SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
There I am, sat in front of my opponent. Our eyes meet over our hand of cards, as he begins to take his turn. He calls out his house, “Dis,” which rattles in my ears like the toll of a bell.
We both have two keys forged and I am sitting on twelve Æmber; he is on five. How can he stop me from forging my final key on my next turn? Unfortunately, he has his Lash of Broken Dreams readied. I still have a chance though: I have three Æmber surplus so can still forge. He then plays Charette (“Play: capture 3 Æmber”). It's OK, I think to myself, I have five house Shadow cards and a house Brobnar card in my hand (this will be explained later). It may take another round to win, but that’s OK. He then plays Control the Weak and chooses house Logos. I have no Logos in my hand. I can't play any cards! I sigh, screaming inside, and remind myself that, as much as my inner rage is running riot at this point, it’s just a game. And standing up and punching a 10-year-old boy in the face is not socially acceptable. The game I am speaking of that holds my heart and twists my cajones is Keyforge. The Fen Orc has already blogged about this, but I would like to embellish on this a little more. For those that are unaware of the game, this is a collectable card game (CCG) of sorts but with one big difference. In traditional CCG games, players would either buy booster packs of cards or, in the living card game style (LCG), an expansion set. This would increase the cards they own and allow them to keep up-to-date with the game meta (meta is the current ruling and card text of the game). They would then build a deck with said cards and either play casually or travel, to their local gamestore or nationally, for competitions. Keyforge has turned the CCG/LCG style game on it’s head by being released as a stand alone game with unique decks. A unique game, bah, mummble, I hear you mutter. What 'unique' means is exactly this: each single pack of cards is sold as a constructed deck, which has been created by a computer algorithm to be, well, unique. The deck also has its own name, which is printed on every card, stopping players swapping cards in or out from other decks to construct their own deck (although on all forums and groups you will see a lot of CCG players who are trying to do exactly this). The starter set has two pre-generated decks for learning how to play the game. Funny story regarding the algorithm: the deck name is supposed to slightly relate to the houses you have in your unique deck. Unfortunately, at the start, the algorithm needed a little tweak, as some decks being created were named with slightly offensive and sometime racist words. These decks were quickly classed as illegal, although a side market for these has grown, but I digress. Each deck will contain twelve cards from three out of the seven 'houses' (there are 7 at the time of writing). The fire giants, goblins and monsters of Brobnar; the demons of Dis; the forest creatures and magic-users of the Untamed; the scientists and tech toys of Logos; the thieving pixies and elves of Shadows; and the Martians of, well, Mars (chances are a million to one, they said). Unlike other CCG and LCG games, instead of attacking a player, trying to reduce the opponent to a certain health level, each player is trying to forge three keys, which is done by obtaining Æmber. How is this mystical bug-sticking, dinosaur-DNA-holding juice created, I hear you say? Well sit back, sir, and enjoy your cocoa and I’ll begin. Æmber is produced by playing or using cards. In a round of Keyforge, a player will generally have a hand of six cards. The active player will start the round by announcing what house they will be playing. During their turn, they can either play cards, discard cards or use already played cards of that house only (although there are card effect and actions that counter this rule). To score Æmber, players can play cards that give Æmber, use cards (which are generally creatures) to either fight another creature (some creatues have effects to gain/remove Æmber when fighting), they can use a special abilities of creatures called actions or they can reap. When a creature reaps, they score one Æmber, although some effects can increase this. In your turn, if you reach six or more Æmber, you declare 'Check' to inform the other player that, at the beginning of your next turn, you will forge a key. If the other player cannot reduce your Æmber below six (or increase the key cost above the Æmber that you have), you must forge your key. The race is the first to three keys. That’s it! Well not quite! There are many more rules and many more keywords you will need to learn before playing your first game, but they can all be found here, along with erratas since the game was released. So why do you love this, you say? Well let me tell you a tale and the Hobbit-style walk that got me to where I am. My routes generally started in RPG games (Warhammer, Mage, Shadowrun, to name a few), but when some members of the party couldn’t make the session last minute, we would bust out a board game to fill the time. This lead to playing more and more board games. I had dabbled a little with Magic: the Gathering (MTG), but never really strayed from the original starter decks I purchased, being a poor student and also living in the middle of nowhere with few travel options. A few years later, a couple of my friends convinced both me to try a LCG called Doomtown Reloaded, where Cowboys, Indians, magic, steampunk and circus sideshow freaks all met. While playing this casually with a friend on a weekly basis, we found we would build decks that could beat each other's current deck of choice. After about a year of playing (as it wasn’t a bad game by any means), we both decided not to put anymore money into the game and call it quits. Move on a couple of years and another group of friends (you can see I buckle to peer pressure) convinced me to try Star Wars Destiny CCG. This turned out to be a great game and most enjoyable with an added bonus of dice to roll! I was even convinced to go to a local game store (Comic Culture and Games Store, Lincoln) and play Lo and behold, I didn’t do too bad with the deck I had built. All the people playing at the store were really friendly. I had seen a lot of vitriol and elitism from some of the MTG community (I hasten to say not all of them!) and I was worried that competitive players would be the same. So I kept attending the competitions and got to know a few faces, but learned quite soon that, unless you wanted to try your luck with boosters or pay through the nose for top tier cards on auction sites or Facebook groups, playing against people who did was quite difficult. The other side of the coin was the ability to use net decks. Net decks are decks that exist online on a card storage site and have been shared for people to try. Many of these are created by the top level players and will get notoriety by winning big competitions. People will then build a deck to match these and may tweak them slightly to suit their playing style. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but you see a lot of these decks at competitions, which can cause over-saturating. Two things became apparent to me from playing Destiny. One being: I am cheap and I don’t want to buy the expensive cards but instead I tried my luck on boosters to build my own decks. Two being: I suck at deck building. I mean, I’m really awful. I loved playing Destiny but if you were too cheap to copy other decks and had no talent at making good decks, you’re going to have a bad time. Then a whisper came on the air of a game where the deck would be constructed for you and the price of a deck would be less than £10. I was interested but also hesitant. I followed the reviews with interest and it all sounded too good to be true. Then the chance came to go and try the game in London at a pre-release show. The day of the ticket release came round and it was limited to sixty five seats and tickets were limited to two per person! I set my laptop up to try and get a ticket for myself and a friend. I logged in to the site, refreshed the page, but in less than a minute all the seats had all sold out. Luckily a few seconds later, my phone pinged with a message saying, “I got you a ticket chump”: the friend I was trying to buy the ticket for had also had been trying and had scored two tickets successfully. A victory dance commenced. Every day more and more people in the Keyforge event were posting the decks they had received from pre-release events all over the globe and all I could do is sit their and dream of what my first deck would contain. The event came round and I finally got to play the game. My first deck was called “Wretchfire, Cavern Slayer” and contained Brobnar, Sanctum and Untamed. I played my first game, heart pounding. I won and I fell in love. The game was vicious, it was chaotic, but overall it was ruddy good fun. How well did I do? Well thirty second out of sixty five: my deck wasn’t great, but it was fun, with some really big hitters in it. My first ever deck with its all-important bar code covered up. The circles are Common cards, the diamonds are Uncommon and this deck has 4 Rare cards with star symbols As soon as it came to the local gamestore, the tough choice came of whether to continue with Destiny or move to Keyforge and, unfortunately for Destiny, Keyforge had stolen my heart. So here I am nearly a six months on and I can’t get enough of playing the game: either casually with friends, in store competitions, online on third party non-affiliated websites. I now own twenty five decks in total, which I have obtained from buying them myself, some Christmas presents or purchased as part of a sealed event. Some of these decks are good and some of them not so much, but all of them are still fun and interesting to play. Twenty five decks to some players are just the tip of the iceberg... I have played all combinations of houses and I am still surprised of the variety of ingenious uses of cards and decks I have encountered. These can be combos such as using a Seeker Needle on your own Bad Penny to gain Æmber or using a combination of Bumpsy and Wardrummer to make your opponent lose Æmber. I have even played strong decks such as one that even contained three Hunting Witches!!! I would have to say the strongest house at the moment seems to be Shadows. They have the most Æmber stealing options that can allow a player to stay in the game longer but, that’s not to say this house does not have flaws as well. So what types of events do I attend? Well they are called Chainbound events. Don’t worry this isn’t some sort of S&M gaming experience; the 'chainbound' relates to a rule I have not mentioned. Within the game, a player can acquire 'chains'. What 'chains' do is limit a deck's draw ability; so, for instance, if you play a Dis card like Arise! you will gain one chain. This chain will mean the next time you go to draw your hand up to six cards, you would only draw it up to five. Once you have done this, you remove one chain. The chains accrued from cards are not permanent. This is not the only way for a deck to gain chains though. At a chainbound event, if your deck is repeatedly winning you can accrue chains. These chains are semi-permanent, as the table below will show, which is dependent on the amount of players at the event. Chains make Power Levels. The chains give you a handicap if your deck is too successful. So a 5-player tournament could add 2 chains to your deck for every 2 wins under your belt: beat 4 people and you have 4 chains and your deck is Power Level 1 In these events, you gain Æmber just for entering and every win will give you another Æmber as well. There are two main types of events: Archon and Sealed. Archon events allow you to take an already-owned deck (and each deck has its own bar code so it can be identified). You can play to gain more chains and with that a greater Power Level. Why have a greater Power Level? If you decide to sell your deck, it is proof of how good your deck is. The other type of chainbound event is the sealed event, where each player is given a deck as part of the entry and then has to play with that deck. This means you will be going in to the competition semi-blind (you just have time to review and sleeve your deck) but these are good competitions to test your knowledge on how you can utilise a deck. Although there is always the chance you pull a stinker of a deck. Alternatively it could be something as rare and glorious as a double Time Traveler deck! Doesn't look like much? Think again. Imagine two of them in your deck. As any CCG player knows, there is no greater wonder or excitement than opening a unknown booster pack, whether it is a deck like Keyforge or a set of cards like Magic. Reviewing what you have just opened and how you can use those cards to your advantage is near-on euphoric and addictive.
Recently, I booked my tickets to go to the UK Vault Tour, the big UK event at the UK Games Expo in June. Oh, and regarding that: every time you play a chainbound event (as mentioned above) or buy a deck and add it to the Master Vault app, you get Æmber assigned to your account. At the Vault Tour you can actually trade these in for prizes (queue audience “Woo” noise). Anyway I have rambled on enough, but I would like to leave you with this: if you want to try the game, it will cost you around £10. Just give it a go. If you don’t like it, great, it wasn’t for you. If you do, hello and welcome to the community. I look forward to our first game No, not the Led Zeppelin song. It's a quote from an interview on Radio 4's Sunday morning magazine show Broadcasting House (9am, 17 March, 2019), discussing board games once more, with familiar results. It's a tribute to how significant a cultural product board games have become that the BBC can't leave them alone. Yet the Beeb's pundits seem unequipped to discuss the topic.
Nowadays, an ordinary undergraduate or a particularly bright schoolboy (if such there be) could sum up the gist of Einstein's ideas, which goes to show that some concepts perplex very clever people, not because they are complicated, but because they are unfamiliar. Something like this seems to be true of board games at the moment. You can listen to the BBC piece here: don't listen from the start (you'll get Brexit commentary that is instantly out of date) or stick around after the end (you'll get the Irish Question which has never changed and never will).
If you don't know, Wingspan is the new game from Stonemeier Games (who brought us Vitculture) and it arrived in January this year after much anticipation, the advance reviews being so positive. Unfortunately, the first wave of stock was too small, so retailers couldn't fulfill advance orders and scalpers on eBay cleaned up, selling copies of a £70 game for three times that amount. Stonemeier Games apologised to fans after a Twitter-led crusade of disappointment. The game is already on its 3rd print run, with 30,000 English copies sold. Wingspan has a charming theme, which is that you are bird-lovers trying to attract the best collection of birds to your aviary. You can lure in different species by placing different types of food and you can choose between a diverse or a focused collection and whether or not to encourage them to nest and lay eggs. The mechanics are elegant but not especially original, being a sort of victory engine where birds played earlier interact with birds played later to trigger more powerful effects or more lucrative scores. There's a lot to say about Wingspan. It's physically beautiful (as Stonemeier games tend to be), with gorgeous avian art. Its sales illustrate the role key critics like Shut Up & Sit Down play in creating hype ahead of the release of a game and the economic heft a successful game now has. It has a conservationist theme, which taps into our current concerns. It was designed by a woman, Elizabeth Hargrave, and the artists are both women as well, and that too is culturally on-topic these days. Hargrave is a keen ornithologist and the game celebrates her enthusiasm for birds and science, being a careful representation of the feeding and mating habits of different species and their place in the wider eco-system. There's an excellent New York Times article on Hargrave, her game and her passion. With so much to commend this story to so many target audiences, the BBC decides to get this game reviewed by a chap called Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, because, on a previous show about museums, he declared himself a fan of board games. Irving Finkel lives up to his name. He's the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay. However, he's also a historian of board games and in 1990 he set up the International Board Game Studies Association. A proper academic heavyweight! And he looks like Dumbledore! Finkel is one of those pet academics that Radio 4 loves to use because of his breathy, kid-in-a-sweet-shop voice and tendency to drop fey witticisms. He's all over the Internet too, teaching geeks to read cuneiform script and challenging people to play the Royal Game of Ur - a board game from 2,500 BCE, the rules for which he deciphered.
Watch either of these and you too will love The Fink! This means the BBC has brought together the game du jour and an academic in board game studies - and not a clapped-out comedian or retired athlete in sight to interrupt with asinine comments about Monopoly. All Bodes Well. Now: what does The Fink have to say about Wingspan, do you think? This is a typical modern game where you have to work very hard to work out how to win Hmm. Bridge is a game where it's hard to work out how to win, but this seems to be a back-handed way of saying that Wingspan is a Euro-style game. Surely, over at the International Board Games Studies Association, they know all about Euro-games? Maybe Fink doesn't want to dazzle R4 listeners with his erudition yet. It's a kind of resource game … overlaid with a tremendous repertoire of fiddly things where the actual fun element seems to me to be trampled underfoot What's going on? Even critics who don't much like Euro-games have praised Wingspan for its elegant design. Tom Vasel calls it "a medium weight gateway-plus game you can play in an hour" - so why does a scholar of board game studies find it 'fiddly' and lacking "fun"? The Fink expands on his critique: In the old days … you would learn [a game] simply by watching it and you’d be able to do it an hour later whereas it would take me I-don't-know-how-many months of incarceration really to understand how to play this game We've been here before. Clever people pretending to be stupid when confronted by a board game. Remember Jeremy Vine debating Brexit but professing himself baffled by Cluedo? Now here's Irving Finkel, who translates Babylonia cuneiform FOR FUN saying that he cannot wrap his head around the rules for a medium weight Euro-game. I smell a rat. But it doesn't end there. Finkel is confident that all the people who rushed to order Wingspan, sight unseen, are going to be bitterly disappointed when they discover what a dull-fest it really is: I’d be very interested to know whether the people who bought it have enjoyed it very much This is where the penny drops for me. The Internet is awash with testimonials for Wingspan from delighted players and gushing reviewers. How can Finkel be unaware of this? Because he hasn't even bothered to find out. This is confirmed when O'Connell asks whether the conservationist theme might explain the appeal of this fun-free game. Finkel sniffs at the idea. Well, I think they exploit the idea that people are supposed to be interested in wildlife by putting information on the cards, like their wingspan, how old they are and when they mate: that's all very well and good but it's a kind of 'nod', I think The simplicity of this remark is breathtaking. Let's pass over the slur that environmental concern is just something that people do because 'they're supposed to be interested in wildlife' - Finkel is clearly baffled by anyone whose sensibilities are drawn to sunlight and birds rather than dusty crypts and clay tablets. No. What's simplistic is his view that this game is a purely commercial venture, cashing in on faddish conservationism by tacking a wildlife theme onto a fiddly number puzzle. Mere minutes of Internet searching would have disabused Finkel of this. This game isn't by Hasbro; it comes from a small independent company that puts out labour-of-love projects and designer Elizabeth Hargrave is a real-deal nature geek with an educational agenda behind her game. Click the image to read a fantastic interview with Elizabeth Hargrave - the sort of reading Finkel should have done but didn't I don't know about you, but if I were asked to go on the BBC (that's the BBC! the BBC! the BB-freaking-C!) and talk for five minutes about something of interest, well I don't know, I might just hit Google and read up on it, briefly, you know, maybe while in the taxi heading to Broadcasting House. Or for spend an afternoon the day before, looking things up, just to make sure I didn't say accidentally say something completely stupid. I might actually play the game. Because this is the truth of things, isn't it? Finkel has opened the box, looked at the pretty cards with birds on them, skimmed the rules and formed a judgment. Of course he didn't round up his buddies in Egyptian Antiquities and Byzantine Reliquaries and other cobwebbed regions of the British Museum to sit down and actually play the game. Can you even imagine that? This is why the only aspect of the game Finkel enthuses about is a gimmicky component. There's a dice tower that looks like a bird feeder. Cute. But Finkel goes into raptures over this. Why? Well, it touches on his area of interest, you see. There’s an imitation of a Roman fritillus, so the bird box where you put the bird food is actually derived from this Roman tower with steps inside where you threw the dice in and they rattled down, to stop cheating. So that’s a rather interesting nod to the past What Finkel is whittering about is that the Ancient Romans loved dice games and they invented the idea of a dice tower (called a fritillus or 'dice box' in Latin, apparently; it's also called a pyrgus or 'tower'). The Vettweiss-Froitzheim Dice Tower (right) has the inscription "The Picts are defeated. The enemy is destroyed. Play in safety!" Yes, you can buy replicas. Finkel, like the old narcissist that he is, imagines that Stonemeier Games have included a dice tower as a deliberate nod to the Classical origins of dice games. He's simply unaware that dice towers are pretty common gaming accessories and have no Roman connotations for most people. But Finkel is so lost in his scholarship, he sees links that aren't there while missing features that are right under his nose. But isn't Irving Finkel on the editorial board of the International Board Game Studies Association? How did he manage to avoid knowing anything about modern board games? With difficulty, surely. But Finkel is an antiquarian rather than a board gamer. He sleeps through seminars on collectible card games and hidden role games, if he attends them at all. He's strictly there for the ancient stuff. This is why, when commenting on a game like Wingspan, Finkel speaks with no more authority (and perhaps less insight and sympathy) than, I don't know, maybe your Nan? If you're not out of patience with Irving Finkel, listen on past the 25:00 point where he gets to talk about stuff he knows something about: the Royal Game of Ur and an Indian game that's the precursor for Ludo. In his own field, Finkel bristles with learning. But he could not care less about 21st century board games. Card drafting? Worker placement? Resource management? Pointless fiddliness! But give him a roll-the-dice-and-chase-each-other-round-the-board game from 5,000 years ago and he's in heaven. Finkel demonstrates the Royal Game of Ur. He betrays no awareness that tetrahedral dice are used in modern games and are termed D4s. Finkel is the single-topic obsessive you don't want to find yourself sat next to on a long air flight. He simply doesn't take anything seriously if it's from after the invention of trousers. Getting him to review Wingspan is like bringing in an expert on the 1908 Model T Ford to present Top Gear or the world's leading authority on the invention of the abacus to offer her views on the latest iPad. Finkel's sheer cluelessness about life in the 21st century finds striking expression towards the end of the interview. He's talking about the elementary Victorian race game Ludo and is confident his listeners know what he's taking about: It’s under every television in the country Younger readers of this blog (i.e. the under-50s) might need help unpacking this gnomic remark. You see, once upon a time TVs were big bulky affairs that often lived in bespoke cabinets in people's living rooms, rather than slim panels that now hang artfully from their walls. Usually there was a lot of storage space under the TV and, before that space was filled with DVDs or VHS videos (yes, that's how far back you have to go to make sense of Finkel's allusion), it was often filled with dusty children's board games and copies of Trivial Pursuit with half the cards missing. And yes, under my grandmother's TV was a copy of Ludo. In other words the last time Finkel checked what board games modern people were playing, it was the 1950s. I don't blame Finkel. Yes, he's an old humbug who rolls up to the Beeb with his hands in his pockets and no notes, talks rubbish on things he knows nothing about and trousers a nice fat cheque, courtesy of the licence payer. But his enthusiasm for ancient gaming is infectious. Maybe, after some future holocaust blasts us back to the Bronze Age, he'll be able to take an interest in the world around him again and we'll all sit down together and play Ur. With that in mind, Finkel's final thoughts take on a delightfully apocalyptic tone: Board games will never die. The digital age will fail before board games die. If we're going to blame someone for making a mess of this, it's the BBC. It's the Beeb (perhaps Paddy O'Connell himself) who made the decision to treat the Wingspan story as essentially ridiculous ('grown adults playing a board game about birds!') and, rather than bringing in any of the informed, witty and charismatic commentators in the hobby scene, decided to get the phenomenon critiqued by someone whose perceptions were only ever going to be absurd. But Finkel is a Proper Historian, so he could balance this nonsense about birds with something that Actually Matters: like archaeology. I suspect that the ingenuous Finkel protested that he had neither the time nor the inclination to learn to play a ghastly modern board game, but was reassured by a BBC research assistant: 'Don't worry old chap. Just give it a look-over. Make a link to something historical. Then you can talk about your Babylonian game for 5 minutes.' I'm strengthened in this conviction by the appearance, towards the end of the interview, of one of O'Connell's R4 cronies, the presenter Jonny Diamond. Diamond has nothing to contribute to this discussion except to make chortling remarks about family feuds over Monopoly. Look, I can chuckle at Monopoly memes too. But is there any basis to them? Do people actually fight over Monopoly? Children will (I know!) fight over anything competitive and Monopoly is rather boring and protracted and once you start to lose there's nothing much you can do about it, but I wonder where the idea comes from that Monopoly is a uniquely fractious game? The competition in Monopoly is indirect; in Risk the other person is actually choosing to attack you, but in Monopoly you simply make an unlucky dice roll and land on someone else's space. What's there to fight about? The link between Monopoly - and board games in general - and socially dysfunctional behaviour is part of the wider negative stereotyping of the hobby as the preserve of misfits and inadequates. But it runs completely counter to my experience. Finkel, who knows a lot about board games but nothing about playing them, buys into this stereotype too. People are full of animosity and board games are a great way to reduce it to a manageable level without bloodshed This is the 'pressure cooker' model of human psychology, popularised by Freud. It suggests that we are boiling cauldrons of rage and negativity who need to vent our nastiness in safe doses through sport or art or politics, otherwise we explode in violence. It's a popular insight, but without a shred of research evidence to support it. Indeed, it was completely debunked in the 1960s. But insights from the 1960s are far too recent for Finkel to know anything about. People who play board games have a different experience. Games are largely harmonious. They bring people together rather than divide them. Good sportsmanship is the norm. Sure, there are sore losers, but they tend to get filtered out of the hobby. It's games with unwilling participants (the reluctant older brother, bored partner or roped-in friend) that produce the rage-quits and board-flips. The truth is much more interesting than Diamond's lazy quips and Finkel's obsolete pseudo-wisdom. People are not full of animosity, but curiosity. They enjoy coming together to solve problems and create things. They enjoy challenging themselves as much as each other. They like to experiment with what is possible and try out different strategies. Board games provide a structure for them to do constructive things together. Finkel is right that board games aren't going away. The BBC will keep returning to the hobby as its economic and cultural significance continues to rise. One day, the nation's broadcaster will decide to treat the story seriously.....
Club Chairman Martin Jackson was recently blessed with the safe and healthy arrival of baby daughter Sophie. That started me thinking about my own experiences as a Dad-of-Daughters. This week's blog is dedicated to my daughters and to the hapless Martin. I guess there must be fathers who want their sons to get into football. They take them to the park for a kick about, buy them mini football strips for Christmas, bring them along to matches, teach them how to swear at the referee, that sort of thing. Probably, if their boys grow up to be more into tennis or chess, those dads feel a sort of crushing disappointment, as if they've failed to pass on a legacy. But if football-dads are dads-of-daughters, what then? I guess they just pack it in. 'Ponies it is, then,' they say, and that's that. No dishonour in having football-averse daughters, right? Gamer-dads don't get a free pass like that. It might be more difficult to raise daughters to be gamers, what with social norms and lower rates of autism in females, but that's not an excuse not to try. Like a lot of people, I reached my 'gaming crisis' back in my 20s: no longer a student, holding down a career, young family. There was no place in my life for Hero Quest any more. Dune was long forgotten. I used to get a group of friends together once every couple of months for roleplaying games. Why did RPGs survive? I can credit one particular product for that: the appearance in 1991 of Vampire: the Masquerade. You see, back in those days Virgin Megastore (remember that place?) stocked games. I was browsing their games section in the Edinburgh store - I think I must have been doing my teacher training course at the time. This rules book commended itself with its arty cover and cryptic blurb: 'a storytelling game of personal horror.' This game single-handedly rejuvenated my interest in RPGs, moving the drama out of the hackneyed dungeon or medieval past and into a 'Gothic Punk' version of our world, with a hidden war between vampire immortals being fought nightly on the city streets. This game landed its creative punches before these tropes became mainstream: pre-Buffy, pre-Supernatural, pre-Twilight. White Wolf games followed up Vampire with a roster of games developing their World of Darkness: Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, Wraith: the Oblivion and Changeling: the Dreaming. They adopted the title-colon-subtitle nomenclature before it had been picked up by every third rate horror or fantasy franchise These games, with their adult themes, grandiose philosophising and angsty settings, were great for keeping grown-ups in the gaming fold, but they were pretty hard to share with children. Instead, my daughters were treated to my had-me-down games from Christmases past. Battling Gladiators was particularly popular. This one took the spinning-tops idea and hung a board game around it. You moved round the board and spaces told you to fight the person to your left, right or opposite in some combination and you needed 10 victories before you could cross the finishing line and wine. Daughter Emily had particular skill with this: or perhaps her preferred top (Mean Marcus, green) just had the better winding cord. Travel back in time to the 1970s Games are good for families. They put adults and children on a level playing field: it means a lot for kids to beat dad. They enforce turn-taking and observing your opponents, which reins in boisterous personalities and forces the eldest to attend to the youngest. They teach losing... Ah, losing. Losing is very difficult for children and observing them struggle with the emotions losing unleashes tells us a lot about what goes into an adult personality. Cluedo, which could end very suddenly if someone stumbled on the identity of Dr Black's murderer, would often end in tears. My daughters recall similar furies over Monopoly but, since I've never owned a copy of the world's favourite board game, I think they must be recalling games with their mother or perhaps reconstructing memories (as psychologist Elizabeth Loftus says we do) from cultural schemas about the hostility that dismal game provokes. Elizabeth Loftus explains how we reconstruct memories We turned to video games instead. Tabletop gaming was in the doldrums (Pokemon never appealed for some reason) but Playstation games were everywhere and a local buy-and-sell exchange gave us a regular fix of cheap games. We toiled through the Tomb Raider franchise with me doing all the difficult manual dexterity bits and my girls looking up advice online for the difficult rooms, but the girls took over the handset for the Harry Potter games. Then, in 2001, Carcassonne came along. Actually, I didn't discover Carcassonne in 2001. That happened a few years later. But Carcassonne is an important game, the herald of the Gaming Renaissance, the game that introduced us to cute wooden meeples and Euro-style gameplay for the first time. Euro-style games actually broke out of their Germanic enclosure in 1995, with Settlers of Catan, but I totally missed that. In Euro-games, there's a focus on skill rather than luck, so dice tend not to feature. They are usually about controlling territory or collecting resources rather than a race or a knock-out. The competition is indirect, which means you're making pleasurable choices and having a nice time even if you're not winning. And they tend to be beautiful: sturdy cards, weighty boards, wooden counters and the distinctive 'meeple' design. All of which means, they're great to play with children. Older daughter Emily was experimenting with Teenage Rage at the time, but her sister Juliet played Carcassonne with me. There was something deeply satisfying about watching the attractive landscape of roads and churches and city walls spread across the table. Somebody had to win, or course, but that seemed less important than the dad-and-daughter bonding experience of placing tiles and meeples, often helping each other out with suggestions about the best placement. The crucial ingredient game along in (I think) 2011. I was amusing myself at a giant car boot sale (which is my partner Christine's hobby and passion) when I came across a glum looking couple selling a copy of Touch of Evil. The lurid art and fantasy/horror themes appealed and they were giving it away for pennies ('Too difficult to understand,' they complained). Here was something new: the CO-OPERATIVE game experience. Actually, ToE can be played competitively, but its real strength is in teaming up to find and defeat the Vampire, Werewolf, Headless Horseman or Scarecrow that's stalking the Sleepy Hollow-inspired lanes of Shadowbrook. Also present were delightful miniatures. I wish now that I'd come across these games earlier. Euro-games with their indirect competition and tactile pleasures, co-operative games that pull the family together as a team - we could have been playing Ticket to Ride back in 2004 or Pandemic in 2008. We'll never get those wasted years back! But I must have done something right, since both daughters are now enthusiastic gamers. So, Martin, my friend, you've no excuse now, not in a world that offers My Little Scythe. But enough about me. I've asked my daughters to speak for themselves.
My Dad's old games from his childhood came out again for mine As I hit my teens and my interests steered more towards parties and my mobile phone, I only ever gamed when begrudgingly dragged into one of my Dad’s Sunday gaming sessions. My scowl often mistaken for a poker face by his friends.
Gloomhaven We went on holiday to the Lake District – now an annual tradition - and spent every night playing Gloomhaven for hours. We were thrilled with the detail and concept of the game, and still plan monthly sessions in advance to push through scenarios. When I moved to Newcastle for my PhD, board games became an easy way to bring new friends together. Sure, some people came for the social side of it – more interested in drinking and chatting than focusing for too long on any game. But a few committed gamers emerged. They introduced me to new games like Small World and Munchkin, and even brought old classics like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game. I began to look for more conversational and co-operative games like Mysterium that might appeal to the more distractible of the group. We meet weekly at my flat or the pub next door, always eager to invite new members to join us. Games are now a regular part of Christmas wishlists and payday treats. My Dad is certainly happy with my renewed interest in gaming, and now Christmas in Edinburgh is often spent as it was when I was a child. The games are newer and more complicated, but still played over the dining room table as the rest of the family naps.
I started gaming myself once my Dad bought me and my sister a PS2. We were introduced to a lot of fantastic games. This included Drakan: The Ancient’s Gates, a sort of fantasy Tomb Raider-esque game, with a powerful female lead called Rynn and her annoying (but amusing) pet dragon, Arokh. Drakan: still the best! Out of the many games I have played, Drakan stood out in its originality, creativeness and how much we all enjoyed playing it, both me, my sister and Dad played it. An Xbox 360 was then bought but my interest in gaming sank down due to the games being less creative and yet more Assassin Creeds were released instead. One day, when I was a young teenager, my Dad was sitting at the dining room table and putting together Carcassonne, a tile placement game. I joined him, putting farm and city pieces together, We actually did not play the game the first time, just put the tiles together and this was fun in itself. Carcassonne: so pretty This was the start of the board game era of my life; less overpriced Xbox games were bought and instead I was playing board games with my Dad. It was like we had gone back to my childhood of watching him play PS1 games but now I was playing the game too! More games were bought at car boot sales including the fantastic Touch of Evil, which included a great soundtrack to play along with the game. I then went to University and visited my Dad less. I played less board games. However, it is always very special to me when I visit my Dad and play old and new games. There is always a new board game on the table when I visit. Now I have moved back to Cambridge and I have just started my first proper roleplaying campaign. I had done some D&D a few years ago with my Dad and his friends. I started playing Vampire: The Masquerade with a work connection I made whose friends were interested in starting a campaign. I was nervous to start as I knew it would be difficult to get into the game to start with. I created an Egyptian vampire named Mahar, who has now managed to kill lots of bad people but still hasn’t lost any humanity! Somehow Mahar has justified these kills (and got lucky dice rolls!). I think I am now in 'my RPG era'. My Cambridge RPG crew and their Vampire characters: Rory, Daryl, Mitch and Duncan I am unsure if I will ever fully commit back to video games, as roleplaying and board gaming fill your social needs as well as being more enjoyable! I have a lot of fond memories gaming growing up and, even writing this, I am wanting to turn on my dusty PS2 and fly Arokh around in Drakan. I miss having so much free time to waste days away playing these brilliant games, but I guess, when I do get to play, it makes it more and more fun every time.
I met Lucy and discovered Wild Ways on a trip to Newark and she has kindly contributed to our blog. You can read about my trip here. I asked Lucy to explain how her shop and club came about and her philosophy of gaming as a hobby and a business.
In 2010, I decided to work for myself. I'd been working between Early Years education and the charity sector for years and, in both, as time progressed, the human element was taking more of a back seat to paperwork, box-ticking and targets. I didn’t like it. So, with £500 of overtime money and what was left of my last pay check after paying bills, I left my job, rented a small market stall in Lincoln Central Market and filled it with second-hand books: one of my passions. It went well, thankfully, as there was no plan B! I sold lots and the credit exchange service meant I was getting more books than I had space to store. Living in Newark anyway and a little tired of getting the train at 8am every morning, I quickly sought out a small unit in the Upstairs of the town's Edwardian Buttermarket and opened up what was then called Belle’s Books. I bought in a small line of new children’s educational books and some giftware and, for 2 years, I was able to slowly take on the 2 units next door too, started a book club and cultivated a steady stream of regular customers. I loved every minute of it, the chats over the counter, recommending great reads and spending time with people that loved the same things I did. Then something happened - quite by chance -that made my business and, I have to say, me as a person, that little bit more complete: Table-Top Gaming. A customer traded in books en masse, 11 boxes full, and, in the bottom of one, I found something I hadn’t come across before. It was a heavy A4 hardback. Looking through it, there certainly appeared to be fiction elements, but there were also drawings, of all kinds of mythical creatures, and what look to be charts with ‘Stats’ written at the top of one. Not knowing what it was, I found something similar online and priced it up, gathering it was a form of game in a book and put it in a window display. Strange things started to happen. A veritable collection of mostly bearded males started to stop by the window and spend ages looking in; they would go away and appear later in the day with friends. On further examination, they all appeared to share other attributes, mainly science-fiction related slogan t-shirts and carrying back-packs. A couple came in picked up the book, flicked through it excitedly, started chatting away and asking, can we get anymore? do we have anymore? were we stocking games? Followed by long drawn looks of disappointment when I said: ‘No sorry’. On the third day, a tall man with short blond hair and glasses came in, picked up the book looked it over and smiled, then asked the same question: Do you have anymore roleplay books? I said No, admitted I wasn’t actually sure what it was, that it seemed like a whole other literary world to me and, off the back of that, he said, ‘Well, if you can close up for half an hour, lets grab a coffee from the café opposite and I’ll explain everything!’ Three coffees later, I found out all about the amazing world they call table-top gaming. In the coming days, more (what I now know to be) gamers appeared, asking if we could start stocking games, that they’d love somewhere to go and meet others, that they were having to game at home, in garages or spare bedrooms, but would like more options and certainly more space.
Within the month, our first box of games had arrived. With it, 20 or so Gamers, who would turn up almost daily to look through them and not leave until they were done buying and talking, so, by the end of the second month, we had made arrangement with the café opposite to borrow a few tables, so they could essentially, bless them, move their arses out of the sales area and go play some games. We rebranded as ‘Wild Ways’ and the septagram, the seven point star that has a deep personal meaning to me in terms of the values it represents in my personal culture, was what I wanted above the door. Value-led, in all things. I didn’t want it any other way. Today, that first group of 20 people has turned into over 300 people, including a 50 strong under-16s club and whole families that have come through our doors, and, wonderfully, stayed. We’re now in our 9th year as a book-and-game store and table-top club. Me and the tall blond-haired coffee drinker are in our 5th year of marriage and 3rd year of parenting our beloved son and official shop toddler, Tristan. We now have over 2000sq ft of space that we’re diligently renovating to fit the ever-increasing number of gamers and number of games. We do and stock the full range of games, have 4/5 roleplay groups in a week. Nearly everyone plays Magic the Gathering, for which we’re an official play store. We have our Sunday wargamers, our regular dedicated board games days, with new games being introduced all the time to our board games library, which can be used as part of the membership. We charge £25 for the year: once its paid, you can use all of our facilities, our gaming boards, scenery, painting station, table space, be taught new games, priority access to tournaments, private roleplay space, you name it. If we have space and time, we provide From day 1, we’ve always been gamer-led. If someone wants a product ordering, a game to be played, we source it and run it. It means the business we have built is sustainable, as we’re happy to adapt, and always, always, put ‘our guys’, the customers who have become our family, first. We still sell second hand too, except we’ve extended the credit exchange to all games, comics, graphic novels and trading cards. Everyone helps anyone else, our TOs and Game Patrons teach and support one another, taking the lead in introducing new club members and help our little ones find friends and choose games If you take anything away from this post, I want it to be this: you don’t have to play the ‘business’ game to do great business. When you make money from a hobby, you naturally attract like-minded people together. There is an innate imperative with something as valuable, as useful as table-top gaming to build community and build it well, because that’s how passion survives. The older teaching the younger, sharing those experiences of gathering round a table, telling, stories, rolling the dice. Communication is an inbuilt necessity, friendship the best and most naturalistic result. Wild Ways is a second home to our gamers. I know that because they tell me, and still 9 years later I get a tear in my eye. Most of these people I see on a daily basis. I’ve celebrated as many of them have got engaged, got their dream jobs, passed their GCSE’s. And then of the other side of things… Last year, I stood side by side with them in a church pew helping to celebrate the life of one of our 16 year-olds who unexpectedly passed away after suffering an asthma attack at home. He had been a member of the club since he was 13. He loved us and ‘his club’ and we him, so he was buried with his favourite Magic deck, was carried out to the song Wild One and I don’t know what made me cry more, the occasion itself, or seeing my guys, a couple in their Wild Ways t-shirts gathered together supporting one another and his devastated mum at the grave side. We all went back to the club after, played games and cried As members of this community, you have an opportunity to make a difference, every time, to sit down to play. You can make it something that brings laughter and brings people together or you can make just another excuse for someone to go away defeated in more ways than one. Games help us, for a little while, come away from the day-to-day and the bonds it often brings with it. They let you engage in a world, and with others, in a way that can't help but make you smile, and forget, for a little while, the worries in your head or the bad day at work This is a safe space. We keep it that way. No power gaming allowed. Respect shown to all, regardless of who they are or how old they are. Me and my husband aren’t afraid to take the lead in demonstrating how it should be and, on the very rare occasion, something is said: if a negative behaviour appears to be one that has settled in and stayed, as it were, that person doesn’t get to come back (to date only 4 people in 9 years). Build the club, the community, the nerd family you want, by your choice, to commit to kindness. Because, in those darker moments, it's knowing there’s those places to go, those happy fun memories of ‘your club’, ‘your friends’, that can make all the difference. Please, protect them
P.S. ... I said I don't roleplay often. My best creation to date was Lonesome, a Bayou-born, alcoholic female goblin with hat-related kleptomaniac issues who rides a giant rabbit that can only turn right due to having survived (kind of) myxomatosis ... they wont let me play her.
I want to tell you about the girl who broke my heart. No Linda, not you. You see, by girl I mean 'board game' and by broke my heart I mean 'turned me into a geek.' It's Dune, Linda. It's always been Dune. The Avalon Hill board game of Frank Herbert's vast, stodgy, politically incorrect space romance-slash-theological swashbuckler came out in 1979. At the time, I didn't know anything about Arrakis or Spice or the Kwizatz Haderach but I knew a great cover when I saw one. Giant frickin' worms, man! Giant frickin' worms! I remember poring over this illustration (probably an advert in White Dwarf) when I was, I dunno, 12 or 13 perhaps and still new to geekdom. What the hell was this? A game where you fought giant worms? Wait, there are people hanging off that thing! And robot birds. What's going on? So when I was 16 or so I read the book, skipping over all the boring bits (don't lie - so did you!) and looking for the bits where the sandworms turn up. Sandworms! Yes, the Shai-Hulud, over 1000 feet long, (implausibly) allergic to water and attracted to rhythmic vibrations on the desert sands. From beneath you, they devour! Dune for impatient people: Dune is Arrakis, a desert planet where the mystical super-drug (not Superdrug) called Spice is harvested. Various factions of the corrupt space Empire vie for control of the planet. Murderous intrigue by House Harkonnen (basically, ugly Lannisters) causes Paul, the last heir of House Atreides (basically, House Stark), to be left wandering the desert with his witchy Mum until he is rescued by the Fremen (basically, Muslims) and revered as their prophesied leader. Lots of dynastic shenanigans and drug-induced mysticism takes place, Jessica's daughter Alia (or is it Arya?) becomes a magical assassin, Paul becomes a LSD-fueled god and blows up a mountain and rides into battle on top of sandworms (at last!) to crush the evil Lannisters, the Emperor, the capitalist Guild and their Bene Gesserit telepathic viziers. Paul ascends to the Iron Throne as the new Emperor but - oh no! - a religious jihad is underway as the liberated Fremen rampage across the universe in the name of their reluctant new deity. Plus, no one gets to marry anyone they actually fancy. Not bad, eh? As a piece of world-building, it's up there with Tolkien (i.e, it shamelessly pilfers European and Middle Eastern history and mythology and repackages it with magic, dragons/sandworms and pipeweed/spice). Then in 1984, they made a film: Opinions vary on the film's merits. It's got Sting in it. You probably get the idea I'm a bit meh about Dune as a book. It's not very well written. But it's got GREAT ideas:
George R.R. Martin was clearly taking notes. His (much better) story of a noble house brought low by treachery, its children scattered and adopted by sorcerous foreigners obsessed with ancient prophecies, mirrors lots of Dune's themes as well as its preoccupations with bloodline, dynastic intermarriage, Maesters instead of Mentats and the advantages of having a horde of screaming barbarians at your back when you make your bid for the throne. Plus, chicks with magical powers and giant frickin' fireworms! Anyway. The game. Avalon Hill was the premier games company of the 1970s whose name was a byword for quality. Their games came in these big (for the time) 'bookshelf' boxes that could be stacked alongside your encyclopaedias and leather-bound editions of Dickens and Shakespeare (or Asimov and Lovecraft, according to taste). Avalon Hill included this promotional postcard in their game boxes: Can you imagine games companies today reveling in the fact that their products were too difficult for stupid people?And notice the use of the masculine pronoun for your 'bright friend': PROBLEMATIC! By today's standards, the components don't look like much. The cards are two-tone and flimsy, the tokens are simple cardstock discs and the rules an unsightly list of numbered paragraphs (1.4 followed by 1.4.1 and 1.4.2, etc) ... but the board ... ah yes, the board: Pretty, yes? And groovy '70s typeface which suits Herbert's whacky space baroque You're looking at the northern hemisphere of Arrakis. The clock-like segments are for the Storm, which moves anticlockwise round the edge of the board, obliterating exposed people it roars across. Your units move from region to region, ignoring the Storm sectors most of the time. The black asterisks are where Spice turns up each turn. The red cities and grey mountains are are safe from the Storm. The Imperial Basin is also shielded from the Storm by the cliffs of the Shield Wall ... for now ... Each player gets to be one of the 6 factions trying to master the planet: the scheming Emperor (loadsamoney, crack troops, starts off-planet), his buddy House Harkonnen (duplicitous scumbags, control Carthag city), hapless House Atreides (psychic powers, start in Arrakeen city), the Guild (also loadsamoney, flexible turn order, control some smugglers in Tuek's Sietch), the Fremen (scattered units all across the western side of the planet) and the witchy Bene Gesserit (coexists with other factions). You get nice little card screens to hide your tokens behind. Player screens are quite common in strategy games now - another way Dune was ahead of its time Dune is asymmetric: each faction plays by different rules. For example, the Storm moves randomly round the board and the Spice turns up each turn in a location revealed by a card (or else a sandworm turns up to gobble up everyone there): the Fremen get to look at next turn's information, so they never get caught out and can always arrive just ahead of the Spice (good: they're dead broke so they need it) Everyone bids on face-down Treachery Cards: the Emperor collects the money spent (and therefore tries to drive up the bidding unless everyone else forms a cartel against him) and Atreides looks at each card first (giving him intel on other people's hands); Harkonnen gets a free card for every one he buys (meaning he owns stuff Atriedes does not know about). In turn, everyone pays Spice to move units onto the planet and this money goes to the Guild - except that the Fremen, who actually call Arrakis home, get to do this for free. Players also get a single on-planet move, usually one territory but the agile Fremen move 2 and whoever controls Carthag and Arrakeen moves 3 (thanks to ornithoptors - those winged birds on the cover). Controlling three cities wins you the game - but, if the game lasts 15 turns, the Fremen win (if they still have board presence) or else the Guild wins by default. But - and get this - the psychic Bene Gesserit get to write down a prediction at the start of the game (who will win and on what turn) and if that prediction comes true, they win and they win alone. I've seen people deliberately throw a dead-cert victory purely because of the anxiety that the BGs have predicted it and manipulated them into this situation. How cool is that? Despite the theme-rich board, factions, Storm and sandworms, combat is almost abstract. Use the dials to commit in secret a number of your troops and add the value of your leader. Weapon cards kill a leader but Defense cards keep a leader safe. Highest score wins. Winner loses only the troops they committed. Loser loses everything. Leaders only die if a Weapon card killed them. Shadout Mapes and 9 troops means a battle strength of 12. Unless Mapes dies. Play Poison Defense to protect her and hope your opponent isn't playing a Projectile Weapon instead. Just this basic system creates fraught conflicts. Better to commit few or no troops and rely on your Leader to win the battle. But what if your Leader dies? OK, better to commit more troops - but since the troops you commit all die regardless, you could win the fight but be left with no one on the board. Let's mix it up. Atreides get to use their 'Prescience' power to inspect one aspect of their opponent's battle plan (how many troops committed? which Leader? what Weapon? what Defense?) which gives them a huge advantage. Hypnotic Bene Gesserit use 'the Voice' to dictate one aspect of the battle plan (telling an opponent that they must or must not play a particular card). A cute rule mandates that if ever the unstoppable Lasegun is played in the same battle as a Shield Defense, a massive explosion kills everyone and everything in that region. What fun when you send in a lone trooper armed with both against a vast army! More fun if you don't really have the Lasegun and you're just bluffing! Most fun of all if your opponent has the Lasegun and the Bene Gesserit uses 'Voice' to force them to play it, destroying themselves! (Almost) the only maths you need to play Dune Mix it up one more time. At the start of the game everyone draws 4 Leaders and chooses one to be a Traitor in their pay. If your nominated Traitor is ever played against you in battle, you can activate him, in which case you win regardless of numbers and take no losses. Horrible Harkonnen gets to select all four of the Leaders he draws to be Traitors. Traitors can be decisive, which is why knowing which Leaders are 'safe' (because you drew them but didn't choose them) is fantastic Intel that gives you leverage over other players. These simple mechanics make every battle a very psychological affair of bluff and double-bluff. Other players offer you information - at a price - but are they telling the truth? Remember Atreides knows most of your cards, so there's no bluffing against him. Remember you may be playing a Traitor, in which case you've lost regardless. Maybe you should play a Truth Trance to ask about that? Or a Cheap Hero in place of playing a Leader? Back when I was a teenager, we played this game to death. Remember when Harkonnen used Family Atomics to blow up the Shield Wall, then Weather Control to move the Storm over the Basin, Arrakeen and Carthag to wipe out everybody hunkering down there now that they were no longer protected? Ah, but then, didn't the Fremen use their power to march through the Storm (gasp!) and a Hajj card to get an extra turn, so they could occupy both vacated cities and win? But then, didn't the Bene Gesserit reveal they'd predicted that victory all along, and win by themselves, despite being the Fremen's allies! Such times! Yeah, that's the other bit of maths you need to know for Dune I need to tell you about Alliances. You only get to make an Alliance when a Shai-Hulud sandworm turns up to gobble the Spice (and the Spice-collectors). You only get to break an Alliance when the Shai-Hulud turns up. In between, you're stuck with your Ally. It's inconvenient. But you get to use each other's powers. That's cool. Choose carefully. Remember, the Fremen get advance warning when one of these is coming up. I guess I love Dune because it's far more about conversation than it is about counters or counting. Turns take a long time, but largely because everyone wants to talk to everyone else about everything. The Fremen check the next turn's Storm and Spice Blow and then people want to talk to them about what's coming up. Everybody bids for Treachery Cards and that means talking to Atreides (who knows what each card actually is). If Shai-Hulud appears, the entire game turns into a galactic summit as people wrangle and wheedle to get into or out of Alliances. Dune bears far more similarity to modern games like Root or Rising Sun than it did to most of the fiddly '70s games with their critical resolution tables or later 21st century games with their hosts of miniatures and rules for tactical movement. Maybe that's not surprising. Game designers Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge and Peter Olotka also created Cosmic Encounter, another classic '70s game that breaks all the conventions: no board as-such and completely asymmetric factions whose powers consist of being able to break the game's simple but immensely nuanced rules. Rising Sun and Root are defining 21st century 'heavy' board games, but owe so much to Dune with their beautiful but abstracted boards and simple but psychologically vexing combat mechanics; Cosmic Encounter is simply evil Cosmic Encounter shares another trait with Dune: it's a game that offers victory to the biggest bastard at the table. If you're a nice guy or girl, if you get on with your fellow players, if you socialise with each other outside of gaming, maybe enjoy the odd co-op game now and then ... go home and play with your kids. These games are not for you. These games are for people you hate. And you will hate yourself while playing them. But it will feel so good. The promotional postcard Avalon Hill should have included in Dune (corrected for gender balance) And this is, perhaps, a problem with Dune for me, now, middle aged, compared to the testosteronal young thruster I used to be. I like my fellow gamers too much to enjoy screwing them over the way Dune demands that they be screwed. They like each other too much. We all sat down last year and I introduced them to Cosmic Encounter and they engineered a draw!!! A draw!!! Why don't you just play Forbidden Island if you love each other so much? I muttered, suddenly missing the company of those adolescent semi-sociopaths who used to howl with laughter at the sight of fellow players being betrayed, ganged-up on and humiliated. Progress comes at a cost. So what happened to it, then, this perfect game? Cosmic Encounter is still on the shelves (Fantasy Flight picked it up back in 2007) but no sign of Dune... Who killed Dune? Well, it was the damned film, wasn't it? Designer Peter Olotka explains it like this:
It seems Avalon Hill hoped the Dune movie would be the next Star Wars and invested big on a new print run, unnecessary expansions (the game cannot be added to in any meaningful way), art and movie tie-ins - and lost big on the gamble. How very like playing Dune itself! Then there followed problems with Frank Herbert's estate. Avalon Hill retained the rights to the game design, but not the Dune IP itself. Avalon Hill flourished into the '90s (they invented Pogs!!!) but ended up getting devoured by Hasbro and are now moribund. Fantasy Flight hoovered up the Dune rules and re-skinned them as Rex, a game set in their (to my mind) rather flavourless Twilight Imperium universe. Rex takes Dune and shortens it to 8 manageable turns and replaces the charming, thematic board with a hideous, nonsensical one. Some changes are welcome. If Dune has a flaw, it's that it's simply too evil for modern sensibilities: every single player has to be working flat out to screw all the others all the time or things become unstable. In a 5-6 player game, you can cope with the odd snowflake (let him play the Guild or the Emperor), but the game lasts until everyone is too exhausted to keep hating, which is often a 4 or 5 hour game. In a 3-4 player game, it only takes one person with a fondness for poetry to hesitate over being cruel and then, oh no!, someone like Harkonnen has betrayed your Leaders, stolen your cities and won the game before the second turn is over. Rex balances the game so that people who don't have personality disorders can get a solid 2 hours of enjoyment out of it: no sudden defeats, no protracted grinds. But something distinctive is lost. Nonetheless, I'll be imposing a 10-turn cap in my classic Dune games from now on. Dune ended up becoming this 'holy grail' out-of-print game that changes hands for £100 or more on eBay. Reverential fans keep it alive and have produced some amazing PnP re-designs: Then there are hardcore fans with craft skills who make their own to-die-for boards and components: Squeeeeeeeeee! I've still got my 'classic' set (with a few pimped components) and I try to get it to the table once a year, to honour the dysfunctional adolescent I used to be. Researching this blog, I discovered that Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge and Peter Olotka originally pitched their game to Avalon Hill as a Roman Empire wargame called Tribute but re-skinned it for Dune. I wished I'd known that when I blogged about themes recently. Right enough, there's a generic, rather abstract, rules engine lurking under the desert sands of Dune. It's just hidden by great theming like the Bene Gesserit 'Voice' and Atreides prescience and the fact that the Emperor's crack Sardaukar units lose their double-tough bonus when up against Fremen units who aren't impressed by their undeserved rep. Now that I think about it, it's a bit surprising there aren't more fan-made Dune re-skins out there. It would translate well into Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or Game of Thrones (with 'Winter' instead of the Storm, moving south down the board instead of anticlockwise around it).
There's a project to get to work on. Samantha, cancel all my appointments! |
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