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2011 on the Blog

December 31st, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Blogs, Me

It has seemed liked every year for the last three has been a transitional year for some reason, and the blog always suffers a little. This year, with a change in city and profession, was more transitional than anticipated, so I played fewer games freshly, and was constrained in what I could really say about a lot of them.

But some writing still got done in spite of that. Here are my favorite pieces from the blog in the last year.

1) The National Character series saw the bulk of its entries completed in 2011 and proved to be a bigger traffic success than I anticipated. Not that I write for the world (I write for myself and for you loyal regular readers), but it was satisfying to see this kind of criticism appreciated by the wider gaming community. I like the Aztec, English, Russian and Zulu entries best.

2)In September, I wrote a post on Collaborative Criticism with even a smaller audience than usual in mind. I want to see more of this kind of writing and regret that the collaborative column I was planning in 2010 never really got off the ground. But that was a post written straight from the heart, with a little bit of regret and a bit of a call to people who can and should do this.

3) In July, I outlined my theories on the place of puzzles in strategy games.

4)That month also saw me unleash hell on the idea of strategy games not being “contemporary”. Well, my own modest Canadian diplomatic version of hell.

5) I wrote about my efforts learning a new genre – racing games. And, six months later, was rewarded with a used driving wheel for my PC for Christmas. <3 6) I took some shots at Republic of Rome‘s layout and promised Tom Chick a post I haven’t written yet.

7) Turning points in strategy games are one of my big things when I talk about player authored narrative in this genre.

And, even better for me this year, Bruce Geryk wrote a few things for the blog. Besides his Holiday Guest Blog, Bruce wrote about PQ-17, which we will start playing soon. Dr. Geryk is kind of funny because he always sends me 2000 words and then asks if I have any place for them on the blog. Bruce has author access, and as far as I’m concerned, he can write whatever he wants about games whenever he wants to on FoS – at least until he finds a home worthy of him.

I’ll do the annual traffic report tomorrow, but for now I’d like to thank all of you for reading and emailing and commenting. (I promise that FlashofSteelTV is going to happen – before February.) Your questions and support have meant a great deal to me, as has your continued support of the podcast under Rob Zacny’s able control. And you disagree with me and my guest bloggers in a civil manner. If we’re a niche, we’re a well behaved one.

A special thanks to those friends who made sure I did not completely crumble under the pressure this year – new job, new city, new start and overwhelmed by a lot of it. You all had your own stuff going on, some of it very serious. But we circled the wagons and made it out alive as a group. And the blog still lives because some of you (and one persistently) kept pushing me to write something because you knew it mattered.

Happy New Year.

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Holiday Guest Blog 4: Rob Daviau “Elements of Risk”

December 30th, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Board Games, Guest Blog

Rob Daviau has been a friend of the podcast for a while, and a friend of Julian Murdoch even longer. He works for Hasbro and his appearance on Episode 144 to talk about his design of Risk: Legacy was one of the more popular shows of 2011. Risk gets a lot of flak on the podcast, so Rob wanted to explore what we meant by “strategy game” when applied to parlor favorites.

Sometime in the past few years I realized that I’ve designed, or co-designed, more Risk games than anyone else. Some right now might be feeling bad for me. Risk seems to be a flashpoint for people. I can tell you that everyone has an opinion on it. But the question remains, have I actually designed a strategy game?

I have no idea.

Instinctively, I say “yes”. A better Risk player will beat a less experienced one most of the time. But there’s a lot of luck in the system. Well, a lot of luck in one key part of the system. I once read that Risk is less a game and more of a psychology experiment of how people react to finding themselves in the thin end of the bell curve. Which is true in many ways. But how many wars or battles have been won not by strategy or planning but dumb-ass luck? More than a few. So luck alone does not make something a strategy game or not.

I think, in games, we like to think of strategy and luck as being some sort of continuum, a zero-sum game where you must trade one for the other. This probably isn’t the case. A better linear system would be to create a line that runs from luck to control. At one end is an entirely chaotic system with no control. The other is a perfectly controlled system with no luck. As long as you have some control, you can develop a strategy.

This means I’m taking the word strategy and using it define “how you approach a game to win it”. Not “how much control do you have in the game”. I have complete control in a game of Go. I have no strategy for it. Control is what the game gives you. Strategy is what you do with that control. I have a strategy for the 100% luck-free game of tic-tac-toe. No one is calling that a strategy game, despite the fact that has as much control as chess. It’s just that the strategies to victory, or to avoid defeat, or easily grasped and applied.

So is a strategy game one that gives you multiple paths to victory? One that has difficult nuances to master? A game that makes you change tactics mid-game to keep your strategy relevant? Tie-tac-toe isn’t a strategy game where chess is. Scrabble is probably a strategy game. In fact, it might not be a word game in some ways. The World Champion a few years back didn’t speak English and had no idea what any of the words meant that he played. He was memorizing patterns and using these patterns to conquer territory.

But what of Risk. Risk…might be a strategy game? It is more than tic-tac-toe despite having a lot less control. Is it more than checkers, another perfect control game? Where does Monopoly, the great gamer scapegoat, fit? There are probably two or three different strategies to victory in Monopoly. I can run the table in Monopoly 95% of the time against non-gamers so there is something I’m doing that they aren’t. But against gamers, I’d like to think it would be more competitive. I say “like to think” because gamers refuse to play Monopoly. But having a lack of control of where you land and where opponents land adds chaos. Too much chaos for many. But Monopoly’s biggest sin to gamers is its popularity, not its design.

But when it comes down to it, in my mind, Risk is a strategy game. At least, you can apply different strategies to it. In most parts of the game, there is a lot of control. The only luck is the resolution of battles. But that’s the heart of the game so control is taken away from players at a key point. Drives many people crazy. What’s interesting is that Scrabble probably has a similar amount of control. The tiles you draw play a huge part in your final score. The control is how you use them. But I’ve never seen Scrabble derided as a luckfest. I think that moving army men on a map wants people to feel like they are in control. And more control is something that many (most?) other wargames give them.

So what is the ‘strategy’ to Risk? “Roll high” is the throwaway answer. Other obvious ones are to start in the southern hemisphere, plus the usual tropes of this genre – balancing offense and defense, a nod to supply lines, achieving smaller goals (continent bonuses) in order to get bigger goals (winning). But these are easily learned by teens (side point: the game is designed for middle-schooler, teens, and father-son play). But that’s probably not the real strategy. Just like poker is not a card game but a people game played with cards, Risk, in person, is a people game played with dice and little army men. The real strategy to Risk is to be in second place but convince everyone you are in third place.

Until you bust loose and win.

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Three Moves Ahead Episode 149: On the Care and Feeding of BattleMechs

December 29th, 2011 by Rob Zacny · Podcast, Three Moves Ahead

ThreeMovesAhead

Rob hosts a conversation with Catalyst Game Labs’ Randall Bills and Piranha Games’ Russ Bullock and Bryan Ekman. Such a group can only mean one thing: BattleTech discussion. Does the BattleTech board game hold up after all these years? Do the various BattleTech and MechWarrior games and books create difficult expectations for what a mech game “should” be? What are the benefits of having a gameworld with so much history, and how do BattleTech-related games tap into it? How do the board games influence the upcoming MechWarrior Online?

BattleTech Introductory Box Set

World of Tanks

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Three Moves Ahead Episode 148 – Unity of Command

December 22nd, 2011 by Rob Zacny · Podcast, Three Moves Ahead

ThreeMovesAhead

Rob and Troy talk about 2×2’s new entry-level wargame, Unity of Command, and why it is such a huge success. How does it stack up against Panzer Corps, and why is it more a wargame than a puzzle game? Why is its treatment of supply so important? Can you make a really challenging wargame without implying puzzle-like solutions?

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Subscribe on iTunes.

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Holiday Guest Blog 3: Michael Barnes “Strategy Games on Tap”

December 22nd, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Guest Blog

Michael Barnes is one of the quintet at No High Scores, a gaming blog run by my friends and former colleagues at Gameshark. Barnes is the site’s board game authority and his Cracked LCD column is something I regularly read if Bill Abner can’t answer my question immediately over Google Talk. But Barnes is also an iPhone game aficionado, and that’s what he wanted to write about for Flash of Steel.

When I reviewed the tabletop card game, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer for my column at Gameshark.com, I thought it was a pretty good but not particularly noteworthy entry into the deckbuilding genre. For those not tuned into what’s been going on in the board and card gaming scene, deckbuilders basically task the player with drafting cards from a mutual supply to create custom decks to generate resources, victory points, or accomplish other in-game goals. A couple of months later, Ascension turned up on the App Store and it turned out to be a perfect platform for the game, with quick play and a simple interface backed up with great multiplayer options and challenging AI. There’s been a lot of IOS implementations of strategy board and card games over the past couple of years, but it was in 2011 that I began to realize that these digital editions of print games could actually be better than their physical counterparts.

Ascension is one of my favorite IOS strategy titles of the year, and it was really the first time where I felt a digital version was actually preferable to a physical copy of a game. But this was also a year that saw the release of handheld versions of Reiner Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates, the excellent co-op game Ghost Stories, Fantasy Flight’s Elder Sign dice game, and an iPad-only edition of Mac Gerdts’ economic wargame Imperial. Throughout 2011, the viability of touchscreen mobile devices as a platform for strategy board games was all but cemented.

But those are just effectively “ports”. Mobile devices also sallied forth with original games like the out-of-nowhere Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion, a turn-based wargame that takes cues not just from video game strategy titles like Fire Emblem, but also tabletop miniatures games. And then there’s The Great Little Wargame, an ersatz Advance Wars. Kairosoft’s popular management games such as Game Dev Story and the brilliant tower defense in reverse design Anomaly: Warzone Earth ensured that armchair tacticians and managers alike had plenty of fun in their pockets all year. You can even play a classic 4x title like Ascendancy or an otherwise long-lost RTS such as Z on the bus now.

Strategy gaming certainly didn’t just suddenly happen to iOS and Android in 2011 and any strategy gamer that’s had one of these devices has certainly enjoyed everything from Uniwar to the pocket-sized version of Civilization: Revolution. But increasingly, I’m finding that mobile is actually my preferred platform for strategy video gaming, and in 2011 I did more gaming in this genre that I did in previous years specifically because I’ve got these games with me at all times, and most with great interfaces and smart implementations. Turn-based games in particular suit the platform well, with their metered pace and the fact that you can play them rather passively, checking in and logging a few turns before getting on with work or whatever.

2011 was also the first year that I really started heralding this kind of strategy gaming as the future, particular in terms of tabletop games. As much as I love board gaming and cherish the sorts of face-to-face interaction that you can only get with dice, cards, and cardboard chits, digital board games simply offer a level of convenience that can’t be beat. I’ve been able to play Tigris & Euphrates more in the past two months than I have in the past ten years. I’ve logged well over a hundred games of Ascension, which would represent who knows how many man-hours of getting people together to play around a table.

What I’d like to see in 2012 is for more ambition from the folks designing iOS and Android strategy games. It’s such an ideal platform for the genre with relatively low risk, especially for classic ports. Bring on the ports of classic PC strategy titles like Panzer General, Alpha Centauri, Master of Magic, and Syndicate. Who wouldn’t thrill to have X-Com with them at their beck and call for a quick encounter during a lunch break? The touchscreen interface, if used wisely, can make these games more accessible and could even introduce new audiences to strategy gaming.

As for board games, there are already a host of great titles queued up at the App Store gates. There’s Summoner Wars, a terrific card-based tactical wargame. Alderac Entertainment Group is bringing both of its flagship deckbuilders, Nightfall and Thunderstone, to iOS almost certainly with plenty of IAP expansions available. Fantasy Flight has tested the waters with Elder Sign, and it’s likely we’ll see more from them in the near future. Wargame publishing houses like GMT, Multiman Press, and Victory Point Games have hired iOS and Android programmers. And there’s that long-awaited Dominion app in the works.

In sum then, 2011 was a year of momentum for mobile strategy gaming. With most hardcore strategy games still residing mostly on the PC platform, mobile devices represent an opportunity for strategy games to both reach more players while also providing long-term veterans with new ways to play favorite games or games inspired by their favorite games. For busy gamers who don’t have the time for those all-night wildcat Civilization sessions anymore or who might have trouble rounding up a crew for the latest board game, the possibility of playing a rich, deep, and complex game at leisure is imminently appealing.

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Holiday Guest Blog 2: Jon Shafer “The Middle Market”

December 20th, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Guest Blog, Industry

Stardock’s Jon Shafer is one of those developers who thinks very hard about everything except joining our Out of the Park Baseball League, which he did as a “Why not?” more than anything else, it seems. Best known as the designer of AAA title Civilization 5, Jon wanted to use this space to again push forward his argument that the middle market for strategy gaming is alive and well.

Anyone that’s read any of my recent interviews or attended the strategy gaming panel at the most recent Game Developer’s Conference knows that I’m a big champion of “middle market” games – those that lack the AAA budget of tens of millions of dollars, but still aim to provide a “full” gaming experience. Although offerings of this sort have become rare in recent years, they appear to be primed for a resurgence. This is great news, as studios focused on the middle market put out amazing games unlike those offered by either the big publishers or the one-man indie shops.

Paradox and Stardock are two good examples of companies in the strategy genre that are built around this market. It’s no coincidence that games like Galactic Civilizations, Europa Universalis, Sins of a Solar Empire and Magicka all share two specific qualities: they have immense depth and replayability, but didn’t spend big piles of money on flashy graphics. These kinds of games are the bread and butter of the middle market, and anyone who’s enjoyed these titles or those like them has good reason to keep a close eye on this corner of the business.

Sales numbers on even the most successful middle market titles won’t ever reach levels that impress Wall Street, and as a result large companies that produce AAA games are nearly absent from this space, regardless of genre. At the other extreme end of the industry are the indie studios with only one or two developers that typically – but not always – produce fairly simple games. There are a few small indies that produce deep and engrossing games that keep people playing for months or years, but this is rare because of the massive amount of work required to make a complex game any good. There’s only so many Minecrafts and Solium Infernums in the world, and that’s a big part of what makes them so special. Without the middle market, very rare would be the strategy game which provides that deep experience so many players love.

Strangely enough, the middle market’s biggest enemy has historically been – of all things – its own past success. If you look back at where the industry was 15 years ago, you’ll find that nearly every game would fit today’s rough definition of a middle market title: solid gameplay as the #1 priority and small budgets (under a few million dollars). However, this place in the industry is inherently unstable. The survival of most independent studios is entirely based on the success of their next upcoming game – if the title underperforms it’s the end of the road.

Even when a studio has a breakout hit that sells gangbusters its situation changes dramatically. To escape the fate of eternally living paycheck-to-paycheck, companies naturally turn to sequels. By their very existence, these successors must bring something new to the table. With more features comes an increased budget and raised expectations from everyone involved, from the investors providing the capital all the way down to the artists painting icons. When this attitude becomes pervasive there are only two “natural” end-states for a game studio: extinction, or complete dependency on the blockbuster.

If looking at the games industry through the lens of business or growth, time spent producing middle market games might simply be considered an evolutionary step towards bigger and better things. Based on what today’s industry looks like, this certainly seems to have been the viewpoint held by those with the decision-making power. Very rare is the studio that has remained in the middle market for more than a game or two.

Despite the scarcity of companies which have built themselves around the middle market, the money there certainly hasn’t disappeared. Those willing to stick around will find not only the increasingly rare freedom to develop a variety of games, but also a nice profit along the way. Stardock and Paradox have found a great deal success with this model, and rather than “upgrading” to AAA development like most studios they instead diversified and began publishing other middle market titles – to even greater success. Both companies are now larger and more relevant than ever, and owe it to their willingness to embrace what they do best and not follow the path that has swallowed up so many others.

Today, the biggest challenge for the middle market is finding new studios willing and able to join the club. There’s no clear path for the big corporations to return to this space, so the most likely means for this community to grow and flourish is for solo indie developers to meet with success, then make that scary leap to hire a few more people. Fortunately, the emergence of a few new strategy publishers coupled with the amazing opportunity provided by digital distribution has resulted in a new generation of middle market companies.

The fairly slow but steady growth rate of this little corner of the industry isn’t going to turn many heads, but it’s clear that it will have an ever-increasing role to play in the future of the business. As has been true for PC gaming as a whole, the so-called “death” of the middle market is very much a myth, and that’s great news for everyone – it’s a huge part of today’s strategy game scene and the best is yet to come!

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