When I started my previous post on fantasy gaming in the 80s and 90s, I realized part way through that I had much more to say than anyone would want to read in one sitting. In that post, I talked about the various board games that I grew up playing, why I liked them, and what I still had left of them. Here, I’d like to talk a little bit about why I miss those games, and what is different about more recent games.
I guess I should mention that I am going to only be talking about games that I own, and I am grouping them into old and new, only based on the gap between the two. Specifically, “The Old” are games that I played while I was younger, and hadn’t started role-playing seriously yet. “The New” are games that I played the first time in the last ten years (this is particularly true about DunegeonQuest, which is a remake of an older game, and I have only played the new edition).
Dungeon Crawls
- The Old: HeroQuest, Dragon Strike
- The New: Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Mansions of Madness
For me, the reason I enjoy these kinds of games is that they are a substitute for role-playing. It’s light, you don’t have to worry too much about a character, or designing an amazing dungeon crawl. The quest text gives the GM enough information to go on and create an atmosphere to make the whole thing come together.
The reason I like HeroQuest and Dragon Strike is really two-fold. First, they make for great “substitute” role-playing. I like the fact that there’s a player behind that screen, calling the shots and making the game what it is. Second, their simplicity makes the time commitment minimal, which is great value in a game. You don’t need much to get up and running, and it tends to run fairly smoothly.
Admittedly, Descent and Mansions of Madness have some things that would have blown me away when I was younger. The vast array of miniatures for Descent is really impressive, and the sheer number of different quests, props, and configurations is astounding. Also, the detail on everything surpasses what was possible back in the day, so all in all, they are very nice looking games. The penalty, in my mind, is that they are considerably more complex – the amount of time it takes for me to pull out and organize a game of Descent is somewhat prohibitive – not to mention the space it takes up in my game shelf.
At the end of the day, though, the thing that caught me the most off guard, when I picked up Descent was the fact that it was competitive (this is also true of Mansions of Madness). In HeroQuest, there is no mention at all of winning (the heroes either complete the quest or they don’t), which already starts to feel a lot more like a role-playing game. In Dragon Strike, there is one line in the rule book that talks about winning, but peppered throughout the book (and made explicit in the VHS), the object of the game is for everyone to have fun – if that’s not happening something’s wrong.
That’s not quite the picture that I got when I picked up Descent though – the Overlord has a very specific way to win – remove all the players’s conquest tokens. And, the only way to do that is to kill the characters multiple times. Whereas in HeroQuest or Dragon Strike, the heroes only have one life (and so are not at all expendable), the heroes in Descent have as many lives as they can spend conquest tokens for, so, as the overlord, you have to treat the heroes as expendable as your monsters. While Mansions of Madness does not have this mechanic, the Keeper is given specific goals that he or she is trying to complete to win, which you can very nearly accomplish without involving the players at all. This, to me, seemed a little counter-intuitive – sure, in any good role-playing game the bad guys have an objective, but should the GM really have a goal that runs counter to the players?
The other aspect of this is the mechanics of how the game plays for the GM in Descent and Mansions of Madness. Specifically, there are very deliberate pacing and rules preventing the GM from doing whatever they want – they’re given enough power to work against the heroes, but it’s doled out by the system, so they have to work within that very strict system to get the job done. This, is when the competitive nature of the thing became clear to me – as a GM, you couldn’t pace to the players, you had to pace based on the rules. So, rather than playing with the players to make sure the game hit all the right spots, you have to work against the players to try to get the advantage to make the climax meaningful.
Adventure Games
- The Old: Talisman, Key to the Kingdom
- The New: Runebound, DungeonQuest, Android, Arkham Horror
Adventure games, to me are the adult version of “Candy Land” – the characters are all working toward the same goal (either as a group or separately), and the board is the only thing stopping them. In this case, I’m not looking for a role-playing substitute, rather I’m looking for the the joy of a group of people all facing the same challenge in different ways.
Talisman especially scratches this itch because it can be pretty brutal right from the start. In my mind, this gave everyone a reason to help the other players when it came up, rather than trying to harm them just because they could (though there was more rules-wise for the latter). Even though, at the end, only one person gets the crown of command and wins, I always had a lot of fun just running around facing the challenges the board threw at me. Key to the Kingdom is a bit more confrontational, only because there are such limited resources, and not really anything else to do but actively ensure that your opponents aren’t making progress toward their goals.
In this case, I think that a lot of newer games have much better coverage. They go from purely cooperative (Arkham Horror) to intentionally confrontational (Android). Runebound, in my mind, sticks to the Talisman formula fairly well, but in my games had a tendency to be a little too easy. Conversely, DungeonQuest is nearly non-interactive, but is incredibly brutal (I think I’ve made it out of the dungeon only once in the games that I have played).
These games are still ones that I thoroughly enjoy, especially when the character or player conflict can be almost entirely removed. Sure, you’re working against the other players, but the real conflict should come from the board – that’s why Android has been shelved and I almost never play it, while Arkham Horror comes out quite often. I’ve also gone through my deck of Runebound and Talisman cards and keep anything that can only be used to harm another character in a stack to itself (usually set aside and not used). In this way, the games all end up being more about the adventure – A grand adventure can be had by all, even if only one person gets the final blow against the dragon, or walks away with the most coveted artifact.