Last week, I wrote about how different aspects of time can affect your game purchases.  In the comments, a few people mentioned that often, the people that you game with are more important in getting a game to the table than the playing time. 

I definitely agree with that, and planned to write an article on how you should consider the people you game with when you are acquiring games, so that you can get the most gaming mileage out of your purchasing power.  Problem is, Gaming groups are as different and unique as a blood spatter. 

So, I thought about my own gaming group and realized that I never consider their tastes when acquiring games, and that is because their tastes are so varied that nearly any game I buy I can usually get to the table with someone.  That is when it dawned on me that it isn't that important to consider people when acquiring games, if you did a good job of considering the games you like when you acquired the people in your game group.

As a general rule one of the things I usually look for in a game is some direct player interaction. I don't much mind if its heavily moderated by action selection or some similar Euro-style mechanic, indeed some of my favourite titles solve the perennial problems of multi-player conflict in this manner, so long as it's in there somewhere. My tolerance for low interaction games is very low - something I'll only bring out once in a while when the occasion demands it. So it's no great surprise that for a long time I found the idea of solo boardgaming bizarre to say the least.

That's a statue joke, get it? See, they're usually made of stone and can't fly... Nevermind. Cathedral Gargoyle was one of the more hyped cards for Paladin in The Witchwood, but either it just isn't going to measure up in Standard or the meta will have to change quite a bit.

As the Gathering goes on, I find that I can play fewer and fewer games, and spend more time at long dinners, trips....out....anywhere. Places that aren't in a non-windowed basement ballroom for 8 days.

One highlight is The Guard Tower in Columbus. It has been perhaps two years since I've been in a proper game store. This one is remarkably clean, well stocked, and well worth the trip if you re in the area.

Other trips were to places with air, sunshine, and beer. (Arrogant Bastard Ale is actually reasonably tasty. We had to buy bottles just so we could give one to Friedemann Friese. )

Ah, it’s that time of year again – GenCon week. You can smell the excitement in the air. For those of you who have not been here before, it smells like hair grease and buttcrack sweat. I freaking hate GenCon.

We explore the other (mostly) human sides, fighting for existence (and sometimes progress) in the blasted world of Neuroshima Hex

In which we look at the mutations of Moloch (instead of humans), the rat people, an intelligent virus, and an Outpost plan gone awry. In other words, the weird factions.

I've had an up and down relationship with Eagle games.  Listen while I tell the tale....

 I don’t like rating games, video or board. A good review should manage to encapsulate how you feel about a game without stamping a score at the bottom. Numeric ratings attract attention away from the writing, and have neither the subtlety or nuance to express wider ideas about the value of the game beyond its play, or the reviewer’s tilt.

But I don’t always have the pleasure of writing just as I’d like to, and many of the editors I’ve worked for want scores. Out of five, ten or, worst of all, a hundred. So I dutifully assign a number and try to move on. But I remain haunted by past scores. Is game X really two stars better than game Y? Was I really right to give game Z that score out of a sense of quality, even though I, personally, disliked it?

Because people put store by those numbers, and therefore so must I. In spite of my misgivings I try to get it right, and end up in ludicrous situations like giving a game a higher rating than I feel it entirely deserves just because it’s marginally better than another game I previously scored slightly generously.

The most corrosive effect of scores, though, is what we’ve come to know as the weak seven effect. You play a game, enjoy it, but aren’t blown away by it’s quality. Perhaps you frequent one of the many online communities which allow you to rate your collection, and decide to give it a score. What do you go for? Seven.

It’s a weasley number, is seven. The people who wrote disquieting thriller se7en clearly knew it, as did the antediluvians who came up with the seven deadly sins that inspired it. When it comes to rating games, eight looks like a solid score for a quality game, while six feels fairly negative. Seven sits in the middle like a spare part, uselessly indicating that the game is fun, but not quite fun enough.

It’s particularly pernicious when those ratings are compiled into an average. Averaging out forces down the score, because you’ll never get an average of ten and even nines are extremely rare. But because it’s still a rating out of ten, you don’t see that, you just compare the compiled rating with the maximum, ten, to get a sense of the game’s quality. Then all those sevens, which aren’t actually that high as individual ratings, suddenly add up to a much more appealing average.

And average is the right word. Because that’s really what we’re saying with those sevens. Fun, but not quite fun enough. That’s average, really. But of course out of ten, seven isn’t the average. The average should actually be five or six. And so we end up with over-inflated ratings for games and punters end up spending good money on games they rarely, if ever, play and the world economy keep on going round.

The problem is that games are supposed to be fun. They’re supposed to be exciting, give pleasure to the gamer. So you end up feeling overly positive about a game that’s actually fairly run of the mill, because it’s partially fulfilled its purpose. Think about it. Finding a game I actually dislike it pretty rare. Finding one I really hate is almost unheard of. I don’t think I’ve ever played one in which I can’t see a single redeeming feature that might appeal to another gamer.

As the design industry has got better, this problem has got worse. Designers learned from the awful train wrecks of the board gaming 70s and video gaming 80s not to repeat those mistakes. It’s pretty unusual nowadays to see something as dreadful as SimCity or Colonial Marines – indeed this column was partially inspired by the rarity of having two bad big-studio games back to back.

But although the quality of the majority of games has increased overall, to the point where unfun games have become a thankfully hunted breed, the top notes haven’t changed at all. In any given year there are still as many stellar titles, games that thrill you, demand repeat plays, stay in your head for months afterwards, as there were in the 70s and 80s.

Those are the games you want to pick out. Ideally as soon as they come out. But to get the proper perspective on their quality takes long hindsight, by which time you may have wasted your money on those horrible, bland, average sevens that have been pushing the baseline up and making themselves look better than they really are.

This is my fault. And I’m sorry.

Not mine alone, of course, but I must shoulder the blame. Along with every other critic who forgot that seven isn’t really the average out of ten. Along with every other reviewer who neglected to realise that good is the new average. Along with all the other journalists who needlessly pushed up a game’s score just for the sake of consistency.

The solution is relatively simple. If I have to rate games I like a five point scale the best. It gives you the chance to differentiate the good from the average, and make sure your readers properly understand what you thought about a game in case you botched your review a little and failed to make that subtle distinction.

When I first started using social media book-tracking site Goodreads, I was therefore pleased to see it used a five-point scale. But I was momentarily puzzled by the names. Three, the middle point, was “liked it” which seems distinctly above average. Two, which looks below par, is “it was ok”. Confusing, until you remember that books are like games. Generally only decent books make it through the publishing process. Really bad books are rare. Therefore, the media is actually good..

So from now on when I rate games, that’s the scale I’m going to use. I’ll just double it or quintuple it for higher ceilings. May I humbly suggest you try and do the same. Good is the new average. Long may it remain so.

Of course it is important to make sure everyone knows about the game you're planning to release very soon or the campaign that's going to launch on Kickstarter shortly. You want people to be excited, so they share it with their friends. You want people to think your game is the best fit for them, so it can compete with the myriad of other games vying for people's attention all the time. In fact, you want your game to be amazing - the best it can be. You want others to love it as much as you do. However, there comes a point at which you might be promising more than the game can deliver. You can run the risk of overhyping your game, which can have a hugely negative effect.

If there’s one fact that’s sure to unite men and women, geek and mainstream, gay and straight...from the richest king to the poorest old woman, the rockstar, the newsagent, the blogger, the Field-Marshall, the vicar and the hot-pants wearing Spice Girl tribute band...it’s that the 1986 James Cameron movie, Aliens, is awesome.

For my birthday recently, I got a copy of King of Tokyo with was unexpected but very nice. What was rather more unexpected was that my six-year old daughter took to it like Godzilla took to smashing up urban Japan. She wanted to play, and play and play to the point where she was even beginning to wear out my enthusiasm for the game, especially two-player which is fun and fast but not where the game really shines. She “got” the whole thing, dice strategy, card effects and all with minimal coaching from me, and had an absolute blast.

The reason this came as such a surprise is that we’ve always had a slightly uneasy relationship when it comes to my games. On the one hand she clearly finds them absolutely fascinating. On the other hand I’m extremely wary of being pushy when it comes to my favourite hobby, and also of trying to avoid introducing her to material that’s too complex for her age which is, let’s face it, most of my games. As a result she and I haven’t spent as much time gaming together as you might imagine, and the times we did it hasn’t been as successful as you might imagine. So so far, she’s been pretty ambivalent about games.

Some of you may think it’s remiss of me not to encourage her interest further. The reasons I have not done so are complex. Partly it’s down to me wanting to let her make her own choices in life. Partly I want her to be able to explore and enjoy standard children’s games while she’s still a child and not want to push her into some faux-academic “improvement” exercise involving maths and strategy. Partly it’s a selfish desire to want to actually *play* a game properly rather than mentoring a youngster in the art. But mainly it’s because I find the spectacle of obsessive gamers rabidly goading their young children into playing complex strategy games absolutely repellent.

Let me be clear here. Some gamers do that mentoring thing I alluded to very well. They sit down with their friends and spouse for a game of Agricola or whatever, sit their kid on their knee and let them play a position while the whole time gently reminding them of rules and suggesting good moves for them, allowing them the participation and attention they crave while making sure they’re not overwhelmed by the mechanics. That’s fine. It’s difficult to do without patronising the child, and I’m a little dubious about the value of it since you could still have family time playing an actual family game but that’s not a big deal. Done properly, everyone still has a good time. I struggle to do this properly, and that’s my loss.

No, what gets my goat is gamers so frenzied over the possibility that “one day” they might get to play Caylus or whatever with their newborn that they seem ready to shoehorn the delicate sensibilities of their growing offspring into that iron maiden of a game just to find out “if they’re ready”. No matter that the rules are too complex. No matter that the strategy is completely beyond them. No matter that spreadsheet games of that nature are probably worse than TV for sucking the playfulness and imagination out of childhood. It’s like the nerd version of the ultra-competitive sports dad.

Just as bad is the excuse offered with older kids that playing demanding games should somehow have to be an educational experience. It’s closely linked with the relatively common mindset that adults can justify maintaining a gaming hobby because modern games are strategy exercises like Go or Chess. The whole thing is a nonsense. While some modern titles can conceivably rival those ancient classics in terms of depth, most cannot. More importantly, nor should they. Gaming is about having fun. Pointing out, correctly, that fun is subjective cuts both ways: some gamers have fun when their brains are engaged in a close intellectual battle, others have fun tossing down beers, rolling dice and making spaceship noises. Society smiles kindly on a variety of activities that involve both variants of fun and everything in between. It smiles less kindly on grown men and women playing board games because it’s viewed as a children’s activity. That’s the problematic point, and whatever solution we come up with needs to challenge that attitude, not to try and bypass it with feeble excuses about intellectual validation. Similarly, when most kids sit down to play games they usually want to enjoy those games in the childish manner that’s suitable and appropriate for them.

Because I feel so strongly about these things, I’ve always felt it was better to sit back and let my daughter come to me with a desire to play games when she wanted to. When she was very small she wanted to do so frequently but of course her idea of play was very different to mine. She would get the pieces out of the box and make up her own make-believe stories with them. I went along with this as best I could in my straight-laced, adult, imagination-free world and learned a lot from doing so. And I figured I was doing the best I could to encourage her at that tender age.

But as she grew older, problems started to develop. When she began to play simple mass-market games and learn the structures of turn-taking and rules, she wanted to try and do the same with my grown-up games. Knowing she wasn’t capable, and wary of the issues I’ve outliIned above, I simply refused in most cases, which caused resentment. Even when I relented, as I did with games like Pitchcar and Carcassonne (if you leave the farmers out, small children are perfectly able to get to grips with it) it became clear that she was still too young to cope properly with winning and losing, and adult games are generally harder to throw than children’s ones. My one attempt at acting like a true gamer parent, getting her a copy of Gulo Gulo, backfired as she didn’t like it but clearly felt compelled to play because it was a present. Gradually, her desire to play declined. I figured that my gentle encouragements had fallen on deaf ears and she just wasn’t wired the way I was with games. That was cool: we played some of her mass market games, and had plenty of other fun things to share together, and I figured it’d be no bad thing if she grew up to be less of a nerd than me.

Then, after a long hiatus when we didn’t play that much at all, she discovered Castle Ravenloft. It happened when I took the game away on holiday last year and her curiosity about all those cool miniatures overcame not only her vague disinterest in games but the active revulsion she felt toward the scary box art. We played that together on holiday and had an absolutely fantastic time. The key was the fact that it was a simple, co-operative game. The co-operative nature obviously overcame issues she had with winning and losing and, more importantly, made me feel that I could help and mentor her with the rules and strategies without feeling like I was being patronising or taking over her game. She still took obvious pleasure and excitement in rolling the dice and drawing the cards: so much tension and terror in fact that she ended up making me drawing all the monster cards because they were too scary! Also the rich narrative that the game presented allowed us to talk it over afterwards and share our experience of play.

In retrospect it seems a bit crazy that I didn't try her with a co-operative game earlier. In reality, my distaste for the genre meant I owned very few of them, and the only one that generates proper story - Arkham Horror - is obviously too long and complex for a young child. So we needed Castle Ravenloft to fill that gap. Of course from there were went on to playing Wrath of Ashardalon and Legend of Drizzt too. And we had such fun playing them that for a year we didn't really play any competitive games aside from her toy shop ones. Until, that was, I got King of Tokyo.

The first time we played it I took it easy on her as I wasn't sure how well she'd cope, especially with the card effects. We played an open-style game where I explaned all the rules and the decisions I was making but she seemed to pick it up really quickly and enjoy it so right away we decided to play a proper competitive game. I went first, and got into Tokyo. And then it was her turn: she picked up the dice and rolled three twos, an energy bar, a heart and a claw. Now if you don't know King of Tokyo, claws damage other players and numbers, if you get three of them, score you the equivalent amount of victory points. When she saw the results, without hesitation she set the claw asisde and went to scoop up the rest to re-roll them. I stopped her.

"Wait a moment" I said. "Don't forget that set of twos will score you points, and points are one way to win the game."

She looked at me, full of innocent sweetness and light. And she said: "I know Daddy. But I want more claws so I can kill you."

I was a very proud Dad in that moment, And I began to believe that perhaps I had not schooled her so badly in the art of gaming after all.

F:AT reader Jonathan Yonce sent us a great after-action report of his Ameritrash-fueled invasion of a very snooty-sounding "EuroQuest". What follows is a tale of plastic, beer, tears, and a distressing lack of nutrition during his stay.

In an idle moment over the weekend I thought about all the games that I'd played more than about twenty times. Considering that I keep banging on about the importance of replayability in games the answer surprised me a bit - there were only five, and what's more there's quite a considerable gap between the amount I've played those five and all the other games I own. The games in question were Risk, Space Hulk, Titan, Twilight Struggle and (most shockingly of all) Attika. Curiosly only two of them - Titan and TS - are games I'd rate amongst my absolute favourites although all are good. So I pondered a little more about what it was about those games that had made me rack up quite so many plays and hadn't managed to come up with anything all five shared beyond them being "really good games" when it suddenly struck me. I'd missed one off the list. I hadn't added my most played game of all, a game which I've probably played more times than all the other five put together. That game is Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

Talisman is 30 years old today. 

Here are some links. Enjoy.

A History of Talisman

 Talisman Turns 30

A Fresh Look at Talisman 

Talisman Pub Crawl Rules

Talisman Digital Edition Is Available for Download

AMC is showing HALLOWEEN III as I type...what a nutty movie. The Silver Shamrock song is pretty much always playing in my mind at any given point in my life.

Anyhoo, Steve Weeks sent out a notice a couple of days ago...the Ultimate Podcast is resurrected for a special Halloween show. Love him or hate him, you know you're gonna listen.

And if that doesn't scare the Eurogamers off the lawn, just put up a FLGS sign and tell 'em they gotta pay full MSRP.

This is a copy of an article originally published on the old F:AT blog. Read original comments . 

A couple of days ago I finished the final Harry Potter book. Kids’ literature and all that, I know, but I couldn’t help feeling a certain sense of loss. After all I’d spent seven books with these characters; I’d watched them grow and develop and shared a little in their adventures and it seemed a little dispiriting that I wouldn’t be able to read about them any more. There was once a friend of a friend of mine who moved to Hong Kong; I didn’t know the guy very well but it seemed kind of weird to think I’d never see him again. Finishing the books felt like that.

Last August I made a trade for Conquest of Nerath, the D&D-themed conquest game from Wizards of the Coast. For months it sat on my game shelf, mostly serving as a toy for my three-year-old son. It was hard to deny its appeal in that regard, but it wasn’t until just this last week that I was able to scare up the four people that so many have recommended. True to my expectations, I had a great time. I have a history of not caring much for dudes-on-a-map games, mostly because I’m kind of an impatient gamer. Conquest of Nerath didn’t disappoint in that regard; we were attacking each other immediately, swapping territories until one team hit the victory point threshhold that ended the game. There wasn’t a single mechanic I hadn’t seen elsewhere. I have played lots of games where you roll dice to conquer territory, and I’ve seen plenty of conquest games where you get victory points for your trouble. It was one of those situations where it wasn’t so much what the game did, but how well it did it. It was like watching a brilliant pianist performing a song that someone else wrote. The fact that it’s not original doesn’t diminish the performance.

Text and board games are inextricably linked. You find text in various places in every board game to a greater or lesser extent. I can't think of any game that doesn't have some text somewhere, but feel free to prove me wrong in the comments below. At the very least, there will be text on the box, stating where the game was made or what its player count is. At the other end of the spectrum, you'll find games that are text-heavy. I want to look at the varying levels of use of text in modern board games.