Electronic Board Gaming

As I mentioned last week, my role at work has changed slightly over the last couple of years, moving towards Project Management and away from Software Engineering. As part of that I've been making more trips for work, often with my boss, Ian. Ian just so happens to be a Games Night attendee, so when we travel, I take the iPad and its collection of board game apps.

I used to be a very keen computer gamer as a kid, mostly RPGs and RTSs with a little first-person action thrown in too. As the games became more realistic, I started getting worse and worse motion sickness, so I gave up gaming. Similarly, my hobby design efforts moved from tiny bits of computer role playing games to fully fledged board games and Reiver Games was born.

As I became more and more interested (some would say obsessed!) in board games, computer games completely fell by the wayside and I stopped playing them altogether. Board games gave you a greater mental challenge in a shorter timeframe, without the frustrating dexterity element of having to push the buttons in exactly the right order at the right time.

I was a late adopter of smart phones, but we've had an iPad for a number of years and the draw of Carcassonne on the iPad (and later Windows Phone) sucked me back in. Being able to play good board games on my own when I had time to kill and no opponent was a fun way to fill the time, without the joylessness of soloing a game (which somehow feels lonely in a way that playing against a computer opponent does not).

The last two years I've been to a big conference in North America (Vancouver in 2012 and Minneapolis in 2013), and I've been with colleagues who come to my Games Night, so I've taken the iPad and we've whiled away the airports, connections and transatlantic flights playing games. I love board games (obviously!), but there's a time and a place for physical games and, for the vast majority of them, being crammed into cattle class on a transatlantic flight isn't it. But the iPad lets you play decent, complex, strategic games with almost no space requirements and as an added bonus you get a lot of the bookkeeping taken care for you and there's no setup or packing away time.

The Wife would tell you otherwise, but I'm actually a fairly conservative board game purchaser. I don't buy many games, and those I do I'll get rid of if I don't like them or stop playing them. I rarely buy a game without playing it a few times first (Firefly the Board Game and X-Wing Minis are a couple of recent exceptions to that rule). Strangely, the same is true of iPad board game apps, despite the much lower price point. Until recently, almost all the apps I bought were games I owned the physical version of, and I've only ever bought one game I'd not played before (Army of Frogs, and that was because I am big fan of Hive which doesn't have a native iPad version). Since the start of the year I've done two trips to Manchester for work (3 hours on the train each way) and next week I'm off to Tuebingen in Germany - pretty much 8 hours of travelling each way - again with my boss Ian.

We usually play Ra a lot, plus Hey! That's My Fish! and more recently Lords of Waterdeep and Puerto Rico. For the German trip I've also invested in Catan (I've previously owned a physical copy), Pandemic (I own a physical copy), Small World (I've played it a few times, but don't own it) and Forbidden Island (played quite a lot, but don't own). It would appear that I'm loosening up a bit.

With all this choice, the two games I play the most solo are Carcassonne (when I've got a few spare minutes) and Eclipse (which I own) when I'm on a journey and I've burnt out my travel companions!

While I'm very happy to play board games on the iPad pass-and-play with friends, I never play online games - either real-time or turn based. There's something about board games that I think is lost in translation if you're not all interacting in the same physical space.

Do you play electronic versions of board games? Which are your favourites?

Narrative in Games

I've had a good week of gaming this week, trying to fill the hole left in my life by the absent wife and daughter. Last weekend I made it to Newcastle Gamers for their all day session on Saturday (it was my first visit in months!) and then Dave came round on Sunday night for X-Wing minis. Monday and Thursday were Games Nights, Saturday was Newcastle Gamers again and Sunday we played Twilight Imperium :-) On top of all that, Tuesday I played Codename: Vacuum at lunchtime with Dave and then in the evening it was Newcastle Playtest.

What struck me about the beginning of the week (and Twilight Imperium!) was the stand out games had great narratives. During play you felt like you were telling a story. On Saturday I'd played A Study in Emerald, Snowdonia and Battlestar Galactica among others. Those three stood out for the clearly defined story we were telling. Sunday's X-Wing minis was a blast and Dave loved it so much that he was still singing its praises at work on Monday to anyone who'd listen. We'd played three games: the introductory game, then a 50 and finally 100 point battle. In each game there was ebb and flow, critical moments when everything hung in the balance - the crap dice roll where the battered, limping Tie Fighter manages to weave between the lasers just long enough to take out the Y-Wing, the epic dice roll where the tricked out B-Wing loses its shields and takes some damage suddenly changing the balance of power dramatically. It was great: there was a story unfolding before our very eyes, and we had (some!) control over it. After Twilight Imperium we spent a good half hour (after a ten hour game!) talking about the highs and lows of the game: massive fleets mutually annihilating each other, the cheeky action card that stops someone claiming an objective, etc.

Our group even creates narrative around games so simple that they don't even have a theme. There's Helga the imaginary milkmaid who turns up when someone sends a card round a few time in No Thanks! when only they can benefit from it, and Gunther the 70s porn star who turns up in a game of [6|11] Nimmt! when someone is about to get shafted!

I was reminded of Joe Gola's awesome Amun Re session report. The game was just a framework that the story hung off. Playing the game is a form of collective story telling.

Tuesday lunchtime Dave and I sat down for our first game of Vacuum in a good couple of months. I'd mothballed Vacuum during November while I concentrated on Zombology for NaGa DeMon and then I'd been too busy in December to do anything at all really. We were trying out a new trade mechanism inspired by Dan, my Newcastle Playtest co-host. Dave and I have played at least fifty games together, and this was the first major change to Trade. We were focussed on getting our heads round the new mechanism and a feel for whether or not it worked. At the end Dave had some concerns about the fact the you discarded the trade cards into an opponent's graveyard - he didn't like the lack of control over your deck that implied (he usually runs an extremely lean deck). Thematically it made sense to me - if you trade with someone they get a trade benefit and it fit my aim that trade be a non-combative form of interaction in the game where you do something that provides a trade benefit to both player and target. Plus it was much simpler to track than the previous mechanism.

So far so good. It was one in a long series of games of Vacuum Dave and I have played and felt much like any other. We explored the solar system, Dave captured lots of locations (a favourite tactic of his) but didn't whale on me (unusual!). I focussed on researching the tech tree and striving towards the Knowledge goal, which I brought in a few turns before the end of the game. Dave's deck was unusually chubby and he couldn't get the right combination of cards together to chose a Conquest victory, so I managed to bring in the second victory condition: Exploration which he beat me on, but not by enough to win. Like the fifty games before it there wasn't a particularly overarching story to the game - we were just cracking on with it. The only stand out moments came from the exploration mechanism.

For the first fifty odd plays, the exploration mechanism involved drawing a given number of cards from a deck and picking the best one to bring into play. It was pretty dull. In September or October last year Paul Thompson suggested spicing it up: "If I'm playing a steampunk game I expect to be finding resources or exploiting natives or being attacked". Off the back of that suggestion, I changed the exploration mechanic to bring both less randomness (you choose a location to explore) and more (each location has an event on it that could be good, bad or indifferent). In our lunchtime game I'd explored Geostationary Orbit early on and found a Silicate Consciousness, adding an advanced Artificial Intelligence card to my deck very early in the game. A few turns later Dave had discovered a Heat Ray which improved the strength of all his military units. The final stand out moment was Dave's two or three attempts to explore Pluto, all of which failed with contact lost to his probe. It was noteworthy: "Pluto is hard to explore!"

That evening I played Vacuum again at Newcastle Playtest with Dan and it was a completely different experience. In the second turn Dan sent a probe to Earth-Moon L1 and discovered a really unfriendly alien race. Each turn they attacked our strongest location with a military strength of 25! At this early point in the game our total military strength was 4 or 5 each. Dan lost control of the US (his homeland) and then I promptly lost control of France (mine). All of a sudden it was the third turn of the game, neither of us controlled any territory, had any income or any real chance of capturing territory until the overwhelming might of the alien aggressors was vanquished. Going deep underground the French Resistance and the US minutemen researched martial technologies and assembled military power. Trading (what I can only imagine were packets of fags and tinned goods - that's cigarettes and canned goods for my American audience!) between each other to gain the income we needed to fund our boffins to develop some decent military units. Slowly we accrued military strength while researching other technologies and occasionally sending out a probe to try to find something helpful. Occasionally we managed to find a seam of valuable materials which we could exploit for a turn until the aliens promptly wiped them clean of human presence. Finally I got to the point where I had a couple of warships and an armada on ready alert - only 16 military strength - but I had more armadas in my deck and a reasonable chance of drawing one next turn, so I sent out a sortie and captured Atlantis. At the end of my turn I drew a new hand: all armadas! The hand was so good I had to show Dan! My next turn rolled around, and when the aliens came knocking I had 42 military strength - an auspicious number :-) I annihilated them and then sent the two unused armadas over the scorched earth to claim the US and France. Dan meanwhile had managed to launch an orbital weapons platform, ready to defend his (as yet non-existant) territories with the threat of nuclear rain from orbit. For the rest of the game we both had the large militaries we'd acquired early on to defeat the aliens. I used mine to conquer a large chunk of the solar system, Dan used his to raid my territories, safe in the knowledge that his nuclear threat would prevent reprisal - most turns I could see off his predation, but I lost several locations to him during the game. The game eventually ended when I chose Conquest as a scoring condition and Dan quickly got Knowledge in before I had a chance to get Population as the second.

The game had such a strong narrative that I had to relate it to Dave in the office the next morning (and in fact to you here). The game lasted just under an hour (not bad for Dan's second game) and fully one third of that we were under assault, severely limited in what we could do. It was hard, but it felt like we were under assault, too afraid to show our faces until we'd built up the military we'd need to defend a territory against the alien scourge. It's rare that aggressor card turns up in a game, and especially rare to see it so early. The game was unusual and totally different as a result. It's not all good news though, in his feedback email Dan described the aggressors as 'annoying' which is probably something I need to pay particular heed to.

Dave and I have had some ideas about how to bring this level of excitement to some of the other strategies in the game. I'm really excited about Vacuum again :-D

Merry Christmas!

Just a brief one this week. I'm now down in Bristol for the Christmas break with the in-laws and the entirety of my family. I'll be taking it easy for the week, just having some nice chilled out time with The Wife and The Daughter before my enforced exile begins when I drive home on my own on Sunday.

I've not brought any prototypes with me, just a few games: Carcassonne (which has already seen some action last night), 7 Wonders (popular with the in-laws), X-Wing Minis (popular with the brother-in-law) and Love Letter and Hanabi, which are pretty easy sells. Gaming is more popular with the in-laws than my family, though my sister has asked for Carcassonne for Christmas (yay!).

Of course, I've asked for a couple more games for Christmas, so if Santa has judged me to have been nice then I might be on the receiving end of Coup and Galaxy Trucker :)

Anyway, I hope that those of you who celebrate Christmas have a wonderful holiday full of festive family gaming and I hope you are equally blessed by an overgenerous Santa. You'll have to let me know what he gave you!

A Breath of Fresh Air

This week has been a busy one. It started in Bristol, leaving my parents' house before 8am on Monday, then a five hour car journey to York where we spent a few days staying with my friend Paul and his family. I was primary carer for The Daughter while The Wife attended a conference for work (it's alright, everyone survived!). Then finally back to Newcastle in time for a work team building event on Thursday (I found out that I'm good at archery, but rubbish with a shotgun - so stick with someone else come the zombie apocalypse). To round it off, Saturday we had four friends and their four kids under five round for dinner and Christmas homebrew bottling - a busy and slightly chaotic day!

It was nice to get out and about, to see my family and The Wife's family in Bristol and then Paul and his family in York (for the second time in just under a month). The team building day was fun, the homebrew bottling is always a fun day if very busy - I'm looking forward to a quieter week next week though.

As I mentioned last week, I've recently introduced some changes that speed up the game (particularly for two or three player games), and the first feedback wasn't great. Dave and Chief, my two main playtesters who play most weeks on a lunchtime, were both not fans of the shorter game, feeling that it was too short to really get into the strategies available.

On Tuesday, after a few games of X-Wing Miniatures, Paul and I sat down to a game of Vacuum. It was the first time Paul and I had played since July last year. I'm not sure if Paul had played in between (he has had a copy since April, and several people from his Games Night mentioned it, but I don't know if Paul played with them or not). We played the new faster rules, and after the game, Paul admitted that he too did not like the shorter game - he would have liked a chance to get more done during the game. Paul's not a Race for the Galaxy fan, and he saw a number of parallels between Vacuum and Race. He had a number of criticisms, things about Vacuum that he prefers games not to have. He didn't like that the game could end with so little warning, and that he didn't know how long he had left before the end.

Despite the fact that I'd been up since 4:45am that morning, and the game of Vacuum didn't finish until about 11:30pm, we spent the next hour or so chatting about ideas of things we could change to improve the game/make it more to Paul's tastes. I was almost asleep on my feet (well I suppose on my bum is more accurate!), but we discussed a whole range of ideas from fixing the game length to making the victory conditions a random selection that are revealed as the game goes on. It was a very useful conversation. The next morning while I took The Daughter for a walk to get her to take a nap my mind was buzzing with ideas either discussed or triggered by the previous evening's conversation.

Upon my return to work I discussed a few of the ideas with Chief and Dave, and I think I'll try out the fixed number of turns shortly. I've also got some feedback from the Newcastle Playtest session I attended a few weeks ago. Both playtesters have sent detailed feedback emails that I need to go through a few times to really take on board, but interestingly, both of them mentioned that the game felt very abstract, with little tie-in to the theme. We played the basic game that night, and I think the advanced game is a bit more themed, but it's certainly something I need to be aware of, since I've been aiming for a tightly themed gaming experience with Vacuum. The fixed number of turns could be implemented with a turn track that counts in years, which might help tie things together.

In other news, we're probably going to make the Newcastle Playtest sessions a bi-monthly thing, with meetups on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of the month, so hopefully I'll get another chance to get some feedback shortly...

Finally, I gave my copy of Vacuum to Paul this week (I didn't have time to make a new one for him as well as update the rules), so my goals for this week are buy more ink for my printer and then to make a new copy in time for Thursday playtesting and to try out the turn track at the same time...

A Tough Week

As I mentioned last week, Tuesday was the inaugural Newcastle Playtest UK meetup at The Bridge Hotel. "How was it?", I hear you ask. By all accounts, very good. "Wait, what now? Weren't you one of the organisers?", I hear you ask. Yes, and therein lies a story.

Monday night had been tough, The Daughter wasn't well so we had all been awake for a good chunk of the night. The next day she seemed a little better, and despite hideous sleep deprivation, I was determined to make it along to the Playtest meetup. I soldiered on through work mainlining coffee directly into my veins, but all for naught, as we ended up having to take The Daughter to the out of hours GP that evening instead. A far more 'exciting' evening than either of us had been hoping for, and one with far fewer games than I had anticipated.

The Daughter's fine now, thanks for asking.

In other news, it was Newcastle Gamers' 100th meeting on Saturday, so there was all-day gaming for free :) I managed to make it along about 7:30pm, and got three games in. I'd taken Die Speicherstadt, K2, X-Wing Minis and Codename: Vacuum. I ended up teaching Die Speicherstadt to John and Christine, followed by K2 to Michael (with Michał) and then Die Speicherstadt again, this time to Michael and Michał. A great evening's gaming plus a chance to catch up with Gareth, who used to run Newcastle Gamers and come to my Thursday games night :).

I've also arranged an impromptu Playtest meetup at The Bridge for next Tuesday to make up for missing the last one (and in fact I can't make the next official one either - we're away in York that night). I'll take along Vacuum, but play what people fancy. I've changed the number of endgame conditions you score back to similar to how they used to be, in an attempt to reduce the play time and add some urgency (and rushing as a valid strategy), Paul's talk of 45 minutes per player game time has spurred me on to speed things up - simplifying things will help there too, so I also need to keep that in mind.

Reaching a Climax

The last few weeks have been exciting, with several things, both games related and not, coming to a head. On the gaming front, I've had the combination of my mate Paul from York and his family up this weekend, and Tuesday is the first Newcastle Playtest Meetup at The Bridge Hotel from 7pm.

On the subject of the Playtest meetup, it looks like we're going to have around 8 people, with at least four designers trialling games on the night. I was hoping to take a new version of Codename: Vacuum (the July version) and possibly Codename: Proteome too. Sadly, what with visitors and everything else, I've not got a new version of Proteome ready to go. But the July version of Vacuum was finished off and then corrected last week (with a couple more corrections to come tomorrow night I hope!). I'm really looking forward to introducing Vacuum to some more people, and getting the feedback of other designers. It's at a point where I think it could benefit from an injection of new ideas.

On the subject of Paul's visit, we got a few games in on Saturday night and during The Daughter's Sunday afternoon nap. I introduced Paul to X-Wing Minis and Pergamon and he introduced me to Hanabi. Hanabi's a great fun little game, I can see it being popular as a starter for ten or a closing game on Games Night, so it's going on my wishlist. I loved both the 'cards in your hand are hidden from you but visible to everyone else' mechanism, and the way you have to try to inform the other players while imparting only very limited information. I also got a second chance to try Love Letter. Definitely still interested in that one too...

We played until one in the morning, which considering I'd been up since five am with The Daughter was a late night! I was practically falling asleep during Pergamon, so I had to stop there. On Sunday I asked Paul if he'd like to receive another playtest copy of Codename: Vacuum. He'd received a copy back in March at the same time as my friends in Bedford. He'd acknowledged receipt of it, but then I'd not heard anything - no feedback forms or reports or anything, so I'd assumed it hadn't been played, so I didn't want to send him another copy if he was just going to shelve it.

Paul said that he was interested in another version, that the version I'd given him back in March had been played a few times. People weren't wowed by it, but they didn't hate it either. Yay! More ambivalence :(. He gave me what criticisms he could remember from the games they had played (not all including him). It was really useful stuff, even though the version they're playing is very out of date now. They liked several of the mechanisms in the game, but found them a bit too much all in one game. The wealth of cards (meant to introduce re-playability) was too confusing and made it harder to learn. It took too long to play. Military was overly strong.

Several of those points I've addressed in subsequent versions, but the most telling one was that their games last 40-45 minutes per player!. Ours, with very experienced players, last about 20-25 minutes per player. But I think I'm aiming for 15 minutes per player once you know the rules and the cards. Still more work to be done on that front, even in the latest version. Back to the drawing board.

In other news, I'm going to stay with Paul and his family in early September for a couple of days. I'm going to set myself that as a deadline to get the August version done, printed, corrected and the rules finally re-written. There. I've said it. You can hold me to that!