How to introduce games to beginners

Last few gaming sessions it fell to me to introduce relatively new players to games they've never played before. Of course explanation of the rules was in order, but I think there's a much more important part of the introduction that's going to set how the game is going to go - selling the game.

It's not a surprise to anyone who plays boardgames or has seen the filled to the brim shelves of a boardgame collector or a serious games store that many boardgames look intimidating. The size of the boxes, or the unappealing art, or titles that suggest ponderous industrial machinery

Doesn't he look like he's having fun?

may turn players away from what could actually turn out to be a really great experience. So selling a game involves both convincing players that it can be a fun experience and setting the mood of the game. So what I like to do when introducing a game isn't to throw out a bunch of terms like "it's a worker placement game" or "it's an area control game", or to immediately launch into a rules explanation ("in this game we are going to be collecting resources and then trading them!") but to describe the theme of the game and what the players are supposed to play as (not what they DO in game vis-a-vis moving tokens or playing cards, but what their characters/nations/merchants/whatever are doing in the game). So here are some evocative (or at least somewhat evocative) ways that I described some fun introductory games to new players.

Pandemic: there are viruses spreading unchecked! We are a bunch of scientists working together to cure those viruses before the human race is doomed!

Puerto Rico: we are governors of New Spain lording over towns and plantations, competing to see who can build the best city and send the most goods to Spain!

Francis Drake: we are English privateers sailing to the Spanish Main and then burning and looting right through it for a chance to win the favour of the Queen!

Orleans: we are French lords and we are building the best damn Medieval society we can! (this can also work for Castles of Burgundy)

Race for the Galaxy (or Roll for the Galaxy): we are developing our own unique galactic civilizations and creating an epic space opera.

Galaxy Trucker: we are building awful rickety spaceships, loading them up with goods and then racing them. Horrible hilarious things will happen to our ships!

Lords of Waterdeep: we are a scheming cabal working against each other to control a city from the shadows. We are going to send a lot of adventurers to their doom!

This tells the players the theme and get them interested. Now arguably the gameplay is more important than the theme (there are some really theme-less or bland-themed games with amazing gameplay, and some games with great theme but crappy gameplay), but the theme is what gets the players interested in trying the game in the first place.

The second thing I do is compare the boardgame to a video game or a movie or a book or a TV show that the players are familiar with and that invokes the mood of the game. Instead of comparing to another boardgame, compare it to Firefly (Galaxy Truckers or Xia), or Battlestar Galactica (Battlestar Galactica game or Resistance), or Apocalypse Now, or Hunger Games or Lord of the Rings and so on. When I bring up this comparison I also try to point out WHO in this movie/book/video game the players represent ("so some of us are going to be like humans, and some of us are going to be like Cylons").

I know at least one of you is a Cylon. I mean government spy!

 It gets players invested not in the gameplay mechanics but in what the game is like - what the experience promises to be. Why do I think setting the mood is important? Because that's what's going to carry the game. Introduce the game as something silly and fun and that's the mood that'll prevail at least with some players. Introduce the game as full of intrigue, paranoia and secrets and players will be more likely to mistrust one another. Mood makes people play a role (you could almost say ROLE play...?) and immerse themselves in the game. For example in Puerto Rico you build plantations and warehouses and put things on ships. Hardly immersive right? And yet, right off the bat the players - once properly introduced to the game - started playing the roles of a corrupt governor, scheming merchant, declaring vendettas against each other (even though the game doesn't have any overtly aggressive mechanics) and it was just FUN!

The last thing I do in the introduction is give an example of something cool that a player can do in the game. Long before explaining the actual rules I can tell the players "Oh yeah, and you can totally double-cross people or totally play it straight and still win" or "you can marry the King of France and then have him assassinated and it's GREAT!" or "you can summon this huge monster that can kick everyone's ass!" I believe that what people get excited about in a game isn't necessarily the actual winning but other things you get to do. You can accumulate victory points in nearly every boardgame nowadays so there needs to be something else cool about your game to get players (especially new players) excited.

"Sometimes I get hard thinking about victory points." Said by no one ever.

 I don't think that people get excited about play Monopoly (although I don't know anyone who does get excited about playing Monopoly) because they get to roll dice and the object of the game is to bankrupt your friends. They get excited because they get to hold big wads of cash and plop hotels down and gleefully tell someone to pay their rent for a change. So single out one cool thing you can do or have done in the past in the game and tell new players about it. It will also give them a potential strategy to think about when they start playing and I think that's more important than explaining every single rule in minute detail.

So TL;DR for introducing a game to new players:
A. Tell them who they are playing in the game and what is the theme of the game.
B. Compare the boardgame to a book, movie, comic book or TV show that has a similar theme.
C. Tell the players what cool things they can do in the game.

What do you think? What's the best way to "sell" a game to new players?

Four games in four stories

This review post is rather late because I was both crazy busy and crazy lazy at the same time, and Fallout 4 came out and yeah, I'm out of excuses. Instead, I'm going to do a pile of mini-reviews at once. But we are going to do this as stories, because one of the things I love about board games (good ones anyway) is that each game is a unique story.

We begin in ancient times, on the coast of eastern Mediterranean, near the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of... Advanced Civilization! There, on the banks of the Upper Nile, a small tribe begins its migration northward, pressured by population growth and hunger for victory points! And victory points, as any student of history can tell you, come from cities and luxury resources! They grew and prospered, spreading west into Africa and north into Sinai and Judea where they came into conflict with a migrating tribe of... the Blue People! (honestly, I can't recall what the actual name of the faction was - it was either Hittites or Asiatics, the point of the story is...)

My glorious Egyptian civilization. I felt like I did as well as I did mostly because of my starting location.

The great Yellow People (a.k.a. Egyptians) rolled the Blue People, but then worked out a peace treaty and commenced lots and lots of trading in the hopes of creating sets of resource cards that could be used to create ever more glorious technologies like sail-weaving and pottery and yarn-making. So it went through several ages, more cities arose, more sets of cards were assembled, and the mighty Yellow People fleet kept the country safe for a few hours until we ran out of time and had to cut Advanced Civilization short. In brief, Advanced Civilization looks intimidating as hell and the rules are not well-written, but it's actually much easier than it appears. It's a game of area control, deck building, and negotiation, and it's a lot of fun at first; however, it outstays its welcome after the first two ages (I think there are four or five in total? I can't accurately remember). After the first age I've pretty much experienced all there was to the game and its mechanics. It's a grand game but it's not worth the 6-8 hour investment to actually finish it properly. I also felt that a big thing this game was lacking was some differentiation between the different civilizations other than starting location. Basically all civilizations are identical in every way and have access to the same technologies. That was quite a big flaw in my opinion.

We skip a couple of thousand years to the rainy shores of... Britannia! There, a bunch of tribes live more or less peacefully. Doing their stuff. Welsh are welshing, Picts are picting, when out of the misty southern fog suddenly... A WHOLE CRAPLOAD OF ROMANS APPEARED! The Romans kicked some major butt, but couldn't quite conquer northern England (held off by the Brigantes) or Wales (held off by the Welsh). Eventually Romans were replaced by Roman Britannians who were promptly wiped out by invading Saxons and Angles. Meanwhile in the north, the Picts and Brigandians were stubbornly staying alive against invading Irish, Scots and remaining Caledonians. However, with the Welsh-Angle alliance holding Saxons down, it seemed like Britannia's troubles would soon be over. Even Brigantians mostly stayed in their hills. A few centuries passed by uneventfully (if by uneventful you mean Irish constantly landing on western shores and taking heads. Which is exactly what I mean by uneventful). When suddenly Vikings!

OK, they weren't this handsome, but close enough. The Norsemen, the Norwegians, and some other Scandinavians I can't remember now pretty much slaughtered everyone. Even the Picts, who managed to wipe out the Scots, were themselves finally wiped. Only the Saxons were holding on, stabbing the Angles in the back when they were invaded by Norwegians. When just as suddenly, the Normans landed and started killing Saxons like they were going out of style. Except William the Conqueror turned out to be William the Unlucky when he tried to take out the Saxon king, rolled like shit and died himself. Leaving the Norwegians to pick up the pieces and become the winners.

Basically in Britannia, players take on successive waves of invaders trying to take as much of provinces in Britain as possible while amassing as many victory points as possible (which is totally historically accurate - I checked wikipedia).

My Angles are getting annihilated while Lille's Norwegians are burning everything in sight.

 If this sounds like Smallworld, that's because Smallworld was actually inspired by the original edition of Britannia (I played the 2008 FFG reprint). I quite enjoyed this game, it has a lot of replayability (there are a ton of different invaders to try and you don't always get the same invaders to control), it's actually very historically accurate so it's great for teaching Dark Ages history of Britain, and it's not a very complicated game. The randomness of dice rolls in combat can turn off some people but I enjoyed it in this game, and also it's not very easy to find. Personally I'd love to play it again a couple of times.

Staying in Britain, but almost six hundred years later, an ambitious English captain is hiring an intrepid crew, outfits his ship - The Golden Hind - with the finest cannons and sails, and stocks provisions for a trip to the Caribbean where riches and glory await. The captain's name? Francis Drake. Even before he sets out, there is a great element of risk. Will he woo the Virgin Queen in hopes that she will grant him additional money and supplies? Petition for a chance to be the Admiral or the Governor of English possessions in the Caribbean? Attract more investors? Hire spies? And most importantly, should he sail ahead of his competitors who are likewise preparing for plundering voyages of their own? At last he feels ready to sail. He arrives in the Caribbean ahead of his competitors but sadly he didn't bring enough supplies so he focuses on trading for indigo and attacking the weaker Spanish outposts, while his competitors chase Spanish galleons and attack the great cities of Havana and Panama. Disheartened, the English privateer returns home to outfit his ship for a second voyage.

The Francis Drake wannabes are ready to sail!

Francis Drake is a pretty awesome worker placement game with a very strong theme. Actually it's two worker placement games in one. The first one is about outfitting your ship, but the way it's done is quite intriguing. The potential actions are laid out with cards in a row, but once you commit to a card you can't do an action on any of the previous cards in a row, you can only go forward, plus you are competing for actions with other players. The second worker placement game in Francis Drake is in voyaging to the Caribbean, attacking Spanish forts, towns and galleons, trading for goods and other shenanigans, in order to (drumroll please!) get victory points. This is done by placing disks with numbers, and as players stack those disks on top of each other, there's an element of bluffing. I really liked this game. More than Advanced Civilization or Britannia, this is a game that I would love to own.

Thousands of years in the future, in a galaxy far away from England or Mesopotamia, a faction of religious dissidents sets out to usher in a new galactic renaissance, but only if the dice fall in their favor as they Roll for the Galaxy! Finding themselves on the run, the religious dissidents make an alliance with other outcasts and separatists in the far away systems of the galaxy. Finding an extremely advanced lab, they research the secrets of nanotechnology which makes them an economic superpower in the long run. They construct great docks to carry their goods and their religious creed to the rest of the galaxy and finally bring about the great galactic renaissance of peace, prosperity and cultural growth that was spoken of in their prophecies.

Victory was finally achieved! With much nanotechnology and dice!

Roll for the Galaxy is a spiritual sequel to the super-popular and acclaimed Race for the Galaxy. Except, while I hate Race for the Galaxy, Roll for the Galaxy is marvelous in every way. Players roll dice, assign those dice to different actions, then buy different cards to advance their galactic civilization and achieve goals, then use their dice and cards to get more dice, and roll those dice, and oh God this feedback loop is too addictive! Unlike Race for the Galaxy, Roll for the Galaxy is much quicker, the new art is much better, you can easily see how well other players are doing, building a "deck" of dice and then rolling a whole bunch of them feels so much more satisfying. And just like Race for the Galaxy it lets you create your own personal narrative of a grand space opera. This is a game I'll be buying for myself the moment I have the chance.

So there we have it, four games. One venerable classic that turned out to be so-so, a delightful historic game with some replayability, a fantastic worker placement game with a strong theme and equally fantastic deck/dice building game. Soon, I hope to review Trains, Exploding Kittens and a couple of other new games. Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year's!

A pile of Eurogames!

This week was something of a Eurogame binge, having played three games: Imperial, Manhattan Project, and Brass. In case you're not familiar with the term, Eurogames refer to board games typically designed and produced by European game designers and companies (but not exclusively so) that focus on non-zero sum victory goals (so definitely not Monopoly or Risk - think more accumulation of victory points or specific resources), creating and running efficient economies and competing for resources. Games like Settlers of Catan and Carcasonne are two of the best known examples of this genre. Two of the games I've played were very much typical Eurogames (Manhattan Project and Brass) while Imperial was unlike almost any other game I've played.

Imperial looks very much like Risk or Diplomacy at first glance.

I'm running Germany into the ground and lining my pockets at the same time!

There are European nations conforming to late 19th century borders, armies and fleets and money. However, this is where the similarities end. You see, the players aren't the nations, they are devious investors manipulating the nations from the shadows! A player who invests the most into a nation the controls what that nation does, but there's nothing preventing that player from also investing in other nations. Growing the nation's treasury through taxation and war and then raiding that treasure through bonds for all it's worth is quite a viable strategy! For example I started out in control of Germany, I quickly invested in Italy and seized control of Italy for a few turns, then spent a few turns without a country to control (but with plenty of cash and investments in most of the other countries) before once again controlling Germany. I ran Germany into the ground but it didn't matter - what mattered was how much cash I had (not the nation I controlled) and the value of the bonds I held at the end of the game. I'm only scratching the surface here because the game also features a very unique rondel which the players use to issue commands to their controlled nations, a simple but enjoyable combat system, and all sorts of other devious things one can do. On top of that it's a purely non-random game but one with a lot of depth. Imperial is definitely a game I can't wait to play again!

Manhattan Project is a quintessential worker placement Euro game with a few twists that made it far more enjoyable for me than very similar games such as Agricola. The players are countries competing to develop their own nuclear weapons.

 My dinky personal playing space, only six buildings but at least I already have a bomb loaded!

 They use three different types of workers (labourers, engineers and scientists) to take actions dictated on the main board as well as the buildings they can buy. Players have to accumulate resources such as money and yellowcake (un-enriched Uranium ore) and then refine uranium and/or plutonium, research different bomb designs, build said bombs, and then "load" them. Only loaded bombs grant victory points - money and other resources are only means to an end (building the bomb) and provide no victory points. So it's an exercise in creating the most efficient economic chains just like Agricola. But what Manhattan Project does differently is injecting a lot more direct competition and ability to interfere with the other players than most Eurogames have.

 Players can use espionage to send their workers into enemy's buildings denying their use, they can also build fighters and bombers to disable enemy buildings and disrupt their chains. There is a LOT of depth to the game, and I haven't even tried the hydrogen bomb rules or the expansion, but I have already enjoyed it a lot more than Agricola. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the theme as being entirely appropriate, but then again Archipelago is one of my top favourite games and it's a game about the brutal colonization of Polynesian islands by Europeans...

Finally, Brass was a game I was very dubious about, since it's designed by Martin Wallace known for very heavy Eurogames and whose game After the Flood I didn't particularly enjoy. On the surface there is little to recommend Brass - it's a game about industrial development in Lancashire in the second half of the 19th century, and it's butt ugly to boot (just look at it!).

 It also features one of the worst-written manuals I've ever seen. However, we played a few practice turns first, slowly figured out the rules and played a proper game, and surprisingly we had a blast! Players play two cards per turn that dictate where the players can construct buildings or what type of buildings they can place. At the same time players are trying to accumulate money and to spend the coal and iron from their mines or from the separate pool of resources. The game has two phases - a canal phase and railroad phase. During each phase players have access to different buildings, the costs are different, and some locations only open up in the railroad phase. Almost everything gets wiped out after the canal phase (this seems to be Martin Wallace's calling card just like After the Flood) so the players have clear choices between trying to make as much money in the canal phase or to lay groundwork for even bigger expansion during the railway age. There is a lot more to this game but suffice to say I greatly enjoyed it and anyone who likes Powergrid will find a lot to like here as well, provided you can get past the awful manual and visual design (I found some tiles very hard to read because of a poor choice of colour contrast).

Anyway, three new games and I can't wait to play all three of these again! Definitely a big hit with me!

Mage Knight and After the Flood

It only took me two weeks after moving to Doha, Qatar to find a board gaming group. Meetup is pretty amazing for finding people for whatever hobby or past time you're looking for. The group I joined (link here) plays every week, Simon is a very gracious host with a very large playing table, a very large collection, and a fantastic view of the Pearl. So if you're in Doha and you want to play some board games give a shout. Anyway, on to the reviews.

We decided to play two games that two of the players have never played before: Vlaada Chvátil's Mage Knight (2011 edition) and Martin Wallace's After the Flood (a 2008 game). I'll start with the latter however as that was the one we played first. After the Flood is set in ancient Mesopotamia and covers about 2000 years of history with the manual being full of wonderful historical information and trivia about the setting.

Picture courtesy of Dice Tower

At its heart, After the Flood is a worker placement, area control game. Workers are used to generate basic resources and to claim areas where these basic resources can be upgraded to progressively better and better resources. At the end of the game if you have the most workers in a given area you score the victory points for that area. Armies are used to deny areas to the enemy, sack enemy cities, or in lieu of workers when trading resources. Cities can also be upgraded for massive victory point boosts. The game has several unique mechanics to handicap the lead players, for example if one player passes the other players can keep taking turns but every turn they subsequently take requires them to throw away some of their resources. Also, the game is broken up into five turns and on turns 2 and 4 a great deluge (or as the game called it Decline Phase) occurs which wipes out most of the workers off the board, effectively resetting it. In each turn new empires open up for players to raise their armies in so you're constantly planning one or two turns ahead, looking to see where you will be able to raise armies and control vital resources. The other noteworthy thing about the game is that it is designed precisely for three players. Three shall be the number of thy counting, and the number of thy counting shall be two. Not two, not four, not two to three or two to four, three. This makes it a bit weird. So what I liked about it was the whole process of building an effective economic engine to steamroll your empire to victory. The way different resources provided different bonuses (such as upgrading your army or building a bigger army or giving you more workers or upgrading cities) was very well managed. I also rather liked the look of the board and the pieces although many people online apparently complain that the game looks boring - I don't agree, it has a clean aesthetic with Mesopotamian feel and the areas are very clearly delineated. However, would I recommend After the Flood? Well, no. And there are three big reasons for it. The first reason is how combat is resolved. Basically it's like Risk, but only the attacker rolls the dice and the probabilities are HEAVILY skewed in the favour of the attacker (7+ if your army has no upgrades, or 5+ if it is better equipped than your opponent, that means that even when you don't have equipment you'll be killing the enemy 50% of the time). Building enormous army of doom to completely disrupt your opponents' plans seems too easy and the dice rolling is too random and feels out of place in an otherwise Eurogame design. The other reason is that there isn't much replay value to it. It's quite clear what gives the most victory points from the start so as long as you try to occupy areas that produce certain resources (particularly Lapis Lazuli and gold) you'll be able to place more workers and have better armies than your opponents. Finally, After the Flood is - like Monopoly or Risk - a game where you can usually see who's going to win the game by the end of turn three, and yet it takes two more turns to make it a fait accompli. If it wasn't for these reasons I'd definitely recommend it. It was enjoyable enough for a 1.5-2 hour game, but nothing I'd really want to play again. Games such as Samurai, El Grande or Archipelago (my personal favourite) do the same thing but much better.

The other game we played is the esteemed Mage Knight, currently sitting on number 8 at Board Game Geek, which is quite a remarkable feat considering the competition. Mage Knight is a fantasy quasi-RPG game with tile-laying and heavy deck-building mechanics. Each player contains a hero and his or her entourage of followers, exploring randomly revealed tiles. They fight marauding orks and dragons, explore tombs, dungeons, monster lairs, and if you're feeling a bit more evil also storming wizard towers, forts and even cities (although cities may require more than one player to work together). Hero's basic and special abilities, spells, and artifacts are represented by a deck of cards that gradually grows throughout the game, and most abilities and spells have a basic effect that doesn't cost anything and a special effect that costs mana. Mana is generated randomly by rolling a bunch of dice, and it can also be acquired as crystals or tokens by going to certain locations on the map or playing certain cards. So it's also a resource management game as well. OK, to be honest I would do the complexity of the game a grave injustice if I tried to summarize it so just go and watch the excellent (and hilarious!) review of Mage Knight by Shut Up & Sit Down crew here to get a better sense of the rules. Let's just say that there are so many little systems all working together in ways you only begin to appreciate (and develop an awe for) towards the end of the first game you play. There are just so many options you have but the game never throws them all at you at once, instead slowly giving you the tools and awareness as the game progresses. And just look at it! It is one of the most gorgeous games I've ever played!

Image courtesy of Amazon.com

 The production value definitely justifies the rather steep price tag. The heroes are decently fully painted minis, the art on tiles and monsters and cards is excellent, the cities are heroclix like bastions and the way the tiles fit together... Unnnnnghhhhhh.

OK, but is it actually fun? Well... The design - both gameplay and artistic - is amazing, but there are definitely a few hurdles that made the first time I played Mage Knight a somewhat frustrating experience. So what were they? One is that since the map is randomly generated moving around can be quite frustrating and very slow, especially at the start. There are too many impassable barriers (at least in the early game before you acquire various spells of flying and such) that make moving about rather tedious. The other is a problem endemic in deckbuilders such as Dominion: the curse of an enormous chain of cards being played on one turn, and if the player plays the cards in the wrong order from the one s/he intended then they usually start the chain anew. Turns where a player took ten or even twenty minutes were not uncommon. There is also an enormous amount of rules to digest - if everyone already knows the rules then the game runs a bit faster but even so, there's already a huge errata and FAQ online for the game that the players need to be familiar with. The other problem is endemic to all of Vlaada's games (except for his party games) and that is a horrible manual. A lot of spelling errors, referring to the same concept by two different names throughout the manual, lack of a decent index, the way related rules are not always grouped together into logical categories, all make learning Mage Knight much more frustrating than it should be. Even after playing it for the first time I'm not altogether sure that we played it correctly, and I still can't easily tell you all the different ways in which victory points are scored. Lastly, most deckbuilding games contain some form of mechanic whereby you can 'trim' your deck or starting cards to make room for better cards. Mage Knight does not and I often found that I wanted to prune my deck of certain cards permanently but there was no way to do so. Maybe one of the expansions for the game (there are two currently out I believe) introduces this, but the base game certainly does not. However, despite these shortcomings, Mage Knight is the game I would definitely want to play again and again, to try out different heroes (each of which feels very different to play it would appear!), to try out different paths to victory and just to see more of it! I feel like during the first game we barely scratched the surface of different special abilities, spells and artifacts and that's just the base game!

So there you have it: one solid if unremarkable game, and the other an occasionally frustrating but clearly very promising experience!