Though deckbuilding games have been around for a few years now, we haven’t seen many experienced eurogame designers dive into the category. Martin Wallace’s A Few Acres of Snow (2011) was a notable exception — and unsurprisingly one of the most distinct deckbuilder designs. Thus, I was very pleased to see Copycat (2012), by experienced euro designer Friedemann Friese.

The Game

Copycat is uniquely a game that combines worker placement mechanics and deckbuilder mechanics. After players have auctioned for initiative, they place workers on certain choice office spaces. Only afterward do they have the opportunity to purchase new cards and earn victory points.

The game works because its two parts are very symmetrical — a topic I’m going to return to shortly. The powers of the worker placement spaces and the powers of deckbuilt cards have a lot of overlap: either one can give a player money to spend, or let him draw cards, or earn him victory points. The worker placement spaces provide the unique ability to give players “buys” — which are required to actually make purchases — while the cards have several (slightly) more esoteric powers, and also offer the unique ability to give players more workers to place.

The entire goal of the game is to earn victory points. These show up whenever players place workers in victory point spaces, play victory point cards, or use worker placement spaces that were unpopular in recent rounds. At the end of the game, players may also get the opportunity to turn their last hand’s worth of money into victory points — though this can sometimes be blocked by other players.

No matter what sort of deck a player made, it’s the person who earned the most points over the course of the game who wins.

The Good

Deckbuilding as a Mechanic. Most games approach deckbuilding as a subgenre of games. There are thus certain rules and methodologies which are incorporated into those deckbuilding games … and they don’t tend to go further afield. Copycat instead approaches deckbuilding as a mechanic: it’s one of several different parts which are put together to form a game engine — with the other major elements being worker placement and (to a lesser extent) auctions.  A Few Acres of Snow (2011), which combines wargaming and deckbuilding mechanics, may be the only other game that does this to the same extent. By using deckbuilding as a mechanic, Copycat is able to deviate quite a distance from the deckbuilding norm.

Amazing Integration of Deckbuilding & Worker Placement. One of the most impressive elements of Copycat is how well it integrates worker placement and deckbuilding into an entirely coherent whole. For example, at the start of a game, you tend to have four cards and three workers. Since the actions for the workers and the cards are very similar, this is a lot like have a hand of 7 cards — except 3 of the cards are in contention. If you prefer to look at the game from the worker placement side of things, the offices on the board are like public buildings and your cards are like private buildings that only you can use. Players will naturally combine the resources from the worker placement with the the resources from their card play on every turn — creating a very integrated whole.

Not Entirely Dependent Upon Your Deck. The integration of deckbuilding and worker placements provides for a deckbuilding game that’s a lot more forgiving than most. Players can actually build a deck that’s missing a key component (such as coins!), and make up for that with aggressive worker placement. I think a lot of deckbuilding games could benefit from figuring out how to better support failures of strategy like this.

Clean SImplicity. Because there’s a lot that’s going on in Copycat, its deckbuilder cards can be pretty simple. There are just a few different activities among all the cards, and there aren’t any cards with the complexity that you’d find in a typical deckbuilder. Some games like Arctic Scavengers (2009, 2013), 3012 (2012), and Penny Arcade (2011) have tried to go the same direction, and I haven’t always been convinced by the result, but it’s a lot more successful in Copycat because the deckbuilding is part of a whole.

Simple Cards Become Resources. Most of the simple cards are effectively resources, that provide either meeples, coins, or additional draws. This twists deckbuilding in an interesting direction, since it becomes about managing those resources rather than about hoping for special powers when cards are drawn.

Round-Based Play. The majority of deckbuilding games play continuously around the table. Copycat instead feature a more complex play order. First,  the game is split up into rounds. Second, each round is broken into three parts: a battle for initiative, worker placement, and purchases. This adds for a lot of variability, which lets the game running longer than I think a typical deckbuilder can support. It also allows for more thoughtful strategy, as players try to figure out when they’d like to go in each of the different phases.

An Orthogonal Use of Cards. Initiative is divvied out based on a simultaneous-bid auction, where each player reveals one card. Those cards’ initiative values are then used to determine who goes in what order. This provides for yet more interesting strategy, as players figure out which card to sacrifice to the initiative auction. Sometimes they may dump a bad card, even though it has a horrible initiative number, and sometimes they may play a great card because of its high initiative value.

I feel like much of what I’ve talked about thus far goes far beyond typical deckbuilding design, opening up entire new vistas of play to explore. However, Copycat also twists some of the more typical deckbuilding ideas just a little bit:

Random Cards, with a Twist. As in Ascension (2010), the cards that players purchase in Copycat are made available randomly. Unlike any other deckbuilding game that I’m aware of, these cards are stacked into sets, so that better cards come out as the game goes on. In addition, the cards are effectively sold through a Dutch auction: they’re a little more expensive to buy when they first appear, but that price comes down as cards ahead of them are purchased.

Victory Points are Continuously Earned. Most typical deckbuilding games give players points only at the end of the game, when they score what’s in their deck. Ascension gives players some points in-play and some based on their deck. Copycat goes the rest of the way and gives players all of their points through the play of cards over the course of the game — which introduces interesting questions about when to earn points, pretty much from turn one.

The Interesting

A Carefully Timed Game. Because of the way in which points are earned, and because of the fact that Copycat’s endgame can be suddenly triggered by a couple of different factors, players have to very carefully manage the timing of the game in Copycat. They have to figure out how fast the game is going and how quickly they should be earning points, in response.

The Bad

Overall, Copycat is a terrific game — one of my favorites in the deckbuilding field. However, like all games, it has some flaws …

Multiple Awkward States for Cards. During his turn, a player can have cards in four different states: in his hand; in his play area; in his clipboard; and in his discard pile. In any deckbuilding game, the difference between a play area and a discard pile is a little awkward for players. Copycat makes this worse by introducing the clipboard. The goal is to make sure that players can’t “copy” cards that they played for initiative, discarded, or already copied — but it’s awkward and confusing for new players. I wish something better had been developed.

SImple Simplicity. Though I lauded Copycat’s simplicity above, I also have some concerns that it ultimately could become too simple. The limited number of cards (and thus actions and resources) keeps the game from being as variable as the average deckbuilder. Thus, the question becomes whether its worker placement mechanics are enough to keep the game interesting. The answer is: I dunno. I’ve played it twice in three weeks and enjoyed it both times, but I’m not entirely certain about the strategic variation in the long-term.

Conclusion

Copycat is one of the best games to come out of the deckbuilding field. That’s not just because it innovates the field by a considerable amount, but also because it takes all of the exciting new ideas that were kicked off by Dominion (2008) and applies them more generally to the gaming field, producing a game with more depth and complexity than a straight-up deckbuilder can offer.

I found one of the best discussions of loss aversion at Usabilia, which describes loss aversion thus:

Loss aversion is a human characteristic that describes how people are intrinsically afraid of losses. When compared against each other people dislike losing more than they like winning. Thus losses loom larger than gains even though the value in monetary terms may be identical.

There isn’t much question on the existence of loss aversion. Instead, the modern scientific articles on the topic tend to focus more on why it occurs and what its boundaries on. I think some of those issues could be intriguing for a follow-up article, but for the moment I want to concentrate on the core of loss aversion as it applies to game design.

As it happens, two different designers have made good and repeated use of loss aversion in their designs. Their games thus offer up good examples of how this psychological effect can be used to enhance gameplay. The two designers also happen to be two of my favorites: Reiner Knizia and Stefan Feld.

The Basics of Loss Aversion

Reiner Knizia’s Ra (1999) is always the game that makes me think of loss aversion most. The main goal of the game is to collect tiles, and those tiles tend to give you points as you build sets of monuments, crown pharaohs, flood land, and advance your civilization. The majority of the points earned are positive, but there are two negatives: if you have the least pharaohs, you lose 2 points, and if you have no civilization advances for an era, you lose 5 points.

Being a very well-designed auction game, the prices for tiles tend to police themselves. However, in most or all games of Ra that I’ve played, civilization tiles tend to be overvalued: people will pay more for them than for something worth +5 points, and that’s clearly because they’re loss averse. I suspect that the civilization die rolls in Ra: The Dice Game (2009) similarly overvalue civilization results, but it’s hard to calculate for sure because Ra values everything in a slightly different way. (That’s probably another project for another day.)

The pharaohs, which can generate -2 points, are even more interesting than the civilization advances. I’m pretty sure that the average player also overvalues staying out of last place in the pharaoh race. However, this aversion tends to fade as players gain experience in the game — a trend that continues through a lot of game designs.

Call that Shannon’s First Law of Loss Design:

I. The more experienced players are, the more willing they are to take losses.

The Age of Scarcity

In the late ’00s, the “scarcity” game appeared on the market. The best known of the category is Agricola (2007), but I think Stefan Feld is the master of the genre.

The basic idea of a scarcity game is that it puts loss front and forward, so that it’s a constant factor in the gameplay. Because  of loss aversion, the tension tends to skyrocket in scarcity games — and it certainly drives decisions in these games, for better or for worst.

Notre Dame (2007) was Feld’s entrant to the category. There’s a lot going on in the game, including card drafting and resource management, but the scarcity elements are always there too: every turn, each player adds a certain number of rats to his plague track, held back only by hospitals that they’ve built.

The interesting thing about Notre Dame is that beginning players often want to hold back their plague track all the time — even though it doesn’t have any effect until it tops out. Experienced players (once more) are a little more open to their plague track increasing, but even they don’t tend to play up the maximumly efficient strategy, which would to almost top out the plague track just as the game ends — because they’re afraid of the mere chance of a loss — which could happen if there’s a bad turn of cards at the end.

II. Players aren’t averse just to loss, but also to the increased chance of loss at some time in the future.

Stefan Feld’s In the Year of the Dragon (2007) may be the nastiest, lossiest game ever. Each year, something horrible happens: contagion kills people if there aren’t enough healers; Mongols kill a persont if there aren’t enough warriors; the Emperor takes people if taxes aren’t paid; and the drought kills people if palaces aren’t supplied. It’s a constant litany of misfortune that players struggle to keep up with — and surprisingly it doesn’t exhaust the players’ aversion to loss (though it might exhaust the players!).

Amidst all of that, there’s a Festival. It’s a good thing that can give notable points to the players who supply the ceremony with fireworks — and it’s always the least of players’ worries while the years count down.

III. Even in a game filled with loss, players tend worry about the loss more than the faint glimmers of gain that shine through.

Spending & Consequences

Reiner Knizia’s focus on loss aversion seemed to occur in the ’90s, and thus we turn to another game from that era, Medici (1995), for some final interesting interactions with loss aversion.

In Medici players are bidding money to purchase lots of goods — which in turn can give them money, though the amount of return isn’t always clear. The catch is that the money that you’re spending and earning is your Victory Points.

Play suggests that the spending of VPs causes some loss aversion, though probably not as much as losing VPs to some gaming system (like rats or the lack of civilization). However, newer players often seem more reluctant to spend their VPs than more experienced players.

IV. Spending can sometimes cause loss aversion, though not to the level of true loss.

Interestingly, Medici also offers a good reason to be averse to loss. You start off with 30-40 Florins and if you drop to 0 … then you don’t have any more money to bid. So, there’s a real repercussion if you lose too much.

V. Sometimes a game can offer a good reason to be averse to loss.

Conclusion

Clearly, the topic of loss aversion in gaming could use some actual studies to better assess how well it works and what precise type of behavior it generates to what extent for what type of players. I also think it’d be interesting to mathematically dissect how some designers value loss vs. gain. For the moment, however, I think it’s fair to say that designing with loss aversion can work well in a game — providing players with dilemmas that can go beyond the game itself, to core issues of human psychology.

Thanks to Arden S., Nathan E., Patrick L., Eric V. Jonathan D., and Christopher A. who gave me some pointers and thoughts about loss aversion on Facebook.

Driftwood Games first released Arctic Scavengers (2009) in a limited edition back toward the start of the deckbuilding era, but it just hit the mass market recently with its rerelease from Rio Grande Games (2013). It turns out that there’s a surprising amount of innovation for something published so soon after Dominion (2008).

The Game

Arctic Scavengers is built around a menu of four options: draw, dig, hunt, and skirmish. Each player can do each action no more than once on his turn (though he often won’t do all of them). Cards used for one action can’t then be used for another.

• Draw quite simply lets a player take additional cards from his deck into his hand.
• Dig lets a player look at cards from the junkyard pile — which has some good stuff (most of it equipment) and some trash — and keep up to one of them.
• Hunt allows a player collect food and medicine, then use it to Hire a card from several face-up piles.
• Skirmish lets a player commit several cards to a face-down pile. At the end of a full round of play, everyone compares the Skirmish values of their face-down cards, and the winner gets the top card in the Contested Resources pile, which is either something great or something worth a lot of victory points.

After 16 rounds of play (timed by the Contested Resources deck), the player with the most victory points (which come from people in the deck, who you might have purchased via Hiring or won with Skirmishes) wins.

The Interesting

Super Small Deck. The original Arctic Scavengers contains just 144 cards. There are very few deckbuilding games that have been built to that scale — and the ones that have been, like Pergamemnon (2011), haven’t been entirely successful. The upside of such a small card count is an equally small price — here $34.99. The downside is limited replayability — a topic I’m going to return to. Fortunately, the RIo Grande edition of Arctic Scavengers gets partially past that problem with a HQ Expansion that also ships with the base game.

The Good

Multiple Currencies & Random Cards. These are both a bit staid nowadays because they appeared in the mass-market with Ascension (2010) — one of the first deckbuilders out of the gate after Dominion. However, Arctic Scavengers introduces its own interesting take on both elements.

First, the random cards (which appear in Contest Resource and Junkyard decks) are hidden, so that only the active player gets to see them; in the case of the Junkyard deck, the active player may get to look through several cards before picking one, so there’s some control of the randomness.

Second, the multiple currencies actually include three “currencies”: Digging, Hunting (which actually includes both food and medicine — two different currencies), and Skirmishing. That may be a record for deckbuilding currency counts. Unlike Ascension or Penny Arcade (2011), the currencies in Arctic Scavengers work in dramatically different ways, with digging resulting in random draws, hunting in open purchases, and skirmishing in blind bidding auctions. This variety of gameplay is even more important than the currency count, and the rest of the deckbuilding field could really learn from it. It’s the sort of dramatic differentiation of mechanics that should be appearing in more deckbuilding games; heck, just having one of those wide variations (the random draw or the blind bid) would have been a great innovation.

Multiple use Cards. Arctic Scavengers gets away with having  three (or four) currencies by its cards being dramatically multiuse. Most cards allow players to do at least two different things (e.g., dig or skirmish) while others allow players to engage in all four activities. An individual card might be better at one thing than the other (e.g., the Scavenger can do everything, but is best at hunting), but that still gives players tactical options for different things to do on their turn — something that’s missing from many deckbuilder games.

Multiple Paths to Victory. You won’t be surprised that all of this combines to offer multiple ways to win — primarily focused on the three main actions.

Equipment, Not Weapons. Games like Thunderstone (2009) and 3012 (2012) include weapons that require people to wield them. Resident Evil (2010) similarly includes ammo that requires weapons to fire it. Arctic Scavengers generalizes this mechanic beyond combat to instead introduce equipment that can modify any sort of action — while still requiring a wielder to hold it. Thus you can have grenades which help Skirmishing, but also equipment to help Digging, Hunting, and the rest. It’s a nice example of looking at a game mechanic, then stepping back and figuring out how to use it more widely.

Great Interpersonal Play. The blind bidding that’s focused on the Skirmish allows for the best interpersonal play of any deckbuilding game — with the possible exception of 3012. You have to be aware of what your opponents are buying and how many cards they’re playing into the Skirmish, and only then can you decide whether you’re going to fight with them or not. It really raises Arctic Scavengers up above the multi-player solitaire rut that so deckbuilders can so easily fall into.

The Bad

Simple. Arctic Scavengers‘ gameplay is quick, but it’s also pretty simple. There isn’t a huge amount of variety among the cards, other than different values for the three currencies. This problem is made worse by the small size of the overall card set, which means there’s not a lot of variety either. Arctic Scavengers partly resolves the problem by also including what was originally an expansion, but still it’s a relatively plain and simple game. Though great for light games, those expecting more complex fare will need to think more carefully.

Runaways Possibilities. If a player is allowed to get out ahead on Skirmish points early in the game, they can then collect great stuff from the Skirmish pile and roll over their opponents. The saboteur and sniper cards are probably meant to partially resolve this problem, as they allow multiple opponents to all gang up on one person in the Skirmish, but it still feels like a weakness in the design — both in the singular focus it suggests and in the rich-get-richer problems it can cause.

The Expansion

The (included) HQ Expansion offered up some badly needed variability to Arctic Scavengers — and it also added some interesting new options for deckbuilding play.

Leaders — Strategic Cards. In Arctic Scavengers, each player starts with refugee/VP cards which immediately get trashed. However with the HQ Expansion, each player now has a leader that gives those refugees special powers (and thus makes them more useful). Some refugees become better at hunting or digging, while others can blow up opponents. This adds a little bit of strategic differentiation to the game, and thus might force players onto different strategic paths. Penny Arcade and other games with main character cards offer similar strategic play, though many of those effects are a bigger deal than the ones in Arctic Scavengers and thus lead to more specialization.

Buildings — Timed Cards. The building cards are somewhat more unique. They’re cards that stay in play once they’re created (which is relatively rare but not unknown in deckbuilders), but they take several rounds of play to finish. Construction takes time! Thus you have to decide if a building will be useful several turns from now.

Gangs — Victory Cards. Finally, the Expansion includes gangs, which give additional victory points to players who meet certain conditions like having the most medicine in their deck. Though the idea goes all the way back to classics like Settlers of Catan (1995) with its Largest Army and Longest Road, it’s another idea that hasn’t been widely used in the deckbuilding field, and perhaps should be.

Conclusion

Arctic Scavengers has more than its share of deckbuilding innovations, especially considering how long ago it was originally designed. It’s a pity that it didn’t get wider distribution back in 2009, else the deckbuilding genre might look a lot different by now.

Released into today’s market it’s another fairly basic deckbuilder game entering a somewhat clogged field, and I’m not entirely certain it’s going to get much traction as a result. Nonetheless, if you’re looking at a simple-ish game with more tactics and more interpersonal play than most deckbuilders, this one is well worth looking at.

This interview was conducted in email over the course of April 2013.

Shannon Appelcline: What made you decide to design a cooperative game — and more specifically, what made you decide to design Pandemic?

Matt Leacock: I was introduced to the idea of a cooperative game being genuinely fun (as opposed to a “fun” educational experience) by Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings. I found the mechanisms in that game fascinating — how so much tension could be created by pieces of cardboard — and wondered what it would be like to create my own. At the time, pandemics where all over the news and it seemed to me that diseases would make an excellent opponent: they’re unfeeling, scary, can grow out of control, and I figured they could be modeled with fairly simple rules. Those latter two properties were the most attractive. I’m drawn to designing games with emergent systems (where a simple set of rules can result in highly complex and variable results) and the thought of a system spiraling wildly out of control was irresistible to me.

I recall mulling a lot of this over in my head as I took my infant daughter out on walks and then one day I started sketching things out on a notepad and immediately started to test the crude sketches along with a modified deck of cards. Fairly early on, I stumbled on to the rule for re-infecting already infected cities — by putting the discards on top of the draw pile — and I was hooked.

SA: I think the slightly complex system for keeping the same cards active in the game is one of the cleverest design elements, and something that makes the game really work! It’s also interesting to hear that Lord of the Rings was what got you into the co-op field, as I think it was the leanest and tightest cooperative game prior to the release of Pandemic. Were they any specific mechanics (or other elements) from Lord of the Rings that influenced your design of Pandemic? Or from any other early co-op games?

ML: In an effort to encourage communication (and reduce the chances that one of the players would dominate the conversation) I did pick up his rule restricting players from showing each other their cards during the game.

I dropped this restriction for the Introductory game so that experienced players can advise newer players, and then (in the second edition of the game) made it completely optional. I’m not sure if Knizia included the restriction in Lord of the Rings so his traitor rules would work or if he included the traitor rules as a rationalization for the “no showing” rule. (In my experience no one ever considers turning against their fellow hobbits.) I suspect he also found that requiring people to describe their cards — rather than show them — helped reduce alpha-player syndrome and add to player autonomy.

I added the roles after a conversation with Mark Kaufmann and Eric Hautemont from Days of Wonder. They tested an early version of the game and encouraged me to find ways to make each player feel special. In hindsight, this is a no-brainer, but for a time, the players jointly controlled three gray, undifferentiated pawns.

SA: A great change, as I think the roles are one of the most interesting parts of the game! Is there anything else in the design of Pandemic that you found particularly important to the cooperative aspects of the game?

ML: The central challenge of melding 5 cards of the same color is difficult to do alone — it usually requires heavy dependence and coordination with the other players. Players must often plan several turns in advance in order to orchestrate complex “meet-ups” across the globe and this is an excellent way to get a group talking and problem-solving together.

The roles (mentioned earlier) provide each player something “uniquely powerful” to contribute. Because the game is so difficult, players must rely on the special powers of their teammates if they want to succeed. The roles also provide a strong sense of purpose which helps players differentiate themselves from the others in the group.

Cooperative games can feel like a group puzzle that could just as easily be solved by one person as by several. (In practice, I find the opposite is true: many minds working together usually do much better than a lone player.) In order to reduce this “group puzzle” feeling, I’ve found it helps to give players a greater sense of autonomy. For example, you are in complete control of your own pawn in the game. While others can move it in certain circumstances, the rules state that they must ask your permission. The “no showing” rules for your hand work under the same principle. You’re in control over the information on the cards: if others want to know what you have, they have to ask you. I’m always on the lookout for other ways to increase this feeling — I think this is a ripe area for development in cooperative games.

Here’s a summary of some of the mechanisms aiding cooperation in Pandemic:

• The melding needed to find a cure requires interdependence on others.
• The extreme difficulty requires a reliance on the role powers of others.
• The role powers provide players a sense of purpose on the team, drawing out wallflowers.
• Hand and pawn control provide a greater sense of autonomy, helping to set boundaries for who controls what.

SA: You mention a few times the difficulty of the game, and I’d have to agree. I’ve personally recorded 10 plays of Pandemic, and if I’ve won it at all, it’s just been one or two times. How do you thinking winning and losing should balance out in a cooperative game, and why?

ML: The primary challenge is keeping the players in a good state of flow. That is, keeping them in that sweet spot where they’re doing creative problem-solving that is neither boring and tedious (when the game isn’t hard enough) nor overcome with anxiety or helplessness (when the game is too hard). I’ve found that players get the most enjoyment when things are just out of reach — that they can almost, very nearly, taste victory each time. And of course, you’ve got to let them win some from time to time or the game will be declared broken. So that said, I generally hope the players will lose their first round or two of the game but — here’s the important part — they must both blame themselves and have some good ideas for what they’ll try next.

My general rule of thumb is to target a 30% win ratio that gradually increases until the players feel ready to graduate to the next level of difficulty, at which point I hope they only win 30% of the time, and so on. But that’s merely a rough guideline. It’s hard to track given the vast array of variables in the game itself, the individual players’ experience, and the way they work together as a group.

If all goes well with the game then, there’s plenty of replay potential (based on difficulty alone) packed into the game.

One thing that I’ve found fascinating and that I never would have predicted when I started is that many players appear to get more enjoyment out of a game that is just narrowly lost over one that they win. I think some of this may be due to a lack of denouement in Pandemic‘s design — winning can be a bit abrupt — but I do think that people enjoy struggling for something just out of reach.

SA: I think those ten plays are my top count for a cooperative game, so that definitely argues for the game’s replayability!

You’ve recently rereleased Pandemic, and the newest iteration has two new roles, the Contingency Planner and the Quarantine Specialist. What made you decide to increase the core game’s role count, and what do you think they contribute to the cooperation of the game?

ML: I was approached by Z-man with the idea of adding some new roles to the base set and asked Tom Lehmann to take on the task of leading the development of these. I liked the thought of increasing the variety in the base game without increasing complexity and thought it would bring some renewed interest to the base game.

The Contingency Planner brings a very different power to the usual role mix with his ability to manipulate events while the Quarantine Specialist provides a straightforward — but powerful way to help control the infections and outbreaks. They primarily add variety to the mix but the players controlling either power can benefit from the advice of their teammates whether it’s on the selection or timing of an event or the correct place to camp out at the end of a turn.

SA: Continuing on with the idea of sequels, I wanted to ask you about Forbidden Island. Some folks describe it as a simplified version of Pandemic, while you’ve said it’s more it’s own game. How did your ideas about cooperative gaming change from Pandemic to Forbidden Island, and what do you think the latter brings to the field?

ML: When I designed Forbidden Island, the folks from Gamewright and I wanted to bottle up all the tension and excitement found in Pandemic in a new (and entirely separate) game that was more accessible to kids and families. A great deal of the development work that went into the game was focused on keeping the rule set as simple and straightforward as possible. Not to dumb it down, mind you — the game is plenty challenging — but to remove any rules that would trip people up and to reduce as much friction in play as we could.

For example, during setup, the draw deck does not need to be primed: players don’t need to intercut Waters Rise cards at pre-determined intervals. They just shuffle the deck. Because this is more chaotic, I needed to ensure the game engine was stable enough that things wouldn’t go off the rails with a bad shuffle. (Players will be quick to point out that it is indeed possible to lose on the first turn — a tradeoff I was happy to make since 1. this is so rare, 2. it’s so fun to talk about, and 3. it allowed me to cut out several minutes of setup and at least one page of rules out of the game.)

I’ll also mention that I think the end game for Forbidden Island works especially well. After players have discovered the four artifacts, they then need to make a mad dash for the helicopter in order to lift off. I think this provides a more cinematic ending. The players don’t end the game at the peak of the story’s climax and have a period of resolution while they make their way to the helicopter.

I also think the game’s overall product design was well executed. The artwork and pieces are gorgeous, the tray insert works well, and the price point can’t be beat. I’m not really sure how they pulled off that price point to be honest. When it’s all put-together (accessibility, artwork, and price) I think it makes for an excellent gateway game for new players to the hobby.

SA: Any comments on the upcoming Forbidden Desert, and how that’s going to continue the evolution of your cooperative design?

ML: The challenge for me with Forbidden Desert was to come up with a sequel for people who liked Forbidden Island that continued the story, but didn’t feel like “more of the same.” I’m hoping that these “Forbidden” games will feel like episodes in an old adventure serial — a continuing story, lots of excitement, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Forbidden Desert introduces two primary threats that the players must counterbalance: they’re in the baking sun and will eventually expire from thirst (due to exposure). They camp out in the cool, dark tunnels, but if they do that, they’ll eventually be buried alive under the rapidly accumulating sand. The dueling threats are similar to Pandemic in that you’ve got to balance the need to address local emergencies with the overall objectives of the game, weigh the risks, and come up with gambits to address one without forgetting the other.

I can’t increase the difficulty without giving the players additional tools to cope. This game introduces a deck of equipment cards to help the players out. Like role abilities, equipment cards give the players additional one-shot powers. The cards were designed so that they are only controlled by their owner (increasing autonomy), can be played at any time (which helps with engagement when it’s not your turn), and come out gradually over the course of the game so the players don’t need to understand everything at the beginning of the game. I also designed them so their powers would encourage interdependence between the players when they are used. For example, the Solar Shield will protect anyone on your tile. You can certainly play it when you’re alone, but wouldn’t it be better to put it up after you’ve convinced a few of your colleagues to join you in the shade?

In addition to those mechanisms that bring out cooperation, the game features a different challenge engine and a shifting board. I had a bit of fun inverting Forbidden Island: instead of drowning from too much water, players are desperate for it. Instead of a rapidly disappearing board, players find themselves getting buried under an overabundance of it (as the sand piles up all around them).

SA: Sounds like a fun new experience. I’ll look forward to seeing it in print! Now that you’ve got three cooperative games under your belt, do you feel like you’ve learned any important lessons about cooperative games that you didn’t know when you put together Pandemic?

ML: No doubt. It would be hard to list the many things you pick up along the way in testing — what types of things work and what things don’t. These things often become clearer when you play a game that isn’t working. You begin to consciously recognize the stuff that you learned tacitly.

Here’s a few that come to mind:

Don’t make a game harder by hamstringing a player and limiting their options — that’s incredibly frustrating. Instead, move the goal post out a bit further, and offer the tools necessary to get the job done — but don’t tell the player how to accomplish the task.

It’s hard to overemphasize this: don’t tell the player how to win. I roll my eyes when I see “helpful hints” in rules. You’re stealing the game from the player! That’s a good tip for teaching too. Present an environment where the player or student is able to succeed or learn given the environment you’ve constructed for them. Telling a player how to win a cooperative game is like telling a student how to solve a problem and then telling them to solve it for you. (Is it any wonder why students find math dull given the way it’s taught?)

And, I had no idea how cooperative games can (and will!) open up new avenues for the incorporation of richer stories and story-telling into board games. I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface and have so much more to learn in this area.

SA: I’ve been pretty surprised by how closely cooperative games have been allied with storytelling as well! Is that what’s kept drawing you back to cooperative games, is it mainly the success of Pandemic, or is it something else?

ML: All of the above.

SA: Thanks very much for taking the time to answer these questions!

The Game

3012 is a game of fighting monsters (encounters) and eventually gaining the most renown by defeating them. In this regard, it’s probably the most like Thunderstone (2009): you play allies, you equip them with weapons, and then you see if your combat total is high enough to overcome the defense of the encounter.

The card purchasing method is pretty standard: any card you play (for any reason) contributes its coinage, and then you use your coinage to buy cards from a random set of allies, a random set of weapons, and a pair of action/reaction cards (on which, more momentarily).

The game also has some interesting quirks. The biggest comes about through the scout cards — which allows opponents to either aid or block the active player in his encounter. Very few deckbuilders have gone this heavy on the player interaction, with Nightfall (2011) and Eminent Domain (2011) being the most obvious precedents.

The Good

As usual, my focus in talking about this new deckbuilder is how it expands the genre in new and interesting ways.

Borrows from the Best. One of the most interesting aspects of 3012 is its presence as a strong member of the third generation of deckbuilders which build upon many different deckbuilders, not just Dominion (2008). Thus 3012 has: random cards like Ascension (2010); characters, weapons, and monsters like Thunderstone; player interactions like Nightfall; character cards like Penny Arcade (2011), etc. The synthesis is quite natural, and doesn’t keep 3012 from being its own game, yet the attention the good stuff that has evolved in the deckbuilding genre is good to see.

Great Player Interaction. 3012 has the best player interaction that I’ve seen of any deckbuilding game other than Eminent Domain (which is really in a class of its own thanks to its role-selection origins). That comes about partly due to 3012′s mechanics. Whenever a player engages in an encounter, every other player has the option to help or hurt them, and can get experience as a result (which won’t win him the game, but will improve his character).

However, there’s more to the interaction than just the mechanics. The way the system is setup, scouting can generate political discussions (to decide who should be aided) and even a sort of prisoner’s dilemma (where going contrary to the group can help or hurt, depending on the situation). Finally, this is all supported by the fact that you get to draw up to your hand size at both the end of your turn and the start. This resolves what I thought was one of the biggest problems with Nightfall’s out-of-turn actions — where you could get to your turn and have nothing to do.

As a whole, 3012 manages to not just include player interactions, but also to support them well.

Great Variability due to Actions & Reactions. Every turn two action/reaction cards are flipped up. These can be purchased (along with the allies & weapons already out), but more notably their powers also go off as if the active player had played them. This is pretty unique, and also adds a lot to the game. Players lagging behind can get a sudden helping hand, and the game doesn’t drag as much as most deckbuilders do, where you can just get bad turns. Beyond that, it adds some surprise to the game and allows players to engage in sudden tactical play of the type that you don’t tend to see in the genre. I’d love to see more deckbuilders figure out how to introduce a little variability and surprise into their turns, as this mechanism does.

Coin Resources. A few deckbuilders to date have let you strategically keep resources from round to round, among them A Few Acres of Snow (2011) and to a lesser extent Pergamemnon (2011). 3012 does so too, but via a pretty clever mechanism. If you ever have one or more coins that you didn’t spend at the end of the round, then you get one coin token which you can use on future rounds. This creates a constant choice (as you figure out if you want to short yourself one or more coins to get a resource), it lets you build up resources, and it’s another way to keep the game from stagnating — as you can fall back to stockpiled coins on “bad” turns. But, 3012 does all of this without being overwhelming, as you can only save one coin each turn.

Risk-Reward Combat System. In 3012‘s combat system, you choose to have an encounter, then choose the approximate level of the encounter. Afterward, everyone decides whether to help or hinder you. Only then do you see what the encounter actually is. Thus, there’s a lot of risk in the system — primarily for the active player, but to a lesser extent for everyone else. It comes about partly through the semi-random card but also (for the active player) In not knowing what the other players might do. This creates a nice little system of risk and reward that’s beyond the simple number-crunching of most deckbuilding games.

The Interesting

Very Symmetrical Start. In 3102 you start with a very small deck of just four cards, and then you draw all of them. There’s no luck in your hand on your first turn, which may be a first in the deckbuilding world — though there’s luck in the action/reaction cards that randomly come up, in the cards available for play, and in the chaos of whether other players support or oppose you with scouts.

Acceptable Cards at Start?  What you have in your hand at the start of the game is four scouts; unlike pretty much every other deckbuilder out there, you must not want to filter them out of your deck as they serve a unique purpose (aiding or blocking) that no other card does. On the other hand, they’re not particularly powerful cards, so you don’t start off too far up the deckbuilding caurve.

Cards are Suited. Most of the cards are suited, with each ally and each weapon broadly matching one of the players’ characters. This creates some nice symmetry in the game’s design (and some nice connections among the various cards, in a Magic-like way). It sadly isn’t supported that well by the components (e.g., you can’t see a “suit” at a glance) and may contribute to the over-regularization of the cards. Still, as I say here, it’s interesting.

Unique Theming. The theming of 3012 — kind of postapocalyptic, kind of anthropomophic — is original. It’s the only game you’ll find with tribes of bat-men, monkey-money, fish-men, snake-men, and jaguar-men are all fighting each other. Whether you’ll find that intriguing or not is of course your call. (I thought it cool, but at least one of my players not so.)

The Bad

A Bit Long. (Maybe.) I seem to have this complaint a lot in deckbuilders, and I think that’s because Dominion showed me the genre could play in under an hour, and few other games manage that. This game claims 45 minutes, but we ran for over two hours after the teach. Part of that was likely inexperience, but I can’t see getting in under 1.5 hours in the way we played it.

Part of the problem is that the game could theoretically go on forever. It’s all based on experience, and you only get experience when you encounter stuff, and players could keep holding back from those encounters. In fact, I think a reluctance to enter combat is what dragged our game out — but I think that reluctance was usually well-founded. Quarriors (2011) had a similar problem with games that could keep dragging on — or, in its case, finish in 10 minutes.

Some Graphical Challenges. The artwork was muddy, and the text was smaller than I’d like. More notably, I felt there were real opportunities to make the game more usable (like marking the “suits”) that weren’t taken.

Cards Sometimes too Regular. There’s certainly a point for simplicity in a deckbuilding game, and you definitely want some sort of “balance” in your game. However, I thought 3012 sometimes took it too far — such as in the weapons, which all cost 5/7/9 and did 1/2/3 damage, and each of which benefited one suit of characters.

Conclusion

3012 is a very well-developed third-generation deckbuilder game. On the one hand it does a great job of building on the development of second-generation deckbuilders, including aspects like random cards to purchase, individual characters cards, and strategic resources. On the other hand, it does a great job job of introducing new stuff to the genre, such as a really well-developed and polished system for player interaction, a unique system for shaking up turns, and some nice risk and reward in the combat system.

The game beyond that is relatively simple and introductory (though not as much as Cryptozoic’s Penny Arcade game), but the result is still good and interesting — worth checking out.

To commemorate that event, I’ve opted to share a second part of my fragmentary history of board game. This one falls a bit after my article on The Birth of the Modern Board Game. 

Wargaming would eventually become an American-dominated industry. However, first the United States had to develop its own gaming national identity, and that would begin in late 19th century. Though the earliest major publishers aren’t remember well today, they nonetheless form the start of a stream of publication that would start gaing steam in 1883.

The first leader in the American board game industry was McLoughlin Brothers & Co. (1858-1920). By the 1880s they dominated they industry. Though their games are little known today among the general public, they remained the most desirable games for this period from collectors. With the emergence of chromolithography their beautiful designs truly began to shine.

Other early companies that were active by the time McLoughlin rose to ascendance include the aforementioned Milton Bradley (1860-1984) — then primarily an educational company despite their production of The Checkered Game of Life — and Selchow & Righter (1867-1987), best known in early days for Parcheesi (1870).

But these three companies would be a prelude for what came next.

The American Board Gaming Century Begins: 1883-1935

In 1883 a new force appeared on the gaming scene, marking the start of the American Century of board game design. George S. Parker, then 16, began selling a self-published card game called Banking (1883). Among other things Parker’s game marked a notable shift in American gaming away from morality and instead toward capitalism. This was reflected in other games of the period including Bulls and Bears (McLoughlin Brothers, 1883), Monopolist (McLoughlin Brothers, 1885), and The Game of Playing Department Store (McLoughlin Brothers, 1898).

George Parker formed George S. Parker Co in 1886 and then Parker Brothers (when he was joined by his brother, Charlie) in 1888. Many of Parker’s games were in the old race/track style, but he also tried to expand the genre. One of his favorites was Chivalry (1888), an abstract strategy game that never really caught on. Parker also published one of the first licensed games, Innocence Abroad (1890), based on a Mark Twain story, and tried out lots of dexterity games over the years, including Tiddledy Winks (1890s), Pillow Dex (1897), and Ping-Pong (1902). In 1887 Parker Brothers also purchased W. & S.B. Ives, the makers of The Mansion of Happiness. They’d later republish Mansion in 1894, labeling it “the first board game ever published in America”. Although not actually true, it might have been one of the first American-published board games that was widely available.

Though Parker designed many of his own games, and the community of American designers was slowly growing, many of the games by these early publishers originated in England, and were then licensed across the sea. It would take more time for the American Board Gaming Century to truly catch on.

In the 1900s Parker found notable success in a series of card games. They were cheaper to make and sold better than board games. Pit (1904) was the first. It allowed for real-time trading in order to corner a commodity market. It was probably based upon Gavit’s Stock Exchange (1903), a nearly identical game, but it was Pit that found success. Trying to replicate Pit’s success, Parker next published Flinch (1905), a sort of competitive solitaire game, then Rook (1906). Rook was introduced for those fundamentalists who still considered cards to be “tools of the devil”. It used a new deck of cards that fundamentalists were allowed to use, and including many games using those cards — most of them point-taking trick games. Rook didn’t take off like Parker’s other card games, but it slowly grew in popularity. Today it remains popular in Eastern Kentucky and in Mennonite communities across North America.

Through the success of games like Innocence Abroad, their various dexterity games, and their card games, Parker Brothers rose in prominence until it eclipsed McLoughlin Brothers in the early 1900s as the prime American gaming company. McLoughlin Brothers would entirely disappear in 1920 when its gaming assets were purchased by Milton Bradley.

In 1925 Parker Brothers picked up another notable game, Touring (1906), which had previously been published by Wallie Dorr Company. It didn’t grow truly popular until it was republished as Mille Bornes (1954). Touring is a simple game of trying to complete a cross-country car trip by playing mileage cards, but it has a notable aspect: you can play disasters like “broken spring” and “populated area” on your opponents to slow down their journey. As such it was perhaps the first “take that” game — a very American style of gameplay where players actively attack each other, often by playing cards from their hands.

Generally the 1920s and the 1930s were kind to the American gaming industry. Following the shortages of World War I, in the 1920s people had been given a license to have fun again—and they did. Though the Great Depression of the 1930s did contract the industry, it quickly bounced back because out-of-work Americans had lots of time on their hands and games could be played and replayed after just one purchase.

The Great Depression also saw the popularization of what would become the canonical American board game: Monopoly (1933). Similar homemade games had circulated as early as the turn of the century. One of them, The Landlord’s Game, was patented in 1904 and published in 1910. However Charles Darrow, the inventor of Monopoly, was the first one to truly popularize this gameplay. He self-published and due to that success he was able to sell the game to Parker Brothers in 1935. It sold phenomenally during the Great Depression, as people dreamed of being able to live a better life. Today the Guinness Book of World Records claims Monopoly as the most-played commercial game in the world, citing 500 million plays as of 1999.

Small Box #1: Wyatt Earp (B+)

Author: Mike Fitzgerald, Richard Borg
Publisher: Rio Grande Games (2001)
Alea Difficulty Scale: 2
Other Articles: The Mystery Rummy Primer (3/09), The Mike Fitzgerald Interview (4/09)
My Plays: 2

The game is pretty much Rummy at its core: you draw cards and play melds. However, it’s got two big differences from that traditional description.

First there are sheriff cards, which let you engage in certain actions, like drawing extra cards or adding a new card to a meld of your choice.

Second, exactly who gets points for a meld is determined by looking at the total value of all the cards in that color (which could include quite a variety of sheriff cards) and comparing totals — only the player with the most points played for that outlaw (meld) gets to collect the reward (points).

So, it’s Rummy with variations.

The release of Wyatt Earp was really something new for Alea. They published it in a small box, primarily (one suspects) so that they could sell what was essentially a card game without having to charge a large-box price. Alea would follow this format for the next four years, until they decided to replace it with a new medium-box size (which has similarly been used for some games that are mostly card games).

Wyatt Earp was originally designed by Mike Fitzgerald as a “Mystery Rummy” game, then turned into a more Eurogame by Richard Borg, who sold it to Alea.

Strengths: Interactivity & Choice

When I first played this game five years ago, I didn’t particularly like it. At the time I was playing a lot of the standard Mystery Rummies, and I found this one needlessly complex, mainly based on its scoring conditions. It was only when I played it for the second time that I became more impressed with it.

The cool thing about the scoring is that it really encourages you to interact with the other people, to get your meld scoring more than theirs — or just to get your own value high enough that you earn something (as you can still get a fraction of the reward if you tie). This process is helped along by the way the sheriff cards are designed: they give you many situations where you can make a meaningful choice about how your cards will interact with your opponents’. (The secret for how this works is in the fact that many of the sheriff cards could be used to affect lots of different melds, so you’re not just stuck with what you drew, like in standard Rummy.)

Beyond that, I think Wyatt Earp is nicely thematic, with the increasing rewards (points), the shoot-outs (where some cards may have an affect based on a draw), and the names of everything working really well together.

Weaknesses: Weight?

One of the biggest complaints about Wyatt Earp was that it was really light compared to the Alea series to date. Except it’s not exactly lighter than the rest of the Alea series, it’s just a different sort of game — a real traditional card game, revved up to the next level (and maybe the next level beyond that).

Of course there’s a flip side: as I said the complexity is what turned me off when I first played it. So it may occupy a somewhat delicate spot in the gaming ecology.

Small Box #2: Royal Turf (A-)

Author: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Face 2 Face Games (2006) as Winner’s Circle
Alea Difficulty Scale: 1
Other Articles: Winner’s Circle Review (6/06)
My Plays: 7 (6 when I wrote this)

In Royal Turf you’re betting on horses, then racing them. Each horse has a set of four stats, which correspond to faces on a die. When you’re ready to race, you throw a die, then move a horse of your choice. Depending on the face and the corresponding stat, you might get to move a horse a lot or a little. All seven horses have to be moved before you can move any of them again. At the end of the race, first, second, and third place score, and last place penalizes. Pretty simple.

I have to admit to being befuddled as to why this game was ever put in a small box, given that it’s got a board and figures and everything. This game was also another pseudo-reprint in the Alea series, since it had appeared previously in a somewhat different form as Royal Turf Racing, which had been published in 1995.

Strengths: Fun, Strategy & Lots More

I like Royal Turf quite a bit for a few different reasons. First, it’s fun. Knizia has correctly sussed out how to make the die roll exciting, because you’re often looking for special symbols that can move a horse much more than he’d get to on average. On the other hand, it’s relatively strategic too. You can manage your strategy from the start, by choosing horses to bet on such that every roll is good for you. But, that’s not the only betting strategy. You might go contrarian instead, for example. During play that strategy turns into clever tactics, as you try to keep your horses ahead and others behind based on specific rolls.

One of the other things that impresses me about Royal Turf is that Knizia encourages players to be nasty to each other, something that you don’t see a lot in German games. That’s because of the penalty for the last-place horse. Often slowing a horse down is about self-interest: you’re just trying to be sure to not come in last with your own bets. But along the way, you’re hurting one of your opponents too.

Finally, the betting in Royal Turf can also be quite interesting if you use the hidden betting variant. I think it doubles the fun of the game, because it’s great pretending the whole time that you like a horse that you didn’t actually bet on and watching all of the other players trying to stop it from winning (while your real horses glide in).

Generally, I think Royal Turf is another of Alea’s stars, albeit a very light one. I just wish Winner’s Circle (which is the copy of the game I have, as the Alea edition is long out of print) didn’t have such bad coloration on the horses. There’s two that I always have to watch out for, lest I get confused.

Weaknesses: …

As you can see, I really don’t have a lot bad to say about Royal Turf. If folks don’t like it, I’m sure it’s largely about the randomness implicit in the game … but that’s pretty much the game, and Knizia does a masterful job of managing it.

Comparisons

Wyatt Earp (S#1).  Royal Turf is an interesting contrast to Wyatt Earp, because where the first was definitely a card game, the second is definitely a dice game. It’s like a one-two of randomness in gaming.

Bix Box #7: Puerto Rico (A+)

Author: Andreas Seyfarth
Publisher: Rio Grande Games (2002)
Alea Difficulty Scale: 7 (which is the top to date for an Alea game)
Other Articles: The Tao of Board Gaming I (12/09), Alea Treasure #3: Puerto Rico (10/12)
My Plays: 13 (11 when I wrote this)

A role-selection and resource-management game where you’re trying to create resources in order to sell them (to generate gold) and ship them (to generate victory points). You in turn use the gold to build new buildings, which helps with all your other tasks.

Strengths: Polished Economics & Roles

First up, Puerto Rico has a fun foundation. It’s an economic engine game where you’re building up the parts to a machine and trying to fit them together. Building always gives players a sense of accomplishment, and that’s clearly the case here.

The creation of an economic engine pretty much defines the strategy of Puerto Rico, but you have great opportunities for individual tactics too, where taking a certain role at a certain time can really advantage you and hurt your opponents. That’s the best of both worlds, where you feel like you have a big game plan, yet every turn is quite important.

All of this combines to create an interesting differentiation of players. The strategy of my engine building helps to define my tactics in a way uniquely different from any other player.

Finally, I think that even today you can’t write an article about Puerto Rico without lauding its use of roles. They’ve certainly gotten very common through the sub-method of worker placement, but Puerto Rico’s use of them still seems clean, elegant, and intelligent.

Weaknesses: Programmed Gaming

With all that said, the main reason that I almost never play Puerto Rico is because it can be too programmed. Playing Puerto Rico with a know-it-all who “understands” all the best moves at every point is pretty much the definition of not-fun, and the almost-zero-luck of Puerto Rico encourages that type of gamer.

Nonetheless, Puerto Rico is deserving of its rating as one of the top Eurogames.

General Comparisons

A Beautiful Design. It’s easy to think of Puerto Rico as being overhyped nowadays, because it’s been so highly lauded for so long. It’s also pretty easy to forget about Puerto Rico, because so much other highly hyped stuff has come out since; in fact, years often go by when I don’t play it. But, in playing it again, I am newly astonishing how at elegant the game is.

You compare it to something like Agricola (which I think I enjoy playing more), and it’s obvious that Agricola has many warts and lumps, as opposed to Puerto Rico’s really smooth veneer, where everything seems to just blend together seamlessly.

This one talks about the games that I played in October, November, and December that I’d never played before.

The Great

Timeline (2011). I was surprised to discover that I’d only started playing this in fall because it’s already become a regular part of my game nights. The concept is simple: each player is dealt a handful of discoveries, events, or inventions. One at a time you have to place these in a timeline in their correct order. So it’s a trivia game, which I usually hate, but somehow this one really works. Maybe because the guessing seems simple enough. You just have to figure out where a card goes relative to the others. The result is surprisingly thoughtful and fun and … dare I say it … educational. Its really quick gameplay helps a lot too.

Gauntlet of Fools (2012). Donald X’s newest is an auction game with a couple of twists. You’re bidding for a unique combination of a fantasy character and a weapon, and essentially you’re betting that they can defeat more monsters than anyone else. The first twist is that you’re bidding with disabilities for your characters, which is a tremendous idea that totally opens up the idea of what you can bid with. The second twist is that when the auctioning is done, you then have to play your character through a dungeon until he dies from the horrible threats. The game is simple and simplistic, but it’s great for an extra 15 minutes at the beginning or end of the night.

Star Trek: Catan (2012). This game is The Settlers of Catan, but with some role selection cards (more or less) that you can grab for extra powers. It’s great because:

(1) The original Settlers is at least a good game; (2) The Star Trek ships and outposts are a lot of fun; and (3) The role selection cards allow for some great strategic play (though I didn’t like their production which is icon free).

If you’re a Star Trek fan and a Settlers fan, this should be a must-buy. If you’re a Star Trek fan or a Settlers fan, you’ll want to at least take a look.

The Good

Catan Histories: Merchants of Europe (2012). This game is pretty much Settlers of America: Trails to Rail with some very minor changes. It’s built around pretty clever incremental gameplay, where you have to build merchant posts to free up stuff you have to deliver, then you have to deliver that stuff to merchant posts built by other players.

There’s a lot of interactivity, some fun resource management, and overall it’s a good use of the Catan system — though as with every historical, I think it’s too long. I liked this better than Rails because of the theming, and I’m sure some players would say the exact opposite.

Cthulhu Gloom (2011). Gloom is pretty much a take-that card game whose biggest selling point is that it uses transparent cards which are stacked atop each other, allowing different parts of different cards to show through. Its second biggest selling point is that you’re trying to do awful things to your own characters, then kill them. The original was funny but not quite polished enough. Cthulhu Gloom is at least as funny as the original, has terrific Cthulhu theming, and has a second-generation ruleset. I liked it quite a bit, though it can be a bit long, and there’s not a whole lot of strategy here. But sometimes theming can carry a game and this one’s theming is strong enough to do so. 

Zombicide (2012). I’ll have to admit that I was leary of this game when it was offered for play because it was a kickstarter from a relatively inexperienced board game publisher. I was pleasantly surprised.

This zombie killing (and zombie escaping) co-op has meaningful ways to work together, lots of excitement, and a constant feeling that you’re about to be massacred. We failed on our final run to the exit — which in my mind is optimal for the first play of a new co-op game. It ran a little long for me (which seems to be my theme for this article), but was full of good fun and good color.

String Railway (2009). I’ll have to say that this game’s main selling point is its fun components: colored strings that you stretch from location to location in order to form your railroad tracks. The game beyond that is pretty simplistic but plays quickly and easily. It’s not quite a filler, but it’s short enough to be a casual and light game.

Fleet (2012). A card-based resource-management game where you’re picking up permits for different types of fish then catching them, and also picking up super powers along the way from the fish you catch. I’m sure that’s not quite how the rules describe the theme, but then the theme is woefully flimsy. The actual gameplay is pretty nice strategy, though a little thinkier than I like and not colorful enough. Still it’s something I’d play again.

The OK

Urbania (2012). This game of set collection and building creation is a pretty enjoyable game that’s largely held back by its components. Muddled colors and muddled designs are the worst problems, because they make the game actively harder to play. A combined track for two different things didn’t help either.

The components problems are a pity because the mechanics of this game are sound — between trying to collect resources to build buildings and trying to get things built in a way that benefits your secret goals.

The Doctor Who Card Game (2012). A Martin Wallace game, and I wanted to like it, but in the end I just thought it was OK. Basically, you play cards to try and control various locations. The gameplay is alright. If anything my biggest problem is with the theming, and in particular the paucity of Doctors (1) and companions (maybe 4?). It thus felt like I was playing the same cards again and again and again; unlike Cthulhu Gloom where the theming really made the game, this time it dragged it down (and I’m if anything a bigger fan of Doctor Who than Cthulhu).

Murder of Crows (2012). A take-that card game (which seems to have been a theme for me this last season). Basically, you try and spell M-U-R-D-E-R, and each letter has a special power. This is a pretty pure exhaustion take-that game that you play until no one can stop the winner. It’s got beautiful art and it’s light enough that I almost didn’t mind playing it. It’d probably be great fun for non-euro players.

The Bleh

Building an Elder God (2012). I really wanted to love this game because of the Cthulhu theme, but sadly there wasn’t anything to love. Basically, you’re trying to build your god to a certain size, and the game is 100% about if you draw the right cards and 100% take-that until everyone is exhausted. I didn’t feel like there was any space left for strategy.

I opted not to write a separate nickel and dime article this year because of (1) sickness -and- because (2) I didn’t earn many nickels or dimes. Here’s a short listing of my nickel and dime play: Unpublished Prototype (17); Kingdom Builder (10); Ascension (7); and Timeline (6). Of those, all four are high on my list for games likely to also be nickels or dimes next year.

My also-ran list was: Cthulhu Fluxx (4); Galaxy Trucker (4); Mundus Novus (4); 7 Wonders (3); Castles of Burgundy (3); Dominion (3); Eminent Domain (3); Gauntlet of Fools (3); Gold! (3); Havoc: The Hundred Years War (3); Locke & Key: The Game (3); Lords of Waterdeep (3); Penny Arcade: The Game (3); and Village (3).

That got me thinking of another project. A few years ago I started putting together a history of the gaming industry generally, in the same style. I only wrote a few sections, and it only came to 5000 words or so, but it’s a good start for a project I may come back to some day. To commemorate my recent work on Designers & Dragons, I thought I’d share one section with you.

The Birth of the Modern Board Game: 1820-1869

What we’d recognize as modern board games first came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution. In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries technological changes resulted in new industrial techniques and in turn social changes as well. This allowed for the creation of a new genre of games in at least three manners.

First and most obviously there were new printing techniques that made it easier and cheaper to mass produce a printed game. Second the change from agrarian to industrial work slowly began to result in the concepts of the middle class and of leisure time. Third as peoples’ work moved out of the house and into factories, homes became a distinct location for both socialization and education. Games would take advantage of all of these changes.

The first modern board games in the United States date to the 1820s. A Traveller’s Tour Through the United States (1822) was an early example, published by a New York bookseller. The best-known early game is doubtless The Mansion of Happiness (1843). It was based on an English design, as were most early American releases. Milton Bradley’s The Checkered Game of Life (1861) was another early offering.

Early board games expressed a strong Puritanical ethos. Both Mansion and Life were simple race games where players tried to get to the end of a track first. Virtue spaces (such as bravery in Life or honesty in Mansion) could move you forward, while vice spaces (such as idleness, which appears in both games) could move you back. Snakes and Ladders (England, 1892) is another example of a 19^th century game based on morality.

Puritanical ideals were also reflected in early game components. Cards and dice were both frowned upon, as they had been throughout the Middle Ages. They were seen as tools of the devil, and so good Christians often refused to use them. As a result many of the 19^th century racing games used “teetotums”. These were tops that could be spun, and would then fall down on a side which displayed a number (or possibly a letter). They were dice in all but shape.

Racetrack games such as Mansion, Life, and Snakes comprised the vast majority of early gaming releases. No matter what the theming — be it the history of Napolean’s life, an actual steeple-chase, or a race around the world — players would inevitably try and move along a track, usually by rolling dice and hoping to roll better than their opponents.

Other popular games were social-conversation games, were players would ask questions and offer answers off of cards, trivia games (which were particularly popular as educational tools), and strangely enough given the Puritanical and Victorian morals, fortune-telling games. However, most of these games were actually designed with cards; if there was a board, it probably showed a racetrack.

Early games were all printed in black and white, then colored in by hand due to the limitations of printing presses at the time. In the 1830s a new printing technique appeared called chromolithography, which allowed the first true color printing. It was being applied to board games by the 1870s, and it produced full-color boxes and boards that often reflect the art nouveau style and are entirely beautiful works of art.

As chromolithography use increased in the U.S. board game industry, it would slowly begin to swell, eventually outpacing its English roots and becoming a true American industry. At the same time a smaller gaming niche was developing, wargaming. It too would eventually become dominated by the United States.

I suspect my sources for this section were The Games We Played by Margaret K. Hofer and maybe The Game Makers by Philip E. Orbanes. (I just have one bibliography for the whole article.) This section needs an accompanying section on Victorian parlor games, which might cause some updates to this one as well, but that’s a puzzle for another day. I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this article, as interest is what I’ll need to get this going some day. In the meantime, I invite you to read my other sorta-related article, on Hasbro eating the gaming industry. —SA, 1/7/13.

Sure, it’s hard to fashion pure gift-giving into a mechanic, because in that pure form it’s theoretically altruistic — offered with no expectation of recompense. But, that isn’t how gift-giving really works, especially not when it gets wound up into societal holidays like Christmas, where gift-giving becomes an expectation.

When you add expectations and recompense in to the idea of gift-giving, then you have something more like a game mechanic. I’m thus going to look at the few games I know of that have used these various elements …

Oasis (Überplay, 2004)
Alan Moon & Aaron Weisblum

In Oasis (or Desert Oasis if you prefer), each player lays out a gift (called an “offering” in the rules). This gift is made up of cards that are drawn blindly, but they come from the player’s own offering deck, which is a limited supply, and the player gets to decide whether the offering should contain 1, 2, or 3 cards.

Then, each player chooses one of the offerings in “priority” order. As the players do so, they each give their priority token to the player whose offering they took — which will give those players priority in the next round.

I think that Oasis could easily have become a trading game. However, by using the intermediary of a priority token it delays the gratification of giving a good gift, thus tweaking the mechanic enough — in my mind at least — to make it true gift giving. It’s a cool mechanic and (IMO) a woefully under-appreciated game.

I think that the core mechanic also gives one of the best methods for incorporating gift giving into a game. You require everyone to do it, then you offer a recompense that’s something more than just an in-kind present. Here that recompense is effectively the opportunity to choose a good present in a future round.

Which is as close as I’ve ever seen to a mechanical representation of in-kind gift giving.

Catan Scenarios: Frenemies of Catan (Mayfair, 2012)
Benjamin Teuber

In this brand-new Catan scenario a player is rewarded with a random favor token when he either gives away a resource card to a player (and they accept it) or else when he moves the robber harmlessly. Those favor markers can then be turned in for pretty good stuff like free cards or even victory points.

This generally follows the same design pattern used in Oasis: you give something away, then you get something back that may be of use. I like the fact that the giving is so seemingly altruistic, and I also like the fact that the favor token you get is random, suggesting that you don’t always get what you want when you give something away.

Frenemies also has a sort of interesting third way to gain favor markers: you connect up your network of roads and towns with someone else. Now that doesn’t sound like a favor, but what happens next does: you get 3 favor markers and they get 1. Doing something that helps you a lot and someone else a little is certainly a staple of board games, but Frenemies make it sufficiently blatant that it pushes the idea further toward gift giving.

White Elephant Gift Exchange (Common, 18??)

My first two gift-giving game mechanics were both focused on encouraging people to give gifts (and offering something in return). The White Elephant Gift Exchange — which is a common “parlor game” rather than a published game design — instead spices up the gift-taking mechanic.

The core mechanic is simple. Players open gifts in a selected order. On your turn you can either open a new gift or take a gift from someone else. There are often additional rules or variants, usually limiting how many times a player can have a gift taken from them or else how many times a specific gift can be taken.

I’ve actually seen this mechanism used in an actual game — the Big Brother reality TV show. Usually players are given gifts as they are knocked out of a competition. Some gifts are bad and some gifts are good. The last person in the competition therefore gets the last choice of gift (and presumably the best stuff). However I think there’s the opportunity for interesting tactics even before that point. For example, if you take a great gift early in the competition, you’re increasing your chance of getting handed off something random (which could be bad), whereas if you keep a mediocre gift you’re more likely to stick with that. It’s solid risk-reward play.

Final Notes

I think there’s ample room for more games that use gift-giving mechanics. Oasis and Frenemies both show one side of the problem: how to encourage gift-giving and how to give something in return that doesn’t make it feel solely like a trade. They also both push on the idea that what you get in return is sort of random, rather than something that’s purely predictable. The White Elephant Gift Exchanges meanwhile show some interesting mechanic nuances that you can add on after the initial gift-giving.

And that’s my seasonal two-cents on gift giving in games. Happy Holidays & I’ll see you in the New Year!