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Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Roleplaying game in a box
While Dungeons & Dragons is a great game to play in a group of 4 to 7 people, you can't really play it solo, and it isn't working all that great for just 2 players. So, many of the board games I played this year, solo or with my wife, were of the "roleplaying game in a box" kind. These games emulate the experience of a roleplaying game, to some extent, without the need of a dungeon master or larger group. And it is interesting to see how they do that.
One of the first board games in which one could be a warrior or a wizard that I played was Talisman, back in the early 80's. There are a lot of games these days where you play some sort of fantasy hero, one game of that type I own but haven't played yet is Altar Quest. But in this post I don't consider these games, because they aren't story-based. There are numerous "dungeon crawler" games in which you don't take any story decisions, but just fight random monsters in a random dungeon. That can be fun, but here I would like to talk about games in which the story is more prominent.
If the story is an important part of the game, the game needs a way to tell you that story, and ideally in a way that allows you to make decision and get a different story outcome based on those decisions. The classic way to do that is in a book with numbered sections, like a Fighting Fantasy / Choose Your Own Adventure book. For example Legacy of Dragonholt is very close to just being such a book. Probably the best game with a book I played this year is Sleeping Gods, which has a good mix of board game elements like worker placement and cards with a storybook that tells you the story, and a very original one at that. But I also played Folklore: The Affliction, which has a dark fantasy theme. I haven't gotten around to starting Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, but that one is based on a book as well.
Another way to tell the story is via cards. The 7th Continent does that very well. One advantage is that you can have more than one card with the same number, so you can get a random result by drawing "card number 10", while "read paragraph number 10" will always have the same result. The system that The 7th Continent uses, with one or more green cards potentially followed by a golden card, and different instructions on whether to "return", "discard", or "banish" a card is quite intricate. It basically creates a sort of story-telling algorithm with some variability of outcome. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - The Adventure Game, seems to use a much simpler card based story system.
These days more and more games use an app to tell the story. Sometimes you still get a book, but have the option to have the text read to you via the app. In other cases there is only the app. The obvious advantage is that getting the story read to you by a professional voice actor in a 2+ player game is better than one player having to read the story aloud. The disadvantage is that you don't see the algorithm anymore, and don't even know if the result is always the same or there is a randomized outcome possible. We liked Forgotten Waters, and there you can even buy a DLC online and get more content without needing to get additional physical components to the game. Destinies even promised to release a "community editor" software at some point, which would allow players to make their own scenarios. The Destinies app has only minimal voice acting, but then Destinies is by far the cheapest option of the games mentioned in this post. Tiny miniatures too, but still rather good value for $45. Forgotten Waters is about the same price: An app is cheaper than printing a book or cards, but Forgotten Waters has fewer game components and no miniatures. Note that some games come with a book, but you can use a third-party app like Forteller to get the voice acting.
The game that reminds me the most of Dungeons & Dragons is the recently released Roll Player Adventures, which is on my Christmas wish list. It is book-based, but every scenario comes in a separate booklet, which resemble very much the softcover booklets that D&D adventures used to come in before 5th edition. Not sure why all the D&D stuff is hardcover these days. Roll Player Adventures, like Sleeping Gods, uses a book of maps as well as a story book. That allows for more map variety than a single game board like Altar Quest, but is faster to set up than tile-based maps like Destinies. I am looking forward to Roll Player Adventures, because it combines the "roleplaying game in a box" experience with the dice manipulation gameplay of the original Roll Player board game.
While I do like these kind of games, they admittedly do have one big disadvantage: Lack of replayability. Roll Player Adventures costs $150, and comes with 11 scenarios. Yeah, you could play through the campaign maybe twice, choosing to support a different faction. But these games inherently don't have the same replayability as typical board games without a story, which you can play over and over. On the other hand, I already have too many games and too little time, so I'm okay with playing each of these games a limited number of times.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 9:35 AM Permanent Link
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I once designed an adventure board game prototype with replayability potential for 10-20 games. I took it to several board game publishers, and they all concluded that there's not much reason to make story-heavy games replayable. Rather than peppering the game with secrets and that you can only crack after repeated playthroughs, they all advised me to put the best content into the first playthrough and cut the rest.
The reason for this is that story games are already established as "one-off" genre, and it would take considerable marketing and communication efforts to explain to the potential buyers that this particular game is, in fact, very replayable. But even if we manage to do that, there's not much benefit in making a replayable game. Statistically, most board games are only played a couple of times (doubly so for "hardcore" audience that prefers to buy new games). This means that the efforts will likely be spent on something that will never be experienced by the players. It would make more sense to just pack additional content into another box and sell it.
So if a designer wants to make a lot of story content, it looks more beneficial to make several non-replayable games instead of one hugely replayable one.
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The reason for this is that story games are already established as "one-off" genre, and it would take considerable marketing and communication efforts to explain to the potential buyers that this particular game is, in fact, very replayable. But even if we manage to do that, there's not much benefit in making a replayable game. Statistically, most board games are only played a couple of times (doubly so for "hardcore" audience that prefers to buy new games). This means that the efforts will likely be spent on something that will never be experienced by the players. It would make more sense to just pack additional content into another box and sell it.
So if a designer wants to make a lot of story content, it looks more beneficial to make several non-replayable games instead of one hugely replayable one.
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