Tag Archives: boardgames

More on boardgames

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Since my last post on the subject, I’ve been to CarcaSean a couple more times now, including a special Sunday session with a bunch of members. In all, my wife have tried the following games: Carcassonne, Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers, Settlers of Catan, Power Grid and Ticket to Ride. These aren’t exactly the Big Box games I’ve always wondered about but they’re not a bad start.

My wife’s favourite so far is Power Grid which is the most complex of these games by far. I don’t like it very much as I found it to be basically an extended exercise in arithmetic and it has too many maintenance aspects that you can easily forget to do or do wrongly (refilling resources, discarding power plant cards etc.) Judging from the game’s FAQ on BoardGameGeek, it seems we got a fair amount of stuff wrong too, but doesn’t improve my impression of it about being too fiddly and full of special, conditional exceptions in its rules. My own favourite at this point is Settlers of Catan. It’s stream-lined and elegant but still leaves plenty of room for strategy.

On a vaguely related note, the topic of wargames and their history popped up the other day on QT3 and the name of the father of wargames was someone that I knew, but completely didn’t expect. If we discount purely abstract games like go and chess, it seems that the inventor of what we can recognizably call wargames today is none other than H.G. Wells, he of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds fame.

In 1913 Wells wrote a book he called by its full title Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books in which he describes a complete set of rules for making a game out of toy soldiers. The book is now out of copyright so it is available for reading online here. It’s a rather simple game by modern standards and doesn’t even involve dice or anything similar to simulate chance. Rather when two units meet each other on the field, they’re presumed to be equally skilled and therefore eliminate one another. The really cute part is that artillery pieces on the battlefield are represented by little spring-loaded toy cannons that actually fire a dart-like projectile. Thus any toy soldiers that are knocked down by the projectile is assumed to have been killed by artillery fire.

Of course everything that Wells used was basically hand-crafted and would be impossibly expensive in our time. Even the landscaping elements he used to create his battlefields looked amazingly nice as the many photos included in the book show. Nowadays, most of us have to make do with cheap plastic and cardboard.

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Getting into boardgames

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I’ve been thinking about getting into boardgames for a while now but I’ve only recently started it doing it for real. I don’t really have much experience in this hobby. I was a fairly avid player of Magic: The Gathering and other assorted CCGs back in the day, but the only boardgaming I ever did was a few very memorable games of Space Hulk at the short-lived Temple du Jeu in Tours where I studied. Still, I’ve always kept half an eye on the field and felt a strange lust for those giant boxes filled with all manner of figures and dice.

It turns out that there’s a boardgaming cafe at City Mall here in Kota Kinabalu, which you can play the titles in their very extensive library for a modest table and food / drinks for each player, so my wife and I decided to give it a try. We played a game of Carcassonne with just the two of us a couple of weeks ago and on Saturday roped in my wife’s oldest brother to join us. We ended up staying a bit longer than expected and played a game of Carcassonne and a game of Settlers of Catan. We probably won’t be going every single week but I have a feeling that this is going to a regular source of entertainment for the both of us.

Right now, I’m thinking of buying a copy of Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers because it’s a great, easy-to-learn game to take out when we have family and friends visiting. I’m also thinking of ordering a copy of Arkham Horror, a highly regarded cooperative game that the cafe, CarcaSean, doesn’t seem to have in its library. According to what I’ve read it’s perfectly playable for two but would be better for more people. I’ve also been trying to connect with other boardgamers in town so that I can finally get into one of those epic games like Starcraft, Battlestar Galactica or Twilight Imperium. So if any friends want to give this hobby a try and are reading this, do let me know. We could always use more players!

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