A 1970s boardgame takes about 1,500 hours to complete
openculture.com
openculture.com
Blogspam is a pernicious cancer.
> It looks like you’re using an ad blocker. With almost half of web users now running ad blockers, it’s now getting very hard to sustain an educational website and keep it free.
I guess they had to resort to grabbing stuff off kotaku because those horrible adblockers killed their ad revenue... :^)
https://www.reddit.com/r/hexandcounter/comments/6r645b/my_fr...
The last official update was a year ago, they were just over 1/3 through the game.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cigarettes/comments/lez1wn/camel_cr...
(Personally, I don't find any of the - very few - claims to have played a full game solitaire to be plausible, and I'm not aware of anyone even claiming to have played a full multiplayer one.)
It is participating in an art piece that was created with painstaking attention to detail. One of the games I have is a WWII submarine simulator ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17484/silent-war ). While play testing it, the realized that the US fleet was sinking too much tonnage. After going back over the records they realized that at any time, some portion of the fleet wasn't out in the ocean but rather in dock getting refitted. Adding that to the rules brought the tonnage sunk back within historical lines.
They could have changed the victory conditions to match the values that aren't in agreement with history - but they didn't. This is part of the (for lack of a better genera description) American Simulationist genera where the goal is to model the thing as closely as possible with rules and cardboard.
---
I've played some two day games. Games where you spend an entire weekend playing one game. With the right group of people, it's quite fun. And then the next weekend, we play another game.
I've also done PB(E)M games where the game can last as long as the person running it keeps it going. ( http://rickloomispbm.com ).
This, to me, isn't any different than someone who is still playing an MMO - just a different medium of play.
Eh, not really. It's an art piece for sure, but as much dada as simulationist. As Berg said, it was designed as "a wretched excess." I think Jake's CNA game is less the gearhead obsession in so many of the WW2 simulations and more like the attitude described at https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/940888/
“Well, Troy,” I went on, “I want to be the guy who suddenly, at age 42, does spend hours doing this kind of thing, if only to feel what it’s like to take back a little piece of the soul I’ve sold to the company I slave for, to the obligatory evenings with people I’m not sure I even like, to daily errands, the lines at the DMV, to tax forms, to tedious family visits. This game is a slap in the face to all thinking creatures who live in such dire fear of the sands sifting through the hourglass. Playing a monster war game on this scale is ridiculous, a waste of energy, a waste of time, and so I want to do it. Let spite rule the day, Troy. Let’s learn and play A World at War!”
If I had to guess, I'd say 98% of all copies of hex+counter wargames are never played, just pored over and dreamed about.
Remember, no pc's, no laptop's, no social media and the constant inability of (geeky) college males to score. Gotta do something other than schoolwork.
My brothers and I bought Axis & Allies about 25 years ago. We spent a few hours trying to assimilate the rules.
Then we got bored and did something less mentally taxing.
We concluded that Axis and Allies was supposed to teach you the futility of war.
Me and my friends played Axis and Allies for probably close to 500 hours in the 80's (middle & high school)
A&A and Supremacy were our go-tos.
Air Superiority was also one of our favorites.
WOPR: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
I played a lot of A&A in the early 90s, as well as DnD.
The market for buying/selling them is still fine (especially with the internet now), they're enjoyable to read and collect. I've got a dozen myself.
For war games though, it was probably really hard to find someone to play against that wanted to put in the hours ...
I should’ve stuck with just the base set and looked for people to play it with, but I kept buying the expansion packs instead.
Interestingly, now that hacking pretty much any of the data management and calculations is not a problem, the desire to sink into some complex game world is gone.
Of course, you can buy it today.
He said, proudly frittering away time on social media.
But I do wonder if they intended to be cynical with the ability, which is - ""peacekeeping" - allows a democracy to declare war 50% of the time" :). The game putting scare quotes around "peacekeeping" doesn't help, heh.
(Normally a democracy in civ ii cannot declare/start a war, having the UN overrides that.)
Alpha Centauri was something special, they never did manage to recapture the magic with beyond earth.
That has a ridiculous level of depth and complexity that is hard to describe without playing it but hundreds of weapons, vehicles, equipment, a fully modded medical system (CPR, Airway Management), technically accurate radios with dozens of channels, ballistic system that accounts for wind/Coriolis effect).
Insanely deep and yet still really good fun to play as a unit.
I played to make them happy but I really just wanted to play it on a computer. When that started to materialize I was pleased.
But you are right for a subset of them and wrong for a much larger subset of the games. There are people that play D&D more as a tactical wargame with a set story, and is basically just a game you would play on a computer (And those games exist!). But for many many other styles of games, the point is that you are using your imagination and flexibility to react to the story that no computer could do. Or alternatively there are many games that are more of a collaborative storytelling - improv game that may occasionally use dice. There is a very large spectrum of games.
I've had a good time in games with a fairly lightweight conflict resolution, like certain classes of action are going to involve drawing cards from a (conventional) card deck, but I most enjoy playing something where it's about an even split between tactical combat (which yes, a computer game could do) and full roleplaying. I enjoy 4th edition D&D, apparently enough people didn't that 5e undoes many of the changes I liked.
One of the big problems older games often have is their resolution mechanic traps the GM by allowing for conflicts to end in a way that destroys the story. There should be a chance that our bullshit "merchants" cover story doesn't work and we get arrested, or our weapons are confiscated, or something else interesting happens. But a chance that we're just dropped into a pit of acid and die instantly is rubbish. If we're trying to open the Space Tomb it's OK if a bad roll means all the sentries inside are alerted, or the Galactic Archaeology Police are on their way to investigate tomb robbers, but it's not OK if now the door can't be opened and so the entire adventure is impossible.
Absolutely. The joy (occasionally frustration for the DMs, but a good DM will keep the guard rails working and keep the partly at least faintly on track) of a good campaign, especially more than a few sessions in, is that the characters start becoming more in depth, and you get the dynamics out of that you'd never see in a computer game. My barbarian is (still) upset with our rogue about the murder of a little halfling who was genuinely helping us out, and doesn't consider whatever excuses the rogue makes to be valid.
And if you want to go completely off the rails, it's common enough to hear from the DM, "Well... OK. Roll for it." Usually nothing happens, sometimes something insane happens.
There was a conflict between characters in a previous session about where a particular soul should be crammed, which was literally resolved by what amounted to a mage war. "I do this." "No you don't." "Yes. I do." "No." With a few other people contributing various bits and pieces. "Yes, I do!" "Nope, you have to reroll that die. I use my luck altering ring." etc.
It can be far, far more than just combat rolls. I agree, if what you want out of D&D is pure combat, then a computer does it well, but... it still doesn't match the joy of doing it with other people. Having your piddling little gnome sorcerer who's a level or two behind make the final hit, with a 2hp roll. Again. And again. After everyone else has been dumping 20, 30hp attacks into this set of enemies. You can get the combat mechanics with a video game, but that has nothing on a group, around a table, with a couple beers, just having a ball.
I've played D&D-type games with various levels of technology over the past few decades (ranging from heavily computer aided, with program based leveling and such, maps via projector, etc, down to pure paper, rulebook, and whiteboard-on-the table with rulers for movement). I honestly enjoy the lower tech ones more. The best blend I think I've played, which was largely due to the DM being excellent, was paper-based for the players ("You're responsible for leveling, here are the rules for it. You miss something, well, too bad. We'll see if we can work it in later."), with a TV set in a gaming table for maps. A bit of Gimp layer magic, and we had an absolutely amazing "fog of war" layer, where the DM could remove the black layer as we went around corners and such on the pre-made maps. It added some of the benefits of technology, while still keeping us bound to paper, pencils, and dice.
On the other hand, we currently have an excellent DM who, as near as I can tell, loves being a DM substantially for the excuses to build bridges, towns, cities, and all sorts of other stuff in practical craftwork - think 2-3' square landscapes and such that something will play out on. We get brickwork carved into styrofoam, painted, detailed, etc. It's amazing, and it's physical in a way no computer game is.
But I'm also a person who has spent his whole life in tech, and more and more hates what it's become. So there's that.
It’s also far from the largest board war game by a little over half.
Look for DAK for a less tedious same scale effort.
I play Gloomhaven with friends. Since we live in different parts of the country, we only meet up to play twice a year to play. It will take us years to complete Gloomhaven. It's awesome. It means we can just keep playing long into our retirements (at which point we might meet and play more often!)
Not to say they couldn't include more modules, but when you're trying to progress a storyline it's really frustrating to have multiple sessions (most many hours long) in between you a plot development.
I think it would have been better as 8 starting classes, 8 unlockables, and two more compressed campaigns with some other progression compressed accordingly.
"Campaign", in this case, doesn't mean something like Gloomhaven's scenario-driven design, with a single character pad and a couple card decks that need to stay in order between serial 1-4 hour play sessions. It's a single game, with huge maps and logistical tables whose state needs to be tracked for the entire duration.
> Isn't it great if you know you have enough content to play the game for the next 20 years?
"Content" in games is generally awful and the modern focus on it is destroying what makes games interesting. Most games, especially competitive games, should become more interesting with repeat plays as you explore the systems involved. Gloomhaven works because the story "content" is largely divorced from the mechanics/dynamics of the scenario so you're playing "the game" dozens of times, and those systems are interesting. Modern narrative campaign games that don't have anything interesting going on in a much smaller inner loop are trash.
Maybe some are fine experiencing this one thing over many months/years, but most people (by far, I would guess) would prefer experiencing more of a variety in the limited time we have.
Our group is playing Jaws of the Lion, but only play it about once every few months, while still playing several other games in between.
But depending on how long a given campaign would take, it might take more than we want to invest in a single game -- in the example of this article, that would take a lifetime for us.
I love these types of games though. Renegade Legion: Prefect is possibly my favorite hexgame, and I spent more hours solo'ing games of Succession Wars than I ever did punching giant robots in the face in actual Battletech.
Afrika Korps perhaps:
But they are. Action figures are also dolls. Sorry.
I've started dabbling in the genre a bit over the past decade - tabletop and computerized - and what really intrigues me is, broadly speaking, there's been a pivot away from complexity in the past few decades, particularly in the tabletop space. If you think of a wargame as a sort of playable model of a conflict, you can look at the gameplay mechanics as a tool for abstracting away or illuminating and emphasizing what people believe are important factors in a battle/war/etc. There's a significant current of thought in modern wargame design circles that believes the old-school rivet-counting complexity you see in the article missed the forest for the trees. So, you instead see games that in clever and elegant ways evoke specific aspects of various conflicts in relatively simple-to-grasp games.
On the table-top side, there are quite a few games that have moved to a sort of card-driven model where you play from a hand of hidden cards. In particular, you have things like Twilight Struggle which evokes a specific sense of uncertainty, paranoia, and tension that's quite impressive, especially as the DEFCON counter seems to inexorably creep towards 1.
On the PC side, Unity of Command uses a very elegant model of supply chains to evoke how maneuver warfare worked on the Eastern Front in WWII. It's striking how well a collection of rules that can be summarized on a single page manages to result in deep strikes and encirclements of large groups like those you see in military history books. Unity of Command is interesting in that it is a game you could in principle play as a tabletop game - it's just that while the supply chain model is extremely easy to grasp and visualize, it'd be an enormous pain to track manually (Well, that, and you'd miss out on the deviously nasty opponent AI). If you're at all curious about the genre, it's worth a look.