Before I do anything else, I would like to extend my thanks to my friend Brett, who suggested the idea of actually blogging about board games. I'm not in this to gather much of a following, but this is worth doing for its own sake.
Although I am sure some of you reading this already know the sorts of games I am talking about. However, if you've seen the title, and your question is, "oh, do you mean like Monopoly or Risk?", or anything else you might pick up from your local Wal-Mart, the answer is an emphatic no.
That's important to grasp; people who love board games these days may often have little in common with each other in terms of which specific games they can agree on, much like how two people who love movies, books or music may have wildly differing tastes in the particular films, novels or artists they actually enjoy. Yet there's a surprising amount of consensus amongst those that play what I call "modern board games" or "designer board games", about what is not a good board game experience. Namely, most of the board games that you and I grew up with are widely considered to be bad. Sure, you'll find me and some other modern board game aficionados defending the odd game from their childhood (I'll still play Rook, Dutch Blitz or Jenga, for instance), but for the most part, there's a consensus amongst anyone playing modern board games that board games are simply better than they used to be. Many would go as far to call what are ironically called "classic" board games bad games with bad game design.
I don't mean to denigrate your experience if you legitimately have fun playing Sorry or Battleship or Risk. It's just that the more you play modern designs, the more spoiled you get. I've tried to narrow down, into broad categories, what characteristics modern board games have that the classics lack. These are the reasons that I find modern board games compelling. I hope by sharing these that not only will you gain some insight into what I find intriguing, but also why you might enjoy modern board games above and beyond your current affection or dislike for the board games we grew up with.
So without further ado, here's what I enjoy, and look for, in modern board games.
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1. Agonizing decisions.
I owe knowledge of this term to a game design class I took, of which I remember relatively little of the theory, but do remember the importance of agonizing decisions. There are two ways for a choice to not really be much of a choice at all. One is to simply leave it all to chance, as a number of what are termed "roll and move" games do (think anything like Monopoly where you simply roll dice to see where you land and what you do next). The other is arguably worse--to have a decision which is so obvious, there's really no choice at all if you want to win. Think how of how dull Tic Tac Toe became once you learned the game well enough to always either win or force a tie. I think this is one of the failings of Monopoly--once you do get a choice, namely about whether or not to buy a property, it's not much of a choice at all.
The key in good game design is obfuscating what the best move is. I think this is the reason why chess has endured a number of years; it is never obvious what the best move is at any given time (though it may be obvious that some options are particularly bad). This is the keystone of a number of my favourite games, including my absolute favourite, Terra Mystica. In Terra Mystica, you get resources for building structures, which help you take the various actions in the game. However, as soon as you upgrade to a new building, you lose the resource you used to get for the old building, which means you have to plan very carefully which structures to build and when. On top of this, you gain points for building different structures in different rounds of the game, which means that you may want to gain points for a building, even if it's at a less than optimal time to make that upgrade. Furthermore, you can get blocked from taking certain actions by other players if you don't take them before they do. The result is that the choices are almost always difficult, and rarely obvious, and you make dozens of impactful decisions every game.
2. Tight pacing.
This is something that I believe is something of a modern luxury in board game design, and where an otherwise excellent game like Chess falls flat. Simply waiting for your opponent to finish their turn, especially if you already know what you're going to do on your turn regardless of what they do, is not much fun.
I've noticed a trend in board games towards offering only a single, quick to perform action on each turn, resulting in turns moving around the table at a more rapid pace, reducing the amount of down time to sometimes under a minute between turns in a game that plays five people (Century: Spice Road is particularly excellent for this).
However, it's not just a lack of down time, but also about creating interest in the actions of other players, and having a distinct arc.
It isn't always the case that classic board games have been uninteresting on the turn of another player. I think everyone watches every turn of Jenga very closely. Monopoly becomes much more interesting when you realize a roll of 7, 8 or 10 will result in a big payout to you. If anything, some board games have gone backwards in this respect. Dominion is a fine game, but it's been called multiplayer solitaire, and for good reason--very little of what you do affects the play of other players. Usually, the best of these games involve little down time between turns to compensate, however. But there are also a lot of games that involve you in other players turns. In Puerto Rico, each action you choose on your turn will be performed with every other player, including yourself. So you have to choose the action you wish to take based not only on what you want to do, but what you think other players will choose later, and how turn order will affect that decision.
But I think the major improvement in modern board games is the tighter sense of an arc. Monopoly can drag on and on, and Risk is much worse for that. My favourite games tend to be about two hours in length, which is about the same length as a feature length movie. These games tend to start slowly and ramp up towards a climax, finishing in an exciting manner where many of the points are decided all in a few crucial rounds. They're also reliably the same length, because the design of the games is constructed in such a way that either you run out of time (a set number of rounds), or the game's end conditions are going to be inevitably triggered at a certain point in the game due to each action naturally building on the last.
To some extent, pacing can still be slowed to the point of agony by players who take a very long time to make decisions, but there's little the design itself can do about that, other than providing relatively simple decisions to make each turn, which is often the case. Either way, it's far less insufferable than a six hour game of Risk.
3. Skill over chance.
One of the most satisfying feelings I find in gaming is a sense of growing mastery. Whether it's a tendency to win more often than your opponents, or seeing your scores in each game grow.
This is really a failing of luck driven games, such as Monopoly or Clue. If you roll badly, you are going to lose, and there is little you can do about it. Furthermore, you're often left powerless for multiple hours at a time.
This is not to say luck has no place in board games. But the more luck is involved in a game, generally, the shorter the game should be. It's a lot harder to have sheer luck take down your plans in a game in which you have invested hours of effort. This is Risk's biggest failing. For a game that usually takes a number of hours, you can lose based on a series of poor rolls at a pivotal time.
Even chance heavy games that I do like such as No Thanks, which takes fifteen minutes, is more than sheer randomness. You are offered agonizing decisions, and luck is used to lend the game unpredictability, in an appropriate measure, because the time investment does not lead you to feel betrayed by a heavy cognitive investment in something that is taken away by mere bad luck.
However, that's not to say that all randomness necessarily means that the game is driven by luck, which leads into my next compelling factor.
4. Variability.
Variability is the name given to a game's tendency to play out differently from one game to another. This is where randomness is often used as a tool for good, rather than evil. Take Terra Mystica, a game that includes basically no dice rolling, no randomized deck of cards. Each game, before you play, you randomize a set of tiles which determine what will score you points in which rounds and which bonuses are available. This means that every game is going to require a different strategy in order to score points, which will affect your choice of which of fourteen available races you should play as. So considering that each game is unique in terms of how scoring can be done and your play style will be different depending on which race you choose, there is a tremendous amount of variation from game to game of Terra Mystica, despite depending entirely on player actions to determine the course of play.
There are numerous games that vary their set up randomly, and yet do not introduce luck into the main game. This takes the inherent strength of luck, variety, and takes away the frustrating aspect, which is that you can't control it. By focusing on creating a different game each time due to how some cards are shuffled or how some tiles are laid out, the luck factor can be minimized while the variety factor can be maximized. It's a terrific compromise, and a number of games use some sort of variation on how they are set up to change every single game into a different experience. That's terribly engaging.
5. Thematic immersion.
I left this until last because it's the least important to me, but it might be the most distinctive aspect of modern board games, and the major reason that I know some other hobbyist board gamers play them. A lot of classics have little to no sense of putting you into a particular role.
This is something in which a lot of modern games thrive. Dead of Winter puts you in the role of a survivor of the zombie apocalypse, and forces you to scour the remnants of civilization for supplies at the risk of being attack by zombies who haunt your every move. Blood Rage puts you in the role of vikings fighting in Ragnorok not so much to survive as to die the most glorious of deaths. Robinson Crusoe strands you to a deserted island where you must forage for food, wood, and build shelter before the elements kill you, while you take on a number of adventures by exploring the island. What would you rather be, anyway, exploring a strange and exotic island struggling to survive, or buying and selling properties like a good capitalist? Or commanding a few generic armies on the world map, or DYING FOR HONOUR because you're vikings and as vikings, you need to kill and be killed in glorious ways? There's just a lot more flavour in modern games, especially if you compare to the relative themelessness.
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So those are my reasons for enjoying modern board games more than I ever enjoyed the classics that I grew up with. Hopefully that gives you some sense of why you might want to invest a little more time and energy into modern board games.
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