Why I Hate Minis

Okay, don't get me wrong. I like miniatures. Who doesn't? They're pretty little flavor to add to your game. When I played D&D, I'd ooh and ahh when that guy brought out his minis collection. They definitely added something nice to the game.

But minis are superfluous. They're bulk. They're cost... and I hate my games being expensive, heavy and big. So a while ago, my friend got Zombicide on Kickstarter. He paid a whopping $100 for the game because it came with 114 minis! And that was with the Kickstarter discount... the game went up for retail for $90, with only 71 minis. And you know what? The game wasn't even that good...

Whatever happened to cardboard cutouts on little plastic stands? Heck, what happened to pawns outside of Eurogames? Sure, cardboard people don't look as nice as a plastic 3d guy, but they're way cheaper and take up way less space in that box. And you know that bigger box? Yeah, it costs more to ship. That's more money they cost.

Let's take a look at the classic Clue. No.... let's take a look at Clue Mater Detective (Cluedo and Super Cluedo for non-Americans). The board and pawns look a lot nicer in that version... yes, pawns. You could see a picture of your character, but you otherwise were just a pawn colored by your character's name (Sgt. Grey, Colonel Mustard, Miss Peach, etc.). What was wrong with that? Would the game really have benefited by adding detailed 3d minis to it? Would it have been worth the extra $10-15 for it? Oh, they actually did release a version with minis? Oh, come on....

I think we've come to this awful time where board games stopped being a niche, and have become mainstream via bitlust. Much like how video gaming has devolved into companies holding your hand through another modern military shooter, board game companies are trying to get you to buy their game on little plastic bits alone. Hey, you like zombies right? Have a hundred little plastic grey ones. Aren't they cute?

Now I know the Eurogaming market is still mostly little wooden cube and meeples, but their games often lack in theme or depth. You're not going to get a Eurogame about slaughtering a horde of zombies, represented by various colored cubes, any time soon. That's not to say that I don't like Eurogames, but I like theme and depth in games that most Eurogames don't touch. Ameritrash is all style and no substance, and Eurotrash is all substance with no style (or player interaction).

Why can't we have games that are dripping with theme, mechanics so smooth they'd shame a watchmaker, and don't come with an extra $20 of unecessary plastic!?

Games Are Restrictive

So I was listening to the latest podcast of Ludology, with guest Eric Zimmerman, author of Rules of Play. The episode was about emergent gameplay, and I definitely recommend a listen. One thing they touched on was that games are basically just restrictions. I'd like to delve into that with a bit more depth.

The reason why games make restrictions is because the restrictions create an unusual challenge to overcome. A sack race, for example, is a race (a normal challenge) with an extra restriction (a novel challenge). A lot of the fun of the game is the silliness of the extra restriction, and people's goofy attempts to overcome this new challenge.

Now why are challenges fun? I've read a few things here and there (I'm way too lazy to Google the papers) about how overcoming challenges creates a very strong emotional responses in people. People love overcoming challenges. It's hardwired into our brains. We want to feel accomplished.
 
Let's take another game most people are familiar with: Scrabble. So the basic idea of the game is that players take turns writing words found in an (usually) English dictionary. There's no real challenge in that, as most adults could do that for an hour and still be coming up with words. This game would not be much fun, as it lacks any sense of challenge. Now let's add the rule that each letter has to fit in a 1/2" square, and words can only go top to bottom or left to right. This by itself would be a silly superfluous rule, as it provides no challenge on its own... but if the availability of the 1/2" squares is limited, you now have a bit of a puzzle.

Now add in a bit of freedom that words can share as many letters with other words as needed, and you give players a mechanic to explore. This gives the player more interesting ways to complete this little puzzle of theirs. But now add in the restriction that words have to share at least one letter with another word (first word being exempt, of course). So now we have a simple little creative puzzle. At this point, we actually have a game.

But let's add a few more restrictions. Simple ones. Not only is the availability of space a restriction, but not the availability of letters. Let's restrict the number of letters that players have available to them each turn to seven. The game is still simple, but it offers up a more interesting challenge because of the few rules (restrictions) the game has.

You could even go further into the emergent aspect of the podcast. Bigger and more difficult words are more 'fun'. People will naturally try to challenge themselves to get the more interesting words out on the board. So, why not make a rule that rewards people for doing this? Less common letters award more points than common letters. This rule isn't so much a restriction as it is a reflection of the emergence of gameplay. Anyone who's played enough word games, like Scrabble or Boggle, will be familiar with the concept of 'good words'. Somebody at the table makes a word, and the other players say 'Oooh, that's a good one!'. Boggle doesn't directly award extra points for more difficult letters, but such a rule would make a lot more book keeping to do at once, and more difficult words generally get awarded by less players getting the same word (you score points in Boggle by making words that other players have not).

So basic rules of games are there to create restriction. Extra rules can be added to reward players for doing fun things, or possibly to emphasize the theme of the game. But, at the core of things, games are a challenge to overcome. Later on I'll have to do an article about what I call 'artificial difficulty'....

Player Interaction 2 - Semi-Co-Op

Last time, I talked about player interaction as a struggle. This time, I'll talk about it being cooperative... kind of. You're directly competing with each other, but the bulk of player interaction is mutually helping each other. This is done in the form of trading.

Let's take a favorite of mine, Bohnanza. This is a card game where you plant beans to try and make a profit. You have very limited space in which to plant, and you have to plant the next card in your hand. You're not allowed to rearrange your hand, and chances are the next card in queue is going to force you to sell one of your farm plots prematurely. None of this depends on other players so far. Nobody can do anything to your plots of land, nobody can manipulate your hand in any way, and you're not competing over land space.

The player interaction in Bohnanza comes from trading. On my next turn, I'll be forced to plant my wax bean, which will ruin what I have planted already. My opponent, on the other hand, happens to be growing wax beans. And maybe he has a stink bean I want, but isn't going to do him any good. On your turn, you can trade any card in your hand, and any cards traded that turn must be planted. This quickly gets into everyone helping each other, but not too much. Sure, I don't need this cocoa bean, but you having the cocoa bean is way more beneficial to you than the chili bean you're trying to trade would be for me. How about you sweeten the deal a little?

If you don't cooperate in Bohnanza, you'll lose. On the other hand, if you help your fellow players too much, you'll also lose. This is where the player interaction, and fun, comes from. You're not at a constant struggle with everyone fighting over beans and farmland. You're just simple farmers trading beans back and forth... and the trading isn't always nice. I mentioned last time about foiling plans, which can definitely be done in Bohnanza. My room mate will sometimes refuse to take your bean for free, just because he'd rather you be ruined by it than him get a slight benefit from it.

Another game with a similar trading mechanic is The Settlers of Catan. You need resources to build things on the map, but you'll often end up short of certain resources throughout the game. Players who trade with others will usually beat the players who don't. Now trading isn't as built into the game as it is in Bohnanza, and there is some other player interaction in the game, it still ends up being an important part. And, much like Bohnanza, you might refuse to trade because you just don't want to see that player succeeding...

So while some games can create tension with direct conflict, other games can create tension with mutual handshaking... and then arm crossing and head shaking. Maybe some evil grinning.

Player Interaction

So when we sit down at the table with our friends and we pull out a game to play, what is the main goal here? What is the appeal of it? Why don't I just go back to the couch and pop in a video game? Well the biggest reason is to get that interaction with other people. But a lot of popular games seem to miss this point...

Let's take Dominion, for example. This game is very popular, the mechanics are solid, there's a lot of strategy, and it is competitive with other players. The problem is that the only thing you're really competing over is the limited number of cards on the table, and usually just one card that is in every game. Ignoring attack cards (which many games won't have anyway), the only player interaction in nearly every game of Dominion is just fighting over the limited number of Province cards on the table. In fact, there are even cards that will easily let you win without holding a majority of the Provinces, which can lower the player interaction even more. Dominion is commonly criticized as being a 'multiplayer solitaire' game, and rightfully so.

While I do think that Dominion can be fun, and the strategy can be very deep (despite not knowing what cards are going to be in each game), the lack of player interaction kills me. My room mate and I were playing an online version of it with all the cards, and nearly every game was played completely ignoring what the other was doing. I'd usually be watching something while waiting for my turn. Aside from attack cards and him buying provinces, what he did had zero impact on my game.

Now let's take Puzzle Strike next. It plays quite a bit like Dominion, and honestly shared more similarities with it than most other deck building games. But instead of the win condition being usually 'whoever has the most provinces once they're all gone', you're trying to survive a constant onslaught of player attacks. This makes the game a lot more tense. What the other players do greatly matters. I generally enjoy a game of Puzzle Strike more than I enjoy a game of Dominion because I feel like I'm actually playing with my friends, and not next to them. We're constantly struggling with each other, not just seeing who can make the best Lego engine.

Another example in the deck building genre is Quarriors. This game uses dice instead of cards, but it still falls into the same genre. Now this game involves a lot more luck on your turn (rolling the dice), and most of the decisions are just what things to buy on your turn, but there's still some player interaction. On your turn, any creatures you summon will attack everyone else's creatures automatically. Any creatures that survive a whole turn will score you points. This can kind of feel like autopilot sometimes, but it can still be tense, and what happens on everyone else's turn does matter. The drama comes from your smirking grin as you get a great roll and are able to summon three creatures to the field, and then your shaking fist as your opponent rolls the perfect combination to wipe them all out. Your plans were foiled yet again, thanks to the wonders of player interaction.

Player interaction is important. To me, at least. Not every game I play has to feel like a constant game of Tug-o-War, but I need to feel like the other people at the table are making a difference.