Re:She Invented a Board Game with Scientific Integrity. It’s...
by bussierem on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @01:40PM
(#19370837)
I was not aware of those train games, thank you for telling me of them. It's obviously possible we both have major selection bias towards what we've seen, but I guess my point was more that the "normal internet fad topics" are not really as overrepresented in board games. Zombies and Dragons and stuff _exist_ in board games, but most of the really popular games are touching on topics that most reasonable people would not immediately associate with the generation of people ravenously playing those board games now.
Civilizations -- yeah, like I said, a VERY broad genre, so I kinda left that one alone.
You have a good point too on multiple strategies being important in game design. I just disagreed with how the author portrays all of this.
In the end, that's what my rant was (not so clearly) about I guess -- Good game, good design, good designer: Terrible article.
It's possible train games are more visible to me due to my train-nut family, but there are a lot of excellent train games out there.
"Civilizations" -- my interpretation of that is, well, the original Civilization, and the many, many attempts to make a more streamlined game with a similar feel. If you want to interpret it broader than that, you could include any kind of game where you build up a society out of nothing, including even Catan, despite its lack of technological progress. Or it could include anything involving ancient civilisations, even if it's just as a theme (we are talking theme here, after all). But if you need to include technological progress, then I don't think this is overrepresented, it's just a kind of game that many gamers find really intriguing but is hard to get right, hence the interest when a new attempt seems to get it right.
I agree Lovecraft is overrepresented.
I'm afraid I can't really comment on the focus of the article, as only the first few paragraphs are visible to me.
You've got a good point about the use of "Holy Grail". Many games do enable very different viable strategies, so it's not as unattainable as the phrase "holy grail" suggests. It is still considered to be an important aspect of game design, though, and games where one strategy is clearly superior to all others have failed at it.