Tag: Eminent Domain

Tabletalk: What’s In A Game?

As pleased as I am to see board gaming emerging from basements and grottos to become a more visible and enticing hobby, I think some people still see it as something of an enigma. The average person probably still thinks of Monopoly or Risk when ‘board games’ are mentioned. Thankfully, modern games provide a lot more than dice rolls to keep their action going and players coming back to the table. Let me tell you about a few of those methods.

Worker Placement

Lords of Waterdeep

‘Euros’ are board games that hail from Europe, or that are inspired by the same. They lean heavily away from random chance as a game mechanic, focused more on player choice and limited resources. Gathering those resources often takes the form of worker placement, as in games such as Caylus, Notre Dame, and to a lesser extent Lords of Waterdeep. With a mere handful of representatives on the board, players must claim what resources they can to achieve their goals before the game ends. That’s another feature of euros – many of them have limited turns, adding pressure to the puzzle presented by the board. And with other players competing to complete their puzzle more completely than yours… well, you get the idea.

Deck Building

High Command: Warmachine

Made popular by Dominion and a key feature in games like Eminent Domain, Ascension, Arctic Scavengers and High Command, deck building games present a tableau of choices to their players, letting the participants craft their experience to their liking. The goals for the game may be the same, but they can be achieved through different means. Rather than resources being directly limited by a static board, a stack of cards can get depleted if it proves to be popular. Like worker placement, deck building games do not entertain the possibility of random chance ruining the experience, but rather use it (in the form of players shuffling decks) to spice up the game and keep players coming back for more.

Procedural Boards

Archipelago

Perhaps one of my favorite mechanics of modern board gaming, the type of game that features what I call ‘procedural boards’ places a randomized set of tiles in front of the players and has them assemble the board on which the action unfolds before them at the time of play. This can be a central board, as in Twilight Imperium, Archipelago, Escape! The Curse of the Temple, Mage Knight or Quantum, or it can be in front of the individual player, as in Galaxy Trucker or Suburbia. Not only does this provide the charm of being different every time, it can also allow for other game mechanics to be layered on top with little difficulty. Archipelago, for example, uses worker placement as well as a procedural board, and Mage Knight has elements of deck building.

What other aspects of modern board gaming do you enjoy?

Tabletalk: Your Table’s Real Estate

Courtesy Theology of Games
Courtesy Theology of Games

Space at your common table, be it in your dining room, den, or boudoir, is precious. It needs to be used wisely when it comes to entertaining. You need room for everyone to sit and be comfortable. Room for refreshments is always welcome. Games that occupy the table should make good use of whatever remaining real estate their is, holding the attention of your guests and keeping them involved and interacting. This is one of many reasons why Monopoly sucks – most of its board is full of negative space.

It also never changes. Board games that I’m finding myself thoroughly enjoying have gameplay that varies from session to session. When a galaxy in Twilight Imperium is created by the players around the table, it is going to be completely different from any scenario setup or previous galaxy, adding another element to the strange brew that makes it fun to devote eight hours to a single game. Quantum is similar in that the ‘board’ is mutable and can be altered or changed drastically to change up the experience. Games like Mage Knight, Archipelago, and Escape: The Curse of the Temple take it one step further by making their boards what would be called ‘procedurally generated’: the board is revealed and assembled as you play, guaranteeing a fresh experience every time.

Other games like to decentralize the action. Galaxy Trucker may have a central board to track everyone’s position in the convoy, but all of the real action happens on the players’ individual boards, as meteors and laser blasts render your cobbled-together space truck back into the shoddy spare parts you used to build it in the first place. Suburbia gives each player their own space to build their SimCity-esque metropolis, with its bank and goals in a central location. Seasons may have a calendar in the center of the table and a single, shared scoreboard, but players will be interacting with their own decks, tokens, dice, and boards to manage the careers of their chosen adorable aspiring forest-wizards.

While board games continue to provide new and interesting ways to make the most of your table’s real estate, card games remain some of the most economical entertainment to grace that same area. While deck-builders like Dominion and Eminent Domain centralize the pool of cards players have to choose from in constructing their decks, Boss Monster takes the route of games above that sees players focused on individual areas just as much as the center of the table. Chez Geek and Munchkin encourage players to keep track of both their own area and those of other players as competition for victory becomes more and more rapid and cut-throat. Finally, hidden role games like Bang!, One-Night Ultimate Werewolf, The Resistance: Avalon, and Coup bring the eyes of the players up from the table and into those of the other players, the game play arguably more about bluffing, gambits, and deductive reasoning than any information provided at the center of the table.

Just to reiterate a point made earlier in this post, Monopoly sucks. Its gameplay never changes and its board consumes too much real estate on the table. Many games make better use of the space, even with similarly sized central boards; Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, SmallWorld, Lords of Waterdeep, and Battlestar Galactica are all examples of recent games that require a good chunk of your table’s space but make the most of it by varying gameplay elements, getting players involved and interacting, offering challenges or emergent narrative, and so on. It’s these things that make the game I’ve mentioned well worth the space on your table (and your shelves), and will more than likely bring people back for more, time and again.

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