The Rise of German Board Games
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
And hey having a 8 year old thinking about his Stratego setup, is a good thing!
This is why I'm addicting to playing (and designing) board games. You get to learn how to think in a different way for awhile. So much fun.
I showed my friend group and we got bored of the base game very quickly, so we started modifying it and making custom versions. We had a double-wide version (just a hand drawn grid hanging off the side and custom pieces made out of cardboard and stickytape), rivers, boulders, tanks (2x1 pieces), 1v1v1, custom scenarios, etc.
We eventually moved on to HeroQuest and then discovered Warhammer (but couldn't afford it so we used to play our own DIY version with LEGO and dice).
Those rapid prototyping and iteration skills I learned at an early age massively helped me in life and they're used daily in my role as an Infra/Ops Engineer.
I also have a published board game (and hopefully more to come)!
Link that stuff up! (Assuming you don't mind being associated with it here.)
They are now 8, 6 and 4, and none of them wants to lose. It always ends up with someone crying, sometimes with all of them crying (including the winner).
For other parents who have the same issue: I was able to "fix" this situation by declaring the winner as the person who is able to take defeat without crying. After that I mostly can declare all of them winners. Sometimes I'm able to end the game nicely like that.
Just saying that playing a board game with small kids is not always as easy as your imagine it to be.
EDIT: One more thing: there are some nice co-op games for kids, and with those I never have a problem. A real recommendation!
At least, this believe is my only reason for playing certain games with my kids like Snakes-and-Ladders. I fail to recognize them as actual games because there are practically no decisions to be made. With most games, I can let my kids win by making stupid decisions. With Snakes there is no such option. The dice can force me to win and my kids have to deal with losing.
There's a desert version as well where you build a ship, which is fun no matter the age.
They were astonished when they played with their cousins (whom they like a lot) and the cousins started to cry when they lost. Mine told them that they (the cousins) can "take the victory" if they want cause this is just a game.
Anyway monopoly makes people of all ages and different sorts want to cry.
Which are some of those co-op games?
Forbidden Island (or Forbidden Desert, they're similar)
The Dresden Files deck building game
In this case, they won't get anything out of crying, so I guess it is purely out of frustration.
A lot of times, the winner also enjoys rubbing it in, and making the others cry. Kids have all the survival emotions, and none of the social skills to hold back on them. But that's probably our job as a parent, to teach them the social skills.
Better they learn it now, that when that colleague got that manager job they thought they were entitled to.
The answer is that as a teenager, we didn't have mobile phones etc (or well, barely) and we resorted to physical games such as card games. And as a kid, it was part of being friends with schoolmates, or (as you put it) playing with my parents. So we were already enforced, pretty much, being in physical space, overcome out boredom, and bended that to pleasure in such a way that we enjoyed being with each other.
The point being, that these games are still solid for youth and parents playing with youth. Heck, its partly even my problem that I don't initialise card games on a birthday.
Being autistic and opposite sex of my kid poses challenges though. Its still a long way down the road but while teaching them to become competitive in games and learning to win and lose seems invaluable, with a girl I'm inclined to not bother with violence or war-theme (or WWII) games. There's tons of these available, but it does pose limitations.
We regularly invite some friends for a "game evening" not "just because". Have dinner together, bring the small kids to bed, then have a round of Dominion, Alhambra, whatever.
That does not work for long games like Axis & Allies, because you would need a whole day, though. Fortunately, there are plenty of shorter games as well.
Speaking of which, this article suggests that boardgames are niche, but games like Siedler von Catan, Agricola, or the many, many games by Reiner Knizia, are absolutely mainstream. At least in Europe. I spent 1997 giving everybody Siedler von Catan for their birthday (and later the Dutch translation), so I would hope everybody vaguely interested in boardgames has it by now.
If you are forced to play it, use this https://imgur.com/gallery/vX3zm tactic, it won't happen again.
When people don't actually play by the rules it turns into a mess.
That's mostly true, but deciding what to buy, how to bid, and negotiating for properties are all important parts of the game.
Part of the purpose of the game is showing how capitalism is unfair because it exploits people by randomness of birth and circumstances rather than their ability to work.
Everyone who's played Monopoly more than a few times quickly understands that:
1. If it's early and you have an opportunity to acquire property, you take it
2. If you are out of cash and land on an unbought property, it's usually best to mortgage your other properties. This teaches the lesson of how leverage and debt, judiciously used, is to the capitalists's advantage.
3. If it's getting later in the game, usually nobody should willingly grant someone else a monopoly unless they themselves get one in return.
Hence the memes: https://imgur.com/a/tUGcn
https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/11/diplomacy-the-most-evi...
I wonder if that is a learned skill or a personality trait? In the former case, it might be valuable to teach it.
As an adult you can try to online versions where you only do one move per x(usually 24) hours. The games last weeks but you can play remotely at your leisure.
However, if you play lots of games, and never get off the British Isles, you might want to look for a different hobby.
The game is meant to be hard: after all at most one in seven people can win. (Unless you are a drawmonger and consider that an acceptable outcome.)
The only true dick move in the game is to trade away all of a certain good in lucrative trades, and then take it all back with a monopoly card. Most people have enough decency not to do that. Then again, at my house, we play it in a fairly friendly way and don't try to cripple each other unless we have to.
The one time we tried Catan I gave up not because the adults couldn't hack it but because my teenage cousins insisted on being involved but couldn't sit still long enough to set up the board and make it through a turn.
So for me the cultural conflict isn't about European vs American values reflected in game play as much as some people who need constant stimulation and have no patience. Considering the ubiquity of phones, ipads and the internet I'm not sure that ADD-like inability to focus is uniquely American. I think these games can also help teach kinds to slow down, decompress and pay attention if given a enough time but at least in my case I see these guys once a year at Thanksgiving which is not enough.
But glomming onto something mentioned in the article Mah Jong is popular with us because who wins isn't obvious until the game ends and who has the highest score may not be the person who declares Mah Jong. That makes the game more fun because everyone's involved to the end and it adds a layer of strategy as you're not just trying to up your score but block score-increasing moves by others.
Dealing with both of those things is part of the game... But I prefer games with less emphasis on those aspects.
Maybe you would not mind these forms of interaction so much in a game that is more upfront about them? On the surface, Catan seems to be almost cooperative, I could imagine the "politics" to catch some players by surprise, over and over again. Something with a darker theme might help to put some distance between personal relationships and gametable betrayals.
Junta for example, my all time favorite despite some really crude game mechanics is all about bought loyalties and backstabbing (or maybe I like it because of the crude mechanics, there is even an annoying Risk minigame that occasionally pops up to completely change the pace) Informal alliances sometimes rise and fall apart before the even first turn is over.
It sucks if you were one of the two players who didn't get a chance to place - but it doesn't feel quite as shitty as when someone occupies the only worker spot for a particular tile, just to spite you.
Of course, this is still boring for a completely different reason.
Even with that rule, we usually only use the robber to hurt the leader. During the early game when nobody is clearly ahead, we prefer to place it on poor production fields, and use it just to steal a card.
This is not just fuzzy feel-good pacifism, it's good sense, because an enemy is not an asset, and it's harmful to make yourself a target. Hurt people who deserve it, but otherwise just go for the card.
My father once caused a game-long shortage of bricks and nobody - including him - was able to do anything. Lol. :-)
Power Grid is pretty relentless and brutal - there's no violent aspect to it, but you can mess your opponents pretty badly, and it still hurts.
The only time I've managed to get my girlfriend to swear at me was when I stole the line she was clearly trying to build in Ticket to Ride.
And the name translates to "Don't get angry, man", so the game creator was quite self-aware here, too.
Unlike startups, with boardgames ideas matter much more than execution. Copyright is the only protection for successful games from being duplicated, since materials are so cheap.
I play Dominion or Catan and I'm working away and suddenly somebody says "game over! I won!" and I'm thinking, well that was a waste of time. I'm resentful and frustrated - what did I do all that for if it ends at such a meaningless point?
And unless it's really one-sided (which sucks, and maybe there is an argument that Dominion lends itself to develop one-sided games without recovery) or whoever you are playing against is keeping mental count of everyone's point (which wouldn't be impossible, but I've never met someone actually bothering to do it) they won't be able to say "I won" before everyone has counted out their points.
Adjusting your play during the course of the game as the game gets closer to ending is a crucial part of the game. If you’re surprised when the game ends you weren’t paying enough attention!
I think the downvotes you're getting are unjustified, yours is a valid opinion to have. Player elimination games can be excellent, but IMO mostly only if they're short. Love Letter is a great example. King of Tokyo/New York and Loopin' Louie are two others I have. Player elimination is a pretty good mechanic for short games, so I'm reading your comment as more of a perfectly legitimate complaint about long games with hidden information rather than a lack of player elimination.
Also, I'm not definitely inviting you to my gaming group.
They all have one thing in common: they're social. You play with other people, rather than in the same room as other people.
I've watched some family members play Catan every holiday for years. They sit in virtual silence for 2-4 hours, all looking grim, hardly speaking. When its over, they seem relieved and exhausted. Its depressing.
Our club games have people talking constantly, laughing, chanting, enjoying themselves to the limit. They're fun. And that seems to me to be a critical threshold to deserve inclusion in the category 'game'.
Actually the one game that really tells you the character of a group is Codenames. In certain groups, the entire game is super serious and quiet with lots of time spent on thinking, while in other groups the game is fun and filled with discussion and jokes and so on.
Ironically I consider Catan a game that is mainly fun because of the social interaction the results from it.
And that seems to me to be a critical threshold to deserve inclusion in the category 'game'.
Is chess a game?
Try playing some of these group games like Carcassonne or Splendor in a 1v1 format. 1v1 strips away the chaos and makes every victory a corresponding defeat, and teaches you the mechanics in their barest form.
Then you come back to a big 4-player table with a newfound grokking of the game.
Playing with at least 3 or 4 players most games become more about diplomacy and getting other players to do what you want than getting good roll / cards. A good trick is to get hit hard at the start of the game (when you win a lot it is not hard to be a target) then once someone start getting ahead focus everyone on them while retelling how everyone fucked you over early-on. When you get in a position to win start speaking less to not attract any attention, don't use flashy combos. Then win.
If you play a lot, learn how one game can help you for next one: if don't break your promises or help someone when they need it; you may get some help next game. Or people will be a lot more willing to trust you, until breaking this trust can give you a win.
One the one hand, yes, it can make games more fairly balanced. It works well when a) all players are roughly on the same skill level, and can independently agree on who the current winner is, b) players are all playing to win, and c) players are willing to recognize that it's still just a game, and not take losing personally.
It can fail hard, though, and make a gaming experience more miserable. "retelling how everyone fucked you over early-on" reinforces the negative parts of the game play experience, and eventually you get people arguing over who's been screwed over worse. You get players who've had a strong showing arguing that "I'm not really the leader", and feeling singled out and attacked when they inevitably get ganged-up upon. Except then it's not merely their perception - the other players have discussed ganging up on them!
My immediate family is almost entirely board game enthusiasts, but arguments of that variety have almost driven apart that board-game-playing shared interest. Games such as Settlers of Catan are effectively banned, since they're really hard to prevent from devolving into "who got screwed over more" arguments.
It is even more fun when they don't. You can spend a lot of time arguing about who's ahead or on the way to be ahead and explaining why. I think the interaction between players is the most important in those games. Bluffing, teasing, making and breaking promises etc. If you want to play with no interaction just start a solo game on your PC.
But I agree with
> players are willing to recognize that it's still just a game, and not take losing personally.
and not only losing. I kinda like to be rough when explaining how someone missed some obvious better move than what they did (and this fucked-up what I had in store). But the colorful language is just for the game duration, out of it all is good.
> they're really hard to prevent from devolving into "who got screwed over more" arguments
We ended making stats of attacks during some games to settle those arguments. Result: everyone was attacking everyone almost equally in fact. It was a fun experiment and explained why everyone felt as the only target during the game.
Eventually we discovered Catan and games got markedly better because of the game dynamics. Haven’t played Risk since those days.
Still, even for a straight "first to 10 points" or "play 5 rounds", to my mind the positives outweigh the negatives. If you play until all but one player is knocked out then a) most players are gonna lose in a very personal, direct way b) players who've lost have to find something else to do while the game finishes c) there's no way to predict or plan how long the game's going to go on for. A lot of competitions involve a fairly arbitrary limit - why run for 100m rather than 110 or 90? Why play football for 90 minutes rather than 80 or 100? Why do 18 holes of golf rather than 17 or 19? Why drive 3 laps in Mario Kart rather than 2 or 4? Sometimes all you can do is find a point at which to draw a line under it.
I guess I object to a race that ends when somebody steps on a crack seemingly randomly, and the one with the most bling on their vest then wins.
Its the part about 'you have to come up with something to end it'. The theme breaks down then. Makes the game seem unfinished, like they couldn't think of some reasonable way to wind it up so they just gave up.
Pandemic ends when you contain the plague, or it kills everybody. You talk and socialize and cajole until the end, with everybody. There's a well-made game.
Plug: "Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards" are pretty awesome if you insist on elimination.
"Points reached, game over" is the only quibble I have with the two-player version of Agricola, "All Creatures Big and Small." The end game condition is reached far too quickly for my tastes so I wind up asking the other player if he or she would like to have a "house rule" of more points.
If you just blithely play out a self-centered strategy and are somehow surprised when Charlie claims the Longest Road card and declares himself the winner, then sure it might feel disappointing to lose.
Instead try to be aware that for the last two turns Amanda has been 2 ore away from completing her last city and winning, but someone would need to roll exactly a 9 to do it on her own, while Bob has already completed all his cities but is unable to build more roads and Caroline is staying one Knight ahead of his army size through the help of Amanda giving her resources for the greater good. Maybe your win-con is going to have to be to steal Amanda's longest-road card and build another settlement which is gonna be a long shot but maybe given Amanda's desperation for ore and everyone-but-you's unwillingness to trade with Bob, you can do it. Maybe you can beat the odds and come from behind, maybe you can't, but either way an abrupt "it's over you lost" can never happen -- only someone executing their win-con better than you did, with the table unable to stop them.