Comments on: Interactivity in Board Games

By: William

William — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 15:08:06 +0000

To be fair, Settlers and Uno are both lousy games :p

Have you tried any simultaneous play games like Roads and Boats?
William´s last [type] ..The Admiral is a Cylon!

By: scrusi

scrusi — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:21:51 +0000

@Belthil: Well I’ve only played the WoW board game twice, but each time I could just twiddle my thumbs while the other team figured out its turn.

@Tesh: We actually tend to play something similar with Uno. In fact I believe the Uno games I was thinking about when writing the post weren’t exactly played with stock rules at all
House rules can be really cool indeed, assuming players know what they are doing. I’ve oftentimes accepted some house rule that seemed innocent enough but later turned out to be quite detrimental. Board game designers are usually quite clever and have reasons for certain rules being in place. Bending them can, in some cases, break the game.
.-= scrusi´s last blog ..Interactivity in Board Games =-.

By: Tesh

Tesh — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 18:05:56 +0000

“What board games need is a way for all players to have fun and be interested at all times, not just when it is their turn.”

Yes indeedy. I’ve come to much the same frame of mind in my own board and card game design experiments. It’s almost the difference between PvP and PvE. If you’re playing “against the board”, you’re just taking turns with PvE (where video games excel), but if you’re using the game as a medium to play against the other player, like Chess, you’re basically playing PvP. Good PvP board games either ask you to do something while your opponent is playing or at least pay attention and try to plan ahead in a move-countermove dance.

In a world where computers can often handle PvE game design better than unwieldy board games, the latter really need to step up their game and play to their strengths; face to face gaming.

Oh, and Cutthroat Uno is awesome. Anyone can match the top card at any time (play picks up in normal direction after the last match is played from that player’s position), making for fast and crazy gaming. Regular Uno is downright glacial by comparison. Draw cards stack… you can sometimes wind up playing Chicken when trying to see who plays the last Draw card (we usually play with two decks mashed together… I wound up drawing 24 cards once). 0s *must* be played if one shows up, and your whole hand is passed the number of 0 cards in play direction, so you don’t even have a promise of keeping the same hand throughout the game.

I love house rules… something that video games can’t do well at all.
.-= Tesh´s last blog ..LOTROlling =-.

By: Belthil

Belthil — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:35:40 +0000

I used to love settlers but the more you play it the more you figure out that the outcome is very strongly dependant on the first turn.
A game that i greatly enjoy is robo rally since there is a lot of interaction and a lot of unexpected things can happen.
As far as playing against the board goes the lord of the rings board game does it well if i remember correctly even though i havent played it that often.
Last but not least i like the world of warcraft board game. especially if you play with a group of players that knows the game it can be quite nice.