BCM 300: Analyzing a Board Game

So in the course of completing my degree I’ve taken on the subject of Game Experience Design, in which we play games, and then think long and hard about what we found out about playing them. Now I’ll present to you two of the games we have played so far (aren’t I ambitious) because they both represent what I feel is an important aspect for the medium of games.

The Resistance: Avalon

Designer: Don Eskridge

Artists: Luis Francisco, George Patsouras, Nan Sumana, Rafal Szyma

Publisher: Indie Boards & Cards

So firstly the name was very confusing for someone who is relatively new to the wider world of board games, considering the box seems to emphasise the words “Avalon” a lot more than “The Resistance”. Which is convenient really since we never felt like resistance members, but neither did I particularly feel like an “Avalon”. But it is a sequel of another game called The Resistance, in which you are actually part of a Resistance, so there’s that I guess?

The game revolves around a kind of social mystery and deception, in which a number of players, in our case 3 of 7, were “bad guys”, and the rest of us were “good guys” set in the world of King Arthur. One of the good guys was Merlin, who knew who the bad guys were; and one of the bad guys was the Assassin, who once they found out who Merlin was, at the end of the game they would win if correct. The good guys won by completing successfully 3 of 5 missions, and blah blah blah.

The game was very interesting and had a lot of excitement in the idea, but there was a couple problems I personally found with it. First note, above it gets very, very wordy to explain how the game actually works, so much of the rules and interactions are held in each players head and so moving forward in the game almost felt like we needed a Game Master of some kind to clarify and walk through the steps until we had caught up with how it all worked and what we could do. When you look up this game on Board Game Geek, well the original anyway, it mentions it takes inspiration from other social games such as Werewolf, but removes the ability to vote players out, and we’ll get back to this.

Our game in particular went very weird, from 15 minutes of discussing what we could and couldn’t do and how the game works, to an actual game being almost immediately being over with three good guy quest victories but Merlin was instantly discovered (by yours truly because I have a big boy brain with lots of wrinkles) and the bad guys won. We’ll get back to this as well.

Final thing of curiosity, apparently this game is compatible to mix together with The Resistance, which judging by the cover, has a lot of Sci-Fi elements; so Merlin is in a world with agents and guns?

Unstable Unicorns

Designer: Ramy Badie

Artist: Ramy Badie

Publisher: Self Published (Kickstarter)

Unstable Unicorns is the other game, a King Maker, Card Race game, where your goal is to get a certain number of cards in your stable before your opponents, and touts a multitude of ways to stop them with adorable art and interesting card mechanics.

First thing you’ll notice is explaining the basics of this game is a lot easier than the other to explain. Obviously there is a lot of cards with different effects and going over all of them would take a long time, but with specific effects relegated to being on the card for explanation purposes makes this game a lot easier to jump in and play, and immediately start experiencing the back and forth and the “unstable-ness” of these unicorns.

Well that is the fantasy anyway; in practice the game always felt like it was coming short of this fantasy it set, and while I could see potential for combinations and interesting interactions between cards, I always was wanting more from the game. This could in part be because of the ridiculous bloat of our deck with all the expansions making the new interesting cards you can pickup few and far between, but also because actions you take that are against other players are mostly reactionary and limited.

Let me explain; the game has cards that let you remove cards from the enemies stable, but as stated with the huge number of cards you never seem to have the card you need, the cards so spaced out in the deck (in my admittedly limited experience) that your turn was mostly spent helplessly maybe expanding your stable by one, but unable to interact with the other players.

The other issue was these Neigh cards, which prevented another players cards from being played. You are limited to playing one card per turn, and so the most direct interaction you have between players is to tell them that “no you can’t play”. Or another way to put it, the fun you have in this game, is making sure that the other players aren’t having fun.

All this brings me to the point I found between these two games.

Player Agency

These games both felt extremely limited in individual player agency; The Resistance has you vote and sometimes this is the most interaction you have between players, and despite whether you know who the enemy is you have no way to act on this, apart from the obvious convincing others to act a certain way, and having such a set win condition kind of set in an early sense of futility in the actions on the board “Well this doesn’t matter, that guy is obviously Merlin”.

The intention of removing the players ability to vote other players out is admirable allowing everyone to keep playing until the end, but this action removed a lot of the play from the game as a whole. In short I believe that this was a good idea with bad execution, and removed choice and action availability hence, player agency.

This was the same issue I found in Unstable Unicorns, the lack of ways to influence the other players in a meaningful way, the sense of inaction and ‘waiting for it to be my turn’ was omnipresent throughout the experience. But the most disappointing aspect of this game was your turn came up, you had this awesome move planned and everything was coming together like the game had promised. Neigh. You don’t get a turn, and put that card away, and so your moment of action and agency had been taken from another player.

Of course you could argue that using one of these Neigh cards is an action with strategy with action and planning ahead. But if you say that you are wrong, stupid and I hate you (and no I’m not salty from having my awesome move thwarted with a dismissive neigh). This is because when you use a Neigh card, it’s not done with a sense of action and planning or something that enhances the fun everyone is having, it’s done almost dismissively it doesn’t really matter doing it to you directly, it doesn’t feel fun you just didn’t feel like that happening.

So, games with promise but disappointing in executing a fantasy they set out.