After seeing the kickstarter for the Teburu game system, I started thinking a lot about app driven games and the integration of digital technology into board games. Specifically, I wondered whether it was something I wanted and how much? Is there a line beyond which integration of technology is too much?
As I started to think through this for myself, I thought about the games that I have, where the app integration happens, and what that means to me.
When I think about the lowest level of app integration, I think of it as being optional. Warmachine/Hordes has the War Room app which is an alternative to cards, Etherfields has the app instead of reading the passages from the book of secrets, Tales of Arabian Nights lets you look up paragraphs using an app instead of the lookup tables. These things all make life a little easier, while leaving control of the game completely in the hands of the players. I really like this level of app integration as there is nothing lost from the experience – as mentioned, the players retain complete control of the game space, and the technology is there to help keep things on track. It also means that if the app goes away for some reason (i.e. no longer supported on your particular phone model, or the developer disappears), the game still works – there’s no worry that the game you have today will no longer function tomorrow.
The next level of immersion, are games for which some level of the gameplay is controlled by an app, where the physical space is still in the realm of the players. Things like Stop Thief or Return to Dark Tower, Mansions of Madness second edition fall into this category, and there are cases where this feels a little intrusive, but not too much. In the case of Stop Thief, the thief’s placement is the purview of the app, and, since it is invisible to the players, this makes a certain amount of sense. For Return to Dark Tower, there is more state information captured by the app (both the state of the tower and villain characters, but also random events like quests), and more things that the players need to interact with, but it still stays out of the way of the player’s ability to move about and do things. Mansions of Madness is an interesting case because it holds a lot more state information, and really tries to act as a “Game Master” for the exploration while being aloof to the state of the players and where they actually are in the house.
I’ll admit that I bounced off of Mansions of Madness a bit, but Stop Thief is something I didn’t mind at all. Dark Tower chafes a little bit with the dungeons and villain card stuff, but too much? I don’t think it hit that yet. On the other hand, I do worry a bit that these games are all literally unplayable without the app. When I think about these, I always have to ask myself, “will the developer continue to support the app, as hardware and OSes change, even if the game is no longer for sale or making money?” That’s why these will always have a strike against them.
Finally, there are games where the app is the game. For all intents and purposes, there is nothing in the control of the characters that the app doesn’t verify. In this category, I put Chronicles of Crime, the Unlocked series of escape room games, and, the thing that made me really start thinking about this list, the Teburu system (featuring The Bad Karmas and the Curse of the Zodiak). In these games, the app controls and knows everything, and if you misplace something on the tabletop, it’s objectively wrong and will likely cause problems with any future decisions you make.
For me, I found that I really bounced off the Teburu system when I read about it and researched it (with the caveat that I haven’t played anything on that system, and am judging it based on hearsay). This is because it removes any control the players have to adjust the game to meet their desires – at this point, it really is a computer game in board game form – the experience is totally curated by the designers. And yet, Chronicles of Crime and Unlocked are the same – these games are also totally curated… …but I’m okay with that, so where’s the line?
I think, for me, whether app integration is too much is based on two elements – how much of the gameplay is based on collaboration between the players, and how much of that is taken away in lieu of curation by the app. For instance, I listed Chronicles of Crime as being fully immersive, where the app is the game, and yet, it still doesn’t remove any player collaboration, on account of the fact that the player decision making of where to go or who to talk to (and how long we take to make that decision) is still left to the players. I think one of the things I miss in Mansions of Madness second edition is how much control the players have to adjust the difficulty of the game based on what they want to do that night – in the first edition, when I played the Keeper, reading the room to determine how hard to press was always part of playing the game. Which makes me think about our experience playing Sword and Sorcery (another game that is planned for the Teburu) or even Kingdom Death: Monster – when we play these games, it’s to have a shared experience that we can all enjoy, and the rules… …Well, sometimes, they’re just guidelines to help us get there, and sometimes we bend them to make the game harder, easier, or just different enough to hit that sweet spot. When the game designer can literally take away the capability to do that, it doesn’t really feel like the kind of experience I want to have on a board game anymore, and is more likely something that I’ll leave on the shelf.