Dark Souls without Its Souls: Rewards versus Consequence

I do love Demon's Souls and Dark Souls for many, many reasons. Over time, however, one curious notion kept picking at my brain: what if these games got rid of their currency? What if Dark Souls had no souls?

Selling Point

For those of you who do not know, Dark Souls and its predecessor have this notorious game mechanic that plays off gathering currency from the slain. If you slay a monster, you get souls. You spend souls to increase your avatar's statistical strength or to trade with merchants. It's currency. The problem (and the root of the notoriety) is that when you die in Dark Souls, all the unspent souls you were carrying drop at the location of your character's death, and you have to run all the way back to this death-spot to reclaim this currency. Did you die before getting back to where you were? You just lost all those souls to a newly-made death-spot.

Demon's Souls got a lot of its popularity through word of mouth. I like to think the dialogue between the mouther to the mouthee goes generally goes like this:

“Dude, this game is hard!”

“How hard is it?”

“When you die, you lose all your experience!”

“Woah! That's brutal!”

Maybe this discourse is a little crude, but if you boil down all the reviews and summaries of Demon's Souls (and Dark Souls), they will always return to the point of souls. When you die, you lose your souls. That just sounds harsh. I think that gamers do like a challenge, despite what publishers seem to believe. When they hear that this game is hard and hear just how hard it is thanks to this nice concrete example, a surprisingly large amount of players are drawn towards the siren's song Demon's Souls sings. And it always starts with the souls.

There is, however, that nagging question in my mind: what if the Souls games had no souls? It may be strange for me to ask this. After all, Demon's Souls gained a huge amount of popularity from its harsh selling point: you lose your souls when you die. Before I try to answer my question, I must back up and answer another one. Why would I want Dark Souls to have no souls?

Grind

I am not annoyed that I lose my souls, this currency, when my character dies. I failed to play at the level the game wanted me to play at. That is fine. What annoys me, however, is that there is even a currency to begin with. If you want to make your avatar stronger, you need to collect souls. If you want to buy new armor, you need to collect souls. You need to keep collecting and collecting if you want to be rewarded with those fancy new items or higher numbers. What this creates is a situation where players will keep killing the same monsters over and over again to collect enough money (because that is all these souls are) to buy what the feel they need to progress, or at least buy what they feel would be cool to own. This is grinding. This is bad.

The worst part about the grinding in Dark Souls is how illusory the necessity of it is. Simply put, you do not ever need to grind in Dark Souls. When they start failing in the game, people think they need to to level up (and thus grind) to beat the boss. The truth is they just needed to beat the boss. Dark Souls is paced so you do not need to repeat content to progress, as long as you play well enough to beat the challenges presented to you.

Despite being titular, the souls are not what makes these games. The souls are just a facade hiding a robust and complex game system of exploration and combat. With a currency system you are led to believe this is a game about collecting the currency to progress. That is not what it's there for, and I feel the Souls series suffers for this misdirection. I know there could be a game here that could do without the currency system, and it would be glorious.

Guaranteed Progression

What would the Souls games look like without their souls? I actually think the games could be akin to Super Metroid from days of yore, where upgrades were obtained via finding items in the world. Imagine Dark Souls where all of your upgrades were obtained solely through items that were either guaranteed to be dropped by special defeated enemies (bosses and mini-bosses) or found as treasure laid out through the world. Now, progression is not necessarily based on these upgrades (Dark Souls relies on key-like items mostly), but finding items through exploration just feels so much more rewarding than spending needless time repeating the same monster-slaying over and over!

I yearn for this game. Or at least, a game like this. The combat of the Souls games and the guaranteed rewards of a Metroidvania together would be my dream game. Except for one thing.

What Is Lost

There is one major ramification for taking out currency in these games. The souls in these games do have a purpose; it may not be the one you expect. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are games about the failure and the accomplishment of surpassing these failures. The souls, as much I harp on them, accentuate every failure. The games would not feel half as unforgiving as they present themselves to be without the feeling that you are losing something every time you die. Currency and the loss of it gives tension to the game; every venture into the world comes at the risk of losing your hard-earned souls upon failure.

That you gain souls is not important. That you can collect cash is trivial. What is so important about souls, what is so essential, is that you can lose them. Loss is key. Without loss, there is no consequence for your failure. Resetting at checkpoints is old news and is not enough. It has been done plenty of times and doesn't carry the impact that actually losing what you have collected can bring.

That is the dilemma. With currency Demon's Souls and Dark Souls entice players into the trap of grinding. Without souls Demon's Souls and Dark Souls lose their oh-so-vital tension of risk and fear of failure. There needs to be something you can lose to keep the appeal of the game, but what? Honestly, I don't know. The thing you lose must be easily collected, ultimately trivial, but important enough to give the illusion of consequence.

Solutions?

Maybe, just maybe, there can be compromise. What if souls were still there, random drops were there, but everything you could gain from these currencies could be obtained through items in-game. Have items that directly increase stats permanently, free level-ups. Give the player ways to upgrade their character that do not require spending currency but instead require exploration and skillful play. Give health increases after beating bosses. Have power-ups strewn across the landscape. Still have souls as a viable way to increase your avatar strength, but make it not the only way. This could keep that tension and consequence for your actions, but at the same time knowledge and skill is rewarded more than grinding is. I don't think this is the perfect answer, but it is better than the current currencies.

Ultimately, there needs to be some sort of soul reward (i.e. something you can lose) in these Souls games, but what makes the series so great is what you can acquire outside of grinding—the true reward.

Amateur Hour: A Boardgame Design Story

I have been working on a boardgame off and on (I am currently in the ‘off’ phase) for what must have been the past two years or so. That may sound like a lot of time, but let me emphasize the “off and on” bit. My work with this has been spotty to say the least. I am making this game for fun, and frankly I have very little incentive to work on this other than for my own enjoyment.

With that out of the way, making a boardgame is great! With no need to program or mess with a computer, you can make something relatively quickly and get very immediate feedback!

Let me tell you about my boardgame! It is a tactical game set on a square-grid where you summon fantasy monsters to fight and destroy your enemies’ bases. Think of a mix between a tactical-RPG like Final Fantasy Tactics, a variable card game like Magic the Gathering and the motions and game space of Chess. Key features include a base that you can move around and use to summon monsters, a monster “pool” that all players take from to pick their armies, and umm…moving monsters (the pieces) around on a grid. There is a battle system, a light build-your-army mechanic, and some features that try to facilitate smooth play. All of this probably sounds like a lot of gibberish, and frankly most of these features do not make any sense without going into a little more detail. Without further ado, let’s go into further detail!

A Brief Look at the Boardgame I Have Yet to Name

Ah, that’s right: I don’t have a name for my game yet. I was thinking of something like Clash of the Summoners (or maybe jokingly call it Sorcery: the Summoning), but I would rather worry about the name of the game after I feel done with the damn thing. I am far from done with it, but I will get into that later. For now, we will call this game Boardgame.

Boardgame is a tactical game. What does that mean? It means it is like Chess (or one of my favorite games of all time, Dungeon Twister). You move pieces over an area, in this case a square grid. Much of the game is about area control and situating your pieces over the right positions on the board. In Boardgame, you have a lot of pieces you could potentially control (currently up to 17 pieces of your own on the board at once). At some point, having enough pieces on a board would turn this from a tactical game to a war game, a game where you control a large army over an area, but I would say due to the smaller scale of Boardgame this is a tactical game.

Unlike Chess (but like Dungeon Twister), there is a combat mechanic in Boardgame beyond “bump into a piece and win.” If you have a piece in range of an enemy piece you can engage in combat, which is very similar to a Magic the Gathering style of combat. Your piece has a combat value; you deal damage to the enemy based on this value. If the value is equal to or greater than the enemy combat value, that enemy is defeated and taken off the board. You can have group battles, which is actually a big part of the game due to the large amount of pieces on the board, and there are rules for that system. I won’t go into those mechanics here; this is only a preview after all.

Another element in Boardgame, one that I think makes it kind of neat and unique, is an army-building mechanic. This mechanic is similar to drafting cards in a collectible card game, except the drafting is part of the actual game instead of an outside meta-system. Each ‘army’ in the game (a type of unit), is given a drafting card. During the course of play players take drafting cards and officially ‘own’ that army, making it so only they control the pieces of that army and no one else has control of it. I like this mechanic a lot because it allows for me to add tons of weird pieces to the game without worrying about having specific team colors. It also adds these elements of thinking ‘which army will work best against the other player’s army?’ and ‘how can I cut off the enemy player’s build with what I choose?’ But mainly I like the idea of taking all my left-over miniatures from long-lost boardgames and having them fight each other.

The goal of Boardgame is to destroy your enemy’s (enemies’) base. The base is where your new units are placed on the board. The base can also move around, but it cannot defend itself or attack. That is what units are for. The base is equivalent to ‘the player’ in Magic the Gathering. It is the ultimate target that you must build your army to kill. You must defend your base with units like you must defend ‘the player’ with creatures in Magic, and you must attack the enemy base with units like you must attack ‘the enemy player’ with creatures in Magic.

That is the gist of Boardgame. Build an army, move army around to kill enemy base while defending yours. Now that you might have some basic understanding of what the game is about, I should talk about the history of this game and the changes I have made. I will do this…now.

The History of Boardgame and the Changes I Have Made

Two years of boardgame-making, despite being ‘off and on’, is a lot of boardgame. I have revised, edited, adjusted, balanced and revised this game dozens of times by now. Going into every single change would be far too in-depth and would require more words than I have time to write. A simple history will suffice.

The game started out with the choose-your-own-army mechanic, destroy-the-base goal, combat-values, and something I ended up scratching: dice-as-money. When I started out there was a lot wrong with Boardgame, and I wasn’t surprised. Of course there would be a lot to improve upon with my first build of the game! As a result, I tweaked the game. Then I tested again. Then I tweaked again, tested, and so on.

What I learned was that having dice did not work with the system I set up. I wanted to have dice in the game because I wanted to somehow incorporate all my table-top junk (miniatures and dice) into one system, but I didn’t want to have luck-mechanics like card-shuffling and dice-rolling. Guess what? Dice in a boardgame are meant to be rolled. Ultimately I had to choose between adding luck to my game or removing dice. I chose the latter.

Another problem I faced was movement. Boardgame has a player controlling on average about a dozen units on the board. How do you keep track of how many squares of movement all these pieces can move without being tedious and slowing the game down? I had tackled with this problem for a while. If you have a pool of movement points, moving multiple units takes far too long and moving one unit is far too easy. Ultimately I decided to add a new mechanic to the game: grouping units into a “squad.” A Squad is represented by a square tile. You place units you want to move onto the Squad, and move the Squad as if it were one unit. This allows me to keep track of moving units without too much busy work and also allows for some interesting mechanics with how you group pieces together.

The next big issue I faced was victory conditions. At first I had it so whoever destroyed the other players’ bases won. The problem with this elimination-style goal is that players who lose early suddenly are kicked out of the game, and this game has not been short. Elimination works for short games mostly, but for anything longer than 30 minutes makes sitting around and waiting for other players to finish really freaking boring. Not to mention, elimination-based games could go on at a very variable rate depending on how the game goes. Stalemates can happen in this scenario. Frankly, I am still working on this problem. I want to find a victory condition that gives the game a fixed time limit, but so far I have not found a system that I am satisfied with. I will let you know how this goes.

The last thing I have changed throughout the game’s history, of course, is the balance. Units that are in play, how fast the units move, how good they are in battle, what abilities they have, all of this has been changed an innumerable amount of times. Balance is the number one thing I have struggled with in Boardgame, for good reason. There are ton of variables in Boardgame, and all of them have to be tweaked to a point where the game is fair and unbroken. THIS IS HARD. I do not think I will ever be finished with balance; I can only hope to bring it to a point where I am satisfied with how the play of the game turns out.

Things I Have Learned About Making Boardgames from Making Boardgame

This section is just going to be a bunch of little tidbits I have found to be true thanks to my time spent making Boardgame. Take this knowledge with a grain of salt. I am an amateur with making games; these are just things I feel are important from my paltry amount of design experience.

Keep things moving

Downtime, time where a player is doing nothing, kills a game. It is your job as a designer to kill downtime. Two major things cause downtime: busywork and analysis death. Any time a player is fiddling around with pieces when they could be doing an action relevant to the gameplay is bad. Analysis death is also bad. Giving a player too many options can melt brains and slow a game to a crawl (although sometimes you want a great thinking game, like Chess, so A.D. is somewhat tricky to work around).

Buff > Nerf

When hearing about a change in game balance you will hear two words more often than others: buff and nerf. Buff is a term for making some element in the game more powerful, and nerf is the opposite, decreasing the power of some element. While sometimes a nerf is unavoidable, I always prefer buffing what I can far, far more than nerfing elements of my game. Buffing game elements makes for more exaggerated gameplay; people (at least me) like controlling more powerful elements rather than having less power and control. If something is fun but stronger than other elements of the game, the solution is not to cut that fun element out. The solution is to make the other elements better.

Do not get attached to the game

This one is hard. It is hard to realize an idea you have been tinkering with for weeks or months or longer will not work out, and it is even harder to part with that idea. The ability to critical of your work is probably the most important skill a designer can have. To know when something isn’t working and to know when to edit your creation is an invaluable skill. Do not get attached.

BALANCE, BALANCE, BALANCE

Easily the most time I have spent designing this game has been devoted to tweaking numbers to make sure no one thing is too good a strategy over other ways of play. It is vital, vital, to balance your game. In order to have variegated and engaging play you need the pieces of your game to fit together properly. You cannot have something be too strong or too weak.

The devil is in the details

This is closely related to balance. Most of the time you spend balancing, which itself is the most time-consuming activity I have come across, is going over the details of your game. The most problems you will have will be because you did not finely tune the little details in what you are making. I learned this lesson the hard way, and I am still learning this lesson. Keep a close eye on the details of your project, or they will end up biting you in the ass.

Keep players involved

This tidbit ties in with keeping things moving. Do not let the players spend too much time twiddling their thumbs. Ideally there should be no time where the player has to sit and wait for other players doing nothing. There should always be something the player can be doing, even if it is simply thinking about what their next move should be (i.e. if you are going to keep the player from actively participating then at least make your game complicated enough to keep a player thinking).

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

What an ancient truth! Do not try to change something if it works. Of course, what is “broken” can be subjective, and “fixing” a problem can often create new problems. That’s why you don’t fix what is not a problem. This is a simple but important axiom both in game design and in life.

The best answer is the simplest one

Overcomplicating things is bad when you can get the same things done in a simpler manner. Especially when you are dealing with a boardgame it is important to cut down on fluff that detracts from the experience you are trying to deliver. You are not working with computer that can keep track of huge amounts of processes. You have a board and people who can move stuff around. Keep it simple, stupid.

Keep the game on the board

Kind of close to the last tidbit, try to keep the core of the game at the center of attention. Do not let the rules stray too far from the play area. That will lead to people having to keep track of unnecessary stuff in their head when they could be spending time thinking about strategy and tactics and all that good stuff.

Offense > Defense

Not just a lesson for the player to know, you as a designer should keep the game lively and engaging. Defense is not good for this. Defensive play can lead to boring, repetitious moves, is not fun to watch, and will result in stalemates more than victories. Make sure to reward offense over defense, or the game gets boring fast.

Busywork is an actual thing you need to worry about

It may be easy to shrug off little bits of fiddling with pieces as okay, but it is vital to reduce the amount of work the player has to do to act. Try to make everything you can as painless as possible to get working. Don’t make a die a counter: it’s hard to find the right number to keep track of and stalls the game. Don’t make it hard to keep track of how many moves you have left on your turn. Busywork is bad and needs to be kept at a minimum!

Know technical writing or have someone else who knows

Want your rules to be clear and concise? Then you will want to know how to write a technical document. That is what your rulebook is. All game designers should take up this skill. It is damn useful to be able to convey to players how to play your game.

Elimination format games have problems in long play

Monopoly has a big problem: you can knock a player out of a game that lasts hours. What the hell are they going to do for that time? Eliminating is essentially making that player have nothing but downtime for the rest of the game. DOWNTIME IS BAD.

Listen to your playtesters!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It may seem like the comments from the people playing your game are wrong, but chances are you are the one who is wrong. Listen to the people playing your game. Observe how they play your game. Do not force them to take an action you think they should do; see what the players will do with the game you just gave to them. Playtesting is a vital part of making a game, and you need other opinions to keep yourself from being too biased towards your game. Remember that spiel about not being attached to your game? That’s what playtesters can help with. Do not ignore them.

Clarify your ruleset

This goes with knowing technical writing, but you need to make sure your rules are clear. How can people play your game if they do not understand what to do?

Be wary of new rules

Similar to “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” new rules are dangerous. Only implement new rules and mechanics if you think they are absolutely needed. Nine times out of ten, more than that probably, new rules bring new problems to the table. Do not go happy-go-lucky with adding tons of features or else your game will collapse into a mess of issues.

“Fun” > Perfect Balance (?)

Symmetrical, totally fair games are not the best thing in the world if they have no engaging play. Before balancing the game (even though balance is utterly essential), make sure the game is actually worth playing. When you’re far into making your game, it is easier to tweak numbers than it is to make something boring interesting.

Conclusions

Well, actually, this game is not finished yet. I need to revise, rebuild, and rewrite tons of stuff before I feel I will be ready to try to make a final product. So really, this game, Boardgame, is to be concluded at a later date. I still need to make a good name for crying out loud! I hope you found what I have learned so far to be interesting, and hopefully this will help you if you think to make a (board)game of your own. It is a rewarding experience.

So I've been streaming a lot!

This is just going to be a quick blurb to give a notice to anyone who may follow this blog (ha!) but haven't been following my justin.tv channel (well, twitch, but whatever). Basically instead of blogging I've been streaming! I note when I'm going live on my twitter feed, so keep an eye on that if you're at all interested in watching me play games and comment on my playing of games.

And to anyone who reads this blog AND watches my stream, you are awesome. Keep it up!

(stream link here)

Boardgame Roundup Part 5: Final Thoughts

Now that I've covered the extent of my boardgame collection, now is a good time to recollect and present some thoughts as to what was good, what was bad, and whatever else.

While early on I enjoyed the simple games, I think I always favor the more complicated, tactically rich games. This doesn't mean a game has to be complex rules-wise to entertain me, but the gameplay needs to have depth for me to have the most fun. This need for complexity has a limit I suppose; I don't want a game that takes days or weeks to learn and play. But something that can take an afternoon? I think that's a good time span for one of these tabletop entertainments.

Assuming the game is fun of course. No one wants a game they don't enjoy to drag on for hours.

All the biases in mind, here are some standout games listed in a game-award fashion:

Favorite Strategy Eurogame: TIE between Caylus, Le Havre, Puerto Rico and Through the Ages
I couldn't make up my mind as to which of these I like the most. Maybe Caylus for it's perfect information setup, but all of these games are absolutely splendid. They all have made it on the top ten list of best games on BoardGameGeek, so I'm not alone in enjoying these titles. Runner-ups: Agricola and Dominion

Best Gateway Game: Settlers of Catan
If you have a friend who doesn't know about boardgames beyond the likes of Monopoly and Risk, start them off with Settlers of Catan. It has that trading fun of Monopoly along with a nice building mechanic and some fun dice rolling. If they get hooked, there are richer, more involved games out there; but Catan is where to start. Runner-ups: Carcassonne and Dominion

Best Cooperative Game: Space Alert
Even after only playing this for a relatively short period of time; Space Alert is easily my favorite cooperative games and one of my all-time favorites. Maybe its just it's newness, but everyone I've played this game with has had a positive reaction to it. The CD-soundtrack twist adds a frantic pace and great theme to the game. Get this one; it's a doozy. Runner-ups: Arkham Horror and Pandemic

Best Epic Game: Through the Ages
This is kind of hollow praise for Through the Ages, because frankly I don't own any other games that are truly 'epic' that compare (Horus Heresy is pretty long, but not nearly as fun). Nevertheless, this game deserves mention for eating up a huge amount of time and being fun all the way through. Thumbs up. Runner-up: Horus Heresy (but not really)

I also have a game I absolutely love most, but first I'm going to list a few dubious awards:

Most Life-Sucking Game: Magic the Gathering
I said it before: Magic is a hobby more than a card game. It can consume more time and money than the rest of these games combined. While a fun experience, sure, it demands so much from the player (and their wallet). Enter this collectible card game world at your own peril. Runner-Up: Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer/Warhammer 40K, i.e. tabletop games and not boardgames.

Most Popular Game That Will Get Old Because It's So Played: Dominion
Okay, this might be a good thing, but Dominion can really get overplayed. A lot of people I see get sick of Dominion because it simply got played to death. Thankfully there are some expansions for Dominion that adds extra variety, but just be careful not to overdo this game! Runner-Ups: Magic the Gathering (haha no it suck your soul), Munchkin

Worst Waste of Money but Awesome Pieces!: Horus Heresy
Horus Heresy is an alright game, but not at what it was priced. Ready? $100. You can get Puerto Rico, Power Grid and Le Havre for around the same price (maybe ten dollars more but still). Although not bad, Horus Heresy is not worth that price. At least it has kickass pieces. Runner-ups: Arkham Horror, Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon Board Game

The Game I Hate the Most: Munchkin
Although loved by many, I don't enjoy Munchkin. At all. Its humor is exclusive, its gameplay is shallow and somewhat flawed, and the time to play lasts longer than the time it remains fun. It's still better than Monopoly though! Runner-up: Fluxx

Now with the good and the bad out of the way, here is the game I absolutely think is great.

Game I Think Is Absolutely Great: Dungeon Twister
Man, talk about a brilliant experience. Dungeon Twister is a wonderful thinking game with rules that aren't to hard to follow but offer endlessly complex strategies and tactics. I will go as far to say it stands with the likes of Chess and Go in terms of richness. It has variety in the many expansions, it has accessibility with the ability to handicap veterans against newbies, and it even has an appealing theme. Simply brilliant game.
Runner-ups: All those eurogames and Space Alert

That about wraps up my thoughts on the various boardgames I've collected so far. Basically, boardgames are a great way to look at gaming outside of the realm of computers and see what can be done with different technological constraints to make a fun experience. Good stuff.

Next up will be a blog post about the boardgame I'm currently making and some thought processes going into it.

Boardgame Roundup Part 4: The Medium Games (Part 2) and More!

Last time I discussed some of the less complicated medium games, i.e. the games that have a fair bit of game mechanics and a fair bit of play time. Now we move on to more medium games, but these are the more complicated ones. The rules are even more complex, the play time is still daunting, and the fun factor is still way up there, possibly higher than ever before. Also, since I only have one of them I'm going to talk about a "medium-heavy" game that is probably the most complicated of all the games in my collection.

The following games range from 3.5 to 4.1 in weight on BoardGameGeek. These games are far from gateway games and I would only recommend them after you have tackled some simpler titles and maybe even some of the less-simpler-but-still-not-too-complicated ones.

The Medium Games (Upper End)

Agricola
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 3.6

Bear with me here; Agricola is a boardgame about farming, and it is stellar. Yes, a game about farming is really good. How is that? First off, the so-so theme is a veil disguising a rich gameplay experience. Agricola is a worker-placement game where every turn players place their little people (represented by little wooden discs) onto action spaces and perform the action associated with that space. For instance, one player might place a worker on the Gather Wood space and collect all the wood that has piled up on that space while another player places a worker onto the Plow a Field space and puts a field on his farm.

The goal of Agricola is to build the best, most well-rounded farm. Each player is given a farm board, and your goal is to plow fields, plant grains and vegetables, build fences, herd livestock, grow your family and improve your little hut where your family lives in. That's a lot of things to do on the farm, and you only have so many workers for a turn. Not only that, but you have to feed your workers every few turns, with less and less turns between each feeding, and you lose lots of points for not feeding your workers. Agricola is all about efficiency and balancing the number of workers you have (more workers is more actions) with gathering food (more workers is more food you need).

You cannot opt to neglect certain traits of your farms and focus on massing one commodity to score points either; Agricola has a hard cap on how many points you get for one particular thing, and you lose points for not having a type of something. There's a lot to manage on the farm, and it's not necessarily easy. It is a blast to play, however.

My only criticism of Agricola is that the rules are a nightmare to understand. It takes a playthrough of the game or two to really grasp what's going on. Until then, good luck understanding all the mechanics going into this game.

Horus Heresy
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 3.6

I talked about how convoluted the rules for Agricola were. Well, Horus Heresy takes the cake on bad rulebooks. Not only is the rulebook massive; it's dense, poorly organized, and filled with misleading statements and exceptions to certain rules and a host of other problems. Ugh.

That said, I think this game is kinda neat. It's a two-player Risk-type game where you move armies slowly across areas to vie for control of the map (or to eliminate the enemy's leader unit). And the two armies are asymmetrical so it leads to some cool, variegated gameplay. There's a neat turn track that keeps track of player order but also adds a timeline to the game where certain events can happen at certain times. There is also a strategy map where you can place order cards (the main way to move and attack in the game) without using as many turns as you would playing the card from your hand. There's a fair bit of depth to game, which I guess is why the rules are so damn frustrating to learn.

The biggest problem I have with Horus Heresy (aside from a god-awful rulebook), is how hard it is to get a game going with this. First, you need to have one and only one person interesting in playing a game; this is surprisingly harder to get done than getting a group of players together. Then, and this is the hard part, you need to convince that person to play a very long game with a lot of rules. See, Horus Heresy lasts about the length of Arkham Horror. It can take a good quarter of a day to finish one game. Combine this with the tricky ruleset and it makes Horus Heresy a hard sell for another player.

Still, if you can get a game going for this and are okay with a rule-heavy, time-consuming game, Horus Heresy isn't so bad.

Caylus
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 3.8

Although Horus Heresy probably takes longer to learn, I would say Caylus is where things start to get fairly...involved. What I mean by that is Caylus is a pretty complicated game and there are a good bit of rules. Nevertheless, I would say this boardgame is one of my favorites out there.

Caylus is the 'granddaddy of worker placement boardgames.' What that means is that Caylus is one of the first and more influential games about placing your workers on various spots on the board to do actions that gets stuff done you need to do in order to win. Caylus is a boardgame about building a castle (in the town of Caylus) for King Philip the Fair; his face frowns at you on the cover of the box. You are a master builder who must get your workers (little wooden cylinders) to earn the most prestige (i.e. points that win the game) by building the town and the castle. You collect resources in the form of little wooden cubes that are needed to build new buildings and construct parts of the castle. Building buildings nets you points, building the castle nets you points, and earning royal favors (which are like special bonuses you get for doing certain things) can net you points.

There's a lot to Caylus; a road that determines the order of activation of workers, a corrupt provost that you bribe to keep workers working, a bailiff that moves down the road slowly towards the end of the game, various special buildings that have their unique effects, royal favors that can do special things like give you money or resources or an extra building action, money to spend, resources to consume--there's a lot on the table to learn. It's all interconnected and can be hard to digest the first time through; simply put it's easiest to learn Caylus by playing the game with someone who knows the rules.

The brilliance of Caylus is that there is no random elements: Caylus is a 'perfect information' game, a game with no hidden elements (e.g. a hand of cards) and no randomly determined outcomes (e.g. dice rolling, shuffling, etc.). The game is a setup of pure skill and strategy; the best player will win. Of course, this can lead to novices being trampled against newer players, so Caylus is best played with people around your skill level. Aside from that slight nuisance, Caylus is a rich, rewarding experience worth playing.

Le Havre
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 3.8

From the maker of Agricola; Le Havre is a somewhat similar game about worker placement and building and feeding your worker come harvest and all that stuff. The rules for winning are simpler this time; the person with the most net worth (i.e. cash + cost of owned buildings) wins. So all you have to do is accumulate the most wealth instead of, say, make the most well balanced farm using a complicated scoring system. Sounds fairly simple, right? Haha, no. Le Havre is pretty complicated.

In this game about shipping and building in a town, you can choose to A) collect goods from an offering slot or B) set your worker to go into a building and do something. Collecting is goods is simple, goods will accumulate on the board and you can grab them. Buildings are where it gets tricky. See, every building does a different thing and you have to pretty much understand what each of them does and how they work into play. You need to know that building x can turn good y into product z and what you need to make things work. There are a lot of different resources in the game, and each of them has a flipside that represents that the resource got upgraded (you can make fish into smoked fish for example). Add buying and selling, feeding during harvest, and ships, and you've got a recipe for a really complicated dish.

Still, like Caylus, Le Havre is conquerable. The rules are kind of horrible to follow (another Uwe Rosenberg game equates to another mess of explanations), but the game makes sense once played. The game has a lot of great decision making and strategy, and knowing what action to take and when can make all the difference. While I think I appreciate Caylus more, Le Havre is possibly more fun (it has a lot more fun bits to play around with maybe?). Both are great games.

So that wraps up the board games I have in the 'medium' category, and pretty much wraps up my collection in total. Well, except for one game.

The Medium-Heavy Game

Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 4.1

Here we are, the game people think is the heaviest game that I've covered so far. What makes this game so complex? Well, to put it simply, Through the Ages has a huge ruleset and a lot of interlocking mechanics. We're talking resource management, action cards, building, choosing leaders, technological advancement, managing armies, happiness, corruption, consumption, politics; all of this and more played through multiple ages of history. Oh yeah, and the game is long, two to six hours depending on which of the three levels of complexity you play at.

Boiled down, Through the Ages is a civilization game, i.e. a game where you play as a civilization and try to be better than the other civilizations competing with you (played by the other players). Usually civilization games involve conquering a map of the world and spending a huge amount of time finishing the game. Well, Through the Ages is mapless, and though a long game takes less time to play than some of the more epic civ games out there.

Mapless, you might ask? Yes, a game about conquering the world has no world to look at. You play Through the Ages through cards (and a board to put the cards on I guess). You have little tokens you put on the cards and that's it. The game has a lot of cards that do a lot of different things, though, so there's a lot to learn here. The game ends when the decks of cards you draw from run out. During that time, you have to take cards, play them, and allocate your wooden workers on them in order to make a victory point-making machine. There's also war, trade pacts, territories to colonize, and more!

Through the Ages is a meaty game that I would recommend only to people who have played some easier-to-learn games first. Once you get to the point where you're comfortable playing a game of this magnitude, however, you'll have a blast. Through the Ages is the best epic game I have (although really the only other ones are Arkham Horror and Horus Heresy, which pale in comparison). Highly recommended for boardgame fans.

Well, that covers the boardgames I've been playing. Next time I'll make some conclusions and talk about which games are my favorite and which I hate the most! After that, some talk about the boardgame I'm making!

Board Game Roundup Part 3: The Medium Games (Part 1)

Last time I went over some not-too-complicated-but-not-too-simple games. Now we're approaching the deep end of the pool. The following games take multiple hours to play and can be quite complicated, but as a result of these factors these games are engaging and have deep, involved gameplay. In other words, these games are fun thanks to all their extra stuff.

The plurality of my games have an average weight on boardgamegeek.com between 3 and 4--the "medium" weight board games. I'm going to break this roundup into two parts; one for the lower end of the medium-weight category (3.0-3.5) and another for the upper end (3.5-4.0). Without further ado,

The Medium Games (Lower End)

Magic the Gathering
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 3.1

Oh my, even if you are outside this boardgaming stuff you may have heard of Magic. It's that card game with those spells and creatures and fireballs and such. Magic is a collectable card game, meaning that the game does not ship with all of the cards at once--far from it. Magic the Gathering has a library of over 12.000 unique cards, and you buy them in either a deck of 60 or in a booster draft of 15. This is Wizards of the Coast's cash cow, and is probably the most popular table-top game I own(ed).

Magic boils down to this: you tap the power of land cards to summon creature and spell cards that help destroy your opponent while defending from your opponents attacks. The basic rules aren't too hard to follow, but the trick of Magic the Gathering is that most cards have text that alter the rules in certain ways. There may be a card, for instance, that lets you play cards from your discard pile, or there may be another that stops an opponent from playing a card that was about to be put down. With twelve thousand unique bits of rules and more being released each year (well, each quarter even), there's a lot of variables to this game.

Deck building is just as important, if not more important, than how you play your hand. Decks must have at least 60 cards, and you can only have 4 of the same card (with the exception of basic land cards and a certain group of rats). The goal of deck building is to try to put in cards that play off eachother and to make it so your deck will work with whatever you're likely to draw. Probability, and buffering against randomness, is a big part of this game. You're drawing cards from a shuffled deck, and you don't want to rely on 1 card out of 60 to save your butt.

I had about 3000 cards of my own (with a lot of identical cards), but I gave them to a friend who was much more interested in the game than I was. Magic is a fun game, but it can become a full-on hobby in itself--a pretty fun one admittedly.

Power Grid
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 3.3

Power Grid is a game about managing a network of power plants better than other players. GREAT THEME. Despite being about something that sounds as boring as watching paint dry, Power Grid proves to be a enjoyable experience about managing resources and knowing when to bid and when to pass. See, Power Grid employs an auctioning system where power plants that you need to light your grid are bidded on by the players. Don't spend all your money on the plants though, because then there's the trouble of buying fuel for your plants and paying to expand your grid to new cities. The player who manages to power 17 cities or more first wins.

Power Grid is a game that has a lot of clever mechanics put into a relatively simple ruleset. For instance, resources are bought off a bank that replenishes its supply only a little at a time; as you buy more of one resource the demand for it increases (as does the cost) while resources that are ignored become cheaper and cheaper. Players have to balance bidding for efficient plants with having enough money left over to fuel the plants and expand their grid. Money earned is based on cities powered, so it's important to continually grow your grid.

Overall, Power Grid is a great economy game with lots of fun for anyone with a penchant for numbers. Sure, managing power plants sounds boring, but the gameplay is more than solid.

Puerto Rico
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 3.3
Man, the weightier these games get the more random their themes are. This one is about colonizing Puerto Rico and being the best colonizer-person by scoring the most points. That may sound a little vague, but that's because the game has a lot of interlocking mechanics; explaining each individual part doesn't show how it all comes together. You do get points for building buildings and shipping goods; but to get those goods you need to build plantations which need colonists to work them and you need to buy buildings and trade goods to get money to buy the buildings and omigosh I've gone cross-eyed.

The key to Puerto Rico, perhaps, is that none of these actions are done in a set sequence; players go around the table picking role cards that determine what will happen that turn. Everyone does the action associated with the chosen role, so it can very well happen that an action you want to do will benefit another player more. The game is centered around careful selection to optimize what's best for you and least beneficial to other players at the same time.

Geeks on BoardGameGeek rated Puerto Rico #2 game in the database, and indeed Puerto Rico is quite awesome. I highly recommend picking this one up.

Arkham Horror and Its Expansions Innsmouth Horror and Kingsport Horror
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 3.4

Yet another cooperative game. This one is a doozy; you can expect three to eight hours of play in a single game (well, maybe only six hours max). Arkham Horror is a game where you play as some character drawn to the city of Arkham and must stop an evil Old One from awakening and destroying the world. Gates to other worlds open up throughout the city and your group must explore and seal these gates in order to win. Or defeat the Old One head on. Good luck with that.

And indeed, this game requires a bit of luck. See, much of what you do is based on dice rolls. This can lead to a lot of chance as to whether you succeed or not. Not to mention that what isn't based on dice rolls is based on drawing cards from a shuffled deck. Random encounters, random outcomes (admittedly you can increase your odds with more dice); Arkham Horror has a lot of chance. This can put off some players when they feel like the outcome of the game isn't based off good planning as much as it is good dice rolls.

Still, Arkham Horror has a fantastic theme, pretty artwork, and lots of pieces to mess around with. It's a massive game with a lot of atmosphere. You can really enjoy this game most when you're playing to see how things turn out rather than to try to win (although trying to win isn't a bad thing). Don't fret if you botched a roll against that monster; see how it the game plays out from there.

The expansions add a little more rules without detracting from the main experience, although the game does suddenly become a lot harder the more expansions you add. Overall I enjoy this game, but it's not my favorite due to its luck factor. If you like to feel you're having an epic struggle against an overwhelming enemy, and can stand a lot of dice rolls, Arkham Horror may have something for you.

That covers the lower end of the medium-weight games. Next up: the Medium Games (Part 2)

Boardgame Round Up Part 2: The Medium-Light Games

A while back I posted about some light board games; now it's time to talk about some games with a little more meat on their bones; or meeples on their boards. Whichever.

All of the below games have a weight (i.e. complexity) rating on boardgamegeek.com ranging between 2 and 3 out of 5. These are the entry-level games that people start with once they want a taste of something that isn't Risk or Monopoly. Most of the following games are more or less an hour in length; and the ones I've acquired at least are pretty damn fun. Some of my favorite games are in this range, and rightfully so. Without further ado:

The Medium-Light Games

Dominion and It's Expansions, Intrigue and Prosperity
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 2.3

If you have played boardgames beyond the point of the mainstream lineup you have probably heard of (and likely played) Dominion. Dominion is a card game where you lay out several stacks of cards and build a deck. Whoever builds the deck with the most points wins. Points are given by certain cards, but in order to obtain those cards you have to 'buy' cards from the stacks that net you deck-building actions, money to buy with, make you draw cards from your deck, and more. The point cards do nothing in themselves so if you claim too many too early your deck will be filled with deadweight.

There are two big gateway games in this blog post and one of them has to be Dominion. Dominion is a game you should probably play, and you might end up playing it a lot. The game has two big issues people complain about, however. The first is that the theme is dry as saltine crackers--you're a lord in the middle ages trying to acquire the most land, whoopee. The second thing is that people play Dominion a lot and tend to get sick of it after a while. The expansions breathe some life into the base game once people get tired of the same cards, but even so this game can be overplayed. That's not so bad a thing. Oh, and sometimes the game isn't very interactive between players; but oh well.

Pandemic
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 2.3

The world is fraught with a global pandemic! Four deadly diseases have erupted and threaten humanity! The players are a crack team of experts who fight this disease and try to stop these contagions before they reach a point of no return and humanity's fate is sealed.

Pandemic is the first cooperative game I've mentioned so far. Cooperative games are not about players competing against each other; instead it is the player versus the board. Every turn players carry out a few actions (move to a city, treat a disease, find a cure), draw some cards, and then play out the spread of diseases--the diseases are represented by different colored cubes. If the cubes spread too much, or run out (or players run out of cards to draw); players lose. If all the cures are found for the diseases, players win.

Pandemic has a fairly simple ruleset and plays at a fairly fast pace; I'd say the average game lasts 45 minutes to an hour. However, Pandemic can be quite frantic. The players have only so many actions they can do before another deadly disease cube appears on the board; and epidemics can occur that cause outbreaks into other cities that can cause chain reactions with other outbreaks and omigosh we've reached eight outbreaks and lost the game. Playing is all about keeping the board under control while players try to find a cure in time. Very exciting game, very fun.

Settlers of Catan and It's Expansion Seafarers
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 2.4

I said that Dominion is one of the gateway games on this list. Catan is the other one. In fact, it's arguably a mainsteam game; you'll find Catan on the same shelf as Monopoly or Risk. Although it's worth noting that unlike Monopoly or Risk, Catan is a good game*.

The premise is simple: gather resources based on dice rolling, trade resources with other players, and build towns and other things to score points. First player to ten points wins.

Catan is pretty easy to learn and pretty easy to play and fairly fun overall. It's not my favorite game--I don't like how you can get really screwed if you get some bad dice rolls--but it's not a bad game by any means*. Honestly if there is a gateway eurogame this is it. Catan was my first taste of the better boardgames, and it certainly isn't a bad start.

*Some people think Catan isn't that great, even bad, mainly because of the dice-rolling being a big factor as to how well you'll be doing. I personally think that dice-rolling isn't that big a problem with Catan, but there are some games I like more that balance luck in a more elegant fashion.

Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon Board Game
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 2.5

Oh my, another cooperative game! This one is based off the monumental Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game (that one with the dungeons and dragons). Tabletop RPGs are epic cooperative experiences where one person plays the devious Dungeon Master who lays out the traps and monsters for the other players to conquer. Wrath of Ashardalon tries to capture the distilled experience of dungeon-delving and monster-murdering into an hour-long session of gaming--without the Dungeon Master. The rules of the boardgame do all the work of laying out the dungeon, filling it with monsters, and getting those monsters to beat you up.

You can get a good bit of entertainment out of Ashardalon, but unfortunately the experience wears thin after a a few playthroughs. Certainly it's entertaining the first dozen times, but after a while the repetive boards and samey monsters takes a toll. There's not enough variety in playing to keep this game interesting for a long time. Still, you can get some fun out of it before your interest fades; and for the amount of miniatures and tilesets the game comes with the price is definitely reasonable. Worth a look if you're interested in getting a bunch of awesome minis.

Space Alert
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 2.8

Cooperative game number three! Although rated at a 2.8 on weight, I found this game to have a fairly reasonable ruleset. Also, THIS GAME IS AMAZING OMIGOSH. It may be because this is my most recent purchase, but wow, talk about a good game.

See, Space Alert is a surival game with a twist: you play the game with a soundtrack. No, it's not just for atmosphere; the gameplay hinges on the two CDs you're given to play with. Space Alert is played in ten minutes, wherein those ten minutes you must plan out your actions (which consist of moving or pressing one of three big buttons) in a panicked rush as space monsters attack your ship from inside and out. After the time is up, you play out your actions in sequence and see how well you did.

It's fun. Space Alert is so much fun. You're rushing to make sure you've planned out your actions as best you can and are trying to not trip over the other crewmembers as you hectically move about the ship. Did you remember to refill the reactor before firing that heavy laser cannon? Did you fire that rocket in time to blast the Interstellar Octopus (yes this is a thing) in sync with the pulse cannon? Is someone remembering to keep the ship's computer's screensaver from popping up which due ton bad wiring turns off the lights (this is a thing too)? There's a bunch to keep track of in Space Alert. Thankfully, the game has one of the best handbooks I've read for a boardgame ever. The rules are clear, the tutorial missions are well thought out, and the flavor text is genuinely funny.

I don't see this game getting old any time soon. Play it.

Dungeon Twister and It's Expansions, Paladins and Dragons, 3/4 Players Expansion, Fire and Water, Forces of Darkness, Mercenaries, and Prison
Average Weight on BoardGameGeek: 2.9

I saved the best for last, or at least my favorite. If you couldn't guess by the fact that I grabbed so many expansions for it, I love me some Dungeon Twister. It is a fantastic two-player strategy game with a minimal amount of luck and a lot of deep, intriguing gameplay. It's wizard's Chess.

The goal of Dungeon Twister is to score five points; you get a point for killing an enemy character or escaping one of your characters from the dungeon. You play action cards to do a certain number of actions in which you can move your character, attack another character, use an item, etc. The literal twist to Dungeon Twister is that the dungeon is built with eight rotatable rooms laid out in in a 2x4 setup. The dungeon is rather mazy, so it helps when you can rotate a room to create a path that wouldn't have existed just a moment ago so you can move your characters to tactical locations on the map to assure victory.

Dungeon twister is all about the strategy. The only random part of the game is the initial board layout, and that doesn't make as much a difference as you'd think. You don't draw cards from a deck, you don't roll any dice to see who won a battle, and you don't have to cross your fingers to hope that luck will be a kind mistress to you this turn. I love this stuff.

Each expansion adds a different dungeon and new characters and items to switch out, along with some possible new terrain to traverse. There is huge replayability in this game and huge tactical diversity. You can even play at a handicap against new players so they don't become intimidated their first time in the game.

Dungeon Twister is a ten out of ten game for me. I recommend it to anyone who likes a lot of strategy and hates losing because of bad dice rolls.


Man, this sure took a long time to post. Anyways, next up will be some medium-weighted games and my thoughts on them, assuming I make another post this century. Or maybe I'll offer a look into a boardgame I'm making (it's horrible).