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Since I've been experimenting on this platform, I've realized I could use a more robust bloggin software.

As such, the blog is now here... http://controlledareagaming.com

Grand Themes vs Small Themes

If you take a look at themes in games, you can easily spot patterns that influence what themes you are likely to see with particular game design patterns. Large area control games lend themselves to warfare or direct conflict style games. Games with resource management or worker placement often have economic stories attached to them. In addition, the theme's time frame and scale usually match the game design.

Some games break this mold and pair grand themes with small gameplay. Very few games take a small theme or a very localized theme and attach to it a very complex game.

Grand Themes + Small Game

There are quite a few games that utilize epic themes for very short or simple games. They abstract much of the gameplay and just allow the grand narrative to take focus. Here's a quick list:

• Cold War: CIA vs KGB (also Star Wars: Empire vs Rebellion)
• 7 Wonders (also 7 Wonders: Duel)
• Splendor
• Machi Koro
• Pandemic: The Cure
• Age of War

Tiny Themes + Epic Game

Sometimes, other games which are complex or lengthy, do not need to have a grand theme. These are much more rare, but they work because they delve deep into details of the subject matter and find all the little nuances of the conflict or problem that make for an epic game. Here's another, VERY SHORT, list:

• Rococo
• Scotland Yard or Letters from Whitechapel

After scouring BoardGameGeek for other games that take a long time (120+ min), it's easy to tell that most games have a base level of abstraction that make certain themes require certain game sizes. It's much easier to abstract down (reduce complexity to simplicity) than to draw out complexity from more basic actions.

Hopefully this knowledge arms you with more decision-making power when searching for your next game. Decide early on what "level" of game your favorite theme requires or choose a theme and pick those games that help deliver the most interesting game play, no matter their size.

Good luck!

Where theme comes from

If you read enough on BoardGameGeek, from the blogs to the forums to the videos, you'll eventually come across a discussion of theme. Why does theme matter? Where does it come from?

Humans are narrative beings. We experience time linearly and inherent in our biology is an understanding of history; what happened before. Some of those stories may educate us, some may cause emotion, and some may strike fear or anger. What drives us most are the stories in which some challenge is overcome or some great task is completed. The nature of that challenge sets the stage for the type of story.

If the challenge is an individual or group against an external force or being, you have the makings for a cooperative or heroic quest. When two or more individuals experience the same events from opposing viewpoints or agendas, two opposing stories occur. Now we have the foundation for the conflict necessary in a game.

Games tell the story of conflict. They must. If there is no conflict, there is no tension, and you ultimately have a bad game.

Theme is the story of that conflict. It holds the mechanisms of the game together. If a game's story or theme does not match the game mechanisms, that can still make for an interesting game, as long as the tension and energy of the conflict is maintained.

Abstract games, on the other hand, don't care where the story comes from or what the nature of the player's agency is all about. All that matters for abstract games is the structure of the conflict. The units in the game simply mark what could be, as in a hypothetical situation.

Because of this, I strongly feel that games with more pasted on themes or themes which really don't match mechanisms are nothing more than abstract games. For me, this isn't fun. I dislike abstract games because I don't connect with a character to play or my objective. This may stem from my roleplaying roots, but without story, I feel lost as an individual.

So if you're playing a game and don't feel engaged, ask yourself, is it the theme? Or is it the theme's connection to the game rules? Discovering this will help you identify in the future what games to seek out and which to pass over.

Gaming Canon: Stone Age

Everyone has a game that they've played more than all their other games. Perhaps it's for the pure enjoyment of the game mechanisms or perhaps it's for the theme and integration of style. One of the games I've been able to play profusely and come to see all the strategy is Stone Age. I feel it represents a moment in gaming history where you can see many popular mechanisms at work in a well designed package. It's a game everyone should play at least twice.

Box Cover

The elegance of Stone Age first comes across with the simplicity of the design. It has resources, workers, and dice for the players. Everything else is tracked on the main board with places for tiles and cards. The art for the board also has a panoramic aspect that gives a reassurance of straightforward play for the players.

Stone Age board in play

That's where the simplicity ends. When players start to understand the choices in the game, they'll see a strong medium-weight design with lots of meat. This is a game that with even five plays, you always feel like you could do better or try a different strategy.

There is also a good deal of replayability and randomness. This has some criticizing  the game for the inability to effect a good move due to poor dice rolls. One way to hurdle this aspect of the game is to gather resources (tools) that help you mitigate the randomness. That one design choice helps new gamers understand the negative impact of random elements in a game and how to turn it into a challenge that can be overcome. In addition, multiple strategies and tactical moves for gaining in-game vs end-game victory points exist. These layers of elements keep me coming back to it.

To truly understand Stone Age, I recommend starting with understanding the points scoring concepts, and then working backwards into how to deliver those points through game moves. Some decisions will involve giving up one path to gain points in another. When to make those choices is key due to the random nature of the cards that come out during the game.

Stone Age also implements a now tired mechanism of feeding workers. During the game, it's not enough to just get extra workers. Doing so incurs the risk of requiring more resources to avoid losing other resources or points. Balancing the extra effort with the risk of losing ground aids the overall tension during play. This has been implemented in many other games, but I haven't found another that represents this design aspect as perfectly as Stone Age.

I recommend Stone Age highly for everyone to learn. It's a game that stays on my shelf continuously and I feel it's always required playing for gamers I have shared a table with.

Thanks to BGG users for the images included in this post.

Should you follow a designer or a publisher?

In the last year, I've had a change of opinion about how to make game choices and what aspects of game publishing are more valuable to me. Specifically, I've decided to follow publishers slightly more than designers. Rather than try to convince you that you should do the same, I'll give you some feedback about why this was the case.

Designers

If you're following a designer, you have to decide early on if the designers you like are consistently making certain types of games, or if the designer likes to spread their wings wide and produce many different types of games.

Bruno Cathala is a designer of high repute but he's also a designer that spreads wide. He has worked on abstract games, light weight games, heavier games, usually all with some strong implementation of theme.

Vital Lacerda, on the other hand, tends to design games with a similar aesthetic. He stays primarily in the heavy game realm with multiple paths to victory and tactical options buffeted by bonus combinations with each player turn.

Making a decision about a designer speaks to what you're looking to get out of gaming. Do you enjoy a variety of games with a similar external focus or do you enjoy similar play across multiple games?

Publishers

You might also want to consider following a publisher. With publishers, you don't usually have the same extremes as above. Publishers like repeat business and so they usually stay within one gaming niche similar to designers like Vital Lacerda. However, what also comes along with this is the use of the same artists and graphic designers over and over. This is great if you enjoy the art style and rulebook layout from one game to the next. A great place to see this is the What's Your Game games Nippon, Madeira, ZhanGuo, Signorie, and Vinhos.

Following a publisher over a designer for me is an expectation of quality. You know what to expect from publishers because they make deals with game manufacturers usually for the long term. In addition, the value that publishers provide usually means that games enhance their quality though the publishing process without diminishing the core concept of the game.

The main frustration that brought me to follow publishers was the vastly different quality from one game to the next for the same designer. Often it feels like it's a game from a different designer because the publisher introduces decisions about style and production.

Ryan Laukat and Jamey Stegmaier

Sometimes a designer is also a publisher (if you're a designer PLEASE don't name your publishing company after yourself). The two designer/publishers I've seen pull this off are Jamey Stegmaier and Ryan Laukat. It is no small feat to be successful at both roles.

The main reason that both of these guys succeed is the personal nature of their games and campaigns. Fans really feel involved for better or worse.

If you're looking for that next great game and have tired of looking through a designer's game repertoire, consider browsing through a publisher's games. For even more depth of understanding, take two similar games from the same designer but different publishers and compare the implementation differences.

What is a review worth?

There's a bit of a new effect happening with Kickstarter campaigns. Given the nature of how Kickstarter works, backers of upcoming games either look at Kickstarter as simply a pre-order system or view themselves as investors in a game, indeed even taking a role as a monetary producer of the game.

Along with that, backers start to feel a bit of ownership and involvement with the game. This is great from a marketing perspective and helps designers make connections with gamers. However, once a game gets released, backers and early adopters are now taking on the mantle of defenders of a game against negative reviews. Nowhere is this more present than with the recently release board game Scythe.

Scythe and the Dangerous Landscape of Reviewing

If you take a look at the current crop of reviews of Scythe on BoardGameGeek, you'll find either glowing reviews or others picking on it for some very specific design choices. Those criticisms are garnering vociferous feedback from many people who feel a relationship with the game, whether because they are backers or early purchasers who love the concept, gameplay, and art.

This is a dangerous trend. I don't say this lightly, but this is a trend that is occurring more and more in popular culture as individuals align themselves with the products they love. Whether it's a review of a movie, book, TV show, or game, consumers take the criticism as a criticism of their emotional choices. This invites argument and extreme disagreement. With consumers like this, scrutinizing reviews for their product does nothing but end with hurt feelings.

The real value of a review is not for the person who already owns the product. The purpose of a review is to allow consumers to make informed decisions. The purpose is not to tear down a cultural icon or lay judgement on others enjoyment. The purpose of a review is to see beyond the hype or marketing around what a product MIGHT be and to reveal what the product ACTUALLY IS.

That role of reviewers means that they MUST be transparent about their evaluation process and state up front any biases they might have. If you're reading a game review, how many times has the reviewer played? How many players have they played with? What external information may have affected the review? And even after all that, it's just a person's opinion.

Stop and take that for what it's worth. The value of reviews in the era of the unshielded mass of Internet published reviews makes them much more meaningless. The informed, objective critic is lumped in with a flood of ratings and comments from the masses.

So the next time you read a negative review of a game you love, don't take it personally. If the reviewer has made some factual errors, feel free to point those out, but don't begrudge them their opinion. Let others decide for themselves if the reviewer is worth listening to.

Gaming Canon: Dungeons & Dragons

I recently watched a series of videos on YouTube from a professor's class on game design. One of the core curriculum of the course was for students to play a game several times, then write a paper dissecting the game's core elements. I found this quite fascinating.

For anyone new to gaming, is interested in designing games, or who just wants to feel like they have a broad experience of game design paradigms and mechanisms, this article series is for you.

Merriam Webster currently defines a "canon" as "a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works". The games selected for this series represent the pinnacle or are widely accepted paradigms of game design. They're not always the highest rated games, but they drive an audience time and again.

The first game in this article series is Dungeons & Dragons (currently 5th Edition, aka D&D).

No understanding of the gaming landscape is complete without an understanding of what D&D is, how it works, and why people regard it as fun. Roleplaying games dominate a section of the table-top gaming hobby and D&D still essentially functions as it did thirty years ago. If you can't find a playgroup to try it out, check out the videos below.

Gaining Perspective: Would you like your game heavy or meaty?

The more you play modern board games, you might start to hear people discussing a game's weight. According to BoardGameGeek, a game's weight refers to a wide variety of factors, most revolving around a game's inherent complexity in terms of instruction to make a play. There's another aspect to weight which I feel is not described by this explanation. I'm gonna call this the game's "meat" factor.

A game can be said to be "meaty" if the range of options for actions to take are meaningful AND if those actions drive deep strategy. Usually "heavy" games can also be described as meaty, but there are some games which are not so heavy, but are meaty nonetheless. There are also some rare games where a game could have a significant number of rules, but underneath the covers, there isn't much meat.

Usually games which are not heavy but are very meaty come across as wonderful games to most people. Chess in this case is a great example. It doesn't take very much to learn Chess and you can get through the basics of play to strategy pretty quickly. However, once you're in the advanced Chess strategy zone, you see how many more avenues and options are available.

Even though I commented on Dominion negatively in my last article, Dominion is another example of a game that doesn't take much to learn, but a wealth of options exist in each play that makes it a new classic which is only enhanced by every expansion. Even though I don't enjoy the game because of the mechanisms, I can understand the joy that fans of Dominion derive. This is a meaty game.

On the flip side, if a game is heavy, but not meaty, it's usually very much criticized. However, one game I have found that is rather popular but falls into this category is Tokaido. Once you've played a couple of times, you understand the overall strategy and can very easily tell which spaces you should go for each turn. Since your opponents pawns are usually not moving very far ahead of you, your options become more limited. However, since many of the spaces function very differently in terms of scoring or money, it takes a while with the first play to explain everything and usually a verbal reminder of a space's scoring mechanism is necessary.

I find games like Tokaido to be tedious. It's still in my collection for game nights with new gamers so that they can see what elegance in visual game design is like (it does add to the cool factor), but really for a filling game session, I'll play anything else.

Hopefully this has given you a couple of avenues to explore when learning about a new game to make better decisions as to what types of games you'll enjoy and where to put your precious dollars. Find those games with meat and you're bound to be satisfied.

The Art of Gaining Perspective

One of the most difficult things to do when purchasing games is how to know if a game is any good. You can watch game review videos (try the Dice Tower), read reviews online, and pay attention to the general zeitgeist and what others are thinking. What you should really know about purchasing games is that there is no magic wand that can tell whether or not a game is for you unless you have the benefit of perspective. For me, that has only come with many years of playing games, mostly good games, but more importantly, all games that represent the pinnacle of that genre or mechanism in game design.

If you asked me "I hear a lot about Carcassonne. Would I like it?" The only answer I can give is "Have you played a tile laying game before?" There are some qualities in tile laying games that all games of that genre share. When you have played one, you gain a certain amount of experience and perspective to know what another game with the same mechanism will be like.

Where this breaks down, unfortunately, is that there are dozens upon dozens of mechanisms and combinations thereof. A recent game that cropped up on my radar is Tyrants of the Underdark. On the surface, this sounds like my kind of game. It's an area control game that uses a deck building system for taking actions. I love area control, but once I saw the game in action, I saw how far the deck building component was used.

Deck building is a mechanism that does not appeal to me greatly. Of the deck building games that I have played (Dominion, Trains, Ascension, Lord of the Rings, Legendary, Thunderstone), the mechanism itself doesn't conjure any enjoyment in me because it gives the illusion of control. A deck building game doesn't allow you much choice in your decision when playing cards besides just how you have selected cards for your deck in combination with other cards. Your hope is that you form certain combinations at certain times to make grand moves. The important word in that sentence is hope. You are always at the mercy of the shuffle.

When deck building is used as an action mechanism, the area control freedom breaks down. I am currently working on a game design (I might write more about this in the future) that has a certain combination of these things and my fear is that I fall into this same trap. Area control requires calculated moves at certain timings. If this isn't allowed by the action mechanism, the ability to maintain that control gets lost. This is just one small example of how a combination of mechanisms can result in a frustrating unenjoyable game. However, that doesn't mean others who enjoy the deck building mechanism more won't find the fun with Tyrants of the Underdark.

One of the goals of this blog is to give gamers tools by which to judge games and understand why mechanisms work in games and why they don't. Gaining the ability to use this perspective arms you with a much greater ability to judge if games will be right for you and what you will like or dislike about them.

Welcome to the blog!

Why start this blog?

In short, I found that most blogs on the web focus on reviews, previews, and experiential anecdotes from gaming. While this blog will focus on that to a degree, this blog will delve a little bit more to the underside and analysis with regards to the why of games, their market aspect, and trends in gaming.

I think all gamers should be able to reach a point in their gaming lives when they are comfortable that the market of games does not drive them, but rather that they are able to take knowledge gained from market analysis, a breakdown of design decisions, and understanding of common themes in gaming marketing to understand their game purchases.

A bit about me...

At the time of this writing, I'm a father of an 8-year-old boy who loves Minecraft and, sometimes, enjoys board gaming with dad and mom. He enjoys set collection games with heavy theme and a layer of adventure. Mom, like me, enjoys heavier Euro games that focus on either management or optimization. For me, games with area control and player interaction are key, while for her optimization and analyzing difficult decisions bring her joy.

My gaming experience begins with 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons and the board game Dungeon!. From there my love for games went to the Milton Bradley Gamemaster series including Ikusa (called Shogun at the time), Axis & Allies, and Fortress America. When college came around I got caught up in Magic: The Gathering for a time. I returned to D&D with 3rd edition and then gradually moved into more board gaming beginning with Descent: Journeys in the Dark. In the past few years, my tastes have moved away from thematic, combat heavy games to more Euro management style games. My favorite games remain Euro-Ameritrash hybrids which meld interesting themes with Euro mechanics and some luck.

I work as a manager a mobile development services company and really enjoy working with others to deliver software and improve the skills of the people who work for me.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy the ride.