learning about game mechanics for computer games via board games
So, we’ve covered digital game-to-board game adaptation briefly in our game session in the past (re: Doom the Board game) and intend to focus moreso on it in the coming weeks with the Starcraft board game. Ian Bogost posted recently about a fun find in board game history: http://www.bogost.com/blog/zimmer_base_ball_and_cigars.shtml
With summer underway and a full semester under my belt at my new university, Georgia Tech, we’re picking up the gaming again with a new crowd in Atlanta and hopefully a sister one starting June 9th back at Michigan State, headed by Ethan Watrall.
After giving the talk in Lisbon last month, I want to try and focus the work we’re doing in both a top-down and bottom-up manner. The bottom-up approach, playing and analyzing games, has been fun and useful. I think that the complement to this work is to try and slowly build a descriptive taxonomy of game mechanics - a useful set of abstractions and terms that can be used to compare and contrast game mechanics in a standardized way.
So, my visit to the board games colloquium was interesting. It is a distinct academic gaming culture (made up of historians, anthropologists, mathematicians, game theoreticians, and archaeologists) that has been gathering for over a decade. The quality of the talks, as expected, was pretty varied - but there were a few gems that certainly made it worthwhile.
In the is game players take on the role of managing a network of power, a power grid if you will (sorry). The board consists of a map of the USA or Germany. Cities are placed throughout the map and are connected by lines that have distance values. Players must purchase hubs on cities that will allow them to provide that city with power, which gives each player money. Only one player at the beginning can own any one city, though this changes later in the game, but the cost of buying a hub is the same for everyone.
For the players to provide power to their cities they must purchase power plants and resources in each round. Power plants have different resource needs and power output. There are 50 power plants in all and with the higher ones being resource efficient and power abundant. Resources are either coal, oil, garbage, or uranium and get replenished at various rates each round throughout the game (various rates meaning oil refreshes more at the beginning of the game then at the end).
Gamasutra has an article about the Essen International Game Day, in Essen, Germany. They say it is the largest board game event in the world. They profile some new games that came out during the event like Galaxy Trucker.
From boingboing.net:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/27/boardgame-pricefixin.html
A board-game publisher has begun engaging in price fixing, a practice newly liberalized in the US in the wake of a June Supreme Court decision. Yehuda sez, Read the rest of this entry »
Ranked number one at boardgamegeek.com, Puerto Rico is basically a game of economics. There is no killing, major conflicts, or much interaction between the players (in terms of mechanics) in the game. Everyone is allowed to do the same actions and may choose how to foster their economy independently.
The premise is that you are a importer/export/land owner in the New World on the island of Puerto Rico (and you must say it with a Spanish accent). With your land you will plant fields (plantations) and build buildings. The crops you produce will be sent back to Europe and you will be rewarded for this act. Let me discuss how all of this occurs.
I think that the three of us enjoyed playing Tigris and Euphrates a lot more than we thought we would. The depth of the game play especially surprised us. Read the rest of this entry »
What are the main game mechanics?
There are many game mechanics and aspects to Caylus. The main idea of the game is about balancing resources. The most important resource is prestige, and the player that has the most at the end of the game wins. Prestige can be earned in many ways. Another main resource is the currency, which is in deniers. There are also five other natural resources, including food, wood, stone, cloth, and gold. Some of the natural resources are easier to obtain than others, and gold for example, can’t be acquired early in the game. In addition, each player can own and buy residential, wood, prestige, and stone lots, which can allow them to gain additional resources of all types, as well as the other players. Read the rest of this entry »
“Settlers of Catan” is a card based resource management game. This game pits two players against each other in a battle to build up the largest settlement. Players are measured in success by the amount of Settlement points that they’ve accumulated. A settlement point is awarded when a player builds certain buildings, starts a new settlement, builds a city, or controls one or both of the specials tokens. The game ends when a player has 12 Settlement points.