Jason Geeks Out, The Final Installment

I may be jumping the gun, but given that we only have 24 entries left, including this one, I suspect it will be the last of the series. So it's fitting then that the end brings us back around to the beginning. Board games.

I've been researching board game mechanics and jotting down notes for a few concepts I have percolating. The list of game mechanics types is pretty long, which I guess isn't that surprising given the number of games available today. In case you're interested, here's the exhaustive list, courtesy of boardgamegeek.com.

Acting
Action Point Allowance System
Area Control / Area Influence
Area Enclosure
Area Movement
Area-Impulse
Auction/Bidding
Betting/Wagering
Campaign/Battle Card Driven
Card Drafting
Chit-Pull System
Co-operative Play
Commodity Speculation
Crayon Rail System
Dice Rolling
Hand Management
Hex-and-Counter
Line Drawing
Memory
Modular Board
Paper-and-Pencil
Partnerships
Pattern Building
Pattern Recognition
Pick-up and Deliver
Point to Point Movement
Rock-Paper-Scissors
Role Playing
Roll and Move
Route/Network Building
Secret Unit Deployment
Set Collection
Simulation
Simultaneous Action Selection
Singing
Stock Holding
Storytelling
Tile Placement
Trading
Trick-taking
Variable Phase Order
Variable Player Powers
Voting
Worker Placement

Now if you're a regular reader of this blog I suspect you read at most the top ten entries in this list and then jumped to the bottom. I don't blame you. It was a boring list, and it was really only tenuously connected to the topic of this entry.

In my research I came across what could be the Holy Grail of board game sites. BrettspielWelt (http://www.brettspielwelt.de), a German site (which exists in a number of languages) that allows people from around the world to play each other online in major commercial board games (major board games for board game geeks, like Carcassone, Power Grid, and The Settlers of Catan...you won't find Monopoly, Clue, or Battleship here.*) And it's free. I downloaded the client and started looking around, though I doubt I'll have the time to play anytime soon.

For me, it's great. We have friends and family that like board games, but we've never actually pulled together a game night. So I have all these games sitting on a shelf and never play them. Kate and I occasionally play the few that work with two players, but there are so many (not that many, really) that I've never played once. I may now finally get the chance.

The excitement builds, and the geek in me threatens to explode out of my chest.


*Not that there's anything wrong with those games. I like them a lot as well.

Designing a Board Game

It's an odd hobby, I know, but it's one I can't seem to shake. I really, REALLY want to gestate and finish a fun, playable, salable game. I've got a few ideas, one of which I wrote about in a previous entry (it involved Zombies.) But I've yet to finish one completely. Most of them are still in concept stage, in various states of not anywhere near finished. A few days ago I had loose idea for a strategy game and a much more concrete concept for the board it would be played on. I designed the board in Photoshop, broke it into four pieces, printed those as large as possible on four sheets of paper and the taped them together into a near full size game board.

At which point I realized that the intended game was crap.

But that's the challenge. Broad concepting is easy. Narrowing that down to compelling, playable mechanics is entirely different.

I don't know what the attraction is. I guess, for me, the game of designing a game, and the mental gymnastics that go with it is nearly as much fun as the games themselves. Plus I think I just want to prove to myself that I can do it.

No luck so far, but I'm unfazed.

Jason Geeks Out, Part 3

I've always had a thing for simulation games. Any game that takes a real world process, replicates it, and hands the controls over to you. And while there are some great simulation board games, like my favorite Republic of Rome, I'm mainly drawn to the computer variety. With sim games, it's all about the authenticity. The more closely you can model whatever system you're replicating, the more fun the game is, and with board games there's always a level of abstraction that pulls you out of the experience.

Wow, Jason. Your cold, technical analysis of sim games makes them sound like such a hoot, tell me more!

Oh, you have no idea. Actually, I don't either. Sometimes I wonder what's so enticing about this genre of games. They often, but not always, model relatively obscure experiences. SimTower was a favorite of mine years ago. It put you in charge of constructing a 100 floor skyscraper. As you built each new floor you had to decide how to distribute the space between office, retail, infrastructure and other categories. You had to design the elevator and escalator layouts to efficiently move people around the building, as well as take care of mundane details like trash collection. The goal was to finish all 100 floors, be profitable, and keep your tower dwellers happy. I don't think I ever got past the 35th floor.

Another game I played a decade or so ago was SimAnt. An ant colony simulation. No, not a digital version of the narrow, glass enclosed toy you might have had as a kid (though equally as pointless probably.) This was a faithful recreation of the day-to-day life of a colony as it attempts to spread itself across some hapless human's yard. Through resource management, queen movement, and ant specialization you slowly establish new hives. Once you've amassed a large enough colony and manage to infest hapless human's house, you win. I know. It sounds more like an episode of "Nature" than a game. But it was a lot of fun. I guess if sim games are your thing.

There are sims for almost everything you can think of. Some of my other favorites included Caesar II, a Roman city building sim, SimEarth, an planetary evolution sim, SimCity, the mother of all sim games, which takes city building and management as far as it can go, and of course, The Sims.

The Sims is the strangest of all the sim games, in my mind, for two reasons. One, because you play sim games to temporarily escape real life and The Sims simulates...real life! And two, because it was wildly popular, even among people that generally don't fall into the sim game contingent. If you haven't seen it, imagine this. A game that let's you create families, build them houses, buy them stuff, find them jobs and friends, and generally help them live their lives. They pay bills, have to call repairmen for plumbing leaks, and get fired if they consistently miss work. All the joys and troubles of life, manageably modeled in miniature.

It gets old after a while, but while the gloss is fresh, it is so addictive. The urge to play must be related to the urge that parents have, trying to make sure their kid's lives are better than their own. You get to live vicariously through any number of simulated people, letting them do all the things you can't, or won't. Or you can just set things up for them, and watch as at all falls apart.

The next logical step from The Sims is SimGamer. A sim game that models the life of a geeky sim gamer as he or she attempts to beat the latest sim experience, wasting hours of their lives in the process. Can't wait.

Game Night

If you remember from my January 10th post, "Jason Geeks Out, Part 1: An Odyssey of Unrequited Love in Cardboard and Plastic", I love board games, but lament the fact that I can't find other people to play them with.

Well...(Survivors', "The Search is Over" swells and a montage of slow-motion smiles and laughter from last night's game night begins) I think I've finally found a good group of people. And Kate's totally into it, too, which makes it perfect.

Social games like Taboo and Apples to Apples are such a great way to grease the wheels of meeting new people. You can be as competitive as you like without having to keep score. If someone screws up a rule or takes an unfair advantage, who cares? Why stress about it. It's all about having fun, not winning.

It was a great time, one that you too can enjoy in the comfort of your own homes. In this economy, staying home and socializing makes much more sense that going out. So grab some snacks (I originally had "snakes" inadvertently, which would make for a very different kind of evening) some friends and a few board games and have a good time on the cheap.

Here's a great site to discover and purchase new games:

http://www.funagain.com

Jason Geeks Out, Part 1

This is the first entry in what I suspect will become an ongoing theme.  To christen this new boat, let me say, emphatically, that I love board games!

It's an itch I don't scratch often enough, only because Kate and I can't find other people with the same level of enthusiasm, and playing with just the two of us gets a little boring sometimes.  At one point I almost joined a board gaming group in this area, but couldn't quite bring myself to pull the trigger.  Enjoying board games is one thing...seeking out a group of people who get together on a regular basis for the express purpose of playing board games, and likely carry their favorite, limited-edition releases of old, out-of-print German language games in a hand-stitched leather satchel emblazoned with the family crest of one of the many warring Klingon factions...that's another.  This is "Jason Geeks Out", not "Jason's Geek Explodes Violently in All Directions, Wounding Several Bystanders", after all.

Who knows.  Maybe one day I'll check out the group.  After all, I also almost joined a barbershop quartet choir, so I don't think my leather satchel is that far off.