Cardboard Revolution

This weekend I committed to purchasing my own set of board games. I’ve been playing with Rok for roughly a year and I’ve decided to begin branching out with my own groups with the aim of more cross-group interaction.

A photograph of the games I purchased.
You can copy and paste it manually because I’m a transparent traditionalist.

http://instagram.com/p/badHDOIn0Q/

The decision to buy board games is a decision to teach them which is different to learning and playing them for obvious reasons.
Teaching is something else entirely, but stopping short of using the word culture, playing board games is good because:

It is first and foremost about people.
Playing board games is about joining together with friends or meeting new people and sharing an enjoyable activity together. Shy people emerge from their shells. People with no friends in the group come out of a session with new friends. Teaching, learning and playing together creates a wonderfully encouraging and affirming environment for as long as the group has a leader that can keep alphas in check, but in a sense, that’s a part of board gaming. A group of any size will always have alphas, but in general, board gaming stops being fun for even the alpha if they dominate interaction and communication too much. In some ways, some games amazingly seem to contain this all on their own.

Many board games have disciplined rule sets that create often astonishingly elegant systems and dynamics.
Sometimes the systems are obscured to players, especially first time players, and this is a good thing. Sometimes the systems are transparent and this can also be a good thing. Nevertheless, one of the most amazing things you can experience is seeing the dynamics of a game emerge and realising how multifaceted they are. Seeing how the designers time things, track things, balance things and control play is often stunning, and their solutions to balance problems in particular are nothing short of genius. You have not seen rules like this before if you’ve not played contemporary board games, especially what are called Euro-games, many from Germany in particular.
When the play dynamic emerges, you realise you’re participating in something truly amazing and while all of these games contain some kind of scoring element, often the end result is secondary to the brilliant experience of the dynamics of play.

Many board games promote interaction and competition in ways other than direct conflict, in particular, dynamics that are not abstracts of violent combat.
The story goes that Europe has a much longer history than North America and as they’ve had so much war in their past, they tend to focus on other themes. While not all games from the U.S. have conflict and/or combat at their core, it is something common to their games (and many of them have great combat systems). European games often have themes of history and specific periods or eras in history. Some are themed around agriculture (you knew there’d be a reference to Agricola in here eventually), many around trading and many about building cities or cultures. Sometimes there’s a bit of a divorce of theme from dynamic as a mechanical rule doesn’t make sense as an abstract of something from the real world, but there are times when a perfect marriage of theme and mechanic emerges and it’s another wonderful experience to discover.
One of the most popular European games is Agricola and is about farming. Players will place workers on a shared game board to take resources or actions in order to prepare their own farm, add to it or improve it.
A great game Rok tested with us this weekend is called Quarantine in which each player builds a hospital, cures patients and decontaminates rooms that are constantly being infected.
My primary teaching game for the moment is a very simple card game called Love Letter in which players attempt to deliver a letter to a princess. Players hold one card at a time and draw one more on their turn, then choosing to play one, with each card permitting different actions. As simple as it sounds, the rules and play dynamic are absolutely brilliant, cunning and thematically wonderful.

There is a quickly growing selection of co-operative board games being created where everyone plays, wins and loses together.
When Rok first introduced me to co-op board games, I had no idea of how the dynamic would work, indeed, whether it would work at all. It really is astonishing at times how designers make the game come to life, give their world a life and behaviour of its own and how player actions affect it. The win conditions for co-op games are often difficult in order to provide more play and a better sense of achievement, with many random elements in setup and progressive play in order to keep the games from becoming simply puzzles that once solved, contain no challenge. Some co-op games have wonderfully sweeping themes with mechanics that play right into truly emergent narratives, while others leverage chaos and hilarity when losing will be often but amazingly enjoyed, every time.

It broadens your perceptions of systems, important in particular for designers of any discipline.
Recent discussions of board gaming begin with dispelling the common perception that board and card games are the old staples, Monopoly, Scrabble, Game Of Life (roll to move etc.) and Uno, to name a few popular ones. These can all be good games, but their dynamics aren’t really very sophisticated. Also many modern gamers do their interaction almost entirely digitally, and often isolated from others. These aren’t bad things either, but it’s a narrow perception of how systems and rules can work.
If you design anything at all that involves progression of any kind, you need to play at least two or three board games. Setting aside how wonderfully enjoyable they can be, they are immensely rich as studies of mechanics and dynamics. As we establish a vocabulary of terms to describe dynamics like rushing, landsliding or as Rok taught me this weekend, king making, we begin to form a greater understanding of the balance of dynamic. Balancing a board game is extremely difficult, and even when I’ve been irritated by a seemingly inelegant rule-set, it’s no mean feat at all to attempt to create one as these systems can be so complex. When you see how some designers control play and dictate pace and the rate of escalation, you come to an entirely new understanding of restriction, option and progression.

It is fun.
I’ve avoided using the word up until this point as we all know the term is relative and also fairly loaded, but setting that discussion aside for a bit, playing contemporary board and card games is just bloody fun. It’s so much fun that it’s compelling enough for many of us to then want to teach games to others so we can have fun with other people. Running a group and in particular, separate groups means coming to understand the people and what styles of play they’ll enjoy. The decision to teach a game is a commitment to learning a set of systems comprehensively, then learning how to communicate them to others in a way that’s engaging for them. After you’ve marveled at learning a game, the next step in getting even more joy from them is teaching them to others and seeing their eyes light up when they cometo an understanding of play. People can pull off the most astonishing moves and that’s something almost entirely unique to Euro-gaming, new players can win and win comprehensively and that doesn’t really happen by accident. Euro games also often have four or five players all with scores within two or three points of one another, rather than the winner steamrolling or landsliding, and the others trailing far behind. This can still happen, but it’s less likely than a close round.

I’ve not played a video game seriously in about two months, the only two exceptions being the amazing Twine game Howling Dogs, and the video game closest to my heart at the moment, Kentucky Route Zero. I am certainly experiencing a fair amount of video game burnout, but what’s mostly missing from it is real, tactile human interaction. Board and card games bring people together in the same space around a table with some snacks and drinks and you have a magnificent time together.

I have always said I place time with people first and foremost above all things, that a game is something I will always be able to play later, a film something I will always be able to revisit any time later and if I don’t, I don’t miss much. I’d rather not miss time with people. Contemporary board games are a way to do both in the best possible way. It’s interactive, cultivates agile thinking and communication, and creates encouraging social environments.

For me, our emerging activity in the new cultural era is not digital games, it’s games made of cardboard. I appreciate that I’m experiencing a fair degree of revulsion from almost every aspect of digital games cultures, and there are still many electronic games that I adore, but in an environment where the designers and digital games that are truly on the frontiers receive little to no press or cultural support, I feel swamped by the horrible culture of what has become modern video games and cultural behaviour, even when I keep my exposure to it to a bare minimum.
Many board games do not contain gender problems and many groups include a wonderful balance of women and men in which everyone is truly equal and welcome. People of any age can play these and become literate in them with some games offering reduced rule sets for younger ones or just for simpler initial play. They’re still enjoyable and when they can scale so easily, they become greatly approachable.

I cannot extol the virtues of social board gaming enough. It is a revolution, and I am glad to be a part of it.