Table-top games are booming in the video-game age | Hacker News Reader

Table-top games are booming in the video-game age

economist.com

55 pointsedward39 comments

I think the primary factors behind the growth of the tabletop industry are increased exposure, the drive for more in-person social interaction (as opposed to online videogames), and the introduction of a host of new complex mechanics that keep the games fun and interesting.

Tabletop games today are leagues ahead of Monopoly and many of the other games of old. Those classics have their place, but even with constant rebrandings (I personally own three varieties of Star Wars Monopoly) they're still just the same tired old mechanics with a fresh coat of paint. Nowadays we can play tabletop games that are cooperative, even story-driven, meaning there are no more sore losers and they're engaging enough to keep people coming back.

I disagree about it being socially driven. My crazy theory: They are fun and a lot more fun than the games of our youth. They also emotionally can be played for laughs, stressfully, be relaxing, or very exciting. They work and work well.

I think everyone should see if there is a board gaming group in your area and give it a try.

> the drive for more in-person social interaction (as opposed to online videogames)

I think this is where Nintendo's marketshare is coming from as well. Local multiplayer. Games like Mario Kart, Mario Maker, Smash Bros etc. are really great.

You can get a group of people (gamers and non gamers), some take out, and have a blast.

Board gaming can be a similar experience - with the added depth that comes with many of the more advanced games.

Yes board games are local multi player games of our youth like Golden Eye and the other games you listed. Didn't think of that.

One factor that I think has helped a lot is Kickstarter / crowdfunding, which helps mitigate the costs of a first production run.

Another factor is DRM in video games -- why spend 4x$60 on four licenses for a multiplayer video game and hundreds more on hardware, when you could just spend $50 on a board game and have it support four to six people?

Pathfinder in particular is booming because all of its game content is literally open source... inherited from the D&D 3.5 "Open Game License".

There are plenty of online databases and apps that get you the entire rulesets of Pathfinder. Paizo's official one is here: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/

You can literally play all of Pathfinder (including all of their optional rules) without spending a single dollar. But the books, adventure paths, and art is so lovely that the GMs and hardcore players are willing to buy them up anyway.

As someone who has been playing boardgames for 20+ years and computer games for even longer I can tell you that neither Kickstarter nor DRM are relevant factors here. In fact, both came much later than these trends started.

Broadly speaking, tabletop games are divided into what are called Euro games and Ameritrash [1]. Euro games have less player-conflict and (often but not always) less luck.

Euro games either originated in or were popularized in Germany and the beginning of that trend is really Settlers of Catan and (later) Carcasonne. Both of these games were and are big but for the more "serious" Euro games, the trend really took off with Puerto Rico, which came out in 2002. Since Puerto Rico there has been an absolute explosion of games.

In the 90s we might've had 10-20 games to choose from? Now, hundreds.

Every few years there tended to be a standout game which would propel the industry in some way, often evidenced by the many knockoffs. Agricola (2007), Race for the Galaxy (2007; although it was largely a rethemed San Juan (2004), which itself was inspired by Puerto Rico) which led to Dominion (2008+), Terra Mystica (2013), etc.

Kickstarter is really feeding off this success not the other way around.

As for DRM (including copy protection), this has been a thing most of the life of computer gaming. Now is really no different other than DRM of the last 10+ years has moved towards always-on Internet connections or, worse, turning single player games into games that can only save online (eg the SimCity V fiasco).

My experience with LAN gaming was it was one of two types of games: FPSs and RTSs.

FPSs honestly haven't changed all that much in years. Sure the graphics have gotten better and there have been minor improvements but honestly an FPS is an FPS.

We played LAN Warcraft 3 (eg tower defense maps). Personally I prefer turn-based strategy games, which are a dying breed (sadly).

But what drove those early LAN gaming sessions was I think two things:

1. Novelty; and

2. Internet connections.

There was a time when multiplayer gaming wasn't possible with the Internet connections of the day. Now it is. The result is less need to drag your computers to someone elses house.

Of course the effect of that is that you can then play with anyone not just your friends, which ironically seems to mean that you just don't do it anymore. Anyone older the school age seems to hate online gaming with strangers as you have to deal with cheaters and kids who have nothing better to do than play 8+ hours a day, which is fine, but it's not fun for the casual gamer.

See why tabletop games work is that tabletop gaming is a social exercise. You get together with friends and play. If you just played online, even with your friends, I don't believe it'd have anywhere near as much stickiness and definitely less adherents.

[1]: http://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Ameritrash

I would throw a 3rd major category in there: wargames https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/wargames.

As an avid player of both video games and board games, I'll say one thing: video games have really fallen afoul of the diminishing marginal utility of interesting decisions. A 2-hour game of Agricola, to me, has far more interesting decisions packed into it than 20 hours of Civilization V, despite having orders of magnitude fewer options per turn and turns per game.

>despite having orders of magnitude fewer options per turn and turns per game.

You say despite, but I think that's half the reason why the decisions are more interesting.

My wording was a bit ambiguous. You interpreted it to mean the decisions themselves are more interesting in Agricola. That is definitely true, but I also meant that there are more of them despite a much shorter play time and far fewer opportunities for them. One is a question of overall yield while the other is a question of efficiency; I believe Agricola wins on both counts.

I agree, but only because Civilization V is a train-wreck. Civilization IV is by far the superior video game. Even then, I would much rather play a game of Agricola with some friends than Civ.

I don't think it's about number of choices, but how impactful and interesting those choices are.

I can explain some of the reasons behind this in video games. Design is hard and in some cases impossible because you want the game to be everything to everyone regardless of their play style or level of competence. This is why you get so much optional content and every decision you make has trivial or superficial consequences. Imagine mario kart rubberband mechanic outside of racing games. If done well it gives you the feeling of agency and achievement whatever you do, if done poorly you feel like the game plays itself. I remember when my innocence was shattered when I was given the task to write code that would subtly "fix" user inputs to do the "correct" thing. Makes my laugh today but back then it felt wrong for that reason.

> I remember when my innocence was shattered when I was given the task to write code that would subtly "fix" user inputs to do the "correct" thing.

I had the same feeling when playing one of the newfangled Prince of Persia games a few years ago: the 3d environment gives you the impression that you'd be much freer. But there are not-so subtle rails that you move along when doing acrobatics.

The original 2d game had simple understandable mechanics, so you knew exactly what rails you were moving on. After a while you just ignored them and though `inside the box'.

The latter style helps much more with suspension of disbelieve.

Out of curiosity are you referring to vanilla Civ 5 or with Brave New World?

I only played with BNW expansion and from what I have heard it improve the game immensely.

I've played both and while the expansions do make the game better it's still nowhere close to as good as Agricola in the interesting decisions department. There's still way too many trivial things for you to manage and way too few situations where you have to stop and think for several minutes before proceeding.

That's why I still like the original Master of Orion: they really paired down the micro-management there.

The boardgame Eclipse compares somewhat. (Though Eclipse really wants to be a computer game.)

MOO2 is amazing BUT that game will never be remade. I loved the unbalanced Civs. We see this in Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis where the challenge level is based on who you start with. Most people HATE that and demand balanced games with equal opportunity to win with any civ. This is why all the other masters of orion games and clones have failed. The games are just not that interesting with a more complicated but still equally easy victories.

Can someone please port Masters of Orion 2 with a tweaked interface for tablets?!?!?!?

Free Orion (http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Main_Page) is a remake of (mostly) MoO2.

> This is why all the other masters of orion games and clones have failed.

You are aware that I was praising MoO for simplicity and railing against MoO2 as being too complicated already?

MoO2 was too complicated with everything but the kitchen sink. Moo kept it simpler. (The civilizations are just as unbalanced in MoO as in MoO 2.)

> The games are just not that interesting with a more complicated but still equally easy victories.

Up the difficulty lever they give you at the beginning of most games.

Given the general hackerish-nature of Go, it's perhaps not too much of a stretch to share with you my game Chakra, which is a variant of Go played on intersecting rings with a movement rule

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chakraboardgame/chakra-...

We're working on an online playable version, which I'll share with HN once we have the kinks ironed out. It's a good hacker game, the core player group has barely scratched the surface of understanding the strategy involved in a good game. Decent AI target as well... sometimes I think about multi-dimensional versions of the game, which would be only of interest to AI, but perhaps the kind of thing they'd appreciate.

Recently finding myself hating staring at screens more and more, I've dove pretty deep into the world of board games and its incredible. It reminds me a lot of the earlier days of the web — the group is still small enough to be niche, and there isn't competition so much as there's a general willingness for everyone to succeed together.

People create new ideas and then other games will iterate and improve the mechanics until you end up with some I pretty genius stuff. And if you try to create your own games (which I am), then you'll find another sub-niche of people that are even more awesome. Nearly everyone is friendly and really happy to set aside generous amounts of time aside from their undoubtedly busy schedules (because there are very few full-time game designers out there) to help you out.

It's the same feeling I used to get from Internet stuff.

As for the games themselves, they've come a long way from the days of Monopoly and Sorry, and they're not all games about slaying dragons or waging war. Check out games like Scoville, where you're a pepper farmer growing new peppers to aid chili recipes, or Camel Up, a game of racing and betting on a wacky camel race, or Tokaido, where you're traveling on the road between Kyoto and Tokyo trying to have the best experience along the way. Anything might make good game fodder, and people aren't scared to try it all.

Board games are so fun and low tech. It's a great way to get away from staring into a screen and to actually find a way to be social while keeping people of their phones for entire hours at a time.

One reason why table-top games are booming amongst my friends circle is that a lot of us aren't into drinking, yet we still want to socialize with an activity anyone can jump into.

Tabletop games fill the niche left by typical LAN party / split-screen games as more and more of them move to only allowing internet connected matchmaking rather than some local network equipment / friends that won't look on your half of the TV.

I for one used to be a fairly avid computer and tabletop gamer, but dropped them for more active hobbies. If I ever did go back to gaming, it would be tabletop, hands down. While LAN parties were fun, the constant hardware upgrade cycle, grind (WoW comes to mind), misogyny, and just general belligerence of multiplayer online doesn't hold a candle to an all-nighter of classic Civilization (and, no, I'm not talking about Sid Meier's).

> ...the constant hardware upgrade cycle...

Console-first development -for all the violence it has done to game design- has been a godsend in this department. I'm getting a huge amount of mileage out of my ~6-year-old gaming PC.

I know that you said that you're not going back to PC gaming, but I just have to recommend a few indie PC games that I've had a lot of fun playing with friends.

If you're ever looking for things to play with friends on the same screen, I can personally recommend Nidhogg, [0] TowerFall Ascension, [1] Monaco, [2] and the somewhat-recent Spelunky HD remake. [3] Also, the Let's Play folks [5] seem to play a new same- or split-screen co-op game once every other week or two.

[0] (A two-player, tightly-designed, reasonably deep, fast-paced side-scrolling sword fighting game) http://www.nidhogggame.com/

[1] (A one-to-four-player single-screen acrobatic archery combat game. This one's a little hard to describe, but the 50% of the video on the Steam page that's actual gameplay gives you an okay idea of how it plays.) http://store.steampowered.com/app/251470/

[2] (A one-to-four-player single-screen strategy heist game with static levels, but semi-random enemy and resource placement) http://www.monacoismine.com/

[3] (A 2D-scrolling randomly-generated-dungeon exploration and exploitation game, that has a rather finely-tuned risk/reward mechanism, and a really high skill cap. [4] However, it's totally not required to get "good" at the game. Derping around with friends is rather chaotic and tons of fun.) http://www.spelunkyworld.com/whatis.html (Sadly, that page is not so useful for getting a sense of the game. The 2008 version of the game is freely available [and linked on that page], so you can play a single-player-only, less polished version of the HD remake.)

[4] That is to say, there are a bunch of systems in the game that can interact in many different ways. You have a much easier time with the game if you are able to figure out many of these interactions, but doing so is strictly optional. The game is hard, but always fair, and gets you back in the game quickly after you -inevitably- fail.

[5] https://www.youtube.com/user/LetsPlay/videos

If you want to play the original GameMaker Spelunky, I suggest you apply the latest community community patch.

The real issue is that Hasbro and Mattel used to have a complete lock on board game sales in major stores.

The first wave of new board games (eg Settlers of Catan) came out of Germany and were sold in the US by specialty stores. That is hobby shops & comic book stores.

Even if you could self fund a production run, there was just no way to get your product on a significant number of US store shelves.

It will be interesting to see whether the alrger iPad pro finds use as a game board; it loks like it's large enough for two people to comfortably play many traditional games, like Connect 4 or suchlike. This seemed like one of the most interesting possibilities for the ill-fated Microsoft Surface Table, but past attempts were just too large.

Augmented reality will merge board games with electronic.

It's already happening. Some games come with companion apps that replace a game master.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf is an example. But there are more intricate ones.

There are already plenty of board games ports to iOS .

http://ipadboardgames.org

I'm looking for a game that displays common state on the tablet in the middle of the table, and let's everyone muck around with their private state on their mobile phone.

Eclipse on the iPad is fun in local hand-the-iPad-around mode. But since you can't see the board while other people are mucking around, you can't plan ahead easily during the downtime.

(I guess I'll have to write that one myself.)

The Scrabble app for iPad used to do that. There was a separate 'Tile Rack' app for iPhone. The iPad app for Scrabble was paid ($9.99 IIRC), but only one player had to buy it. The companion tile rack app was free. For some reason, EA seems to have removed that functionality:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/838860/scrabble-tile-rack-a...

https://twitter.com/askeasupport/status/237941190538977280

For some insights on what designing an engaging table-top experience is like read Ignacy Trzewiczek blog: https://boardgamesthattellstories.wordpress.com/ Phil Eklund's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/phil.eklund or Bruno Faidutti's blog http://faidutti.com/blog/

If people are up for a tabletop game through Vassal or Tabletop Simulator or just talking about board games, e-mail me and we could arrange something through skype/hangout/mumble. I'm in CET. The games I like are listed on my boardgamegeek profile. https://boardgamegeek.com/user/fsiefken For example: The New Era, Greenland, Polis, Puerto Rico, Carson City, Terra Mystica, Dvonn or Arimaa. If you like the idea of table top gaming I can also recommend to get together a regular gaming group of friends or board gamers in your area. Perhaps on a city level something is setup already, ask in tabletop game shops, check meetup.com or facebook groups. I'm lucky to live in a city with 5 gameshops and 3 regular city level board game events.

I think it's because baordgames are happy to cater to smaller niches - they don't need big runs to break even. The number and veriety of new board games boggle the mind. And they're more sociable.

In Toronto, we have a series of massively successful tabletop game cafés - which is a perfect, non-offensive place to go on a date, heh.

Got tablet, laptop, desktop, mobile phone. Still prefer paper books and print outs for long form reading.

We are not living in the video-game age. We are living in the nerd age. And it's awesome!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com