The Gungame

I would never have predicted I'd be playing the Ungame with one of my inlaw families over Christmas break. But that, plus a viewing of Fargo, leads to this.

Get a Fiasco ruleset. Assign characters, relationships, etc.

Then, instead of playing Fiasco, play a game within a game. Your lowlife Fiasco characters are trapped in a community rehab house, playing an hour's worth of the Ungame . Answer the questions from their point of view. The challenge is to tell a story through the playing of the game. Good luck!

Tales of the Arabian Nights

Here's a game that has given me more entertainment than it really has a right to. This is Tales of the Arabian Nights, the 2009 Z-Man Games remake of a 1985 West End Games production.

It's a board game, but the real engine is a huge Book of Tales with over 2000 numbered paragraphs. You roam a map representing the Old World as seen from the caliph's Baghdad, playing one of the Arabian Nights characters (Sindbad, Ali Baba, Scheherazade, etc.) Every turn you pull a card from the encounter deck, roll a die on a table to see what you get (anything from a House Fire to a Vengeful Efreet), and choose an action to take appropriate to the type of encounter (anything from Grovel to Court).

The player on your right checks a matrix and reads out a paragraph number, which the player on your left looks up in the big book and reads out loud. This paragraph sets out the situation, and may give better or worse results according to what skills your character has. Goodies you may get include Destiny Points and Story Points (which help you win the game), fabulous treasures, or improved skills. Balancing these out are the infamous "status" cards that some paragraphs hand out. Among other things, statuses can leave you cursed, turned into an animal, sex changed, diseased, or more ambiguously married (you get point benefits but have to stick close to your family's city).

The version I have is the 2009 remake, which hugely improved the graphics and doubled the number of paragraphs in the by now enormous Book of Tales, but did little else to streamline the game design. Indeed, a number of design choices still seem odd or not well thought out, with the quirks and complexity of the 1985 design mentality. Some encounter cards have different results for the second or third time through the encounter deck, but in my experience games often end without ever having to reshuffle it. Although the 2009 version makes official the 1985 version's "quest" variant with a deck of quest cards, these take on the role of directing play across the board, so that the city encounter cards, which give bonuses on reaching a particular city, now seem like an unnecessary afterthought. And the rule for dealing with the "expert" level of skills, in which the book reader has to scan the adjacent paragraphs for uses of that skill and switch to them, is still clunky.

All the same, I think the game has to be defended against one of the major criticisms you see on Boardgamegeek and elsewhere, which is that it's a random rollercoaster ride that doesn't reward strategy. I think this is actually a psychological effect, where the game is designed so that action choices don't always lead to the logical consequence or skill opportunity, so that even though the majority of outcomes have some logic to them, the ones that don't stick out in the memory and lead to the perception of the game as meaningless. But the alternative is to have a game where the Rob action always leads to a use of Stealth and Stealing, and so on, which is also not fun.

More to the point, this game is a litmus test. If you are able to enjoy taking part in a picaresque story full of reversals and randomness, Tales will be highly rewarding, and filled with "wow" moments like gaining fabulous treasures, visiting mysterious and climactic Places of Power, and those times when the random story elements come together in a coincidental, funny way - for example, when you just can't stop having encounters with that seductive efreeteh and her jealous efreet boyfriend.

The replay value, too, is higher than I expected, having played it four times in the past few months. The sheer number of paragraphs, the random elements that interfere between an action choice and the outcome work in its favor. So does the Poisson-like distribution of events - so that many common events tend to recur, like house fires and hunchbacked beggars, but the truly special things like Places of Power are much rarer. This is the principle used in most encounter tables to balance meaning and surprise in a world, and its use in Tales means that the game is not entirely guilty of presenting a complete random carnival of events.

Finally, Tales is unique in design in the game world, in spite of the suitability of its basic concept for a more convention sword-and-sorcery picaresque. Does the requirement to have a hundreds-of-pages paragraph book scare off designers? The Dying Earth world, I think, would be particularly ripe for such treatment.

Braggart: Munchausen meets Munchkin

Cracked.com had a piece recently that may as well be called "Don't Play That, Play This" in which the author argued for the superiority of post-1990 boardgames like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride to traditional family boardgames like Monopoly and Risk.

I am pretty sure nobody reading this blog needs convincing on that point, but it occurred to me that similar value judgments could be made within the category of games considered "geeky." As one example, there's a class of games that I think of as "LINO": Legends in Name Only. These date, also, from before 1990, when weekends were long and unrelieved by the Internet, and game designers put quickness of play and elegance pretty low on the list.

Revisiting these games as an adult with few opportunities to sacrifice more than four hours at a time to the gaming gods, they don't have as much appeal. The long playing time, rather than creating an epic realm beyond time and space as you remember them doing, instead just aggravates their design and rules flaws. Titan, I'm looking at you; Kingmaker, Talisman, the list goes on. I would even venture to say that almost every game in the plastic-figure chokefest genre (for example, Shogun/Samurai Swords) has been decisively made obsolete by FFG's Chaos in the Old World, which delivers the same kind of strategic sweep at half the price point and less than half the playing time.

The present age's Legend in Name Only has got to be SJG's Munchkin. A rampant best seller by hobby game standards, Munchkin's fun value is about 75% exhausted once you have read the jokes in any given deck. The game grinds on randomly, punctuated only by outbursts of violence against anyone so much as threatening to be the winner.

Yesterday, though, I got introduced to a game that kicks Munchkin out the door. It may be hard to find outside the UK, but Braggart plays in a half hour or so and delivers solid laughs. You are taking the part of Generick Fantasye adventurers sitting around in Ye Old Fantasye Inne and boasting of their exploits, which you put together from a required Deed ("I heroically slew...") and Foe ("...the foulest of all dragons.") and can embellish with a Scene and Result. All these cards have a point value, with the less impressive ones being lower. There are also Ploy cards that let you steal and draw cards, and "Liar" cards which let you switch out better for worse cards in another player's story. The humor comes mainly from bathos ("I forged elemental weapons to destroy ... an angry looking chicken") and slightly suggestive exploits ("I covered myself in oil to wrestle ...")

Strangely enough, Braggart's flaws are also Munchkin's flaws: the laughs follow the law of diminishing returns, and the gameplay is random with a hobble-the-leader tendency. Honestly, the best feature is that Braggart proceeds to a definite conclusion: the winner is determined when the deck runs out. What Braggart lacks that Munchkin doesn't, of course, is over a decade of expansions.

All the same, what makes it work for me is that it's a sendup rather than a simulation of adventure, kind of like the Baron Munchausen game on rails.

Roll Dice And Move

It's one of the most ancient of board game mechanics, going back to the Egyptian Senet. It powers the most beloved family board games, from backgammon to Parcheesi to Monopoly. Yet rolling dice to move is almost completely absent from the geekish world of hobby games that has sprung up since the 70s.

Random determination of movement stands out as the easiest and most fun way to run a race game. Certainly, there are other ways. For example, the almost-luck-free Hare and Tortoise is deceptively complex for its kiddie theme. Movement depends on managing a hand of carrot cards which can be used to fuel movement. The "mileage" gets mathematically less efficient with greater speed. Picking up carrots depends largely on predicting your position in the race when the next turn comes.

However, board and miniatures wargaming took a different turn. Military science in the 19th century emphasized the predictability of troop movements, gunnery and logistics. The rates of march tables from military manuals were translated to fixed movement distances in military kriegspiel. Wargames in the 20th century picked up these habits. Although combat required dice to resolve, being seen as necessarily uncertain, how you got there was seen as a much more predictable process.

By the time wargames evolved into roleplaying games and fantasy board games, the cultural divide between serious and family games was clear. Figures in serious games were going to be moving at a fixed and stately pace. Even the exceptions confirm the rule. Avalon Hill's Titan, for example, used random movement on the highly abstracted strategic board but fixed movement on the more detailed and war- gamey tactical board, as if to flaunt the hybridization of the two models while keeping clear what each one was for. Milton Bradley's family-oriented HeroQuest was a dungeon crawl where your movement rate was the roll of two dice. However, fixed movement could just have easily been used and the movement dice had little impact on play most of the time. Again, this choice betrays the association of random movement with light, family-style gaming.

But there are good reasons to make movement random in some way, even if you're aiming for simulation. On a strategic level, whether a small party or a huge army, a movement roll can easily reflect all the myriad mishaps and inefficiencies of day-to-day travel. Greater expertise in logistics or terrain should be able, too, to reduce some of the slower results. On a tactical level, combat is an ever-shifting field of dangerous weapons flashing, opportunities to lunge, divided attention and obstacles underfoot. With this in mind, it makes more sense to have movement be in some way random, rather than carefully plotting out a steady distance each turn before your one allotted attack.

Some game systems today acknowledge that randomness in movement is part of simulation. Most often this is done through a command control system, where the uncertainty is less about how much a unit or leader can move than whether it can move at all. This has always been a good feature of the De Bellis Antiquitatis family of wargames, for example, and also plays a part in the very popular family of card-driven conflict games that began with Hannibal.

For skirmish combat in role-playing games, the main drawback of random movement is added time and strategizing to roll, for not a lot of payoff. I find, actually, that the amount of movement that can be done even in a very short 6 second combat round is sufficient to get most figures from one end of the effective fight area to another, so varying this really adds very little tension or strategy.

However, I'll make an obvious exception for contexts where it could be important, like charging to close or better yet, a chase. I recently commented on the 9 and 30 Kingdoms blog that chase scenes are the one form of contest that are most under-served by adventure game rules, especially traditional ones. The main culprit is the insistence on fixed movement rates. Clearly, this is what "roll to move" was made for.

Next post I'll consider some options for making chases exciting. In the meantime, check out the system that Talysman came up with in response to my comment.

Gonks and Cronks

The De Wolfe production library has supplied royalty-free stock music to such illustrious shoestring auteurs as Terry Gilliam and George A. Romero. De Wolfe's memorable mall-music tune from the 1978 Dawn of the Dead, "The Gonk," had me wondering about the title, and sent me on a trip back to 1965.

Gonks, apparently, were novelty doll-toys of a generally round shape with a fused head-body and assorted limbs. Almost forgotten now, they inspired an early British rock film ...

and, perhaps, one of my favorite monsters from the gonzo SPI mini-universe surrounding the Swords and Sorcery, Citadel of Blood and Deathmaze games: The Cronk.

This counter from Citadel of Blood shows a furry, two-footed, hassock-like creature with middling hit dice (1+1) and a decent attack value (4). (How these armless wonders can field archers, spearmen and cavalry in the Swords and Sorcery wargame is something I don't quite get ...)

The rules also tell you that "Cronks have a stench that may sicken a character." So, the troglodyte niche, but so very much cooler.

CRONK

HD: 1+1
AC: 7[12]
MV: 60'
Attack: 1d6 bite
Special: stench

Cronks are foul, furry creatures that live in abandoned tunnels, dank swamps, and dark woods. Where prey is small, they exist in groups of two to five, but larger mobs are known to assemble where large creatures can be brought down. They have a malicious intelligence that cannot be put to full use because they lack hands. Nevertheless, their fanged bite is a nasty weapon. Also, they have a stench that may sicken others; any character who comes within a 10' radius of a cronk for the first time that day must save (Poison/ Fortitude/ Body/ CON) or be incapacitated retching for one combat round, and -2 to hit for 3 rounds after that.

This jolly character from Citadel of Blood was "Raman Cronkevitch" ...a demi-cronk. Yeah, why don't you let that one sink in for a while.

The Epic Fantasy Wargame: Survivals

Not only did the hex-and-counter game suffer a sharp decline in the 1980's, but the medium was not that well suited to depicting a fantasy epic. There's a limit to how much information a counter or map hex can hold, and most of these games creaked under the weight of a mass of special rules that had to be constantly looked up.

There is also a kind of first-kiss syndrome that paints a halo around these old games. I think a lot of the positive feelings old-schoolers associate with them are residue from anticipating how cool it might be to try them, as well as a much less critical outlook when actually played. Not by coincidence, gaming companies in the 70's and 80's also seemingly chose to produce games largely on how cool they sounded. They had a naive (by today's standards) outlook on usability, play balance, elegance, replay value, and other factors that have come to gamers' awareness in the Internet decades. Again and again in comments on BGG - and in some comments on previous posts here - we hear that the rules are incomplete and baffling, the gameplay either simplistic and obvious or swingy and random.

The Epic Fantasy Wargame Catalogue:1980-1991

As obscure as the counter-based epic fantasy games from the 70's are today, the ones I presented previously are actually the better-known of the lot. The list below from 1980 on is largely a product of Boardgamegeek (BGG) research; I only have definite memories of seeing Barbarian Kings, Valley of the Four Winds, and of course the late arrival Greyhawk Wars.

The Epic Fantasy Wargame: Introduction

In the 1970's and early 1980's, the established hobby of board wargaming cross-fertilized with a wave of interest in fantasy literature and adventure. The result? A genre of game largely neglected in the ongoing old-school revival: the epic fantasy wargame.

Below I'll catalogue the central elements of this genre; the ones in bold I think are essential, the other just typical.

Photo by j.mccracken at boardgamegeek

Epic-scale map board. The map takes in kingdoms and even continents, on a grand-strategic scale. It depicts either an invented fantasy world; a fantasy world taken from fiction; or potentially, a real-world area given a fantasy treatment.

Hexagonal map grid. Although this was typical of games in that era, there were some games (like the Elric one, or Greyhawk Wars) that dispensed with this, using movement by areas instead. Arguably, you don't really need the kind of precise rendering of maneuvers and battlelines that hexagons give when gaming large-scale pre-conscription warfare, in which small armies cruised across a huge landscape without much operational subtlety, and clashed at designated battlefields.

Photo by Richard Maurer at boardgamegeek

Die-cut cardboard counters. Another standard feature defining the era's wargames. The success of Axis and Allies in the early 90's would create another related genre of game using plastic figures, but that belongs to a later time.

The counters represent armies as well as individuals ... Without the armies, it's not a wargame, but an adventure or quest game (as in Greg Stafford's King Arthur's Knights). Without the individuals, it's not epic - typically, one of these games would have rules for heroes leading armies, as well as going on quests, conducting diplomacy, and other things that armies can't accomplish.

.. and there is a lot of flavor and color through other means. Counters for monsters, artifacts, special locations; cards, tables, or numbered paragraphs representing events, nations to be won though diplomacy, relics ... all of these are very typical of the genre and helped give each game the special flavor of its world.

With all these elements, the play and objectives of one of these games were fairly similar to the historical equivalents. Armies fought by comparing strengths and a die roll on a chart, and the object of the game was to capture territory; or at least doing so won victory points. Less typical, though, was the "epic" layer in which heroes moved around the board attempting various things, gaining magic items and allies, which in turn could serve as an alternate victory condition or contribute to victory points.

In the next post I'll attempt a catalogue of these games, and ask for your help in identifying any I may have missed.

The Panda's Hit Points

I guess everyone who writes about D&D has to tackle the enigma of hit points sometime. Here's the basic paradox:

1. Hit points are a gross abstraction, representing nothing more specific than how long a being can stay in combat without dying. By most accounts, a fighter with 50 hit points taking damage is dodging, ducking, wearing down her favor with the Gods, running out of luck. A dinosaur with 50 hit points taking damage, though, is taking huge slashes to its flesh and hide. This is poison to those who want their game to be a sensible simulation. It's one of the most frequent "problems" that tinkerers try to fix in D&D - by separating body points from luck points (Star Wars d20, etc. etc.), physical damage from defensive skill (Runequest, etc., etc.).By the standards of simulation, hit points are terrible.

2. Hit points are the most successful game element to be exported from D&D. Almost without exception, any computer or board game that simulates a fight at the skirmish level for the past 35 years has used hit points, life points, health bar, or some variation thereof, instead of a more realistic system where individual injuries are tracked. Compare the longevity and sales of Soul Calibur vs. Bushido Blade. By the standards of meeting gamers' needs, hit points are great.

I'm going to take a roundabout trip to explain the discrepancy between the two. I want to argue that hit points are an evolutionary exaptation in game design, adapting to needs gamers have that a more realistic system would not meet.

Exaptation in evolutionary biology means the development, through natural selection, of a new function for a given structure. The concept was popularized by Stephen Jay Gould in an essay on the panda's thumb. This appendage, used to grasp bamboo, actually evolved from one of the panda's wristbones. Another example is feathers, which originally evolved on dinosaurs for temperature regulation but then became important in flying.

Games also have selection pressure. In the game designer's ideal world, the best-selling games will be those that use elegant mechanisms to capture the essential experience of that which the designer is simulating. In the real world, market-dominating games tend to be meatballs like AD&D in its heyday and Monopoly.

Faced with this tragic state of affairs, designers will often resort to a narrative in which, Microsoft-like,  industry leaders achieved their position through sheer corporate throw-weight and user conservatism. I am not discounting these factors. But I want to present an alternative view. Although these games are anathema to intelligent design, they often hold within them features exapted from other games that crudely address some of the very real needs of game players. The crudity of these panda thumbs may offend the sensibilities of refined gamers, but they help explain how these games come out ahead in the more rough-and-tumble process of mass market natural selection.

Take Monopoly as a simulation of real estate dealing, for example. In real life, real estate moguls do not randomly move house from street to street, hoping they will not be forced to pay rent in an an expensive location. Their purchases do not depend on their physical residence, either, and precious few of them enter beauty contests. What a lousy simulation, huh?

These features make more sense in accounting for Monopoly's longevity as a family game. They are exaptations from dice-and-track games (Parcheesi, Snakes and Ladders) that let young kids play along and even succeed sometimes by sheer chance. Monopoly also gathers a couple of other game concepts alien to the simulation of real estate dealing - set trading and collecting, chance cards.

So where are hit points exapted from? Some of you may already know, but here's a roundabout clue:

T-shirt available at Threadless.com

More next time.

HeroQuest: Tactics and Tactiles

I played this for the first time the other night as part of our local pub boardgames night, taking the part of a dwarf in a full party through the first two scenarios. Pretty neat, very simple dungeon crawling missions from 1989 Milton Bradley with help from Games Workshop - the involvement of the hardcore hobby gaming pros definitely shows.

I think when it was released I ignored it pretty much as a "kids' game," and it certainly is that, but it teaches fun lessons. Initiative is achieved by running right at things and whacking them. The dungeon furniture is cool, though disappointingly generic in game effects. The miniatures are really well sculpted and could form a starter set for a beginning DM in a more serious game. Although the game is cooperative in theory (4 players against a game master), the lure of treasure is strong and there's room for some sharp elbows, blocking off doors to rich chambers, and the like. And eventually, in a streamlined way, the rules cover such complexities of dungeoneering as secret doors, traps, hidden treasure, wandering monsters, spells and saving throws. There's something to be said for a character sheet that only has 2 numbers on it ...

All the same, the replay value doesn't seem long on a game like this; a few more characters could have helped things out some, or some way for characters to advance beyond just accumulating more gear and loot. There were a whole bunch of expansions, too, and I suppose the basic game did its part of getting a generation of kids interested in pushing miniatures around a dungeon.

As Grognardia is talking about entry-level games, I think one plus of HeroQuest is its very tactile nature, coupled with simplicity (a lesson Fantasy Flight need to learn) and completeness of play out of the box. The need for miniatures and tactical displays certainly show that the core D&D brand has staked itself on the tactile experience as a point of sale against the computer game juggernaut.

Will that ultimately mean longer legs than the truly interactive, social and creative experience that's offered as a counterpoint to computer games by the old-school revival? Perhaps, but I know which one is more important in my games.

Hex Crawl Mombasa

We spent most of the day with friends playing Avalon Hill's flawed classic from 1977, Source of the Nile. Really unlike any other boardgame, Source comes with a laminated board of central and southern Africa as it appeared to Europeans in the late 19th Century, with only coastal hexes and Cape Colony mapped. The players mount expeditions to explore the interior, filling in blank hexes with randomly generated terrain as they go. The rulebook charmingly talks about playing the game in the spirit of the "new role playing games," and there is a lot of overlap in feel - from the hex-mapping and exploration, to the choice of different professions with different victory priorities and special abilities in play, to the way ridiculous random events can wipe out nearly a whole expedition. In fact, an older version got a glowing review from a key figure in role-playing.

Leaving aside the somewhat chaotic tangle of the rules, which true to 70's form are full of holes, typos and charming special circumstances and mechanics, the game is just too full of fun-killer moments to recommend playing without changing the rules for getting lost and recruiting funds in Europe. Sitting there for half an hour, rolling a die or collecting cards so you can start moving again, is not fun. A computer spreadsheet is also mandatory to handle the complex task of balancing cost and carrying capacity for expedition design.

Still, the game play reminded me that there is something glorious about an explorer mapping out huge stretches of the continent, only to die in a random ambush, his discoveries fading into ontological unreality ... or the largest exploring party ever known, financed by the proceeds of five elephant tusks, karmically being scattered to the four winds by a rogue elephant stampede near the mouth of their starting river. There also was a great overland trek where one party, defeated in a fight with natives, was reduced to just the explorer. Trapped behind large lakes and hostile tribes without a canoe, the explorer chanced swamp and desert, putting life in the hands of an uncertain water supply ... and eventually coming out in glory as the first European to cross from the Atlantic to Indian Ocean coasts. Only the very real chance of failure can truly gild success as it deserves.

This is a lesson we may be losing in the gaming hobby at large, with its Nirvana of studiously balanced rules and procedure guaranteeing a constant diet of fun and involvement for everyone. What that design ethic doesn't teach is patience, the ability to fill empty "downtime" with banter, work out the holes in the rules cooperatively, and take hard knocks with a grin. Ah, progress...

I'm not sure why some enterprising game company has not taken it on themselves to produce a less difficult version of Source. The fantasy genre could get rid of any and all sociopolitical objections to the "natives" and "voodoo", and the game idea itself is lots of fun. At the very least, a hex crawl through a jungle continent in a role-playing adventure game could be regulated by frequent consultation of the random events and findings on the cards.