Ameritrash--Theme or Mechanics?

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?"

Roll Playing

For someone who's enough of an avowed Ameritrash fan to start a blog on the subject, I have an odd and ongoing aversion to boardgames that attempt to simulate aspects of role-playing games. There seems to be an ongoing relationship between AT games and role-playing games, with role playing being a common path for AT gamers to get into the boardgaming hobby (myself included). Really this is not surprising given that both types of gaming have a tendency to emphasise theme and narrative. As a result dungeoncrawl and role-playing style boardgames constitute a fairly large sub-genre of the Ameritrash canon. So why do I shut myself off from these games?

Well I ought to start by admitting that in part my reluctance to invest in these sorts of games stems from the fact that I know I'd have a hard time persuading the groups I game with to play them. The people I game with can generally be categorised as hardcore miniatures gamers, hardcore strategy gamers and casual gamers, none of whom have any great interest in role-playing and by extension in board games that attempt to simulate the experience. But my dislike for these games does extend beyond mere inability to find an opponent - after all a number of them make good solo gaming fare - to my mind the genre is plagued by a number of problems which mostly stem from the very aim they're trying to achieve. Allow me to elaborate.

The first question I always ask when confronted with a game of this nature is - why? Role-playing is a gaming scene onto itself with its own design conventions and where players seek after different things than they get from boardgaming. What's the point in trying to combine the two styles of game into one? Too often it seems to me that the resulting games only succeed in capturing the worst aspects of both hobbies - endless repetitive "monty-haul" style games with labyrinthine rules that have neither the freedom of choice and expression offered by role-playing nor the tactical depth offered by a good board game. What you do get in terms of a system and components for simulating combat in a more understandable and satisfying fashion than the typical verbal melee of a role-playing combat can often be achieved simply by using some board gaming props to help you along in your role-playing session rather than trying to separate it off into a different game.

The nature of role-playing is that a group of players co-operate together against the challenges thrown at them by the games master. Although I have run and played in games where player versus player plotting was a significant element (and a lot of fun it was too, I might add) it's difficult to imagine how a role-playing game could be set up which allowed all the people playing and the games master to be competing against one another. An attempt to replicate this situation in a board game leads to two problems. The first is a personal one - I don't generally like co-operative games so that's another turn off for me. The other problem is that the Games Master role in a board version of an RPG is significantly less interesting. Gone is the need to assess and pass judgement on the effects of the players actions, the fun of trying to role-play non-player characters in a memorable fashion, and the challenge of fudging the dice rolls in the interest of driving the narrative. All that's left is that smug feeling of knowing things before the players find them out which, while pleasant, is hardly enough to make you want to put time and effort into the game.

Another issue that seems to arise in these games is that they often seem to degenerate into glorified puzzles - a complaint that I often level at the bulk of Eurogames on the market. Given that the hallmark of role-playing games themselves is the creative freedom they offer the participants this seems like a particularly bizarre problem to throw up but it does seem to be a recurring problem. Witness the number of these games that suffer from the "corridor problem" - the tactic of having the heroes line up behind a door in order to pick off monsters one by one. In general it seems that too many of these games have optimal play solutions and don't have the open, creative access to strategy that I, for one, look for in a satisfying game. I don't doubt this is something to do with the fact that these games often play well solo - almost every solo game is going to suffer from this problem because you don't have another human brain playing against you to do unexpected and creative things that you need to consider and react to. The old fashioned solution to this problem in these sorts of games was to offer the players a vast and mind-boggling array of possible encounters but even this tended to get bogged down in the inevitable limitations placed on game play by having a boardgame-like rules framework which needed to cover every possibility instead of leaving some decisions to the GM.

The solution, in turn, to this problem was to make games of ever increasing complexity. The apex of that design path is Magic Realm which is the most complicated board game that I've ever tried to play. It's an interesting game but the basic problem with it, in my view, is that the satisfaction of play in no way makes the effort of learning all those rules worthwhile - and the same is true of every single role-playing boardgame I've come across that tried to solve the issues I've outlined by increasing the number of rules. We come full circle with the arguments now - if you've produced a game with a rulebook the size of a role-playing manual then again, why not just play the role-playing game instead of accepting a hybrid?

On reflection it seems to me that I often use my space in this column to criticise things instead of lauding them. Essentially that's pretty lazy - it's much easier to write an interesting piece and get people talking by throwing down insults than praise. So I figured I'd take the second half of this piece to look at a few role-playing boardgames that I think have succeeded and why.

My absolute favourite in this area has to be DungeonQuest although in fairness this game succeed by breaking almost every convention of role-playing games and is basically a boardgame dressed up in a dungeon-crawl theme. There's no GM and al the players are competing directly one another. The game solves the problem of not having a GM to dish out the map as the players explore by having the relatively simple expedient of having the player draw a tile when they enter a new room and take cards to simulate encounters. You might immediately spot that this has the potential to create unfair situations - players drawing dead ends or corridor directions that are useless and so forth. You'd be right - in fact DungeonQuest makes absolutely no attempt to be fair and oddly enough this gives it a big part of its appeal. It's short enough that no-one cares and brutal enough that usually all the players get shafted by the game in some form or fashion before the dungeon trip is done. Simply brilliant and a great antidote to too much carefully considered strategy games.

Another one I still find myself pulling off the shelf occasionally is a left-field oddity from Tom Wham called Mertwig's Maze. This was published by TSR in an AD&D RPG module sleeve as a "Forgotten Realms Gamefolio" in spite of the fact it had sod all to do with AD&D or Forgotten Realsm and would obviously have benefited from being packaged in a game box. This again has no GM and has all the players competing against each other but the particular mark of genius in this design is to have each player running a party of adventurers instead of a single character. Recruiting new characters into your party in indeed an important part of the game play. The result is a game that does manage to feel like both an RPG (there's your party of characters - go out and seek for cool treasure to equip them) and a strategy board game (you're competing against everyone else and there's the potential to exploit the rules for creative strategy). Tom's sense of humour also helps add to the longevity of this one, although maybe it's just me that still gets a chuckle out of the "Bollock the Bear" card every time it comes out. "Ork" goes the Onyx Oryx.

A game which does look to be worth playing - but which I have never, and probably will never, play - is Descent from Fantasy Flight. It solves the problem of the impotent and annoying GM through the simple but ingenious means of making the Games Master compete against the players - he can win by having his minions slaughter them all. The game does still look to have repetitive strategy problems but at least all the people involved are trying to compete against each other on a relatively equal footing. The reason I'm never going to play this is just because it looks too much like a long time playing a standard dungeon crawl to interest my gaming circles into trying it.

My final pick in this category is a favourite of a number of other F:AT writers - Return of the Heroes. This succeeds by tearing up all the conventions that usually govern this genre and reassembling the basic theme in the image of a Eurogame. This actually works amazingly well - I've already mentioned that there is in fact a link between Euros and RPG-style games in the mechanical approach to strategy that often results. In Return of the Heroes you've got the challenge of solving the Euro-puzzle style game play with all the added narrative and theme of an AT game. It's the narrative aspects that really make this - the stories that you build as you play can result in surprisingly engaging solo game sessions.

Impossible Themes

I recently discovered, to my delight, that my cable TV company supplies me with a variety of old TV programmes on demand for free. Amongst the inevitable barrage of crap they have on offer there's some great comedy and Band of Brothers and I chose to start using my new service with some episodes of the latter.

If you've never seen Band of Brothers it's a ten-part series made by the same team who put Saving Private Ryan together about a company of US paratroopers in Word War 2. Unlike Saving Private Ryan the series is based on the genuine memoirs of the troopers - in fact each episode is prefaced with short talking-head interviews with the men themselves. It's absolutely brilliant - so brilliant in fact that I managed to get my partner to watch all ten episodes when it was first on even though she espouses complete loathing of all things combat-themed.

One of the brilliant things about it is it's realistic recreation of combat. The scenes are breathless, dangerous, confusing and yet somehow exhilarating, just as I imagine the real thing must be. I stress the word imagine here because of course I have no clear idea of what it would be like and nor, or course, would I want to. But I'm satisfied that at one level watching the programmes gets me as close to the experience as I'd want to be.

Another way in which I can get a different, equally distant angle on the experience combat is through playing video games. Shortly after watching Band of Brothers I picked up the game Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. I'd avoided WW2 first-person shooters before because it seemed to be rather pointless and even somewhat disrespectful to release games of that theme that were so unrealistic in the sense that they let you play a hero-type, ploughing through swathes of Germans unassisted. Brothers in Arms is different - combat is deadly if you don't make use of cover, strategy or the AI-controlled allies that it provides. I think it's a fantastic game, and probably one of the most-played computer games I've ever bought.

Both the TV series and the video game are highly thematic in the sense that when enjoying them I feel completely immersed in the world that they're trying to create for me. I think that both have helped me learn about, and gain new perspectives on, the history of World War 2. In different ways they let me get as close as I'd want to to the lives of the soldiers who fought in the Western Front in that war. I also have a book by John Keegan called The Face of Battle which attempts to do a similar thing by looking at the experiences of soldiers in the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. While not so immersive as computer or TV again, in it's own way, it might be seen as a very thematic experience.

My dealings with WW2 board games on the other hand are decidedly un-thematic, at least in the sense of making me feel like I'm getting closer to the experience of being in combat or even commanding soldiers into combat. There's none of the feeling of fast-paced, dicing-with-death action even at squad level games. Rather the rules and the consideration of decisions and the poring over charts actually completely obscure any feeling of urgency you might derive from the game. You might argue that moving up to the strategic and operational levels might make the game more like the experience of commanding troops but I think not - battlefield command is hugely stressful in a completely different way. I read recently that both supreme commanders in the Battle of Stalingrad suffered with nervous afflictions. Even so, the computer still does a better job of being thematic - I've played a lot of the excellent freeware offering Steel Panthers: WW2 in which the complex mechanics governing movement and combat are all hidden under the hood. This allows a much more realistic simulation thanks both to the way the computer can handle levels of complexity that would swamp a real game and because it stops a commander trying to play the system rather than concentrating on tactics.

This isn't supposed to be a rant against wargames. I understand that in most wargames the focus is on creating a realistic simulation for the purposes of historical "what-if" scenarios rather than of creating an immersive theme. Rather I'm questioning whether theme is really something that boardgames are terribly good at providing - in most cases a boardgame is about learning to play the rules for best advantage, as opposed to live-action and strategy computer games which have the potential to be much more open ended. In a boardgame the rules have to be open, transparent and to some extent simple and short enough to be digestible, all of which leads to an inevitable degree of structure in the approach to play.

So this leaves us with the obvious question of why "theme" is considered such an important quality of AT games. Personally I've always had a slight problem with this definition - I play AT games partly because of the themes they choose rather than because the theme is strong. Rather I have a lot more sympathy with the view expressed by Jezztek in his eloquent definition of ameritrash over at boardgamegeek which emphasises the importance of drama and narrative over theme.

Nevertheless, there are a small handful of boardgames widely regarded as being extremely thematic to play. I want to devote the remainder of this article to looking at those games and perhaps trying to distil out the elements that make them transcend the ordinary strictures of mechanical boardgaming.

Almost inevitably my first pick is one of the pinnacles of AT design, the much-lamented Avalon Hill classic Dune. The theme in this injects itself on a number of levels. Firstly the variable player powers assigned to each house seem to be an excellent reflection of the supposed skills and traits of the various factions seen in the Dune novels. Secondly, and perhaps key in bringing the theme to the game, is the unforgiving and vicious nature of the treachery aspects of game - the intrigue created around the treachery cards and the inevitable stab in the back from your turncoat leader(s) do a fine job of recreating the smoke-and-mirrors paranoia of intergalactic diplomacy. Finally the physical layout of the board, with the rules for worms and storms and such, mimic the environmental factors that soldiers operating of the face of the planet would have to contend with.

My second choice is also one that many of you will probably have guessed in advance, and would get my vote for the most thematic game of all time - Fury of Dracula. Both versions of the game - FFG and GW - are highly thematic, but for me the GW version edges it, and that's what I'm going to focus on in this discussion. There are two things that make this game work for me. First and foremost is the balance between the asymmetrical vampire hunters and the Count himself. The ingenious idea of pitting three hunters versus Dracula creates a situation where the game can be set up to make the vampire player extremely powerful in comparison to the hunters without affecting balance, since the power differential can be corrected through the hunters ganging up. The power balance is further tilted by the hunters being in receipt of very little information about the state of the game in comparison with the virtually omniscient vampire. This creates a situation in which the Dracula player really ends up feeling like an immortal monster weaving Byzantine plots across Europe while the hunters play most of the game in a state of genuine fear and doubt - all while retaining a reasonably balanced game. The second element are the excellent components of the game which really evoke the late-Victorian setting of the fateful chase depicted in the novel.

Hopefully by now getting away from the obvious candidates my third pick is Space Hulk. I think that WW2 games attempting to be thematic could learn a lot from this, which manages to be a squad tactics game that derives a genuine sense of urgency from the simple expedient of placing a timer on the marine players' move. Doing this injects an exciting element of panic into what is otherwise quite a thoughtful and tactical game. The use of differing hidden information on both sides is also an important component in creating a claustrophobic atmosphere - the marine player can never know the precise number of the foe he's dealing with and the genestealer player has to contend with the hidden action points of the marines. And again the fantastic GW components also help.

My final pick, is Bootleggers from Eagle Games. While this looks like (and is) a somewhat garish mishmash of Euro mechanics shoehorned into an Ameritrash game the tie between mechanics and theme is actually very strong. In particular the area majority mechanic used to govern control of speakeasies seems incredibly reminiscent of the way mob bosses would have to use muscle in order to maintain presence in the marketplace. The rules around stills and whiskey production, while random, actually use the randomness to evoke the trial-and-error process of illegal spirit production and the greater chance of attracting law enforcement to stills that produce larger amounts. The crowning glory of the theme in this game though is the brutal free-for-all nature of trading and debate which rewards loud threats as much, if not more, than careful wheeler-dealing and at the same time has a built-in real-life policing mechanism to stop it getting out of hand: renege on too many deals and no-one will trust you any more. Playing this I always feel like I should be breaking out the trilby hats and the fat cigars.

So what can we derive from all this? Well, obviously the games above all differ in the way that they go about creating a thematic experience but nevertheless, I think we can use them to draw up a five-point list (in no particular order) for building thematic boardgames:

1) Hidden information is a great way of representing a number of different themes.

2) Don't be afraid of setting up asymmetrical games with flavour rules for different sides that help to set the scene.

3) Try and include some open mechanics (i.e. negotiation) which mirror real-life situations and come with similar advantages and disadvantages.

4) Implement your choice of the above rules without too much regard for game balance - it's important, but the theme comes first.

5) Provide good quality components that are designed to evoke the setting of the game.

Right, armed with this I'm off to design FFG's next bestseller. See you next year.