Matt.Tarbit.org

Cards and dice and all things nice

I just spent a bit of time writing up some recommendations for 2-player board games to mail to a friend and thought I might as well add them here too.

BoardGameGeek

• http://www.boardgamegeek.com or http://www.bgg.cc
• http://www.geekdo.com

Something like the IMDB of the board game world, BGG is a huge, ridiculously well-populated, community-driven database where you're likely to find every game ever published. On the downside it's also a bit ugly and slow, but I suppose you can't have everything. GeekDo is just a re-branded BoardGameGeek with a slightly different nav and the addition of an RPG section.

When browsing game entries, anything with an average user rating above about 7.5 is a good bet, though bear in mind that there tends to be a slight bias toward more complex games.

Some name designers to look out for:
Reiner Knizia, Uwe Rosenberg, Richard Borg

Some name publishers to look out for:
Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight Games, Z-Man Games

Where to buy in the UK?:
Waterstone's sometimes has the odd bestseller like Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne, but for a proper selection try the nearest branch of Travelling Man (or failing that see the BGG UK FAQ).

2-player games I own and like

• Ticket to Ride Colourful, rummy-esque, train-themed, classic gateway game. Loved it at first, but after repeated plays has started to feel slightly shallow to me. The alternate versions with added rules might work around that though.

• Carcassonne Another good intro one with nice looking components. Gradually build a map by placing tiles, and lay claim to parts of it as you go by placing "meeples". I like this one a lot and think it's got longevity, but some people don't warm to it as much.

• Agricola Only just bought this one. Confusing rules explanation due to lots of components and varying rule sets for different numbers of players. But just off one play it's obvious that it's a winner. Really fun farming theme with lots of character and it's difficult to pick out any clear best strategies which is always important.

• San Juan Card game about building a town. Seems slightly dry at first but it definitely grows on you. Has a cool mechanic with lots of strategies to try out, and is quick to play. With the bigger boardgames, the setup time can feel like a bit of a mental barrier to playing, so it's good to have smaller card games like this around to play too.

• Memoir '44 Probably my favourite. Takes a lot of setting up, but it's beautifully made, ridiculously fun to play and is always fresh thanks to the booklet of scenarios. Same mechanic is used in other highly-rated games by the same designer: Commands & Colors: Ancients and BattleLore

• Pandemic Collaborative game with players working together to eradicate a global pandemic. Clever mechanics and a cool theme, but slightly too hard for my liking. If the players don't maximise the potential of any of their moves you're likely to lose the game.

2-player games my brother owns and likes

• Ticket to Ride (including a couple of the alternate versions)
• Pandemic
• Lost Cities
• Small World

The crossover between our two lists doesn't necessarily mean those are the best ones. I'm actively avoiding some of the things he has, even though I like the look of them, because I'll probably have the chance to try them out and see what they're like first.

2-player games that I've had my eye on

• Dominion
• Race for the Galaxy
• Power Grid
• Tales of the Arabian Nights

For a second opinion on some of these games and a few others, see Defective Yeti's article, Games For Two.

And finally, a word of advance warning: I've found quite a few games seem a little bit underwhelming on first play. It's only after you've had a bit of time for the rules to settle in that you find yourself craving a game of this or that one and thinking about the strategies when you're away from the table, so try not to be quick to write anything off.

0 comments

I've been reading: Hobby Games: The 100 Best

I read this great book of essays recently. Successful games designers of all stripes writing about the games closest to their hearts. It's a fun read, though some of the essays struggle a bit in evoking the appeal of games you've never seen before. Especially since the book contains no illustrations.

To help with that, I've put together a kind of "Hobby Games - A Visual Companion". For the most part, I tried to find the cover art for the game edition specified in each essay, but there may be one or two that are incorrect.

The board & card game imagery was relatively easy to source through the BoardGameGeek API, with a bit of manual tweaking. But I was stuck for RPG data until BGG added rpg.geekdo.com to their portfolio just the other week and I was finally able to fill in the gaps. A very welcome addition, I'd say, and well worth a look, though it can be a touch sluggish at times.

And finally, if you have the book and find the thumbnail page at all useful, you might also be interested in Alan De Smet's various dissections of the book's data.

I should also mention that there's a companion volume, Family Games: The 100 Best, due out later this month.

0 comments

A lick of paint and some new furniture

If you're reading this in its native environment, rather than by way of an RSS reader, then you might notice things looking slightly different.

I did some work on the site a month or so ago and just got around to putting it live. Nothing spectacular, just a small layout re-jig, turning the volume down on the header bar and making room for a new library section on the front page.

I'd been using, and liking, LibraryThing but hit the 200 books pay-wall and didn't really feel like forking over the cash for it. I've also since signed up for Readernaut, which has seen some hype, but doesn't really work for me, and am aware of sites like Good Reads and All Consuming, but find them a bit lacking.

I want two things from a library/consumption site: to list my stuff (not just books, and not necessarily physical products), and to find more stuff. The current offerings either seem to get lost in the social aspects (Readernaut & All Consuming) or bogged down in too much data (LibraryThing).

Anyway, the site now has a library (sticking to books for now). It's far from finished, and may never be, but better to put up what was there than have it languishing on my laptop for any longer.

2 comments

Head down memory lane until you come to the forest of doom...

For the past few weeks I've been digging back into the strange and wonderful world of roleplaying games where I spent so much of my youth. I've been back for visits now and then over the years, seeking out books and boxed sets at my mum's house or browsing the cover scans on labour-of-love sites like The Museum of Roleplaying Games. But never stopping for much more than an hour or two.

I'm not exactly sure what's triggered my deeper excursions of late. Maybe it was a spate of recent roleplaying posts on MetaFilter, or the Penny Arcade / WotC D&D 4E podcasts, or Wil Wheaton's photo of his "time machine". But I'd imagine it's mostly to do with my new found addiction to "not just for kids anymore" boardgames (more of which in another post). It's a slippery slope, you know?

That and the realisation that there are thousands of photos of happy gaming action on Flickr, readily available downloads of my old favourite rulebooks & supplements on BitTorrent, and a smorgasbord of well written roleplaying blogs scattered around the internet.

Back in the day I remember playing D&D, AD&D, Marvel Super Heroes, Call of Cthulhu, TMNT, Heroes Unlimited, Palladium FRPG, Rolemaster, MERP, Star Wars, WFRP, Chill, Advanced Recon, Shadowrun and probably more besides. My group of friends owned and read plenty of others that I never found time to play, Tales from the Floating Vagabond, Cyberpunk, Rifts, Paranoia, Judge Dredd, and Robotech (all on RPG.net). We played board games and miniature games on the side like Car Wars, Battletech, Bloodbowl, Warhammer 40K, Warhammer Epic 40k, Space Hulk and Advanced HeroQuest (all on BoardGameGeek). And in my spare time I read magazines like Dragon, Dungeon, White Dwarf and Imagine. Poring over each article, advert and review for inklings of further adventures to be had.

Good times.

There's no question that roleplaying is a dwindling hobby, and there's many, many contributing factors caught up in that, so it brings on mixed emotions to look back with nostalgia at this sickly ailing beast. But there are still signs of life and positive trends here and there.

So, what went wrong?:

• Roleplaying is hard. There are too many rules. Open-endedness leads to a lack of focus. Improv-style aspects can be embarassing. Refereeing is hard work.
• Developers lost site of what brought people to the hobby. Whither the entry-level boxed set? Instead we were shovel-fed weighty tomes filled with 3rd rate fantasy fiction and ever growing rulesets.
• Other trends ate roleplaying's lunch. Computer gaming and the internet distracted us, while collectible card games and miniature-based gaming made companies like WotC & Games Workshop slaves to their profit margins.
• Shrinking profits saw RPGs being bought up or licensed off to companies who either didn't care enough or didn't have the talent to do the job properly.
• Versionitis. Presumably due to small target audiences, RPGs are constantly updated in an effort to encourage repeat purchases. That inevitably leads to "fixing" things which weren't broken. Book publishers don't do this, boardgame publishers don't do this. RPG publishers shouldn't either.

And the good news?:

• A greying market. Teen roleplayers from the 80s (like me) are now old enough to stop cringing at the nerdiness and start looking at our old hobby with fresh eyes. Others have kids who're just old enough to show an interest themselves.
• D&D's 4th Edition. Love it or hate it, Wizards of the Coast's MMORPG-ization of D&D may be doing exactly what they hoped it would, which is to attract the attentions of WoW players who'd only ever tried a computer RPG. You only need follow PA's Mike Krahulik on his first steps into DMing to see that at work.
• Experimental & Lite RPGs. Dogs In The Vineyard, My Life With Master, Nobilis, Savage Worlds and Spirit of the Century all take roleplaying into new and uncharted territory.
• Old school revivalism. Spurred on by disenfranchisement with D&D's current direction, several parties have released faithful "clones" of 70s-era D&D rules under names like Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC. These are published with open licenses as free or cheap PDFs and via print-on-demand services like Lulu.

It's this last that I was most pleased to see. At it's heart, roleplaying is about imagination, no purchase necessary. So a grassroots, DIY movement of free, and freely modifiable, gaming seems like a natural fit to me. If the industry is troubled it seems healthy to reduce dependencies and make the hobby self-sufficient.

That and reading the thoughtful debate about what made original D&D great. Wizened old greybeards from tabletop mountain passing around adjectives like Grognardian and Gygaxian make for happy reading to someone like me who has trouble convincing others of just what was so enthralling about those early books.

So raise a goblet to those still in the fight, and heartily opine "Fight On!"

1 comment