THE RANTING SHEELEY
This month's rant portion concerns video games. Now, while I don't play video games myself - very little manual dexterity, and a very low tolerance for failure (which is a big problem with most, if not all video games, since the vast majority of them depend on making the player work over and over to solve problems, until the player gets it right. And many, many games proceed this way with almost every challenge in the game to be solved) - but I do like to watch other people play them, and occasionally help (Assassin's Creed dam' near required a spotter to help the player spot those little flags while the actual game player was busy putting the game's hero through the acrobatic sequences getting around town).
Some video games are quite innovative, and some are excellent pieces of the art (oh, yes, there's an art to making a good game. It's as tough as making a movie, and it's got to be interactive as well!). A lot are fairly plebian, and there are, of course, a huge number of video games that are little more than knock-offs of better games (bound to happen; success gets copied). And then, of course, there are the true front-runners of video game design, working to make the hobby more interesting and more personal. But the vast and abiding majority of them require the above-mentioned manual dexterity and tolerance for failure that aren’t my cup of tea.
So I’ll turn my rant to an old grognard subject: Whatever happened to the idea of taking old-fashioned board games and turning them into video games? You know...okay, you most emphatically don’t know. For the young ‘uns out there, a very long time ago, dinosaurs walked the earth, and they were called board games. They usually involved historical wars, ranging from tactical, squad-level games up to strategic world-wide or at least continent-level games. They were played on maps, with cardboard counters, they were quite expensive for their day (back in 1976 the average price was $25-30, which is heavy when you considered that luxury cars were in the $15,000-20,000 price range), they were turn-based and usually relied on a single six-sided die as a random element (there weren’t polyhedral dice back then). And there were lots of them, spanning conflicts from ancient to science-fiction, and even fantasy subjects, as a new fantasy game called Dungeons & Dragons became ever more popular. These vast herds of board games started disappearing in the mid-80s, as their market became swallowed up by an equally vast herd of role-playing games (most of you reading this weren’t even born by the early ‘80s - trust me, it was the most wide-open market for RPGs ever. Okay, a lot of them had a lot of D&D knock-off in them, but there were some wild ideas and concepts floating around!).
This number decreased even more when video games broke out of the 8-bit realm and started heading into really high-graphic, high-memory territory. For a while there, it looked like board games were headed for the extinction zone.
Now, the real meat of this rant is this: Why in the (^&^%! world didn’t war game designers convert some, if not a vast amount, of their games to video format? It wouldn’t be nearly as difficult to write, and way easier on the animation front. Heck, there’d barely even be a design problem, since the games were already written and the rules thought out. And practically no game physics; there’s less to animate than any RTS in existence, and all the random number generation can be covered by an assembler program that was old when mankind touched down on the Moon!
Man, that’d be great. One of the biggest problems of war-games is finding other people to play - you know, finding time, place, and inclination to learn a game, let alone play it (since a lot of these games can take hours). With a computer and a simple algorithm program for playing the other player - usually little more difficult than writing a program to play chess - you would always have an opponent, as long as you had the computer. Heck, even the simplest RTS games have that.
Sigh. I’ve got a good idea of why these conversions didn’t happen: They wouldn’t make large gallons of cash. And why not? 1: Lots of re-play value. If people aren’t bored, they’re less likely to lay out the $$ for a new game, sometimes as often as every week. 2: Not flashy enough for the general public; there’s only so much you can do to dress up what is essentially a complex chess game. 3: Not ’personal’ enough for the general public; how many RTS games are there compared to FPS games? A single-character game (FPS are included in this category) give a better role-playing experience, which appeals to more people. Practically everyone’s got an imagination, no matter how little they know what to do with it.
But I believe the big #1 reason that board games didn’t make it onto the small screen was another facet of not-appealing-to-the-public: These turn-based simulations really worked on a principle of considered and coordinated action, requiring thought and planning, not eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity, and a high tolerance for repeated failure. In short, these games require that you think instead or reacting. And since a lot of people in our species don’t like to think, then classic board games wouldn’t appeal, and so wouldn’t sell well.
(Why should people like to think? They are bombarded every day of their lives by media messages that encourage them to react, to emote, to feel rather than thinking. A consumer who thinks is dangerous, because such a person can look at commercials and see through their irrational, emotional appeals, and call them garbage. Look around you: the youngest Pokemon player uses more strategic thought and cogitative ability than at least 80% of the humans walking the earth. That’s my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.)
And I’m writing this column in the middle of the night, when there’s no-one around and the store is closed, wishing that I had a computer copy of Ogre or Avalon Hill’s old Starship Troopers to play.
Yeah, I know that I mentioned Arkham Horror as a possibility this month, but this last weekend I played Dominion again, and I decided to postpone Arkham Horror for a little while. There's another supplement (yet another supplement!) coming out for Horror, so it's no big thing to wait...after all, when The Lurker in the Threshold comes out, there'll be plenty of time to talk about one of the larger games available to the public - honestly, to get so large in such a short lifetime, usually a game has to be an MMORPG.
So, on to Dominion. This game came out a couple years ago - '07 or '08 - and it won at least one distinguished award for excellence in gaming. As far as I'm concerned, Dominion can and should win at least one distinguished award for excellence in gaming each and every year for several years to come. It's got good presentation, good organization, a decent price, an excellent value for that price, and a real winner of a game system.
Yeah, I meant every word of that last sentence. I am a grumpy man, chary of effusive praise, and swear by the motto, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." But Dominion is as good as I just said it is.
Let's start with the milder good qualities. It comes in a decent-sized box, with 26 different 10-card selections of action cards (things that drive the mechanics), a whole lot of money cards, and some oddballs (the random sampler cards, victory point cards, and the Curse cards). All of these are arranged in a card tray, with a cardstock guide that fits in to show you where the cards go in the tray - this is really useful for set-up. A 4-page rulebook completes the set.
The first step to playing a game is to decide on what cards you'll be using. There are a number of pre-generated set-ups in the rules, including a beginners' set-up which has cards the encourage ease of play. You're not limited to these few set-ups, though. That's where the random cards come in: There's a single random set-up copy of each card (denoted by a different card back color scheme). Every card has one of these randomizer cards, so you have to take out the non-play cards and set them aside. Then you deal out 10 of the 26 play cards, and bang! You're ready to go.
Play is interesting, but really easy once you get the hang of it. The trick is that each player gets a single action to use a play card. After that action, then the player gets to total up the money in his hand, and purchase a single card. Then the player's entire hand is discarded, and the player draws another five cards to make his new hand. Simple.
Then things get a bit more complex. Many of the play cards allow you to draw more cards from your draw deck, take additional actions, discard cards and replace them with other cards, get to buy more than one card during your Buy phase, or other effects. And these cards can cascade really easily into using up your entire draw deck and shuffling your discards back into your draw deck! For instance, the Village card (a favorite mover and shaker) gives you an extra drawn card and two extra actions. And if you, say, draw another Village, then you can play it, drawing another card and having gained another couple of extra actions, and so on, and so on. The game recommends keeping a count of the extra actions you get, because it can get confusing after a while. I can confirm that this is so.
The real trick is that you start out each game with ten cards, three Estates (the lowest denomination victory point card), and seven copper (the lowest denomination money card). You have to decide what you're going to buy with the purchasing power you have every turn, so each player's deck is likely to differ, with ten different action cards, as well as victory point and money cards to purchase. As one player I played with put it, "It's like a collectable card game where you build your deck as you play."
There are distinct phases to game play. The early game is a struggle to acquire cards to get you more actions and generate a little bit more money, so you can move on to the mid-game, where the goal is to generate more money - you can buy more potent money cards, the idea being that it's worth a lot more to have money cards worth more per card than just 1 monetary unit per card. After all, a lot of your purchasing power is going to come from the money cards in your hand, so it pays to have silver or gold cards rather than copper cards. The end game is where you can get enough money in your hand that it's a good idea to start buying victory point cards - Duchies and Provinces - instead of buying more action and money cards. This is definitely an end-game pursuit, since those victory point cards are totally inert - they're worthless until the end of the game - and do nothing for you but stack the deck and clog your hand.
A good sign to start the end-game is when two stacks of cards have been depleted - if three stacks of cards of any type, or all the Provinces, are ever bought dry, the game's over, count up your victory points.
It's a remarkably fast game, with a staggering replay value, for people who play complex games, and for people who don't play complex games. (A complex game is anything more challenging than Go Fish, or simple poker.) There are only two hang-ups to it: The first is that the cards will get used and degraded after the lots of play the game will get (this is easy to fix: Cheap card sleeves). The second problem is that it'll only support four players, and this game begs for more.
But hey! Dominion, at this time, has no fewer than three supplements (Intrigue, Seaside, and Alchemist). Playing with Dominion and Intrigue or Seaside, or with Intrigue and Seaside, will allow up to six players, and I believe Dominion, Intrigue, and Seaside combine to allow up to eight players. (Intrigue is supposed to be playable as a stand-alone game, but it doesn't have as many extra action cards as Dominion, and I think that starting with a number of those cards makes for a better game.
I can't state it strongly enough: This is a game worth having. It should be as ubiquitous as Monopoly and Risk. Get this game.
