Eulogy for Middle-Earth

I visit the Fantasy Flight Games website regularly. I am a fan of a good few of their games, so I pop in now and again to see what they are up to. Only recently did I notice something that I probably should have spotted some time ago. Middle-Earth Quest, one of my all time favourite games, is gone – and has been gone for some time. What the hell?

Middle-Earth Quest seemed to have everything going for it: a well known, very much beloved world, a ton of cards both big and small, some really great artwork and a sprinkle of little plastic dudes and dudettes. Simply put, it was absolutely up to par with what FFG has so many of us hooked on, and (with the Middle-Earth licence) a little more.

I remember vividly the day when I brought the box home, I also remember my first games. I would face off against my wife (who was not my wife back then) as Sauron or as a fellowship of heroes, and we would play it almost every day. Middle-Earth Quest completely took over our spare time, occupying evening after evening for a good few weeks. And even now, almost six years later, it still takes over our table on a regular basis.

Image source: BoardGameGeek

There are good reasons why this game became one of our favourites so fast, despite its long playing time and the typical FFG-style rules (something they now do much better), which would make finding this one thing we don’t remember a five minute endeavour. Middle-Earth Quest is beautifully atmospheric, it’s tense, it’s (mostly) very well paced, and it’s surprisingly cerebral. So cerebral in fact, that I now honestly think it was too smart for its own good.

The heroes in Middle-Earth Questt are not expected to blunder around the map in search of monsters to slay and treasures to loot. The development of each character is an element of natural progression and not one of the goals, which will then open up the opportunity to kick the snot out of the main baddie. The players will not be chucking dice. Instead, they will be managing hands of cards, carefully assessing the dangers and shrewdly picking their routes (evading combat whenever possible), so that every step they make will lead them closer to foiling Sauron’s plans and plots. They will have to work together, proving that their fellowship as a whole is more than a sum of its parts. And the Sauron player will have to keep up.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

Now Middle-Earth Quest is gone. There will never be an official expansion we were so much hoping for (against our better judgement). There will be no more heroes, quests, tricks for Sauron. And I keep thinking that this is because Middle-Earth Quest was published before Vlaada Chvatil took to the BGG top ten with his Mage Knight, proving that adventure gaming can be as much of an intellectual challenge, as any Eurogame. That may have recalibrated the expectations that had taken down Middle-Earth Quest just a few years before.

Luckily, nobody will take my copy of Middle-Earth Questt away from me. I’m looking at it on my shelf as I’m writing these words, happy that it still gets to my table. It has astonished me, it has inspired me (and showed me the way I could go myself with Mistfall), it has shown a new way narrative and atmospheric games can go, instead of what seems to be the canon. Middle-Earth Quest, my friend, although you’re dead to FFG, you will live in my heart and – obviously – on my gaming table.

Now, let me take a look at my calendar to set up a meet.

__________________

FIND OUT MORE NSKN official website | Facebook  | BGG

Follow us on Twitter: @NSKNGames

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.

__________________

FIND OUT MORE NSKN official website | Facebook  | BGG

Follow us on Twitter: @NSKNGames

A Road to Adventure

When asked about adventure games, it’s quite easy to give a long list of examples: from the grandfatherly figure of classic Talisman, through its almost carbon copies like Prophecy or the more recent Relic, to progressively more complicated designs like Runebound or A Touch of Evil, the now out of print World of Warcraft: The Board Game and the legendary rules behemoth known as Magic Realm. But what is it exactly that makes them adventure games?

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

According to Robert Harris, the designer of the original Talisman, the game was created as a substitute for Dungeons & Dragons. What might be hard to believe to modern gamers, accustomed to slim designs which take an hour to set up, play and break down to neatly put back into the box, Harris wanted to make a game that would create an RPG-like experience in a shorter time and a more manageable form (one of the key points of this simplification being ejecting the time consuming role of the Dungeon Master).

With that in mind, it's rather obvious why the tropes and decorations for Talisman were ported directly from classic fantasy: it was, after all, a cornerstone of the game that started the whole role-playing genre, in turn spawning numerous board games and then MMOs, the majority of which still favour visiting worlds inhabited by warriors, wizards and dragons over any other. 

Consequently, it comes as no surprise that games are often categorized using their settings, with ones featuring characters, enemies and events known from fantasy literature and movies often falling into the Adventure genre (unless very blatantly being something else).There are admittedly some small deviations, but even some of those science-fiction worlds (like the universes of Star Wars or Warhammer 40.000 used as a setting for Relic) have in fact little to do with science, with their defining stories being much closer to heroic epics than the writings of sir Arthur C. Clarke.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

A fantasy theme, however, does not an adventure game make. The dwarves, axes and quests do not obscure the fact that Caverna is a Eurogame through and through. The theme of travelling around mythical ancient Greece in Venture Forth is nothing more than a theme, with the player able to best optimize their movement being the winner every time. The most important experience of playing Magic: The Gathering is not that of coming into contact with mythical heroes and creatures the decks are so ripe with – it’s about coming into contact with your opponent and crushing them. Playing any of those games is rarely an adventure - it's an optimization task or a duel.

Image source: 
BoardGameGeek

Now, the actual experience of having an adventure is sometimes a difficult one to create. Tabletop role-playing games do the best job here, using the best tool available: the human mind. The imagination of a Dungeon Master creates worlds, characters and surprising twists, exciting the players, and allowing the game world to react unexpetedly to their actions. But how can a board game ever substitute the unpredictability and creativity of a live dungeon master? That is and was simple since 1983 - just use a die or a stack of cards.

After looking at all the games I played, if I were to point to one feature that is prevalent to any game that “feels like an adventure”, I’d probably go with randomness. It is the randomness that allows the game to be different every time. It is the roll of a die that in the end decides of success or failure. It's the flipped card that puts a peril, a stranger or a fantastical event on the road that makes or breaks a hero. Now, am I saying that it is enough to just make your game random, to make it feel like sharing an adventure with a bunch of friends? 

No. But that is something I will have to leave for next week.

__________________

FIND OUT MORE NSKN official website | Facebook  | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine 

Follow us on Twitter: @NSKNGames

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, Dominion, Thunderstone 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.

__________________

FIND OUT MORE NSKN official website | Facebook  | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine 

Follow us on Twitter: @NSKNGames

BoardGames Night Out

Thursday evening in Belgium, after a surprisingly sunny day I met Agnieszka and Andrei and went to the Board Games Shop in Leuven. The place is pretty close to the city center, and the guys there are very friendly and enthusiast about what they do. Of course, how can you not be enthusiast about having a job in a place full of great games? Great games indeed, they had Warriors&Traders both on the shelf and in the demo's room.

We arrived there at around 8 and almost all the tables were full of people playing different games. We were warmly welcomed and invited in the demo's room where we picked our game: Mage Knight.

We heard so many good things about this game that our choice came natural. The game looks marvelous, the already painted miniatures and the map are all pretty amazing. As a design short-coming, I would say that the game is dedicated for people with  excellent vision.

Andrei struggling with the rules :)

The four awesome heroes

We didn't manage to finish our play before the closing hour of the shop, but the two hours spent with the game and the rules convinced us that is a game we want in our collection. Unfortunately, they didn't have it on stock yesterday, so we had to pick something else as our weekly treat. Agnieszka was so excited about this purchase that I cannot wait to play it tonight.

Buying decision "Show me the Dwarfs and I will buy it"