to run concurrently with Eurofest 2008. (for more information on Eurofest http://euroquest.gamesclubofmd.org/).

He writes:

I think for the 1st year or 2 it would be best to run it with Euroquest. If it's run as a wild card type event as part of Euroquest we would only need about 20 people participating to make it viable. If there is enough interest in later years it could be run as a stand alone conference. We'd pick 6 - 12 Ameritrash games that people can play anytime during the weekend. Scoring for Trashfest would be similar to the Wildcard events: # of players * # of hours the game takes = Trash Points. Winner takes all. There is no 2nd place in Ameritrash games.

KingPut, despite his recent psychotic break during WBC, is a pretty together person and seriously has the ability to make this happen. What he needs, however, are game suggestions and an idea if there are people who are actually interested in attending. My suggestion was that he propose games that I'm good at so that I would win and then he would have to refer to me as "your highness" for an entire year. He didn't like that suggestion, and asked me to solicit some real suggestions from you all.