Check out Brenda Braithwaite’s piece from last year. I’ve been meaning to post about this for ages now…
http://playthisthing.com/train
Train is not your standard board game. It comes on a full-sized window, not in a cardboard box. There is no company logo on the rules, because there is no publisher. You cannot buy it, because only one [...]
I’ve been particularly interested in group decision making since undergoing research on improvisational theatre. A big facet of improv games is the disparity of knowledge. Improv scenes typically involve the actors having different models of what is going on and trying to come to an implicit agreement as to what the scene is, [...]
Check out Gabe’s experience with the WoW CCG and MMO character he built here. He notes that “the card game is built so well that I was actually able to construct a deck that matched my WOW character exactly.” He comments on how surprised he was that “they managed to model all the PC game [...]
We tackled a large scale game in Starcraft this past month (though not nearly as large scale as Twilight Imperium by far). Starcraft is an appealing adaptation of an enormously popular real-time strategy game on the PC. We thought this would be an interesting game to study (much like when we played Doom) since it [...]
So, we’ve covered digital game-to-board game adaptation briefly in our game session in the past (re: Doom the Board game and currently Starcraft) and intend to focus more so on it in the coming weeks with the Starcraft board game. Ian Bogost posted recently about a fun find in board game history: http://www.bogost.com/blog/zimmer_base_ball_and_cigars.shtml
So, my visit to the board games colloquium was interesting. It is a distinct academic gaming culture (made up of historians, anthropologists, mathematicians, game theoreticians, and archaeologists) that has been gathering for over a decade. The quality of the talks, as expected, was pretty varied - but there were a few gems that [...]
From boingboing.net:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/27/boardgame-pricefixin.html
A board-game publisher has begun engaging in price fixing, a practice newly liberalized in the US in the wake of a June Supreme Court decision. Yehuda sez,
So, Ben posited the question earlier:
I’m wondering, since the computer does a lot of the calculations for you does that seem to take away the “mechanic”. Picking a skill to use and rolling die are taken away and made quicker decisions for instance in Doom. Does that add or take away from [...]
We have played a game of Settlers of Catan as a five person game…which is fairly different of a game. All players can do more actions each turn. This likely was introduced to keep people involved in the game, as turns can be dragged out as players make difficult decisions. I have [...]
We have gotten through two solid sessions of playing Ra, enough to constructively talk about the game but not enough to satiate our desire to play it. Ra is a fairly simple, easy-to-learn game that can be very engrossing after a single time playing it.
We want to discuss these games and answer key questions [...]