Anatomy of a Genre: Role Civilization, Part Three: The Galaxy

Race for the GalaxyIn November, I took a look at a smallest of mini-genres: what I call the Role Civilization genre, which originated with San Juan and which also grew to include games such as Glory for Rome and Eminent Domain. My previous articles covered the origins of the field in role selection and those three games. In this latest article, I’ll be looking at the final major  entry in the category, Roll for the Galaxy, discussing how it simultaneously invented and reinvented the field.

The Shared History of San Juan and Roll for the Galaxy: 2002-2007

Puerto Rico (2002) was the game that brought role selection to the field of serious, dense eurogames. It ruled the gaming table for a few years and was considered the top game in the field. Alea production manager Stefan Brück asked Puerto Rico designer Andreas Seyfarth for a card version of the game, and the result was San Juan (2003), which kicked off the whole role civilization subgenre.

But that’s not the whole story.

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Anatomy of a Genre: Role Civilization, Part Two: The Empires

Glory to Rome I.VA few weeks ago I kicked off an investigation of a small genre of games that I call “role civilization” games. These are “role selection” card games that were inspired by San Juan. My initial article defined the genre through four mechanics that all debuted in San Juan: phase (role) selection; card building; multipurpose cards; and card economies. 

This week I’m going to continue my look at the genre by seeing how it’s evolved since the advent of San Juan and by investigating two Imperial successors to the game. 


A History of Role Civilization: 2004-Present

Andreas Seyfarth’s San Juan (2004) could have dramatically changed the board gaming field. Not only did it make the very popular mechanics of Puerto Rico (2002) more accessible, but it also introduced a new style of dense filler that played quickly in a short period of time while still allowing for real strategic decisions. Unfortunately, San Juan was held back by the fact that Alea games tend to be somewhat underproduced and until very recently didn’t get supplements. The best San Juan ever managed was a few mini-supplements in Treasure Chest (2009), one of which reappeared in the second edition San Juan (2014).

Despite that, a few related games trickled out. Continue reading

Anatomy of a Genre: Role Civilization, Part One: An Introduction

San Juan CoverThe evolution of board game mechanics fascinates me. That’s the main reason that I’ve written a long series on deckbuilding games: to assess new ideas and tropes as they enter the design space of a genre. With 25 such articles under my belt, I should really write a summary some time!

This week (and over a few more weeks in the future), I’m going to be examining another genre of games — one that’s much smaller. In the main, it contains just four games, plus a number of supplements and spin-offs. However, those games constitute a strong design style that’s full of innovation.


The releases that I call “role civilization” games started with San Juan (2004), but are actually part of a rich stream of game design that’s produced many of the most notable games of the 21st century. Continue reading

Six Designs of Real-Time Games

Real-time games are one of my favorite genres. Sadly, they’re pretty rare too, with a game of real note only showing up every year or two. In this article, I’m discussing several of the most interesting real-time games, to highlight what each does great (or not). Rather than trying to rank these games, I’ve listed them in order of publication … but if you want to know my favorite real-time game, it’s Galaxy Trucker (2007), hands-down.


Ubongo (2003)

UbongoUbongo isn’t exactly a real-time game by my definition. Instead it’s a game that you win by engaging in a task (the placement of puzzle pieces within a grid) faster than everyone else. However, Ubongo shows off the most important element of real-time gaming: adrenaline.

When I first played Ubongo, I was amazed by how jazzed I felt afterward and by how much I wanted to play again. That’s because it does a good job of making you want to play fast and rewarding you for doing so.

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Five Designs of Dutch Auctions

Merchants of AmsterdamAuctions have faded a bit from the euro-scene. They were a prime euro-mechanic during the genre’s youth, but pure auction games like High Society (1995) and For Sale (1997) soon turned into auction hybrids like Amun-Re (2003). Then auctions became just another mechanic — a part of more complex games like Age of Steam (2002) — and even that has mostly disappeared in the modern day.

There’s one prime exception: a style of auction that has survived well into the present day. It’s called the Dutch Auction, and I think it’s survived better than standard auctions because it can be so tightly integrated into a game that you might not even realize it’s an auction at all.

In a Dutch Auction, prices on an item drop until someone decides to purchase it. That’s its power: there’s only one bid, none of this round-after-round silliness that can go on forever. If done well, it can look like a purchase — not an auction at all; the price just happens to drop as part of the normal flow of turns. And that’s how some of the best Dutch Auction games of recent years have done it.

I’ve listed five of them below, arranged in ascending order of elegance.. By chance it’s also a climb toward in the modern day. This isn’t unusual in designs: I think it shows how the use of the mechanic has matured over time.

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Anatomy of a Genre: Train Games, Part Three — Stock Holding

This is the (somewhat delayed) third article in my series dissecting train games. The first part covered connections train games and the second part covered pickup-and-delivery train games. This one covers railroad gaming’s final major mechanic: stock holding.


In my opinion, stock holding train games can be the most complex in the category. That’s because they’re sometimes full of numbers and can run for many hours. So, consider this the other end of the spectrum from the simple games that I covered when writing about connections. I should also be upfront and say that this is the sort of train game that I personally have the least relationship with, as connections and pickup-and-delivery games tend to be more my speed. (Nonetheless, I seem to have played almost a half-dozen of them!)

Stock Holding

1830

1830

The stock holding mechanic permits players to buy partial ownership in some entity. This allows multiple players to all share in the ownership of the entity — and perhaps to even buy and sell it over the course of the game.

The trick is, of course, to figure out how to value the entity that everyone’s buying into — because the act of buying cheaply into an entity and then having it grow in value is usually how one wins a stock holding game. However, dividends and the sale (or merger!) of entire companies can also raise monies.

It should go without saying that when you combine stock holding mechanics with train games, you get players investing in railroad lines.

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Anatomy of a Genre: Train Games, Part Two — Pickup and Delivery

Last week I started a multipart series on train games. In that article, I suggested that train games are usually built around three mechanics: all train games have connection mechanics, while some train games add on pickup-and-delivery mechanics and others add on stock holding mechanics.


This week I’m going to focus on the second main mechanic found in train games: pickup-and-delivery. I believe that train games using this mechanic are (in general) somewhat more complex than plain connections games … but don’t tend to be as difficult as stock holding games, which I’ll be talking about next week.

Pickup and Delivery

The cool thing about train games (and connections games of all sorts) is that once you have track you can do something with it. This is what gives rise to the second sort of train game, where you pickup goods and then deliver them using your existing network of rails.

Lunar Rails

Lunar Rails (Empire Builder)

There are two classics in the pickup-and-delivery train game genre: the crayon rail games starting with Empire Builder (1980) and the huge mass of related Martin Wallace games that center on Age of Steam (2002). Each of them does its pickup and its delivery in slightly different ways.

In Empire Builder — and the many, many related train games, of which my favorite is Iron Dragon (1994), thanks to its easy-to-find cities and its secondary underground map — there’s almost no contention for pickup-and-delivery. Contracts are privately held, and though goods aren’t unlimited in supply, it’s rare that a player can’t get a good if he wants it. As a result, the game becomes purely one of efficiency rather than competition: the player who is able to most effectively build out his rail line and to best balance multiple demands is the one who wins. Continue reading

Anatomy of a Genre: Train Games, Part One — Connections

A few weeks ago, I was playing a game of Martin Wallace’s Steel Driver, and when we finished one of the players asked, “Is that what most train games are like?” Though Steel Driver has some fairly typical features of train games, it doesn’t cover the entire spectrum of train game design. Overall, there actually aren’t a lot of games that cover all the features that you find in train games … and so I expounded for a while on my theory of train games — which is what follows.

In my opinion train games feature three main mechanics — connections, stock holding, and pickup and delivery — but few games feature all three.

Connections

Ticket to Ride with Aliens

Ticket to Ride

The fundamental mechanic that makes a train game a train game is connectivity — the act of building connections from place to place over a large board. Certainly, not all connection games are train games, as Michael Schacht has proven. However, I think that all train games are connection games.

In the modern day, Ticket to Ride (2004) is probably the definitive connection train game. The whole game is about collecting the resources (cards) to build tracks. You’re then rewarded with points, both for the actual building and for connecting up specific cities. Unlike most train games, Ticket to Ride allows you to build discontiguous rail lines, but the rewards for connecting cities usually preclude players from doing so. Metro (1997) and String Railway (2009) offer examples of even more minimalistic connections-only train game (the latter with strings!),

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Anatomy of a Genre: Dice Games, Part Three — Mini-Reviews

Over the last few month, I’ve been talking about dice games: how they work, why they’re fun, and how their mechanics have evolved over time. In case you missed them, please check out Mechanical Evolution (part one) and Just the Stats, Ma’am (part two).

This week I’m going to put a capstone on my dice game series by offering some mini-reviews of all the games I’ve played in the genre. Within you’ll find discussions of Airships, Can’t Stop, the Catan Dice Game, Dancing Dice, Easy Come Easy Go, Kingsburg, Liar’s Dice, Pickomino, Stone Age, To Court the King, Wicked Witches Way, and Yahtzee. Continue reading

Anatomy of a Genre: Dice Games, Part Two — Just the Stats, Ma’am

It’s a Dice Fest!

That’s an oft-seen complaint on certain internet bulletin boards whose readers think that all games should be entirely strategic, with no chance for random elements to intrude upon carefully made plans.  If that’s really the sort of game that you like, then no problem. But, don’t buy blindly into the concept. I think dice games can provide a lot of benefits that you don’t find in a “less” random game, the greatest of which is the visceral and encompassing joy that can fill you when you receive an unlikely, but badly needed roll. Besides that, if you’re wanting to simulate reality in any form, then you need to accept that randomness happens. Just ask Hillary Clinton or Constable Charles d’Albret (of Agincourt).

This isn’t to say that a good dice game is totally random. Instead, it uses additional mechanics to turn that luck into another game element that can be controlled by a good player–which is the topic of this week’s article. Continue reading