The concept of player elimination is a thing of the past. Unless we’re talking about games that are short, random and light – or about “classics” like Monopoly – straight up elimination is gone from most European and American style games these games. Or is it gone in name only?

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Plastic vs. Wood - Pros and cons of standardizing in board games (III)

Some time ago we started a discussion about standardizing board game components.

Pros and cons of standardizing in board games

Pros and cons of standardizing in board games (II) - Cards

Originally I wanted to debate the pros and cons of plastic vs. wood, as many games offer the design space to choose between these two types of material, but then I realized that was a much to narrow topic. So, let's take a look at plastic and wood and their advantages and disadvantages and where and how do they fit best.

Custom Tokens

One of my first board games was Agricola, a classic and former BGG top ranked game. I was lucky enough to find a copy in Romania back in the day, when board games were as hard to find as gems. A few years later I saw a more recent edition of the same game. With the same rules, the new edition of Agricola triggered a completely different feeling because the token were personalized. The sheep were no longer white-ish cubes but tiny sheep, the grains were no longer yellow discs but little yellow grain-like custom wooden tokens and the cows looked like... cows! And yet the game played just as well with the old tokens.

Do you think that custom wooden pieces add value to a board game? This is the first tough question I want to ask today.

Custom tokens in Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia
source: BoardGameGeek

In my personal opinion they do, but like every good thing, it comes with an ugly hidden part. Custom tokens are more expensive than regular plain old cubes, discs and meeples. The added value is there, but it comes with a cost which is reflected in the final price of the game. Without going through the whole pricing philosophy, I can give you a simple example: Versailles, with an $55 MSRP - a game printed in 6000 copies - would have had an MSRP of $67.5 with custom wooden tokens. 

So it all comes down to this: would you rather pay a bit more for custom wooden token or settle for the lowest possible price and play with cubes and discs?

Before you answer this question, please take a look at Euphoria to see some of the best custom token in a board game. For me that game would not be the same with plain wooden tokens.

Plastic tokens

There's a whole new universe of tokens made of plastic. I personally discovered this rather late, a few years ago and at NSKN we have not taken advantage of this discovery yet.

Plastic tokens
source: plastictoken.co.uk

Regular plastic tokens are significantly cheaper than wooden tokens of the same size. But the key word here is regular. I We could easily replace the wooden resource cubes in Praetor with plastic cubes of roughly the same color. The same for Versailles. But the million dollar (actually just $5K) question is: how would you feel seeing plastic resources in a game about ancient Rome or medieval France for just a few bucks less?

Anyone who has played board games by Martin Wallace will know his "trademark" plastic coins which look a little like the ones in the image above but worse. I personally do not mind them, they seems to add a certain charm and to his games, but I know many who find them "too cheap". On the other hand, the plastic gems in Ascension look and feel great and I don't know anyone complaining about them.

It is probably a matter of taste - whether one likes plastic tokens or not - but they definitely did not become mainstream yet. My bet is on the gaining ground because they are cheaper than wooden tokens, they are even more solid and they can come in almost any color.

There is only one downside: plastic tokens require molds which are expensive, so without making tens of thousands of copies of a game, custom plastic tokens are not really an option.

So, how do you feel about them? Is plastic a real competitor for wood? Would you rather stick to the "classic" cubes and discs or do you see added value in custom tokens, plastic or wooden alike?

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Gaming Lessons

There’s been dozens of discussions, articles and forum posts on what skills one can acquire or develop while playing board games. From making informed decisions based on calculations, assumptions and experience, to teamwork, negotiation, and the ability to cope with defeat, both kids and adults stand to gain (or expand) some abilities that might come in handy in everyday, non-gaming situations. And how about life lessons? 

Image source: BoardGameGeek

One could argue that losing is always a life lesson, as defeat is something that everyone will come to experience sooner or later, and sometimes the reasons for that defeat (especially when they are more than a simple miscalculation) can steer us in the right direction for the future, teaching us to either minimize the negative impact on ourselves, or at least accept it more graciously. Still, is there more board games can teach us?  Are there more complex messages they can convey?

Well, if we take a look at games like Diplomacy or A Game of Thrones, we’ll end up with a few pretty horrible lessons, as victory usually belongs to the person best at lying and most adept at obfuscation. Although, I can also remember a very interesting game of Spartacus, which ended up with the player who would always tell the truth becoming the most successful lanista in Capua, beating everyone else by at least three points. 

Then there are the simplest of ideas, like “Never let your family go hungry!”, which is probably the only life lesson anyone can ever learn from Agricola. Uwe Rosenberg’s classic worker placement teaches us this very effectively, by making it extremely difficult to win, if you ever forget about feeding your kids - and do not have that one special helper that will allow you to literally discard some of the proof of your shame. 

More complex ideas (and on a more serious note) are more difficult or simply more risky to include in a board game. After all, we sit down to have fun, and although some of the more complicated and involved games are able to almost physically wear us out, people are less likely to play a game which might take them out of their comfort zone by touching upon subjects they find difficult, than simply playing one that does not come close to having an important or controversial message. 

Image source: BoardGameGeek

There is also one more problem with board games that may try to make any kind of a statement or make us think about something else than just our final score, and it is a simple, but meaningful obstacle. A game like Tales of the Arabian Nights (as noticed some time ago by Quintin Smith of the Shut Up & Sit Down fame) allows players choices, but seems to reward being a good person (which translates to picking certain options more often) than being a skillful gamer. And although that makes its message (stemming from the message of its source material) clear, it still creates a certain problem. By making some of the choices obviously better than others, it makes for a good story and for a clear message, but it does not necessarily make for a good game. Or does it? 

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No second chance to make a first impression

The theme of a game is something that needs to be considered carefully, as I tried to prove the last time I tackled the topic, pointing to issues that turned out to be somewhat problematic when it came to reception of some games. Sometimes navigating through what rubs players the right or the wrong way turns out to be surprisingly difficult, as a small misstep can make some of our potential customers unwilling to buy our product, regardless of the quality of its mechanisms. So, maybe dropping the theme completely would be a better idea altogether?

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

The obvious answer is, well, no. Themes are there for two important purposes. The first one relates our game to other games already present on the market, allowing it to either stand out, or fall in line with similar products. This is a little bit like sending a message: “If you like games like Puerto Rico or Caylus, you will like this game as well” or “This might tickle your fancy if you like Talisman style fantasy adventures”.

The second purpose is of a seemingly different nature, as it is a more practical one. A theme is something that helps us learn a game. It uses shortcuts that help our brain process all the new information we are feeding it in order to finally sit down and have some fun around a gaming table.

Now, I know that at this point some of you might say that a lot of games do not have a theme and they are doing pretty well. However, even in some of those cases rudimentary theming is often also involved, especially if the game comes with six types of pieces, with each of them using different movement rules (and as a side note: while I would never try to argue that Chess is thematic, once you read The Flanders Panel, you will never look upon Chess the way you had looked at the game before).

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

However, if you try to completely remove a theme from a more complicated (rules wise) game like Agricola, you will quickly see how ungodly difficult it would be to teach it to new people. Just think about trying to make new players remember that the yellow and orange pieces are multiplied through placing them on brown squares (which you first place on green squares), while the white, black and brown pieces are gained through placing them on green squares which need to be either surrounded by your sticks or need to contain a cube of your colour before you are actually allowed to place them, and any multiplication is performed only once every four, three or two rounds.

The two above reasons make some of the most abstract European games, excellent titles like the classic Goa, Shipyard or Yspahan cling to their theme, hoping that even with a significant number of disassociated mechanisms, they will still be able to make use of the ones that make some sense, and give new players a foothold, that will allow them to actually learn the rest of the game.

In short, the theme of the game is there to translate a bunch of complicated mechanisms into a language we can easily understand and relate to something we already know. Farming, building a castle, constructing ships, sending good overseas – all this help us make enough sense of some wooden cubes and some strange symbols to actually have fun while pushing them around a board. And the memory of this process also allows us to choose efficiently while making purchases, which brings us back to relating our game to other games on the market.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

A proper theme of a game announces what we can expect inside the box. A ship, a sheep and a sad guy on the cover will tell us that we will most probably be optimizing our moves, exchanging cubes for other cubes and preparing a nice point salad. A dude with an oversized weapon, a fiery dragon or a charging army will tell us that we will most probably be rolling dice, playing “in your face” cards, putting narration over common sense and relying on both strategy and luck to win the day. Altogether, the box tells us then, if the learning process will be aided by a positive filter, or hampered by a negative one.

Finally, it all boils down to our likes and dislikes yet again. I know a very aggressive gamer, a fan of extremely confrontational games, who suffered through an explanation of Istanbul and ended up really liking the game, after he had powered through the somewhat stunted learning process to appease his wife. I also know a very multiplayer solitaire centred gamer who decided to give Combat Commander just one try and ended up having lots of fun leading her troops, but only after overcoming her aversion to aggressive gameplay and World War II history.

And as much as the above cases tell us that many gamers can actually enjoy games towards which they were initially reluctant, the publishers should probably learn a completely opposite lesson. Because in fact, most people will not play a product they are not fond of right from the start, and with the abundance of games on the market today, no game will have a first (not to mention the second) chance to make a good impression – and very rarely will there be another person around to help with making the first one really count.

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Board Games in Application

The world of board games is no stranger to all kinds of digital aids, which rose in popularity with the introduction of smartphones. Unofficial scoring helpers for games such as Agricola or 7 Wonders, a life and status tracker for Sentinels of the Multiverse or set randomizers for different deckbuilding games seem as natural as a scoring pad or a simple sheet of paper and a pencil. But is this just a novelty or a great shift in gaming?

7 Wonders Scorer by Forrest Wang
(source: https://itunes.apple.com)

If you’ve been to Essen this year, you probably had a chance to play XCom: The Board Game from Fantasy Flight Games. Perhaps you were one of the people who bought Alchemists from Czech Games Edition. And you know that, in essence, both of these games require a digital component to play (with Alchemists introducing a token alternative to having at least one smartphone at the table).

Alchemists has recently been “ran through” by Richard Ham (known and loved by the gaming community as Rahdo). The naturally mouth-watering main part was then supplemented by Rahdo’s opinion on digital components in the runthrough finalthoughts. Suffice to say, that he his attitude was quite positive, with a few very good arguments against all the things people seemed most unhappy about when it came to fusing board games and digital applications.

Alchemists official cover by CGE
(source: BGG)

The truth is that I wholeheartedly agree with most of the points in the video. Making the argument that Alchemists would be unplayable in twenty years, which seemed to surface most often when it came to both the newest CGE outing, as well as when XCom was being discussed, is indeed not a very strong one - especially now, when finding all sorts of digital media from two decades ago seems easier than ever. The same goes for all sorts of “no smartphones” table policies. There is, however, one thing that surfaced in the general discussion – an argument mostly made by all those truly excited about including digital elements in board games.

Alchemists by CGE
Selecting another position
on an iPhone @ Spiel 2014.
(source: BGG)

On a somewhat personal note I should say, that I am not sold on the idea of mandatory application use for my board games. Although I love the social aspect of gaming, I also find the physical aspect of games very appealing. Simply put, I like touching and moving the components, and distancing the player from some of the game elements by putting them behind a touch screen is something I am not crazy about. Still, what the enthusiasts say is that this step allows for introduction of mechanisms simply too complicated or too fiddly to implement in a fully analogue game. And that resonates with me on a completely different level.

From a designer and publisher perspective it might be extremely tempting to start looking closely at the possibility of removing some of the in-game busywork and hiding it within the depths of a simple app. But there are broader implications everyone – those who make games and those who play them – should possibly consider. And it is one of the elements that makes board games what they are today, possibly even being responsible for their growing popularity in a world that seems completely submerged in its digital existence.

The Settlers of Catan cover
(source: BGG)

Since Settlers of Catan made its glorious appearance on the market, paving the way for games very unlike older American titles – complicated, heavy with rules, often convoluted or inconsistent enough to make them very niche products – tabletop gaming was about simplicity. Board game mechanisms can only be so complicated, and beyond a certain level lies a realm of games played only once a year, or only be their greatest and most devoted fans. The trick is – and has been for the last twenty years – to design systems that introduced interesting decisions or simulated complicated ideas in a simple, digestible form.

Make no mistake: introducing digital components to a tabletop game is a great opportunity, but I sincerely do not think that these elements will start taking over board gaming anytime soon for a simple reason. The more complex systems have already ruled the tabletop gaming world and (although still existing and doing well) they failed as its mainstream. Reintroducing them using mandatory apps is a novelty that is probably here to stay, but not dominate the scene. When it comes to high complexity simulations with internal systems hidden away from the players, we already have those: they are called videogames.

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Perfect to a Fault

Last time I talked about how most games can be at least partially broken by exceptionally smart players. And although it may seem that it is the geniuses game designers should aim to please the most, the truth is that they are not the biggest threat to how we perceive games. On the contrary, it is the idiots that should be feared.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

Let me start by saying that I really do not mean to offend anyone – at least not without offending myself as well. The truth is each of us may become a boardgaming idiot from time to time due to various circumstances. In my case, I managed to come through as a complete dumbbell during my first game of Agricola.

It was a few years ago, during a convention, right in the middle of a graveyard shift I was assigned to staff the games room. We started the game around 4.30 and by the time it came to an end, roughly three quarters of my brain bailed on me, deciding that whatever usually governs breathing can hold the fort, while all the other little grey cells will go to sleep. Thus, it should come as no surprise that I scored way below zero, with a single pasture, three bags of wheat and a (probably extremely underfed) pig to show for all my heroic struggles.

I do not remember all of the mistakes I made, but I can easily recall the guy who taught me the game, as he gazed at me triumphantly, counting his precious points, thinking that I was probably somebody’s brother, who (by the looks of him) is a drummer in a thrash metal band nobody listens to, duped into doing a job no sane convention attendee would ever want to just do out of their own volition. So, in short, I was the designated idiot for that game.

So, you're the idiot that ruined that other guy's game.

The real problem with us idiots is that we are also able to break a game – as I clearly broke Agricola for one other player at the table on that faithful night. My erratic movements made it impossible for him to form a consistent strategy and between me doing random things and the game teacher performing at the peak of his abilities, that other player felt that the game structure gave him no chance to do anything significant, thus deeming it vastly underwhelming, if not outright broken.

All of that meant that by performing erratically, making really silly moves, doing what no intelligent player would ever do I transformed the game (for one player) into an excruciating experience, either by testing the mechanisms until they finally give way, or by making the game underperform severely due to my inconsistency and counter productiveness. And although it should be easy to differentiate between an experience of suffering through a game diminished by poor player decisions, and a broken design, the reality is that often it simply is not. And I am pretty certain of that, being a few times on the business end of such an unpleasant experience.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

This is exactly what happened to me with Mag*Blast, a light card game about shooting lasers and making silly noises, right after it was played with two people who decided to make it a full on strategy game, killing the fun for everyone else and proving that there was one clear way of winning the game. A similar thing happened to my wife, as she played Garden Dice with someone who decided to adapt a strategy as aggressive as humanly possible, which meant that, while having no chance at achieving victory, he made the whole game a painful slog for everyone else at the table.

Now, I would lie if I said that there is no space between the idiots and the geniuses. There is and most of us actually inhabit it on a daily basis. It is full of people smart enough to understand and play board games proficiently, but either not quite as bright as the brightest, or just never bothered to calculate and optimize everything, choosing to go with their gut for the sake of what they perceive as fun. And it is this exact group most designs should probably be aimed at.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that dumbing down is the way to go, as this is not what gamers expect and, for obvious reasons, appreciate. What I am saying is that a game should strive to be fun even if not all moves are optimized, because it will mostly work in an imperfect environment. It will never be idiot-proof, as destroying a game is sometimes as simple as swapping the original objectives for a set of few arbitrary ones (like becoming “the master of all wizards” in Lords of Waterdeep, or deciding to never trade in Settlers of Catan) or just being dead tired. But a design should be able to withstand some sub-optimal play without immediately handing over the victory to whoever uses a strategy that can be countered only with a very specific response, executed flawlessly and perfectly timed.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

What I am also not saying is that games for the exceptionally smart should be immediately discarded. However, we need to remember that they have a tendency to be misjudged by gamers not willing to delve deep enough. A prime example of such a misunderstood game is The Great Zimbabwe, which has an amusing feature of becoming longer with every subsequent play. The first games will usually be surprisingly short, won by a player who manages to seemingly break the game by introducing a strategy that seems unbeatable. That might earn the game a “broken” status right out of the gate and move it from the shelf to the trade pile, without giving it a second chance.

It is only later that players discover that there is a counter for every possible approach and that the first victories are usually a matter of other players’ negligence rather than anyone’s superior performance. But that requires everyone to be willing to play The Great Zimbabwe again, and that, as my own experience clearly indicates, is by far not a given.

So what should a designer do in order to make a game that would satisfy the most people? In a perfect world, he or she should aim at the brightest, hoping the rest will see how solid their design really is. In the real world, aiming for the smartest gamer should also be acknowledged, just as much as remembering that a game should be attractive to all others – even some of the idiots. After all, we learn, we become smarter, we sleep off the wear and tear of pulling an all-nighter at a convention or we are told to stop acting like a jerk – and we become the masters of the games we enjoy the most. But for this to happen, we also need a chance to enjoy the game right from the start, even if we err on our way.

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The Agent and the Narrator

According to an old joke about Talisman, the first prototype of the game was actually a single six-sided die. The players would sit down staring at it for four hours, and then roll off to see who won the game.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

Obviously, the joke is still being told by the people who do not enjoy the overall experience offered by the cult classic. They seem uninterested in the heroic stories created by hours of rolling dice, moving around the board and then either drawing a card, or... rolling more dice. And it does not necessarily mean that they hate wizards, dragons and magical swords (although some of them actually do). What it does mean is that they are unsatisfied with the level of agency offered by the game.

Last week I said that a certain level of randomness seems to be a required element of any adventure game. I think we can agree now that if everything can be weighed and measured before the game, there will be no adventure – only an exercise in optimization or, in other words, a German style game. Randomness is, obviously, not only an element of an adventure game. Even Agricola randomizes some of its elements, but only up to a certain extent. The players are first treated to a random distribution of cards, and during the game they have to take into account the fact that the appearance of some action spaces is random – although this randomness is also very limited.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

It is actually quite easy to get randomness right in a Eurogame. Just remember a simple rule: randomness first, decisions later. Shipyard introduces this element by giving players scoring tiles before the game, just like Lords ofWaterdeep which – although plagued with the quest cards random draw which felled many a strategy – supplies each player with a lord card that tells them what they will score points for.

Adventure games are, however, slightly more difficult to calibrate. In optimization games agency is king – but it is narrating a story that adventure games are all about. And here, it seems, erring on the side of caution means that it is better to make a game more random, than one that can be fully planned from the first turn and then flawlessly executed. Does that mean that all adventure games will inevitably boil down to, more or less, Talisman clones?

Certainly not, as some designers have already proven – with Mage Knight being the most recent example of an adventure game that really puts the player in the driver’s seat, while sometimes heavily taxing their little grey cells. What is important to take note of here: randomness is not gone, but it still precedes all decisions made by a player on their turn – just like in many Eurogames.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

As a fan of games with a clear narrative arc, I enjoyed my time with Mage Knight, just as much as I enjoyed a few dozen games of Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, where a random card draw created challenges for players to deal with using their custom made decks and (on a more turn-by-turn basis) their hands of cards. I was, however, surprised that many adventure game fans had a completely different view of those two games, finding them dull, too complicated or simply “not really adventure games”.

All in all, getting an adventure game design right is not only about creating a set of working mechanisms, but about (and perhaps even more so) balancing the player agency and the game’s narrative aspect. It is obvious a single design will not satisfy every gamer, which makes this balancing act, ever interesting from a design standpoint - and exciting for gamers open to experiencing new ideas within their favoured genre.

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Board games - between art and engineering

Source: www.123rf.com

Some may argue that designing a board game is not art, it is simply the process of dressing up a mathematical structure with a theme and the few tweaks that make the game interesting can be easily added during play-testing. If you play Uwe Rosenberg's Agricola you will most likely have the peculiar feeling that the game has been engineered o be perfectly balanced, still offering enough options that no two games are alike.

The whole genre of German (or Euro) games are usually almost luck independent, they challenge only the wit and skills of the players and the more you play the better you are. In a typical Euro-game, it is quite unlikely for an experienced player to be defeated by a newbie. Therefore, we may safely say that most Euro-game have an engineered engine, a mathematical model which is usually nicely hidden behind a village or town building like theme to make it more attractive to light gamers and families.

However, those of you who have played lots of Euro-games know already that there are hardly two games alike - I am talking here about the good games, not about cheap clones - and that every game challenges you in a different way. If you know how to win Agricola, you won't be able to apply the same 'algorithm' for Puerto Rico, Trajan or Ora et Labora. As a game designer myself, I must argue against the assumption that most Euros are a nice cover for simple (or complex) maths. I am not saying that there isn't a core based on an algorithm, most good games have that, I am simply stating that there's a lot more to making a game than the maths behind it.

You may have noticed that the best games out there are innovative in at least one way. This is where art or inspiration comes in. It's not enough to be a good engineer and apply optimization algorithms to have a good game. You might end up with a perfectly balanced game, but to achieve the holy grail (new + fun + balanced) you need a drop of ... something else. Innovation is not as easy to describe and quantify, but I will give it a try. When Puerto Rico was launched, it brought something that most player have not seen before, the mechanism of the common action chosen by the active player, executed by everyone. This was the new and brilliant touch that pushed Puerto Rico to the top of gaming charts. In Terra Mystica (best Euro I have ever played) it's difficult to pin-point a single innovation that makes the game great. If I had to choose, I would go with the way the theme integrates with the game mechanisms. I don't know how the authors worked this game, but I notice the result. Terra Mystica does not feel at all like two separate parts, the algorithm and the theme, it feels like an inseparable integrated body. Each race has one or more unique abilities and it also comes with deviation from the standard costs vs. advantages. However, each race feels so solid that I could not have imagined it having different abilities. Designing this game is definitely a combination between art and engineering, because the game a whole is balanced without being boring and each race is unique without being overpowered.

Let's take a look to a different genre, the Ameritrash games. In my opinion, most of these games are leaning more towards the art side. To make a successful game of this genre, you need inspiration above all. You need to have a story, an universe that sucks people. Of course you will also need solid game mechanisms, but the theme dictates the mechanisms and not the other way around.

Regardless of its type, whether it is thematic, family or strategy, any game is a mix of inspiration and hard work. The hard work is usually on the engineering side, when you bust you brains to balance resources or to quantify different paths to victory but the small tweaks that make a good game great are always the fruit of inspiration. In my opinion, making a game is just as much art as it is engineering because you need to be creative to make a board game but you also need to develop a technique of development to make the game playable and balanced.

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