Board

Hey! That's My Fish! has got to be about the silliest possible theme for what is, when you get down to it, an abstract strategy game with surprising depth. True, its rules are sufficiently simple as to be accessible to quite young players, but as with any abstract strategy game, the ability to plan and think several moves ahead is critical. In other words, this is not exactly a kid's game.

Before game start, the players lay out hexagonal tiles in a set pattern. Each tile is printed with between one and three fish. Each player places penguins of their colors on tiles, pretty much as they wish; it can be played by up to four, and the number of starting penguins depends on the number of players (e.g., in a four player game, each starts with two). On your turn, you may move one of your penguins any distance in one of the six directions permitted by the hex grid -- but not through an empty hex, or a hex containing another player's penguin. When you move, you remove the hex you formerly occupied, and score between one and three points, as indicated by the number of fish on the tile.

The main strategic element of gameplay is working to isolate other players' penguins, trapping them in small areas; when this happens, and an area is isolated that contains only one penguin, the owner scores all tiles in the isolated area, and the penguin is removed from play. Maximizing score by getting high-fish hexes is a secondary but important strategic consideration.

What is striking and admirable about the game is the strategic depth it provides for a remarkably sparse rules set. As Eric Goldberg says, it is far harder to design a good, simple game than a good, complicated one, and Hey! That's My Fish! succeeds at the task.

Sixteen Thirty Something is a design by Martin Wallace (who also designed Steam) dating to 1995. This version is a redesign by Danny Stevens, and has been released as a free "print and play" game with Wallace's permission.

Although the game has something of the color of the period, it is not, as you might expect, a Thirty Years' War game. Instead, it's a strategy game in which players, theoretically representing large merchant houses, have influence in the various countries which they use to attempt to earn victory points. Wars occur, but are highly abstracted.

At the start of the game, each player receives a number of secret "victory point markers" printed with the names of different countries. At the end of each turn, a player earns victory points for each of these countries, if he has influence there, with the point award being the smaller of the country's current "status" (a measure of prestige and power) and the player's influence in the country. There are multiple markers for each country, so that, say, two players could both be earning for Denmark, or one player earning doubly there. Players calculate their own VP totals, with only the totals revealed each turn, so it may be possible to infer, as the game goes on, what powers each player has VP with, but it is never overtly revealed, at least until game end. This, coupled with card hands, is the main source of uncertainty in the game.

"Influence" is in the form of cards, which players place in front of themselves, with a set of rules governing when new cards can be played, drawn, and so on. The main player conflict is in the form of "lobbying the crown," whereby a player attempts to get a nation to initiate a war with another nation; players vote their influence, with players able to play new influence cards in the process. The victor of a war gains status (and thereby may confer more victory points to players with that country's marker), and the loser loses military power.

The original version of the game had two main flaws; first, random allocation of cards and VP markers made it perhaps too luck-dependent, and second, there's an obvious positive feedback loop in terms of power status that tends to mean that, by midgame, some players are clearly in the lead and others pretty much out of the game, which is not a desirable effect.

Stevens's version redresses the problems and produces a considerably tighter can, at the cost of some additional complexity. Hand limits tighten over time, which makes for tenser play, and a system whereby a player's influence can be in decline (and the player unable to increase it) is added; this provides a negative feedback loop that redresses the positive one. In addition, a system is added to reallocate some cards among players each turn, which helps with the randomness issues.

On the whole, it's quite a good game with some novel mechanics, and worth the effort to assemble a copy to play. Stevens's version is, unfortunately, not particularly attractive from a graphic design perspective, though a fan contributed alternative game board helps. (It's designed for v1, though -- you'll still need the tracks from Stevens's game board).

Games produce fanatical geeks. Not all games, of course, but games of very diverse sorts: You'll find people who practically live for Counter-Strike or World of Warcraft and people who spend a big part of their waking life painting miniatures, and on and on. Railroad games are a case in point; people who love rail games will often play something else, but their eyes light up when you start talking about trains.

"Perhaps I should write about Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!," I mused. "But of course they can't play this thing, since it's not only out of print but incredibly obscure, and basically no copies are available anywhere."

No problem; I emailed JFD and got his permission to put the game up here.

A House Divided is unquestionably my favorite game about the Slaveholder's Rebellion (better known to many as the American Civil War, and to Reb sympathizers as "The War Between the States," or in sad and extreme cases as "The War of Northern Aggression"). It deals with the entire war, barring minor actions in Texas, with a map whose four corners cover roughly New York, Kansas, Louisiana, and northern Florida. It's also playable in a few hours.

Agricola is a bit of a departure for Uwe Rosenberg, previously best known for his tight, engaging cardgame, Bohnanza. Agricola is instead a big, sprawling game, quite complicated by the standards of the Eurostyle, and "tight" is not quite the word.

My boardgame Megacorps was released last week. It would, of course, be otiose for me to review my own work, so these are more along the line of design notes:

When Zev "Z-Man" Schlesinger called after playing Megacorps, he said "It reminded us of an old Avalon Hill/West End game." Which startled me, because I thought I was designing a Eurogame. But on reflection, he has a point; Megacorps owes something to the Eurostyle, but also something to the Anglo-American hobby boardgame tradition -- not surprisingly, since that's what I cut my eyeteeth on.

When I started work on the game, I wanted it to require 3-6 players, take an hour or less to play, have a limited set of mechanics, and have very tight rules. To place it square in the middle of the Eurostyle, in other words.

And I did achieve those objectives -- but did not achieve another salient characteristic of the Eurostyle: theme irrelevance.

For most Eurogames, the theme is essentially arbitrary. Designers of such games are concerned mainly with devising interesting and original game mechanics, with the theme just an overlay, a bit of marketing fluff to dress the game up and perhaps inspire some attractive graphics. In other words, you could take the game, reskin it with a different theme, and no essential changes to the game would be required. The designer begins with mechanics and moves to theme.

In saying this, I want to make clear that I am not offering a criticism; a game like, say, Medici may actually have nothing to do with Renaissance-era trade, but that doesn't matter; it's a fine piece of work and an excellent game. Rather, I'm remarking instead on an aesthetic difference between the Eurostyle and the Anglo-American hobby game tradition, and I could quite as easily make a countervailing statement on the aesthetic flaws of the latter kind of game in light of the Eurogame aesthetic: E.g., too much dependence on randomness, the sacrifice of strategy to the simulationist impulse, and excessively long and often tedious play times.

But in this regard, I did almost the reverse of a typical Eurogame designer: Rather than starting with mechanics and moving to theme, I started with the theme. The mechanics of Megacorps almost fell out of the theme.

The original idea for the game came from Kevin Maroney, who, when we worked together at Crossover Technologies, proposed an online-only multiplayer game, with the same title and basic theme -- large multinationals competing and waging war with each other in a future world where nationality is essentially irrelevant. Nothing came of the idea, but later, looking for a boardgame idea, I recalled the title, and thought that there could be an interesting Eurostyle boardgame in it.

Clearly, the players must represent megacorps, the game must be economically-driven in nature, and there must be governments for the megacorps to manipulate. It must also clearly be set in the not-too-distant future rather than there here-and-now, since this is not how the real world works today. (Today, when governments want to take down even very powerful companies, they can do so with amazing speed and thoroughness -- vide Drexel Burnham, Enron, Lukoil, and Lehman Brothers.)

For manipulating governments to be meaningful, governments need to have an impact on the economic game, so we come to the idea of individual companies located within countries and the ability of governments to affect them, if not the megacorps directly. And to make that interesting, we need ways for megacorps to take control of countries from each other.

In a way, the basic mechanics of Megacorps almost designed themselves, falling out of the basic premise of the game. Or so it felt like; I realize that's an illusion. Years ago, I designed a space-trading game called Trailblazer, and after I had finished it but before it was published heard that Nick Karp was working on a game called Star Trader. I worried that the two games would be too similar; it was hard for me to conceive of a way to do a space trading game other than the way I'd done it, that is, as a microeconomics simulation with variable supply and demand curves.

No need to worry; his game was totally different. Trailblazer, too, had seemed almost to design itself; and doubtless another designer starting from the same theme as Megacorps would come up with an entirely different game. Yet the point remains: the theme of Megacorps informed and infused the design in a way that seems alien to the Eurostyle as a general rule.

Secondly, most Eurostyle games can be, somewhat unjustly, characterized as "simultaneous single-player games." That is, in a game such as Puerto Rico, the only real interaction with other players is a mild level of competition for some scarce resources; by contrast, most Anglo-American hobby games pit players directly against one another, with ways for them to directly assist or injure each other. In this regard, Megacorps is somewhere between the two: Most of the time you are acting purely to improve your own position, but the war and government intervention rules do give you a way to attack another player's position indirectly, and at least in the end-game, the use (or misuse) of this capability can be critical to the final score.

The fiddliness of some of the game's rules fall partly out of the same quasi-simulationist impulse, and partly out of a need to break symmetry. Thus, some of the Megacorps begin in control of countries with which the corporations I'm mocking are connected -- Mokia with the European Union, for instance -- and the event cards, too, try to have a game impact that actually has something to do with their name and theme. But symmetry breaking is also important; by that I mean that any game which begins with players in identical positions runs the risk that all players adopt identical strategies, which is often a recipe for dullness. By giving players starting event cards that offer potentially useful options, and by allocating some countries to players initially, the game begins in an asymmetric landscape, encouraging players to take different tacks. The risk of this kind of approach is, of course, that the asymmetry gives some players clear advantages or disadvantages relative to the others, unbalancing the game; I think I've managed to balance the positions reasonably well, but went through quite a few iterations to get to this point.

I'm aware that what I've semi-accidentally hit on with Megacorps -- a sort of synthesis of the Euro- and Anglo-style -- is not unique; 1960 and Pandemic, notably also by American game designers, have some of the same characteristics. But it occurs to me that this may be a fruitful synthesis, something that provides both the strategic purity of the Eurostyle and the color that only a meaningful connection to theme can provide. I look forward to working further in this vein.

{See also The Future History of Megacorps.)

Kittredge, Eberle, and Olotka are better known for the superb Cosmic Encounter, but Borderlands is almost as good a game -- and though published in the early 80s, is an uncanny precursor of many features of today's popular Eurogames.

John Butterfield, with whom I shared an office for a time at SPI, has long since gone onto an impressive career as an interactive designer, but in the late 70s and early 80s, he designed a whole series of games for SPI, Victory Games, and West End Games. Among them was RAF, which we published when I was running all game development efforts for West End. He has greatly reworked and improved the game for this new edition from Decision Games.

Blokus is an abstract strategy game in the same general family of games as Hex or Twixt, but with more strategic depth than either of those games.

Each of four players has a set of 21 pieces that are all possible polyominoes containing one to five squares. (The Tetris shapes are the five possible polyominoes with four squares; Blokus shapes run from 1 square to 5 squares in size, one of each possible configuration.)