I was in San Francisco last week to see a presentation of the latest version of the City Building Series That Just Won’t Quit. You can read about my time with Blue Byte’s Settlers 7 over at Gameshark.

Over dinner and drinks the night before the preview, Bruce Shelley and Benedikt Grindel talked about boardgames. Both of them are big boardgamers (Shelley, of course, is a veteran of Avalon Hill) and were excited about the integration of boardgame mechanics into their new RTS.

Here’s one that didn’t make it into the preview, for example. You can research technologies to improve your military or economic power, but each technology can only be held by a single player on a map. If your enemy researches faster troops, you can’t get that bonus. But, once they start researching it, you have a countdown timer to outbid them – you off to pay more to gain that tech for yourself. Eventually the cost will reach a point where it makes no sense to keep outbidding your enemies, so the auction will stop and someone will win the tech. Since some of the techs come with victory points attached, and the possession of victory points determines the winner, you can see how this mechanic could make things very interesting.

I think there was a little bit of willful blindness going on, of course. Though a lot of my friends play boardgames, it would be a stretch to say that love of boardgame mechanics is likely to bring them back to a series that many people are surprised is still continuing.

What could make Settlers 7 relevant to American gamers is the slower pace, but that presents a marketing problem. When Bruce Shelley says that there has to be room in the market for more than one type of RTS play, he’s almost certainly right. Settlers, like the Anno games, is more city builder than RTS and is more about how well you plan your economy. But there is some military stuff going on, too, so you need to be ready for it. Armies are essential, but not dominant. Dawn of Discovery and Settlers 7 are for those gamers who like the turtling part of RTSes, the resource gathering and city building and watching the people move around.

But how do you reach them? Especially in an American gaming media that has little patience for games that require patience? City builders, and even the most frantic RTSes, make for terrible game trailers once you get beyond opening cinematics. All the pounding music in the world won’t make building a fifth storehouse the must see movie of the year.

So the people who would appreciate a slower and more elaborate game will find it very hard to learn about it since those videos and developer diaries and previews will not get Dugg (Digged?), if they read the games media at all.

When I started this blog (as Portico back in the Blogger days), strategy gaming was in better shape. In many ways, so was the gaming media since it too moved at a slower pace. The 24 hour gaming news cycle has become good for business and has led to more people writing about games, but it also means that there is a lot greater churn and a lot less emphasis on elegance and efficiency, because loud or cute are better for traffic. Part of this is the old man in me talking – and I do like loud and cute sometimes.

Settlers 7 is cute but it’s Hummel Figurine cute, not wacky Japanese cute. How does a game like this, still very relevant in Central Europe, reach a new audience? I hope that Ubisoft finds a way. I doubt trumpeting the board game elements will be the key.