In for the Long Haul

Hi, y'all! Randy here. Today's topic is about games that take a loooooonnnggg tiiiiiime to play. I've included five below. Maybe it reflects that I didn't write our post on cooperative games a couple days ago, but it just so happens that all but one of the games below are either team or cooperative games. Why? I dunno. That was just how I was feeling. Anyway, check them out... my top five long games:

5. Arkham Horror


The game Arkham Horror is based on the Cthulhu Mythos of writer H.P. Lovecraft. It is a world where Things Man Was Not Meant To Know(tm) exists, where slumbering gods, alien and unsympathetic to humanity, may wake at any moment to make the Earth a charnel house. But, of course, a few heroes stumble through and manage to keep the cultists and horrors from beyond at bay. The game is cooperative, and it does a great job of keeping you on your toes. You are tasked with keeping the public unaware and closing portals into the realms beyond, from which these horrors continually pour through. Its length (expect three hours) means it doesn't come off the shelves often, but I like it.


4. Battlestar Galactica


Battlestar Galactica is a great cooperative game that employs a traitor mechanic. The game starts with each player picking a character, and then drawing a loyalty card that specifies whether or not they are a Cylon, which is kept secret. The ship is travelling to a habitable planet to colonize, and the humans win when they get there. When a challenge arises, it is coded with a color and everyone contributes a card face down, with cards of the appropriate color contributing to the effort, and those of opposing colors detracting from the effort and sabotaging the Humans' efforts. Halfawy through the game, another loyalty card is distributed (representing 'sleeper' Cylons, if a Cylon card is received by someone who previously not a Cylon). I've only played twice, but it is a fun game, and clocks in around 2-3 hours.

3. Duel of Ages


An interesting game that only sees play very occasionally is Duel of Ages (DoA). The premise of DoA is that champions from different ages, worlds and cultures come together to fight in an arena assembled of pieces of disparate worlds. You could have a wild west area next to an office park next to an alien wasteland. It is a team game, with each team controlling the same number of characters (though possibly with players controlling more than one character). The teams' members will try to coordinate to explore labyrinths, invade the other team's base, attack other teams and (with expansions) do other challenges. With 360 genre-spanning characters and loot, it can be a blast. I can't think of another game where you could play a samurai riding a BMX with a Spanish Cannon in tow.

2. Through the Ages.




Through the Ages is an excellent civilization-building game by Vlaada Chvatil (Galaxy Trucker, Space Alert). The game comes in a deceptively smallish box, but is densely packed with high-quality components. It takes around 3-4 hours to play, putting it the longer end of the board game spectrum for us. I feel it does a great job of simulating the passage of time periods. Be prepared to move around a large number of tiny, tiny wooden disks that represent workers and resources. I love this game!

1. Roleplaying Games

  


Aaaahhh.... the classic "I've-just-spent-way-too-much-time-gaming!" game... or rather, genre. Roleplaying Games, immersive as they are, can easily span to eight hours or more. They somehow don't seem as long as the games above, but that mainly reflects the social, free-form nature of them. My current favorite is Pathfinder (successor to Dungeons and Dragons version 3.5), though recently I have enjoyed the new Gamma World 4th Edition and Star wars Saga Edition. If you haven't played a pen-and-paper roleplaying game, I highly recommend trying one. Chances are, you know a geek who plays. I unfortunately haven't had the chance to play regularly in quite a while, but this is one of my favorite pastimes.

What are your favorite long games? Or what gaming experiences that have lasted a long time have you enjoyed? Let us know! And after that, why not pop over to Cool Factor 5 and see what he has to say about his favorite long gaming experiences!

Cooperative Board Games

Us Versus... Them? It?

Cooperative board games are an interesting genre. The basic idea in a nutshell is that everyone works together to defeat "the board". Usually this amounts to a series of increasing challenges that are randomly thrown at you in an attempt to simulate artificial intelligence. The team of players figures out a way to overcome these challenges and either easily wins or is swamped with another wave of even bigger problems. This formula often amounts to some fun tension, provided you have the right crowd of folks, and that some players aren't way more familiar with the game than others. The problems arise when you have an over-bearing player (or players) who wants to tell everyone exactly what to do, or someone who has figured out "the solution" (ie the optimal way to play in order to beat the board) and either intentionally or inadvertently takes away the mystery and challenge of figuring it all out. Or when the game just sucks, which happens sometimes. As you've probably guessed by now, this isn't exactly my favorite type of game to play. I'm not a hater, but I'm not a fangirl either. I'll play a cooperative game with friends here and there and have a good time with it, and after thinking it through and trying to decide on a favortie I've realized I think the genre has come a long way and is heading in a good direction.

Rising Stars

There are a few cooperative games that I think do a better job of creating fun and interesting problems than others. Some of the genre favorites such as Pandemic really don't hit that sweet spot for me of a game I want to rush back and play again and again. I enjoy Arkham Horror for it's theme, depth, character options, and interesting story, but it can be such a long (and sometimes tedious) endeavor that I don't play it very often. There are 3 cooperative games that really stand out to me as heading in "the right direction"; not perfect games, but something I'd be interested in playing and seeing more of in the future.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a fun, story-driven, cooperative horror game in which you play explorers adventuring around in an old haunted house. You all stumble around discovering rooms, finding equipment, and stirring up trouble until suddenly "the haunt" begins and one of the players becomes the traitor. The traitor then gets some special rules and everyone else continues to work together to do whatever heroic action is required by the scenario. This game usually takes about 45 minutes to an hour, is different every time, and has a fun level of interaction and intrigue. The traitor mechanic usually allows for a thinking opponent which keeps things challenging and unpredictable in a way that most cooperative AI's can't. I have many fond memories of this game, and while it was long out of print (and very expensive) there is a new edition out and it looks like it's only $20 on Amazon right now! That would have easily made my top 5 games under $25 if I had seen it. (It might be a holiday sale, so don't quote me if you're reading this on a day other than the one I'm writing it on)

Ghost Stories is one of my favorite cooperative board games right now, and I think it has some staying power. This game sets up the players as taoist monks working to exorcise the ghosts plaguing thier villiage. With the help of the villagers, the monks fight off the hoards and hoards of vicious ghosts until a final showdown with the incarnation of Wu-Fen. This game provides a good level of tension and strategy, and has players working together to solve problems and use special powers in a way that makes it feel like teamwork and individual strategy are both important, while remaining accessible to family gamers. I think the only downfall of this game is that sometime you just get buried in ghosts you can't defeat. such is life as a Taoist monk I guess. Or maybe that's the whole "random heaping of problems" complaint I have of games in this genre. Overall though, this game is a strong showing and one i would highly recommned trying out.

Finally, the "winner" for the day, Space Alert. I have not gotten to play this game as much as I would like to, despite it's relatively short playing time (20-30 minutes per game, but you'll never play just once!). It's complicated. It's hard to learn. It's HARD. The main reason I haven't played it much is because I feel like I would need to get a team of friends together, TRAIN them on how to play through a series of drills (provided in the book of course!), and then we would need to learn to work together and strategize in order to be successful at this game. And that's exactly the reason it's the winner. It manages to take the idea of a cooperative game a rachet everything up a notch. It's problem solving and teamwork and stress and awesome and it makes my brain hurt. It all happens so fast and more and more keeps happening that you have to react to and all your careful plans fall apart if someone isn't in the right spot at the right time to power up the shield or refill the battery from the reactor core or do whatever thing that is needed to make the plan all work. I've stood there time and time again punching a button to shoot a laser at an oncoming enemy ship only to discover my teammate who was supposed to be powering my gun station instead sent the power to the shield. Or got lost. D'oh. Who was supposed to be taking care of these battlebots? Aren't you out in a fighter drone? Who is on shields? Batteries!?! Miscommunication! Stress! Tension! Teamwork! Blowing stuff up in space! Yes, this is the direction I would like to see cooperative games go in; games that make us think and actually work together and learn to be a team while having a blast. Literally. Haha.

In retrospect...

I guess I like cooperative games more than I thought. Anyone wanna team up?


Challenge Link:

Check out Cool Factor 5 for more thoughts on cooperative games from one of the only crew members to ever survive a Space Alert mission with me.

Variety is the Spice of Life

My Favorite Game Mechanic

I've been thinking about board game mechanics and what makes a game "fun". One thing I've realized (after staring at my game shelf for a long time and thinking about which games I like to play most often) is that I really enjoy games with variable player powers. I'm not even sure if that officially counts as a mechanic, but it sure does make a game more interesting and replayable for me. What I mean by variable player powers is that I like it when each player has something special in a game that only he/she is allowed to do.

Many games have this feature/mechanic, so I am just going to highlight a couple examples from our frequently played games shelf. These are games we pull out time and time again from our collection.


The Big Daddy

One of the first games to really showcase variable player powers in a big way is Cosmic Encounter. In this game, each player plays a unique race with a special power that lets them break the rules of the game in a different way. This game helped inspire many later games (including Magic: The Gathering) and is different and fun each time largely due to the combinations of powers and the fact that players can not all do the same thing, or the same strategy they used last time.





That Farming Game (No, Not Farmville!)

Another great example of variable player powers in present in one of my all time favorite games, Agricola. In Agricola, each player starts with 7 occupations and 7 minor improvements that they can choose to use or not use during the course of the game. This allows players to each have special abilities or points that no one else has, and creates a dynamic game that is never the same twice. Players don't inherently have a special power, but they can choose to create a strategy based around their available options.



Working Together For the Common Good

As I thought about games and game mechanics, one striking revelation occurred to me... variable player powers are one of the main features of most popular cooperative games as well. Ghost Stories, Pandemic, Shadows Over Camelot, and many other cooperative board games (games in which everyone works together to "defeat" the challenges the game presents) includes giving each player a unique power or ability. One of the main considerations of these games is trying to figure out how to coordinate various special powers to be most effective. It provides a way for each player to do something special and be part of the team, and also keeps things interesting and challenging from game to game. This stands out even more for me in cooperative games because they inherently don't have the "thinking opponent" on the other end to push your strategies in new directions. The inclusion of special powers, and sometimes the exclusion of certain powers, requires you to think differently and work out new solutions to familiar problems.

Challenge Link:

Read about another favorite game mechanic at Cool Factor 5. And of course feel free to share yours here or there!