My boardgaming journey, part II

    Last week, I posted a bit on my hobby of board gaming. I was not sure if anyone would read that post, as it is not my usual faire on this blog. For whatever reason, that post got way more views than anything I have posted in a while. For what it's worth, I will continue my little series of monographs on board gaming, as there appears to be some interest. 

    My assumption for these first few board game blog posts is to start with the basics that I wish I had known when I started getting into board gaming. As I went into in my first post on this topic, I largely blundered into the modern board gaming world quite by accident. I played a lot of video games over the years, but my knowledge of board games was largely stuck in the moldy oldies of my youth like Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue. Probably the most recent game in the board gaming of my youth was Jenga (or the cheap side ripoff I owned called Stak Attack).

    Given that background, there were basically not a lot of what gamers refer to now as "mechanics" or game "mechanisms." The games of that era were very linear. I take a turn, roll the dice, move my piece along the board, turn a card or buy a property or whatever, and then rinse and repeat with the next player. That was particularly true in games like Monopoly or Life or even Chutes and Ladders or Candy Land. Not a huge a lot of strategy in most of those. 

    Nowadays, with the thousands of board games out there, there are several new "mechanics" that make the individual games work. Some are variants on the classic "roll and move" kind of board games. Others are completely new and novel ways of making a game work. One of things I found when I got into modern gaming was the new verbiage that gamers used to clue you in to how a game was played. I was quite confused on what some of these terms meant until I ordered different games and started experimenting with their game play. It was not until I "got my hands dirty" so to speak with playing these games with modern mechanics that I became to finally grasp what was meant when gamers would describe games as "deck builders" or "drafting" or "worker placement" games.

    So, I thought I would briefly list some of the most common major mechanics that games use nowadays in the hopes of piquing the interest of those of you, who were like me at the beginning and thought something like "deck building" literally meant you like built the deck of the ship like in a wooden ship model kit. (Imagine my surprise when I ordered a deck building game that came in a tiny box that I could hold in one hand. True Story!)

    Here is my list of the top 7 most common types of new mechanics terminology you may not be familiar with. I have left off the well known ones like "Roll and play"-I mean, everyone has played a board game of that variety at some point in their life. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of different types or variants, but this is what I take to be the most common you will see when you start putting your toes into the water of modern gaming:

(General note on outside links: I tried to link to various different board game sellers that I have bought from in each entry. So, you can see what is out there in terms of board game companies other than Amazon that you can patronize, even though I did link to Amazon in the first entry, just to be fair. I also link to various YouTube channels for quick How To Play tutorials, to give you a feel for what is out there in terms of gamer channels and walk-throughs of games. Online resources for gaming DIYs are truly amazing.)

No. 1:  Deck Building:

    Deck building games involving building a deck of cards to basically produce the best hand or point count at the end of the game. You usually start with a basic set of cards in the first round and then  progressively buy, trade, or acquire better cards to improve one’s hand (deck) as the game evolves. One of the purest (and fun) forms of a deck builder is called Star Realms. You get the box (and it's expansions) and it is literally just a deck of cards. No dice or tokens or board. You play out the game in a science fiction battle kind of motif and acquire new ships and such and game dominance as you build a fleet of science fiction ship cards. A good quick "How To Play" tutorial can be found here.

No. 2. Worker Placement:

    In worker placement games, you place your cadre of ‘workers’ on specific spots on a board to perform actions and/or gather resources. Sometimes you only start with a few workers and grow your work force as the game progresses and create this worker army of resource production. There are several good examples of worker placement games, but by favorite of the genre (and all time favorite game in general) is Everdell. Everdell is also a deck builder of sorts, as there is a card element. To get those cards to build your city (deck of cards), you have to move workers around and collect resources to buy cards. The artwork is truly stunning on Everdell. There is a good "How To Play" tutorial here.  

3. Tile Placement:

    Tile placement games involve players laying tiles to construct landscapes or cities or other configurations. That sounds kind of boring on the surface, but these games are very open ended. You generally have to have good spatial strategy. The added bonus is that no two games are alike. What you build in one game might be totally different from the next game. A good example, and another top 3 favorite of mine, is Terraforming Mars. As the name suggests, you are a colonist or corporation trying to terraform Mars into a livable planet. There are other mechanics at play, but ultimately, how you place the tiles as you change the surface of Mars is critically important. For instance, do you place a city here or a lake or a forest, etc. A good quick "How To Play" tutorial can be found here.

4. Area Control/Influence:

    This particular mechanic is, as the name suggests, about taking control of areas on the game board. The classic version of this mechanic is something like “Risk,” which coincidentally is the only board game of my youth I actually liked. Usually this type of genre involved deploying armies and battling to control areas of the board. A better more recent one you may not have heard of is called Inis. Inis is an area control game that is based on Celtic mythology. I include this game here for those who want to try a game of this genre but aren't enthused by militaristic battling. This game is as much about diplomacy that outright war, as you are diplomatically trying to get yourself elected king of the island. To do so, players must achieve victory through 3 different victory conditions: Land, Religion, and Leadership. Inis is primarily more of an area influence game that has a stronger emphasis on maneuvering and positioning rather than direct conflict. A good somewhat longer "How To Play" tutorial can be found here. 

No. 5. Drafting: 

    Drafting games are basically games where players select cards from a set and pass the rest to their neighbor. 7 Wonders is a classic drafting game. Each player selects cards that build their ancient civilization. That seems simple enough, and on one level it is. However, when picking your card, you have to decide from three options: pay the cost to build, pay a cost and use it to construct your wonder, or discard it for free money. The points you score at the end depend on the combination of buildings in your city, whether you finished your wonder, and how you fared in military battles against other players. It’s not hard to learn, but the game has many moving parts to keep you thinking. One wrong draft of a card can have serious longer term consequences. A good quick "How To Play" tutorial can be found here. 

6. Push Your Luck:

    Push or Press Your Luck games test a player's appetite for risk. These are sometimes referred to in the gaming community as "Ameri-trash" games because they tend to appeal to Americans who like to "go big or go home." A game that has been a smash hit in this category of mechanic in few years is called Quacks of Quedlinburg. This game is a delight, and younger kids (like elementary level) love this game. Basically, the premise is that are are would be Medieval alchemists, drawing ingredients from a bag and hoping not to trigger a potion explosion, which introduces an element of suspense. While there's a strategic layer in choosing how to build your potion, pressing your luck plays a significant role, leading to moments of tension and relief. A good quick "How To Play" tutorial can be found here.

No. 7. Variable Player Powers:

    This is a bit of an omnibus term in game mechanic. Basically, games in this genre assign unique abilities to different players. Each player has a completely different set of powers and sometimes even goals within the game. Some might be defensive powers, some might be brute force offensive powers, and some might be powers in acquiring useful resources or tools. This may on the surface seem unimportant in terms of strategy because most people assume from classic gaming that all players basically are playing the same character in the game. They may have a shoe instead of a wheelbarrow as their token in Monopoly, but everyone plays the same with basically the same strategy. In Variable Player Power games, that is often not the case. These games tend to be cooperative as well, meaning players are working together to defeat a common enemy or achieve a common goal and are not necessarily trying to defeat each other.
    The classic example in modern gaming that I can think of for this category is Spirit Island. This is probably a bad example for beginners because this is an extremely complex game. The premise though is that you and other players are elemental forces on an island that is being invaded by colonizers. Your goal is to help the native tribe defeat and expel the colonizers and their blight that they bring to the island. The kicker with this game is that each elemental character has radically different powers and abilities from all the other characters. Depending on what elemental force each player chooses will radically alter how your team strategy of defeating the colonizers will play out. A winning strategy for one set of elementals will be a losing strategy for another pairing of elementals. The learning curve is steep on this game, but if you like complex strategy, this game is marvelous. This mechanic ensures high replayability, as each game offers completely different strategies and interactions. A good quick "How To Play" tutorial can be found here.

    So, in any event, I hope this quick discussion of gaming mechanics might help the beginners out there who might not understand the terminology. I know I was certainly overwhelmed by all the jargon when I started.