The Longest Yard

I don't come from a big gaming family.  I didn't pick up boardgaming from my dad.  I don't learn new games from my mom or my sisters.  In fact, besides Settlers of Catan, my family has not tried any of the strategy games I have (with the exception of 1 sister, who has even sat through a game of Android with me).  They tend to assume that my games are a complicated mess that will take hours and hours to play.

Well, some of my games (I'm looking at you, Android) are a complicated mess that take hours and hours to play, but most of the games in my collection have about an hour playtime and are relatively simple.  There is some variation in there - Munchkin is pretty straightforward, the mechanics of Smallworld are simple but beefed up with all the special race abilities, and Cosmic Encounter is short but can get crazy fast with red-level alien powers.  Still, I think my family could actually handle a lot of the games I play, and even enjoy them.

This is a land of Armies... and Land!

this game requires many dice

This morning, I ran the first test-run of Armyland.  In case you didn't know, Armyland is the current title of the board game I am working on inventing.

The first test run of a game is an interestingly mixed experience.  A peak and a valley, so to speak, at the same time.  It's very exciting to get an idea you've been working on for years and years to a physical product that is actually playable.  There's a lot of energy in that.  It's fun to see everything that was on paper, now played out.

Cold Turkey: The Art of Learning Board Games

I'll start off this post by admitting that I'm comparably new to board games.  Some people have grown up with board games since they were babies, learning games from their parents and friends.  Sure, I played Monopoly (shudder) and Life as a kid, but it took me up until just recently - a year or so ago - to call myself an actual hobby gamer.  If you've read my 1st post, you will know that through high school I had tried some games - Catan, Munchkin, Heroclix - which I enjoyed, buy never really got into (except for Heroclix.  Good golly I spent a lot of money on those.)


I feel fortunate that I kept a pretty solid group of friends through those years.  We all sort of transitioned through various hobbies together.  We played Heroclix, we played Halo, we played Soul Caliber.  And so, when we finally discovered Games Plus and started getting into DnD and Board gaming together... none of us really had a big background in board gaming.  None of us knew which games to start with beyond a few basics (Carcassonne, Settlers) and our first few shots were just guesses.  We picked up some games from other groups, but I lot of the games I own now I simply heard about and took a chance with a purchase.

And that brings me to the main subject of this post:  learning how to play a board game.

Because of the previously described situation, we learned a lot of games in perhaps a unique way - from the instruction manual. 

Okay, that's probably not that unique.  But I think a lot of people learn games by playing with another group that has experience with a game.  It's definitely a great way to learn - when you encounter those tricky situations where the rules seem unclear, experienced players can offer a quick and usually correct solution without wasting time paging through a booklet looking for that hidden piece of information.

But many of the games our group picks up, we learn from scratch.  Android, Arkham Horror, Cosmic Encounter, Frag, even Dominion - our first few plays were enjoyable, but somewhat painstaking exercises in working through confusing rules and unexpected situations.  Dominion was easy enough, but Frag seemed a little unbalanced, and some moments of Cosmic Encounter were a little bit rough as we worked through the terminology of the game.  Android took hours to explain and longer to play, and Arkham Horror thrashed us through and through.  (Actually, our group has not yet successfully won a game of Arkham without cheating, though it can be assured that this cheating was due to a lack of knowledge of some of the finer points of the rules). 

Still, there's something.. rewarding about piecing together the subtleties of any game, working out the rules, figuring out the strategies, all by yourself.  And I'm sure it's great exercise for the brain as well.

However I can certainly see the benefit of learning from an experienced player.  Though I'm often assigned the duties of learning the rules of a new game, my Nemesis (the other Jon) is excellent at explaining rules of a game quickly and concisely.  I feel like I understand a game better when he introduces it.  He's also very good at pointing out some of the basic or key strategies of a game, which is another benefit to learning from an experienced player.  Sometimes games have very important strategies that aren't always obvious from the get-go.  Learning Cosmic Encounter took a number of playthroughs to start to understand the strategies of offering alliances, attempting negotiations, and preventing others from getting too far ahead.  Carcassonne, which I learned from the Nemesis, made a lot of sense after 1 or 2 playthroughs - perhaps because it was a simpler game, but I think it had a lot to do with the Nemesis offering up some basic strategies.  After all, what good is a nemesis-ery if you're not somewhat evenly matched?

There can certainly be a downside to learning from an experienced player, though.  Nemesis Jon has told stories of games he learned from friends or relatives during which he was totally creamed, because the experienced players used his inexperience to their advantage.  Instead of helping a new player into the game, these players took advantage of him to feed their egos.  Don't be that guy.

Learning from scratch can be challenging but rewarding, and perhaps provide a unique insight to a game. On the other hand, it can cause some rough first experiences with a game until the rules are ironed out.

Learning from an experienced player or group can get you up and running faster, but with the wrong person or group a first-time with a new game can be very negative.

So how do you guys learn most of your games?  Do you play with others familiar with the game, or do you like to page through the rulebooks yourselves?  Do you feel that one way is better than the other?  Any other thoughts about it?

Bonus! Armyland: Then and Now

As my DnD campaign is nearing it's finale I've found some extra time to work on some other good stuff - namely, my boardgame project, Armyland.  In the spirit of Almost Being Done With Card Design For The First Prototype, here's a fun image for you all: the original card design I made back in high school, when the game sucked, and the current design.  Both missing art, unfortunately.  But still... the times, how they've changed things.

The Calm Before the Storm and other Stories

The lesson learned from my most recent session of my ongoing DnD/Pathfinder campaign, Fallen Heroes, is that not every great idea works well right out of the box.

New design!

You maybe noticed, or maybe you didn't, that iSlaytheDragon has gotten a new look!  Unfortunately there have been some kinks in the conversion process and i'm not totally finished with the updates, so don't be surprised if you see a few more modifications in the future.

Evil Robot Overlords

A new edition of Monopoly has been announced, involving an evil robotic Sauron tower that is responsible for handling many of the game's mechanics automatically, such as dice rolls and calculating money totals.

First of all, I still don't understand why people think monopoly is fun.  Maybe there are people out there that quite enjoy spending hours slowly draining money out of the other players as one by one they are eliminated and have to go find something else to do while the others finish the game.  That guy is not me.  I've tried to think of ways to change monopoly to make it more fun, but I usually end at the conclusion that the end result will just be Settlers of Catan.

Secondly, can we all just stop and think about this for a moment?

RPGs: The Readied Action

The other day on twitter, I found myself (read: violently broke into) in a conversation about Readied Actions and their appropriate usage, with a few other players of various DnD brands.  A particular frustration expressed was when players used a readied action to constantly get a jump on baddies, trying to achieve surprise round after surprise round.

Being that I am somewhat of a blogger on RPG topics, I decide to dig into the readied action a little bit, and share my thoughts with the world, AKA "you guys."

A Cosmic Encounter: an Interview with Peter Olotka, designer of Cosmic Encounter

If you've never tried it, Cosmic Encounter is a great game.  I'll get a review of it up here sometime (I haven't yet because I've yet to have a chance to play with an optional feature that is part of the base game) but for today's purposes, a short description.   It's a fairly simple goal-oriented (as opposed to points-oriented) game that involves attempting to spread throughout the galaxy by populating the other systems with 5 of your colonies.  Of course, the other races don't necessarily want you to do so, and in order to plant a colony you have to defeat the native's ships. Battles are resolved by totaling the number of ships, the number of allies ships, and an attack or negotiate card.  Destroyed ships go to "the Warp" and can be recovered 1 at a time during the start of an "encounter" (each player can have up to 2 encounters per turn, but they have to win the 1st encounter to get to a 2nd), or all at once via certain special cards.

Fallen Heroes, Chapter 5: This Might Be Harder Than We Thought

This session of my Fallen Heroes campaign was possibly the most interesting. This session focused not so much on combat, or even overcoming challenges.  This chapter really brought out character backstories, and some of their conflicting natures.  Players darkest secrets were blasted in their own faces.  Surprisingly, a lot of the conflict that arose centered around the secret alternate identity of one of the characters, which I did not plan or expect to be fully revealed at this point.   The mechanics of this session?  Almost entirely just telling a story.  The challenge wasn't dice rolling.  It was presenting situations that dug deep into characters feelings.  And it was awesome.  I'm basically just going to tell the stories because I'm pretty happy with what happened.