The Board Game Soapbox is an ongoing column in which we sound off on all the things in tabletop gaming that grate our cheese, honk our horns, and just plain rub us the wrong way. Anything that makes us feel strongly, we’ll tell you about here.

I have a pet peeve. Okay, okay, I have a lot of pet peeves. If I didn't, this would be a pretty lacklustre column. Specifically, I have a pet peeve related to board game terminology and the way we talk about complexity in games.

As a hobby, we use two concepts to discuss complexity in games: weight and depth. I’m getting on my soapbox to sound off about (i) why weight is inadequate and harmful, and (ii) how depth is misused. Stick around to the end and you’ll even discover our terminology manifesto for a better board game future!

Weight’s Murky Definition

For those unfamiliar, weight is the term given to BoardGameGeek’s (BGG) complexity rating: the more complex a game is, the heavier it is.

Except… whilst you might assume that the weight scale is synonymous with complexity, BGG defines weight based on one or more of the following attributes: lots of rules, a long playtime, a small amount of luck, a large amount of choices, a…

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A Box of Nostalgia

When I was a kid – I’m talking 6 or 7 years old – my older brother and I had an action figure bucket. This was wholly separate from my collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and it pre-dated the G.I. Joes I would start to gather as I neared my teenage years. Rather, this bucket was a kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of figures and characters gathered piecemeal from garage sales, flea markets, and assorted birthdays. In this box you could find He-Man and Skeletor jumbled up with Bucky O’Hare underneath a scattering of Dino Riders, G.U.T.S. soldiers, and Battle Beasts. The hallmark of this box was that it held everything that we only had a few of, as opposed to the toys like M.U.S.C.L.E. men and others that we collected. And it was the best box!

What this mottled collection lacked in cohesion was easily made up for by the precocious imagination of youth. Nevermind the 10:2 size difference between Maxx Steele and the Z-Bots because clearly the former was a vast titan out of space sent to destroy the small, robotic denizens of this strange world. The utter absence of coherence in the box unleashed its potential and we would…

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Taking a Walk

If you’re ever in Minneapolis and the weather is bearable, do yourself a favor and visit the Stone Arch bridge.

It curves its way lazily across the Mississippi River, forming a gentle contour just a stone’s throw from where Highway 35 slashes its way across. But unlike the highway, this bridge is meant for those who want to take their time.

It begins in a park on the north side—which park I couldn’t tell you, as there are several sprawling their way across the bank under the watchful gaze of new apartments slipped into old facades. This used to be one of the city’s booming mills, now renovated for the next generation. If you want, you can park farther away and walk down cobbled streets or dirt paths as you make your way to the bridge itself.

Once you begin to cross you quickly find yourself above the steadily flowing river—first the swirling eddies that catch and curl at the shore, and soon the broader, stronger portion of the river that rushes by dark and deep and unending. You’ll have plenty of time to take in the sights as you walk: not only is the river a calming sight, but ahead of you lays the sprawled cityscape…

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The quality of a game may be objective, but one’s enjoyment of it is not.

I was never very close to my paternal grandmother. She was a second generation German, a devout woman who was both strict and idiosyncratic in ways that made her hard to be close to. After her husband died and her health began to decline, my father helped her move from Philadelphia out to southeast Minnesota where we lived.

[caption id="attachment_12628" align="alignnone" width="952"] (My brother John (left) and myself, circa 1994. Game: Tens from Waddingtons Games.)[/caption]

From that point on we saw a lot of her, but the relationship always felt more dutiful than anything else. She was a constant presence at family holidays, gatherings, and even just weekly visits. Here was a woman some 65 years my senior who still showed the signs of growing up in the depression-era, a woman who believed straight-laced and well-groomed equalled good and moral and intelligent. To 10-year-old ragamuffin me she may as well have been from another planet.

I obediently hugged her at every visit, counting the seconds until I was free to race back to my bedroom and my bucket of G.I. Joes, Battle Beasts, and Dino Riders. That is, until I realized something: she was the one person in…

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Hot off the success of their “Unique Games” releases of Discover and KeyForge, Fantasy Flight Games have decided to leverage their new technologies in even bigger ways, helping gamers overcome the rigors and difficulties of curating their own collections.

Unique Game Collections will hit stores in Q4 of 2019, and will allow gamers to buy unique, procedurally-generated collections of boardgames. No longer will gamers have to scour the internet for reviews and top 10 lists. Instead, they can simply purchase a whole collection that no other gamer will have!

Fantasy Flight estimates that there are 68.3 billion different collections possible using their Unique system. And sure, they won’t all be winners, but they will be 100% unique to you. Said FF spokeswoman Allison Diaz: “Yes, you may end up with 40 games that are all different versions of Munchkin, but no other gamer in the world will have that uniquely-curated collection, and we believe that’s where the true value lies.”

Project lead Richard Garfield went on to elaborate: “Sure, some people may be overjoyed to find Twilight Imperium and Food Chain Magnate in their collections, while others might be less-than-thrilled to receive Monopoly Zelda and Trump: the Game. The important thing, though, is what each gamer is able to do with that collection. To me, there’s far…

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The Hook

It’s happened before. Many times before. I’m sitting in my living room with the rulebook in my lap, paging carefully through it. In the background Ross and Rachel bicker quietly on the TV, while further back I can hear my wife working in the office and the gentle whir of the stove-top fan that one of us forgot to turn off. I nudge my drink on the table revealing the ring of condensation that’s forming. My phone buzzes and I reach for it reflexively. Then I stop, my hand returning to the page in front of me, fingers underscoring the line that’s caught my eye. And I’m hooked.

Reading board game rulebooks is tedious at best and soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly confusing at worst. Sometimes, though, as you move your way through a manual just hoping to be playing soon, a certain line, rule, or passage will make you shiver with excitement as you find yourself visualizing—clearly and concisely—what’s to come. GladiGala, the new skirmish/simultaneous-movement game from Tyto Games, gave me just such a moment.

The game presents itself as something of a mashup of Onitama and RoboRally with a handful of extra steps and bits. Which is fine. But as…

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Prologue: Making the Pitch

We are in the brightly lit offices of Flights of Fantasy Headquarters. Behind a mahogany desk that’s covered with Star Wars models and molded Lord of the Rings miniatures sits CHRIS T. BOSSMAN, head of new products.

There’s a KNOCK ON THE DOOR and Chris looks up from his work.

CHRIS: "Come on in."

The door swings open and ELIZABETH HARGRAVE, game designer, enters. Chris gestures to a chair and she takes a seat.

ELIZABETH: "Alright. So what I’ve created is an engine-building game, something like Gizmos mixed with Terraforming Mars."

CHRIS: "Brilliant. So what’s the theme? Zombies? Superheroes? Space marines? Space marines are so hot right now."

ELIZABETH: "Birds."

CHRIS: "Excuse me?"

ELIZABETH: "Birds."

Chris sits up in his chair, confused.

CHRIS: "Birds?"

ELIZABETH: "Yes."

Chris flaps his arms, miming wings.

CHRIS: "You mean…?"

Elizabeth nods. There’s a long, uncomfortable pause. Chris looks down at the desk, then up at Elizabeth, then back down at the desk.

ELIZABETH: "Your player board will be your aviary."

CHRIS: "Aviary?"

ELIZABETH: "Bird zoo."

CHRIS: "Can your birds… attack your opponents’ birds?"

ELIZABETH: "Attack them?"

CHRIS: "Attack them. Battle. Fight."

ELIZABETH: "No, you can’t attack them."

CHRIS: "Oh."

There's a pause. Elizabeth tries again in an encouraging tone.…

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If you haven’t figured out by now, abstract strategy is a style near and dear to my heart. My first “real” games—games that didn’t consist of simply rolling dice and advancing pawns along colored tracks—were abstract strategy. Quarto was the first game that truly captivated me, mind and soul. Abalone and Pente broadened my horizons and my skills. And now, some 20+ years later, I find myself constantly charmed and enchanted when a publisher puts out a good abstract game.

Trinity is a new title from Polaris Games and is the epitome of “abstract strategy.” A scant handful of pieces each (five per player, to be exact) and several black hex tokens along with a small, roll-up gameboard all inside a zippered case that’s little-larger than one that might hold your sunglasses. And that’s everything, which is why you won’t find too many pictures accompanying this piece.

What’s here is neither cheap nor glamorous: it’s perfectly utilitarian. This, in my childhood, would have been entirely adequate. In today’s climate of glitz, and glamor, and over-production (which, I would like to add, is not necessarily a bad thing) it may, unfortunately, be a stumbling block to reaching its full potential. Much like the…

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The Board Game Soapbox is an ongoing column in which we sound off on the things in tabletop gaming that grate our cheese, honk our horns, and just plain rub us the wrong way. Anything that makes us feel strongly, we’ll tell you about here.

It's 2018. Druid City Games is hiding secret promos under their components and Chip Theory Games is giving you 9 pounds of game in the modestly-sized Undertow box. Kickstarter has turned into a frantic race of "Top this" when it comes to stretch goals, and CMON Games has compounded matters by shooting for the world record for largest "mini" with their logic-defying Cthulthu mold for Death May Die.

And yet, despite the monumental growth in the industry over the past decade, despite the increased attention to detail and emphasis on artwork and graphic design, despite all that and more there's one detail that remains, for the most part, overlooked: inside-the-box organization.

It's not flashy. You can't snap a hot Instagram pic of your molded plastic insert. But the fact remains, this element is far more key to your enjoyment of the game than many others (spot UV on the box, a few bonus cards, etc). Good box organization can trim your setup…

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I love games of logical deduction. The electricity of the unknown, the thrill of peeling back one layer at a time, never knowing when the penny may drop and the mystery will reveal itself to you. Growing up, that game was Mastermind, a seminal classic among logic games in which one player creates a hidden sequence of colors and their opponent must guess it over a series of turns based on cryptic responses. Well, after 38 odd years of Mastermind, there’s a new kid on the block. All you have to do is find him.

The Devil’s in the Details

Cryptid at once paints an intriguing premise, and I mean that literally! The box features a gorgeous rendering by the ever-talented (and seemingly-tireless) Kwanchai Moriya of the titular “creature.” In this case it’s presented as a gorgeous aquatic beast tantalizingly portrayed in light and shadow. As far as representing a game about hunting for mythic creatures goes, it knocks it out of the park. In terms of representing the actual visuals of the game’s contents, not so much.

It takes several games of Cryptid to get used to the way it looks, and that can be off-putting to players who are already on the fence about a game this analytical.…

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First Impressions Deserve a Second Chance

When I first played Dominion I hated it. It was six or seven years ago and I was in Michigan visiting my brother who insisted that I had to play this game. He and his wife had been playing it consistently for months, adding in several expansions and growing familiar with all the possible permutations and options. So, quite naturally, I got my behind served up to me on a silver platter. (It’s worth noting that no one in my family would ever “go easy” on me at a board game, a treatment I richly deserve).

It wasn’t just the fact that he knew, instinctively, how the cards would work together and how to construct his deck, it was that coupled with the fact that I had no such idea. I could guess, I could imagine how things would go, but at the end of the day there was just too much new and strange and unpredictable about the game for me to even come close to being competitive. So I hated it. Naturally, in the intervening years I returned to the game and gave it a fairer chance, on more even footing, and it has gradually become…

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Visitor in Blackwood Grove is a new Target exclusive game from designers Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman. It hearkens back to the “plucky kid in unspeakable danger” movies of the early 80s–stuff like The Goonies, Stand By Me and, most of all, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The aliens have arrived, and the only thing standing between them and a future of being dissected in a laboratory by shady government agents is you, a plucky young child on a bike (okay, I’m adding the bike part, but there has to be a bike!)

Deduction at its Finest

Visitor in Blackwood Grove is built on a wonderfully simple premise: the aliens are surrounded by a forcefield through which some objects can pass and others can’t. In order to get at them, you must figure out what rules govern this strange barrier, and therein lies the puzzle. Visitor owes a great debt to an old party game known most often as the “Green Glass Door” game, in which one player makes up a secret rule about what will or won’t pass through the door, and players must guess that rule through trial and error (everything contains metal, they’re all red, etc).

The game is played 2-versus-many, with the visitor (alien) trying to get…

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Every game is an “Abstract” game. Let’s get that out of the way early. Every game you will ever find is, to varying degrees, an abstraction of whatever concept it is attempting to convey. Even heavily-themed games like Terraforming Mars or Blood Rage are abstract. No game is a literal representation of its topic. However, some games go out of their way to try and give you a feeling--an experience--that transports you. Games like Captain Sonar or Spyfall, while they can’t put you on a submarine or in an espionage agency, work hard to make their mechanics serve their theme. To me, an abstract strategy game is the exact opposite of that.

The theme, if there is even one present (which is often not the case) is superfluous, thrown on like a blanket and, wherever necessary, made to serve the mechanics of the game instead of the other way around. As publishers grow cannier, they have realized that some semblance of theme can help a well-designed game ascend to a higher plane of popularity. Take, for example, Santorini, which was actually first created in 2004 to little or no recognition. 12 years later it was reprinted, replacing its cubes and blocks with elaborate miniatures and tiny buildings. The rules were largely…

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