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.
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