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So I am an avid videogamer, retrogamer specifically, but I was first and will always be a boardgamer. I started playing boardgames with my family at a very young age. My grandfather taught me how to play cards like he learned in the Navy during WWII and one of my uncles had several titles in the Avalon Hill Bookcase line, including Acquire (think Monopoly for grownups), Civilization, and Kingmaker. Many days of my childhood were spent slugging through dungeons, building empires, and trying to apply glass cannon tactics to the Patton's Third Army. This is not to say that I did not play videogames, I did grow up in the 80s, but boardgaming is a hobby of mine that is simply cathartic.
Some gamers prefer to play Catan on their 360, others prefer to actually roll the dice. I dont know how to explain it, something about the smell of the paper, seeing your opponents, and actually rolling the dice, makes boardgaming impossible to replicate in a videogame for me. Luckily in highschool I met some people who thought the same way and they introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons. Now a whole subset of RPGs kinda took off in my life. In college this led me to meet other gamers who played a lot of boardgames and RPGs but some never videogames, and this kinda irked me.
Now I am fairly openminded when it comes to hobbies and collections. I mean I have friends who spin their own yarn, blow glass, and some who are trapeze artists. But I have never met a more stubborn group of people than gamers. Some gamers will not branch out from their path at all. I have dealt with a lot of RPGers who call all videogames kiddy or simple games and I have dealt with videogamers who say worse things about RPGers. Well since I sit in the middle of all of these, like I am sure some of yall reading this do, and since I can never keep my mouth shut, I started to do something about it.
I first started with RPGs and couldnt find footing. So I asked a friend of mine for help. That friend was Gary Gygax and when I asked him about it and a truncated form of his response was:
The CRPG captures vividly most of the essential features of the true RPGexploration, problem solving, combat, acquisition. What is missing is the inter-personal role-playing and the vast range of possibilities provided by the game master.
Furthermore he suggested that when I brought up CRPGs (Computer RPGs) with RPGers I should present them as interactive movies instead of RPG games. He also said it probably wouldnt work, which ofcourse he was right. As I was asked to leave one of the groups I was gaming with after trying to bring it up.
So I decided to shelve the idea. Years later one of my friends asked if I knew any games like Final Fantasy Tactics. I named off a handful I knew off the top of my head that he could get at a Gamestop at the time: Tactics Ogre Knights of Lodis, Zone of the Enders Fist of Mars, Front Mission 3, and Xcom (Since I knew he had a GBA and a PSX). He surprised me and said that he loved Ogrebattle on the PSX and did not know that there was a sequel. As I was talking to him I had the idea come back into my head. I asked him when was the last time he played a boardgame. He responded with boardgames are for children. I asked him if he would humor me and try playing a few. He was hesitant so I bucked the tiger and made a deal with him. I said that if he would humor me and try two boardgames and if he did not like either I would give him a copy of Tactics Ogre on the GBA (I had two copies from when we use to battle a lot in it at work). He said fine and he was going to come over that Saturday.
I had one chance to make this work and decided on the two games to try based on that conversation we had. Since he liked Ogre Battle I decided on the most Ogre Battle like game I had Titan. And since he liked SRPGs we went with the simplest SRPG like game Heroscape. I know what some of yall are thinking right now: Heroscape that sounds familiar well it should, it is in every big box store you go to. From Frys to Walmart, and has been seen at some Riteaids. Bear with me and youll see where I am going with this.
So Saturday came around and several of my friends came over to play boardgames. There were four of us total so we started with Heroscape.
Heroscape is a very simple miniatures wargame created by Hasbro in 2004. It was targeted at the 8-16 ages and the rules reflect that. The game comes with two rulesets, simple and advance, and a whole mess of options. This is important since you can play the game with most anyone and have a pretty fulfilling experience. The game itself takes characters from all over history and fantasy and drops them into battlefields fighting for dominance for their avatar (the Viking in Valhalla who brought them to the battlefield). So your team might have part of a Roman legion, an Elf, and a team of Robots and that is normal. But there are two very big draws to Heroscape:
1. Customizable hexagon terrain
2. Pre painted miniatures
So every time you play the game should be different.
Gameplay utilizes a fairly simple IGOUGO (I go You go) mechanic. You have a card that represents each type of figure you have on the battlefield. So your Elf has an Elf card, your Legionnaires a Legionaries card, etc. And you are given four little shields that have the numbers 1,2,3 and an X. You put the shields down on your units cards to signify what round you want to move them, the X is obviously a decoy. Whoevers turn it is moves and then the person to their right, etcetera until the all three rounds are complete and the turn is over.
Combat is achieved by rolling fistfuls of specialized dice. Each unit has an attack number which equates to how many dice you roll. Each die has Skulls, Shields, and blank spaces. When you are attacking all that matters is skulls, defending needs shields. If the attacker rolls more skulls than the defender rolls shields, the unit hit looses wounds. Once the wounds are gone the character dies. There are special abilities, combinations, and a variety of other elements that make the game more complicated, but we do not need to go into those here.
Very simple to learn, very elegant in execution, and almost infinitely customizable. The game has had numerous expansions, some of which go for lots of money, and still draws large crowds at conventions and tournaments.
I cannot tell you too much about the game we played, I do remember using one of my ghosts to take over one of the other guys Orc riding a Tyrannosaurs and then ran him back into his own men, but other than that I dont remember that much. I do know that despite my ghosts being on point, I ended up losing the match. The newbie enjoyed himself but thought it did not have enough meat for him to really buy into it, or care to play it again. So that is when we switched gears to the behemoth.
Titan is, for lack of a better word, a pain of a boardgame. It is complicated, takes a long time to play, expensive (fixed with the rerelease but at the time of this playing a copy went for $200+), and is confusing. The first time I played it I read through the rulebook a dozen times and played with people who had played before and still had no real idea of what I was doing. But lets see if I can explain it anyway.
The goal of Titan is to defeat the enemies Titans. To do this you send your armies around the map recruiting other units, upgrading said units, and trying to avoid your enemies. When your stack of units runs into another stack, they are revealed and ushered to a battle board on the sidetable to duke it out. These battle boards are small hexagon boards with terrain on them based on what square the battle commenced on the main board. In battle you move your units, they move theirs, and you roll D6s based on your units statistics. Your Titans can upgrade and if you play your cards right you might be rolling a whole fistful of dice by endgame (the Serpent unit rolls 18 when it attacks).
Now Ill be honest, despite playing the game on and off for fifteen years, I am no where near as versed in the rules of Titan as I should be Blame Advance Squad Leader and TFC. But that has little to do with the event, more to do with the writeup. We did play with one house rule: Game is played until one person is eliminated. Then you figure out who won via various scoring methods. This way the game does not end up taking up all day the average game of normal titan can last upwards of eight hours.
Our newbie was the one who lost, by pure chance to he ran his Titans army into another players just by bad luck and he happened to have a dragon and his Titan in it. However this was after several battles and about three hours. His verdict was that it was some of the most fun he has ever had and wanted to buy a copy.
So in six hours I had taken a diehard videogamer and made him interested in boardgames. And since that time his collection has grown to dwarf my own. Slowly I will corrupt all of my friends to other types of games. As seen in this next story.
With the accomplishment of the first friend I was riding high and thought I could do it again (or that is the story I am going to tell you. In reality it was about a year later). So I called up a buddy of mine from middle school who I use to try and play Magic Realm with (a very complicated fantasy boardgame). I called him because I knew he lived in town, and that he hated videogames. I knew this was going to be a challenge but figured it was worth a shot. So we got together with some others to play Twilight Imperium (a 4x boardgame think if Masters of Orion was a boardgame). About halfway through the game, the board was destroyed by a cat when we were taking a break so we all just gave up. After we packed it up were sitting around talking, so I made my move. I had one of my laptops in the car and they had one of the Gateway 2000 32inch CRT monitors as their tv. So I hooked up the laptop and fired up Civilization 2.
We started playing it as a lark and my mark was not enthused so he stood, grabbed his book, and started to leave the room. I called him out and asked him to atleast stay and talk. He reluctantly agreed. We had played for about an hour just taking out barbarians and the Americans and then I heard a suggestion that I never thought I would. My mark had grabbed the manual and tech tree out of my bag told us exactly what to research because it would be the fastest way to dominate the seas, therefore giving us the world. He had worked it out on a piece of paper and just handed it to me. I was just dumbstruck. Here was the guy who had told me that I was a child for playing videogames, with a breakdown of the weapons in Civilization 2.
Turns out, later that night he went and bought a copy of Civ2 for himself. Last I talked to him he had just bought a copy of Alpha Centauri and was about to move to the other side of the country. I havent talked to him since, but I know I made a videogamer out of him.
What was the point of all this? Well if you have a friend who is a gamer of some kind, but is stubborn, just try finding a game that fits. In these examples, both gamers were of above average intelligence and it was easy to convince them to play a complicated game of the other type, this gets shakier with other types of gamers. You should also try to not be pushy. Take your time, plan the best time to try, and give it a good shot. If it works, it works, if not dont worry too much about it. There are always other potential gamers out there. But I know how painful it can be to have three friends to play a game with when you really need four. Patience is key, as always.
Next time lets talk about something lighter. Like custom arcade sticks, why I own five Gamecubes, or point and click adventures.
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This is fastbilly1's Blog.
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The sometimes unedited, often confusing, ramblings about random topics revolving around videogames. With a heavy focus on retrogaming and exotic projects.
From the mind of the promotion coordinator for Retrogaming with Racketboy and Momocon On Tour. |
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