I was sitting at Snakes and Lagers a couple of days ago playing a game of Revolution! – which, it turns out, is not very good at all: it has a serious runaway leader problem in that, if you “win” a round of bidding in the right way, you are more likely to “win” the next round. (And I say this as the person who won the game handily.)
Afterwards, the general agreement around the table was that the game was not very fun, but one player explained that this was all right, because he would rather play five or six games in a night rather than one long one. This is a fairly common sentiment among boardgamers, especially as we get older what with the babies and the adult responsibilities and all: if you’re going to have a game night, better to spend it playing a variety of things rather than one big long thing.
I don’t really agree. This is not to say that I don’t like short games; there are plenty of short games that I really like, and over the last year or two in particular mini-game design has really gone to a new level with games like One Night Werewolf and Mascarade and Coup and Love Letter and Council of Verona and… well, I could go on at length. There are lots of fun short games out there.
But short games are like appetizers. They are a wonderful little prelude (or an after, if you prefer the metaphor to be a cheese plate or something, bear with me). But if all you play is short games, then you are effectively doing the gaming equivalent of a tapas restaurant. And tapas restaurants are all terrible.
Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Bruxelle 1893. It’s a remarkable design as Euros go – a tense combination of bidding and worker placement and area control and point accumulation all at once, with a lot of interaction and a lot of variable strategy. It also takes about 30 minutes per player and plays best with four, so as a game it tops out at two to two and a half hours, which puts it at the upper end of what most gamers are willing to play on a regular basis.
But here’s the thing: that play length is what allows for individual plays of the game to have their own narrative, which I find to be more and more important to me as time goes on. I don’t just want to interact with people, I want to create my own story through the game. That story doesn’t have to be exclusively driven by the game’s internal narrative, mind you – that’s a reason a lot of people like “Ameritrash” games, and while it’s fun for me to make Warhammer references when I’m playing Chaos In The Old World, the narratives I enjoy more are “I dominate the entire game and then have to fend off a three-person alliance in the last turn” or “I do my best to come from behind but fall just short.” Those narratives are universal, which is why they can come from Euros or Ameritrash games or abstracts or what have you. That’s what I love about board games.
It’s one of the reasons I own every expansion for Battlestar Galactica, a game that almost always takes longer than three hours; it’s why I own six different 18XX games, the quickest of which starts at three hours as well; it’s why I make a point to play Virgin Queen twice a year even though a full game of it takes anywhere from eight to ten hours. (Almost invariably after those games I sit down and have a beer with people who were playing other things and we just swap game stories.) You get out what you put in.
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My weekly game group has really gotten into Zombicide because of the narrative it creates like you mentioned. I was reluctant to play it at first, because oh god not another zombie game, but I’m glad I caved. We’ve had some amazing stories created because of it.
To each their own. I tend to find long games tedious; Battlestar is a GREAT game… for about two rounds. Then it’s the same mechanic OVER and OVER and OVER for the next SIX HOURS.
The Resistance takes that same mechanic and distills it into a 40 minute game. You get the same tension, paranoia and raising stakes without the tedium.
As for the food analogy; I love a good burger, but I don’t want to eat six burgers in a row. I’d rather have a side of fries and maybe a milkshake.
Maybe if they made a game that changed over the course of the game it’d be better. My favorite game nights start off with a fun little filler game while we wait for people to show up (Coup or Bang!), followed by a good crunchy game where you really have to plan things out (Manhattan Project or Caylus or Power Grid), followed by a lighter game with a more interactive component (Medici or Resistance) and cap it off with a big round of Time’s Up or Eat Poop You Cat.
Meanwhile the Battlestar table is still trying to get the board set up. (Seriously I’ve seen some guys spend two hours just getting the game prepped).
I’ve played Revolution a number of times, and I have to disagree with the runaway leader problem. Force doesn’t help you get force, and blackmail doesn’t help you get blackmail, and there are enough good options that a player who wins a bunch of force and blackmail can’t keep shutting everybody out — the players with less force/bm will have more money, so can win ties.
None of this means you have to like the game, of course.
The more I think about it, the more I want a game that changes mechanics over the course of the game… maybe one where players can steer the game into mechanics that suit them!
It’d be like playing a serious of interconnected games with a single end game!
For the record, I really can’t stand any game that takes more than about an hour to finish; I feel like anything over that starts to fall into the Monopoly trap of feeling repetitive to me. That said, I’d have a terrible life if I expected everyone else to enjoy the same things I did.
Ultimately, though, I fall back on the great truism of gaming–a game is as good as the people you play it with.
I would love to play BSG one of these days: I’m not even interested in the show, it just seems like a fascinating game. I’ve played Revolution once and I have to admit that I and my friends had fun with it.
My gaming group has been playing Risk: Legacy since Christmas, and it takes about two hours most of the time. We play Forbidden Desert when we have less time, but we don’t enjoy it nearly as much.
I love long game emergent narratives. My friends and I played Khrysos Hunters recently, which lends itself to very quick games, but I found that the most satisfying way to play to was to keep the same hand of characters over multiple sessions, so I could construct my own little story of a scrappy bunch of ragtag mercenaries coming together to run missions.
I’d agree that longer games are better, with one caveat – it only works as long as everyone has roughly equal experience with them. If two people have been playing the game for years and they try to teach two people who have never heard of it before, I can’t imagine that being fun.