The actual engine wouldn’t have to be too difficult: after all, pro wrestling writing mostly depends on a number of scenarios that only vary mildly (the basic feud, the friends-split-up-and-become-enemies, the formation of a heel stable, etc.). You could probably come up with about forty or so possible mini-plots and the player could mix and match them to best effect. In terms of the wrestlers themselves, you could assign ratings for various traits – some for interviews and acting ability (acting ability, improvisational ability, charisma) and some for wrestling ability (selling, execution of moves, large moveset, ability to resist injury) and then some X-factors (motivating factors which make the wrestler happy – some want money, some want outside-of-wrestling-fame, some want to only wrestle great matches, etc.; as well as how much the wrestler demands in salary). You could also do something like how baseball-manager games do and as wrestlers age their traits can shift (and not always simply a decrease, either). And, if you were being honest to the spirit of the thing, there would be the occasional tragic death.

Once you get past the wrestlers, you can start to consider the audience and business models as well. How do you negotiate TV deals? What does your audience demand, and does it vary from city to city? How much money does your company spend on pyrotechnics? What PPV schedule will you use? How do you deal with competing wrestling companies – cooperation deals like the old territory system or WWF/ECW in the late 90s, or total bloodthirsty competition a la the Monday Night Wars? Hell, you could even timeshift scenarios – managing a wrestling promotion in the 1960s-1970s was a totally different ballgame than managing one in the 1980s or today. Put together an “exodus” challenge to mimic the business challenges of losing a number of your top young stars to your chief rival – how do you stay afloat?

The only problem is I don’t see how you would account for events like the Montreal Screwjob or other things that exist only in wrestling and are one-off, non-duplicable events. Which is part of the reason wrestling is the way it is, I suppose, but make the tycoon game that much harder to design.

5.) Olympos. A ninety-minute civilization/conquest game is practically impossible to manage, but Olympos does so quite well. Its “time” turn-making mechanic (lifted from games like Thebes) gives the game a modular feel – clever players can figure out how to set up their plays so as to take multiple turns in a row and gain advantage that way, but then again sometimes going for a big single turn is the right play. The scarce resources force you to fight other players for tactical advantage (particularly when it comes to the Zeus heads which give you religious bonuses at the right time – and timing the gain of these bonuses is another aspect of the game that lends itself to strategic thinking). Olympos is simply a well-designed area control game with a lot of nifty tweaks to it, and a good fight-it-out area control game is always worth my time.

4.) Blood Bowl Team Manager. Oldschool nerds are all familiar with Blood Bowl – Games Workshop’s last truly funny property since Warhammer 40K and even Warhammer Fantasy seem determined to suck all the joy out of their respective settings – but this is a different twist on the idea, abstracting the idea of football with elves and dwarves and orcs into a season at a time, and doing so quite successfully. Sometimes a good game is more about communication of its theme, and BBTM is an excellent example of this: it’s a game that’s about giving you the feel of playing a whole lot of Blood Bowl without actually having to play a whole lot of Blood Bowl. And it’s funny, with some clever mechanics (the mandatory cheating is my favourite) and nice art.

3.) Airlines Europe. Last time we discussed board games, I was talking about 18XX games, which are about creation of rail networks and manipulation of the stock market. Airlines Europe is an entry-level stock game, and sort of the equivalent to 18XX in stock manipulation in the way that, say, Ticket To Ride is sort of the equivalent to 18XX in route building. (Both games were designed by Alan R. Moon, so this is doubtless no coincidence.) The result is a fun game that isn’t too time-consuming and is very enjoyable for new players, but offers quite a bit of fun for experienced boardgamers as well. My only criticism of the game is that the route-building aspect of the game is too wide open for experienced players, but the recent Flight Ban expansion (which one should soon be able to get very cheaply online) seems to fix that quite nicely.

2.) Eclipse. A stupendous achievement and naturally short-printed in its initial run, so you’ll have trouble getting a copy (and even then this one is ‘spensive). But it is well worth the effort to pick up, as this game is simply superb. Boardgame versions of Master of Orion have been a holy grail of design in the hobby for years, and mostly they fall into “light fun, but not meaty enough” games like Terra Prime or Ascending Empires, or “I hope you like LOTS AND LOTS OF FLOWCHARTS” games like Throneworld. Eclipse straddles the boundary between these two neatly: it is a game that only takes half an hour per player, but remains a true 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) and has so much customizability that a big part of the game is designing your own spaceships. It has a comprehensive tech tree research system, a brilliant economic engine, a solid combat system, rules for diplomacy, a half dozen variant alien races, and best of all the rules are simple enough that they will not overwhelm players who want to avoid the aforementioned flowcharts: the action-selection mechanic the game uses is inspired. Really, every single aspect of this game’s design is inspired, and the production value is excellent. There is simply nothing that is bad about this game.

1.) King of Tokyo. This one was designed by Richard “Magic: The Gathering” Garfield, and Garfield is a designer who has only gotten better over the years. The game is best described as “Yahtzee, except you are a giant monster.” Of course it’s more than that, as roll-and-keep dice games have gotten more sophisticated over the years, with Roll Through The Ages being the most complex of the genre and one of the most popular. But where Roll Through The Ages offers players a complex set of upgrade options, King of Tokyo offers wilder and more chaotic gameplay – but also more tactical than RTTA, since that game is more of a point-scoring race with some minor options for interaction while KoT is all about beating the other players up, as a giant monster game should be. Every turn is filled with important decisions: do you chase points or try to beat up other monsters? Heal yourself, or save up to buy upgrade cards to make yourself a more efficient giant killing machine? (Or, if you like, a Friend to Children Everywhere, as the game will offer you that option.) It plays fast and furious, is tons of fun, only takes about twenty to thirty minutes, and also this is a game where you are giant monsters beating each other up. Nothing else comes even close to being the best game of 2011 for me.

Other games in 2011 that were good: A Few Acres of Snow, Pastiche, City Tycoon, Ankh-Morpork, Skull and Roses.
Other games in 2011 that were not so good: The Star Trek TNG Deckbuilding Game, Quarriors, Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon, Urban Sprawl, Cargo Noir.
Most welcome reprint in 2011: Montage.

So what qualifies a train game? I think the fundamentals of a true train game are as follows:

1.) They are about building routes. In a train game, part of the strategy should be making sure you can lay your track to where you need it to go. You will have destinations you need to reach – either forced upon you by game fiat (as in Ticket to Ride) or as a result of your own strategies.

2.) They are about making money. Proper train games are primarily economic games, because everything that is really interesting about trains is as follows: they go places and they carry cargo. That’s really all that is interesting about trains in an abstract sense. (Maybe you like train-spotting, but that’s a specific sort of thing.)

2a.) Part of the way train games are about money should be about delivery of cargo. Because, again, this is what trains do.

2b.) Part of the way train games are about money should be about the fact that they were corporations. Again: train games are economic games. The pick-up-and-deliver aspect of train games should matter, but there should be more to them than simply “go here, drop off that, do it again.”

3.) They are about improvement. The expansion of trains led to economic development not only of the train networks themselves but of the regions to which they laid track. Therefore, in a sense, a good train game also has aspects of civilization-building and/or exploration to them.

The granddaddy of modern train games is 1830, designed by Francois Tresham (who also designed the original Civilization board game that Sid Meier took inspiration from when designing his same-name video game, which in turn has spawned not one but two boardgame spinoffs – the second of which is honestly pretty good in its own right). 1830 is a meaty, meaty, meaty game, by which I mean it takes fucking forever to play: with people who really know what they’re doing, a good game of 1830 lasts at least four hours and usually goes into the five-hour mark. With people who don’t quite know what they’re doing, it can go six or more. 1830 is a cruel, unforgiving mistress: you have to know it to truly appreciate it, and it’s always been a bit of a niche within the boardgaming community because most people aren’t willing to take on a six-hour learning game to decide if they like something – not even nerds, generally.

(Experienced 1830 players can tell you that a big timesaver is replacing the paper money that comes with the game with poker chips. Really, this is a good idea for any game where players make a lot of money transactions, because chips handle so much faster than tiny paper bills. But in 1830, it is essential.)

Luckily, the new and gorgeous edition of 1830 published by Mayfair Games (which finally showed up a month or so ago after being promised for literally the better part of a decade) includes rules for a “starter game” which lasts about sixty to ninety minutes. The starter game teaches players the basics of 1830: how to lay and upgrade track, how to upgrade trains, how to manage a company. It’s actually pretty interesting in its own right, but it’s like true 1830 as a Coles Notes reader is to a novel.

This is because the genius of 1830 isn’t laying and upgrading track: it is the buying and selling of stock. See, in the “true” version of 1830, you don’t own a company: instead, you are a money-man who invests in numerous rail companies, and the bulk of the game’s strategy lies not in laying down track but in buying and selling stock at the right time. Expand that company you just made extremely profitable and which you control the majority of stock, dividend out all of its stockpiled earnings to the shareholders (e.g. mostly you), then sell the shares? That’s a basic stock strategy in 1830. But the game can get more complex than that quickly, because there’s usually two or three times as many railways on the board as players, and with that many railroads come more options. Use that small railroad you own a majority share in but is never going to be profitable to block out that potentially profitable railway you don’t have a stake in, watch as other players shed their stocks – then buy the shares on the cheap and rebuild the railway to profitability.

You see how this can get addictive, inasmuch as anything that takes four to six hours for a single play can get addictive.

What’s more, 1830 is just the tip of the iceberg. There is an entire family of “18XX” games out there, published by numerous different companies (many of them print-and-play games or self-published). I myself own three: 1830, 1856 (set in Ontario) and 2038 (set in the asteroid belt of our solar system and applying the train mechanics to space-liners). But there are many more, and most offer their own tweaks on the basic formula established by 1830.

“But I’m not sure if I want to devote that much time to a game,” you say. Well, fine.

Esteemed game designer Martin Wallace has designed not one but three train games for those looking for a less intense experience than 1830: Age of Steam, Steam, and Railways of the World. (Railways of the World, pictured above, was formerly marketed as “Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame” before the publisher lost that license and was subsequently rereleased.)

All three of these games have the same basic set of rules, which is one where money is streamlined and players are trying to accumulate victory points rather than simply having the most cash at the end (well, the VPs are sort of like money, but…). However, the core of what a train game should be remains intact. You’re still trying to expand your line, competing for space, generating money (well, victory points, but whatever) by performing cargo deliveries, and upgrading your line capacity. And the neat trick that all of Wallace’s train games have in common is that you’re financing your train company with debt: you start the game with exactly zero dollars and you initially have to pay for things by issuing shares. Only later in the game – if you don’t screw up and take on too much debt – will you actually start earning a profit based on your line’s operating capacity.

Of the three, Age of Steam is the least forgiving (you can go bankrupt and be eliminated). Railways of the World and Steam are remarkably close to one another in gameplay: Steam is more complex but I actually like ROTW’s pace as a game much more. (That having been said, ROTW has gigantic enormous boards that often do not fit on many tables.) All of the games have expansions. In Age of Steam’s case, lots and lots of expansions. However, ROTW and Steam have both been expanded to create a different game out of their component rules (ROTW by Railways of England and Wales and Steam by Steam Barons) wherein instead of owning a single rail company, you…

…wait for it…

…are a rich mega-money-man who invests in rail companies. Yes, ROTW and Steam now both give you the option to convert them into a sort of faux-1830. It’s not quite the same thing as 1830, to be sure – it’s not as rewardingly deep – but it gives newer players a taste of that delicious 1830 experience without the full initial commitment. And that’s something.

Pantsless Pete: An explanation of how Betty Brant doesn’t come off as creepy in early issues of Spider-man by being a woman in, using the bare minimum of her completing high school and secretarial school, her early twenties hitting on a weird looking seventeen year old.

You know that one episode of South Park where a schoolteacher falls in love with Ike, and whenever anybody describes their relationship to a guy, the guy’s inevitable answer is “…nice.” You know that? It’s like that.

Arthur Robinson: What are your thoughts on podcasting? Like what do you think of the medium? What are your favorite shows? And would you ever start your own?

I’ve guested on Squideye And The Bitter Guy once and guested on a couple of other podcasts, and in terms of the medium I think it’s radio gone indie. Which is fine and good, don’t get me wrong, but some people treat podcasting like it’s this transcendent thing, and really, it’s just radio when you get down to brass tacks.

As for doing my own, I find that unless you’re being paid, you generally either blog or podcast, not both. It’s a time thing.

RAC: Played any interesting new boardgames lately?

I recently got the chance to play Eclipse and was monumentally impressed with it. I think it’s that long-foretold board game: the playable and elegant 4X space game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate, for those who don’t know what 4X is). The mechanics are streamlined enough that the game isn’t too hard to learn (although it’s still an advanced game, don’t get me wrong), but there’s an incredible amount of depth, theme and replayability to it. I mean, this is a Euro-styled game where you still get to design your own spaceships a la Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, which is pretty great.

I also played a few games of Ankh-Morpork, which is a fun, fast and light game with a few major design flaws that desperately need to be addressed to make it playable (the most notable of which is that Vimes is simply much more powerful than the other personality-roles players can be).

Oh, and everybody around here is always up for a game of Blood Bowl: Team Manager or King of Tokyo. (Fun fact: any game with “Tokyo” in the title is either about World War II or giant monsters.) BBTM is a great little card game that really carries the theme of “seasons of Blood Bowl” quite well, and KoT is Yahtzee except with giant monsters instead of boring scorepads. Both are excellent.

I’ve got a few longer boardgame posts in draft form, currently. I’ll get back to them at some point.

Crazed Spruce: What fantasy books would you recommend for a person who likes fantasy movies and television, but never really got into fantasy novels?

Standalone fantasy novels tend to be relative rarities – the only author I can think of who does them regularly is Guy Gavriel Kay. Epic fantasy is epic for a reason: they tend to be book cycles rather than individual books. That having been said, The Belgariad by David Eddings is a very good “light” entry into fantasy epics. Even thou fantasy readers will mock the hell out of Eddings for reusing the same plot like six times, it’s like how every ZZ Top song is the same: you’re not there for the plot, you’re there for the dialogue and the eminent fun of the thing. And all those mockers read Eddings and loved him at one point.

If you want to go heavier, in ascending order:

- The Magician/Riftwar cycle by Raymond E. Feist, which is basically the mostly thinly disgused D&D campaign in the history of fiction, but is quite good nonetheless;
- The Servant of the Empire trilogy by Feist and Janny Wurts, which expands off to the side of the Riftwar cycle as a set of standalone books set in a different world (explaining would take a while) and, while heavier than the Riftwar books, are also better;
- The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay is middle-weight and epic and lovely;
- and if you’re going to jump into the deep end right off the bat, just go with George R.R. Martin already and save yourself some time.

And Pratchett, of course, but if you’re going to start reading fantasy anyway, it might be better to save Pratchett until after you’ve read a bunch of the books he’s parodying.

protocoach: What are your thoughts on Aaron Diaz’s reboots of the DC Universe?

I think they’re an admirable creative effort, but are coming from a place that ignores the essential appeal behind the characters in the first place, which is important in any reboot because the point of a reboot is to remind audiences why the character is vital in the first place. Most of Diaz’s reboot ideas are neat and cool, but Superman as some weird energy matrix just isn’t Superman (as DC figured out soon enough). Diaz’s ideas are more akin to the Tangent Universe or “Stan Lee’s Just Imagine” and should be considered accordingly.

Given that TF2 is now free to play, this seemed necessary.

Dice are what a lot of people think of when they think of board games (well, that or tiles with letters on), thanks to childhoods spent playing roll-and-move games like Sorry! or snakes-and-ladders. Because of this, many designers have tried to incorporate dice into board games in different ways. Not, generally speaking, in a roll-and-move sense; instead, designers usually try to use the random-but-not-quite-that-random allocation of numbers that dice present to their advantage.

Can’t Stop! is one of the older examples of using dice in a non-traditional sense: this is a design by the late, great Sid Sackson (who designed hundreds of games, most notably Acquire). In Can’t Stop!, the dice are used in a way not unlike the way they’re used in craps: you roll four dice, and combine the dice to make two numbers (a five and a nine, an eleven and a six, two eights, etc.). Then you advance your markers along those number-tracks. Then you decide if you want to roll again, and if you roll numbers and can advance markers (you can advance up to three markers per turn, but no more); if you can’t roll the numbers for your markers, though, you lose all the progress you’ve made that turn. Can’t Stop! is a fast little game about pushing your luck, which is something dice are good for doing.

Can’t Stop! isn’t particularly representative of modern dice games, though. Yspahan (which I think is pronounced “Ees-pa-hohn,” but don’t quote me on that) is more in that vein, where the random roll of dice represents, in a sense, the allocation of supplies within a certain amount. Yspahan’s dice rolls represent the allotment of supplies (camels, gold, buildings, and special cards) purchasable by all of the players, which can then be used to build up in the various city sections of the board. It’s a pretty simple realization of dice being used to generate random stuff but using the probabilities of various amounts rolled accordingly, and a good application of the rule that any game with camels in it will be reasonably good. (There are no outright bad games with camels in them, and more than a few truly great games with camels in them. There is just something about camels.)

Kingsburg does sort of the same thing. Here, the trick is thinking of your dice (each player gets their own dice!) as sort of being your servants: you rolls your dice, and their totals tell you where you can send them to influence people at court for assistance as you build up your part of the kingdom. With three dice, the King himself is hardest to influence (as he requires an 18); meanwhile a lowly sergeant only needs a 5. The various elements of court get you resources: soldiers, building materials, and stuff that lets you influence future rolls of the dice. You then use the building materials to build buildings for extra abilities – much like a civilization-building sort of game – and the soldiers to defend yourselves from the waves of bandits and zombies and orcs that attack each year. Kingsburg is a pretty popular game because, firstly, you get your own dice and everybody likes having their own dice, but also because bad rolls won’t necessarily hurt you: strategic placement of your low-roll dice can mean you get to influence multiple courtiers while other players with better rolls only influence one (since each courtier can only be influenced by one player, normally).

An additional note: there is an expansion for this game, one element of which (a variant on how the military defense of the realm works) is absolutely mandatory for the game to truly shine. The rest of the expansion is pretty awesome too (variant buildings, more buildings, opportunity to play as characters with different abilities, a random event deck), which means for the “full” game Kingsburg is essentially more expensive than it should be. But it’s a really fine game.

Alien Frontiers was released last year (initially through Kickstarter) and is currently very much a Hot Thing with serious boardgamers. I am not a fan of it, personally, because I find that although the theme (alien planet colonization) is fun, the actual gameplay bores me: there’s no real ability to plan out your turn in advance. When your turn comes, you simply roll your dice and place them as best you can to get benefits, and that’s it. If this sounds underwhelming – well, I was underwhelmed by it. Very pretty pieces, though, and lovely graphic design. Some people quite like it. (These people are of course completely wrong and bad.)

Troyes is the most recent dice-as-resources game to come along, and probably is the most complex. Here, you use dice for all the activities on the board, as in other games, but the twist in Troyes is that players can buy each other’s dice in order to use them, which means that each player’s supply is somewhat variable and you can’t rely on getting to use all of your dice – and further, most of the things you can use those dice for are similarly limited to a certain number of uses per turn, so each allocation of dice becomes quite strategic as a result. I’ve only played Troyes twice so far, and in terms of mechanics it’s really very clever (a little difficult in terms of learning curve – this isn’t a game for beginning boardgamers – but not insurmountable). The downside for Troyes is that it is game number 27452 where the theme is “let’s build and improve a town in Middle Ages Europe,” which is at this point almost actively repellent to many players because how many goddamn towns in Middle Ages Europe do you have to improve? Given Troyes’ mechanics it could have been about almost anything else, but European designers really do goddamn love improving towns in Middle Ages Europe.

Going from advanced to suitable-for-beginners, Roll Through The Ages is a civ-building game based solely around dice – albeit special dice with fancy symbols on them. Roll Through The Ages cribs from Yahtzee in that you roll your dice and then get a couple of opportunities to reroll certain dice to alter what you receive. You can then use the resources your dice have generated (workers, food, and trade goods) to build up your civilization by researching technologies (which give you additional abilities), building wonders (victory points at the end of the game) and building cities (which give you additional dice, but also require additional food to keep from starving). Roll Through The Ages is a favorite of mine: it’s quick, simple and fun. Also because it is a dice game where you can inflict plagues on other people.

Finally, we have Perudo, or as it is more commonly known, Liar’s Dice, or sometimes The Dice Game They Were Playing In The Second Pirates of the Caribbean Movie. Liar’s Dice is dead simple: everybody gets a cup and five dice, and each player uses their cup to roll their dice and check them to see what they rolled. Then you start bidding, based on what everybody has rolled (of which, you only know your own dice). “Three twos.” “Four twos.” “Four fives.” “Six fives.” “Seven threes.” Et cetera. Until somebody says “you’re lying,” and then you all reveal dice: if your bid was true and there really were seven threes (or whatever), the player who called your bluff loses a die. If your bid failed, you lose a die. And then you continue like this until only one person is left. Variant rules for Liar’s Dice are common as dirt: the most widely used rule is that ones are wild (which in turn means that a bid of ones is twice as valuable as any other bid). Liar’s Dice is simple and straightforward, and the bluffing element makes for a fun, riotous game. (Any game where people swear a lot when a bluff is called is a good game so far as I am concerned.)

EDIT TO ADD: As always, Canadian readers interested in purchasing any of these games are advised to consider Meeplemart, which routinely has the best prices for games in Canada. As in “it’s not even close.”

The age old debate of Ameritrash v Euro.

Which, even for a nerd site like this one, is definitely getting into esoteric territory, so explanation is in order. Among serious boardgamers –

- No, wait! If you’re not a boardgamer, stick around! I promise something at least slightly profound by the end! –

- ahem. Anyway. “Ameritrash” and “Euro” are the names for the two major “serious” styles of boardgame design.

Here is Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. It is considered “Ameritrash.”

“Ameritrash” is code. It means, roughly, the idea of a game as a thematic experience first and foremost. Battlestar Galactica is a board game that positively drips with theme: it mirrors the show by having the players be important humans on the Galactica, like Adama and Tigh and Roslin and Baltar, and they’re playing a cooperative game to get to Earth before the Colonial Fleet starves to death or runs out of water or fuel or commits collective suicide or get blown to shit by the Cylons, just like in the show, and secretly some of the players, randomly selected, are actually Cylons bent on making sure the humans lose.¹ Thus, the actual mechanics of the game are twofold: there are the rules which explain how you fight Cylons and jump from star system to star system, but there’s also the real game, which is figuring out who at the table is a Cylon and who isn’t, and who’s lying and who isn’t. If a Cylon can manage to stick an innocent human player in the brig, they often win.

To further aid in immersing players in the theme, Battlestar Galactica has bits. Lots of bits. It has umpteen different decks of cards to randomize all the events that could possibly happen. It has little plastic Vipers and Cylon raiders to fight in space. It has dials to measure how much water and food and fuel the fleet has left. It has rules for the extra advantages the President and the Admiral get, and the chain of command among the players for each position to descend. The rulebook for this game is thirty pages long. There are, so far, two additional expansions, which introduce the Pegasus and New Caprica and the Ionian Nebula as additional playable elements of the game and heaps more rules and characters and options.

All of this makes for the quintessential Ameritrash game. Lots of attractive bits. Lots of rules to cover every possible fiddly little idea the players can come up with. Lots more bits. A theme that’s usually either fantastic or epic if not in fact both. And lots of bits. “Ameritrash” isn’t a derogatory term: it’s one spoken with affection.²

And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there is Caylus. Which is a “Euro.”³

Caylus is ostensibly a game about building a castle and its surrounding town for a king, but really, that is crap and everybody knows it. Caylus is a supremely complex mathematical problem in game form. The game’s victory condition is simple: who has the most points at the game’s end. You can get those points in a variety of ways: by building the castle, by building buildings other players use, by getting the “royal favour” again and again and again and using it every time for points, and so forth. But while you’re getting points, you’re also trying to set up the board to ensure that you have what you need to get more points as the game progresses. And so is everybody else.

The theme is besides the point: what matters is the gameplay, and Caylus is a brainburner of first order as you sort out your moves in order to generate best advantage. The idea that you’re collecting food or dye or stone or gold in order to build the various buildings is entirely besides the point: they’re just wooden cubes in various colors and combinations that you require. This is the quintessential Euro.

Of course, both Ameritrash and Euro can commit sins of excess or laziness. With Euros, gamers have coined the phrase “JASE” (“Just Another Soulless Euro”) to describe Eurogames that rehash the same old variety of mechanics all over again – worker placement, auctions, area control, role selection – for no purpose other than to get victory points in a slight variation on the formulae other, superior games already used the first time through.⁴ Ameritrash games can concentrate so deeply on their theme that they can forget to have an actual game be present, turning the whole affair into a boring slog because without some decent mechanics at its heart, a game’s play just becomes a joyless exercise in mental calisthenics.⁵

Despite this, however, plenty of gamers have taken up the banner of nerd supremacy (or, if you like, competitive geekery), proclaiming the innate superiority of Ameritrash or Euro. Which is silly, really, because a game is a game is a game and I believe what we come to play games for is not the actual exercise of the game – although that’s important – but the rituals inherent in playing that game. There’s a reason gamification theory has become so prevalent in modern marketing: we love ritual, we’re trained to love it, and every game has its own set of rituals.

As a longtime patron and occasional part-time employee at Snakes and Lattes, Toronto’s boardgame cafe, I can safely say that despite the staff’s best attempts to get people to adventure a bit and play more advanced games like Power Grid⁶, the most popular games are stuff like Jenga and Hedbanz. Hedbanz is really just a game manufacturer’s clever method of getting people to spend money to play Twenty Questions, but the ritual of putting on the silly plastic headband is one that people find endlessly entertaining. It doesn’t matter that there are better block-stacking games than Jenga (for example, the always-awesome Bausack) – people love the ritual of stacking up the pieces almost as much as they enjoy playing the game itself.

Ameritrash and Euro enthusiasts each begin with a starting premise I think is false, which is that they downplay ritual in favour of a specific experience. For Ameritrashers the allure of ritual is obvious: the thematic games they play are steeped in it, and lend themselves to injokes, traditions and unique ways of approaching each game. Eurogamers might want to pretend that their games are less ritualized, but that’s crap. The most abstract strategy games like chess and go have their own sets of rituals, and just because they’re less overt doesn’t mean they’re not there. Go to a chess tournament sometime and watch people playing “serious” chess and you’ll see it. Using one hand to simultaneously move your piece and capture your opponent’s piece. Hitting the timer on your clock with the piece you just captured. The ceremonial tipping over of the mated king. The Eurogaming experience is no different, if more varied in how it’s approached because of the variety involved.

In the end boardgaming, whether it’s Ameritrash, Euro or Hedbanz, is about socialization. It may offer different rewards (mental immersion into a setting, challenge of brain calisthenics, or the opportunity to wear a plastic headband), but the method of offering them is ultimately the same. All we can do is extrapolate our social selves and put them into the game. Otherwise you might as well just be doing sudoku on your couch.

1. Yes, yes, I know that by the end of the show we all knew who was a Cylon and who wasn’t. Shut up. It’s a game.
2. Well, usually.
3. Okay, I could have gone with Agricola for this example, but firstly I think Caylus is a purer example of the form, and secondly I hate Agricola with the passion of a burning sun. It is a boring non-interactive game about FUCKING FARMING.
4. Or, as some people have suggested, “getting wooden cubes so you can make other wooden cubes to buy more wooden cubes.”
5. Steve Jackson Games makes plenty of these.
6. Which everybody should play.

But licensed games aren’t the reason original roleplaying settings have gradually died out. Original roleplaying settings have died out for a very simple reason: roleplayers, as a market, aged. Midway through the 1990s, the replacement rate of old RP gamers by young RP gamers started dropping, and it’s never really reversed trend despite numerous attempts to revive the hobby among young people.

Here’s the thing: old gamers mostly don’t want a new, dramatic setting. They want what they know, both in terms of rules systems and in terms of settings. That’s why the D&D revivals – third edition, “3.5,”, fourth edition, and Pathfinder³ have been the truly important releases of the past decade. Steven Long’s list of “major RPG releases of the past five years” misses things: the Gamma World rerelease, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying rerelease, Shadowrun’s 20th Anniversary Edition, and so forth.

And if the RPG market has aged ungracefully and grown more hostile to anything they don’t know already – and I think there’s pretty good evidence that that’s the case – then what can an RPG publisher rely upon to generate new customers? The answer is simple: licensed product. Licensed product offers publishers the opportunity not only to get wary older roleplayers’ attention by offering them rules for intellectual properties they’re already familiar with and like, but is also the best remaining way for those publishers to attract outside attention from non-roleplayers, by offering them a gateway. Most of those non-roleplayers will never buy anything but the licensed product, of course, but so what? They still bought it.

And if you’re looking for original roleplaying settings – well, not to get all Doctorow on you or anything, but it’s just moved. It’s all on computers now. Look at Bioware’s output of the last decade: Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age. Any one of those could be a pen-and-paper RPG book setting, and a detailed and enjoyable one at that. Look at games like Arcanum, Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3. There’s really no shortage of options. Now, granted, these are computer RPGs and therefore inherently inferior to pen-and-paper RPGs in that the game master doesn’t have to cheat horribly to get players back on track with his plot because the computer will do it automatically, but the point remains.

1. 7th Sea! WOOOOOOOO!
2. Although not that World of Darkness 2 thing, which took all the grace of the WoD’s well-deserved and well-wrought ending, and completely threw it out the window.
3. AKA “I Can’t Believe It’s Not 3.5.”

Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game. Out of all the new boardgames I played in 2010, this was my favorite: a three-hour brainburner that genuinely captures the feel of playing a marathon game of Civ on your computer, except there’s no computer and you get the fun of playing against three other opponents face-to-face. Multiple victory conditions, variant civilization rules, tech advancement for strategic purpose – everything you would expect out of a game of Civ is here, and produced with screamingly awesome quality.

The first and third episodes of Sherlock. I can’t in good conscience give the whole series a total endorsement because the second episode, “The Blind Banker,” is just not in the league of the other two; cheap Orientalism plus a less-than-compelling mystery make for teevee that is only passably entertaining at most. But the first and third episodes are fantastic stuff – the best visual description of texting yet put to screen, genuinely inventive and fun mysteries, brilliant renditions of the Holmes thought process and of course Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman’s superb Holmes and Watson turn what could have been a goofy lark into some of the best long-form telly of the year.

ArchAndroid by Janelle Monae. Any year Janelle Monae drops a new album it will make this list.

Beasts of Burden by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson. As I get older, and to an extent more productive, the “I wish I had written that” feeling occurs less and less often – that sheer burst of envy you feel when somebody writes something that is so fucking good that is, in retrospect, such an obvious idea that it should have occurred to you years ago, but it didn’t. Beasts of Burden is the only comic all year that made me feel that way: gorgeous, intelligent, crucially not overwritten or overexplained (which would have just ruined it) and mostly just vital. A cat clawing a demon in the eyes felt more urgent than any superhero comic all year long, which says something about superhero comics.

Community. The second half of season one and the first half of season two combine for one of the most virtuosic meta-seasons of any show ever. Community is brilliant not because of the thematic parodies it does (in episodes like “Contemporary American Poultry,” “Epidemiology,” “Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design,” and above all “Modern Warfare”), although those are brilliant. No, Community is brilliant because of its exacting attention to detail in crafting its stories: no show is as efficient at using every single inch of screen real estate and every second of running time to cram in as much story as possible. Think Abed’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it subplot in “The Psychology of Letting Go,” or the fact that the show actually gives away the ending of “Cooperative Calligraphy” in the first two minutes in a way that nobody watching will notice the first time through, or the numerous references to the fact that Jeff and Britta keep hooking up on the sly without ever actually bothering to address it in a main plotline (until they do, of course) – but then bear in mind that all of this detail and craft is simultaneously used to further develop and strengthen all of the show’s cast and drop as many gags as humanly possible.

Animal Kingdom. The best crime movie in years. Animal Kingdom features a teenaged protagonist actually acting like a real teenager (sullen and moody), some of the most vivid and genuinely evil characters to come along in a very long time (when one character matter-of-factly explains what is to be done about another – you’ll know it when you see it – it’s just a tour-de-force of the filmmakers daring you to believe that this isn’t happening when it is), and a plot that surprises out of old-school Hitchcockian tension rather than boring old shock value. Staggeringly good movie.

Matt Smith as the Doctor. Because he’s really, really good at it.

Still feels very much like the start of a game rather than a game itself; this is something where you can see the designers inventing missions, objectives, customizing it in many different ways, etc. But it’s well worth a play or six hundred.

My guess is that it won’t. This is not the same thing as saying it’ll fail; I want to stress right off the bat that I think it’ll make money. It’s actually pretty easy to make money on an MMO, because you’re charging people $10-15 a month to play a game you’ve already paid the development costs for. You’d have to make a spectacularly bad game in order to fail to cover the costs of server maintenance and QA with a subscription-based model, and very few people have made spectacularly bad games. (That said, it is theoretically possible for the game to fail, long-term, if the game gets enough negative reviews that DC decides to pull their license with Sony when it comes up for renewal. But that’s pretty unlikely.)

But just because it doesn’t fail, doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed. And I do think that DCUO is going to wind up in that same shadowy limbo of “making enough to keep going” that Champions Online wound up in, instead of making the push to topple CoH. (Full disclosure: I have a 72-month veteran’s badge in CoH. I don’t know that I’d call myself a raving fanboy, but I’m not unbiased and I know that the hardest thing about bias to recognize is how much of it you have.) DCUO has a lot of the same problems CO did–it’s much easier for CoH to zip in and copy their relatively small innovations than it is for a new company to design an entire game from the ground up that does everything CoH does and does it better and then add new things on top of that. CoH might have an older game engine, but it’s also got the benefit of six years of additional content and depth of development. (Although thankfully, DCUO is not making the colossal mistake CO did of not having villains available at launch. That right there was a deal-breaker for many.)

But DCUO has the DC superstars! That’s got to count for something, right? Well, it does and it doesn’t. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, honestly; on the one hand, it does have a brand recognition that CoH doesn’t. Superman is more exciting than Statesman, Batman is more exciting than Manticore, and so on. But on the other hand…let me put it this way. Imagine buying a game called, “DC Universe Online”. Imagine getting home, spending the half-hour to an hour that it takes to install the game, jumping through all the hoops to get registered, logging in…and finding out that you can’t play as Superman. Or Batman. Or Robin, or Wonder Woman, or Elongated Man, or even frickin’ Turtle Boy. Instead, you help those characters. That’s right, you’re the DC Universe’s newest sidekick! (Or, for those of you who would rather play a villain, you’re the Joker’s newest henchman. The strict continuity-correct version of the game has you getting shot in the face by your own boss at level five.)

The interesting thing about this is just how small a mountain we’re talking about, by the way; CoH probably has about 125,000 subscribers (although it’s gotten something of a bump from its recent expansion) while WoW, king of the MMO market, has about ten times that. It really shouldn’t be all that difficult to set your sights higher than CoH, and yet the first game to go head-to-head with it failed. Part of it might simply be the “sunk costs” factor; for me to go to a new super-hero MMO means giving up six years of character development, perks, and time, and DCUO is simply not convincing me that it’s worth that right now. That might change, of course; part of the “fun” of blogging is being forced to eat your words in a year’s time. But my guess is that DCUO is going to be a modest success, which will be a failure by the standards it has set for itself. Only time will tell if I am correct.

- Battles of Westeros is the Game of Thrones-themed variant on Richard Borg’s “not quite miniatures, not quite a boardgame” set of systems that you see in games like BattleLore, Memoir ’44 and Command and Colors. Each of the games has its own quirks, but so far out of all of them Westeros is my favorite, because for me it works better: the game is very commander-centric, so it makes sense to form your units around a Robb Stark or Jaime Lannister to get most use out of them, but it has some options for you to send a unit afield from your main armies without stranding it in a “can’t command it” zone (as happens in some of the other games). The other major upsides of Westeros compared to its cousins are that it has a system for generating essentially infinite custom scenarios out of the box, which greatly ups its replay value, and that it tends to play more quickly, I find, than the other games.

The downside of Westeros is that the basic units included in the main box are kind of boring; the Stark and Lannister infantry, cavalry and archers are basically identical to one another. Granted, your meat-and-potatoes units by definition have to show up in the main box, but a little more gravy would have been appreciated. Still, the first expansion (more Lannister units, including Tyrion as a commander) fixes this problem to an extent and makes clear that future expansions will definitely shake up the game; presumably when they gradually introduce Baratheon and Greyjoy and Tyrell and the Night’s Watch and wildlings and Martell and Targaryen forces as future expansions, the game will grow ever more diverse. And it’s certainly much cheaper than any standard minis game, and provides a lot of the same flavour that minis games can provide.

- I recently picked up Glory To Rome because it was reprinted and I figured, “heck, if nothing else it’ll eventually go out of print and then increase in value again (as it has every time it’s been printed), so even if I don’t like it I can always trade or sell it off.” However, that won’t happen, because I quite enjoy the game. It’s a complex card game with a lot of elements to it, but anybody who’s played Magic will understand the concept of “zones” (IE, different areas the cards can be, which affects what they can do). The problem for most players is the really terrible graphic design, which… well, let’s look at a card for a second.

Look at that. The title of the card is at the top. What the card does when you play it as a building (and only when you play it as a building) is in the center. What the card does when it’s raw materials is at the bottom. What the card does when it’s a “client” (citizen serving your interests) is on the left hand side. The number of coins (victory points) it’s worth when you sell it is at staggered opposite corners. And then, just because there wasn’t enough information on the card, there’s a quote by a Roman philosopher along the right hand side. That is a lot of information and it’s delivered in a way that’s honestly just terrible.

The upside is that the game is honestly really great. Every new building a player builds changes the game, and new players sometimes complain that a given combination of buildings is broken right up until they realize that the game is literally full of broken combos which all balances one another out. It requires a reasonable amount of familiarity with the cards to know which combos you should start building towards once you see your hand, of course, but this is true for any card game that has disparate elements and a common card pool, like San Juan or Race For The Galaxy. And Glory To Rome, while more complex than either of those, is still a hell of a lot of fun; it’s got more depth than either of the aforementioned card games and much, much more interactivity, which is key for me. (I tend to dislike non-interactive games. I know some people love Agricola, but Christ – it’s just sitting around and baking bread at each other for three hours.)

- Defenders of the Realm is goddamned terrible. I don’t much care for Pandemic, mostly because as a collaborative game it always seems to come down to a mathematical exercise done by the most adept player at the table, and Defenders of the Realm is a fantasy retheme of Pandemic done worse. The diseases are now hordes of monsters, see.

Now, granted, the retheme will work for some people, and the idea of sending your heroes questing about to get magical items so they can kill the monster generals (or cure the disease, in Pandemic turns) is engaging. The problem is that Defenders, apparently realizing that for some people Pandemic is too easy even at its hardest setting, decided that the way to fix this was to include a random element, which is: you roll dice to kill the monsters, and the generals’ advance towards the capital (which is the game’s clock) is entirely randomized within the deck. This means you can lose the game in seven turns or watch it drag out for seventy. On top of that, not being able to guarantee that you’ll kill monsters (cure diseases!) means that you can commit to the right strategy and still end up wasting your entire turn.

But hey, if you really want to see Larry Elmore art first used in the early 90s for Forgotten Realms products recycled in the most blatant way possible, go wild!

- I really want Zombie State: Diplomacy of the Dead to be more fun than it is. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not an unfun game, because it’s basically World War Z done up as a boardgame. The mechanics are good and the game is difficult, which is as it should be: it’s really, really hard to beat the zombies in this game and players will usually default to holding three or four of their original twelve territories: the Redeker Plan, mentioned in Z, is actually one of the ways to buy yourself time to stay alive, and that’s pretty cool. (It’s not explicitly mentioned as such in the game, but smart players will quickly figure out that baiting zombies with humans you can afford to sacrifice works.)

My problem with the game is twofold; firstly, the “virus goes airborne” clock is a bit too fast (I find the vast majority of games end that way, which doesn’t quite feel right), and secondly the title is all wrong, because for a game called Diplomacy of the Dead there’s barely any diplomacy. The idea of helping other players (or hurting them) is really kind of awesome, but it doesn’t work in this game because your interaction with other players is near-nil; other than occasionally barricading a territory so that zombies attack your neighbors rather than you, there is literally almost nothing you can do to help or hinder other players in this game.¹ If the game had had more interactivity, I think it would have been a true classic; as it is, it’s a fun shared experience of watching everybody circle the drain, kind of the opposite of Agricola but with a better theme because you’re not baking bread to win the game.

1. Another quibble: you have to research nukes. What the hell is that? Come on, they’re nukes. Everybody knows how to build nukes.