There’s an interview with the Game of Life (Hasbro) creator on about.com of all places. The game is pretty dull by most of my personal measures, but I had a copy in my youth and I’m sure most of you did too. (As an aside, I had changed the rules when I played to something more interesting and removed some of the crummy rules – I was a game designer back then too!) Anyway, it’s hard to argue with success. I think Cranium is cringingly awful too but it sells by the truckload so obviously I am missing something.

It’s something obvious to me that Life was his first game design:

However, James Shea, Sr., president of Milton Bradley asked me if I would develop a game in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Milton Bradley Company. I immediately accepted this challenge.

But I think he is getting a little… aged when he says:

Klamer believes that The Game of Life has remained so popular for so long because it features “tremendous interaction between the players” and because players are faced with several important decisions as the game progresses.

It has nothing to do with Hasbro nee Milton Bradley’s long retailing arms combined with an attractive and colorful combination of packaging and components? I wouldn’t credit the game mechanics with its longevity, it is the theme and presentation combined with the business.

Would Life have been as popular if its presentation was as ugly and generic as Trivial Pursuit‘s?

Image courtesy BoardGameGeek

It makes me think about what digital games are successful more based on their presentation and distribution than mechanics. Do we escape this in digital because the arc of evermore engaging graphics possibilities tarnishes titles quickly and thus nothing can reach the kind of “simple hollow classic” status like Life has been?

Rocked some solo Tobago last night. Can’t wait to play this with real people.

Article in Wired about the best party game of all time, Mafia (or Werewolf):

If you want to play Werewolf well, you have to draw on a wide skill-set. First comes memory. It’s not always easy — particularly at 2am — to remember who accused whom and how everyone voted, but this is crucial for spotting patterns. And you need meticulous observational skills; note someone drumming their fingers or fiddling with their collar, and you have the “evidence” to back up whatever theory you’re selling. Then there are concrete observational cues — who’s making eye contact with whom? Has somebody slipped up by saying a werewolf has been lynched, when only a fellow werewolf could know that?

Agricola is a board game, but calling it that is like calling the Burj al Dubai (or whatever they call it now) a tall building. The Spiel des Jahres, the German board-game equivalent of the Academy Awards, had to implement a special category for complex games just to give Agricola some laurels. So it is impressive looking with all its little fiddly wooden pieces and rulebook with the six-point font. But it has been in the Top 2 games on BoardGameGeek since I started being interested in board games again, so I figured there must be something to the complexity.

Since I’m alone in my apartment for the next month and had the day off, I figured I would try to learn the game and see what all the fuss was about.

First, a disclaimer. The game is about 17th century farming. So a complex game about farming should just set your loins ablaze, right? Moving on.

If you are planning on learning Agricola, it is probably best to have someone who already knows how to play the game teach you. Why? The rule book is not entirely helpful for learning the game. It runs fast and loose with terminology and takes important mechanics and puts them in an aside. I had the board all set up and ready to go when I realized I had no idea what it meant to “go”. Since a game is a series of meaningful decisions, I needed to put some meaning behind the bevy of options available.

Luckily, I found this video which cheerfully explains the game, if you can get through the cringingly embarrassing stuff in the intro. In fact, i found his presentation so helpful that I just may watch his other videos just to check out some heretofore unnoticed games. Super-major kudos to this Scott fellow as I may have never shifted out of first gear without his presentation.

I chose to play a three-player game by myself, because I like to test games as they were designed to be played and also it’s lonely here so having a split personality helps. You will need a very large table to contain everything you need to play. Here’s my coffee table as I was setting up. I have an additional game mat on my couch just to fit everything.

Once you get into the game, it is surprisingly fun and I believe that fun comes from the wide array (and increasing as the game unfolds) number of actions you can take. There’s a sensation of trying to keep spinning plates balanced in that there are a number of categories in which you are scored, but only so many actions in which to build in those categories. I want to be able to expand my farm’s family but I can’t because I’ll need to feed them and I need to be in a better position with my resources to do so. Well, shit, that fits the theme of starving farmers pretty well.

I have the feeling that unlike Dominion, there won’t be a particularly dominant strategy given any particular setup. This isn’t a big problem in Dominion, yet there are certain setups that scream out for a particular strategy (Chapel decks, for instance). Here, it seems like there are so many things to manage, that each game will provide unique ways to expand and settle. Time will tell, I’ve only played one game and I am certain I have made at least one rules mistake. The rules sheet, as mentioned, is simply not very good unless you already understand what is going on – which makes the whole sheet a Catch 22.

Here’s what my table looked like at endgame. Red won by a bunch, despite being behind purple for most of the game, which gives me hope that early mistakes don’t have to be your undoing. I was trying for a home-expansion strategy with my green player but he could just barely muster up enough food each harvest so he never really got anywhere. Purple did alright, but didn’t have the explosion of resources at the end like Red did.

For my first play, I am really impressed. I thought the game would be dry and methodical, but it seems to be more friendly than I had imagined. It will certainly need more plays to flesh out strategies and tactics, but I get the jist now already, which is something that was lacking in another popular game Race for the Galaxy that still vexes me. As a game designer, I have experience analyzing systems of mechanics, but with this game I just can’t take a bite off and make a lasting judgment. It needs more chewing.

If anyone reads in the New York City area and knows of any game stores that do board game nights, let me know as I would love to get beat up on by more experienced farmers. I think the game will be a lot more fun with other people (though it supposedly has a very robust true solitaire variant) simply because you can be super melodramatic “FAAAARRRRRMING! Gonna raise some vegetables up in your face, wooooo!”

There’s this interesting article up on Boardgame News called “The Tyranny of Choice” that argues against the popular notion from Meier et al that a game is a series of meaningful choices.

I don’t agree with it, but it is an interesting perspective nonetheless. It plays a little loosey-goosey with intent and definition. Are we arguing that a game needs meaningful choice to be a game or that it needs it to be good or that it needs it to be fun? I think those a three different questions that are kind of jumbled up in the article.

And how loose are we with the term meaningful?

And that’s when it hit me. We both like Crazy Chefs and I had a fun time playing it against her even though its clearly aimed at people one-tenth of my age. We both thought The Very Hungry Caterpillar Game was dull even though it too is clearly marketed at young children. What’s the difference? Choice. Not choice which is meaningful in any way, shape or form but simply choice. In Crazy Chefs we get a choice: we get to choose which tile to flip and even though the game is entirely random and the choice meaningless the act of making it alone involves us both in the game. We’re there. We’re chefs trying desperately to be the first to gather the food together to feed our hungry customers. In the other game, the name of which I can no longer be bothered even to cut and paste, there is no choice and we are merely observers of the course the arbitrary nature of the game forces us to take. This is boring, even for a three year old.

I fail to see how the choices in Crazy Chefs aren’t meaningful. Random does not mean meaningless, it just means the meaning is uncertain at the time of the decision. When I choose a piece to attack in Stratego, a game whose very name invokes strategy, I am doing the exact same thing. The opponent’s pieces may as well be random to me because the information is hidden. That doesn’t make my decisions on where to move and who to attack meaningless.

I think the definition of a “meaningful choice” is a choice that causes a dependency with regards to the objectives. I.e., Because I chose to buy Boardwalk, others can land on it and pay me money which furthers my objectives and it is thus a meaningful choice. My choice to play as the thimble causes no dependencies via the rules so it was not meaningful.

Anyway, food for thought.

I updated the Dominion Card Randomizer (original thread here) to include Seaside’s cards. Thanks to the nice folks who posted scans to the BGG gallery.

I also fixed the bug with the “Attack then React” rule, so you should no longer get duplicates in that query.

I spent extremely little time testing the update since I know you are all getting your Seaside boxes and are clamoring for the update. Therefore, you are all my QA. Thanks!

As always, questions, suggestions, bug reports and comments are welcomed.

Sorry to those expecting more substantial posts. I realize that September and October have been my weakest months regarding posting since starting this blog four years ago (the archives only go back to 7/07 since that is when I moved to WordPress). I’m doing this graduate student thing with three part time jobs and it is really sucking the life out of me. I have lots to say about Canabalt, Brutal Legend and the like – it’s just a matter of putting fingers to keys for purposes other than writing a critique of some dull accounting case. I only did the Dominion update because people were asking for it.

So I promise I am only on hiatus. I hit Twitter more often because I can do it from my phone in twenty seconds, so look me up there. I’ll be forcing myself to output posts of substance and quality once my life settles down, which it should (God willing) in a few months.

In the meantime, go play Canabalt.

Brenda Brathwaite came to our IGDA chapter’s meeting yesterday and talked about the process behind building her game Train. Here’s a WSJ article about the game if you are unfamiliar. It was a great talk, wonderfully performed, and it really energized me about design again – not through high falutin’ look-at-this-art-I-made-aren’t-I-important? but through the pure attention to detail and meaning that is almost always lost when making a game for anyone other than yourself.

One of my fellow IGDAers (who will remain anonymous because I didn’t ask permission to blog about it) said that we [designers] are all on the hook now, that we can’t use our medium as an excuse to make meaningless works. But in retrospect, I disagree. Brenda’s game is important, but it isn’t the first game to sacrifice fun for message. There were player-made D&D modules that did this. Even in the digital age, we have games like September 12th. That doesn’t make Train any less important. Train is just another brilliant salvo in the battle to legitimize our medium.

She didn’t change the role of a designer – she just reminded us what is possible.

If you have the opportunity to see her talk, I would recommend taking the time to go.

I spent today dusting off my old PHP and SQL skills. If you play the card game Dominion, you may be well aware that an expansion just released called Dominion: Intrigue that doubles the number of cards. (If you don’t play Dominion, what the hell, man? It’s the best card game since Texas Hold’Em.)

Well, there’s an issue with playing with both the base set of Dominion and the new Intrigue set. To figure out which ten cards to play with, you have to mix cards from different sets together, shuffle, draw and then put those away and get out the piles of the corresponding cards. What a chore.

So I threw together the Dominion Card Picker.

With it, you can choose which sets you want to play with (including the promo cards if you have them) and the script will shoot out a random ten cards for you to play with, including letting you know which set each belongs to so you can dig them out of the correct box.

You can also add constraints to make the selection less lame like requiring a card with an extra buy to be in the ten or at least one card that nets an extra action.

Try it out and let me know if there are bugs or any ideas to improve it.