Dana and I have been playing games I’ve described here as Eurogames, designer games, or hobby games. Some people refer to them as “these games of ours,” but I tend to favor the Eurogames tag. It’s a complicated reason—and complication is good—but I’ve felt my favoring if the term reviving after re-reading a post by Yehuda Berlinger arguing for considering game design forming periods in much the same way that art or literature can be grouped or separated into periods. Eurogame design favors non-confrontational interaction, a minimization of randomness, favors algorithms over theme, strives to engage all players on every turn, and keeps all players in the game until the end. There are exceptions to this list, of course, but the essentials are there.
Last night we sat down to Fairy Tale (yes, Kilroy_Locke with the photo), which we had considered and rejected the day before . Unlike many games of the Eurogame family, Fairy Tale comes from a
Japanese designer, Satoshi Nakamura. The game is a bit like Magic: The Gathering
lite, and all in one box. You start with a large deck of cards, and the players
draft them into their hands with a mechanism that has reached its maturity with
Dominion and Thunderstone. As you play cards down in each round, you develop
relationships among the cards that determine your score. Cards move quickly,
especially in a two-player game, and it becomes
clear early on what you’ll be
able to do. Dana and I played two hands in forty minutes. I won both times, but
the margin of victory shrunk from nine to four. Still, she didn’t care for the
game, so we talked about what turned her off.
Not the art, but the lack of developed and clear narrative. Games like Carcassonne and Ingenious leave a visual narrative of the play. Jambo had an ad hoc narrative of trade and community. Fairy Tale has a story, but it’s not well developed in the flavor text (the brief paragraph or two telling you how what you’re simulating), and the story’s hard to make up on your own as you’re passing and playing cards. Such a story can develop, but Dana (and I) spent so much time thinking about the math of the final relationships that the joy of narrative all but disappeared. (Remind us to talk about resource management and Dana's increasing interest in games that have that mechanism.)
So we’re left with two issues: narrative and abstraction. Both of these are too large to deal with so close to bedtime. But I want to point out that these are huge issues for how humans deal with the world, and it’s important to recognize that games deal with each explicitly. Games force us—as designers, as players, as scholars—to engage deeply with these issues. While a party game like Trivial Pursuit might skew heavily toward the ludus end and not really pick up the question of abstraction, the game clearly builds a narrative that we can revisit and share—a narrative developed during play and which we share during the gameplay experience.
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