Two iPhone Knizia Games: Poison
There’s a pair of Rainer Knizia games currently available in the App Store. Both are based on already existing physical games, neither of which I’ve ever played, but seeing Knizia’s name attached to anything is enough to pique my interest. Add to that instant availability, portability, a low price, and remove the need for another physical human opponent and the purchase becomes a no-brainer. I bought both games, Poison (iTunes link) and Knights of Charlemagne (iTunes link), and have been playing them over the course of the last week. Some impressions follow.
Poison was made by Griptonite Games and at $2.99 is the more expensive of the two (as opposed to $1.99) if you consider three dollars “expensive.” It’s also the more polished overall since it’s produced by a full-on game studio (Griptonite is a part of Foundation 9, which also has the fantastic Backbone Entertainment) and not by one guy.
Poison’s premise is simple. Four to six players are dealt specially designed cards spanning three colours and covering the values 1,2,3,5,7. There’s also a green “wild” card that is valued at 4, but I’ll get to that later. During each turn you are required to play a card into one of the matching coloured cauldrons. If, after placement, the total value of the cards in that cauldron is greater than 13 that player claims all cards from it save for the one they just played. These cards are removed from play and counted, each is worth one point. The goal is to have the lowest score at game’s end, after the last card has been played.
Having the lowest score does not, however, mean having the fewest cards. There are two special conditions: first, the player with the most cards of a specific colour negates that score. In other words, if you have 8 blue cards and everyone else has 2 or 3, you score 0 while everyone else scores 2 and 3, respectively; secondly, each green “poison” card, which can be played into any coloured cauldron, counts as two points. You definitely do not want to be stuck with these.
That’s where the give and take of the game happens. Depending on your hand, you can either try to take nothing or try to take the most of one colour (maybe two if you’re ambitious, but this too is harder) since neither of these scores you points. But if you try to focus on one colour, and if anyone else was eyeing it, chances are the other players are going to poison that cauldron. Each turn you have to decide what high or low card to play and which to hold on to (you don’t want to get stuck in a situation where you have to take something you don’t want; always try to keep safe outs), and manage the risk and reward of the poison cards. It’s a fairly simple game but a very well balanced one and one that has a decent amount of strategic thought. In some ways, it’s reminiscent to Hearts.
The iPod version does a good job with the actual card playing, and the drag card to a cauldron interface feels fine, but it offers very little on top of that. The only available options are a mute button and the choice of how many computer controlled opponents to play against. That’s it. The AI is competent and puts up a good fight, but with only one difficulty level it does start to feel a bit same-y after a few games. The absence of any multiplayer, local or otherwise, further adds to the repetitious nature of Poison. I believe that games like this would benefit greatly from even a basic goal, aka. achievement, structure. The added incentives those provide might be minor but they do encourage a little more play variety.
Poison feels very temporary. It doesn’t keep a record of past games, or any play history, so it feels a great deal like a quick distraction. At $3 that’s not a problem, but you can’t help but wish that there was more to it.
Knights of Charlemagne pseudo-review to come, but it’s worth saying, slight spoiler, that it is the game that I return to more often.
Also, those interested in App Store boardgame versions should note that award winning game Zooloretto (iTunes link) is now available.
Conflict-free Competition
As I plunge deeper into the world of (mostly German) boardgames I develop a new perspective on my long entrenchment in the videogame world. Their game designs and themes are a breath of fresh air relative to the constant frustrations and repetitiveness that competitive videogames are providing. The highest rated and most popular of these games (according to BoardgameGeek), Puerto Rico and Agricola, are especially profound because they are highly competitive without ever having direct conflict.
Take Agricola for example. This is a game about growing a seventeeth-or-so century farm by planting grain, breeding livestock, having kids, and taking on side jobs. This is a solitary job. You mind your own business. The closest there is to any interaction with any other farmers is when each of your family members does an “action” that claims a resource or ability from a shared, global supply (basically, the town.) Once something is claimed no other player can take it for that turn, but they can do anything else that is available. This is what I mean by a lack of conflict. You can’t go into the other player’s farm and burn their crops, or poison their cows, or have sex with their wife. Their farm is theirs alone and whatever they build or do there, with those common resources, is theirs and theirs alone. This might sound like a boring rule-set for a multiplayer game, but it is surprisingly competitive, strategic, and fun.
While there is no direct interaction between players, everyone is competing to create the best farm in the allotted number of turns. The challenge, and all the strategy, emerges from how you use the shared, and limited, global supply. As an Agricola player you need to be aware of what everyone else is doing, what you think they are trying to do, and, more importantly, how this might affect what you need to accomplish your goals. If everyone is constantly accumulating wood to build pastures and stables and new rooms for their house, it might be more beneficial to change your plans towards growing grain and gathering the clay that everyone else is busy ignoring. Of course the nuances of Agricola are far more complex than this and require a lot more writing to properly explain, but the basic idea is just that: manage the resources you need to grow your farm and feed your family amidst a dynamic market, trying to anticipate other player’s needs and the demands they create. It’s, basically, an economic game without the money. It’s also really fun.
I try to think of equivalent designs in the modern videogame world, especially in the commercial spectrum, and I can’t think of one popular, competitive multiplayer game that is strategic with no direct conflict. Not a one[1]. The genre is dominated by shooters (war, violence), fighting games (violence), real time strategy games (war, violence), and turn based strategy games that, too, are often war based. If there are equivalents, they are obscure. It’s a single-minded market.
Amongst some people, there is talk of so-called Ludonarrative Dissonance, about how videogames have a hard time conflating the mechanics of a system with the narrative elements behind the motivations in it. It’s a fine challenge to tackle, but it seems to me to be a lesser issue than the overall thematic bankruptcy that is present. As technology advances, allowing for improved dynamic situations and presentation and control, the vocabulary developers have at their disposal increases. But if it’s applied to nothing but more elaborate ways to shoot people in the face, what’s the point? You are still using the exact same metaphors as one of the oldest videogames: SpaceWar!
This is why boardgames are so fascinating. Free of those technological advances they’re forced to explore mechanics and rule-sets and player interactions rather than new ways to present the same thing. Granted, it’s a specialized market with an audience (and publishers) that’s seemingly willing to try new things. From the boardgamers I’ve met, it’s also generally an older market, one that’s not obsessed with the blockbuster fly-by-wire explode everything attitude that permeates every pore of the videogame biz[3]. That’s not to say that boardgames are without their own set of problems, but not having billions of dollars at stake every year certainly minimizes them.
Market demands and audience considerations are good excuses for a little while, but videogames already are big enough to allow for diversity. There are developers, and scenes, that focus on niche markets and do so with success. So why is it that even they, when creating multiplayer games, stick to the same metaphors of conflict?
Perhaps the general consensus amongst videogame publishers is that non-violent multiplayer games can’t be as exciting, and can’t sell as well[3], as their war-mongering counterparts. Maybe they think there could never be enough competition, excitement, betrayal, surprise, defeat, skull-daggery, and general griefer-worthy assholeishness in a game without direct conflict. But the last year’s worth of news out of Wall Street tells a different story. It’s a tale of a system corrupted from the inside by the scheming, cheating, gaming of a few powerful and greedy individuals. If this is not prime material for a videogame, I don’t know what is.
So all this might have been the build-up for a self-serving question, because this is something that I want to play, but I have to wonder: in this economic climate, where are all the economic games?[4]
- Not counting things like global leaderboards and indirect competition like that. I’m talking specifically about multiplayer games based on such mechanics.
- There’s a culture of one-upmanship that occurs in the battle for those dollars: every big million seller needs to be topped by an even bigger one.
- Settlers of Catan has sold over 15 million units over its life. Suck on that Killzone.
- This is why I’m curious and excited about Cities XL.
Essen Spiel Report, Part Two
After discovering that I missed half of the bloody show, I started wandering some more. These lost halls were quite a bit different, in content and atmosphere, from the big boardgame publisher halls. They were the Kentia Hall equivalent for boardgames. Here you’d find all sorts of games by small game makers and two-person companies looking to get noticed. This is where all the comics were stashed, which I ignored. There were also a few jewelry and knick-knack sellers here which I thought weird until I came across the stalls with full-on LARP gear. Holy shit was this stuff weird.
I readily admit to being a geek, but there’s a hierarchy to this. Boardgame players -> German boardgame players > non-German German boardgame players that download translations for untranslated games that they imported -> war gamers -> CCG players -> miniature players -> RPG gamers -> LARPers. The LARPers are at the bottom of the geek totem: I’m allowed to shake my head with an air of snobby superiority when I see them. Here, in these halls, my neck was sore from shaking at all the grown men wearing cloaks, vikings, women in renn-faire dress, and some chubby furry cat thing.
Absinthe, liqueur, drinking horns and a viking.These halls were their Mecca, full of stalls selling all sorts of fake swords and armour and shields and pendants and drinking horns and helmets and archery supplies and cloaks. There even was a retailer selling all sorts of bottles of absinthe and other LARP-approved liqueurs. It was all oddly curious, from an anthropological point of view, but this clearly wasn’t the place for me so I headed out to Mayfair Games’ booth where I could do something far less nerdy: play a boardgame with complete strangers.
Lonely archery shop in the corner.I sat down to play “The Dutch Golden Age” with a pair of Norwegian guys and a Mayfair demonstrator. Mayfair, of course, is one of the large American importers that localizes and publishes German games for domestic audiences. Chances are, if you play these boardgames, you have one of their published titles: they’re the ones that brought over hugely popular “Settlers of Catan” (and my personal favourite “Tigris and Euphrates.”)
“The Dutch Golden Age” mostly reminded me of “Puerto Rico,” but I say that primarily because my vocabulary for boardgames is still relatively nascent and I don’t have too many frames of reference for this. I don’t know how to classify these games by their mechanics and general themes, but if there’s a genre that contains “Puerto Rico” it would contain “The Dutch Golden Age” too. Maybe. The goal of the game is to reach a target amount of victory points, which can be acquired by investing money in colour coded fields like trade (build ships, import spices) or culture (sponsor the arts) or politics. Everything is played on a fixed board representing several Dutch provinces, each reflecting one of the mentioned fields, that you can control by placing people markers on them. Once you control them, and you can’t lose that ownership, you can buy an action — if you have the money for it — that can get you bonuses and/or victory points.
“The Dutch Golden Age”.Securing a new province (you start with one) requires you to position several people there first. The catch is that to do so you first need to acquire them and then move them into place. This takes money and time away from building out your other resources, the ones that more directly lead to victory points, but can lead to more money in the long term and more available actions. Additionally, there are guilds that you can finance so that you can buy actions without owning the proper coloured provinces. The guilds are essential since they’re, in the short term, cheaper than securing a province but can be a lot more expensive since they are available to the highest bidder. To further open things up, any available actions that you do have, be it on a province or through a guild, but have no use for can be auctioned off to the other players to raise some extra funds.
There were some interesting mechanics at work and they became far more evident as the game progressed, but by then I realized that I made a few mistakes. I had focused on art, but not strongly enough to get any benefit from it, and my backup plan was too dependent on luck to create a proper strategy. I was short on money and power and I would have been out of the game if not for a handful of fortuitous card draws. That’s what I didn’t like about the game the most: there was a fairly prominent random element. It wasn’t overpowering, strategy was still needed, but it was strong enough to be a potential hindrance to good decisions or a reward despite bad choices. That’s the thing I love the most about “Puerto Rico”: there’s no luck of the draw and it’s a tighter, more focused experience.
Still, if you’re looking for something new “The Dutch Golden Age” isn’t a bad choice. It seems a little excessive at times, but I can see how it can become varied and interesting and the bidding and auctioning mechanics do make it somewhat more social than “Puerto Rico.”
Once we had a sense for the game, we all agreed to call it a match. The two Norwegians headed off one way and I stepped over to the next table to observe, from behind people’s shoulders, another game being played.
“Sutter’s Mill”Essen Spiel Report, Part One
I arrived at my hotel in Essen, conveniently right next to the station, at a quarter past noon. I was ten minutes late. After spending six and a half hours in stations and on trains (I was in the Metro station at a quarter to six in the morning), there was nothing that I wanted to do more than lie down and rest. That, however, would have wasted the reason why I was there. I dropped off my bags in my room, made use of the facilities and headed back to the Hauptbanhoff.
There I purchased an all-inclusive ticket, admission into the Messe Essen Convention Centre and two way fare, and hopped on the U-Bahn 11. It’s always amazing to me, after growing up in Mississauga (a sprawling suburban city of 700,000,) that there are cities in the world that are smaller but with proper metro transit service and even underground rail. I realize that cities in Europe are more condensed and have more history to allow for this sort of thing but it is a strong reminder of Mississauga’s poor planning. I return there in a week I’m already here, sadly.
Anyway, Spiel 08! Boardgames! Outside of the Messe Ost station I knew I was in the right place. A large number of very Teutonic-looking people were milling around in their Teutonic-ways. There were long jackets, cigarettes, and long brown pony tails. Some were wearing cloaks. An old balding jedi passed by.
Spiel EntranceI entered the Messe and, instantly, I was awestruck by boardgames. Oh so many, many boardgames. There were large booths with giant signs advertising Roskothen and Eggertspiele and ASS Altenburger and SechserPasch and other German companies that I had never heard of before but were, judging the size of their banners, somewhat important in the German boardgame market. Other more-familiar posters promoted Catan and Carcassone and games that I knew by name but never played. There were tables everywhere, all filled with people playing games, and those that couldn’t find any were playing on the floor. Numerous retailers adorned the hall, selling hundreds of games at special show prices. Just to the right of the entrance was a wall of boardgames, all for sale, of a scale and variety I have never before witnessed. I think in this one corner there were more modern boardgames than in all the hobby stores in Toronto combined. This from a single retailer in a show that had many, many more strewn across a dozen halls. I knew the temptation to buy things would overwhelm me.
For the first hour or so I wandered hall to hall, camera in tow, taking it all in. There were many new games from companies I didn’t know advertised in a language I did not understand. The old stand-bys were ever present, as one would expect, but they had strange and unusual variants on show. There was an odd Deutch version of Catan that was played on a massive, fixed board (the regular game board is created from an arrangement of tiles) with new German landmark pieces. I never learned how those worked. Carcassone had an expansion featuring a physical catapult. I never figured that one out either.
Odd Catan variant“Keltis” seemed quite popular throughout, being played across all the halls. Only later did I learn that it was a Reinier Knizia game (instant interest from me) and that it was this year’s Spiel des Jahres winner. Had I previously known this I would have sought out a demonstration. Oh well. “Comuni” and “Agricola” seemed popular too. Czech boardgames were getting all sorts of buzz, including the generic sounding “Space Alert”. In that regard, I did notice quite a few space-themed games there, from the licensed Battlestar Galactica boardgame to the unusual “Duck Dealer.” I thought that the German boardgame industry had milked all historical themes for all their worth, so it was focused on the future, but there were multiple feudal Japan themed games present so clearly there’s still some new old ground to tread.
Battlestar Galactica boardgameAnother part of the floor seemed to have a number of licensed games like World of Warcraft, Starcraft (a bit of an old game, that) and Battlestar Galactica. There were collectible card games here and there and a bunch of videospiel retailers strewn around. Occasionally you’d see a demo station for videogames. They were, almost exclusively, DS and PC games. There was one exception: an EA Wii demo station in Hasbro’s massive booth showcasing a Monopoly game.
I stopped at Bezier Games’ booth since they were the first demonstrators that I heard speaking in English. They had a version of the party/conference game werewolf, “Ultimate Werewolf”, for sale as well as a poker-based card game with a bidding mechanic called “Rapscalion.” Werewolf is quite popular amongst some geek conference crowds so it’s interesting to see a publisher jump on that to provide a boxed, illustrated, codified version of it, but a game that ideally requires a dozen or more people seems like a hard sell to me. That dependence on a large group meant that it was of no interest to me. I took a mental note of “Rapscalion” though.
Nearby, at another booth, someone explained “Cities” to me. It can be summarized as a tourist-based “Carcassone”. It had a similar “draw tiles and place them strategically” mechanic but the scoring and strategy seemed more shallow. The demonstrator agreed with me, saying that it was a game designed for families rather than strategy nerds, but mentioned that it did have variable game rules that could be used to make the game more complicated if one chose to do so. Last year’s game, “Wadi,” was also there and while it looked very similar, also riding the “Carcassone” bandwagon, the mechanics used in the game seemed a tad more interesting. I never did get a full demo of it but I made a mental note of it too. The box was also quite small which, considering how I was travelling, was a bonus.
Boardgames galore.After wandering for an hour or so I found myself where I started and decided that, yes, one day was enough for all this. While the place was certainly big I couldn’t imagine spending four days there. I went off looking for some more play tests and possible booths that I might have missed the first time around. It turned out that there were more than a few booths that I had missed. For example, I missed, in its entirety, Hall 9. That, by itself, then connected to Halls 8, 6 and 4. I had also missed those. Hall 5 too. This show was way bigger than I thought it would be.
Finally I understood why the show was four days long: it’d be impossible to see everything otherwise. It was HUGE. At this moment of realization I was struck with a greater sense of urgency.
Essen SPIEL
I’m probably going to Die Internationalen Spieltage SPIEL in Essen, Germany this weekend. For those not in the know, this is essentially the E3 for German boardgames. Actually, that’s not exactly a fair comparison. The “Nuremberg Toy Fair” is probably more akin to E3, as they’re both trade shows (though E3 might not be exclusively that anymore, maybe?) The Spiel is a consumer show[1]. Semantic differences aside, if you like boardgames it is the place to go. I do. So I’m probably going down for a day or two.
Gamasutra’s write-up on the 2007 show.
I don’t know what to expect there. There’ll be a lot of exhibitors and games on show and games to play and try out, some before they’re released, but I don’t know what the actual experience will be. Boardgames are a social endeavour and I am not a very social person. I also don’t speak a lick of German. Things might get awkward. This might be an overly pessimistic expectation for the show, but it guarantees that I won’t be disappointed. Besides, if I find the whole thing completely boring there’s a very nice photography museum I can check out up the street. It’ll be nice to venture beyond Paris for once too, while I still have the opportunity to do so (I return to Canada in less than two weeks).
Afterwards I might go to Amsterdam. I don’t know, nothing is planned. It’s always more fun to travel this way.
(And I say “probably” because everything is dependent on my ability to wake up in time to catch the 6:50am train at a station 40 minutes away.)
- You could say that Essen is the Leipzig of boardgames, but that’s a little too clever.
