On Developing Tastes In Cardboard

Delicious, delicious cardboard.

This weekend just past, I played my first 4x game with Rok, Eclipse. We discussed the few random elements, less about the dice and more about the location hex draws. The dice then became central to analysis when Rok attempted to take the centre of the galaxy and failed due to dice-rolls. That happened on the third of fourth round, and what was interesting was that he couldn’t really recover from it. He didn’t mind because nothing is obscured, all information is available. If you commit a force and fail, you’ve just lost on your investment and you go into a situation knowing that it’s possible. I appreciate that, but the problem is that he makes one decision a third or two fifths into the game and if it goes bad, the determination of the game is decided there.

It was my first game though so I asked whether he was just changing things up for himself to keep it interesting but he allegedly wasn’t taking it easy. I do this thing where I don’t like people to be crushed or subject to landslides. I really don’t like landslides and more to the point, I really don’t like being the one doing the landsliding. It isn’t engaging or interesting for me and I’m beginning to understand why.

Euro games are mechanically and dynamically rich. While there’s often a score track that is in a sense live, updated after every action that immediately pays Victory Points (VP)/Prestige, there are almost always endgame conditions that are determined after play. Recently we played a couple of shared city building games in which all players contribute to the same city and score their own actions, and there were no endgame conditions at all, it simply ended when the last legal move was played. When I posted a picture of it with a few remarks, I noted that it lacked a crescendo and I realise what I mean by that is endgame scoring or what is often called bonus scoring.

I particularly like endgame scoring because it can completely destroy landslides. A player may score heavily during play but another who plans or anticipates the endgame can end up with more VP after everything is determined. That kind of information is always available to all players, and decisions are made by players as to how they wish to chase the score. Many Euro games are also fully or semi-open information so they can observe others’ scores and adapt strategies accordingly. Even if someone doesn’t quite catch the leader in the endgame, scores are often close and I find that’s quite satisfying.

Eclipse does have obscured VP from battles, but it’s certainly not everything. I do appreciate that it’s all a part of the design – that you need to be capitalising on every action and expenditure of resource and when you don’t, you’re severely punished. That’s the game and it’s a good game, it’s not flawed. It just means that there’s potential for things to happen that aren’t to my tastes. The other consideration is that only two of us were playing and it tends to exclude some fairly significant dynamics that I know are great with three or more players.

So what are my tastes?

People
Firstly, I’m not competitive, and very far from an alpha persona. I don’t care in the slightest who wins. First and foremost what I like seeing is people enjoying playing the game and yes, that’s not just about the actions of individuals restricted to their own dynamics, but it’s about them also enjoying things being done to them as much as the doing, should player interaction be on offer. It does depend on the type of group one’s playing with and certainly, some folks just won’t enjoy every dynamic of a game.

It makes it an interesting environment for me then, because my conditions for my own enjoyment of a game are largely dependent on the enjoyment of others. I’ll play almost anything (almost) as long as other people have a great time with it. For that reason, I actually don’t really like winning at all for myself, because most people want to and many feel some kind of reduction to their enjoyment if they don’t. It means that at times if I see a good strategy in a game but we’re playing with people totally new to it (or indeed, contemporary gaming itself), I’ll try a really wild alternate strategy just so that they have a better chance of achieving something good. They get to experiment with the core dynamics and I get to test something with higher risk and greater difficulty. If I pull it off, fair play to me but often I don’t which I still find hilarious and delightful.

So there are at least two parallel ways in which I seem to derive enjoyment from board games. Socially – in sharing enjoyment with people and being a part of that joy, and mechanically – where I observe great design. The best of both worlds is when the mechanics take advantage of social interaction and interactive player action (when players can affect to a greater degree the options and scoring of other player).

The marriage of mechanic and theme
I still haven’t mentioned theme and there are a few important reasons why. Let’s look at it.
Rok and I have a long running joke about ‘realistic hovercar racers’. That probably says it all but in brief, years ago some kids were discussing F-Zero and Wipeout, debating which one is more realistic. Primarily it’s a redundant comparison as they’re completely different games with different objectives in mind and dynamics at play, but beyond that, the concept of a ‘realistic hovercar racer’ is absurd.
To that effect then, I wouldn’t really be able to tell you what it’s really like to cast actual spells and fight actual dragons because I’ve never been an actual wizard. You see where this is going.

That doesn’t mean that theme is completely unimportant. There are definitely advantages to being able to tie in themes to mechanics. Doing so gives actions meaning and brings the game to life in a way that otherwise ‘dry’ games don’t. That’s a pretty big ask though, as we’re carrying out these abstracts of real or fictional actions with cards and tokens around a table, so I appreciate that no-one actually means that they ‘really feel like they’re casting spells’ etc.

Complex dynamics
The ‘dryness’ of a game can be a real thing. Some games can feel like you’re not really doing anything meaningful, just engaging in mechanics or more blatantly, mathematics in order to get an end result. I guess for me though, sometimes the systems in place to do that are absolutely ingenious. Complex systems are my thing, I adore them. I adore seeing a bunch of rules and not really knowing exactly what they’re going to do, especially when you can’t account for other players’ actions yet, and then playing them out and seeing how they work. This is the difference between mechanic (the rule) and dynamic (what happens as a result of executing it). Some dynamics don’t even bother with any thematic relevance at all, but I get a real kick in being involved in everyone getting embroiled in something wonderfully complex. Often this means that mechanics are layered and segmented, sometimes bringing on additional mechanics if specific conditions are met which then precipitate a whole new dynamic. I really revel in this stuff, just marvel at how dense and complicated and controlling it can be. These dynamics often make rushing and landsliding completely impossible, or if done, end up netting a low final VP. They also keep the full endgame picture of all players somewhat obscured until it’s all meted out, meaning any strategy can win, each strategy has to adapt to the actions of other players and scores are often very close. It also means that while some actions may be blocked by other players, forcing unexpected and alternative choices, these can and often do lead to victory. No one action or set of actions will guarantee victory.

Restriction
That tightness is probably the next important thing for me. In Rok’s brilliant continuing of my education in terms, he tells me it’s called crunch, and it’s an apt term. I adore crunch. I love the feeling of not knowing what the best strategy is, silently hoping no-one takes the action or resource you need, the exasperation when they do and then the rapid iterative thinking that tests other potential actions. Things carried out in this turn have repercussions over the next two, three or even more turns that can help or hinder everyone. Sacrifices are made, overlooked opportunities are exploited and sometimes devilishly cunning plans come to fruition. Being a part of that and then seeing it happen, seeing anyone at all pull it off – it doesn’t have to be me, is an absolutely wonderful experience.

What’s interesting is that hauntingly-similar crunch dynamics can be employed for co-op games. Some folks don’t enjoy co-op games as they tend to have a high degree of difficulty. Not only are they hard to achieve success in, they depend on everyone working together, and many games add to the crunch by intentionally and directly obfuscating player communication (Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Space Alert! (Also Hanabi)). I don’t know if I’m just a sado-masochist, but I freaken’ love this kind of chaos and destruction. I love seeing everyone try their very best but still fail. I think it’s because most other games are always about gain (and gain and more gain) and interestingly, this subject has come up in video games for me in the past. Co-op games tend to almost always be about loss, and often you already start with very little.

What’s amazing though is when you actually succeed (except for Space Alert, because you never succeed at that (which by the way makes me love it even more)), your success is made over such incredible odds and in spite of enduring so much loss and sacrificing so much, that it feels truly worthy. It’s usually impossible to succeed unless every player contributes and contributes significantly. It’s something I’ve not really found in other interactive mediums at all, strange, given the power of digital tools and the levels of agency they can facilitate.

So there you have it, or rather, I have it – some personal notes on my tastes.
I tend to favour:
– Every player enjoying play, individually and as a group.
– Mechanics and dynamics that are fun because they make thematic sense.
– Systems that form complex dynamics in order to promote intelligent strategising and deft adaption.
– Multiple paths to victory with dynamic player action removing single strategies as guaranteed success.
– Restriction and loss that enforces cooperation and sacrifice, making failure more often than success, and success truly worthwhile.

As an aside, I’m now on Board Game Geek.

http://boardgamegeek.com/user/Vroenis

I’m intentionally not lazylinking any more.

NB: Many thanks to Rok for correcting crush to crunch! Extra crunchy!