Well, I happen to have a copy already! So let me confirm: it’s very good. It’s a sort of area-control game wherein each player is a major political player in 18th-century New York (it is, in some ways, Gangs of New York: The Board Game). Each turn you can either plunk down “ward bosses”, or a combination of ward bosses and immigrants (Irish, English, German or Italian). When you place immigrants on the board, you get political favour chips of the appropriate nationality.

Then, at the end of every four years, you have elections in each of the city wards, which are won by the player with the most votes. Votes are your ward bosses plus all of the political favour chips you choose to expend – but chips are expended in a sealed bid, which effectively turns each vote at least partially into a bluffing contest (“so, is he going to pull in his Irish favours here, or save them for ward 17?”).

That, plus some other clever mechanics (slandering opponents, the fact that the big winner of each election gets more VPs but then has to assign the special powers of the game to other players) make for a boardgame that is both extremely engaging and not too complex from a rules standpoint, but what I really love about Tammany Hall is that it captures the feel of political horse-trading almost perfectly, and the bluffing aspect of the game really seals that for me. (Also, you can make lots of jokes about English and Italians, if you are so inclined. Playing the game with friends of the appropriate ethnicities gets hilarious and lowbrow very quickly.)

Right now it’s a few hundred bucks short of making its Kickstarter goal for the base game, so it’s guaranteed to succeed. I highly recommend it – it’s a fantastic game.

(Also, other people should Kickstart Ogre so it gets to 700K and Steve Jackson promises to thus Kickstart Car Wars. I don’t care about Ogre, but I want me some Car Wars. With the long-awaited official rules for scaling gameplay up to Hot Wheels.)

So I was talking with a friend of mine who is a retailer of boardgames, and we were discussing the distribution side of the industry. If you did not know: the distribution side of the boardgame industry is remarkably fuckety. Basically every boardgame publisher is signing exclusive distribution deals, which in turn places retailers at the mercy of the distributors, and the distributors are not always brilliant. My retailer friend complained that he was at present completely unable to purchase Filosofia/Z-Man boardgames because the Canadian exclusive distributor was, in essence, not doing its damn job.

Anyway, this conversation eventually led its way to Kickstarter, and said friend dislikes Kickstarter even more than he does distributors because the entire sales paradigm, for him, gets screwed with. He has to constantly explain to people when he carries a formerly-Kickstarted product that, no, he doesn’t have the Kickstarter promo bonuses because those don’t come with the mass-market release. Each Kickstarter has its own, shall we say, eclectic release schedule. Reprints are never guaranteed and usually are not expected: Kickstarter products are one-shots. And this last element is especially problematic because good retailers depend on shelf stock to grow the business. After all, retailers – even those who smartly use the internet to promote their business wisely – need to compete with the Amazons and eBays of the world and the only way they can still do it is by having deep stock so that if you want X, they will most likely have X.

But the Kickstarter problem for boardgames goes beyond just retailers – it’s about boardgaming as a whole. Every new product depends on word of mouth. These are not products intended to create new gamers; they’re intended for an existing audience. Steve Jackson Games right now is Kickstarting a new super-deluxe edition of OGRE, their classic “one giant mega-tank versus an army” game – but how is this going to create new OGRE players? Shouldn’t the point of any new product launch be to both satisfy the target audience and expand the existing base? (I note that SJG has offered, as a benchmark goal that is still approximately $50,000 away, a “mini edition” of OGRE – AKA “the entry-level edition that new players might actually buy sight unseen.) Is anybody ever going to see super-deluxe OGRE on a shelf and think “let’s try that?”

Kickstarter is targeted-marketing that depends heavily on word of mouth. That’s fine for many things. But it worries me that it’s becoming a primary business model for game publishers, because I doubt that such a model is sustainable in the long run.

supergp: What game would you use to introduce a young kid to boardgames, and at what age?

Start them early (and this isn’t just me espousing the hobby, incidentally – any childhood dev expert can tell you that the problem-solving and analytical skills kids can pick up by playing boardgames will go a long way in their lives). You can start playing boardgames with kids as early as two thanks to games like Go Away Monster! (among others). Animal Upon Animal is a dexterity game first and foremost but there’s strategy to be found there (enough that I have played it with adults and had fun, albeit using variant rules); Geistesblitz never, ever stops being fun either, whether you are four or sixty-four. As kids get older you can introduce them to slightly harder stuff: Liar’s Dice, Blockers! or Zooloretto or even Ticket To Ride. And then you can get them into the big-name stuff like Settlers or Carcassonne.

Evil Midnight Lurker: Have you ever killed a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Seems like a waste of a perfectly good murder to do such a thing.

A2H: Will there ever be any more Who’s Who columns? And if not, would going over the Official Guide to the Marvel Universe be a possibility?

Yes to both. I was actually working on a fairly lengthy Who’s Who entry (one of the more think-piecey ones, although I do especially want to do another Crime Tailor segment at some point and have a couple of villains in mind for that) last week and didn’t have time to finish it for that Thursday. Maybe this Thursday if everything goes smoothly. Or not. It depends.

As for the OHOTMU, probably, yes. Rex the Wonder Dog’s awesomeness is not constrained to one universe.

Mitchell Hundred: Does Armond White actually believe all the crazy shit he writes, or is he just trying to garner publicity? I’m really not sure about this.

I think Armond White is a born contrarian, and contrarians are extremely skilled at making themselves believe that the contrary opinions they hold for the sake of being contrary are also correct. Seriously, if Armond White is trying to get publicity, there are much easier ways to do it than by arguing that latter-day Michael Bay films are unrecognized works of genius.

Nicodemus: If you were a flavor of soup, what flavor would it be?

Presumably “mangled flesh” flavour.

Jonathan: Do you have any opinions/insights into the current Alberta election? Does it even have any meaning to you as an Ontarian?

Yes. I said on MetaFilter a couple weeks ago that I thought Danielle Smith – not Wildrose, Smith – represented the future of Canadian small-c conservatism because she was what it needed to be to survive (or at least pretending to be so): fiscally radical-conservative and socially liberal/libertarian. Youth polling in Canada – even in Alberta – makes it quite clear that social conservative positions are wildly unpopular with young voters and that is only trending downwards. Libertarian-conservatism is really the only way for conservatism to truly survive in Canada over the next fifty years, and Danielle Smith was trying to sell Wildrose as being that.

The problem, of course, is that Wildrose was actually chock-full of the usual old white Reform Party psychotics who have always been the backbone of Canada’s far right and once it became obvious that this was the case, the moderates and youth that might have considered voting Wildrose suddenly found they weren’t so interested in voting for Canada’s religious right and went for the Progressive Conservatives, who have moved to a decidely centrist position over the past few years. So generally, I’m quite happy with the results, as Alberta politics seem to have shifted from all-right-wing-all-the-time to a centrist/conservative fight, and that’s a leftward shift in the most conservative province in Canada.

KD: Nearly a year in, what are your thoughts on the DcNU?

I’m reading I, Vampire and that is pretty much it (and I don’t know how long I’ll hang on to reading it). The Nu52 basically killed DC for me – the emotional attachment that I always had to the DCU is still there, but it’s strictly to the old DCU and not this shitty new EXTREEEEEEME version. Really, most of the Nu52 comics are just appallingly bad, and the ones that aren’t are crossing over with the bad ones far too often. But at the end of the day, it’s not about quality but about the fact that my DC comics, the ones I grew up with, have been mostly discarded for something else. Even if they were good comics, I still wouldn’t want to read them, because without the emotional tie they lose all resonance for me. I mean, I’m not even reading Legion of Super-Heroes! This is the first time basically ever that I am not bothering to read Legion. It just feels weird for me to type that, but it’s true.

And look – DC has greatly increased their sales, so good for them, I suppose. But it’s not for me any more. I used to dream of writing for DC; I don’t any more, because it’s quite clear that even if I could get past their abominable treatment of creators (and I don’t think I could), it’s just not a place I’d want to work now.

1.) The idea of an Assassin operating during the American Revolution is awesome;
2.) But what about Desmond?

Afterall, the overarcing plot of the Assassin’s Creed story demands an awesome epic conclusion with Desmond in 2012. But this is an example of how video game writing can be constrained by the gameplay, which is relatively unique to video games.

The problem with a Desmond-centred storyline isn’t a problem with Desmond himself. Some people don’t like his character, and I agree he comes across as whiny in the original Assassin’s Creed, but the following games flesh him out and make him more appealing (and his white hoodie is a nice modern equivalent of the Assassin robes). It’s not Desmond’s character that makes him unsuitable as the primary character in the next game in the series.

No, the issue with Desmond is that at this point in the series, Assassin’s Creed, as a family of games, does certain things. And one of the things that makes it mostly impossible to do what it does are automatic weapons, because while sneaking around and stabbing people and getting into awesome swordfights is terrific, it’s all more or less rendered obsolete by firearms. Indeed, the end sequence in Assassin’s Creed II, where Desmond has to fight his way through a bunch of Templars with the wrist blade, makes absolutely no sense. Why do none of the Templars have guns? Heck, why don’t any of them have so much as a frigging taser?

This is not to say that eventually we might see an AC game where the protagonist exists in an era where there are reliable guns. But it would demand being a wildly different game from the existing franchise in many ways. Arguably, Assassin’s Creed III‘s American Revolution setting is about as far forward as you can go in time and still use most of the existing gameplay of the franchise: multiple-shot rifles and pistols start showing up a few generations later, and realistically that’s the ball game for stabbing people as a raison d’etre. “All men are created equal – Sam Colt made them that way” isn’t just a cute saying: for Assassin’s Creed it’s the obelisk standing before the cavemen.

If you put Ezio Auditore in the Wild West, he would be one dead Italian pretty damn fast. And Ubisoft isn’t going to fuck with how the franchise plays in the final game of their flagship trilogy which, in best Douglas Adams fashion, is now five games long.

Tobago came out a couple of years ago and was immediately very popular; it’s a weird puzzle game where players gradually winnow down the number of possible sites where treasure can exist on an island, and then race to get the treasures. It has an interesting set of mechanics and is reasonably interactive (which is key for me, because I hate multiplayer-solitaire games like Agricola – seriously, I could write a thousand words easily on how much I fucking hate Agricola, but that is for another day). But when it is suggested, my response is always “eh.” Tobago doesn’t really feel very competitive to me – in a three- or four-player game, it’s far too easy for a player to scavenge wins based on little more than turn order and a bit of luck. It’s just sort of there. The pieces are cute and I suppose it’s a good gateway game to get people to heavier stuff, but there are plenty of good games to get people to heavier stuff that are better than Tobago – not least because Tobago isn’t really like anything else. That should be a plus in its favour, but it isn’t, because it feels so inessential to me. I mean, when I teach Stone Age – another light game I don’t particularly like – I can at least try to push people to try Caylus eventually, or one of the other half-dozen really good worker placement games out there. But Tobago doesn’t really link to anything.

Fresco is a worker-placement game that can at least lead to better experiences, but I dislike it. It has one clever mechanic – “waking up” your workers earlier means you get initiative for the best slot placements, but it makes your workers less happy which in turn means you gradually get less actions. That’s a clever initiative system and I wish it had been better implemented in this game, where I rarely see worker happiness matter overly – and that’s really my beef with Fresco, which is so very straightforward a game. You get cubes, you turn them into other (more important) cubes, and then you trade in the cubes for points. Too many modern Euro-style boardgames are about trading cubes for other cubes. (In this game, the cubes are supposed to be paint. But really. They’re cubes.) Fresco fails for me, because in attempting to be accessible it fails to really be a game. It’s just a pretty straightforward expanding economy game – get A to get B to get C.

But what’s worst are the ones I really, really want to be good. I was waiting eagerly to play Pret-a-Porter because the theme is so awesome – you’re competing fashion design moguls! Come on, that is a great theme for a boardgame. If I play one more game where I am a merchant in historical Europe I may shoot myself. (Or, more practically, I might shoot other people. I mean, come on. There is only one of me, and so many other people. This is logical, see.) But Pret-a-Porter did not live up to my hopes. It’s a worker-placement game with an economic theme – you’re buying buildings and hiring employees to get more clothing designs and materials so you can present the biggest and best collections at fashion shows.

In practice, the game is a very complex set of steps – buy business resources (A) to assist you in getting designs (B) and raw materials (C) so you can complete sets of clothing (D) which generate you money (E) and victory points (F), the latter being determined by special categories of attributes which you can also earn from the buildings and employees as well as other areas on the board (G) but the victory points also earn you money (back to E) and you need the money to buy the resources and materials in the first place (back to A and C). Furthermore, the game has not one but TWO different ways to borrow money – the “on purpose” way which is reasonably easy and straightforward for a player to play back, and the “emergency loanshark” way which is not. The employees and buildings all do appropriate things (for example, the PR person gives you additional VPs when you come in third or fourth in a category). Really, this game has a ton of clever ideas.

But they don’t work. Because the employees and buildings – which are really the core of the game, as you need them to build your efficiency engine – show up randomly every turn and initiative shifts on a preset order, there is no real way to sacrifice to guarantee to get what you want or need. Which means that the essential parts of the game are essentially doled out to players at random, which would be fine in a lighter game, but this is a game with at least four levels of mental accounting. Which means that you’re brainburning on a game which doesn’t reward you for it. I have no problems with four levels of mental accounting if the game respects the work I’m doing to make it work, but Pret-a-Porter just doesn’t. And that sucks, because I really wanted this to work.

See also: Core Worlds. I’m kind of burned out on Dominion lately, and I’d really like to see a great deckbuilding game take Dominion’s ideas and run with them. None of the wannabes have done so – most have not even come close. Core Worlds was advertised as Dominion with space-empire building, which seemed like a slam dunk. I love Eclipse, but want a quick-and-dirty space game. Something that does what Race For The Galaxy does, except in a deckbuilding context. Core Worlds seemed like that thing! Except, of course, it wasn’t.

See, Core Worlds is another game where turn order is determined by the first player changing every round (the person on your left is first player next round). And you draw replacement cards into the pool randomly from the deck. These cards are either troops and ships, who can earn you the two types of “currencies” in the game (ground-fighting and space-fighting, basically) which let you conquer planets. Simple – except that since the planets are also dealt out randomly, it is quite possible to, for example, have a situation where all of the planets need starfighters, and you never get a starfighter because on your turn to go first there are no starfighters and on other people’s turns they buy the starfighters before you get a chance, so you basically sit there having lost the game in the first couple of turns and that is that. Core Worlds is an example of terrible game design, because when a game can assfuck you on a totally arbitrary basis from the very start of the game, that is a bad idea. Many deckbuilders have also made this same mistake, but their mistake has been to incorporate more complex ideas than the deckbuilding mechanic can handle. Core Worlds is relatively simple and still fucked it up.

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.