Game systems and abstracts

I am a big fan of game systems and I also like abstracts a lot. I think that it's hard not to like game systems if you don't already like abstracts.

Game systems, a collection of bits and bobs that can be used to play multiple games, tend to fall under the umbrella of abstract pretty easily. After all, if the pieces can be used for a bunch of different games, they can't be too unitasker. Yes, I just stole a concept from Alton Brown (he probably stole it from someone else anyway) and completely misused it.

Of course, the most important game system out there is the deck of cards. (I don't think anyone can argue that point and come out sounding rational) This would make poker and rummy and bridge all abstracts. Which could be argued but I think that makes the term abstract too vague and universal.

Random elements, hidden information and bluffing are all iffy categories when it comes to defining abstracts and card games tend to have all three. Then again, everyone says Qwirkle and Ingenious are abstracts and they have all three too. 

Kind of makes me wonder if we need to break abstracts down into more categories, the way I've seen Euro games and German family games broken down. Of course, an important factor in defining a category of games is who the intended audience is and what they want out of the game. Would games-you-can-lose-money-playing be a category? Then poker and chess belong together :D 

But when you look at game systems like dominoes or checkers or Looney Pyramids or Piecepack, they tend towards abstract games. But since the abstract ideal is a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. If one game system gives you a lot of games that are easy to teach but still interesting to play, that's a good thing.

http://www.looneylabs.com/looney-pyramids

http://www.piecepack.org

Exploring lamination with Micropul

Ever since we got a laminator, I have been testing out what I can do with it as far is print and play projects are concerned. In actuality, it has actually exceeded my expectations.

The first 'real' project I tried with the laminator was making a set of laminated Micropul tiles. Everything else that I've done up until this point was just to see how it would do, without actually worrying about ending up with a game that I would want to play.

(Well, the first thing I tried was making laminated cards for Button Men, which is a game I like. However, that just makes nice cards. I don't need them to play the game. A friend of mine and I used to play Button Men with just dice and printed out spreadsheet of various buttons)

Micropul is a relatively old print and play game. It first came out over 10 years ago. Part of what has to have given legs is that it is a very simple project make. All you need is to make one page of tiles and some tokens of some kind. However, it's also pretty decent game which has to be the biggest part of why it is still part of the print and play scene.

It's a tile-laying game where you try to claim and close groups of symbols, not unlike farming scoring in Carcassonne. And if that's all there was to it, it wouldn't be that much.

However, unlike most tile-laying games, you don't draw tiles as part of your turn. You have to activate special symbols on the tiles to get tiles. Unused tiles at the end of the game are worth points. That's a pretty good twist.

What I decided to try doing was laminating the sheet of tiles and then cutting them out. I did this, even though I didn't think it would work.

Now, I haven't dealt with lamination in probably over 20 years. My memories of old laminators were that they would basically create a plastic sandwich around the paper with the edges being sealed. If you broke the seal that the edges made, everything would fall apart.

I have some sort of crazy memory of lamination paper that was actually clear plastic with the sticky side and you would make a sandwich out of two of them. But I never used anything like that and I don't know if it actually exists in any place other than my imagination.

I had some hoped that the heated plastic of modern lamination pouches would actually adhere to the paper but I didn't really expect that to be the case. The quality of the plastic has definitely improved and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the actual laminators are hotter.

Lo and behold, the plastic actually did adhere to the paper. Instead of having to cut out the tiles and individually laminate them, I was able to just run the laminator once and get laminated tiles.

The fact that I used regular copy paper as opposed to card stock or cardboard might've actually helped the process.

Now, the real question is how well will they hold up in the long run. I am sure that over time and play, the plastic will start peel off of the tiles.

In the case of Micropul, that's not such a big deal. Between printing and laminating and cutting, I can probably make a set in about fifteen, twenty minutes and material cost probably comes out around fifteen cents at most. Even if they fall apart after a month of play, that's not too bad.

For more complicated projects, I might want to actually individually laminate every piece.

Despite that, this does make making functional pieces a whole lot easier.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10660/micropul

http://neutralbox.com/micropul/

Looking at the increasingly large shadow of Apocalypse World

Over the course of a couple days, I found out that a second rdition of Apocalypse World is getting Kickstarted and I read the short form RPG Crossroads, which uses a streamlined Apocalypse World Engine. 

Crossroads isn't the first game that I have seen that is Powered by Apocalypse and it is far from the most out there. Dream Askew or Murderous Ghosts both do far more experimental things with the system. But reading through it in conjunction with the Kickstarter got me thinking about why the system is just so nifty.

It's hard to pinpoint what makes it's so good. There are elements like characters being made up of qualities, as opposed to statistics. It isn't what you do but why you were doing it that helps determine what stat you use. There is the fact that the only person who ever rolls the dice is the player, never the GM. This all makes the game both narrative driven and player driven.

Oh, in theory, any game can be narrative driven and player driven. But I have seen games that ended up being just about the dice rolls or being controlled by the GM. But the Apocalypse Engine not just encourages it, it makes doing streamlined and easy.

Players can be creative about what they do and one die roll resolves it all.

Crossroads strips away most of the mechanics. It leaves the player making the die rolls and the failure, success and success with a price outcomes.

That last one it's actually something else that makes the engine special. You don't get partial success. You get what you want. You just get a nasty little bonus. It's actually a very important way of doing things. The story keeps on going but things just got a little more complicated. Which actually makes the story better.

Crossroads is based on a web series which I had never heard of called the Booth at the End. There is a man who sits in the last booth in a diner. He can make any wish come true but there's a price. You basically have to do something horrible to get that wish. How far are you willing to go to get what you want? Will you kill someone? Will you plant a bomb in the hospital? What price can you handle? How important is your wish?

As near as I can tell, the only set in the show is the diner. People sit down with the guy and tell them what they want. And later scenes, they come back and give him progress reports. It's all just conversations and flashbacks and decisions.

Which makes it a pretty decent form for a short RPG that should be completed in two hours.

Crossroads comes as a preset scenario with pregenerated characters with pregenerated desires and horrible tasks you can mix-and-match with them. Even under those circumstances, there's a lot of flexibility about how the story will develop.

But, I realized that it wouldn't be hard to come up with new characters with different desires and new horrible tasks. As long as you are willing to stick with the whole premise of the man in the last booth, there's actually some decent replay value here.

Apocalypse World is one of the most impressive RPG systems that I've come across in recent years. I am very impressed with Dungeon World and Monsterhearts, two well thought out uses of the engine. Crossroads, in comparison, is a pretty dinky little application of the engine. And I still think that it has real potential. That says something about the Apocalypse Engine.

http://apocalypse-world.com

Let's take a look at the first book, the Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is honestly the last book by L. Frank Baum that I should have to tell anyone about. Seriously, if you have been living under a rock in a cave on the bottom of the ocean, you know the Wizard of Oz. When aliens land, they comment on how much they liked the Wizard of Oz before pulling out the death rays.

The Wizard of Oz is a cultural juggernaut. Everyone knows Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, regardless of who you are or where you are from.

Since its public domain, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz should be on be top of the list of free books parents should download for their kids, along with Alice in Wonderland and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That's part of the reason I reread it.

And you already know the story. Dorothy Gale gets blown away to Oz in a cyclone. She gathers together a ragtag band of misfits. Together, they defeat the wicked witch and prove the wizard a fraud. They discover that everyone was special all along and Dorothy realizes there's no place like home.

Of course, the reason why the Wizard of Oz has become such an ingrained part of world culture is because of the 1939 movie version of it. While it is at least the fourth movie adaptation of the book, it is the definitive version of the Wizard of Oz.

I am normally the guy who always thinks the book is better than the movie. The Wizard of Oz is one of the exception to that rule. Honestly, as far as I am concerned, the movie really is better. Heck, the movie is one of the great cinematic masterpieces.

And that's the thing about approaching the book. You have to know that it is different then the movie and that, quite frankly, it isn't as good.

The movie, in addition to having some really good music, has a much tighter plotline. The book tends to ramble and it doesn't have a strong through line. 

The best way to compare them is by looking at the wicked witch of the west. In the book, she appears for one or two chapters, has almost all of her minions killed by the tin man in the scarecrow before they even get to her castle and is scared of the dark. You never are actually worried about her hurting Dorothy.

In the movie, Margaret Hamilton gives us a witch that has been giving generations of children nightmares. She shows up right after Dorothy makes it to us, is a constant looming threat, and is a fireball throwing bad ass. She is a driving presence throughout the entire movie.

OK, so I've established that everyone should see the movie. Having said that, the book is still pretty good. It is worth reading and it is especially worth reading to your kids.

You see, there are 13 more books to go. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the gateway to a whole bunch of other fun books, ones that you in any children that you read them to will probably get a real kick out of.

Spending part of last year reading a lot of Baum

Last year, I decided to read all fourteen of L. Frank Baum's 'official' Oz books. When I was younger, I had read the first nine or so but I never actually finished reading the entire series. So, since I will probably be reading them to my son when he gets a little older, I decided that it was time to actually read them all.

As it turns out, Baum's estate and his publishers get the books coming out after his death. There are actually 40 books that are considered canon in Oz, nicknamed the Famous Forty. 

I decided that I don't need to read the other twenty-six, at least not yet. However, as I started into reading Baum's work, I found that there were other works that he had written that part of the larger Oz picture.

He wrote the queerer visitors from awes and the humbug book in order to drum up interest in the second Oz stage play, which is pretty much only remember today for being a total flop. While he was never big and continuity, the writing in these works are so different that no one considers them to be part of the actual Oz universe.

He also wrote Little Wizard Stories of Oz, a little collection of Oz short stories when he started the series back up again. On the other hand, these actually do fit in (and are much better)

I also was reminded that two of the later heroes, Trot and Captain Bill, had been into previous, unrelated to Oz books. I figured I should read those two. And then I discovered that a lot of characters from his other fantasy stories would make cameos in the books.

In the end, I ended up reading every fantasy book he wrote, including some that really had nothing to do with Oz, including the Enchanted Isle of Yew and American Fairytales

Spending a year with L. Frank Baum was an interesting experience. On the one hand, his books generally hold up despite their age. He wrote some very fun children's books. He also was a staunch feminist, I had at this time it is attitudes there. On the other hand, he wrote at least once about how the government should wipe the American Indians out wholesale. Staunch feminist, actively encouraging genocide, it feels like a weird combination.

He was also appallingly bad businessman. In fact, we have eight of the Oz books because he had to keep writing them in order to keep out of bankruptcy. He was an interesting man, all right.

Since I spent 2015 reading his books, I figure I will spend 2016 writing about them. Yeah, for the most part I'll be writing about other stuff but I'd like to write about each of the books before the end of the year.

Looking back at thirty years or so of changes in gaming

I got into role playing games in the 80s and started getting interested in modern board games around 2002, seriously collecting them in 2004. Somewhere along the way, I got in a smattering of war games.

I've known folks who have played more than me and who have been playing longer. However, I feel like I can say I've been around long enough to see some changes.

Back in the 80s, games read like they had been written as engineering manuals. When I look back at the original Dungeon Masters Guide for Dungeons and Dragons, I don't know how we managed to play the game.  

(To be fair, D&D did get its start from war gaming. Since one of the major starting points of wargaming was military colleges, there's a good chance that they were designed by engineers.)

Last year, I read the rules for a role-playing game called Hero Kids, which was designed to be a dungeon crawler for ages four to ten. It had very simple and easy to understand iconographic and very simple approach to dice pools.

First of all, it was a role-playing game that was simple enough that you could explain it to somebody who had never played and have them up and running in less than five minutes. Second of all, if you had talked about running a Dungeons & Dragons game for four-year-olds, you'd have been accused of being a Satanist back in the day.

Seriously, if there is one thing that really strikes me about the change in gaming, it is that it has become so much more acceptable. Sure, you can still get teased for doing it but folks are going to socially ostracize you for it. Heck, people think I'm a little weird because I don't play video games.

But, in general, even ignoring the fact that production quality has gone up a lot, games in general are a lot more accessible then they were when I first got started. I even think that's true comparing 2016 to 2002.

Yeah, some of the games that got me started then our games that I would use to introduce people to boardgames now, like Catan or Carcassonne. But you can find those games in stores like Target now and people have discovered them on their mobile.

I don't think I would go so far as to say that gaming is as mainstream as football but it has come a long way.

Some initial thoughts on gaming

I had planned on writing the summation of board gaming and why I am into it as early blog. After all, it's something I'm going to be writing a lot about.

But, ho boy, that topic is just way too big. I mean, in my last blog I wrote over 600 blogs about gaming. I'm not gonna be able to cover it in one go.

Look, over the last 20 years, the world of gaming has radically changed, particularly in the United States. Board games have always been bigger in Europe and other countries for decades. But in the late nineties, we started to figure that out on this side of the Atlantic.

Honestly, now that we live in the future in the Internet has connected all of us, a lot of things that used to be niche activities have become a lot more significant. Seriously, things like World of Warcraft and movies about superheroes being treated seriously? I couldn't of seen that coming in the 80s.

Personally, I spent years playing mostly role playing games before I twigged to this board gaming thing. It started out with games like Catan  and Carcassonne. 

And then it became an avalanche.

And I've been hooked ever since.