Reverb Gamers 2012 Prompt #3

What kind of gamer are you? Rules Lawyer, Munchkin/Power Gamer,Lurker, Storyteller/Method Actor, or something else? (Search "types of gamer" for more ideas!) How does this affect the kinds of games you play? For example, maybe you prefer crunchy rules-heavy systems to more theatrical rules-light ones.


Role-Player not Roll-Player with a nice side of Storyteller. I am into story and theatrical combat. I try to bring what my friends call the 'awesome'. Christian's daughters rightly capture my play-style by shouting "Boom!" at the table.

I think Ryan Macklin does a good job of pointing out that this prompt "It's a trap!". I feel like all of these lavels for types of gamer apply to me depending on the game. sometimes more than 1 label at a time.

I enjoy mastering the rules for my PC when playing D&D so crunchy rules/Rules lawyer. But when I run D&D I care more about facilitating fun for everyone else and don't let things like rules get in the way of everyone's fun.

In Savage Worlds the rules are so simple that I find myself lurking in most games and occasionally trying to play the 'troublemaker'.

For Do it's a storytelling game so it's all about telling silly stories for me.

In the big picture I would say that the rules of a game and its themes will dictate my play style.

Reverb Gamers 2012 Prompt #2

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #2:
What is it about gaming that you enjoy the most? Why do you game? Is
it the adrenaline rush, the social aspect, or something else?

It's definitely the social aspect. I have met many great friends through gaming. One bit of statistics based evidence for you. It was pointed out to me by the Face Book that more than 25% of my friends on Facebook are fans of a little FLGS(Friendly Local Game Shop) called EndGame. This also doesn't include more of my friends who game but aren't local to Oakland. So they only know about because I talk about it so much. Gaming is definitely a social thing for me(also I love telling stories; to people, with people, for people; the collaborative story telling that RPG play allows for is another major reason that I play games).

Reverb Gamers 2012

Atlas Games is starting a new RPG blogger group called Reverb Gamers 2012. You can follow the results at their website and also on Twitter @ReverbGamers. For each day in January they are posting a prompt for RPG, MMORPG, and LARP players to discuss. I will endeavor to write a response, however brief, to each one.

Prompt for the 1st:

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #1: What was your first roleplaying experience?
Who introduced you to it?
How did that introduction shape the gamer you've become?

How should I answer this one? Do they mean formal roleplaying experience like with rules and stuff? Everyone's first roleplaying experience is when we are little kids and we imagine that we're the 'police' chasing down our 'robber' friends or some similar game. Do I count the Milton Bradley published Hero Quest, which is really a boardgame now that I look back on the experience? You know what? that's it.

Hero Quest 1989



It was designed by Stephen Baker, according to boardgamegeek.com. HeroQuest was developed by GamesWorkshop, you know The Hobby Games guys. It was released in 1990 in North America by MB so I must have first played this game when I was 8 or 9 years old. It was the go to boardgame for me, my brother, and our best friend Chris. We would all imagine we were our characters and take them on each quest in sequence in the game. We'd take turns playing as the evil Zargon. Eventually we upgraded the game and got the two expansions as they game out. Kellar's Keep and Return of the Witch Lord. And when we finished those we started 'hacking' the game. We made up new heroes using the stats for the other characters mixed up. I think one of the characters we made was really weak in dice rolling but had access to Zargon's spell cards. We also made a ranger. And we upgraded some of the characters so we could play the game with fewer heroes and really roleplay one character at a time(in the three player games we usually played two heroes per player for balance reasons).

It is the earliest in my life that I considered game design as a career path. I think I was 10 or 11 at the time. I always dabbled with the idea in middle school and high school. Turn the clock forward 20 years and I'm finally starting a career in game design. Just last week I was looking through some old notebooks and found card designs for MtG from the mid-nineties that I wrote while I was in high school. So I guess the lesson is pay attention to the career dreams of your 10 year old self.

My copy of the game is pretty beaten up. It is not at all like the video I posted above. My heroes and a few goblins are painted but are chipping badly. The box is not holding together and some of the cardboard furniture is missing. This game was a gift from my parents so thanks Mom and Dad for making sure I was a lifelong hobby game enthusiast. It is something of a treasure that I will never think about parting with though.

Happy 4th Day of Christmas -- A Belated Merry Christmas

I meant to put this cartoon up on Christmas Eve, but alas I was too busy getting the house ready for Santa Claus.

Second Battleship Preview Leaves Me Wishing They Made "Battleship Galaxies" Into Film

Yesterday I tweeted that I might be the only person in America who is excited to see the upcoming "Battleship" film directed by Peter Berg. I think that Berg has a talent for both the artistic and for the popcorn, and think that his "Battleship" film looks like pure popcorn. Ridiculous popcorn.

Like, doesn't make any sense popcorn.

Not only that, but popcorn that follows the typical invasion story formula.

1. Earth encounters alien force
2. Earth gets owned by alien force -- the "Footfall" moment
3. Earth keeps fighting against hopeless odds
4. Some change/shift occurs
5. Earth wins/Aliens quit

In Footfall the aliens stop when they realize that humans are crazy and won't ever give up.  In "Independence Day,"  we create a "virus" to even the odds.  In War of the Worlds, the aliens catch a cold.  It's a common formula, tried and true.  A little staid perhaps, but I don't mind if the film is pure popcorn.  Heck, even "Skyline" followed this formula even though it ended just as the shift toward "human" victory begins.




Regardless, after seeing the alien designs in this film, and having played the "Battleship: Galaxies" board game, I personally wonder why they didn't just base the film on that game.  It would still have the transmedia marketing tie in, and it would make sense to include the aliens.

In Defense of Candy Land

In a recent episode of the Dice Tower podcast, Eric Summerer gave some surprising praise for the classic Milton Bradley board game "Candy Land." To those who are casual gamers, rather than obsessive hobby gamers, it might seem odd to call praise of "Candy Land" surprising, but it is.  While the "child's first game" is a staple in most households, it isn't a well thought of game in the hobby gaming community.  For example, the hobby gamer's go to website for opinion research is the excellent Board Game Geek website, and its members have given the game a lowly 3.2/10 rating (with an N of 1568).  This rating falls somewhere between "bad" and "not so good."

My opinion of the game has changed over the past year, and now falls pretty squarely in line with Eric Summerer's praise, and also with Rob Donohue's.  He praised the game as a great introductory game that he was playing with his son.  If memory serves, Mr. Summerer stated that "Candy Land" was the first game where his son actually started playing by the rules.  I had a similar experience with my 3 and a half year-old twin daughter's Mystery and History.  They adore this game, and have learned some valuable game playing lessons from the game.  Like Mr. Summerer's son, they play the game by the rules...well with one small exception.  Rather than the goal of the game being to "go home" as is written in the rules, Mystery and History are on a journey to have tea at Hello Kitty's house.  To add to the immersion, they have placed Lego Duplo "cat legos" on the board at both the home and peanut brittle house squares.  The home square represents Hello Kitty's house and the peanut brittle house is the domicile of Hello Kitty's apocryphal twin sister "Boxie." 

I am pretty sure that my own heightened opinion of the game is stronger than that of Mr. Summerer's.  Where I once found the game "simple" and not really worth playing, I now believe the game to be a vital addition to any gamer's collection.  But one must own the game for the right reasons.

"Candy Land" was created in 1948 by Eleanor Abbott.  Eleanor was a retired San Diego school teacher who suffered from Polio, and she created the game as a fantasy world into which children suffering from the disease could escape.  The game was first played by children in a polio ward in a San Diego hospital and was published in 1949 to great success.

The game is quite simple.  Players draw cards which have and illustration of either a colored square (or two) or a board location. The player then places their game piece on the next square of the color drawn, or the location in the illustration.  The first player to follow the track all the way to the "home" square wins.  The cards are only shuffled once, unless the entire deck has been gone through and then you shuffle again.  There is no strategy to playing the game efficiently, and the players make no tactical decisions.

It is a game of pure chance.

I believe that this one of the primary causes for the low rating the game receives on Board Game Geek.  To elaborate, I believe the following to be the reasons the game is so disdained:

1. The game is purely random with player decisions having no influence on play.
2. Due to the single shuffle, the game's outcome is effectively decided before the first piece is moved.

There seems to be a preference on Board Game Geek on games where players have control and where the role of luck is minimized, but this is a view that I personally don't share.  I love games of skill, but most games of skill are also solvable games akin to Nim.  An eventual "best strategy" can become known and that means that the game is only fun/challenging insofar as the people playing the game have incomplete knowledge.  Tic Tac Toe is only fun when both of the players lack mastery.  This is never true of a game that incorporates chance.  Chance allows for variation in play, and allows weaker players to beat stronger players.  Reiner Knizia, in his book Dice Games Properly Explained, describes games of luck in the following way, "Even though you have no tactical influence, these games provide great entertainment.  It is like watching a good movie.  You cannot change the course of the action, but you join in the excitement."

I agree.

A good game of "Candy Land" is very much like watching a good movie, especially if you are playing with people of the recommended age group of 3 to 6 years old.  Watching Mystery and History act out their journey is a great part of the fun of the game play.

But the benefits of "Candy Land" are more than just the entertainment of play, which does in all honesty have limits.  The highest benefits of playing the game are as follows:

1. Teaches turn taking
2. Teaches following the rules
3. The lack of tactical contribution minimizes "bad losing/gloating by winners"
4. Teaches color matching
5. Engages the imagination in storytelling
6. Introduces all the basics of future board game play in a conflict free environment

That's a  lot of benefits.  One could add "can be used as the basis for a discussion of Markov chains and even a full discussion of statistics" if one were so inclined, but I don't think my 3 and a half year-old daughters would be up for such a discussion.

I think that the benefits of "Candy Land" far outweigh the first criticism of the game, that of "pure" randomness.  Opposition to chance in games is more a personal taste issue than any transcendent rule of game design.  That said, I do think that the second criticism -- that the game is decided before play actually begins -- has a good deal of merit.  Therefore, I'd like to offer the two following variant rules for "Candy Land."

Bag Draw
In this version of "Candy Land," all of the cards are placed into a bag, or hat, and the players draw a random card from the bag on their turn. This makes the game more purely random, and eliminates the pre-determination factor of the game.
If players wanted to eliminate completely the influence of prior draws from future play, cards can be immediately put back into the bag after it has been used for movement determination.

1 to 4 and Left or Right

In this variant, players shuffle the cards as normal at the beginning of the game thus setting the order of cards for the remainder of the game.  The first player draws as normal and is considered Player 1 for the remainder of the game.  The other players in counter-clockwise rotation are players 2 through 4. 

 After the first player's draw, all future draws are decided through the roll of a six-sided die.  On a result of 1 to 4, the player of that number draws the next card.  On a result of 5, the player to the left of the current player draws a card.  On a result of 6, the player to the right of the current player draws a card. 

Neither of these optional rules eliminates the role of chance in play, but both add a level of mystery and change the Markov dynamics. of play.

I have found that this game is perfect for its intended audience, and believe it a vital part of any gamer's collection.  It can also be used as a point of departure for design and the creation of house rules.

The "Boxie" character should not be confused with Hello Kitty's real twin sister Mimi, and is a creation of my daughter Mystery.

Walsh, Tim (2004). Timeless Toys.

A Victory Point Games Christmas

Victory Point Games is an independent small press gaming company located in Southern California that is both a game company and a classroom.  Not only do they want to produce fun to play games, but it is their mission to turn game players into game designers.  They are a friendly and talented crew.

For the past few years, VPG has released playable game after playable game.  What the games have sometimes lacked in quality of components, they have more than made up for in quality of play.  Recently, VPG has made two corporate decisions that will bring the physical/visual quality of their products in line with the play quality.  First, they have ordered a die-press in order to produce high quality die-press counters for their games.  They have been hand pressing and cutting the individual games in the past.  Second, VPG has slated a series of digital adaptations of their games.

VPG has just released their first digital game, an adaptation of Chris Taylor's "Loot and Scoot" fantasy game.  The digital version of the game does a good job of capturing the simple charm of the printed version of the game.  It also features significant graphic improvement over the tabletop game.  You can compare the digital version's graphic presentation to that of the original by looking at the images below.  The first two images come from the new digital edition, while the second two images come from the physical version of the game. 

 

I am quite fond of the physical game, and there is no replacing a good face to face board game experience, but the digital game is both cheaper and slicker than its physical counterpart.  The new digital game -- available for both iPhone and Android devices -- comes in at an inexpensive $2.99 where the physical copy has a $17.95 price point if purchased direct.  The digital game is competitively priced, where the physical game reflects the costs associated with limited print runs, both are worth the price.  Get yourself a copy of the digital game, and purchase a copy of the physical game for a friend.

In addition to "Loot and Scoot," VPG has a large catalog of fun games that make perfect Christmas presents.  My top ten list (in no particular order) are the following:

1. Hero of Weehawken: The Aaron Burr Conspiracy
2. Gettysburg: The Wheatfield
3. Forlorn Hope
4. Nemo's War
5. Empires in America
6. Zulu's on the Ramparts
7. Waterloo 20
8. Final Frontier
9. Ancient Battles Deluxe
10. The Barbarossa Campaign