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

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

Its official: According to BGG, Euros now suck

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.

Rumors of my Demise have been Greatly Exaggerated

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.

Burnout: Taken Down Edition

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?

Foreign Exchange

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!

Biting Back

I keep reading how the AT crowd, and especially the people over here at the F:AT blog are generally anti-Euro and how all this is nasty, poisonous to the hobby and generally negative. I just wanted to take a moment to explain why I, for one, sometimes come across as appearing to be anti-Euro. I don't actually like being called anti-Euro because there's a number of solidly Euro titles that I enjoy immensely, but I'm certainly very vocally critical of the design concepts behind the bulk of Eurogames. Maybe sometimes I come across as being more critical and sharper than I intend. Here's why.

Let me give you some background ...

When I first arrived at the BGG site several years ago I found lots of people raving about a whole bunch of games that seemed to be from a paradigm I knew nothing about. In particular I picked up that these games shied away from random mechanics or excessive length and that this was a good thing.

At this point I'd not played any of these games. But on BGG there were so many people saying how great these games were, and how fantastic it was that they were short, analytical and non-random that I did a silly thing. I started to presume that everyone was right and that these new games were totally superior to all the old, crappy random ones that I'd been playing and enjoying with my friends for years and years. I took this attitude on board to the point where when I first started using the 'geek facilities to rate my collection I was deliberately criticising and marking down some games I'd enjoyed for being overly random and too long because I just assumed all the new games, which had transcended this old fashioned approach, must be so much better. This attitude even came across in a couple of my early reviews.

Of course I was excited to try a few of these games, so I got my first two: Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. Settlers was first to get played and boy, was that a blast. Although it had random mechanics I could see how it was different to the games I was used to because to be successful you really had to play the game system rather than relying on luck, or negotiation or some attempt at real-life tactics like you could in the games I was used to.

Then I played Carcassonne and that just fell really flat for me. I lay a tile. Then maybe a meeple. Then another tile. Then I might get to complete a city and get some points. Wow. Big deal. I was playing it multiplayer at the time and of course the two-player version is slightly more interesting because of the screwage element, but not a whole lot. I really couldn't see what the big fuss was about on this one.

But hey, not everyone likes all the same games, right? So I got myself a couple more - the Knizia Lord of the Rings design and Ticket to Ride: Europe. I found LotR, with it's pathetically chummy co-op element and puzzle-like play to be tedious in the extreme - we won our first game and in the second we ended up competing to see who could finish the game with the ring just to inject some life into the damn thing and Sauron ate our little hobbity souls. I thought it so poor that I gave it away to a friend who thought his kids might like it. TtR:E was definitely better and I could see how it'd make a great family/gateway title but although we enjoyed our first few games it just got old really fast.

And so the Euro revolution really passed me by and I went back to playing and enjoying all the old titles that I'd loved so much in the past. And then a strange thing began to happen. Because my cyberspace peers in the gaming world just kept on telling me how brilliant these Eurogames were and how outmoded and dull the sorts of games and mechanics I liked were I started to feel like the must be something wrong with me and my taste in games. There was obviously something I just wasn't getting - perhaps I wasn't smart enough, or socially adept enough to play these games. I began to feel bad about myself and ashamed of the fact I liked older games.

Eventually I got really fed up with feeling bad and posted my Seven Reasons to Hate Eurogames list. That made me a feel a lot better because it generated such a great response. It got lots of thumbs, huge geekgold tips and best of all a bunch of comments from people I'd never heard from before who were basically saying "yes! Me too! I like games like this too!". Sure we were in a minority on the 'geek but at least there were others out there who, like me, had felt for a long time that they couldn't put their heads above the parapet and say how much they loved the games they loved for fear of attracting ridicule from the majority on the 'geek. Because saying things like that did get ridicule, no matter how nice and friendly the majority of the Euro crowd were, there were a small minority who preferred to stick the knife in. The other interesting thing about that geeklist was the fact that a number of Euro fans thought it was an ironic humour list and others, having looked at my game ratings, were posting in shocked disbelief that there were old-school gamers like me still around. Both those things go to show just to strong the pro-Euro bias on BGG was at the time.

A while later we had the first Ameritrash list, and Robert Martin coining the term and the AT fans, suddenly having a name to give to their obsession, really started coming out of the woodwork in droves. I started to appreciate that I wasn't being stupid for not "getting" Eurogames but rather I sought out different challenges than those offered by Euros that were no more or less difficult. We got a very vocal champion in Michael Barnes who wasn't afraid to stick the knife right back in to those people who'd been giving our taste in games so much grief over the years and, unfortunately, also into those people who'd been a lot nicer and even-minded about the whole thing.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The point of all this rant is to illustrate the fact that for a long, long time - years in fact - there were a small crowd of AT gamers on the geek who spent all their time there being told, indirectly and in most cases completely unintentionally, that there was something very wrong with the games they liked and something very right with games that they felt were boring and over-analytical. That sort of suppression and pent-up negativity generates a whole lot of negativity and bad feeling. And when I criticise the Euro paradigm, that's what I'm getting out of my system, and that's why it sometimes looks like I've got a strong anti-Euro bias. I'm well aware that this makes me every bit as guilty as the people who were chewing out my taste in games in the first place. It's not an excuse - just an explanation.

The other reason that I'm sometimes overly venomous about Euros, especially on the 'geek, is because I want to counter the pro-Euro bias over there. I'm well aware that BGG is a site by and for Euro fans so it's bound to have a pro-Euro bias and usually I wouldn't have a problem with that. The problem is that BGG is such a great site that it's basically eclipsed every other boargame resource on the internet - most of the other sites out there are spin offs maintained by people who are very active on the 'geek and even on those that aren't people refer to themselves and each other by the BGG usernames and use BGG articles and resources as reference points. Even wargamers, who have their own site in consimworld, often seem to prefer to hang around the 'geek. Those of us who don't always see Euros as such a great thing find this terribly exasperating - the premier gaming site on the net seems stacked against us - so inevitably, we overcompensate when we end up posting our own opinions.

So next time you want to slam the boot in to an AT fan for being overly nasty about your favourite Eurogame stop a moment and think why they might be doing it. And then slam the boot in anyway, 'cos secretly we all enjoy a good fight.

Wave Without a Shore

What's an Ameritrash game?

This question keeps coming up, and appears to have no entirely satisfactory answer - ask different people and you'll get different opinions, ranging all the way from "isn't it obvious" to "there's no such thing". It's the latter response that really annoys me, the idea that just because even the fanbase can't form a coherent definition of the genre there is no such thing as the genre. I'd like to see any fan of a particular grouping or subgrouping within the boardgame hobby come up with a watertight definition of what constitutes "their" group of games, especially given the modern design trend of deliberately borrowing cool ideas from across the spectrum.

Of all the times that this lack of focus gets used as a stick to beat the AT crowd, the worse is when one of us labels a game as an AT game and people come along and sneer and tell us that of course it's not for reasons x,y and z and then go on to point out what a shallow and desperate concept Ameritrash must be when it has to claim clearly unsuitable games as part of its canon. I've seen this happen with Memoir 44 more than any other game. To me, and, I suspect to most AT fans, this is clearly an AT game. It doesn't have enough of a simulation edge to please wargamers (and anyone who doubts this should just look at the huge number of Grognards who bash the game because it doesn't reward WW2 tactics in play) and it's too random and conflict-orientated to be a Euro. It's a lightweight combat game and nearly all lightweight combat games are AT game. Simple, right? Well, of course not. Turn the perspective and you can make all the opposite arguments - it must be a Euro because it's short, simple and streamlined. It must be a wargame because it's got a clear historical pedigree emphasised in the rules and scenarios. M44 is both a good and bad example of the problems that plague attempts at game classification because it shamelessly borrows heavily from a load of design paradigms which is of course partly why it was such a popular game in the first place.

So given that subdividing games is a messy and pointless business in the first place (albeit one that we all enjoy indulging in, me as much as the next guy) why is it that fans of other game groupings are able to sit comfortably in their corners and point and laugh at us while we squirm and attempt to justify what we're doing? I've no doubt that part of the answer is very simple - we're attempting to insert a new classification into a fairly well established landscape. For years no-one bothered with a tag for the particular group of games we now call Ameritrash, in the first place because back in the old days there were only AT games and Wargames in the boardgaming hobby and wargames back then had a very clearly defined remit, and in the second place because the advent of Euros had everyone talking about those instead so no-one bothered with a tag for the older games. I've always felt that getting that AT label was a really important moment though because it helped to crystallise together a group of disaffected gamers who were kind of milling around and trying to define themselves as standing against something (the domination of euro concepts as "truths" about the best way to design and play games) rather than as supporting something, which is never really satisfactory.

The other part of the answer is considerably less simple. The inspiration for writing this particular piece came from the conclusions that eventually struck me when I was reflecting on the question. It seems to me that even though the actual results of game design are becoming ever harder to place into succinct groupings, designers are still using particular sets of goals as their starting point in the design process which are much easier to group and define. Euros, for example, might be defined as games which have been designed to extract the maximum amount of difficult gameplay choices out of a minimal amount of rules and play time. Wargames might be defined as games which attempt to simulate and/or reproduce the events of historical conflicts. Going into sub genres you could have party games as games which are designed to accommodate a large range of player numbers and skills and which are more interested in inspiring laughter than strategic challenge.

Ameritrash games don't have this founding design paradigm to fall back on. The idea that AT games are interested in reproducing themes gets kicked around a lot but really, how much more thematic can you get than trying to reproduce the fine details of a combat scenario like a Wargame does? Also, in reality AT games are actually about quite a narrow range of themes centred around fantasy, sci-fi and faux-historical conflict. Surely if were that interested in theme we'd be buying into some of the more thematic eurogames such as Amun-Re when in fact these are often the sorts of games we reserve for the greatest scorn. I'm more sympathetic to the idea that AT designers go out to design games that can provide a worthwhile narrative experience but I find it hard to accept that the design teams behind some of the more war-orientated AT titles like Titan, Conquest of the Empire and others, or the more negotiation style AT games such as Cosmic Encounter were really interested in providing narrative. What other common themes do we see running through AT designs? Well, drama is another one I've heard but that's a very personal thing and I'm sure a Euro fan finds a close game of Puerto Rico every bit as dramatic as a nail-biting roll of the dice in an AT game. Ameritrash games also commonly seem to feature frequent screw-your-neighbour mechanisms but in a sense, any competitive game has to have elements to get one over on the other player else it's not much of a competition.

This lack of a specific direction has no doubt come out of AT's historical links with role-playing games. The origin of the AT paradigm comes from people who were effectively design board games either as light entertainment diversions or heavy wargame equivalents for the RPG crowd. Role-playing games don't have design paradigms in the same way as boardgames do - rather they seek to deliver a particular kind of character-driven experience that no other game can provide. So, inevitably the initial board game spinoffs from this hobby were rootless. Times have changed, and AT designers have absorbed enough clever ideas from other aspects of the hobby that we've definitely got the capacity to stand as a genre in our own right, but that lack of focus remains with us and remains a problem.

So where does that leave us? What's the answer? Sadly, I don't have one. If you love AT games you're going to have to continue to put up with being the bastard stepchild of the RPG hobby and enduring the scorn from Euro-purists. The only ray of light I can offer is that this lack of a specific approach point is as much as blessing as it is a curse. Ameritrash games have perhaps the widest range of themes (proper themes anyway, as opposed to bolted-on afterthought themes), play experiences and mechanics of any type of game across the whole gaming hobby. They've evolved and become increasing successful over the past few years by being able to experiment and re-invent themselves by stealing and borrowing ideas from all over the place. This is all down to the fact that our designers are not tied to a specific approach and can do whatever they want and it'll keep us from falling into stagnation as we increasingly see happening in other areas of the hobby. And maybe that is the answer, maybe that is a focal point you can bring up the next time someone asks: that AT games, much like the open and organic play strategies that they encourage, are designed not to get themselves tied down to one specific idea, but to remain open to explore.

The Beast Within

The recent article by Ken Bradford, A View of Villany touched a personal nerve with me and really got me thinking. Not about the great villains that have been presented in AT games over the years but more about why the role of a villain in a game is such an appealing one. Because let's face it - by a certain standard virtually every game role available in a good AT title is a villain to some extent. With occasional, notable exceptions such as Arkham Horror the genre virtually demands that players betray, maim, pillage and slaughter their opponents whatever dubious moral justification is offered for one side being the "good guys".

I can't remember exactly when I became interested in genuine military history as opposed to make-believe battles in RPGs and miniatures games, but it must have been before the first Gulf War when I would've been around 17. I can recall sitting with some friends watching the news and discussing in some detail the weapons deployed against each other and the likely (and predictable) outcome of pitting T-72s against Challenger tanks and Apache Helicopters. Before that I can also remember creating and playing historical Vietname War scenarios in Overrun! with a friend on his C64. This interest continues to this day - I have vague Grognard tendencies in my choice of games and I'd probably play a few more wargames if I didn't have a bent toward multiplayer games, or could find anyone to play them against, or didn't find most of them of a level of complexity better suited to computer simulation.

On the other hand I can remember when I first took against the horror of war and violence. It was while studying the poetry of Wilfred Owen at school, aged about 15. I took against the apparently pointless and unnecessary violence embodied by the First World War, and indeed most other wars, to the point where I became a sworn pacifist and really quite an annoyingly self-righteous hippy wanker.

I've since recovered from that extreme position and recognised that violence is sometimes necessary and on very rare occasions, legitimate. However much of my adult life I've struggled with the apparent contradiction of being against war but fascinated by militarism and military history. I found some sort of reconciliation after reading the excellent book Dispatches, a journalistic memoir of Vietnam from which I took the message that warfare is at once terrible and yet glamorous. And it seems to me that until we can recognise this, and perhaps find something to replace combat in the collective psyche, war will continue to dominate the world, like it or not.

But as usual, I have digressed to some extent. You see, I love being really nasty to other people in games - it's one of the prime reasons I pick AT games out as being favourites. I absolutely delight in games where you can pretend to co-operate with someone and then pull out and stab them in the back. I get an immense thrill out of games where you can make plays which suddenly and unexpectedly put your opponents position back by several turns. I have a fantastic time rolling the dice and grandiosely sweeping enemy figures off the board. Destruction is fun. Betrayal is good. Wholesale slaughter is awesome.

But only in games.

This is stuff I'd never, ever do to people in real life. I'm a nice guy, basically, who likes to please people and shies away from genuine conflict. I'm absolutely convinced that the reason I enjoy being such a bastard to people when I play games is because it allows me to express the less pleasant side of my personality - and let's face it, we've all got one (with the possible exception of Mr Skeletor who might not have a pleasant side to contrast it with) - in a way that doesn't really hurt anyone else. For me, this is the catharsis that's replaced the glamour of conflict in my system and allowed me to behave like a sensible, civilised human being most of the time.

I can't help but wonder whether deep down, this isn't part of the appeal for other AT gamers and Grognards too. It would undoubtedly help explain why playing the villain is such an attractive role - the more dastardly you get to be in the game, the greater exorcism of your own darker feelings you get in return. Which brings us on to Eurogamers and the oft-commented tendency amongst that crowd for passive-aggressive behaviour. Could it be that this is because pushing little coloured wooden cubes around a table doesn't help much in letting off steam? So some of them, who perhaps haven't found other constructive or harmless ways of dealing with those sorts of feelings, decide to get it off their chests by adopting the passive-aggressive stance when challenged?

I just realised this article has gone way beyond a focus on games. Ah well, I've started so I'll finish.

So here's another idea to chew over. As anyone who's played a particularly intense and vicious game of Diplomacy will know, deciding to be really nasty to other people in board games isn't always a safe option. Handled badly it can really, really upset your fellow gamers and lead to the sorts of situations which make board flipping incidents look trivial. To be comfortable playing games which absolutely require you to be really horrible to each other you need to be playing with a certain set of people - people with whom you have a good enough understanding that everyone knows it's just a game, but people that you're not so close to that real-life issues can be dragged into the equation. In other words you don't want to play these games with strangers, vague acquaintances or family - you want to be playing them with good friends. That's my preferred gaming environment. I can't speak for my fellow AT fanboys but I do pick up the idea that Eurogamers have a greater tendency to game at clubs or with family members. Maybe if they tried playing games with a crowd where everyone knew each other well enough not to be bad loosers, whatever happened, they wouldn't have such an issue with player elimination and other elements of ultra-competitive games.

Plastic Nazis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Right Way of Thinking

I'm a cold hearted bitch.

A while back a house guest was looking through my games for something for us to play, and noticed El Caballero on the shelf.

"That's a good game," she said.
"I don't like it," I told her, "You can have it if you want it."
"No thanks," she replied,"I don't like it much either."
"Let's play Talisman," I suggested.
"Talisman is so chaotic and random, we might as well just roll a die, see who's highest, and call it a day."
"Sorry, I thought you liked Talisman."
"I do, but it is a bad game. I rather spend my time playing something more worthwhile."

Then my head spun around like that chick in the exorcist.

I was confounded and bewildered. How can you say that a game you don't like is a "good" game, but a game you do like is a "bad" game? Clearly I was missing something.

So I crawled out of my cave, looked around and discovered there were these things called "Game Clubs," and "Game Groups," and "Game Nights." People went to these to meet other "gamers" and play games. More importantly, they discussed games. Not only were people discussing games in person, they were also discussing them on the internet. Through these discussions, a set of objective criteria had evolved by which it could be determined whether a game was objectively "good," or "bad." These criteria included elements such as randomness, meaningful decisions, player interaction, perfect information, playing time, and elegance. Apparently benchmarks had been set. It took me a while to determine what these benchmarks were, but eventually, I think I figured it out. I may be mistaken, but it seemed that Chess and Go were towards the top of the scale, Monopoly was towards the bottom, and, the most important benchmark of all was Settlers of Catan. Games whose various criteria fell above Settlers and Chess were "good" games. Games whose criteria fell below Settlers were "bad" games. It was an epiphany. Here I had been happily playing Talisman, Arkham Horror and Merchants of Venus, unaware that these were "bad" games.

I decided that I had to find more worthwhile games. In fact. I decided I had to find the best game. After years of searching, I finally found it: Hey, That's My Fish.

Hey, That's my Fish has variable set-up. I learned that that's important for replayability. All this time I had been playing games on the same board, over and over. I'm such a dope. It has perfect information. That sounds impressive doesn't it - PERFECT INFORMATION. Player interaction. Yep. Meaningful decisions. Yep. Short playing time, and short rules. Absolutely. I think you can teach someone to play in about a minute and a half, and the whole game takes only about ten minutes to play. And most importantly, zero randomness (well except for the set-up, which, I am told, is an allowable randomness).

In Hey, That's my Fish, you play a penguin trying to catch fish, while attempting to set all the other penguins adrift on small ice floes, so that they can't get any fish, and die or something. I know kids who like this game. I know adults who like this game. I know adults who like playing this game with kids. But, crap, I just don't like it. I really tried, but I just don't give a damn about my penguin. Shouldn't I feel something? I should feel happy when my penguin gets a two fish tile, instead of a one fish tile, right? I should feel bummed when he is set adrift, facing certain death on that tiny ice floe, shouldn't I? I should at least feel annoyed that my stupid penguin can't swim? If he could swim, he could just jump off that ice floe and save himself, right? Maybe I am supposed to feel compassion for him or something, because of his disability?

So, Hey That's My Fish is a good game, but I don't like it. My friends think it's because I'm too stupid to understand it's depth of play. But the truth is, I'm just a cold hearted bitch that doesn't give a damn about my lame penguin.

Who wrote these stinkin' rules?

"All players go through these steps simultaneously.

The active player goes first in each step."

HUH???? I kid you not, the above rule is from a game that I have spent the last three days trying to figure out how to play.

In the past month I have read the rules to three new games. None of these games are particularly complicated. None of them were translated from another language into English.

One set of rules was clear and understandable.

One set of rules had about a half dozen instances of ambiguity, and one out right contradiction. It required three trips to the publishers web site, and a print out of the errata and the FAQ's to clear up the confusion.

The last set of rules read like they had been run through babblefish. After reading them three times, visiting the publishers website several times, printing out the new revised rules and reading those through twice, and printing out the eight pages of FAQs and reading those, I'm still not clear on a couple of points.


Poorly written rules are inexcusable. Hire a technical writer for heaven's sake. Hire a proof reader. At the very least, hand the rules to someone who is completely unfamiliar with the game and see if the person can understand the rules well enough to play the game. I'll volunteer. Send me a copy of the game and the rules and I will gladly tell you how friggin' awful they are. God, I miss the old AH rules with the cross referenced, numbered paragraphs.

Things in Game Rules that Piss Me Off

• Grammatically incorrect sentences. All a publisher has to do is pick up the phone and call the nearest Catholic school and hire a nun to proof read the rules. While the publisher is at it, they should hire that nun to teach a workshop on ambiguous reference, general reference and weak reference. "Take the top card from the deck and place it face up in front of you," means "Take the top card from the deck and place the deck face up in front of you." In this case I know that the writer's intention was that the card should be placed face-up, not the deck; however, grammatical mistakes of this nature can make more complex rules incomprehensible. Futhermore, I don't want to waste my time diagraming sentences, and argueing with rules-lawyer friends over the strict gramatical meaning of the rule vs what the author really meant to say.



• Rules written by someone so close to the game that they leave out what is obvious to them. In one of the games mentioned above, a player has to move one of their pawns onto a "challenge space" to attempt a "challenge." The opponent player can increase the difficulty of the challenge by playing cards out of their hand. What the rules fail to mention is that the opponent must have at least one of his pawns on the challenge space in order to be able to play those cards. This one omission makes the difference between an interesting game and a stupid game.
  



• Rules that attempt to be funny, or that are written in a conversational tone. Extra verbiage is annoying, confusing and just makes the rules longer. The babblefish rules mentioned above contain the following gems:

"like...uh"
"Yep. Another two-player passing thing."
"Duh."
"Yikes!"

• Rules with a section entitled "Sequence of Play" where every third line is "see page xx." If you are going to include a sequence of play, write it in sequence, damn it!
  



• Important rules that are buried in a paragraph of a section that is about something else, such as healing rules buried in the section entitled "Movement."
  



• Rules that don't define words that have specific meanings in the game but have other meanings, similar meanings or multiple meanings in the English language. The most common examples are games that have "turns," "rounds," "phases," and "steps," and games that have "skills," "traits," "attributes," and "talents." Games that have thematic names for things like points and money are also guilty of this offense.
  



• Rules that use "player" and "character" interchangeably. My favorite example of this error is, "You can do X to the player next to you." The intention of the rule is "you can do X to the character whose pawn occupies a space adjacent to your character's pawn," not "you can do X to the person sitting next to you." How about "You can attack a player that occupies the same space that you occupy."? I claim that this rule breaks the laws of physics, however my husband claims this rule means that if I sit on his lap, he can attack me.

Titan! Fucking Titan!

So I waited a few days to see if Matt was going to post about this topic since the game mentioned above is his stated favorite. I cannot wait any longer and I feel it is safe to say Matt had his chance.


Company that is doing a kick ass So unless you life in a news proof bubble or have been having an all out orgy with 10 incredibly hot chicks for the last few days you have probably heard that Valley Games, that little Canadian reprint of Hannibal, is now going to reprint Titan. (And Republic of Rome but more on that later)

True to form, I have just completed making 2 copies of this game for myself and my Little bro "Bobby Tweaks". I seem to have this innate ability to cause the reprint of long out of print games simply by either purchasing them or by making a home made copy. (Successors and Hannibal were announced hours after doing so) That's no big deal as my homemade version, complete with larger Masterboard, will certainly get used for the next 6 months until the reprint is available and there is always a small chance the new version will suck.

Anyway, I am fired up about the reprint for a number of reasons. First there is the fact that this game has caught on like wildfire with the group. We have played it 3 times in the past week and interest in learning the game (Read getting good at it) is high. Only a few nay-sayers have complained and that's a guy who complains about everything so we just ignore him. I am already looking at adjusting my schedule for the WBC to fit a schooling in Titan in, as are a few others in the group. So having a fresh version available will only help prolong the interest in this great game.

In addition to my own game groups interest in Titan, a reprint will increase general interest int he game. A game that is about as Ameritrash and they come. I have already heard some complaints on the geek about how Titan is old school with roll and move and the dreaded player elimination. This is total bullshit! Titan is a classic game, where the rolling to move (and the option not to) is part of what separates good players from those who bitch that they can't roll that 4 they need. The player elimination mean that you have to pay attention! You can just stroll around with your Titan stack and attack a random stack. You need to watch what people recruit, try and know where their Titan is and plan out your strikes carefully. Add to this the tactical battles where a skilled player may out beat out a stronger army and you have a game that is won most of the time by better play.

So lets all give a big cheer to Valley Games, if they come through with the products they have announced they will be doing more of the hobby than anyone else by making some fine, but hard to come by games obtainable by a new set of gamers.

-M

Why I Love the Term Ameritrash

I was about to post something about the old AH gangsters game, but when I headed over to the Geek this morning I noticed way too many AT posts by people wanting to change, discontinue the use of, or simply stating their dislike for the term Ameritrash. So I am going to defend it a bit.

First, let me start of by saying that I do not agree with the whole Us vs. Them attitude that seems to have been so popular on BGG over the last few weeks. I know that a few individuals (AT and Euro based) managed to move what really were personality conflicts into the debate, stealing the thunder of Ameritrash for issues that were completely unrelated to games. Personal pissing matches spring up on internet forums all the time, and well I guess that's human nature, but I for one do not want anything that happened on BGG to stain what for me is a legitimate attitude toward games.

The attitude that all aspects of games, the length, the rules complexity, the mechanics implemented, the diplomatic meta-game; all of this are in and of themselves worthless when not coupled with and respectful of Fun. Games are entertainment, and when one aspect of a game's design interferes with that entertainment, they are a failure. This is as true for over reliance on conflict, as it is for over reliance on game mechanics.

Ameritrash was a group of guys saying "Hey, we know that the current trend in games stresses streamlined play over open interaction, but let's not forget about these other games who manage to provide great entertainment in the past." It was a questioning of the mantra of Euro games design that wrote off certain game mechanics, player elimination as an example, or forced game length under 120 minutes. A call for designers to include older styles of play in their design and not simply push out yet another tile laying game with an auction and area control scoring.

The simple truth is that Ameritrash games design is dead. It’s moment was in the past, and designing games that are 100% AT for the future is not viable. No one wants to buy Risk++. The point is that there were good aspects to these games and these aspects should not be forgotten in favor of the current hot trend in game sales. The future of game design has to get past the Euro style, no one wants to buy Caylus++ either, It too has become nearly as stale as Ameritrash was in the late 80's. We will all be better off if designers look back and select the better elements of both Euro and AT, think of new ways to mingle them and produce games that are innovative.

This is what the original intent of the Ameritrash label was. It is time that we get back to that, and over the notion that AT all about returning to the past or pissing off Eurogamers. We are gamers who love games, and have concerns about the current direction of game development.

So the term Ameritrash is not about attitude, it is about respecting where game design has come from, where it is now and where it needs to head in the future.

-Malloc

Good Game, Good Game

There's a couple of places that I'm aware of that do a ranking of popular designer games. One is boardgamegeek and the other is the internet top 100 games list. If you look at the two listings what immediately strikes you is how similar they are - six out of the ten are the same. Those that are the same are all German-style boardgames.

So what conclusions can we draw from this? Well probably the obvious answer is that the voting on both lists is dominated by fans of German-style games. This is interesting in itself because I'm not aware particularly that these sorts of games outsell other kinds of mass-produced (to differentiate them from niche wargames) designer games. There's plenty of publishers for other game styles (Fantasy Flight, many Days of Wonder games etc) and I'm not aware of any game store owners who are suggesting they sell a ton more Eurogames than other styles of game. Fine - the lists are dominated by people that like Euros - why should we care?

The easy answer is because unfortunately they beguile people into believing that these sorts of games have become the one true grail in the gaming hobby. A new visitor to one of these sites isn't likely to stop and think about the possibility of a certain fan type dominating the voting, or about the statistics involved in building up these profiles or indeed about the self-re-enforcing nature of "top 10" lists of anything. They're going go to look, and believe that games like Puerto Rico and Tigris and Euphrates are just way ahead of the competition in terms of design and enjoyment. I know this because I've been there and done it and bought some games I didn't care much for as a result. Not, I hasten to add, PR and T&E which are both fine games. But are they really such fine games as to justify their exalted status in the gaming community?

This point also allows Euro-fans to justify their belief that the German approach to game design is better than other approaches (look, it results in the best games ever made!) again without recourse to analysing the mechanisms and sociology that got them there. It leads to the top ten lists being completely dominated by games of the same style because the biggest voters are fans of those games whereas I'd suggest what most gamers are looking for is a good mix of gaming goodness.

This is a great shame because I firmly believe that a good game is a good game, no matter what style or genre it comes from. In the past, before the advent of German games we only had Ameritrash games and wargames to choose from. A lot of crap got published and justly forgotten. But a few games have survived the test of time to become out and out classics. Give it a few years and I reckon exactly the same thing is going to happen to the Euro phenomenon - the very best of them like PR will stay up there in peoples collections and memories and keep getting played whereas the rest, many of which are currently highly ranked and regarded, will get forgotten and gather dust in attics. If you look at the 'geek top ten you can already see some evidence of this happening. Crossover games that appeal to large sections of the gaming community like Twilight Struggle and Battlelore are starting to make an appearance.

The point of all this is to justify why we get angry when we get told that our favourite style of games are outmoded by modern Euros. They're not - you just happen to think that they are because they don't conform to your stereotype of game design. It's also why some AT fans accuse some in the Euro school of being more interested in design purity than having fun, because they're denying themselves the opportunity to try out some really different games that would offer new and exciting play experiences. I'm pretty confident I'll still be playing Ra and Titan ten years from now. Can you really say the same about Caylus?

Why?

Those of us who are playing board games these days are fortunate enough to have an almost overwhelming amount of choice when it comes to selecting games to play. Everything from light two-player abstract games, to heavy multiplayer war games, is available. One can pick and choose titles to add to their game collection that fit their particular game style of choice. With great web sites like BoardGameGeek and Consimworld, finding information about games is easier than it has ever been. Trading or buying games second had is common and often times affordable. With all this choice, everyone is free to play what they want with whoever they want. I have a moderate sized collection of cardboard and plastic of my own, with nearly all styles of games represented in there someplace, but my personal favorite style of games belong to a category of games know as Ameritrash.

Let’s start by saying that the term Ameritrash is not a negative label slapped on games. It is a slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to the notion that these games are of a style that reflects design choices made in days gone by. Design choices that are usually missing from, and often intentionally avoided by a lot of the newer “Euro” or “German” style board games. My fondness for games of this style is, as most slightly subjective preferences are, hard for me to describe. My tastes in how I spend my free time have, and continue to, change. So please, as you read this, consider it a point in time reflection on the personal tastes of Michael Buccheri and nothing more. Maybe you agree, probably you will not.

Let me back up a bit. I rather recently rediscovered board games as a hobby. I have been an avid table top miniatures game player for some time, however due to some tine constrictions imposed on me by my choice to start a family; the constant upkeep of these hobbies became too much. I needed something I could enjoy, yet not devote hours of time too between playing. Board games filled this niche very nicely. I was immediately drawn to many of the modern popular euro games. Titles like Puerto Rico and El Grande, the usual gamut of popular games. For a while I was in proverbial hog heaven, however, after a bit I began to long for something more. The pre-programmed nature of these games and the realization that the game winner was often decided by sub-optimal play on the part of one of the other players left me wanting more control. Perhaps it was the mini’s gamer in me wanting the ability to tailor my style of play, maybe the lack of having to take a chance on some odds or maneuver myself so that the odds were always in my favor. Something was missing and I couldn’t figure out what it was. All I knew was that once I got past the novelty of the euro game design (and this is their true value) then the game play itself really was not that much fun, for me. I wanted bigger. I wanted more.

Enter Ameritrash. With not-so-clean cut rules, with direct player interaction, player elimination, long play times, dice, and all the things that modern euro game designers hand out frowny-faces for. What is it about this style of games that appeals to me? Haven’t we been there before; was there not a revolution that saved us all from downtime and the ever so pedestrian act of throwing a numbered cube about a table? Sure we have, but I for one need to go back. To me there is more to gaming than following a detailed set of instructions. If I want to do that I will bake a cake, at least at the end of that process I can satisfy myself by eating it as opposed to feeling like I got nothing for it. I need control of my destiny, I need options (that matter) for game play, I need what I do, both with the pieces on the board and with my relationship with the other players to matter, and not be some sort of optimization choice. For example, in a multiplayer game I have the choice of attacking someone, however I need to consider what this will do both in terms of the game mechanics (I.E. improve my board position) and also in terms of that players attitude toward me. In a lot of euro style games this becomes a total optimization choice. “I have to block you here so that you don’t score 3 points, you would do that if you were me”. In Ameritrash games this is not the case; often the optimal choice from a mechanical point of view will have very sub-optimal results from a diplomatic point of view. It is this type of decision making that keeps me coming back, having to balance the desire to improve my position rapidly with the fact that doing so too quickly will derail my relations with the other players. Add to that that once the other players are against me, they then have the ability to be dangerous. Regardless of what it does to their position in the game. A lot of euro games limit the ability to direct set up roadblocks to another player’s strategy. This limits a player’s ability to rein the leader in a game back in. The problem is so bad that a number of the more complicated euros incorporate some sort of play leveling mechanic. The income loss in Age of Steam is a good example of this. As is the auction, resource purchasing and build order in power grid, we won’t mention the drastic methods taken in less thought out games such as Tempus. The end result is a game that plays out in a very similar fashion each time. I much prefer a more open game style, where player choice, diplomatic maneuvering and even a little press your luck can make the difference in the end. Sure there is a cost to this, complexity of rules and time, are the two things that suffer most. These games are longer and tend to have an above average thickness to the rules. For me neither is a real show stopper. Game length is a limitation we have to accommodate. Sure, I cannot pull out my favorite Ameritrash multiplayer titles at lunchtime, but most of the game nights I go to are at least 4 hours long, plenty of time for a game. I do not suffer from the “I must play an auction, tile laying and an area control game in each session” affliction that many folks I know seem to struggle with. One good game (AT, Euro or War) is worth more than 100 not-so-good games. As to rules complexity, well even the most complicated AT game is no more complicated than the average heavy euro, and nothing when compared to war games or mini’s games. I see the lack of commitment to learning a game (any game) as laziness. When it comes to rules, you get what you pay for. For me the time investment pays off in game play; of course, your mileage may vary.

-M