Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve talked about the kids and gaming – but that’s because I’ve been so busy working on games that I haven’t been able to spend as much time playing games with the kids (or other adults for that matter!) However, the kids’ birthdays have recently come and gone, and the immediate aftermath of the celebrations are a closetful of new boardgames for the kids.  And, with this new stack of games comes the daily requests for me to teach them new boardgames.  The funny thing is – they don’t want to learn the games that they were given… They want to learn the games off MY shelf!  So, as I am starting to prepare for a spring filled with teaching games to the kids – I’m reviewing my guidelines that I try to follow when teaching the kids any new game.

1) Only teach the kids a game that they want to learn

I’m a proud parent, and like most parents, I think that my kids are smart.  They can understand concepts in games that I would never guess that they could grasp.  While they often don’t see advanced strategies or subtle points in games, their young minds are able to pick up the basic idea of most games quickly.  That being said, if the kids aren’t interested in playing or learning a game, not a single idea will enter their minds.  I’d have a better chance of teaching our new guinea pigs a game than a disinterested child.  Therefore, I will only try to teach a game to my kids once they ask about it or ask to learn in.  I’ll admit that I’m guilty of conspicuously leaving games in places where the kids will “run into” them and hopefully become entranced by the cover art so that they will ask me about it – but this has to be the first step.

So, much to my surprise, the kids have been asking all week to learn Dominion.  Which I was thrilled to hear because I’d been waiting for about a year for the kids to ask again.  They had tried to learn last summer, but the game proved to be a bit too much for them at that time.  I’ve been wanting to try to teach them again, but I had tried to wait them out until they asked.  And, this week – they finally asked!  They have also recently asked me to teach them Clue F/X, FITS, and Risk Black Ops.  (They weren’t thrilled with my answer that Risk Black Ops was not to be opened!)

2) Start with the basics

Well, many of the games that we play can be complicated.  I find that the methods that I would normally use to teach other gamers simply don’t work with a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old.  Most importantly, I find that I can’t just rattle off the entire ruleset at once and have the kids follow me along.  Usually, I have to break the game down into different parts and go over each part until they get it.  This might lead to a few aborted turns as we learn portions of the game, but I’ve found that this is the most successful way to go about it.

So, for Dominion, I’m going to start first by giving them a pre-built deck.  I’ll show them the 10 cards they always start with and go ahead a throw in a few easy Action cards (say Smithy, Village and Woodcutter).  We’ll just start playing the game with me explaining how to draw a hand, play an Action card if it comes up, and then redrawing a hand at the end.  This scenario will also help me illustrate how to buy a card, how much those cards cost, etc.  It will also let the kids figure out how and when they need to shuffle their discard piles.  As we start, I’m not going to worry about telling them about victory point cards or game end conditions.  I just want the kids to get a basic grasp for what goes on in each turn.

3) It’s OK not to teach them everything at once!

Once we’re good with that, I’ll likely move on to explaining the different action cards.  Again, I’ll likely take a stepwise approach to this – probably starting with 5 or 6 cards from the starting 10.  At this point, we’ll try playing a few rounds again just so the kids can get used to the different cards.  In addition to Smithy, Village, and Woodcutter, I might add in Workshop, Militia and/or Moat.  Once the kids are comfortable with these cards, I think it would be a good time to finally introduce the victory point cards and the game end conditions.

4) Try to shorten the initial games to keep their interest high

At this point, I think that we’d be ready to play a game.  Well, not a full game – while I’d like to keep the endgame conditions the same (Provinces gone or any 3 piles) – I have had a lot of success with non-gamers in cutting down the size of the piles.  Maybe 5 cards in each of the Action card and Victory card stacks.  Yes, this totally cuts down the length of the game, but that’s what I’m trying to do here!  I’m fairly certain that the kids’ decks will be chock full of actions and/or Estates, so this will be a way to make the game run a bit shorter while still giving them the flavor of the tension of the game ending with three piles gone.  Until the kids get a little better idea with what they want to do with their decks, I’d likely keep to the smaller card piles to keep the length of the game in a range where they won’t lose interest. 

5) Finally move onto the full game as they master the smaller parts

After a few of these games, it’ll be time to move onto the full set of 10 Action piles, and then give the kids a few games to learn the new cards… And hopefully, before I know it, we’ll be able to play the Starting 10 in a full game!  After that, we can swap out two or three cards at a time so that they can learn the rest of the cards in small doses. 

So we’ll see how this works, as I’ll be trying it out with the kids over the next few weeks – of course, trying to find time amongst the multiple soccer practices, playing with the new pets, and all the other things that keep us busy each day!  We’re around step 3 right now, and things are going as I have foreseen… Bwahaha!

Scrabble Puzzle Answer –

No new puzzle this week, it’s been too busy at work to come up with something suitable for here… But, here is the answer to the Scrabble challenge from a few weeks back…

My high score of 267 was created with the following words

STORMED – 33
OXEN – 38
QATS – 52
BEATINGS – 72
LIPOID – 36
FOAMING - 36

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

One item that’s been on my to-do list forever is to transform Gone Cardboard into a sortable list along the lines of this Xbox 360 release calendar on IGN.com. I’ve tried a couple of things, but have been unable to discover the right set-up for the Expression Engine blogging software behind Boardgame News. If anyone wants to email me to offer programming advice, I’d be grateful, especially since I want to expand GC coverage beyond North America in the near future.

French website Jeux sur un Plateau recorded a number of game descriptions during its trip to the Nuremberg game fair in February 2010, including one of the forthcoming alea title Glen More, designed by Matthias Cramer. Here’s a short game description from a Jan. 2010 item on BGN: “Players are members of Scottish clans who want to increase their territorial holdings, whether to enlarge pastures for their sheep and cattle (to be sold later at market), to cultivate corn (and perhaps later transform that into whiskey), or to develop ideal locations along lakes or near castles. Success comes down to making the right decision at the right time.” For more details, watch the video below.

Glen More should be in German shops by the end of April 2010, according to alea’s Stefan Brück, with the German rules available for download in mid-April.  (2-5 players, ages 10+, 45-70 minutes, €22) Thanks to JSP editor Olivier Arneodo for permission to repost this video on BGN!

Jeux sur un Plateau : Glen More (Alea)
Uploaded by jsp-mag.

The International Abstract Games Organization (IAGO) has set up a leaderboard that pulls game result information from igGameCenter.com, Super Duper Games and Games.WTanaka.com, then compares players across similar games. Dozens of games are included on the leaderboard, from traditional games like Fanorona and Hex to modern designs such as Cannon, Amazons and Pulling Strings.

The leaderboard is still in the testing phase at this point, says IAGO’s Rich Hutnik. “All of this is automated from a data feed from the partner sites, so there’s no manual entry of data. Players who register at the IAGO site will be tracked this way… We will be looking to add the Arimaa site next, then we hope to get more sites on later.”

Néstor Romeral Andrés has released a new title of his own design from nestorgames: Way of the Dragon. The game marries the die-rolling mechanism from Yahtzee – roll five dice up to three times, rerolling dice as you desire – with a Chinese theme and a racing platform. After a player finishes rolling dice, she chooses one or more dice that show the same element and moves a playing piece of her color forward in that element’s column a number of spaces equal to the number of dice on display. Alternatively, if each die shows a different element, she moves a piece forward in each of the five columns. Each space can be occupied by only one piece, and while you must move if you can, in some cases you might be out of luck.

The final five spaces in each column are numbered 1-5, and once a piece lands on a number it stays there for the rest of the game – unless a player rolls four or five dragons, in which case she can swap two pieces in the same column. When one player places all five pieces in the scoring zones, the game ends and players tally their score by summing the numbers on which their pieces stand.

Complete rules for Way of the Dragon, along with special player powers for an advanced game, are available on the game’s page on the nestorgames’ website. (2-5 players, 30 minutes, €27)

From the BBC comes this story about the purchase of the 1941 game Adler Luftverteidigungs Spiel in an auction for £600:

“I’ve been looking for this particular game for over 40 years,” said the [House on the Hill Toy Museum] owner Alan Goldsmith....

“When [the Allies] bombed Dresden and burnt the factory down all the games went with it, other than the ones that were sold before them, so they’re extremely rare.”

He added: “You have 88m guns and one person is defending the Fatherland, the other person is the English bomber pilot.

Sounds like a good description of Friedemann de Pedro’s Duel in the Dark. Interesting to see game settings repeat like this over the decades…

From a Ryan Bradley article in The Atlantic:

1. Pick up the abalone. This may require prying the abalone from its hold, and using a stainless steel putty knife is recommended.

But let’s back up for a minute, because maybe you’re wondering, What is an abalone? Or, Isn’t it a board game? And maybe, Why should I care about the sex of a board game you crazyperson? To answer: It is both a sea snail and a board game. But you can’t sauté the board game in butter or sell it for $50 a pound in Japan. People don’t form international smuggling rings or get themselves eaten by great white sharks over the board game.

Au contraire, Mr. Bradley – everyone knows that the easiest way to slide those marbles down your windpipe is to coat them liberally with a beurre blanc. As for becoming a shark meal out of desire for a board game, well, maybe someone else can speak to that…

Lookout Games has announced a new title for release in June 2010 – although the game might slip a month later or arrive in May at the Spielwahnsinn ("Game Madness") event in Herne, Germany. The new game is Die Minen von Zavandor from designer Alexander Pfister with graphics by Lookout regular Klemens Franz. (2-4 players, ages 10+, 45-90 minutes, ~€35)

Die Minen von Zavandor is set in Lookout’s fantasy world of Zavandor, but otherwise has no direct connection to Lookout’s The Scepter of Zavandor. In this game, which has a bidding mechanism at its heart, players are dwarves who try to equip their mines with buildings and people that will prove useful during the game, in addition to earning them points at game’s end. In his blog, Pfister describes (in German) Minen as being less complicated than Scepter. He also says that the bidding mechanism doesn’t feel like a classic auction: “The minimum purchase price of the buildings / artifacts is 3 gems – but with a starting income of 2-3 gems, the question is usually not how much you should offer, but whether you should even make an offer.” Bidding is handled simultaneously, he says, so the game has little waiting time and plays smoothly.

I already wrote about Klaus Teuber’s Settlers of America: Trails to Rails in my 2010 NY Toy Fair coverage, but now publisher Mayfair Games has released the cover image and clarified a few other details, so here’s the publisher’s description:

The 19th Century has arrived and Americans are heading west. Wagon trains are forming up and heading out to settle new lands and build new cities. These new cities will need railroad lines to bring in new people and necessary goods. Some head west for the adventure, some to start a new life, still others to find work.

Look west to make your fortune. As the population grows, resources will dwindle and the smart money seeks new sources and new markets. Finance your settlers as they head west to build the cities of tomorrow. Link these cities with rails of steel and operate your railroad to supply the townsfolk with goods. To the west lie lands to settle and fortunes to be made!

Settlers of America: Trails to Rails utilizes the familiar Catan hex-tile grid to present a map of the United States. Players collect and trade resources, in order to purchase, migrate and build settlements, forge railroads and acquire locomotives. Railroads are used to distribute goods to the interconnected cities. As westward locations are settled, old sources of resources deplete. The addition of gold adds to the depth of play and increases options for the players.

As I noted previously, Settlers of America will be available only in English from Mayfair Games with a release date of June 2010. No other edition is planned at this time. (2-4 players, ages 10+, 60-90 minutes, $55)

At least that’s what Alliance Game Distributors is announcing in a recent game solicitation to retailers. I’ve poked game designer Tom Lehmann about providing another designer diary about the game’s background, as he has done so ably for the previous Race for the Galaxy titles. Fingers crossed…

I’ve played a trio of new games in the past couple of months that have the unusual quality of featuring two games within the same game: Mystery Express, Cornucopia and Martinique. How did these mash-ups turn out? Anyone recall a David Cronenberg flick from the mid-1980s?

Let’s start by looking at the new Days of Wonder title from Antoine Bauza and Serge Laget. I’ve played an advance review copy of Mystery Express three times now, and feedback from players has been all over the board. (I’ll post a complete review in the next couple of weeks, prior to the game’s general release.) The most damning criticism has come from two people who have refused to play the game again due to one aspect of its design. What’s more, a third player skipped game night this past week because I had expressed a desire to play Mystery Express again that session.

What’s all the fuss about? Most of Mystery Express revolves around the familiar “find the missing card(s)” mechanism of Clue, a deduction game staple that also shows up in Alibi, Black Vienna, Mystery of the Abbey and Martinique (described below). In Mystery Express, each deck of cards – Suspect, Motive, Location, Modus Operandi – consists of pairs of cards, with one card being removed from each deck at random. The remaining cards are shuffled together and dealt to the players, with a few cards being introduced into the game in later rounds. By peeking at cards, passing them and stealing them, your challenge is to find the singleton card in each deck among all the pairs.

The second part of the game requires players to identify when the murder took place, and this aspect of the game runs parallel to the first but on a separate track. A deck of 24 time cards shows eight different times – 4:00, 4:30, 4:45, etc. – with each time appearing thrice on numberless clocks. At the start of the game, one card is tucked under the board and players must identify which card appears in the deck only twice. Unlike all the other cards, the time cards are revealed three times during the game in three different ways:

1. The active player flips over the cards one by one into a single stack at whatever pace she wants.

2. The cards are dealt into as many stacks as there are players, with each player receiving a stack; the active player calls “pass” whenever she wants to change hands, with each player looking at each hand only once.

3. As in the first reveal the active player flips over the cards one by one, but into three adjacent stacks.

Thus, the analytical, highly interactive deductive aspect of Mystery Express is paired with a solitaire-ish pattern recognition challenge that frequently devolves into a race to look at the cards as quickly as possible. In one game, for example, a player managed to deduce the proper time in the first pass through the deck. (He said that he paid attention to a few particular times and happened to get lucky with his choices.) Turns out that he was the active player for the second pass through the deck, so he picked up his stack, skimmed the cards for five seconds, called “pass,” skimmed the next batch, called “pass” within seconds, and so on just to verify his findings – which resulted in no one else finding out anything and all of us cursing him.

When I read the rules, I knew that certain people in my play group would hate this aspect of the game, and their facial contortions upon hearing the rules described proved me right. Playing the game did nothing to change their opinion either. Hence, the boycotts. One player said that he enjoyed the rest of the game a lot, but his hatred of the time mechanism was so intense that he was still complaining about it days later!

Thankfully, if you or your fellow players despise the time mechanism in Mystery Express as much as some folks do in my group, you can play without that aspect of the game and lose little in terms of the overall challenge.

I already discussed the “two games in one” aspect of Cornucopia, designed by Carlo A. Rossi and Lorenzo Tarabini and published by FRED/Gryphon Games, in this January 2010 column. To recap, on your turn you choose how many cards to turn over from a deck of fruit and vegetable cards, then you turn over those cards one by one to see whether you can fill one of five baskets with five items following various rules. Penalties or rewards follow as appropriate. When it’s not your turn, you can bet on whether the active player will succeed or fail in filling the basket.

This second action has no relation to the first other than that you’ll earn or lose a few points through betting and that might affect your chance of winning the game. The real importance of the second action is to make you care about what other people do on their turn. Without those bets, you’d simply be staring at up to four people flipping up to a half-dozen cards each. Booooring!

While the betting system somewhat works to keep you involved on each turn, players tend to shuffle a ton of chips to and from the bank with little effective gain. Busy, busy, busy. What’s worse, as I wrote in my earlier column,

...the bidding feels superfluous in the two-player game. With two players, you’re alternating card draws so the bidding on success/failure feels like an interruption of the main action. At best, between active turns you win or lose a point, which is a distraction from the bidding cards and rewards for filling baskets. With five players, though, the bidding can net you four points between your “real” turns, so it becomes as important (if not as interesting) as the main game.

I published a preview of Martinique in Sept. 2009 that summarizes the game play with quotes from designer Emanuele Ornella. To summarize: Players move over an island composed of treasure tiles and map tiles with their four pirates. Whenever a pirate leaves a tile, it moves 1-3 spaces depending on the number shown on the tile it leaves, then it claims that tile. Map tiles show the letters A-H and numbers 1-8, while treasure tiles show different symbols; whenever a player collects treasure tiles that match one of the three small treasures available, the player must discard those tiles and claim the small treasure.

Once all eight pirates have finished moving – often because they have no tiles on which to move – players take turns placing them on the location where they think the Lost Treasure is located. This location is identified by the one letter and one number tile removed at the start of the game. Find the Lost Treasure with one of your pirates, and you win; if no one wins this way, whoever claims the largest value in small treasures wins.

So you have a deduction game married with a set collection game – but in four playings someone has always won by finding the Lost Treasure, which makes all the time spent finding other treasures seem meaningless. Each player usually nabs a roughly equal portion of the 14 available map tiles, and leaping over an opponent’s pirate lets you peek at one of the opponent’s map tiles, an event that has happened a couple of times each game.

Thus, both players have a lot of information available, and once a player starts placing pirates on suspected buried treasure, you reveal even more information to the opponent. In my most recent game, for example, I placed one pirate, then the opponent placed three of hers. (Pirates guess the treasure in the order they left the board.) By chance, I placed my pirate in a number column that she didn’t have, so she plonked her pirates within that same column on various letter tiles, hitting the winning location along the way.

You can bluff by placing a pirate on a location that you know isn’t valid, but with only four pirates to place, bluffing seems like a risky option. Arguably, however, I should have done just that in my last game since I had a larger share of the small treasures. Better to have misled my opponent by choosing a number column in my possession than possibly give her real information about where the Lost Treasure was located. A lesson for the future, I suppose.

Martinique works fine aside from some graphics issues, and all of the information other than the map tiles is open, so players can ponder a lot over the “if I move there, then you can move there” type of plays found in such games. With better play, perhaps the twin aspects of the game would merge for me into a more acceptable whole, but for now I’m still seeing the stiff hairs emerging from Seth Brundle’s back and recoiling…

I’ve been waiting to play Conflict of Heroes for a long time. The idea of a relatively lightweight yet demanding World War 2 tactical game really got me excited and the only reason I didn’t dive in right away was because the historical background of the first game didn’t interest me much. I almost bought Storms of Steel but eventually passed on that because it looked like what I really wanted, a Normandy campaign iteration of the system, was coming up next. So until that time I was reliant on a friend getting a copy to try the game. Someone eventually came up trumps with Awakening the Bear and I sat down to get my fill of squad level Operation Barbarossa action.

Whilst listening to the rules explanation, something starting nagging me slightly at the back of my brain, but it didn’t dare come forward until we were properly stuck in to the carnage. The game reminded me a lot of something, and not just Eastern Front history. It reminded me very closely of one of the many dubious prototype games I’ve had the misfortune to attempt to design during my years of gaming. There really were a lot of similarities in the basic system: both CoH and my own design were tactical WW2 games which revolved around the use of individual action point tallies for units and a generic pool of action points that could be used to react to actions by the opposing forces and which went down as units (and their command structures) were destroyed. My game was simpler, focused more on generic unit types and had a different combat system built around the principle of fire concentration, but clearly I’d had a lot of the same basic ideas as Uwe.

So when I went home that night, the thrill of my hard-earned victory was tinged with a vague annoyance that if I’d worked at what I had a bit harder I might have been able to build something just as lauded as the CoH series and I might have been a rather more self-satisfied and marginally richer human being. I awoke the next morning a rather humbler and marginally wiser human being instead.

During the night I’d been thinking about what made CoH different from my design, rather than what made it similar. And what struck me was that that list of differences included virtually everything that made CoH an innovative and entertaining game to play. My game didn’t have the clever red/blue system that makes armoured versus non-armoured combat in CoH such a breeze. It didn’t have the activate unit or pass element that adds such a deliciously tricky timing element to the game. It didn’t have the cards and the added interest and tactics which they provide. It didn’t have the historical research to back up the scenarios or the unit statistics in the game. It didn’t make a point of trying to streamline rules and play by shoehorning as much realism as possible into those unit statistics rather than the rulebook. In short, it was nothing, and the crowning indignity was the realisation that virtually every historical gamer that has ever played Tikal or something similar must have had the basic idea of trying to use a Euro-esque AP system in a war game.

What I’d unwittingly taught myself was one way of telling the difference between a great game and an ordinary game without actually playing it: look at the basic idea the game is based on, ignore it, and look at what’s built on top to see what gives the game a distinctive edge. Imperial would be dull if you just look at the military rules and the stock market rules: what makes it a great game is the fact that each rule set has subtle knock-on effects to the other. Twilight Struggle would be a rather lesser game if it just mimicked basic CDG principles without the innovation of triggering your opponents events. Titan would look a lot like any other dudes on a map game if not for the tactical/strategic split and the cunning way in which loosing creatures (usually) gains you Angels and a better Titan. 

This is important. It’s important because it seems to me that adding some sort of extra level of coolness on top of the basic game concept is exactly what the designers of any number of faceless, forgotten games have failed to do. It’s important because that extra level is the reason behind the failure of quite a lot of hotly-anticipated titles which didn’t manage to live up to the hype. Take Kingsburg for example. About a year ago it was the bees knees, with fans crawling all over it, endless discussion of relative merits and strategy and much excitement over an upcoming expansion. Now where is it? Largely forgotten. And when you look at it, the reason becomes perfectly clear: Kingsburg doesn’t actually do anything particularly interesting that another Euro-dice game doesn’t do better. It has nothing that Yspahan or even Stone Age don’t have except a fairly meaningless, bolted on “final battle” to give a vague illusion of co-operative gaming because that happened to be fashionable around the time it was released. Stone Age, even though I actually enjoy playing it less than I do Kingsburg, is clearly a deeper and more inventive game in the way it mixes dice-rolling with the tediously ever-popular worker placement trope. Yspahan, on the other hand, was one of the original wave of games that bought a welcome return for dice to the Euro genre, and even though it’s substantially older than Kingsburg now has a subtantially better rating over at BGG.

This in itself illustrates an important point. This is about building blocks of design. Twilight Struggle is a great game partly because it does something that no other CDG currently does. But of course you can follow the design history of CDGs back into the ages and for each of the most memorable games you’ll see it did something different from it’s predecessor. We the People started the whole design trend, Hannibal began the now standard approach of mixing events and operations on the same card, in Successors it became multi-player and in Paths of Glory the basic concept got a brand-new rules makeover. And so far those would pretty much be most people’s pick for top CDGs - I think it’s no coincidence that the less succesful games in the series are those which have taken the same basic rules and concepts used by an exisiting game and done nothing but change the history and the setting. So Yspahan follows the trend because it stood out by being new and fresh when it was released and it still sticks in the mind - but Kingsburg did pretty much the same thing differently and has been largely forgotten.

The point of all this is that I think it illustrates nicely an argument I’ve always made in the past, which is that genuine innovation in game design is overrated. Board and card game design is inherently limited by what’s on offer to construct a game: paper, card, plastic, dice and the players’ imaginations. The idea of mixing electronic media into gaming as in something like Space Alert is all very well but one reason I’ve never played Space Alert is because I play a lot of games in the pub where I’m not sat next to a personal CD player, and as long as computers remain larger than mobile phones, and media remains bulky and of mixed types, this is going to be a problem. The best way to innovate something in game design is to build on what has gone before rather than trying to strike out boldly into the unknown: and the best way to build on what has gone before it seems is to take something that impresses you and see what it is that you can add, in particular, that makes it genuinely better and not just just different.

There’s no other great conclusion to draw here, I’m afraid, except that designers - especially amateur self-publishing designers - could do a lot worse than to try and look at their games from this angle and see whether or not what they’ve created has that extra angle, that extra thing that makes is special and if it hasn’t, keep working at it until that extra level is there. And for us poor game-buying public perhaps we could learn the same lesson so that when we’re buying blind we have an extra tool in our inventory to make sure we’re picking up games that are likely to be, and to stay, the cream of the crop instead of rapidly becoming yesterdays’ has-beens.

Lewis Pulsipher, designer of Brittania, floats the following argument on his blog:

Many people worldwide have talked about a maxim related to any kind of manufactured goods, or to projects, that runs like this: For production in general, “fast, cheap, good – you can have two out of three.” ...

In boardgames, the maxim is something like “short, simple to play, richly detailed. In boardgames, you can have two out of three,” but almost never three out of three.

Oddly, he then suggests that “[g]ames using cards are more likely to be able to achieve all three, I think, with Magic: the Gathering being an example of the many collectible (and sometimes non-collectible) card games that achieve all three.” While certain games of Magic would be simple to play – ones in which the preconstructed decks consist of few special abilities – I’d suggest that most games of Magic would not meet that standard. Cast “Warp World” in a multi-player game for a bunch of creatures with “comes into play” abilities and simple is out the window.

How would you formulate the “two out of three” maxim for games? And do you think it holds true?

By the Ragnar Brothers
March 7, 2010

There is something mysterious and awe-inspiring about canals, something that railways don’t quite match. Having thoroughly enjoyed researching and designing Canal Mania it was exciting to learn that Martin Wallace had started from the canal revolution in his game Brass. This game has been brought to table frequently in various Ragnar groups and is rightly a favorite. However, on first playing we felt a trick had been missed. Instead of taking the canal counters off, why not flip them to the railway side? This simple question was the starting point in the designing of Workshop of the World.

Of course, the very next step was to scale the game to match and eventually exceed that of Canal Mania. All (or nearly all) of those lovely canals had to be incorporated. From the start this felt like it could be a “gateway game,” but with the size of map and the mission to follow canals with railways, the mechanics of play would have to be simple in order to achieve a ninety-minute playing time.

At about the same time, the Esher Gaming Group happened to play Gypsy King by Corné van Moorsel. This is a game in two halves. The second half is a little more powered up, but otherwise there’s not much that happens in the first half that affects the second. Not much that is, except for the driving knowledge that some players are clearly doing better than others – good, old-fashioned “tall poppy” gaming. Amun-Re by Reiner Knizia is similar, but in this there are rather more ripples from the first half that wash into the second. In Workshop of the World we were determined on more.

Other things that we wanted were:

• Recognition that the canals of Britain were more expensive and slower to build than the railways and that the canal network was never so vast as that of the railways.
• Recognition of different types of Industry across Britain.

With this basic structure and these principles in mind, the designing was more like an exercise than any previous Ragnar Brothers game. Though the thematic elements are robust, Workshop of the World is one of our most abstracted games.

From the start a drafting of Town cards was used. No system could be found to drive this important choice except an auction. Auctioning each individual Town card may have “valued” cards more accurately, but would have been time-consuming and quickly tedious. Auctioning Turn Order was a neat, fun solution. [Editor’s note: For a summary of game play, read this game announcement from early March 2010. —WEM]

A persistent problem was in achieving smoothness of play. It became apparent that it was not good to work entirely with cash or entirely with a Revenue track. The combination of the two eventually solved the problem, but balancing them was imperative.

Much time was spent in manipulating numbers to make things work elegantly. This included:

• The number of Links that could be built per turn.
• The value of towns. Initially set at 1-2-3, an important development was changing to 2-3-4.
• Canal Links costing £3, railway Links costing £2. This always felt right, but was dropped and re-introduced on more than one occasion.
• How to raise extra cash from the Revenue track.

Initial playtesting was encouraging, with players more upbeat about this game than they had been on any other RB launch. Thanks are due to a number of friends who suggested the following ideas, either directly or by their comments and initiatives when playing:

• Enthusiasm for building a track from London to Scotland led to exploring “length of track” bonuses common to games such as Ticket to Ride by Alan Moon. The network system has an original feel and gives an important third way of collecting cash.
• Disappointment at not being able to build a Link from towns already fully-connected led to the use of the Set-aside cards. This does not always pay off, but “a gamble is a gamble.”
• Removing another player’s Industry caused disgruntlement when town values were at the 1-2-3 level. At the 2-3-4 level, removals are not as common and create tactical opportunities to hinder the progress of leading players.

Many months of game-testing passed before the Demand token system emerged. Previous to this, players were issued with Bonus cards that were declared at the ends of each half of the game. Not a bad idea, but the luck of the draw was too influential, particularly as the numbers of town types is, and always was, unequal (eight ports, four Crafts etc.) It may seem obvious now, but what the Demand tokens introduced was very new: all players have equal chance to benefit from the Demand values of Industries and all players have a chance to drive up those values.

For much of its development Workshop of the World was played on a map based on Canal Mania with sections of Scotland and Wales added. Only at a very late stage were the connections re-examined and finalised. For example a direct connection from London to Portsmouth was removed and a route created via Guildford, whilst the highly influential East Coast mainline was established by connecting Peterborough to Hull. As with most of the routes, these are approximations and it should be borne in mind that canals were not built on all the connections shown (particularly the double connections).

As with previous RB games the introduction of Steve Tolley’s graphics added a new energy to the design. In the case of Workshop of the World there was an unusual twist. The first copy of the map appeared with circular towns and bright yellow rectangles for connections. Play-testing showed that placing Links on the rectangles was far more satisfactory than on the wiggly lines used previously. Steve was surprised at our enthusiasm – he’d positioned the rectangles purely to space out the towns.

And finally, what happened to the flipping of canals to railways? Well, we tried it once, found it totally confusing and never looked back!

By Jeff Allers
March 7, 2010

German Word of the Month: Lebensabschnitt (phase of life)

Mention the “Middle Ages” while selecting themes for an upcoming game night, and it might give me pause these days. This is not at all due to the fact that it is a much over-used backstory for European board games. Rather, it’s because I had my 40th birthday a few months ago.

I’ve always been a staunch member of the “age is just a number” camp, claiming that the round numbers were no different than any other year, and in theory, this still makes sense to me. But cultural stigma has finally trumped logic this time around, and I’ve found myself in the midst of a mild midlife crisis (which in the German language is, conveniently, called a “midlife crisis").

The moment has spurred an above-average amount of self-reflection that, naturally, does not exclude the gaming hobby and my participation in it. In fact, it seems that the majority of the gamers I know are middle-aged, too, even in a country where strategy games are successfully mass-marketed to families. The teens and younger attendees to my game nights usually have parents who are much more serious about the hobby than they are, and I’m left to conclude that an obsession with boardgames may very well be a result of entering midlife. It’s sobering to think that a 40-year-old placing a large order with a local online boardgame retailer might generate more eye rolls from friends and spouses than buying a Harley Davidson.

Perhaps the obsession with board games is due to the nostalgia of a time before computer games – something only a 40+ year-old would remember. And there is nothing like new technology to make one feel old. In fact, I was almost ready to check myself into a nursing home a few weeks ago after I witnessed my three-year-old sons intently playing a game with their preschool buddy on his daddy’s iPhone.

Or maybe it can be attributed to the greater disposable income gained after being in the workforce for at least 15 years. Or it could come from the desire for greater social interaction away from work after having invested so much time and energy reaching that higher rung in the corporate ladder.

Perhaps it could even be the stereotypical quest for adventure. For some, baking in leather chaps and a horned helmet on an obnoxious motorbike doesn’t compare with building a medieval cathedral or guiding heroes on a mythical quest for wealth and glory. For that matter, why bust your buns on a dude ranch when you can have wild west shootouts in the comfort of your living room with a few cards and plastic dice?

Whatever the reasons – and I suspect it is a combination of factors – I am in good company, even among game designers. Many “household names,” I’ve discovered, were born within a year of my birthday, including Karsten Hartwig, Rüdiger Dorn, Stefan Feld, Uwe Rosenberg, Friedemann Friese and Reinhard Staupe. Most of the other designers I’ve met are also in midlife, and the most well-known and successful professional designers are at least a decade older. It sometimes makes me wonder whether the boardgame hobby will have the same problem as Germany’s pension system, with too many retirees and not enough working people to support them.

Thankfully, one can play games at any stage of life. In fact, the physical limitations I’ve experienced during the past several years have been one of the factors that have driven me to play more board games instead of focusing solely on competitive team sports. It has been discouraging, for example, to witness my strength and speed in basketball slowly wane, and to be forced into adjusting my style of play. When immersing myself in a good engine-building board game, however, the options usually expand during the course of a game. And while I will no longer be able to hone new skills in most sports, I will hopefully be capable of learning new games and strategies for decades to come. Thankfully, unlike the “over 40” sports leagues, most games do not have that kind of age segregation. Once you reach the “12 years and up” cut, you’re pretty much capable of playing anything with anyone.

And even if I do make it to an age when my mind begins to fade, I can still play games. I once had an interesting conversation about this with game designer and self-publisher Karsten Adlung. Many of his signature small card games, he told me, are targeted at children and sell well at schools. But they have also been successfully marketed to nursing homes and retirement centers, he added. It makes sense, of course, knowing that our lives reach full circle, from the dependency of childhood to the self-sufficiency of adulthood, then back to the dependency of old age. We feed and clothe and push our toddlers around in a stroller, and some day they will probably do the same for us.

As our minds again revert to that of a child’s, however, games may actually slow the deterioration of the brain synapses, as attested to by a friendly retired couple I recently met on vacation. They played Rummikub every day together in the hotel café “to keep our minds sharp,” they said. Then they proved their point by destroying me in a three-player game.

I hope to play games as long as they have, although I have noticed that my attitude about gaming has changed as I’ve “matured.” As with everything else at this age, I am much more aware of my limits and realize that I do not have the time to play as much as I used to. I have also had to prioritize more, as I still enjoy designing and playtesting prototypes the most, while hosting gaming groups comes in a close second. And I’ve become more selective in the games I purchase, realizing with experience that it is no longer necessary to acquire a game if I will not have the opportunity to play it repeatedly. Besides, there’s only so much space left in the apartment for games, and I’m sure there will be an increasing need to store other more important items as my wife and I get older – vitamins and arthritis medication, for example.

If Mr. Adlung and the friendly retired couple are on the right track, however, games may be one of the best ways to stay young.  So it’s time to put this so-called crisis to the side, stop the naval-gazing, and be proud of the milestone I’ve reached. And if anyone asks how old I’ve become, I’ll declare it boldly and without shame, loud and clear for all to hear:

“12 and up.”

By Michael Schacht
March 6, 2010

The Beginning

When I redesigned my website years ago, I incorporated an element of Valdora as the game was already “finished” at that time, several years before its actual release. The book in the background of most of the pages of my website was an exciting reference to the coming game, which just a few people recognized.

The development work on Valdora was actually completed back in 2006, and I started to offer the game as a prototype to publishers. I quickly found someone who was eager to release it, and the game was scheduled for the Essener Spieletage 2007.

After Zooloretto became Spiel des Jahres – Germany’s Game of the Year – in that same year with the same publisher, we decided to postpone the project. Too many other things now needed our attention and energy.

So Valdora was delayed, which led me to start work once again on a game that actually was already finished.

The Revision

Modifying a game is part of a designer’s basic responsibilities, and usually it doesn’t present a big problem. More tricky is finding an endpoint in the development. When is a game really finished? Is there anything that I can make better? Or more elegant? Perhaps there is still a nice idea for a special material to find. Or a good variant for pros. Or, or, or....

Frequently, it is quite easy for me to decide when something is finished – but as the saying goes, the better is the enemy of the good, and so Valdora eventually received several small modifications that finally justified the really big investment. That said, I’ve sworn never to go into that much detail again as I had some other time-consuming projects under development at the same time :-)

An early take on the gameboard

The Concept

The starting point for Valdora was to make a game of the complexity of a Puerto Rico as easy as possible, so that even families might have a chance to get in the game.

Another precondition for me was that the possible winning strategies should be implemented as organically and inconspicuously as possible. Personally I prefer, as I’ve often mentioned before, not to be forced by the game to play well. I like game systems in which you can discover things by yourself, game systems with simple methods and without helpful constructions.

Also very important for me was the simplicity of the rule set. Here I continuously threw interesting elements out of the game. At different points, I replaced already working good mechanisms to have a more simple solution. It was a real challenge not to noticeably thin out the game.

So what was first: the mechanism or the story? In the beginning there was only a conceptional outline: I wanted to make a so-called “pick up and deliver” fantasy game with quest-like exercises.

The very first mechanism was then the simple movement idea, with provisions already included as a special ability. The original board concept got discarded. The same with the possibility to recruit persons with special abilities. In those early stages, the players could buy castles as part of the game end conditions. Also, the horses had a different and more important role.

The books were also part of the first ideas to appear. How did they come about? When thinking about unique card drawing mechanisms, the idea was – as is often the case – simply there. It already worked well, and I didn’t need to change it a lot. Later, I developed models of the books with different materials; the wooden version was my favorite, and luckily got taken by Abacus.

The Name

The prototype was initially named “Quest,” but as the game lost more and more of its fantasy aspects during its development I renamed it “Legend.” This name was very close to being the final one, but together with the publisher we searched for something different: a sensible and good-sounding made-up word.

The final name of the game Valdora comes from the English word “valley,” the corresponding French word “vallée” and the French word for gold, “or” – all together meaning something like “valley of gold.” This fits very well because gold has an important role in the game.

I also appreciate the connection to Die goldene Stadt – The Golden City – which was developed around the same time. You can even think of playing both games in the same world.

In the prototype that I am working on at the moment, gold also plays a role – perhaps this will be part three in a little series. As I’ve said, I like these small connections.

The Graphics

After a long break, my fellow student Franz Vohwinkel finally illustrated one of my games once again. And this came after he had made himself scarce on the boardgame scene – still with a lot of projects, mind you! – in order to concentrate mainly on American trading cards. I appreciate his work very much, so it wasn’t a surprise to me that Valdora looks great!

A preproduction copy in use at Spiel 08

As one might guess, uprooting yourself from home for months on end to wrangle a pair of very young boys does not lead to lots of time boardgaming.  However, while my wife is on sabbatical, we have been taking in some sights.  Most recently we headed over to Normandy to take a look at some of the history there.  We had a very tight schedule, so didn’t have time for many diversions, so it was with quite a bit of longing we passed by the expressway turn-off for the port of Le Havre.

Why?

I have no idea.  While I’m sure it is a nice town, my understanding is that it is primarily an active port town with far less tourism than one finds in the many other historical towns in the area.  Pretty much the sole reason I was drawn to visit the place was because it shares its name with a popular board game.  I wonder if anyone else has gone out of their way to visit a location simply because it was referenced in a board game somewhere?

I haven’t even played Le Havre – a friend has recently acquired a copy so I expect to get a game in this summer when I return – and I’m still drawn to the city solely due to its connection with one of my favorite hobbies.  While those who scorn the theme of a game and judge it solely on its mechanics may never feel the same way, there’s something in me that relishes in being able to connect an actual location to a board game I play.  I even brought my copy of San Juan along when I went down to visit Puerto Rico with my old college buddies.  (I didn’t bring the big Puerto Rico itself as few of them are boardgamers, but I figured I could get them at least interested in the lighter-weight game.) I feel the same call for the south of France to visit Carcassonne.  In this case I get the double-whammy of a boardgame connection and a very huge, old castle/fortification in which to tool around.  Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll make it that far south on this trip and will have to leave that on my wish list for now.

One thing that will change the way I play some games is my visit to the beaches of Normandy.  We had an excellent personal guide, Stuart Robertson (look him up over at Normandy Battle Tours), for an entire day.  It was something else to see the actual locations and hear much more personal stories about the events in and around the D-Day invasion (and the follow-up fighting)… While I do enjoy the strategy of wargames, I rarely pay much attention to the “backstory” of most scenarios.  After getting the chance to see some locations and terrain, I know I will be paying much more attention to scenarios I play in the future.

I had read a couple years ago that Memoir ’44 was being sold in some of the museums around Normandy, so when my family briefly visited the largest museum there in Caen, I figured I had to take a look.  After a bit of searching, I found it on the very bottom shelf on one of the two or three aisles in the store… right next to a copy of Caen Monopoly.  Go figure…

Two games in the War museum in Caen

Given the explosion of board and card games being converted to iPhone apps, it’s no surprise to see the game apps covered in places that might not normally write about designer games. On Tuaw.com, Sebastian Blanco reviews two recent game-to-app conversions – Viva il Re and Money! – and from his reviews, he’s clearly played the games in real-life, too. The latter app receives strong praise from Blanco:

[O]f the iPhone card game apps we’ve played so far, Money is our hands down favorite… When playing with friends, Money takes around 10-15 minutes. On the iPhone, it’s a five-minute affair, which is grand. The shuffling and math are all handled for you, so you just have to concentrate on figuring out which bids to make and which currencies to focus on.

BGN columnist Shannon Appelcline designed the iPhone Money app, and he wrote about the conversion process in a January 2010 column. Appelcline is currently working on an iPhone version of Reiner Knizia’s High Society.

As for Viva il Re, Blanco feels that the digital version loses something in the translation:

[W]hen you go through all these steps [moving characters and voting on them] with friends around a table, it can get pretty intense, especially once a few rounds of voting have passed. When playing the iPhone app version, though, everything moves a little too fast and the “opponents” (bots) don’t have any sort of personality to make you feel like you’re playing a bluffing game. Instead, it becomes a simple game of moving your characters up and voting now and again. Sure, this sounds like pretty much the same thing, but if just feels very different and not in a good way.

To follow up on BGN’s March 3 description of the Ragnar Brothers new game Workshop of the World, I asked Ragnar’s Gary Dicken how the game would be distributed following its debut at the UK Games Expo in June 2010.

Says Dicken, “We are selling direct to customers until after Essen [in October 2010] and only then, if there are copies left, will we sell to retailers.” As I previously noted, only 1,000 copies of Workshop of the World will be produced, compared to 2,000 copies of more recent Ragnar titles, which consequently means that production costs per copy will be higher, making direct sales to gamers a more attractive option for the publisher as opposed to distribution. “It’s hard to finance our new games if the cash flow is fast outwards but slow coming back!”

“This method also keeps the price at a reasonable level for customers,” adds Dicken. “A typical cost including postage for delivery by airmail to the USA is £44 and to Europe it is £36. I would encourage people who want a copy to reserve one via payment in advance (for delivery in late May) – simply email me and I will give them the total including postage.”

Look for design notes from the Ragnars about Workshop of the World this coming Sunday, March 7 on Boardgame News.

Update, March 6: Gary Dicken has clarified his original statement to me, noting that “Ragnar Brothers won’t be at Essen this year, due to ‘normal’ work commitments, so we will have to post all games out to people.” Spiel attendees take note!