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 certainly made it worthwhile.

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In this game players take on the role of managing a network of power, a power grid if you will (sorry). The board consists of a map of the USA or Germany. Cities are placed throughout the map and are connected by lines that have distance values. Players must purchase hubs on cities that will allow them to provide that city with power, which gives each player money. Only one player at the beginning can own any one city, though this changes later in the game, but the cost of buying a hub is the same for everyone.

For the players to provide power to their cities they must purchase power plants and resources in each round. Power plants have different resource needs and power output. There are 50 power plants in all and with the higher ones being resource efficient and power abundant. Resources are either coal, oil, garbage, or uranium and get replenished at various rates each round throughout the game (various rates meaning oil refreshes more at the beginning of the game then at the end).

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Gamasutra has an article about the Essen International Game Day, in Essen, Germany. They say it is the largest board game event in the world. They profile some new games that came out during the event like Galaxy Trucker.

Link

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, Read more…

Ranked number one at boardgamegeek.com, Puerto Rico is basically a game of economics. There is no killing, major conflicts, or much interaction between the players (in terms of mechanics) in the game. Everyone is allowed to do the same actions and may choose how to foster their economy independently.

The premise is that you are a importer/export/land owner in the New World on the island of Puerto Rico (and you must say it with a Spanish accent). With your land you will plant fields (plantations) and build buildings. The crops you produce will be sent back to Europe and you will be rewarded for this act. Let me discuss how all of this occurs.

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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 the gameplay?

I think this a finer grain issue of interface as opposed to mechanics. Die roll vs. a random number generator “do” they same thing in the end. However, there’s a tangible satisfaction in rolling the die, visual satisfaction in seeing them tumble to a rest state, etc. That’s not a mechanic persay – they player still effects the game model in exactly the same fashion – but the interface for doing that is different……and we do get satisfaction / frustrations from UI’s.

I know he has a further point to make on this though – so respond away.

Written by Steve Jackson and illustrated by John Kovalic (of Dork Tower fame), Munchkin is a card game (of the non-collectible variety) published by Steve Jackson Games that takes a humorous and cockeyed look at the D&D, dungeon crawl setting. The game is appropriate for 3-6 players, and usually runs about an hour. We found, however, that the more players you have the longer the game takes. After it was originally published in 2000, Steve Jackson Games released a series of expansions. In addition, Steve Jackson Games has released a series of additional Munchkin “sets” based on other themes – Star Munchkin, Munchkin Fu, Super Munchkin, etc – all of which use the exact same gameplay mechanic as the original D&D-esq Munchkin. In fact, its easy as pie to mix the sets themselves, thereby creating an even zanier gameplay experience.

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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 played a decent bit online since then in three player games. I much much prefer both playing with fewer than 5 people as well as online (the board for Catan is a little cumbersome to setup). Read more…

Mechanics

Lost cities is a turn-based card game. There are five colors of cards. Each set of colors has four start cards and nine number cards that have the values 2-10. Read more…

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 that will help inform what about the game is special / interesting / fun and how those elements can be mapped to
possible game mechanics in the digital game realm. Our list of questions thus far are:

• What are the main game mechanics?
• What makes this game fun / interesting? (Oh, so easy to answer)
• How would this work as a computer game?
• ….what other questions should be asked? Read more…