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Jake

Idle Thumbs 116: Ragnar Calls it Quits

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Yeah, board games have more freedom to do that kind of thing in the first place. See also Battlestar Galactica, etc.

 

I can't recommend the Battlestar Galactica board game enough to a group of good friends. The basic game is nearly flawless with five players and requires absolutely no knowledge of the show or board games. Playing a learning game takes about three hours, but once everyone knows how to do their jobs it's over in under two, screaming matches and fistfights included. It's really nothing like the Game of Thrones board game, which has some pretty heavy strategy in addition to its social elements.

 

Yeah, and that is rad. The game of thrones board game audience is very different from the game of thrones Xbox or even steam audience (in that it is almost guaranteed to be people who have German style board game-heavy game nights and the like), so weird shit is allowed to rule supreme in that space. Is the GoT game a Fantasy Flight game? That is a company I keep feeling like I should dislike or be untrustworthy of just because of their size and flashiness, but they make a ton of pretty hardcore, high quality stuff.

 

I think the issue with Fantasy Flight is that they have a pretty strict release schedule and an unwillingness to start over on designs that aren't working, which means that a lot of their stuff is just slightly underbaked or bloated, if not huge and weird and unplayable like Android.

 

They're fulling capable of making tight and well-designed games (see Battlestar above), but most of the time that's not where their money goes to and comes from.

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The only issue I have with Fantasy Flight is their aversion to proofreading. Their products tend to be riddled with typographical errors.

 

I do love many of their products, though.

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Yeah, and that is rad. The game of thrones board game audience is very different from the game of thrones Xbox or even steam audience (in that it is almost guaranteed to be people who have German style board game-heavy game nights and the like), so weird shit is allowed to rule supreme in that space. Is the GoT game a Fantasy Flight game? That is a company I keep feeling like I should dislike or be untrustworthy of just because of their size and flashiness, but they make a ton of pretty hardcore, high quality stuff.

 

I think being suspicious of Fantasy Flight is a healthy instinct, but they have a large catalog of games, and some of them are fantastic (like GoT), and quite a few of their games are unwieldy junk. Just like most other companies, it's not going to be exclusively hits or misses.

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I really like GoT the board game, but I can't get into BSG. It felt a bit mechanically thin to me. One of the main mechanics is pulling  a Warp Card and if it's a problem, the solution is always just "dump cards on it." It doesn't make a ton of narrative sense if the game is supposed to be tell a story.

 

The cards you dump have pretty limited use, and don't have much variation per job. I think there are 3 or 4 kinds? Between the warp cards, and ship movements, it seemed like it was the kind of game that was trying to approximate a video game AI.

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I really like GoT the board game, but I can't get into BSG. It felt a bit mechanically thin to me. One of the main mechanics is pulling  a Warp Card and if it's a problem, the solution is always just "dump cards on it." It doesn't make a ton of narrative sense if the game is supposed to be tell a story.

 

The cards you dump have pretty limited use, and don't have much variation per job. I think there are 3 or 4 kinds? Between the warp cards, and ship movements, it seemed like it was the kind of game that was trying to approximate a video game AI.

 

I hate to say this, but it sounds like your Cylons just aren't very good at what they do. In the five-player game, which is the best number at which to play, there simply aren't enough skill cards in the players' hands to overcome every obstacle, even if the one or two Cylon players aren't strategically sinking the different votes by adding the wrong skills to the piles. Besides, all the interesting decisions in the game don't come from the game itself, but from how much you can trust the people you're playing with not to be lying to you about whether or not they can help overcome the card using the skills in their hand. If you feel the only threat comes from the deck itself, someone's not doing their job.

 

Plus some of the skill cards are hugely impactful, especially the one that reduces the difficulty by two, the one that forces people to add cards face-up, the one that adds two to a dice roll, and the one that gives another player a double turn in your place. Not to mention all the pilot and repair cards, which are pretty essential at times.

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Haha, it's certainly possible! They've won a few, though. It's more that I feel "trust them to drop the right color card" is mechanically kind of thin for a game that is supposed to be telling a story. Arkham Horror for example makes far more amusing narratives out of it's gameplay elements.

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Haha, it's certainly possible! They've won a few, though. It's more that I feel "trust them to drop the right color card" is mechanically kind of thin for a game that is supposed to be telling a story. Arkham Horror for example makes far more amusing narratives out of it's gameplay elements.

 

Well, the colors represent different types of skills, so different characters are each using their own skills to meet different kinds of crises, with an opportunity cost giving up the ability on the card (except "Launch Scout," fuck that card is worthless), but if it doesn't click with you, it doesn't click. I mean, I love Arkham Horror, but sometimes the theme falls away and I realize it's all just "go to place, pick card, test skill" myself.

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I remember making a ton of super short jokey Xanga posts every day for a while in high school. It annoyed all my friends because they'd keep getting update e-mails or something. Then Twitter was invented and the rest of the world caught up to me.

 

LSD: The Dream Simulator is kind of bonkers, but I also found it incredibly arbitrary. Basically it feels like a less focused version of Proteus, except with super PS1-y textures.

 

Wasn't LSD: Dream sim basically just the creators dreams in game form?

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Thematically Arkham Horror is delightful, but Gormongous is right - the gameplay is rote. Good for impressing your friends that don't normally play board games though.

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Oh gosh I forgot to mention the Quake 3 story from my email, in case anyone missed it from whatever internet sources covered it.

 

So Quake 3 Arena had a function for the AI where it would adapt to and 'learn' things you would do when engaging it. I can't remember how extensive or noticeable it actually was. But in this fake story, a guy started a server full of bots to test how their AI would adapt over time to itself basically. He remembered it years later and when checking up on things found the bots just staring each other down. The notion put forward is that they evolved to form peace. My view of it was that they evolved to form a cold war. And the two party-pooper explanations are that their scripting crashed, and also the truth that it's a fake story.

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Wasn't LSD: Dream sim basically just the creators dreams in game form?

Possibly, I never read up on the history of it, but that would mean his dreams solely involved him wandering around the kind of empty blocky worlds where you can hardly interact with anything and all textures were nutso PS1 psychedelic nonsense. Which would be a lucky break on his part, since that is way easier to turn into a PS1 game than most dreams that people actually have.

 

So maybe I'm a little skeptical there.

 

But after every level it would give you all these stats about that dream that seemed to have a specious connection to what you actually did in the level. Everything would always play out more or less the same, and any way that dreams progressed or stacked on each other was totally undetectable to me.

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Yeah, board games have more freedom to do that kind of thing in the first place. See also Battlestar Galactica, etc.

 

I agree, and also wonder if that's a business decision that doesn't make sense.  Fans will buy licensed games with almost no consideration for what other people have said about it's quality.  I think that the same could be true for complexity as well.

 

If it's a game with an up front conversion point, and distribution channels that overpower any word of mouth, why spend the time streamlining the design?  Or rather, why is it less acceptable to ship a complex game, than it is to ship a broken game in the world of licensed products?

 

The topic of 90s Star Wars games brings up a huge volume of games that even by 90s standards were a bit on the complex end.  I think I prefer the carpet bombing approach, where they just slap their branding on anything, and see what people enjoy without overthinking the demographic.  Dark Forces, X-Wing and Pit Droids probably wouldn't make it past modern investors.

 

Why not just take the low hanging fruit and push a re-skin on existing technology.  The production cost of a total conversion of CK2 to GoT was low enough for modders to tackle, it probably wouldn't be that expensive to do officially.

 

Also, I think the AoE Star Wars game Galactic Battlegrounds is under rated.

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You know what, I'm going to go to bat for Star Wars: Empire at War, too. That way we have all the Star Wars RTS games represented.

 

Yeah, it was a fairly simple RTS game at its heart, but it had a turn-based sandbox campaign that was more or less on par with the early Total War games. Plus, even though I can't really defend the boring ground battles, the real-time space battles were a lot of fun. Sure, it was annihilation and base defense dictated by only a few capture points, but both sides played differently (the Rebels had specialized capital ships that disabled the enemy for fighters to take down, while the Empire was more about effective use of all-purpose ships) and there were tactical elements to jumping in ships, blocking hyperspace lanes, and targeting different hardpoints. The one level near the end of the second campaign where the entire battlefield was like one third of a Super Star Destroyer did more to convey the scale and depth of space combat to me than anything since Homeworld.

 

The expansion, not so good, but at least it was one of the last and most visible attempts to integrate Star Wars EU stuff before Lucas really started speaking out against it.

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Yeah, and that is rad. The game of thrones board game audience is very different from the game of thrones Xbox or even steam audience (in that it is almost guaranteed to be people who have German style board game-heavy game nights and the like), so weird shit is allowed to rule supreme in that space. Is the GoT game a Fantasy Flight game? That is a company I keep feeling like I should dislike or be untrustworthy of just because of their size and flashiness, but they make a ton of pretty hardcore, high quality stuff.

 

They have very high production values and terrible manuals. I tend to be a booster both because many of their products tend to err on the side of complex, thematic games that take a significant investment of time but are really rewarding on a narrative/"coolness" level (i.e. the "Ameritrash" end of the spectrum) as opposed to heavily mechanic-focused light-to-no-theme mathy sorts of games (i.e., the so-called "Eurogame" end of the spectrum), which is my personal preference, and because they're located like six blocks from where I used to work and I know multiple people that are or have been employed there. I've even gotten to playtest for them occasionally, although since my friend who was a designer there moved over to AEG I don't think that's going to happen again anytime soon.

 

On an unrelated note, it's good to hear that Sir, You Are Being Hunted has an actual objective. I love the aesthetics and I want to support Jim but I tend to regard procedural game content with suspicion and I've tended not to be able to get into games like Minecraft (and to a lesser extent Terraria and Don't Starve) because without the game pointing in any particular direction I don't find that I have any incentive to actually play. After all, the easiest way to survive a completely open-ended survival game is to not enter the gameworld in the first place.

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It's interesting how board game adaption of licences are forced to simulate the mechanics of a story, rather than the narrative. I wish more video games would attempt to do the same.

 

Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings are all prime examples. For GoT, the CKII mod (and it sounds like the board game) gives a way more interesting look at the world by leaving some variables open, and you get to see how the world reacts as those are manipulated. THis is, at least to me, a lot more appealing than the game on shelves labeled "Game of Thrones" that's a hack'n'slash 3rd person action game, that promises to let you play through your favourite moments of the show (or rather, look at them remade in polygonal cutscenes).

 

It's the same as the LotR movie games for the PS2 10 years ago (oh god those movies are 10 years old now). The strategy game Battle for Middle Earth did way more for me to look into the different races of the world and how they do battle, than hitting square to get Aragon to hit a bunch of orcs with his sword.

 

It doesn't have to be strategy games either, just look at any Star Wars game that takes you away from the main characters and let's you play as just another soldier (X-Wing series, Battlefronts, Republic Commando, etc).


 

 

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to trawl this Livejournal for choice Breckon quotes.

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It's interesting how board game adaption of licences are forced to simulate the mechanics of a story, rather than the narrative. I wish more video games would attempt to do the same.

Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings are all prime examples. For GoT, the CKII mod (and it sounds like the board game) gives a way more interesting look at the world by leaving some variables open, and you get to see how the world reacts as those are manipulated. THis is, at least to me, a lot more appealing than the game on shelves labeled "Game of Thrones" that's a hack'n'slash 3rd person action game, that promises to let you play through your favourite moments of the show (or rather, look at them remade in polygonal cutscenes).

It's the same as the LotR movie games for the PS2 10 years ago (oh god those movies are 10 years old now). The strategy game Battle for Middle Earth did way more for me to look into the different races of the world and how they do battle, than hitting square to get Aragon to hit a bunch of orcs with his sword.

It doesn't have to be strategy games either, just look at any Star Wars game that takes you away from the main characters and let's you play as just another soldier (X-Wing series, Battlefronts, Republic Commando, etc).

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to trawl this Livejournal for choice Breckon quotes.

Some of the exposition in Inception sounds like someone explaining how to play a board-game to a first-time player.

One of the games I pretend to work on is my attempt to put the formula of romantic korean dramas into game mechanics. Korean dramas such as "Playful Kiss", "Coffee Prince", "You Are Beautiful", "Me too Flower", and "Dream High", are filled with mechanical tropes that seem translatable into games. It's not that every 16-episode series has a wrist-grab, it's that every wrist-grab is a negotiation of co-dependence. It's not that every series has a moment where someone's cell-phone breaks, it's that misunderstandings will have to be resolved. The initial motives of the characters are often symbolized to the level of iconography; the hard-working girl who has to provide for her family after their parents leave, the rich charbol prince who searches for sincerity in his social relationships, the no-humored successful type who just wants to be able to trust.

Watching a lot of these shows, I've begun to see how they look like the same game-system with different playthroughs.

This reminds me of a more general idea I've been having: I think that playing games that prioritize mechanics and systems encourage the player to look at the world as one of mechanics and systems, rather than looking at it as a detailed list of historical events. I think that games teach me to extrapolate more (but maybe my tendency to extrapolate has led me to games).

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This reminds me of a more general idea I've been having: I think that playing games that prioritize mechanics and systems encourage the player to look at the world as one of mechanics and systems, rather than looking at it as a detailed list of historical events. I think that games teach me to extrapolate more (but maybe my tendency to extrapolate has les me to games).

 

I feel similarly. In my dayjob I work with customer service for an electronics chain, talking to customers, and also following up warranty repairs that have taken a long time. This is all based on individual cases, but I tend to be better than my colleagues at pinpoint patterns and weaknesses in the system, and working out how to improve this. I recently realized I'm using the same analytic brain process I use when starting a new mechanics-heavy game, or even when watching someone else play it, like Nick & Remo with CKII, or Brad Shoemaker with Dota II.

As you say, I don't know if it's the fact that my brain likes doing this has led me to games, or if playing games growing up has sharpened this, but it was an interesting little epiphany.

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Chris you haven't read/watched Game of Thrones? Huwhaaa? You really should. Borrow season one off a friend and just dive in from the start, i'm pretty sure it's impossible not to be hooked. It's easily one of the best shows on tv at the moment, especially if you like a bit of fantasy and power-games between great characters.

 

Maybe you have some esoteric reason as to why you haven't seen it yet, but I think you should just forget that and watch it.

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Chris you haven't read/watched Game of Thrones? Huwhaaa? You really should. Borrow season one off a friend and just dive in from the start, i'm pretty sure it's impossible not to be hooked. It's easily one of the best shows on tv at the moment, especially if you like a bit of fantasy and power-games between great characters.

 

Maybe you have some esoteric reason as to why you haven't seen it yet, but I think you should just forget that and watch it.

I'm just not really into fantasy stuff, and also really plot-driven stuff.

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Hodor?

I looked this up but I don't understand the implication!

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I'm like Roman from Party Down and I dislike fantasy. I'm into hard sci-fi.

 

So beyond the fact that this character is a Pokemon and can only say his own name, does Hodor do anything else?  At least Jigglypuff sings.

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I'm like Roman from Party Down and I dislike fantasy. I'm into hard sci-fi.

 

So beyond the fact that this character is a Pokemon and can only say his own name, does Hodor do anything else?  At least Jigglypuff sings.

 

He's got a really big dick.

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