My partner loves board games, and one of my takes that drives her nuts is that IMO most board games are better as a computer game where the tedious mechanics are automated. I am certainly an extremist in this way, I believe almost every board or card game ever made is better to play on a computer, but I think we should all be able to agree that a LOT of board games would benefit from automation.
Monopoly is a great example, because basically everyone has at least some understanding of the game and basically no one has ever played it entirely correctly in purely analog form. I have literally never seen anyone do the auctions in real life, mortgaging is rare, and other "house rules" like the pot on "Free Parking" are common. All of these things tend to cause the game to drag on forever, ironically the thing most of those same players will complain the most about.
If you play any of the computer/console versions the auctions are automatic and easy for everyone to participate. Some support the house rules as options, but they have to be enabled and some versions specifically warn that they will break the game.
Computers exist to automate tedious tasks, if your game has tedious mechanics that require a lot of text to explain it'd probably be better as a computer game where those parts can be automated and the player just has to make their choices within that framework.
In industrial safety one of the mantras is that if it's easier to do it wrong than right people will definitely do it wrong, so you need to make the right path also the easy path, sometimes changing entire systems or processes to make it that way. I believe the same logic should be applied to gaming. If your game is complicated enough that effectively no one is going to play it correctly as a board game, either simplify it so that's not the case or don't make it a board game.
My partner would argue that the physical interaction with the pieces/cards/board/whatever is what matters and computers don't have that, but I believe if I'm judging a game as a game then the gameplay not making me hate it is the most important part.
OTOH, creating a computer game is not a trivial task, and I don't see a good way to do it for 6 people Face-to-Face with some hidden information like a card hand. Would it be good if a complicated diplomatic game with hidden info like Republic of Rome https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1513/the-republic-of-rom... were available on computer, and everyone had their own device making it easy to see their hand / interact? Absolutely! But that's not a realistic option.
I would agree with "If your game is complicated enough that effectively no one is going to play it correctly as a board game, either simplify it so that's not the case or don't make it a board game." but think you may be underestimating serious gamers' ability to play complicated games correctly and still have fun. Agree that you really want to try to minimize tedious bookkeeping, though.
I may well be an outlier, though - I actually read the rules of Monopoly as a kid and we did auctions and mortgaging...
I've long thought the "Jackbox Games" model would be absolutely perfect for board games. The board goes on a TV, a tablet, or for the really dedicated a screen built in to their gaming table and each player's hand/deck/whatever displays on their phone through a browser-based client.
If I were a frontend programmer I'd have taken a whack at it.
> but think you may be underestimating serious gamers' ability to play complicated games correctly and still have fun.
My experience fits with something mentioned in the article, a lot of serious gamers are not in fact playing their games correctly but they just don't know it. I said this in another one of my replies but I'll repeat it here, I have rarely played a complicated (read: more than a page of rules to be understood for proper play) game with my partner's board game crew without discovering some way that they were playing it wrong half way through the game. These are people who meet every week at a board game bar to play board games, go to board game conventions, and a few of them even make and sell their own games.
No it isn't, because board game people hate it. I don't know who is defending Monopoly, but it's not board game fans.
> If you play any of the computer/console versions the auctions are automatic and easy for everyone to participate.
Sure. It still doesn't make for a fun game though.
> Computers exist to automate tedious tasks, if your game has tedious mechanics that require a lot of text to explain it'd probably be better as a computer game where those parts can be automated and the player just has to make their choices within that framework.
Sure. But good games avoid tedious tasks to start with. If anything I'd say the converse is true: most computer games would be improved by trying to make a board game version and cutting the mechanics that make that difficult.
> My partner would argue that the physical interaction with the pieces/cards/board/whatever is what matters and computers don't have that, but I believe if I'm judging a game as a game then the gameplay not making me hate it is the most important part.
If "gameplay" was the only thing that mattered then all games would be abstract games. And even abstract games often have a tactile part of the experience that creates its own feel. Every computer game is kind of the same - you sit in front of a screen and push keys - and that limits how much you can get out of it; there are no great novels about computer gaming.
It's a great example because almost everyone discussing this topic understands the game and its flaws in physical game form, and most of us have probably played at least one digital version over the years.
Also board game people are the same people quoted in the article as saying that bad rulebooks were in fact great, so their judgement may not exactly be the best. Enthusiasts of any category tend to be able to ignore a lot of flaws in their favorite thing as long as the thing they like about it works. I'm a car enthusiast, and there are a lot of us who absolutely love objectively bad vehicles just because of one unique quirk that happens to make us smile.
> Sure. It still doesn't make for a fun game though.
Right, but it takes a lot of the parts that actually ruin most physical plays and solves their problems.
> Sure. But good games avoid tedious tasks to start with.
Remembering a book full of rules and what applies when is a tedious task. If the game requires players have a grasp on a substantial rulebook for basic play it is not avoiding tedious tasks.
That's what's great about computer versions of board games, the computer handles that part and players are only able to do things that are allowed. You never have to remember what you can do when, and more importantly never have to decide between unwinding multiple turns worth of gameplay, just rolling with it, or throwing away the entire session when inevitably someone gets it wrong.
There is exactly one game I've played with my partner's board game crew where I didn't discover some way they were doing it wrong, and that's Everdell which has a very well done computer version that they regularly play as well as physical, so they've been forced to learn how the game actually works instead of how they think it works.
> If anything I'd say the converse is true: most computer games would be improved by trying to make a board game version and cutting the mechanics that make that difficult.
I wouldn't disagree with that, but the fact remains that computers allow more complicated mechanics to be implemented without increasing the cognitive load on the players or increasing the odds of a game-breaking misunderstanding.
Did correcting the others make them more fun?
I don't generally find correcting others fun, unless they don't take it well and make a scene about it in which case that can certainly be some delicious schadenfreude. That doesn't happen with the game group, they're generally receptive.
I think the games probably got more fun though. Presumably those rules are there for a reason, and it's not like I'm staring at the rulebook the whole time. I either had a question come up as a part of gameplay the group couldn't answer confidently or something didn't feel right about how the game was playing so I checked and found what I found. On more than one occasion this has led to someone else in the group pointing out some other related element they had found weird until then.
Exactly. My pet peeve is when a game is launched as a kickstarter and they add new game mechanics as stretch goals. If it was a good game with just the basic mechanics then why on earth would anyone want it be more complicated just because more people have funded it? And from the other angle if it is a better game with the extra rules and mechanics added then why not make that the game? It is the job of the game’s designer to make the very hard choices and tradeoffs between complexity of rules and the fun people will have with them. If they abdicate this responsibility and leave it up to “let’s see how viral our kickstarter canpaing will be” then they don’t understand their task.
If you talk to people in industry, they realize that this is making the games worse, but it's making them sell better. Just like today, just like with a movie, high sales don't come from great mechanics, but franchises or licensing. Your superhero coop game is going to do much worse if it doesn't have a license. Why do we have so many boardgames with video game licenses? Because it sells. There's way too many games in the market right now for even industry insiders to good track of most offerings. Buyers working for large internet game stores are overwhelmed.
So no, game designers are 100% understanding their task, which is to make a game that gets backed and is profitable. Cutting half the game after you told backers what you were doing is a disaster, and it's all those extra rules and extra boards that sold the game in the first place. The fact that the game is shelved after 3 plays is not a problem for them.
Personally I have as much fun learning a game with a 40-page rulebook as playing it. And I think most rulebooks are pretty good, I can't think of a single game I've learned where the rulebook was "awful".
1) They like the worlds of the complex games, building societies or facing some major broad challenge. 2) Elaborate games are so open-ended and hard to analyze forward strategically that they are much more balanced across people of different skill levels. People who would have no hope of a competitive, fun game of chess will have a more interesting game of Brass: Birmingham or Eclipse. 3) The games can be played with a lot of players and involve a lot more human-human negotiation and discussion, rather than pure strategy.
I love the simple but incredibly complex games myself, but I understand why they're not everyone's cup of tea.
To the ones who want human designed things chess is like this vast procedurally generated forest that just has trees everywhere with different branch layouts, so you have to climb them in different ways.
Awful in the sense of overly complicated and fiddly. There are plenty of games with deep strategic depth that have been around for hundreds of years and are simple enough that the rules fit on an index card and children routinely learn them from other children in the course of playing.
If you end up with a 20-page rulebook, perhaps the problem is not how best to organize that rulebook, but that you have 18 pages too many rules in the first place.