Monday 18 February 2013

Android

This is going to be hard review for me to do: this is mostly because I will find it very, very hard to create unbiased, objective views of this game without dipping into my deep, everlasting hate that I have for this game. This game has a multitude of factors that make it frustrating, annoying and badly made, but even viewed through this negative filter, it is going to be hard for me to truly put to words what it is about Android that has made me rate it so low on BGG or why I can't stand to see even other people play the game. The reasons for this are various and compound and they reflect some of the recent changes that I've had happen to me in relation to my own tastes and choice of games. So, in the first part, I will attempt to set the scene and explain the reasons why I hate the game, while in the second I will do my usual ranty analysis of the game, followed by at least a brief attempt at objectivity.

If you have read the Arkham Horror review, you might have found out that it was one of my first true boardgames, without counting stuff like Taboo, Risk or Monopoly. This was about the time when the new version of Arkham Horror had first come out, when I had recently started playing board games thanks to my University's large Roleplaying/Tabletop/Board Gaming society. Up until that point my contact with board games had been moderate to none, since usually my main hobbies had been either tabletop wargames like Warhams. I had dabbled into some roleplaying as well, but mostly as a vehicle for creative writing and thus usually only took part in rules-light freeform forum roleplaying, rather than playing anything with a strictly codified set of rules such as D&D.

From this base, I entered the world of boardgaming. I remember being euphoric about playing Arkham Horror and enjoying the game so much that I bought the Dunwich expansion even though I didn't have the base game, so that me and the people I lived with could try it out. I also remember playing Tigris & Euphrates for the first time, a game which I would rate as being in my top 3 nowadays, but which at the time I found frustrating and not having enough theme. I remember even liking Talisman, although even to me some of the faults of the game were readily apparent. Even though I hadn't heard about the terms at the time, it was clear that by any definition, I was a fan of Ameritrash games. Now, I'm not going to frame the rest of this little randezvous with history as an epiphany, where I suddenly saw the light and decided that Eurogames were the one true path, as much as it appeared that way for me. This is, of course, a personal journey that I went through and that I think everyone should or has gone through on their way to finding the sort of games that they like. Everyone's final destination is different, though, and I even know people that have taken the reverse journey, starting with Euros and then gravitating the other way as their tastes change (Acolyte, I'm looking at you).

Anyway, my board game playing went on a small hiatus for a couple of years after I left University, only to come back with a vengeance once I started working in a bigger city. This was about a year and a half ago and this was probably the time the most dramatic change happened in my gaming tastes. Unfortunately, I still remembered the days when I loved stuff like Arkham Horror, so I had a half year or so in which I would still play Ameritrash games even though I was starting to dislike them more and more by the week. It was during this time that I bought Android and this game became the moment when I truly realised that my taste in games had changed completely in just a few short years.

I love Bladerunner: I can't get enough of the film. I have seen the film again and again and I even remember playing the videogame of it, which sometimes I attempt to track down so that I can play it again. The entire feel of the film really resonated with me when I was a teenager. I've always loved reading about future dystopias and the grim setting of Bladerunner fit the bill almost completely. To me, Android seemed like the perfect theme. I bought the game for what I thought was a relatively good price and tried to find people to play it in my meetup group: I finally gave it a go one Sunday afternoon, when we had about 3 hours before the pub would be closing down for the day. I thought it would be enough time to teach and play it. I thought wrong.

The first thing that strikes you as you open the box is the sheer number of components. There's a component for everything, there's different decks for every single character, there's a huge board with chits for clues, conspiracy components, everything. Just unpacking everything takes a geological age, a feat that takes even longer than Dungeon Lords, which itself has a truly bewildering number of different components. Even once that was done, it took about 45 minutes to even just explain how to play the game: the game itself is quite simple, you move, you do an action, but there appear to be so many exceptions that I always going back to the rulebook to find out how this work, or how this card worked in conjunction of that card: it felt that i was reading the rulebook more than I was playing the game.

Half-way through we noticed that there was no where near enough time to finish the game at the pace we were going, so the little vestiges of theme that for some people make the game went by the window. No time to read the cards aloud anymore, nobody knew what was happening to their own or other people's character and the game boiled down to doing repetitive, mechanical actions in a bid to speed up. We were still no where near winning, so we called time at some indeterminate point and totaled up our scores: someone won, although we weren't sure how. I said I would be trying it again later, with more time to spare, but I never took it out of the closet again. I eventually traded it for Incredible Contraption, a game which I have yet to even play.

Now, you might be saying, quite rightly, that I didn't give the game a chance, that if I had the time to play it properly, I might have seen it for what it was. As true as this might be, what was clear to me at the time was that I didn't care much anymore about board games attempting to bring storytelling aspects to games and Android was largely the catalyst for this change. The rushed game of it that I had allowed me to see the game behind the mask and this allowed me to see that I had bought a game on the strength of the theme alone and I was committed never to commit this same mistake again.

The problem with Android is that the it's difficult to work out what was the actual focus of the design of the game: the central elements of the game, the murder mystery, is an afterthought, a vehicle for the personal development and storyline of the characters within the game: this is central part of the game. The mechanisms of the murder mystery are the most boring part of the game, involving the character just picking up tokens as they appear around the board, like picking up clue tokens within Arkham Horror but instead of them being future resources, they are the end-all and be-all of the entire mystery. Granted, it is possible to use the clues for other things, for example the so-called Conspiracy Puzzle, but even this feels detached from the game: you don't feel like you are piecing a conspiracy as much as you are just connecting stuff up in order to get you more points. Lastly, the entire murder mystery falls flat on its face when you realise that the act of investigating it feels more like you are framing people than actually discovering who the murderer is.

Although I make comparisons to Arkham Horror, but the game itself functions in a fundamentally different way: while Arkham has the characters be largely faceless apart from being themed as being certain people, the adventures that they will go within Arkham are colourful and filled with twists, as each of the locations that a character can find himself in can have different, unexpected challenges. Android, on the other hand, attempts to make the characters colourful through the use of branching paths, but does this at the expense of making the world and the adventures that the characters go through essentially faceless. Most of the locations within the game matter little, with the only thing mattering being if the location is dark or light. The story of the characters themselves is told both through the aforementioned branching story cards and dark/light cards: these are meant to represent good/bad events that happen on your character and are played depending on if you are in dark/light areas, but largely these cards don't feel like events but more as pure, mechanical bonuses/penalties. Even the branching story paths feel disconnected to your actions: sometimes the choice of path is completely out of your control and into the control of other players, which I guess can be said to fit the fact that you can't completely control your own life but it doesn't make for the most exciting of tactical choices. In the end, it does not feel like your action are weaving storylines of any sort, like they do in `Arkham Horror, but that the story that your character goes through is accidental to the actions that are happening on the board. It's this disconnect with the theme which is the most jarring part about Android and this, coupled with the frankly boring actions that you can do in the game (move here, pick up tokens, move there, pick up tokens etc etc) mean that by any metric, even one that purely attempts to analyse Ameritrash games by their own metric, the game is an utter failure.

There are a few saving graces, although they are few and do not outshine the shadow of bad design outlined above. First of all, just in terms of aesthetics, the game excels. This is a game in which to mark the different ranges of vehicles, there are different sized calipers. Everything else has beautiful art, including the big board showing New Angeles, the beanstalk and the lunar colonies. This is an additional shame, because such beautiful art deserves good, integrated theme/rules to back it up. As well as that, it is possible to enjoy the game as an attempt to progress the journeys of self-discovery which are the main theme of many of the characters within the game. At this point, however, it almost begs the question of why not simply play a Roleplaying game and attempt to answer those questions in a much freer, deeper and more meaningful manner, especially when Transhumanity has been done so well by RPGs such as Eclipse Phase.

In the end, there's no way I can honestly recommend this game. The main frustration I have with it is that it promises more than it delivers and feels distinctively like a broken dream, one that seemed good at the outset but on further reflection just turns out to be a false hope. Android, to me, feels like a well of possibility badly misused, a hodge-podge of rules that was more concerned with outside appearances instead of attempting to give a gameplay experience that fitted with  the theme presented. As such, Android only gets 1 angry scowling King Philip out of 5 due to the way that it crushed my young dreams of replaying Bladerunner.

Friday 8 February 2013

Dungeon Petz/Dungeon Lords

This will be a double barreled review that, along with expressing my views and opinions on the two games, will also attempt to compare them to each other in order to show some similarities in designs, along with some theory in terms of how strategy games can work at different levels depending on what kind of mechanisms are central to the game. I have been playing these two games a heck of a lot recently and I through the course of the review I will try to answer one question that seems to be omnipresent whenever I ask someone if they are interested in playing the games: Which one should I play first/Which one is easier for beginners?

First of all, a little bit of history: Dungeon Lords came out first, followed by Dungeon Petz and finally by Dungeon Lords: Festival Season (which I will also touch upon). All of these games were designed by who I pretty much consider to be the Boardgaming Jesus, Vlaada Chvatil, designer of other hits such as Space Alert, Galaxy Trucker and one of my all-time favourites, Through the Ages. Both Dungeon Lords/Petz have art from the same artist, David Cochard, which most agree has done a wonderful job at giving both games a real sense of character. Both game are, at their core, worker placement games, but both games provide a unique twist on this basic formula.

Dungeon Lords has the players choose their actions all at the same time and then revealing them in turn order one by one, with only three spaces per action, which means in a four player, someone can get locked out of doing their selected action. On the other hand, Dungeon Petz has the players secretly dividing their imps/gold into groups, with the larger groups going first, although the actual placement of actions is pretty similar to the bog-standard "one worker per space" methods of most other worker placement games.

While in many other worker placement games the action selection is largely the entirety of the game, both Dungeon Lords/Petz make you collect resources/choose actions in order to help you perform damage limitation/prevention within a seperate second phase: in Lords this is the end-of-year combat rounds, while for Petz it is the assigning and fulfilling of needs for the aforementioned pets.

These tend to be largely solitary phases, in which you worry about your Dungeon/Pet Shop and don't worry too much about the actions the other people are doing: this is not to say that the games can be played Solitaire, especially for Dungeon Lords, which is a cut-throat affair, especially within the action selection stage since you can REALLY screw other people if they don't plan correctly. Everyone knows that a large part of the fun of worker placement games is the fun in screwing over other people (something that Caylus has managed to distill down to a fine art) and this aspect is actively encouraged within both games.

Concluding my brief explanation of the basics of the games, how do the games ACTUALLY work when analysing them at a higher level? In order to do this analysis, it will be necessary to take a look at the games in isolation. First of all, Dungeon Lords.

Dungeon Lords attempts to mix several different aspects of gaming genres/rulesets: although the use of worker placement is obviously one of the larger influences on the game, the selection of orders is more akin to role-selection games such as Puerto Rico or Race for the Galaxy, although it mixes elements of both since roles can be both chosen by several players while at the same time only providing limited numbers of slots.

This allows a player to experience an agony of choice (which in extreme cases can cause analysis paralysis) since not only does the player need to work out what immediate/long term needs he has, but he has to track what the other players need as well. Further adding to the complexity of choice, the order in which the actions are chosen also has importance, since all actions are more beneficial if you land on the third spot rather than the first.

This choice is somewhat alleviated by the fact that a player has two action cards 'locked out' each round, but even this mechanism is used to add further complexity, since only the first action chosen will return to your hand, with the other two being locked out next round. It is indeed quite masterful how Vlaada has managed to make the choice of 3 actions out of 6 have such far-reaching implications both in terms of your game and the game that the other players are experiencing. One thing that newbies have often told me when playing the game for the first time is that it's relatively easy to play, but agonizingly hard to actually figure out what to do.

As well as the worker placement/role selection rulesets noted above, Dungeon Lords also features elements of puzzle solving in the form of the combat round, in which it is up to players to work out what the best way to defeat the heroes is. The puzzles are created organically through the course of the game in terms of the choices that you make in regards to monsters/traps/dungeon layout/rooms and the type of heroes that attack your Dungeon. In order to keep things from descending into a straight mathematical puzzle there is one random element that is in place to keep you on your toes in the form of different spells and different levels of damage that the heroes simply get for wandering around the dungeon (called fatigue in game).

One last feature of Dungeon Lords which is worth mentioning is the possibility of death spirals: much like Agricola, certain events can happen that force you to lose resources or lose points/monsters. This can catch out people that aren't prepared for them quite substantially and can cause newbies to pretty much lose if they aren't careful about how they manage their scant resources.

At first glance, such a multitude of different type of concepts would make you think that the game is a mess, an untidy pastiche with little to tie the different mechanisms together (Android, I'm looking at you), but you'd be wrong: they all seem to work seamlessly together. The role selection/worker placement aspects work well together and the way that they are a mere prelude for the puzzle elements later works in often unexpected, wonderful ways.

Dungeon Petz, in some estimation, has much more the flavour of the classic worker placement games, although as mentioned earlier, the group selection allows a much better control of the game's turn order, so people that are last in the turn order don't necessarily get screwed out of something they absolutely need, although  it will likely cost them the ability of selecting other actions they need if they splash heavily on just a couple of large groups.

The group selection also has elements of group-think: I was certainly surprised at the difference in group selection within my regular gaming group and the Play-By-Post game I made of Dungeon Petz. The other part of Dungeon Petz is more crisis management rather than anything else and is hard to describe in terms of other mechanisms since I haven't seen anything much like it in any other game.

The types of needs you play on a pet both determine what they will need (food, pooping, playing etc) and thus the resources that you need to use in order to keep your pet happy, but as well as that, they determine how much your pet is worth and how many points you can get out of that pet. Since you always know what's coming up in the next few rounds, there is an element of control in terms of what pet you get/what cards you play, but there is a strong element of random chance within Petz that is present in order to emulate the simple unpredictability of a pet. People that like the almost deterministic aspects of Lords can be put off by the higher level of random chance that can occur within Petz.

Referring back to my first paragraph, I mentioned that I would explain how different strategy games can work at different levels and this ties in with the fact that I am much, MUCH better at Petz than I am at Lords. This is due to the fact that Lords rewards long-term planning: both in terms of what monters you get, what rooms you get, the heroes you face, the traps you buy etc. Petz, on the other hand, rewards making snap decisions based on the situation at hand, and it is certainly easier for me to do the latter rather than the former.

I tend to make snap decisions which usually are good on the short term but can suffer in the long term and largely this means that I am able to deal with the emergencies that occur within Petz much more easily than the ones within Lords: this is largely because within Lords it is difficult to dig yourself out of a hole that you placed yourself in, with the aforementioned death spirals being possible, while within Petz, although you might lose points, there will never be a situation in which you can lose what you worked for entirely.

In terms of pure psychology, it is clear that the two games attempt to make your brain think and work in different ways, which is why I enjoy both equally: they provide different challenges. As well as that, they both manage to add limited random elements that don't feel as unfair as the profession/minor improvements cards that are present within Agricola, thus increasing the replay-ability of the games.

Responding to the initial answer within this review, it is impossible to truly say which one should be played first since they both utilise their mechanism in such structurally different ways, but at a push, Dungeon Petz would have to be chosen first, simply due to the fact that it punishes slightly less for screwing up, although largely both games can give severe blows (to the ego) if you don't plan your turns properly.

If asked about my own subjective view of the two games and which one I prefer, I couldn't honestly answer at this stage anymore. I used to love Petz because it was the first one I bought and because it felt easier for me to play, but since I have started playing Lords more often, I couldn't decide anymore. They both feature cute, endearing art, boards which look seamless art yet are completely functional, solid rules that reward both elements of strategy and tactics, indirect conflict that can really impact other players and remarkably different gaming experiences contained within a single game.

I couldn't recommend either of them enough. The theme of the games is also strongly tied to the rules of the
game, with both games having flavourful rules that still affect the game by a very large degree. As well as that, the expansion for Dungeon Lords, which basically adds more of everything works well with the game, adding both new features which don't just feel tacked on to the main game.The expansion does, however, make a difficult game into a even MORE difficult games, with some of your decisions having even more of an impact.

There are, however, issues with the games: first of all, the sheer number of components means that it usually takes a long time for both of them to setup. The number of different tokens/pieces/boards is truly staggering and rivals the best efforts by Fantasy Flight Games. As well as that, although both games are solid in terms of rules, it is necessary to have an up-front understanding of them in order to really know how to play: within Lords, it is necessary to explain how the combat works in order for someone to figure out what he needs to be doing within the previous turns. Within Petz, assigning/fulfilling needs of pets is likewise important. It can feel overwhelming to have to learn so many rules up front: I personally prefer to play full games of something from the get-go, although I know that other groups simplify combat rules the first year in order to further ease in newbies to both games. As well as that, and this is one of the constant criticisms I have of Vlaada, the rules for the game are fun to read but aren't easy to use as reference, although the rules in this case aren't as bad as Through the Ages, which has appalling levels of incomprehensibility so far unmatched by any other Vlaada game.These faults, however, are very minor for me and largely don't detract from the gameplay of either game, although it is likely that newbies which don't have anyone to teach them the game might struggle the first couple of times they attempt to play the game.

In the end, it is difficult for me to express just how much fun I have playing these two games. They provide me with the necessary complexity, the strong theme tied to good, solid rules, the visual narrative and the the antagonism/interaction between players that I need in order to like a game and play it over and over again. For these reasons and many of the ones I have outlined above, I give both games 4.5 angry scowling King Philips, with Dungeon Lords reaching 5 if the expansion is included.

Thursday 7 February 2013

Why I Play: Visual Storylines

In this series of blogs, I will explain why I play what I play. This might not be a big, incisive piece that tries to explain the theory beneath board games and how their concepts interact with each other, but an important part of this blog is that it's primarily to feed my own personal ego so today, it's me time and on me time we talk about the concepts of gaming that personally appeal to me. In other words, I will talk about some fundamental concepts of why games are fun for me (I'm allowed to use the word, this is a personal opinion!).

In order to explain what I mean by 'visual storylines', first of all let's consider the sort of games I like. Some of my favourite games include: Tigris & Euphrates, Dungeon Petz, Dungeon Lords, Brass, any sort of 18XX games, Napoleon's Triumph, Agricola, Factory Fun, Pursuit of Glory and many others. One of the initial observations that can be made is that they are all relatively on the heavy side, many of them are either economic games or worker placement games that use resource, some of them are Wargames and there are couple of games that can be considered tile placement games. Although complexity and length of the game does tie them all together, there is another factor which isn't as abstract as complexity that ties all the above choices together: 'visual storylines' or 'progressive story telling' (there's probably a better word out there invented by someone smarter than me but I don't know it, answers in the comments!).

What I mean by that is that all of the games above, by way of your actions in the game, allow you to weave a  story through the game by the medium of the actions that you yourself take. The above can be said to be true of any board games out there, but many of them have very simple way to track what you have been doing in the game, either through a VP count, or how your deck is shaping up in a deck-building game. Unfortunately, these aren't very visual ways to show progress: what I want to see when I play a game is a factory being built up, machine by machine within Factory Fun, or watch my pet shop/dungeon grow in Dungeon Petz/Lords, or watch the ebb and flow of the front lines in a game like Napoleon's Triumph, Pursuit of Glory or No Retreat! I want to see kingdoms be built up and then collapse in a game of Tigris and Euphrates, their remnants scattered across the landscape only for the next kingdom to swallow them up.

Some people might be surprised at the last choice, but Tigris and Euphrates, even though at first is might appear like just another one of Reiner's abstract games, sticks to its theme in remarkable ways, allowing you to really create a storyline about the actions of your dynasty. Conquering kingdoms from the inside, either through diplomacy, commerce or outright war is all done seamlessly and once the dust settles, external conflicts leave one kingdom victorious while the other one has splintered, fallen apart from external and internal pressure.

This is what really inspires me to play: the start of the game is like an empty canvas that is constantly evolving and it's a wonderful thing to compare the start of the board with the end position, each little step containing its own storyline. Although not one of my favourite games, Agricola also does this particularly well, making it possible for you to see your farm gain size and evolve as the game progresses: there's a real feeling of satisfaction for me to see the end product and remembering how little I had started with.

This is largely the reason why I play 18XX. Generally, trains don't interest me all that much and pure financial/stock trading games are pretty low in the list of games I'll play, but 18XX really nails that aspect of visual storytelling. It's why I used to take snapshots of every game I played, because I liked to see how the networks compared to other sessions: each a canvas of tiny choices multiplied together to create completely different routes, no matter the fact that the starting position was the same. The end board just ends up being a collective diagram of all the minute decisions made by all the players within the game and there is something wonderful about how the cities in the game develop, how economic incentives shape the network.

This is why Napoleon's Triumph is my favourite game: the battle within it and the front lines are ever-changing, one side collapsing while the other stands firm and this is all intuitive from simply looking at the board: everything you need to know is right there, no numbers to count up or tables to look at in order to see if this particular area is better defensively than another.

There are other reasons why I play games, but this is the big one. It took me a while to realise how important this aspect of board games was to me, but once I found out about it, the kind of games that I would buy changed dramatically and for the better. Although it's the complexity that initially draws me in, it's this aspect that actually keeps me playing a game over and over again, without getting bored of it. It's why I need a mixture of both theme and rules in my games: too abstract and I can't envision the building up of the board as a cohesive storyline: too theme-based and I end up being told what happens (as happens in Arkham Horror) instead of building it myself. Balance, as in many things, is all important.

Monday 4 February 2013

The Eternal War: Rules vs Theme

Except for the article on Napoleon's Triumph, most of my articles are created as a reaction to something that someone posts on the Something Awful board game thread, which has pretty much become my home since I feel that I can talk about board games there without some of the idiocy that I've come to expect out of rest of the internet as a whole. Most of my readers are going to come from Something Awful but for anyone that has found this blog somehow and is not aware of how the Something Awful forums operate, they have both a paywall and a moderation policy strict enough to keep most of the idiots that seem to infest the other places that seem to discuss nerdy interests on the internet. There have been long discussions on the thread recently on what constitutes a thematic game, but in this article I want to primarily express my own views on the subject and how the boundaries can be and should be blurred.

Now, as you might have guessed, I am a huge fan of Caylus: it's a cut-throat game in which it is possible to have several different strategies to victory and the rules work in a beautifully way, feeding off each other that allows a lot of choice while still creating an element of uncertainty. On the other hand, Caylus is truly one of the better examples of rules over theme, since the theme itself is as bare-bones as possible without reaching the heights of <insert any Reiner Knizia game here>. In the end, you are just exchanging blocks to put other blocks down, although there are elements of feeling like you are building a town as you construct more buildings going down the road and eventually replace existing buildings with residential buildings and eventually replace those with larger buildings: in that at least, the game can feel organic. What I have heard though is that the game itself doesn't feel much like building a castle because you are placing little houses to represent the castle instead of building the castle itself, and comparisons between Caylus and Pillars of the Earth are made. What I find interesting about these comments and what brings us nicely to my first point, is the difference between theme as substance and theme as style. It would be very easy to replace the little house-tokens in Caylus with sections of walls or whatever that you join together to make a model of a castle: by some of the arguments made before, this would suddenly make Caylus much more thematic, because instead of using tokens as an abstraction of building a castle, you are building an actual castle. This might be an exaggeration of the argument, but this is certainly within the field of Theme as Style, in which the look of the game and the extra effort made in order to make certain parts of the game more tactile make the game more thematic even if the rules themselves remain the same.

What exactly do I mean by Theme as Style? If I was to use an example, many of the Fantasy Flight Games would be within this field. Many of their games are considered thematic due to the amount of art assets poured into the game in order to conform to the theme and the various miniatures that the company produces for its games can certainly add to the impact that the game has in a thematic sense. If you replaced the miniatures in Descent with tokens it certainly would have have the same impact. This can indirectly lead to certain popular themes automatically making a game thematic just on the pure popularity of that particular theme: there is certainly a large number of games that rely on being in Space, or having Zombies, or being Fantasy in order to be considered thematic, while on the other hand games that deal with a medieval town are usually not considered to fall within the category of 'thematic'.

In of itself, Theme as Style is essentially harmless, since the production of games with an heavy emphasis on the art assets and with certain popular themes is not going to impact the rest of the hobby and if people like that sort of thing, more power to them. What I do find troubling, though, is the polarization that Theme as Style seems to cause within the hobby. The boundaries created by the terms Ameritrash and Eurogame (irrespective of their historical connotations of where those games were actually produced) seems to stunt the ability of people to acknowledge that not ALL games that feature Zombie need to be badly ruled dice-a-thons, while on the other hand games that involve medieval towns do not necessarily have a paint-by-numbers theme that can be easily replaced by something else. It seems to suggest that theme or rules are two sides of a coin and that it is impossible to both have theme and rules at the same time, which is patently untrue.

To bring a few examples, let's first of all consider Agricola. Agricola is well known as being pretty heavily in the Eurogame camp. I have argued in the past, though, that it is the prime example of how even the most Euro of games can be extremely thematic. Within Agricola, you do feel like you are truly creating your own little farm, from humble beginnings to being able to feed an entire family. Now, you might argue that it has elements which mean that it is not thematic. One of the most used examples in this respect is why actions slots are taken up, so if you plow a field, your neighbor can't. These can either a) be explained through abstraction (you are in a village, there's only one ox to plow and if you use it, someone else can't use it) or b) say "So what?". Even thematic games, even Arkham Horror, have rules that in context of the game itself don't make thematic sense (why don't I get killed by the monsters? Why, when I get lost in time and space, I end up at the correct time/place again? Why are GOOs so goddamn puny and weak?), yet no one would argue that the game itself is thematic. What Agricola does best is to make you FEEL like you are running that family of farmers, with needing to scrape every resource, find any source of food and constantly having to worry and plan in order to not starve: there's a real sense of both urgency and dread that you might not have enough food by the next harvest. So, at least to me, the reason why Arkham Horror is considered thematic and Agricola isn't is due to personal preferences of theme: Arkham Horror is thematic purely because it is based on a cool theme about alien monsters that you have to fight.

My example about Agricola above neatly segues into an explanation of Theme as Substance. What I mean by this kind of theme is theme in which the actions that you do within the game can directly translate into the actions that the people/groups you control within the game would do within the game. As Broken Loose defined in the thread (although I disagree somewhat with the level of connectedness within Arkham Horror), if you are feeling the same feelings that the people you control are feeling, then the game is doing a good job at connecting theme with the rules. Although I agree with Broken Loose in many of his points and I generally prefer Rules as Substance over Rules as Style, I still think they are both equally important in order to create a game that truly exploits the use of Theme as a whole, rather than only in parts. Hence, even if some games that are stripped of their art assets would evoke the same feelings as compared to ones in which the art assets evoke the entirety of the theme, it is important to have both work together or otherwise it will always feel like you are pushing blocks around instead of appreciating the theme of the game.

I think a principal example of how to combine the two aspects of Theme well is any of Vlaada Chvatil's games, or even Napoleon's Triumph. The former games are truly evocative of how you can combine art assets and good rules in order to create games that truly are innovative. Take Dungeon Lords or Dungeon Petz: they both have beautiful art assets in which ease of use is sometimes neglected in favour of beautiful looking boards, but both games have robust rules that have very thematic flavours attached to them. One example is that in Dungeon Lords, Priests don't heal unless the hero party fought with monsters that turn: this is given a humorous explanation within the manual that the priests have been contracted to 'provide healing after a battle', hence no battle, no healing. This rule, when analysed, is clearly present as a sort of balance to the game, but the thematic explanation of it does add to the game (much as if a thematic explanation had been given about the Agricola only-one-worker-per-action rule). Similarly, although Napoleon's Triumph rules are very solid, it is clear that some of the design decisions of the game were done for purely thematic reasons in order to make the game visually similar to Kriegspiel/old battle maps.

In conclusion, I think the whole argument of Eurogames vs Ameritrash is completely overblown and that in recent years, it has been shown to be a complete misapprehension of what the spectra of games available actually are. Rules and theme are not by any means mutually exclusive, and the real argument needs to start in analysing games in terms of how they approach the subject of theme instead of simply arguing about the theme they might have/have not. In the future I think it will be important to judge a game more by how it connects to its theme through Theme by Substance rather than the superficial analysis of Theme by Style that seems to be prevalent now.

Friday 1 February 2013

Arkham Horror

I will start in the end, because much like I teach games, in which I tell people how to win the game first so that they have an idea of what the rules do, readers deserve to know what someone thinks of a game before they actually go through the entire review. Arkham Horror is a bad game and in the end of the this review it will only get 1 angry scowling King Philip out of 5. I personally detest this game and i would rather drill out my own eyes and then use the liquid that comes out to make ice cream rather than actually play this game ever again. If you are shocked and appalled that I would say such words about your favourite game then please A) Find a better favourite game and B) It's just a fucking game, grow some backbone (if it's not your favourite game, then there might be hope for you yet, unless you like Munchkin, in which case your soul has already been condemned to hellfire for Bad Taste in Boardgames). Alright, now that the easily shocked and appalled are out of the way, let's actually get started.

Someone in the thread, in words more eloquent and succinct that I could ever pen, wrote admiring words about Arkham Horror, praising it for it's procedural gameplay that changes at every attempt, with the rules changing at every session due to misreadings of the rules. The fun of Arkham Horror starts even at the rule reading stage, as the unfathomable and insane scribbling with the feared Arkham Horror Rulebook can drive a man insane more easily than even the dreaded Necronomicon. Each page opens a portal to a dimension in which the established rules of flow, structure and layout are radically different, with each step described in such a way that would only make sense to a mind already lost to utter and complete madness. That the designers were able to fit the theme of the Chthulhu Mythos to every single detail of the game is truly a feat to behold.

But madness does not end merely after finishing the reading of the Rulebook, for during the game you will be forced to look upon that dreaded text again and again, the vile words within it drawing you in deeper and deeper while you search for that rule about the fifteen different case scenarios affecting the movement of the Hound of Tindalos, each second becoming more and more scared that the rule will never be found and that you will be lost within that tome forever, your mind forever doomed to wander how does a weird combination of spells and items allows you apparently to have 5 hands available and if this is against the rules.

Mere discussions of the game outside the reach of that vile box of darkness can cause chains of madness: one merely needs to utter one of the myriad rules present within that text to unleash a flood of 'Holy shit, I've been playing the game wrong THIS ENTIRE TIME'. After the floodgates are open, only madness ensues. The forum in question will be locked for pages and pages of people posting their rules clarification and statements that 'man this totally changes the entire game': it is unclear if such disparate renditions of the rules are due to player mistakes or the dark tomes themselves being slightly different for each player.

How does the game actually play, you might ask? Well, to echo the theme of chaos, most of the results are so completely random that's impossible to really feel like victory or defeat is in your hands, again echoing the theme of helplessness and inability to affect the world that is a strong central theme of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. You roll a D6 for any so called skill check, which in actuality should be called Luck Checks because no real skill is involved in rolling dice (unless you are some kind of cheater, then more props for you for cheating in a co-op game). Rolling a 5 or a 6 means a success, which statistically speaking for such a low sample size will mean that the probabilities are all over the goddamn place (more on probabilities and me being bad at maths in another blog entry).

But the randomness doesn't stop there! You also have a dozen different decks, each for a different set of locations in Arkham, which means that your character might want to go to the newspaper to get a job but NO! Instead, he finds a monster stuck in the printing press! And he must fight it! Or maybe he goes to a shop, but shops work differently in Arkham, for they are populated by evil, possessed shopkeepers that only ever show you 3 items at the time. As more expansions are added to the game, the shopkeepers become even more possessed, showing you Cultes Des Ghoules for the third time instead of getting that Elder Sign that you really, really need to win the game.

The main focus of the game centers around portals that must be explored and closed in order to save the city of Arkham. Portals are apparently so big that one immediately falls within them once reaching their location, entering one of the many alternate dimensions. Here, the elements of chaos once again reign as you might get lost in time and space or even devoured by a Great Old One through completely random luck. And once you are back, you can finally seal the gate, an exciting scenario where you either fight the gate with your bare hands by wrestling it into submission or use raw intellect to make it feel academically inferior. Failing this test has dire effects on the sanity of the player, as they are forced to watch the other player exploring locations, fight monsters and dive into alternate dimensions while they are forced to babysit a gate until the turn when they can actually close it. It is also possible to seal gates to prevent them opening again, but this involves the use of clue tokens, which normally are used to re-roll dice, thus forcing you to use them sparingly and thus making it hard to use the single tool you have at your disposal to make the rolls go your way.

The game ends once the gates have all been closed/sealed or once the Great Old Ones has awakened: in the spirit of the theme, the appearance of a real life God does not end the game (although in one case, it does), but allows the players to literally machine gun an alien god to death, an action which surely doesn't clash with any of the established canon of the Mythos, although strangely a 'Boat' weapon card is absent.

With all of the above being said, there is only one recourse and that is to give Arkham Horror 1 angry...wait. This isn't that kind of review. I might be negative, I might hate the game myself, but I am not going to make a list of things I hate about the game and avoid making an objective analysis, without any of my own subjective opinion and my inherent hate of ameritrash. I started this blog with the intention of making reasoned, objective analysis of games (as well as some humour about this way-too-serious hobby) and to be different from other reviews that seemed to just judge the game based on their own biases. Now, don't get me wrong, I feel what i have written above is true for the game, but it isn't the ENTIRE truth and if I left the review like that, I would feel guilty about trying to steer the reader towards a negative conclusion of the game, which just wouldn't do. In other words, get ready for part 2: The Return of the Objective Analysis.

So, Arkham Horror, it's not a bad game. By far, there are games out there that are worse than Arkham Horror and as well as that, there are many good ideas within the game that allow the players to really weave a storyline around the adventures that their characters are going through, without having a tightly regimented script or storyline that must be followed in order for the game to be immersive. I used to describe Arkham Horror as being a roleplaying game for roleplayers with low imaginations  and although it was said in a mock-disparaging way, there is a grain  of truth in that sentence because the game does allow you to go through the events that might lead to injury or madness or even death.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are a boat-load of problems inherent in the game. The manual IS difficult to get through and it can be hard to find specific rules, but the general flow of the game is pretty easy to follow: you move, you fight or evade monsters, continue moving if you evaded, have encounters in locations and then in the otherworlds. The problems are mainly associated with unclear explanations (for the longest time, I played the game in which you could still move after fighting if you won the fight, which makes for a radically different game since you just get one tooled up hero sweeping through entire waves of monsters.

To be absolutely honest, I kind of have a soft spot for this game. It was one of the very first games I ever played when I started board gaming and I even bought the Dunwich expansion without even owning the base game, I loved the game that much. Although in the years between then and now my opinions about game have changed, it's hard to get rid of the memories of, you know, actually having fun playing this game. We houseruled it a whole lot: the best rule change was forcing other players to read your encounter cards and not tell you the outcome of your choices until you had decided what to do, which turned the game from a pure mathetical number cruncher to a 'Do I really want to explore this cold, dark, creepy cave?'. That rule alone amounted for a large percentage of the fun situations that my characters found themselves in.

There are some good mechanical ideas within the game itself, if you attempt to detach the game from its theme, which in this case is very difficult since it is such a theme heavy game. I like the sliders that you get: these both make the characters more flavourful (with brainy professors being useful at certain skill checks while fighters being better at combat), but also they provide hard choices: do I go full Lore? Maybe I need some Luck. Do I go for full movement or do I try to get around sneakily? All these feel like some good choice, although the actual resolution of 5-6 a success is boring and feels like a bit of a letdown considering how interesting the slider rules are. Another thing I like is the resource management of having 'hands': you can't carry everything and you are have to make choices. I like the fact that using some of the more powerful spells make you go insane. I like the madness/serious injury cards you get in the Dunwich expansion, they really give an element of choice if you get too injured or lose too much sanity. I like that everyone can have a role: you can decide to tool up and fight monsters, or dive into other dimensions in order to close gates or go around picking up clues.

It's such a shame then that the good parts of the game are negated by some of the bad parts. The randomness in this game is both a curse and a blessing (yes, the play on words is meant, although only people that have played the game will get it): most of the skill check, although the number of dice can be modified by skills, weapons etc, are still too random. On the other hand, the randomness of the encounter decks does lead for interesting situations. The real problem occurs when the GOO wakes up: for some of the weaker GOOs, defeating them is simply a matter of tooling up and beating the crap out of them. Even the stronger ones in the base game don't provide enough of a challenge. I love playing against the one that if he wakes up, the game ends immediately (which I am told is like what happened in the original game): it means that the heroes can't just give up on the gates half way through and decide to tool up instead. That the combat with the GOOs always comes down to random dice rolls also doesn't enamor me to the game.

Arkham Horror, for all its faults, does provide the right feelings when playing it: it feels overwhelming, but IT SHOULD! It feels like it will be impossible to surmount the odds and in terms of theme alone, it does evoke some of the scenarios that it tries to inspire, while still providing some comic situations which have caused even me to laugh out loud. In the end, it's more of a disappointment than anything else, because the potential is there but seems to be obscured by the bad rules and by the uncreativity behind the roll-for-successes resolution system. Arkham Horror does accomplish what it sets out to do and although there are some games that do it far better, none seem to have the scope of epicness of a game of Arkham Horror. There are, also, far worse games out there which fail miserably to even evoke a fraction of the theme that is present in Arkham Horror or in which the rules don't just make the game hard to play, but completely unplayable from start to end.

So what is my final score after having written so many words about this game? It deserves at least 2.5 angry scowling King Philips out of 5: you could have fun with the game if you are happy to put in the effort and you will get rewarded for it, but a great experience is marred to make the game just average rather than completely terrible (and if you just read the first paragraph and this one to check the scores: shame on you for doubting me in the first place and I feel no regrets in trying to make you think that the score was going to be 1, you Cliff's Notes reading bastard).