What are the fundamental functional differences between boardgames and card games?  I’m not sure how important this question is from a game player’s point of view but it’s certainly important for game designers (even for video game designers).  The obvious physical format is important, but now that we can convert physical non-electronic games to electronic formats the lines are less clear. More importantly, each type of game emphasizes or encourages different kinds of challenges and gameplay, regardless of the physical format.

It strikes me that this game, released in 2000, was kind of the turning point where the "German game" era sort of ended and the "Eurogame" era began...and all of the really great stuff that the European designers had been doing for like, 20 years prior was suddenly undone and Eurogames began their descent into a brown morass of over-designed, linear, and anti-interactive designs.

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It is December, 1984.

The sky is a gray slate, the air damp and cold. But I am aglow with excitement. As an 11 year old, newly-minted gamer I am about to visit my first proper game shop. It's a little way out of the Norwich city center streets I know, so my Dad guides me, eyes rolling with loving exasperation.

So, I get to go to this thing every year called the Gathering.

If you've heard of it, it is a tiny con of about 300+ people that used to be swathed in secrecy. Dark secrets abound as to what heinous Eurocentric activities occur within its hallowed walls. Within the 300, there lurks names like Days of Wonder, Rio Grande, Alan Moon, Alea, Ravensburger, Eggertspiele, Hans im Gluck, Z-Man games, Zoch, Friedemann Friese, Phalanx Games.

They are here. They play a lot of prototypes to get gamer reactions, and play each other's prototypes. They also just play a lot of games. It doesn't work like other cons, because they don't really have to put on the full salesman hats, and just run demos.

Once you have been in the hobby five years, you begin to look at your game shelf and say, “I have too many games.” This doesn’t actually mean you’re going to get rid of any of them or that you will stop buying new ones. Mostly it’s just an acknowledgement that, hey, space is getting a little tight, and that you’ve spent a considerable amount of money on all the games you have.

The following article is re-printed with the kind permission of the author from his webstiteHarris-Authors.com.

In response to our e-mail requesting permission to post the article and explaining what Fortress Ameritrash was about, Mr. Harris had this to say:

I have a great liking for the games you mention. Fury of Dracula is one of my all time favourites and I will never forget the game of Dune where my army was wiped out when my wife destroyed the Shield Wall.  I should have remembered that bit from the book. Anyway, you have my full permission to use my article

Whenever I ask people to name their favourite columns from those I’ve written, there’s always a unifying thread amongst the responses. Everyone mentions pieces that skirt around that deliciously murky place where games and real life collide. Whether it’s the story of how gaming helped me reconcile pacifism with an interest in militaria or the tale of how my daughter learned to love gaming, the human interest stories that always float to the top.

And why not? Human interest stories float to the top of journalism like the oil-slick rainbows of childhood puddles. We are human. Other humans interest us. So when deeply felt, personal stories collide with our interests and hobbies the result is a perfect storm of wonderment that, at best, helps us know ourselves and our relationship with our games just a little bit better.

As you’d expect, it holds equally true of video gaming journalism. I was reminded of this universal truth this week when this superb article about playing L.A. Noire with a native of the games’ 40’s setting, united internet denizens in a flurry of adoration. It seemed to set other journalists tumbling over one another to mention other, previous favourite pieces. And again the universal truth held. Many were articles made special by the human angle, such as this harrowing fable of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. press event near the actual Chernobyl reactor.

So no surprises that people playing games is also the number one thing mentioned when I ask people what they want to see more of. So here I am, trying to do just that. But when it comes to board games, what’s surprising and worrying is just how difficult that turns out to be. I’ve written those two pieces I mentioned at the start of this one and I think there’s probably one more in me, about family gaming over the festive season, which I may slot in closer to the appointed date. But beyond that I have nothing.

This should not be. Board gaming is a deeply social experience. You’re playing face to face, right there, with other human beings, real people with whom you can chat, share jokes, pass the time between turns with banter about things other than the game. Social mores are actually leveraged as game mechanic in anything that involves trading or negotiation. Playing games has been a part and parcel of custom and tradition for centuries. There are, in fact, few hobbies that are more social than playing a board game.

Computer gaming is certainly not one of them, unless your definition of “social” encompasses screaming juvenile obscenities over a headset during multiplayer Call of Duty Games. And yet human interest stories in the videogame press abound. How do they manage it? Well, a quick glance at the articles I linked earlier, or at relevant pieces from any outlet, reveals that the personal angle is usually exterior to actual game play. Very little in either of those articles actually talks about playing the game, but instead relate the experience of play to things in the real world, reaching out to touch important, emotional things that everyone can understand.

Videogame journalists can make this link for two reasons. Firstly because playing computer games has become a mainstream, ubiquitous thing. That means it’s becoming a cultural reference point, a thing readers can relate to quickly and easily without paragraphs of introductory text outlining the setting or mechanics of the game. Secondly because computer games have begun to do a startlingly good job of mimicking aspects of the real world. Much of the piece about L.A. Noire was focussed on how good it was at evoking the physical reality of 40’s L.A., and how in doing so it missed some of the cultural realities of that period.

When we sit down to write about board games, we’re afforded neither of those luxuries. The things that differentiate hobby board games from mainstream ones are not well known and often need explaining, even to an enthusiast audience because many of them may not be familiar with the intricacies of the game in question. And even the most simulation oriented board games are highly abstract compared with the reality they seek to depict, so we need to spend time delving into the relationship between the two. It’s hard to make the link between the experience of play and real life in a board game because there rarely is a link to make. And when you can it’s impossible to do it and keep the narrative flowing and trimmed to a reasonable length because of the background material required.

So we come back to the fact that the experience of playing a board game is inherently founded in social reality in a way that playing a computer game is not. That, surely should be something we can leverage? But it seems not. For all the thousands of that I’ve spent gaming, I have precious little even in the way of anecdotes to offer, let alone genuine human drama. I have a lot of fun to show for those hours, and I wouldn’t give up them up for anything. But all I learned from them was better statistics and logical thinking. For all the much-vaunted social value of board games that tends to get trotted out by hobbyists explaining how much better their hobby is than nasty, introspective video games or TV watching, precious little that happens in the game has much relevance to what happens outside it.

It’s very tempting to open up the whole can of worms with the introverted, socially awkward gamers again but I don’t think it really has much to do with this, although I do feel that some people use gaming as an excuse for not socialising otherwise, fooling themselves that they get all the social time they need over a board . It’s about the games themselves and how obsession can limit horizons. I don’t think I ever realised any of this until I read those pieces of videogame journalism and had a long, hard think about how one might be able to find a similarly powerful angle for board games. But I could not. And, strikingly, I couldn’t think of a single board game writer who ever has.

Before that realisation I happily bought into that “board games are social” line. But that seems to me a quaint, self serving myth. Board games are only social in a dreadfully restrictive manner, totally isolated to play itself. There are too many times that I’ve been out with friends to play, and got home, and been asked “how is so and so? how are their kids?” and I’ve not been able to answer. That’s sad, but I kept on justifying it to myself by thinking about how much we talked and interacted.  But all we talked about was the game, and what happened in the game. Board games are a great tool to organise your socialising around, but it’s too easy to let them dictate your interactions completely.

Could we do anything about this? Yes, if we wanted to. It'd help is board gaming was more of a common culltural touchstone than it is. But a lot of hobby gamers have a worryingly narrow definition of what constitutes a board game. There are many games on the fringes of the hobby scene that encourage genuine sociability and imagination, such as the excellent storytelling game Once Upon A Time, or the emerging scene in mass-participation social games to look to for inspiration, all of which a lot of hobbyists would turn up their noses at for being too imprecise or poorly defined. But then again there more important question is, do we want to? There's nothing particularly wrong with game experinces being escapist, introverted or non-social. But perhaps it's about time that we stopped pretending they were not those things, and kidding ourselves that they're a substitute for genuine socialising.

So far computers have been helping us with our gaming hobby but they've been largely absent from our tabletops.

However with the advancement on e-readers I think this will change and this is how we can benefit from it.

A smooth fusion of deckbuilding and area control, Tyrants of the Underdark meshes differing game tastes just as easily.

    Hi.  It's me again -- that guy that complains about worker placement and drones on and on about how important "unpredictability" is in board games and why it matters to me.  I'd like to spend a moment focusing on that last one yet one more time.  Now, I am well aware that most of you are tired of the subject, but since I'm the one with the keyboard and you're the one with the monitor I'm going to pretend for just a moment that this is all about me and that I actually have some level of control, and that's apt because it's going to be at the heart of this article: it's about control.

Hey, remember AGE OF CONAN?

I barely do. I played the game one time, and it just kind of died on the vine. No one is interested in it  anymore, it seems. It's kind of a shame, I liked it OK the one time I played it.

But maybe that's the problem, that it was just OK. Nobody wants an OK Conan game.

So at Gameshark this week, I thought I'd write another anti-review in the spirit of that WORLD WAR IV review I did. But I also wanted to try to suss out why this game appears to be such a flop. We talked about it a lot back when it came out, I know, but it's weird that it's just silence now. I mean, people (Maka, mostly) still talk about MARVEL HEROES...

Here's the jump. Weep for Conan!

When I was young and freshly unleashed upon the world of boardgame columnists, burning with points to prove and issues to argue, one of the concepts that I did to death was the idea that Ameritrash games owe a huge debt to Euros. In spite of my flogging the subject to death, I still feel it’s worth resurrecting from time to time. Not least to remind people in the Ameritrash camp that no matter how many times we justifiably chant “boring Euro-clone”, it’s a self-evident truth that back in the early 90’s, AT games were in very much as bad a state as Euros are now. The market was glutted with tedious, unimaginative game which all copied stale mechanics from one another. It took exposure to the first wave of German games to hit the US, with their fresh approach to mechanics, to revivify the genre. That, and the gradual creeping boredom with Magic: the Gathering that a lot of gamers were experiencing after playing it for several years.Indeed so great is the mechanical debt that the games I love owe to the games I hate (generalisations, obviously) that I wouldn’t think it was that much of a step too far to think of virtually every successful thematic game released in the last decade as a form of hybrid. The trick has been borrowing mechanical innovations from the European paradigm and re-shaping them - and in some cases improving them - in order to fit a more demanding and rigid thematic mould.

Last week I got to play a game for the first time that just bowled me over with the quality of its presentation. This isn’t about overproduction, or artwork, just a simple appreciation that laid out on the table in active play the thing was a veritable feast for the senses, a smorgasbord of texture, colour and sculpture.

So it inspired me to have think about what my favourite looking games of all time were. What titles draw admiring looks from gamers and non-gamers alike when they’re laid out of the table and being played in a flurry of dice, cards and activity. So I made a top five which I’m about to count down for you. In doing so it has to be said that I’ve simply ignored all the massively priced collectors games and whatnot that would obviously dominate this list if not left out. Things like theWar of the Ringcollector’s edition, or the deluxe hand-carved and jewel-encrusted editions of popular games likeMonopoly andOutragethat can sell for hundreds, if not thousands. No, we’re sticking to mass-produced games here that can (or could) be bought for prices in line with the vast majority of hobby games already on the market.

And remember, this is my list, my choices and this is about aesthetic appreciation which isn’t amenable to facts or even resolute debate. Feel free to disagree, that’s what the comments section is at the end for, because I suspect my number one choice isn’t going to be popular. And neither is the one I’m opening with.

But before we get to that I have to cover a glaring omission in order to head off the people who’ll wonder why certain games are not here: there are no Games Workshop games amongst my picks.Space Hulk has production value coming out the wazoo but it basically just wasn’t to my taste. I thought that although the embossed tiles were fantastic and super-chunky, there wasn’t enough uniformity in the board art: every single door being different? That just looks odd. And again although the miniature sculpts were beautifully detailed,  I don’t like the new gothic space marine look, and I didn’t like the way the genestealers were moulded on to the scenery. Pillars don’t move around, you know.Dreadfleet looks fantastic from a miniatures gamers point of view but unpainted it looks a lot less spectacular, thanks to its relatively plain board and cards. And seeing as painting is an optional extra I can’t consider that as part of the qualifying criteria.

5. Last Night On Earth

It’s a divisive one, certainly, but you can’t argue that Flying Frog’s approach to board game art with its actors, make-up and staged photo shoots isn’t unique. I’d also argue that for every other game in their line up it’s been a flop. The people in hairy rubber masks that masquerade as monsters inA Touch of Evil just look stupid - it’s pushing the envelope too far to expect to make a scary vampire on a board game production budget. But to make a good zombie you just need a bit of face paint and here’s where theLast Night On Earth artwork really shines: it makes the game look just like the zombie films it strives to emulate. It’s not an approach that’s either applicable of functional for most genres, but for zombies, it’s damn perfect. It helps a lot that the game also has a ton of excellent plastic sculpts including various poses of zombies and unique sculpts for all the heroes.

4. War of the Ring

So I dismissed the Collector’s Edition early on in this piece but let’s face it, the basic package was damn spectacular as it was. Which you prefer, the board and card art in both editions is striking and spectacular, and when you lay the quite ridiculous numbers of plastic figures on the top the whole effect is mind boggling. I don’t know any other game that quite gives the viewer such a sense of titanic forces clashing, let alone manage to do so in such a dynamic enthralling manner as this does, with so many different sculpts and character figures. And the icing on the cake is, of course, that this isn’t just generic fantasy: this is a god’s-eye view of all the action encapsulated in the epic and much beloved Lord of the Rings bought into life in full 3D in your very own living room.

3. Cadwallon: City of Thieves

Cadwallon never seemed to catch on as a popular title and no-one ever talks about it, which is a shame because it’s a decent game with plenty of narrative and re-playability thanks to the scenarios. And also because it looks like a million dollars, something that more people might realise if it got played more often. It might not have a ton of plastic miniatures in the box, and they might be low-grade, bendy plastic but I love the fact that every sculpt is different. I also love the big bag of stamped plastic coins in sparkly bronze, silver and gold: in games with money I delight in being able to grab fistfuls of it and let it run through my fingers, and these coins are just perfect for that. But the attention grabber in this game is the stunning, jaw dropping, high-quality and amazingly imaginative art. I realise most of it was stolen from an RPG that shares the setting of this game but the style is just so rich and vibrant that I’ll happily sit and flip through the rulebook and scenario boards just to immerse myself in the art, something that no other board game makes me want to do.

2. Claustrophobia

This is the game I was alluding to when I opened this list. It eats table space like a starving man would fall upon a bowl of pasta but my, don’t those oversized tiles look amazing in their chunky technicolour glory? The dark tunnels, glowing with the hellish light of the abyss and detailed with horrors such as holes into the underworld, writhing tendrils greedy for blood, flooded caverns and infernal mechanisms are hugely atmospheric. But the crowning glory here are the figures that grace them. They’re good sculpts for starters and made from good plastic that doesn’t warp and bend with use but it’s the fact they’re pre-painted that really make it. Pre-painted figures are pretty rare in board games anyway but in this quantity (17) and at this price point it’s unheard of. The card art is a bit rubbish but they’re face down most of the time. And if you’re anything like me you can barely tear your eyes away from the magnificent spectacle of the board to actually read the text of what you’re got in your hand in any case.

1. Napoleon’s Triumph

No plastic. No illustrations. Very little colour. And yet since the time I broke the shrink on this and started to lay out the components I’ve been in love with what came in the box. As a demonstration of the “less is more” maxim, it’s unrivalled. The art on the enormous board is minimalistic and functional and yet manages to be beautiful, recalling a military map in its subtle use of greys, greens and browns, occasionally interspersed with symbolism or gothic text. The long, low wooden pieces are nothing in themselves, but ranked together and topped with the metal flags used to denote a corps they seem strikingly martial. And, in demonstration of yet another maxim about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts the result looks exactly as you might expect a map of the situation laid out in the tent of a 19th century general officer to look. That precisely the effect the designer intended and it adds a magnificent dash of authenticity, authenticity you can actually reach out and touch and interact with to what’s an already deep and highly enjoyable game.

I’ve been coming to this website for many years now. I’ve decided that instead of constantly suckling off of the F: AT knowledge teat, like a gluttonous piglet, I’m going to give back.  What you don’t want my opinions and observations?  Well too bad because I’m going to give them anyways.  Hey you in front, hands down please; we will be doing a Q&A afterwards.

I’ve been waiting to play Conflict of Heroes for a long time. The idea of a relatively lightweight yet demanding World War 2 tactical game really got me excited and the only reason I didn’t dive in right away was because the historical background of the first game didn’t interest me much. I almost bought Storms of Steel but eventually passed on that because it looked like what I really wanted, a Normandy campaign iteration of the system, was coming up next. So until that time I was reliant on a friend getting a copy to try the game. Someone eventually came up trumps with Awakening the Bear and I sat down to get my fill of squad level Operation Barbarossa action.