Thursday, July 31, 2014

Deckbuilding the Genre

I remember 2008 mainly for two things: the somewhat quirky apartment I was living in at the time and a new gaming craze that seemed to be taking over gaming space everywhere any was available. The craze was called Dominion, and it was spreading like a surprisingly fun virus with the sickness heralded not by sticky coughing and thunderous sneezing, but by silent rustle of a shuffled deck of cards.


Image source: 
BoardGameGeek
I did not stick with the strange apartment, but the base set of Dominion is still on my gaming shelf. The worn out money cards remind me of literally hundreds of games played and all the people around me that had fun with the game. Donald X. Vaccarino’s ingenious child left an impression on many gamers, grew with new expansions and, probably even more importantly, created a new genre of games, with many designers jumping on the opportunity to use this new and hip thing called deckbuilding.

The gaming world needed to wait less than a year to see other deck builders emerge, with AEG’s Thunderstone arriving with probably the biggest splash. The fantasy dungeon romp brought what many people missed in its predecessor: a stronger theme, a flavour and a slightly lower level of dissociation of game mechanisms with what they were supposed to represent; but it also lost some of Dominion's smoothness in the process. Now, six years after Dominion first conquered the gaming market, dozens of deckbuilders inhabit our gaming shelves and it is clear that the genre spawned by Vaccarino’s creation is here to stay – and evolve.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek
Thematically wise, DominionThunderstone and many others offered no explanation as to why the mechanism is there – nor did they need one, as building decks, shuffling and playing cards was so much fun, nobody would ask what the system is supposed to simulate. Over time however, designers started to either associate deckbuilding with a specific phenomenon it was supposed to depict in their games, or use it as only one of the elements of gameplay, re-implementing, re-mixing and crossing new boundaries to use all deckbuilding has to offer, succeeding or failing in the process.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek
A great example of the above is the tragically flawed A Few Acres of Snow by Martin Wallace – a game, where the growing deck simulated the difficulties a French or English leader had to face while waging war and colonizing at the same time, having to whip their growing, unruly empire of towns and traders into battle-ready submission. The game succeeded almost flawlessly in employing deckbuilding as an abstraction of a specific process – and failed utterly in balancing the two sides of conflict, making it a broken, but nonetheless beautiful thing.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek
Finally, we also have games that use deck building as just another element of the puzzle, which do not revolve solely around building a strong deck and make players focus on things other than what next will they buy and discard. Vlaada Chvatil’s Mage Knight serves a great example of how the mechanism can be both prevalent and yet not the centrepiece of an engaging, deeply thematic game. Ryan Laukat’s Cityof Iron proves that deckbuilding has its place in more traditional German style games. Mac Gerdts’ excellent Concordiawalks away from deckbuilding, becoming a fascinating exercise in area control and managing a deck-sized hand of cards.


With its popularity and incredible potential, deck building is something all “people of gaming” should keep an eye on, as there are still opportunities of putting it work in new and interesting ways – or to build upon the simple idea that became a great game, a craze, a genre and finally, a new cornerstone for the games to come.

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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Cardboard Olympus Part IV: A Matter of Faith

Do you remember Black & White – an old video game created by Peter Molyneux? If you don’t, let me refresh your memory. In Black & White you play as a god, invoked into being by prayers of a family hoping for a miracle to save their drowning offspring. As time passes, your task is to make more people believe in you, for your powers – and your avatar – grow with the unwavering faith of new believers.

Image source:
BoardGameGeek
What does this all have to do with board games and the BoardGameGeek ranking? Well, as I previously said, entering the Cardboard Olympus requires a powerhouse publisher and a well known designer (besides an excellent game, which should go without saying). If all that is true however, how is it possible that Twilight Struggle is and has been the number one for some time now?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that GMT Games is in any way lacking, but if we compare it to Wizkids, Asmodee or Fantasy FlightGames, it is still relatively small, with substantially smaller print runs. Now, it is true that Twilight Struggle has been the all-time bestseller for GMT, but if you compare the number of boxes sold to Agricola, you will see how vastly less popular Twilight Struggle actually is. Since we know that just being a great game is not enough to justify a godly position, there must be something more to the seeming miracle of a political wargame reigning supreme over mages, knights, farmers, colonists, dwarves, mystical lands and power grids.

And there is - the loyalty of the people who play games published by GMT Games. Anyone who is a fan of this publisher, knows that it has a business model that used to be quite unique. A game goes through a period during which the fans can look at its prototype components, read designer diaries, ask questions and possibly even become play-testers, and decide to pledge a fixed sum of money towards the game, which guarantees them a copy, if the game is ever produced. If enough pledges are gathered in the time allotted, the game goes to the printers.

The above system is called P500 and if you’re seeing some similarities to Kickstarter, then you are absolutely right. This is why I said this business model used to be unique. It still is actually, but not as much as when GMT started using it years ago, when crowd-funding was merely a glint in somebody’s eye. Still, even now it brings something very unique to the table: a sense of participation and loyalty, usually associated with either the largest and oldest companies, or those who really know how to work their crowd-funding magic.

Obviously, P500 has one more advantage: it lowers the financial risks of publishing a game. However, from the BoardGameGeek ranking perspective, it creates something even more important: the willingness of the fans to invest themselves in the project. And this investment means that they will buy, play, talk and be more disciplined and eager when it comes to rating a game on BGG.

“Hold on a moment”, a hear you ask, “does that mean that a place on the Cardboard Olympus can be secured merely by fans who are a vocal minority?” Well, yes… in a way. Although you may also say, that it’s more of a proof of how much passionate fans can do for a relatively unknown, but nonetheless excellent game. That is why one should never underestimate the power of a happy community of followers, for becoming a cardboard deity is not only a matter of cold calculations but also, to a reasonable extent, truly a matter of faith.

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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

A busy summer

A few week have already passed since our Kickstarter campaign for Progress: Evolution of Technology finished. We have been relentlessly working on the final files for production and this cause our week of silence. Now this silence is over because the manufacturing process has starter and we're glad to announce that everything we planned is still on schedule.


The tech tree file for approval
Our Kickstarter project has drawn quite some media attention and for those of you who can speak Romanian, here is an article in one of the most popular Romanian newspapers about Progress and the Polish-Romanian team who managed to pull this off.


Agnieszka and Andrei on the cover of the article in "Gandul"
The ink has barely settled on the first print run of Praetor - this is a slight exaggeration, of course - and we're already preparing a second print run in English. The original 7500 copies are in stores around the world, according to our estimation currently in 33 countries on 5 continents.

On Wednesday evening (8:00 PM EST) we will hang out with Ryan from Cardboard Republic talking about Praetor and the future plans of NSKN Games. You are welcome to join us...https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/c5k4dqtbjinsljdnh9j3ebfj3qk

Last but not least, about one month ago during TIG Con we had an interview with our Bulgarian friends from the most popular local blog. No need to get scared, all the questions and answers are also in English...




And for those of you who do speak Bulgarian, here is the link to the local article
http://bigboxgamers.com/interview-andrei-novac-nskn/.

Oh... since we haven't spoken about Exodus in a while, a friend has found it in a games store window in Utrecht, the Netherlands, surrounded by quite some other impressive titles...


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