Little boardgaming history

As long as I can remember I have been playing games. Uno with my parents. Then Monopoly, Clue and a slew of other more mainstream games. Some of those were more involved like the 1982 game: Survive escape from Atlantis. Some were total thrash like the badly designed french canadian game called Fric which tried to emulate Monopoly without any of the strategies.

At some point, I stumbled upon a French magazine called: Jeux et strategie. I then began to discover what were the designer games of that time.

Fast forward a few years, I went deep into Dungeon and Dragons. And then Magic the Gathering. And then all sorts of other collectible card games.

In University all hell broke loose: I discovered Settles of Catan. And then proceed to buy over the years all the best games on Boardgame Geek.

What about podcasts?

When podcast just began in early 2000’s the 2 founders of Boardgame Geek created a show called Geekspeak. This was the first podcast I listen to, and it started a whole craze of boardgaming podcasts.

These days I listen mostly to The Dicetower, The D6 Generation and a few others.

Strange to see how a medium as low key as boardgaming has pioneered the podcast movement (or has it?).

Present times

These days I still play a lot of games. My boardgame collection is still growing thanks in part to kickstarter. I play both Euro games like Puerto Rico, Terra Mystica and Agricola. I also play a lot of more confrontational games like Cry Havoc, Eclipse and Scythe.

Since I have been gaming for such a long time, I am a bit jaded :) I do not play all the latest Euro games coming from Essen. At some point, when you have played a lot of “victory point cube pushers” they all seem a bit samey. I tend to like games where the theme is well integrated. When the theme fits the mechanics and when you can lean on the theme as an anchor both to assimilate the rules and to grok how to win. Power Grid and Kemet are good examples of games with well integrated themes.

These days I really like campaign games like Imperial Assault, Descent, Seafal or the newer and super intriguing Gloomhaven.

Developers and games

On the different boardgames forums, I noticed that a lot of gamers are working in the tech world. It seems games appeal to the mind of programmers! Why is that?

Contrary to computer games, all the systems of a boardgames need to be explicit. All the rules must be explained up front. In fact this is part of the difficulty of introducing more complex games to “muggle”: not everybody is able to stay still for 30min of rules explanation and then to apply what they just listen to (but probably not understood) to win a game.

I feel programmers are appreciating that all the rules are layed out in front of them and that they can do their best to optimize the systems.

Games and programming

Somes games have a “progamming” theme: the mediocre game Hacker tried to replicate what it was to be a hacker in the 1980’s.

Some games use programming as a mechanic: in Roborally [https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18/roborally] you use cards with different moves to progam the movement of a robot.

The fact that the cards you receive are random at the beginning of a turn makes it difficult to always do something really clever or useful. But the dynamism of the board and of the different conveyor belts, lasers and pushers make every turn a challenge to progam that robot.

Mechs and Minion a boargdame by Riot games (yes that company is into boardgame as well!) uses the programming element of roborally but adds a campaign element to it.

What is nice is that the “progam” of your robot is created over multiple rounds: you add effectively one new “command” each round. And you still must execute all the other “commands” of your program. Beware if you stuck a “turn right” somewhere because you will be turning right at some point every round!

Colt Express is way lighter but it also uses a progamming mecanism. It is easy at first to deduce where you will be moving but your fellow cowboys will make sure to foil your plan.

The Quintescence of Programming and Boardgame

In my opinion the best game both about programming and using tech related mechanic is Netrunner. This master piece was created by Richard Garfield, the same guy who has created both Magic The Gatehring and Roborally! What a resume…

Android Netrunner is the reedition of that game and is readily available. In that asymetric 2 players game you are either playing a Corporation who hides “agenda” and projects behind ICE (programs protecting your data).

Or you play the Runner who tries to hack the corporation using a slew of home made programs, special hardwares and externa resources.

The gameplay is very different depending if you are Runner or Corporation. And the Cyberpunk theme is litterally dripping!