The Flywheel and the Doom Loop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

When Dice Attack!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Imperial Instruction

I'm going to follow on from my previous blog post and tell you a bit about a game I played recently, and what I learned from it.

The game in question was Twilight Imperium 3. It was the first time I'd had the opportunity to play the game face to face and although it was an all day gaming event with plenty of time I was still anxious to keep playing time low so I could get to play some more games later on! Also I'd be teaching the game to new players and I didn't want it to overwhelm them with complexity. So I used my limited experience with the game to try and pick options to keep play time and learning curve to a minimum.

Well from the base game I picked the "Age of Empires" option which lays out all the objectives from the start. This helps play time by allowing players to focus on actions which allow them to get VPs every turn and helps the new players because they're not going to be at a disadvantage from never having seen the objective deck. I was using the conflict-oriented objectives from the expansion in the assumption that more conflict is a good thing but in retrospect I'm not so sure that's a good assumption. Firstly more combat means more dice and that means more randomness in the quest for VPs - you may or may not like this and I'm pretty on the fence about it myself. From a play time perspective though it actually slows things down as people keep on throwing in ships and then building more - plus combat is fairly slow to resolve. In the event the actual objectives dealt included virtually every non-conflict one from the conflict deck so it was kind of a moot point, but I might try mixing the two decks for another game.

Next choice was what strategy cards to use. I chose to use the "II" variants from the expansion for all the cards that had them and the original ones for all the rest. I did this for two reasons. Firstly to use the variant "Bureaucracy" card with Age of Empires requires a house rule, which would be further annoying things for new players to remember and contrary to the text printed on the card. Second using "Imperial II" gives the game another source of potential VPs to speed up play without having to resort to the dull original Imperial card.

What else? Well, artifacts were an obvious choice to put some more VP in the game although I declined to use the "voice of the council" option since no-one ever seems to bother with it. A pre-set board was used to speed up play, avoid having to teach the rules for laying out galaxy maps and to ensure balance since new players are notoriously bad at constructing a "sensible" galaxy when left to themselves. I also left out the Winnarian Guardians as that slows the conquest of Metacol Rex and thus the rate of VP gain. As a final shot I took three races out of the deck before we started - the Saar for complexity, the Xxcha because they clash with "Diplomacy II" and would have meant more differences in play from the text on the card and the Yssaril because the pass ability helps slow the game down.

In the event we had four players - Saardak N'orr, Letnev, Mentak and myself as the Winnu. The opening rounds went as one might expect with people expanding their empires and claiming the first couple of easy victory points, with two players getting a head start through artifact planets. One thing I didn't forsee was that with the low level of trade agreements on offer and the inability to use political cards as resources it took several rounds before people had enough resources to start building big ships and regularly claiming tech advances.

Anyway, after the initial stage I got dealt a "flank speed" card and from this I formed the basis of a plan. I took some newly-minted carriers and ground force from my home system and using the card and the XRD transporter tech I'd previously acquired, landed a bunch of troops on Metacol Rex. I saved my resources that round and built a space dock on my last move, allowing me to complete my secret objective which was to hold MR, have a space dock there and have two tech advances in three different colours. This put me up to 5VP. I was hopeful I'd get at least one from the Imperial II card next round and I'd bought red tech to put me in a position to gain another 2VP from a "five techs in one colour" objective without needing further prerequisites and for the other two I was confident I could keep the Rex for a few rounds and milk it for VPs.

Sorry for all the quotes.

I did get my VP from the imperial card the following turn but then odd things began to happen. The Mentak built a huge fleet ready to strike at Metacol while the Sardak, oddly, was obsessively building PDS units on the planet next door. The Letnev player seemed to be entirely out of it by this stage, being last in VP and not having any obvious ability to claim more. So I got my War Sun tech and built one of the big ships right there on Metacol with the aim of scaring off everyone else - it worked and I held it for another "Imperial II" VP the following round, although the Mentak had used some of their by now immense fleet to take away a couple of my planets, leaving me in something of a resources blight.

By this time I was well in the lead and the other players had started to gang up against me. My ground forces on the Rex went down to a plague card from the Letnev player and then the Mentak stormed in taking Metacol Rex and some more planets off me, leaving me 3VP short of my goal and virtually nothing to build new fleets with. I had the five tech objective pretty much in the bag - just one short and I'd got first pick of strategy cards the following round - so I needed another one. There was a 1VP objective out for "invade a planet containing at least one GF" and I had a far-flung carrier in a system with 2GF that had been there virtually since the start of the game. It was within reach of a Sardak planet with just 1GF defending - so in it went and my Winnu soldiers duly dispatched the enemy for the missing VP. Victory was within my grasp.

However, Letnev, who'd been quietly turtling away for the last few rounds, building forces and claiming virtually nothing and apparently out of the game had a plan as well. He took Imperial II as his first choice in the last round and suddenly pushed out, using the cards ability to claim multiple objectives and artifacts to gain VP at a most alarming rate. In the status phase he managed to creep up to 9VP while I just got in there with the ten, claiming the win even though I had virtually nothing by my home system left on the board to my name.

My plan worked fairly well - the 4 player game, with setup time and the inevitable learning curve for the new players - weighed in at 5 hours which isn't too bad. I can seem myself sticking with that set of speed options for future face to face games. The time passed like absolutely nothing - we'd got two hours in before anyone even bothered to look up from the board to check the time - which for me is always the sign of a really great game.

So what did I learn from this fantastic game session?

Firstly I'll chip in with the oft-repeated adage that it's better to play one brilliant five hour game than five one-hour rubbish ones. I managed to get in a game of Roborally afterward which took around 90 minutes. It was my first ever game and it wasn't bad but there's no way I'd have sacrificed that fantastic game of TI3 for three sessions of Roborally. Of course if you like short games for the mechanics and not just because they're short then good for you - but the moral is don't kid yourself that shorter games are better just because you can play more of them. Time spent having fun is time spent having fun whether the activities are varied or not. When we'd finished an onlooker asked how long the game had taken and, looking somewhat aghast at the answer, asked whether it was worth it. All four players gave him a resounding "YES"!

Secondly - and possibly controversially - I noticed a curious thing about two blokes at that game day who'd come to game with female friends or partners. Both had come with bags full of Eurogames and both had eyes popping out of their head when they saw the TI3 setup. Both asked their female acquaintances if they wouldn't mind stepping out of the Euros to spend the bulk of the day playing TI3 - one ended up joining in and the other didn't. This makes me wonder two things. Firstly it seems that AT games with their often violent themes and frequent backstabbing gameplay have a greater appeal to men than women. That in itself isn't surprising but the experience has made me wonder whether a number of guys who have game-philic partners aren't kept in the Euro fold by their women insisting that they play quick, low-conflict games and that given the chance they'd leap into the AT universe like a fish into water. I wonder also how much of the venom we get from some of the Euro crowd is caused by repressed envy from this sort of behaviour.

Thirdly it made me think long and hard about the diplomatic metagame. This is very much a feature of TI3 and can strongly influence the course of a game but I think my experience in this session showed that the TI3 design does an absolutely brilliant job of limiting it to just another set of strategic choices, thanks largely to the nature of objectives in the game. In other long, conflict orientated games this balancing mechanism isn't there and the metagame can completely dominate the play beyond and influence the dice or strategic choice can have. Paradoxically, having played a game which demonstrated how best to allow the metagame but limit it's influence I've finally decided that long games with dominant metagame themes aren't really for me. Except Diplomacy of course, but that's a special case in which the metagame basically is the game.

The fourth point is one of complexity. TI3 is supposedly a complex game yet my three neophyte players all knew what they were doing by the end of the first turn. This isn't a testament to my brilliance at explaining games but rather a testament to the fact that length and number of rules is only one aspect of complexity. TI3 has a system which is logically consistent both internally and with regard to the theme it attempts to portray - this is a hard concept to define but basically, when I read the TI3 rulebook by the time I was halfway through I was able to make good and accurate guesses about the way the remaining rules were going to work. Today I attempted to read two rulebooks - one for the wargame Paths of Glory and one for the euro Imperial - one was long and one was short but both left me utterly baffled about how to play the game. In the case of PoG this is because the rules are full of special cases and exceptions. In the case of Imperial it is - like many games slimmed to the merest essentials of rules - because the rules have little connection to the scenario they're trying to portray. So don't dismiss a game as being "too complex" just because of the length of the rules - read them first, or have someone teach you. Similarly don't go thinking you can jump right in and play a game just because it has short rules - they won't always reveal how the game plays and they may hide a dizzying depth of strategy.

So that'll do for the day. I just wanted to add a short note to the blog readers to say that I'm going to be moving jobs in a few weeks and my ability to make regular posts is going to dry up, at least for a while.

Twilight Teachings

I know I don't really use my blog space for what blog space is usually used for - rather than telling everyone about the games I've been playing and spewing forth amusing anecdotes from my game evenings I tend to prefer to get on my high horse and preach at everyone. I make no apologies for this - I thoroughly enjoy doing it, and if I sometimes come across like a lecturing professor then so what? But today I'm going to something different - I'm going to do the usual blog thing and tell you about a game I played.

And then I'm going to preach at you.

The game in question was Twilight Struggle, one of my absolute favourite games. It was played over the fantastic free facilities over at WarGameRoom. I, a moderately experienced player was playing the USSR against a considerably more experienced US player.

One of the reasons I wanted to flag up this particular session for public consumption is that is showcased everything that's brilliant about Twilight Struggle. Every hand was loaded with tense, agonising decisions about best plays and risk management. There was luck in the game that helped it swing one way and the other to groans and cheers from the players involved. It's possible that luck, in the end, decided the game and although I don't think it did, the bottom line is that TS is just so much fun to play that really, who gives a damn if it does?

The opening few rounds went pretty smoothly, with no great changes in either direction. Europe and the Middle East were balanced but I'd managed to get into a strong position in Asia, having gathered North Korea, Pakistan and India and when Asia scoring came out I took a small lead. I also absolutely raced up the space race track leaving my opponent standing in the dust.

Things started to get a bit wobbly for me in the mid-game. I made a textbook mistake in Europe, being suckered into participating in a race to get control of France and then being hit by the dreaded "Truman Doctrine". However, my opponents' play of "De-Stalinisation" gave me the chance to grab battlegrounds in South America and Africa - since I already had Cuba thanks to "Fidel" I was in a strong position in those countries. Having gained control of these important areas I made a decision to use the points from "Decolonisation" to usurp the US in SE Asia, gathering Thailand, Indonesia and Laos for my troubles. However I then got hit with "Voice of America" or whatever it is that cleared out my influence in Africa and South America, which put me in a real bind having only Asia and Central America to score from.

The real disaster came in turn seven. I had a hand full of scoring cards and I got hit with Pope John Paul, Ussuri River Skirmish and the China card all in one turn - I lost Poland, North Korea and Pakistan and there was nothing I could do about it. I spent the next two turns desperately fire fighting - the scores were pretty much equal and I managed to claw my way back into parity in South America and gain a slim domination of Africa. So now I had Africa and Central America ranged against Europe and Asia for my opponent - the big scores at the end of the game were his.

However, in turn nine I also managed to loose control of East Germany (I don't now recall how this happened) and I thought my number was up as my opposite number had complete control of Europe. My last few cards on turn nine were to hit the enemy with "Quagmire" which basically made him miss one turn and then in sequence cram in "Soviet Governments" to make him loose control of West Germany and "Willy Brandt" ( the first time I've ever played that card as an event) to give me a foothold.

Then the game crashed.

So we hooked up again in the WarGameRoom chat facility and I basically offered him the game but he talked me into playing out the last round. My headline was the dreaded "Red Scare" which reduced the points he could pour into Germany this turn. The first few cards we were just battling for control of West Germany. Then my opponent played "tear down this wall" to give him a free realignment attempt at West Germany. Muscles were tensed, breaths were held and ... it backfired spectacularly as he actually lost influence, giving me control of the country. He'd burned all his best cards and I used my last few cards to minimise US scoring opportunities in other regions and make sure he couldn't get his military ops for the turn. I thought I'd lost it.

When the final scores came in, I winged it by a measly two points, and rejoiced.

So, a great game. But it occurred to me afterwards that there were a few lessons that I ought to take away from the game.

First and foremost, never give up. Watching people in games whose world has collapsed around then get all sulky and throw in the towel has to be one of the most pathetic sights in the world. I've long since learned not to sulk when it happens to me, but to appreciate the fine play of my opponents and enjoy my spectacular demise for the fine gaming spectacle it often is - but I still frequently resort to giving up when it happens, as illustrated by the game above. But I played the last round and snatched victory from the iron jaws of defeat thanks to a combination of luck and poor play by my opponents. Keep going to the bitter end - you never know what might happen.

The second lesson is that this is a fantastic illustration of why random mechanics and thematic games have the ability to create more exciting and memorable gaming moments than more tightly scripted games. A level-headed analysis of the situation would run something like "we played a game for two hours, and a last minute dice roll was a significant factor in determining the final winner". But that's to miss so much - I only pulled out the last minute win because I'd played well enough over the preceding rounds to stay in touch, and in the end, random win or not, we'd both had a fantastic time and come away with a great gaming anecdote to bore our friends with.

And the third lesson is probably the most important lesson in gaming - however viciously, desperately, achingly you want and play for that all-important win what matters at the end of the day is that you had a laugh doing it. A big part of how I learned not to sulk when the players gang up on me or the dice go against me is to remember that my gaming experience is just part of a wider narrative, so if you're going to go down, don't go quietly no matter how pointless your situation is. It might just be that you swing the game in one direction or the other, even if it's not toward you, and it might just be that you pull off the mother of all spectacular collapses or even comebacks that everyone will be talking about for months to come.

This week Matt has been:
Drinking: Oyster Bay 2006 Sauvignon Blanc
Reading: D-Day by Stephen Ambrose
Watching: Black Books
Playing: Twilight Struggle (well duh!)

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.

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.

Playing Games to Make Music to Play Games to

The gaming community has always been associated with Heavy Metal. I can recally an edition of White Dwarf back in the nineties which included a plastic disc of a particularly execrable death metal track by a band called Bolt Thrower. If you look at the boardgamegeek music microbages there's a predominance of metal and rock fan badges. I don't know why it should be so, but it is.

I used to be a bit of a metalhead, a long long time ago, but my musical tastes have broadened significantly since then. While metal can be fun and is good for many things I'm not entirely sure it's much good for playing games to - it's loud, demanding and energetic and tends toward the theatrical instead of the genuinely atmospheric. Sadly for me, the guy who hosts most of our game nights has a nice line in sixties psychedelia and I've spent more game nights listening to the likes of Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens and Pink Floyd than I care to remember. Great artists all, but it's music that needs to be sat and listened to rather than played in the background.

So, having been rebuked on last weeks' column for becoming far too speculative and serious, I thought I'd devote this slot to looking at a few musical styles that I favour as backdrops to Ameritrash gaming nights.

Rap

Semi-autos roar in the building hall
Symptoms of bloodsport, the slugs are still in wall

I used to really hate Rap music until I discovered one day that, like most musical styles, the stuff that gets the most airplay on the TV and the radio are usually the most useless examples of any given genre. I still think a lot of Rap albums are full of filler material but the stuff that stands out is so good that they're worth a spin in any case.

What really surprises me about Rap is that it's pretty much the only kind of music that I find can really generate a latent feeling of threat. Metal tries but it's just pantomime violence - it's so over the top that it's hard to take it seriously. Rap artists on the other hand tend to sound not only like they mean it, but that they've done it before and seen the consequences and the lyrical threat is intensified by the stripped down, sparse nature of the backing music. The past-masters of this are the Wu-Tang Clan who have an ability to sound deadly serious once you've got past the enourmous drag factor the rather comical name. My opening quote on this sector is from a track called Let my Niggas Live from the album The W, is possible the most dense, strangling track I've ever heard in my life. Another track from the same album Careful (Click, Click) manages the same feat. The Wu debut album, 39 Chambers features a number of between-track skits including one where clan members sit around discussing aspects of torture in an off-hand fashion. Next time you have a horror-themed game night, put together a collection of tracks like this for the background instead of the metal and see if it freaks you out as much as it does me.

The natural match up for Rap music in terms of game style though is, of course, gangster games like Blood Feud in New York. For these sorts of games there's plenty of rappers who don't take themselves terribly seriously who can help set the mood. Try something by Cypress Hill for instance with their nice line in cartoon violence which occasionally veers over into genuinely scary stuff, with the shock coming from the sudden contrast. Or, particularly for Blood Feud, check out the Fun Lovin' Criminals and their brand of smug, often highly comical rapping.

A final heads up here is that a number of rap artists have an abiding obsession with Kung-Fu films and the more overt efforts in this genre are great for backing up games with an eastern flavour. Probably my favourite rap album ever belongs in this category - the fantastic Liquid Swords by Wu-Tang member GZA. It contains no filler whatsoever and is packed to the brim with great rapping and memorable kung-fu samples. So good it might even enliven Samurai to the point where it's bearable to play.

Folk

Now they have taken out his heart and stuck it on a spear
They took it to the house of Mar and gave it to his dear

Read that quote again - it's from Sir James the Rose by Steeleye Span - and tell me how it's not 100% Ameritrash? It's got medieval weapons, violence and taunting of the vanquished all packaged neatly in one rhyming couplet. There's vast archives of European folk music that are just like this - filled with history, fighting and supernatural themes. It's just the ticket for fantasy game nights.

For fantasy lovers, it's the overt inclusion of ghosts, monsters, goblins and such that really sells it. The fact that the music was largely written by people who still believed that such things were real lends it a particularly effective edge. There's ever flavour of fantasy you could want here. For a more grisly atmosphere how about the ghostly, ghastly Famous Flower of Serving Men or the murderous protagonist of Long Lankin. Elves (and not the sort of elves Tolkien wrote about) get a number of mentions in songs like Seven Hundred Elves and Thomas the Rhymer. If want more hideous monsters try out the horrible haunt in King Henryor the vile witch Alison Gross.

I also wonder why folk music isn't more popular amongst wargamers given it's strong link to historical material in which battles feature strongly. There are evocative accounts of a huge number of battles from the bloody affair that was the Battle of Harlaw in 1411 all the way up to songs from the First and Second World Wars.

Electronica

Electronic music covers a very broad variety of musical forms, many of which are far too high energy or far too low energy to use as theme music for a game night. However, the lack of lyrics (hence no quote to begin this section) means it makes great background music and the modernist nature of making it means it's eminently suitable to accompany sci-fi games.

I can remember hearing a compilation album called Trance Europe Express which was just taylor made for this kind of experience. A glance at some of the track names - Black Hole, Gravity Pull, The Colour of the Sun - will confirm this. It's a hard album to track down now, but well worth the effort. Another compilation to check out in the same vein is Earthjuice with the 1984-inspired Soma Holiday and the spaced out Universal Message.

Some artists working in this field have released concept albums with a powerful sci-fi theme. Although it's rather on the ambient side, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld by The Orb is a great example - it makes a great partner with Twilight Imperium since the game is engaging enough to keep you awake through the music and the album (a double) is long enough to accompany the games' vast play time. Check out Earth (Gaia) on disc 1, with its Flash Gordon sample for a particularly evocative effort.

*****

I hope that's given you a few ideas for music for your next game night. I'll end with a bonus question - kudos to anyone who can identify the album title that inspired the title for this post - a great album by one of my favourite artists.

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.