In my previous post I mentioned two board games, both of which are using apps to play. Yesterday Fantasy Flight games released one of the hotly debated games of this year, Descent: Legends of the Dark, and it is app-based too. On BoardGameGeek the game right now has 308 user ratings, of which 148 are a 10, and 107 are a 1. And it appears as if neither the 10s nor the 1s are actually about the game, but about the fact that it is a hybrid board / video game. Some people who like board games don't like the use of apps, and some people who like video games don't like the comparatively expensive use of a board game box full of terrain and miniatures. As somebody who likes both board games and video games, here are my thoughts about this issue.

Let me start by saying that I own Gloomhaven, which is a pure board game without an app. And when I play it, I use two third-party apps: Gloomhaven Helper to keep track of combat, and Forteller to add voice-over. My wife and me like two-player, cooperative, story-driven games. So either we both try to read a text at the same time, or one of us has to read the text to the other, or we use an app that does the reading aloud for us. It is pretty easy to see how an app that reads the story is an advantage, with basically no downside. Your mileage may vary on the use of an app to keep track of various game scores, I think that for a rather complex game like Gloomhaven it can help.

Now these story-driven games that don't rely on an app have a book of stories in the box. That often works like a choose-your-own-adventure book: You get a starting paragraph, and then are told to move to some other paragraph based on either your decisions, or for example in function of the result of a skill check. Such a book gives you the maximum of freedom to cheat, if you want to. You can read ahead, you can move back if you don't like a result, and so on. In Lands of Galzyr that I mentioned in my previous post, the app does have a "back" button, so if you make an innocent error *or* want to cheat, you can wind back. In Destinies, also mentioned, there is no back button. Some might welcome the elimination of cheating, but pressing the wrong button by mistake sure is annoying if you can't reverse that.

Where I don't really like apps is when they are used for hidden information. In pure board games you by necessity not only make decisions and roll dice, you are also the person checking whether your dice rolls resulted in a success or failure. I like the app of Lands of Galzyr, where you are still being told whether a skill check is easy, medium, or hard, before you decide what to do and roll the dice. I don't like the app in Destinies, where that information is hidden from you, you roll the dice blind, enter the results in the app, and find out whether what you rolled was good enough afterwards. There are a bunch of other uses of hidden information, where the Destinies app keeps track of something, and modifies results in function of that, without really telling you why. I prefer transparency.

In Lands of Galzyr, the app only basically replaces a book, and thus saves a tree. In Destinies, as well as in the new Descent game, and previous games from Fantasy Flight Games like Journeys in Middle-Earth, the app also shows the map of the game. You end up with a weird situation where you basically have two copies of the board: One physical, made up of tiles on your table, and one virtual on the app, where it shows how the tiles should be arranged. I must say that I am not a fan. You spend a lot of time making the two versions of the board align with each other, and ultimately you wonder why you bother with the physical version. If you play solo, you can play Destinies using *only* the map on the app. At which point only your player board and the item cards from the physical game are still a reminder that you are playing a board game.

In summary, I am not totally against the use of apps in board games, but I like to limit their use to managing (and if possible reading aloud) the story. If I want a game in which important game mechanics like how success is measured or how the game decides what happens next are mostly hidden from the player, I'd play a pure video game. And no, I'm not going to buy Descent: Legends of the Dark. Not only because it uses an app for more than what I like, but also because the 3D terrain looks problematic and unstable to me, and the $180 price tag rather high.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 11:03 AM Permanent Link