Under the influence

We live in a world now, where Influencer is a career. People build up huge numbers of followers on the various social media platforms, and have become honest-to-goodness celebrities. Every hobby and interest you can imagine has its own army of influencers and celebrities, and legions of devotees trailing behind them, hanging on their every word, waiting for them for to tell us what’s hot, what we should be wearing, eating, drinking – and playing. Board game Twitter and Instagram have huge numbers of followers, Tiktok is gathering steam, and even the stalwart of video game streaming – Twitch – is seeing huge growth in board gamers.

It’s always been the case that publishers gift copies of games to prominent names in return for reviews, previews, how-to-plays, and just general exposure. Over the last couple of years however, some publishers have taken it a step further, and are now hiring these same people to act as a presence for them. Organising their social media posts, drumming up support for Kickstarters, and liaising with their public and media contacts too.

It sounds like a match made in heaven. A fan-base with an already familiar face telling the world how good the games are. What could possibly go wrong?

Clique-bait

There’s a real danger inherent in this approach, and it lies with the influencers themselves. If you spend any amount of time following any of the prominent names on board game Twitter, you’re likely to see tempers flare, and lines drawn in the sand. There’s established bad blood between some people, and as is the case with human nature, people like to take sides. This leads to block-lists being created, and people actively ensuring they can never interact with people, just because of their implied association with others.

This isn’t just anecdotal either, I know this from experience. There are at least two very high profile names in the board game Twitterverse who have blocked me. I have never interacted with either of them. I can only assume that I’ve followed or replied to someone that’s on their hitlist, and I’ve been pre-emptively blocked. While it’s like water off a duck’s back to me, it’s just a small example of the type of division that exists. People disagree with others’ views, they fall out with other people, and some people just aren’t very nice. That’s life. But what does it mean for the people their employers want to reach?

People on Twitter and Instagram are told to curate their followers, often by these self-same influencers. “Make sure you don’t associate with these people, they are bad eggs”. Responsible calls-to-action like this add evidence of some kind, but I’ve seen plenty of occasions where die-hard fans will block anyone and everyone they’re told to, just because they’re told to. When it comes to people interacting with other people, this is fine. It is what it is, you’re never going to change human nature, so you either like it or lump it. When these people become the public faces of businesses though, that’s another matter. Does this famous face accurately represent their company, their ethics, and their ideals?

A case in point

The names here aren’t real, but the situation is. I do some review work with a publisher who has a social media personality organising their relationships with the media and the public. Let’s call this person Steve. I was talking to a good friend (Bob), who also does board game review work and is a much bigger deal than me, who had a eureka moment when we were talking. You see, Bob used to work very closely with this publisher, and had a long-standing, good relationship with them. However, in the distant past, Influencer Steve took a dislike to Bob, and caused them a great deal of trouble and upset. This same publisher more recently has had no contact with Bob, and Bob hasn’t been invited to preview The Big New Game. Coincidence?

Of course, it could just be coincidence. Maybe they want to move on with other people now instead, but even my spidey-senses are tingling in this situation. It certainly doesn’t feel like a coincidence. This is just one example, which I happened to stumble upon during an unrelated conversation. But it got me to wondering – how many other examples of situations like this must be happening all the time now? Do the publishers even realise it’s happening? Do they care?

Perhaps a better question is – How can this be made safer for publishers? I don’t know what’s involved with the hiring of a Bright Young Thing to represent them on social media, but I wonder how much vetting takes place. How far back in the person’s posting history do they go? Have they been involved in controversy in the past? Do they share their ethics and values? Do they ask them to openly declare any current problems or issues they have with any particular creators, influencers, other publishers? Maybe they do, and this was just an isolated incident, but a part of me doubts it.

Tread carefully

I think there’s a real risk for this blowing up in a publisher’s face, and I don’t think it’s far off happening. Of course, the situation could be reversed and it turns out someone at the publisher turns out to be a bad actor, but it’s easier for an Influencer to cut ties without bad financial and reputational damage being done. For them, it’s usually a side-gig, but for a publisher, there’s a real risk of a bigger impact. People will always come with baggage, we just need to make sure that baggage doesn’t prevent them from working in their new employer’s best interests.

I’ll end this by saying I know this isn’t the case across the board. I know some really good people who have roles like these, and they do an excellent job. When it works, it’s fantastic. My worry is for the people making our games, working against a worldwide pandemic, a global shipping crisis, wood shortages, increased costs at every step of the way. My worry is someone with their own agenda could alienate a group of people to such an extent that it sinks a publisher, or damages them irreparably. How much influence is too much influence?

The post Bad Influence – Social Media Personalities as Marketers? appeared first on Punchboard.

Having a quick look at BGG tells me there are over 20¹ board game adaptations of video games coming out in the next year or so. Go back ten years however, and you’re looking at around a quarter² of that, if you’re not counting Monopoly or Risk cash-ins (and I’m not). It’s a trend that only looks like it’s going to increase as time goes on, with video games set in concrete as the biggest entertainment industry³ in the world, and tabletop games seeing incredible growth recently, with no signs of slowing down⁴.

Filling a gap that isn’t there

The obvious and most cynical answer to the question “why do people make board games based on video games?”, is money. Video games are big business, tabletop games are worth billions, so it makes financial sense to try to use the big names and franchises in video games to boost sales of board and card games. Gamers also are often likely to enjoy both formats independently, and that’s easy money! That’s all well and good, we live in a world of rampant capitalism after all, but for me, as a board game fan, why should I be interested?

The beauty of a good video game is that it does something you can’t do in the real world. It can create worlds, stories, and experiences that cannot exist. A good game can put us in control of anything from an ant to the leader of an intergalactic empire. The worlds exist digitally, and we can be immersed in them. Board games offer an abstraction of these things. They give us puzzles, adventures, and mechanisms to explore, sure, but there’s a lot of investment from the players to create immersion in the theme, and in the worlds created.

Yet, despite the fact we already know that a tabletop game cannot give us this same level of immersion or experience as its digital counterpart, we throw our money at them regardless. Why? Familiarity is one of the main reasons. We love the original game and want a reminder of that, and a way of expressing that affection. Let’s have a look at some examples of what makes a board game version of a video game work, and where they can fall short.

The natural fit games

Turn-based strategy is the most natural fit when you’re looking at a genre of video game to try to translate to the dining room table. When you look at the likes of Civilization, you can see why. In both versions players are taking turns to build cities, to move units around the map, and to try to conquer the world. Sid Meier & Bruce Shelley (designers of the video game) and Francis Tresham (designer of the original Civilization board game) have tangled roots in the past anyway, but that’s a post for another day.

Then you get games like Awaken Realms’ adaptation of This War of Mine, which took a critically acclaimed video game and turned it into a game which as well as being excellent, also reached people with its message and theme. This review of the game, written by a survivor of the siege of Sarajevo, deserves your attention. The game adapted the strategy of its digital predecessor and was a hit, but it’s that word – ‘adapted’ – which is key.

Many of the other good tabletop adaptations are in the same vein: Age of Empires III, Starcraft, X-Com, Master of Orion, Cities Skylines. They’re a perfect natural fit and you can see them capturing the same feel as the video game they’re each based on, because there was already a feeling of scale and distance in the game they’re drawing from. By marrying good presentation and keeping the same base feeling of strategy – albeit handled differently – designers can encapsulate the familiarity that fans of the originals are looking for.

For example, Starcraft is a notoriously fast action video game, and the board game managed to capture the battle feel of swarms of opposing units, with cards. Then we’ve got Master of Orion, a grand scale, turn-based, space 4X video game, which became an engine-building board game. Smart decisions get made in adapting games like Superhot, which translates effortlessly from a time-based shooter into a card-aligning puzzle game, and makes you see the mechanism from the videogame in a new light.

It doesn’t always go so well though. In early 2021 a board game adaptation of Stardew Valley was announced and released, coming as a complete shock to everyone. There was no fanfare, no crowdfunding, no previews, just – “here you go, a new game”. I’ve not played it, as it’s only had a US release so far, but I’ve watched and read a lot of reviews, and two things stand out. Firstly, the theme and feel is there from the video game. It looks like Stardew Valley, and it captures the aesthetic of the much-loved game. The gameplay, however, appears to have far too much luck involved. I like a little bit of luck in a game, but it needs to be balanced. In Stardew Valley, luck is so baked-in that winning can become all-but-impossible with plenty of the game left to play. A quick look at the variants forum for the game on BGG shows the effort people are going to to fix the game already, so beloved is the franchise.

The “What? How? Why?” games

Then we have the games which really leave me wondering how they came into being. Dark Souls, Doom, Bloodborne, Gears of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn. Heavy action games that spawned turn-based tabletop games. Now, to be fair to at least a couple of those, they’re pretty decent games, but Dark Souls is the game I’ll use as an example here.

From Software’s Dark Souls is notoriously hard. It’s one of the things that people really appreciated about the video game, that you had to work at it to play well. The board game captures this feeling of difficulty – You’ll die. You’ll die a lot. Unfortunately, that’s where most of the similarities end. l asked a big Facebook board game group for their opinions on these games, and they mostly mirrored this, noting that what made the video game feel special is the way it rewarded careful exploration, and learning patterns, and that the board game is missing that experience.

This is the difficulty with making the transition from a screen to a table. Trying to capture what made a game feel special is very hard to do when that ‘special’ revolves around the movement, the ambience, and the world-building – especially in a first- or third-person game. Horizon: Zero Dawn’s board game had similar shortcomings, and although it has its fans, it was quickly forgotten and seldom recommended. The game is dragged-out and the variety of enemies and feeling of exploration – both key features of the video game – are absent.

Doing it well

The reason Doom and Gears of War did so well is because they don’t try to recreate the experience of the video game. Doom, for instance, was turned into what is basically a dungeon crawler. It’s ironic that capturing the frantic experience of a first-person shooter has best been done so far by games which don’t have a license but aim squarely at that goal – Adrenaline being the best-reviewed example.

Meanwhile Gears of War combined dice and cards in a clever way to build a sense of foreboding and tension, which was one of the key features of the video game: being up against it. Both did well because they drew on themes from the video games, but completely rewrote the styles of the games.

Another good example is the Kingdom Rush series. A tower defence game doesn’t initially sound like it’d find itself at home on a table, but when you boil it down to its essence, you can see why it works. Tower defence games, at their core, are a game of numbers. Enemies with a combined strength of X are going to move across the map in T units of time, and your towers deal Y damage per second. As long as you can deal enough damage in that timeframe, you’ll succeed. These are formulas you can recreate in a physical format. Kingdom Rush and the follow up, Rift in Time, are both great examples of an unexpected title which translates well to a physical game.

Games on the horizon

Things look as though they may be improving in the digital-to-physical realm in the near future. I’ve paid a lot of attention to Frostpunk, as I love the video game. From what I’ve watched and read about it, it sounds as though they’ve maintained that tense feeling of trying to survive the harsh weather, and force you to make difficult decisions about the plight of your people. Prison Architect seems to have made the right concessions about what it can and can’t do to ape its digital counterpart, and has one of my favourite designers (Dávid Turczi) heavily involved. After speaking to the project manager for the game, I have high hopes for it.

Even with these natural fit games though, people are still inclined to just throw money at a franchise just because of the name. Stellaris is a great space 4X video game which recently kickstarted a board game version. A space 4X is something board games do brilliantly – just look at Twilight Imperium or Eclipse – so you’d think Stellaris is an obvious choice. When the Kickstarter began it absolutely destroyed its goal in a few hours. They originally aimed for $50,000 and ended up raising just over 2.5 million. However, the majority of those pledges were made when there was no gameplay explanation, no videos, no rulebook to read through. There was just an explanation of the sort of game it intends to be, and a lot of renders of minis and cards.

Let that sink in. Without knowing the first thing about how a game will actually play, people pledged millions of dollars to a game based on its name, with its publisher (Academy Games) being relatively unknown unless you’re into wargames. That’s the power that these much-loved franchises have, and that’s where the danger lies. Get the right studio and designers behind an adaptation, and you can have something really special. If it goes the other way though, you can end up with a game which is wearing the right clothing, but swings and misses as an experience.

With a popular franchise’s name in their hands, publishers wield a huge amount of influence. My hope is that we see a continued drive to bring the feel of our favourite video games to the table, even if that means taking them in unexpected directions.

Special thanks to Dr Douglas Brown for his input and expertise.

¹ BGG link
² BGG link
³ Statista – entertainment industry value
⁴ Board games market outlook & forecast

The post From Screen to Table: Board Games of Video Games appeared first on Punchboard.

It might not be a thing that we really think about or talk about too often, but carefully trying to anticipate – and then deliver on – peoples’ expectations are a massive responsibility for a good board game host. It can be very easy to think “I love this game. I’m going to take this game to my group, and we’re going to play it, and it’s going to be awesome“, but there are some major potential pitfalls in doing this. I’m going to share my own experiences and recommendations here, so which groups are you likely to encounter, and what should you be mindful of?

1. Friends who don’t play board games

If you’re a board game fanatic like me, there’s often a part of you that wants everyone to share in the joy and excitement you take from these games. You’ve probably also had the same reaction that I have with some people. Even with lifelong friends, it can be really hard to bridge that divide between someone who loves cardboard, meeples and clever mechanisms (me), and people who have never played a hobby game (my friends). I’ve tried (and failed) to get people to engage with games I’d even consider to be lightweight. A lot of that is based around preconceptions, or a bad experience in their past.

For me, personally, there’s a running joke that I’m going to explain the rules to my friends, and they will ignore me. Then I’ll do it again, and they’ll do talk through it again, and laugh. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. Now in fairness, sometimes they’ll then engage when I get exasperated, but often it means I’ve lost them. Complicated rules – even if they sound simple to you – are a major turn-off. I’ll be revisiting this in a later post around teaching board games.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, you’re definitely not alone. This video by the Aunty Donna crew from Australia sums it up perfectly.

Some suggestions

When we’re allowed to see other humans in the same room again, post-lockdown, and you’re planning a games night with your friends, start simple, and build up. Take a selection of games, but make sure that at least a couple of them are on the very light end of the scale. I’m talking about some games lower than 2.00 weight rating on BGG. It’s very easy to look down on a lightweight game if you spend most of your time playing heavier stuff, but don’t do it.

There are some amazing games that you can play that require minimal rules explanations, simple goals, and intuitive gameplay. I’ve had great success with 6 Nimmt!, The Resistance, Citadels, and Cockroach Poker. Carcassonne is a fantastic example, as it plays really easily, and it’s easy to work on your own thing on the bit of the table you’ve innately claimed. But once the group get the hang of the rules, you start getting questions like “If I claim this road over here, then join it to his road, can I steal his points too?”, and their eyes light up when you explain that you can. It’s moments of understanding like this which open the door to other games. The roars of laughter when a convincing spy reveals their role after a win in The Resistance, or people laughing when you have to pick up a load of bull heads in 6 Nimmt! – that’s when you know you picked the right game.

2. Family

Families can be tricky to play games with, especially if you have a mix of generations playing. If you’re playing with parents or grandparents whose exposure to games is limited to Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit and Rummy, dial down your expectations accordingly. It’s very hard to offer recommendations here, as nobody knows your family like you do. You know the people who have no patience, or those with a vicious competitive streak. Only you know if being a table-flipping bad loser is in your gene pool.

In my own experience I’ve found that older generations are more likely to be engaged with card games. A lifetime of holding playing cards for various games means there’s often an immediate familiarity. That familiarity can be lost when people are faced with a board for something like Praga Caput Regni, which looks so confusing to a non-gamer, that they’re immediately daunted and disengaged before you’ve begun.

Some more suggestions

There are a ton of great card games out there which offer a sense of familiarity, as opposed to an imposing and confusing board. The Crew would be a quick teach to anyone who’s played a trick-taking game before, and I’d look at games like Love Letter, Condottiere, and I’d even go as far as Dominion if you get on with those. Mysterium and Dixit are also both excellent games that encourage talking, interpretation and engagement above the table.

Abstract and Dexterity games are another couple of types of games which easily cross generational boundaries, especially with children. The Azul games, for example, are so tactile and easy to learn. My experience of kids playing Azul (Summer Pavilion in my house) is that they’ll fixate on completing a pattern, or trying to collect all of their favourite colour. Dexterity games are almost always a hit with kids. Don’t be afraid to break out the Jenga (or Men At Work if you want something a bit more interesting), PitchCar, Meeple Circus, Rhino Hero (HABA make incredible kids games), or the perennial favourite in my house – Coconuts.

People, kids especially, like to make up their own rules and restrictions in games, and you know what – that’s okay. This is one of the most important things in my opinion, when it comes to playing games with different groups of people:

Let go of your expectations, and what you want, let the players enjoy the game.

Bold, underlined, and big text. That’s how important that bit is to me.

If you’ve got kids who want everyone to make a particular pattern in Azul, what’s the harm? If your other half has very particular ideas about quilts, and wants to house-rule Patchwork so that 1×1 tiles have to fill gaps in the middle first, go with it. Remember the two main reasons you’re playing with them in the first place. 1) You want everyone to have fun playing games with you, and 2) you want them to play again another time. There’s a time and a place for being strict on the rules, and it’s not always here. Usually, it’s in this next group.

3. Your regular games group

Heck, you know this lot by now. Bring out whatever works well, whatever people want to play. Run a poll, draw straws, have fun. The idea of having a regular group is that you can play all of these games without the concessions you might make in the examples above. There is an exception to this though…

4. Your regular games group – but there’s someone new

If someone new turns up to your group, try your best to make that person/people feel welcome. It can be a really daunting thing, to step into a room for the first time and be faced with a group of people you’ve never met. Some people face real anxiety in situations like this. With any luck they’ll have talked to you via email or some kind of chat, so you’ll have a rough understanding of what their level of experience is, and their likes and dislikes.

Unless they’ve already told you otherwise, I’d avoid going for anything with a take-that! mechanism. It might be the case that every week you and your crew beat seven shades out of each other in your favourite game, but it doesn’t mean someone else is happy doing that straight away. Even when you’re with people you’ve known all your life, you only need one bad day and it’s easy to feel picked-on or victimised. It’s not a good first impression for someone new. Talk to them, try to grasp their level of experience, and make sure you don’t pick something too daunting.

Get them involved

A co-op game is a great idea here, it makes people feel like they’re part of a team, and that new person gets to go home knowing they helped you solve that Pandemic, or find the killer in Mysterium. If they like Euro games, pick something that matches their level of experience. Finishing the night with a game of Just One is perfect. It’s super-light, co-operative, and usually raises a few good laughs. Whatever happens, your aim here is to make that person feel like they had a fun time with new friends. If it means putting your epic legacy campaign off for a week or two, so be it. There are still a hundred different ways to have fun with your games collection.

In summary

Please bear in mind that this is all based on my own experiences over the years. These are not hard and fast rules, these are things I try to bear in mind whenever I’m going to play games with different people. There are a ton of other situations I can think of, but I think the ones above cover the gamut of the most-likely situations you’ll encounter.

The trick, if you’re as obsessed with games as I am, is to take a breath. Relax, and accept from the outset that in all likelihood, in most of the situations above, you aren’t going to be playing a competitive game of Tawantinsuyu, or Root, or whatever your favourite heavyweight game is. Heck, even medium weight games might be too much for most of them. Just tailor your expectations, use some empathy, and remember that above all else:

If you want someone to play games with you again, do your best to make sure they have a good time.

Thanks for reading folks, hopefully there’s something in there you can take with you and bear in mind in the future. If you have any good hints from your own experience, feel free to comment here or find me on my socials, linked to at the top of the page.

The post Know Your Audience appeared first on Punchboard.

What is an automa?

Let’s start at the beginning. What is an automa? You might have seen the term thrown about a lot in the last year or so, as the pandemic forced people to search for solo options. An automa is a simulated opponent for a board game, who the player controls, usually with a deck of cards. The term was coined by the famous automa designer, Morten Monrad Pedersen. While working on the solo mode for Viticulture (a wine-making game set in Italy), someone suggested the name ‘automa’, the Italian word for automaton. The name stuck, and he founded the Automa Factory, a company that board game developers can contract to create solo modes for their games.

Sometimes you’ll hear these solo opponents referred to as AI. Although it means largely the same thing, there’s a small, but subtle difference. In my opinion anyway. An automa tends to be an opponent who doesn’t need, or use, things like resources in games. Their actions more often instruct the player to give the automa some kind of reward from the game (e.g. give place a building on their behalf), but not by collecting and spending the resources. Instead, through clever playtesting, the rate the automa takes these thing to compete with, or impede the human, roughly mirrors a real opponent. AI opponents on the other hand, usually collect and spend resources, just like a real person. It’s a subtle, but important difference.

Automated opponents – What are your options?

Let’s start this off with looking at three of the best automated opponents, and their designers.

Automa Factory

I’ve already mentioned Automa Factory above, so let’s start there. The majority of the titles they’ve worked on are for Stonemaier Games. Automa Factory games work with a deck of cards that are split into two halves. By matching the right-side of the left card to the left-side of the right card when the two are placed side by side, you’re given a prioritised list of things to do. If the automa can do the first thing, do that, if not, read the next one down, and so on. Other parts of the cards often give you other things to do at the end of a round, or symbols may tell you when the automa passes, ready for the next round. For the next turn, the card on the left slides over the one on the right to replace it, and a new one is dealt next to it. Simple.

Automa Factory games are really easy to run, with very little fuss. I don’t think I could pick a single recommendation, because a lot of it comes down to the theme of the game you want to play. If you want a traditional ‘turn one thing into another thing’ euro, go for Viticulture: Essential Edition. If you want something with a bit more theme, look to the smash hit, alternate history, Euro-in-mechs-clothing Scythe. And if you want something a bit ‘friendlier’ on the table, check out the bird-attracting, tableau-building, eggcellent (sorry) Wingspan. My own personal favourite Automa Factory game is Gaia Project, which is a fantastic game of space exploration and empire-building which I really need to review (note to self).

The Automa Factory games provide a really good opponent, and the scores, turns and interactions really duplicate the feel of playing against a human. It’s already at the stage where spotting their logo on a game is almost a guarantee of a good solo version.

Garphill Games

In a lot of Garphill games there’s a solo mode, and more often than not, it’s against an excellent automated opponent. The West Kingdom games in particular, really manage to capture the feel of playing against a human opponent. Shem and Sam work together in an iterative process to refine the solo mode, until we get the finished product in the box. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I love both Paladins of the West Kingdom and Viscounts of the West Kingdom. Solo play in these games is similar to Automa Factory, in as much as the opponent’s actions are determined by flipping a card. Things get more clever from here though.

Both of those games use one of the player boards, flipped over, for the special AI modes. Paladins gives three different setups, for easy, medium and hard difficulty levels, which is great. Viscounts on the other hand, has four different AI boards, each of which concentrates its efforts on one of the main scoring mechanisms in the game. It really feels like playing against different personalities. It also has to collect and spend resources, just like I do, and this makes things feel fair. I’m not too proud to admit I’ve had a few ‘Ha! Screw you!” moments when the AI hasn’t been able to afford something really good.

The scores are comparable to playing against a person, and the gameplay feels like playing against someone. Importantly, they are very easy to run. Once you’ve played against them once, you won’t need the rule book to play solo again. That’s especially important in a game as heavy as these, as you need your brain to work out what the heck you’re going to do, never mind running a complex opponent too.

Dávid Turczi

Dávid’s been brought in to create solo modes in a lot of different games over the years, as well as creating a few games that are completely of his own design. I’ve covered one of each of these, in my Teotihuacan and Tawantinsuyu reviews, respectively. His solo designs are unique, and I really like how they work.

If we take a look at Anachrony and Tawatinsuyu (both completely his own design), the opponents really are AIs. They even have names! In Anachrony you square-off against Chronobot (now being replaced with Chronossus in an expansion), and in Tawantinsuyu you fight for victory against Axomamma. In both, the AI has a custom player board, numbered tokens, and a special die. You roll the die, find the numbered token that matches, carry out the action, and then move the token along. In both games though, the AI needs to gain and spend the resources to carry out its actions. It’s a really clever way of running things, and shows how much work must go into development, balancing the mathematics of chance with the die rolls.

Both of those examples look far more intimidating when you first set them up, than they actually are to run. Thanks to clear rules and good iconography, you won’t need the rule book again to figure out what they’re doing. Much like with the Garphill Games, this is really important, as these games are heavy enough at the best of times.

Worth getting just to play by yourself?

If you’re asking about any of the games I mentioned above, then yes, absolutely. Every game I’ve mentioned so far is an excellent option for solo gamers, and I either have, or would, pay just to play them alone. The reasons the first two systems above work so well, is because although they make you step down through a series of priorities on each turn of a card, the actions are always easy to carry out. There’s very little in the way of calculation or deduction to do, so the automa’s turns pass quickly.

Things aren’t always so good though, and I think it’s worth highlighting what makes for a disappointing solo opponent, in my opinion. I’ve not played against an automated opponent yet that’s outright bad, but there’s one thing that can really sour things for me, and that’s making the automa’s turn take longer than mine.

The culprits

I should preface this section by saying that this is entirely my opinion, and that in both cases I absolutely love both of the games below. Seriously, they’re very good games. The issue for me is the amount of time I need to spend referring to rule books, or performing mental arithmetic during the AI’s turns. As I mentioned above, when you’re playing a game which requires strategy, planning, and thought, the last thing you need to be doing is two things at once. I speak from experience as a parent who’s spent a lot of time in the last year trying to do a demanding full-time job, and home-school an eight-year-old at the same time.

Clans of Caledonia

Clans of Caledonia is a fantastic game. There’s a reason why it sits so high in the BGG rankings, and why it gets recommended to Euro game fans all of the time. Out-of-the-box, Clans comes with a beat-your-own-score mode which is functional, but nothing special. In a game about expanding your control over a shared map, and influencing market prices between players, it doesn’t really do it justice. A special automa was brought out after release, which players can download and print for free (there’s also a digital version). The problem with it though is how tricky it is to run.

Some actions it carries out are pretty easy, but others feel like a test. I challenge anyone to resolve its Expand action without thinking about it. The same goes with certain market actions, the calculations you have to carry out to see how much money the automa takes, if any, are like school homework. It doesn’t mean the solo mode is bad, far from it, the scoring and interaction is very good. It’s just very high maintenance, and in my experience I spent longer carrying out its turns than my own. It should be the opposite.

Merv

Yep, the same Merv I reviewed and really like. The solo mode is really good, and very tough to beat, but I found myself keeping the rulebook open on the solo rules to work out its choices and placements over and over again. In a game with only 12 turns each, it felt like a lot. I really like the solo mode, but it definitely needs a something to make it smoother.

If you’ve not read the review yet, each turn takes place in a specific order, and as well as moving yourself and the Corrupt Magistrate (your opponent), you also both control a third player, called the High Courtier. It’s like some kind of messy divorce, with you and the Magistrate saying “well this time I’m placing him, you can have your turn next time”. There’s a tricky set of rules of precedence to decide where the automa places his and the High Courtier’s buildings, and I end up checking the rules for it every, single, turn.

Of course, that might just say more about me than the game, but I think it could really have done with some kind of player aid or reference for it. If there was a good player aid on a board, I don’t know if this game would even have been included here.

Just to reiterate that neither of the games above are bad. Far from it. The solo opponents both play a very good game too but for players new to solo games, the experience could be off-putting compared to something like an Automa Factory game.

Solo gaming – a summary

Hopefully you know a little more about what makes an automa tick now. I can’t begin to understand how people can create them, but I’m extremely grateful that they have. Between these and beat-your-own-score modes, there are a lot of really good solo options out there now which don’t feel like a disappointing compromise.

There’s a growing list of people whose names alone are enough to convince me the solo mode will be worth playing, and it’s already becoming an expectation among the board game community that a solo mode should be in a new game. I’m already seeing complaints in Kickstarter campaigns when big-name games are being funded without a solo mode. Solo mode designers even have their own section on a game’s credits on BGG now.

Some games will never work for solo. Social deduction, auction games, take-that mechanics, party games – there’s a big list where it just isn’t viable. But there’s enough good stuff out there now, and far more on the way, to make solo board gaming an excellent hobby to take up. I’ve seen some people turn their nose up at it, scoff, and ask “what’s the point of a solo board game? It won’t be any good. I can just play a video game“. Yes, you can. I do too. However, a lot of the strategy games that people will spend years of their lives playing on a computer are just running the same branching decisions and algorithms that we’ve got in board games now. But with a board game we have the added bonus of being able to look away from a screen, to play with something tactile, warm, and personal. It’s not a compromise, it’s a choice.

If you have any questions or comments, please just leave a message below, or scroll to the top of the page and find me on social media. I’ll be more than happy to talk to you (exhaustively!) about solo games.

The post Solo Modes In Board Games – Part Two (Automa) appeared first on Punchboard.

Solo gaming is nothing new. Our parents and grandparents spent countless hours playing various card and tile games on their own. Confused? Think about it – Solitaire, Mahjong, Freecell, Spades. While these are still great games (and free to play with those links above), things have moved on. During this, and the next couple of blog posts, I’m going to take a look at the options available for the solitaire gamer, the systems used, the games that do it well, and those that don’t.

In the next post, I’ll be looking at AI and automa opponents in games, but for now let’s get stuck in with the first part: solo games where the aim is to…

Beat your own score

Ever since the early coin-op cabinets like Space Invaders, chasing the elusive high score has been a goal for game players the world over. The majority of modern board games use a scoring concept in one form or another, usually named Victory Points (VPs), so it seems like a natural fit to create a solo mode which has you try to beat your own best score.

Board games with this option usually have one common feature. More accurately, they have one common omission – an opponent. Beat your own score solo modes normally build in some kind of round or turn limitation. Without this, it would be very difficult to make a balanced game, as one play might see you take more turns than another, giving you a better chance of getting a better score.

Let’s look at some examples.

The good

In my opinion, the best designer of beat-your-own-score modes is Uwe Rosenberg. The brain behind seminal classics like Agricola and Caverna, right through to modern hits like Nusfjord and Hallertau. He has a signature way of creating his solo modes.

There’s no automa opponent, but you take extra workers (his games are often worker placement games). You alternate between placing your two sets of workers on alternate rounds, but the previous set of workers remain on the board, blocking spaces and limiting your options. In Nusfjord for example, this means you have plan building fishing boats carefully, as there’s only one place to do it on the board. Use it this round, and you can’t use next round, because your worker will be left there. Of course, there’s always the ‘copy an action’ action space, but what if you wanted to use that for something else? Arrrgh! Darn you, me!

It’s clever, because it feels like you’re playing against an opponent, but you aren’t. That annoying git who’s blocking the spot you want, is you, from a round ago. For some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, I really like his approach. It’s a bit like being given a puzzle to do, but being told that you can make up most of the rules. I find Uwe’s games compulsive, and chasing a score doesn’t feel like a tacked-on option. It feels like a good enough reason to buy the games, knowing that you’ll only play it solo most of the time. In fact, I would rather play the solo campaign mode of Nusfjord than play the normal game with more people. High praise indeed.

Terraforming Mars by Jacob Fryxelius is an example of a designer realising that their usual game wouldn’t work by making the player just play the base game with no changes. Instead, they introduced a solo challenge mode, which revises the rules for setup and starting conditions, and challenges the player to complete the terraforming in 14 turns. If you don’t manage it, you lose, but if you do, then you’re aiming for the highest score you can manage. Now let’s have a look at what happens when a designer doesn’t make the necessary changes to the game.

The… not-so-good

‘Bad’ would have been the wrong word to use. I’ve yet to play a truly bad solo mode. But there are a few which don’t do beat-your-own-score as well as the others. One such game, is actually a game I really, really like, and reviewed here recently – Praga Caput Regni. I love Vladimir Suchy’s games, his designs are brilliant, but the solo for this one was disappointing.

The default solo mode in the box has you playing the game without any other players, which the mechanisms allow. The problem though, is that without any other players, some actions become all but pointless. For example, placing buildings around a plaza in the town rewards bonuses when a plaza is surrounded. When multiple players are placing the buildings, that’s great, as there are lots of buildings going around lots of plazas. In the default solo game, if you place the buildings yourself it’s very difficult to surround even just one good plaza. So why would you bother?

There’s a downloadable opponent for the game (I made a digital version here), which is both good and bad. Good, because it places buildings down, so you can score with plazas, but bad because it feels like it’s an automa opponent, but it isn’t. It doesn’t score points, and you don’t compete with it for a win or loss, which is a shame. Don’t get me wrong, Praga Caput Regni is a brilliant game, and I love it, it’s just the solo mode which is disappointing. It’s an example of where beating your own score isn’t as simple as the designer saying ‘Play the game as normal and see what you can score’, because the loss of an opponent means you can’t play the game as normal.

The others

There are some games which don’t really fit into the two areas above, and that’s because they’re designed for either one player, or loads of players.

When it comes to games made for one player, you’d do well to find a better example than Nemo’s War: 2nd Edition, which I reviewed last year. It does have a win/lose condition, whereby you have to make it to the finale card and complete it, but if you manage that, then there’s a score to compute. Scores are based on the motivation you picked at the start of the game, and multipliers are used to score the things that thematically match that motivation higher than those that don’t. This is taken one step further by giving you an epilogue book in the box. When you finish the game, you find the section in the book that matches your score, and it finishes off the story you’ve created over the last hour or two. It’s a great example of solo scoring done well.

Maybe surprisingly, there’s a whole heap of games that can be played with huge player counts, which work perfectly for solo, beat-your-own-score play. Many of them are roll and write games. The reason they work so well is because the game is played identically in most cases, whether you’re playing by yourself or with ten others. I’m talking about games like the Clever series (all players playing the solo mode, copying the communal dice) which include Ganz Schön Clever (review here) and others like Metro X, Railroad Ink, Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade. There are a few others in this vein that don’t automatically work, because the game involves interaction between players. Cartographers is a great example of this, but overcomes it by introducing a solo mode with modified rules.

Would you enjoy beat-your-own-score?

I’ve heard quite a few people say they won’t play this type of solo mode in a game. That’s fair enough, it’s not going to be for everyone. However, there’s a chance some of you have just had a disappointing experience with the ones you’ve tried so far, and some of you who wouldn’t even consider it. My advice would be:

1. Try an Uwe Rosenberg game. Specifically, Nusfjord if you can get hold of it. This time last year, you could have picked it up for less than £20 in the UK (I know, because I did), so you should be able to buy it for less than the bigger games like Hallertau or A Feast For Odin. Play a game or two to get the hang of it, then play the campaign mode from the back of the rule book. It’s a really chilled-out game, the boards are completely modular, so you can get it on just about any table, and it’s a great game in its own right.
   
   
2. Try Ganz Schön Clever. You can get it for less than £15, it’s simple enough that you could get your parents playing with you after dinner one night, and it’s a tiny box that won’t take up too much precious shelf space. The wooden dice, little pens, tear-off score sheets – everything about the game is just really charming.
   
   
3. Go digital. There some great apps for computers and phones & tablets, which are digital adaptations of some of the games I’ve talked about. If you’re not sure whether you want to buy Terraforming Mars, spend a few pounds on the digital version and you can try the solo mode. You’ll also be able to play it online with your friends, or experience the normal game against some AI players. The same goes for the Clever games, and Cartographers, the apps are great implementations that let you try the game without paying for the full physical version first. If you enjoy them, I’d still recommend getting the physical versions, so that when we can meet actual human beings again soon, you can share the enjoyment with them.
   

Let me know what your favourite beat-your-own-score game is in the comments below, it might be a new favourite for me. I’ll be back with part two soon, where I’ll be taking a look at automa / AI opponents.

The post Solo Modes In Board Games – Part One appeared first on Punchboard.