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Monday, February 28, 2022
Old Man Ring - Part 2
I am up to 10 hours of Elden Ring played, and I am still having fun. The purpose of this post is to tell you my thoughts on what the appeal of "souls" games is, and why even beyond the fact that I am getting too slow for them, they aren't really for me.
Did you like raiding in World of Warcraft? Failing the first attempts at a raid boss, then learning "the dance", the correct moves and reactions to signals that allow you to overcome that boss, until your guild finally succeeds beating him? Elden Ring is the solo version of that.
There are a lot of games these days, especially in the mobile space, that shower you with rewards for doing very trivial tasks. Some people like that, for others it is not very satisfying. A reward should be granted for actually achieving something! But how do you know that you actually achieved something worthwhile? Well, if you failed repeatedly at a task, that task must be difficult. And so, finally beating that challenge feels very rewarding and worthwhile.
Only, of course, all of this is as manufactured as the mobile game rewards. Elden Ring is full of surprises that you couldn't possibly have foreseen, and that are likely to kill you. Bosses even more so, because they tend to have initial moves you learn to overcome, only to then get surprised when the boss pulls some very different surprise move after being down to half health and kills you again. You have to learn the whole "dance" of a boss over multiple failures to be able to beat him. And that, to many people, will feel very good.
Not for me though. I already hated the "dance" of WoW raiding. I definitively don't want a solo version of that. But I kept playing WoW long after I stopped raiding, because there are a lot of other things to do as well in that game. Elden Ring with the option of turning cheats on is very much the same. Without cheats I might be blocked at some point, or not being able to do certain things or reach certain things. With cheats I can just fast forward the boss encounters and pretend I beat them.
Note that I am pretty certain that if I wanted, I would be able to beat the first story boss, Margit, without the use of cheats. To some extent you can overcome a lack of reaction speed in Elden Ring by grinding to gain more levels and better equipment. So if I wanted, I could play until I feel really powerful, and then try Margit. It would take me multiple attempts, but as long as you spend all your runes before you don't lose anything from dying. So I could "learn the dance" in X failed attempts, and ultimately succeed. It is just that I absolutely feel no desire to do so. Overcoming challenges isn't rewarding to me when the "challenge" is only pressing buttons in the right sequence and the right timing. Of course, your mileage may vary. As there is a way to circumvent the first boss and reach other regions of Elden Ring without beating him, you could potentially become rather powerful before trying him. And then you probably would be able to manage this challenge, even if you are a bit slow. The question is, do you want to? Is that something that would be fun for you? Or do you find, fail, fail, fail again, until you succeed a not-so-fun game mechanic?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 AM Permanent Link (4) comments
Sunday, February 27, 2022
Old Man Ring - Part 1
This is part 1 of a series of blog posts that I am planning about me, an old man, playing Elden Ring, a game that isn't suited for old men with slow reaction times. Basically I am using cheats to make up for my lack of ability in action based RPG combat.
The first good news is that I have been able to play Elden Ring for 6 hours and had a lot of fun with it. I reached level 20 and got a basic grasp of what the game is about. Following advice on YouTube, also by Bigeye in the comments on this blog, I took an Astrologer spellcasting class, which is very much oriented to ranged combat. As Bigeye said, using summons in combination with ranged spells is "easy mode", at least for regular monsters and mini-bosses.
Now I spent many years playing MMORPGs, and this is my first "souls" game, so I am somewhat struck by the differences. Elden Ring has game design elements that would make a MMORPG developer cringe. MMORPGs are designed to not make farming too efficient, and to avoid combat situations in which there is no danger to the player. Elden Ring has none of that. In the starting area there are two giants slowly pulling a huge wagon. You can kill them with ranged weapons without them ever being able to touch you, as they are chained to the wagon. They each give over 1,000 runes, which is both the "gold" and the "xp" in Elden Ring. And after you killed them, you can teleport to the closest rest area, and by resting not only regain all your mana, but also respawn the giants. Rinse, lather, repeat, this is how I got to level 20 in no time.
On the other hand, some monsters can be extremely hard, especially boss monsters. I haven't reached the first story boss yet. But right at the start there is a boss that pretty much automatically kills you, and then you come to the first outside area and there is another boss on a horse riding up and down a path. Of course he killed me immediately when I checked him out. So I turned on god mode and tried again. And he killed me again! Apparently the god mode only provides unlimited health, and boss mobs frequently have insta-death abilities that aren't prevented by unlimited health. Doh! There are other cheats giving *you* insta-kills, so I don't think I'll ever really get stuck, but this was kind of unexpected.
So in my experience I haven't been able to find cheat settings yet that would make combat both challenging and fun for me. Even without cheats, many regular mobs are just pushovers against a summon plus ranged strategy. I am beginning to suspect that the game is based on melee combat, not ranged. While being a spellcaster is efficient, I constantly get rewards or discover game elements that are of absolutely no use to me: Strength or dexterity based weapons, armor, shields, "ashes of war" that add combat skills to melee weapons, smithing to improve weapons and armor, nothing really applies to my character yet. Kiting enemies is ridiculously easy.
Elden Ring is sometimes frustrating in that it doesn't tell you a lot on how to play the game. Somewhat ridiculously there are guide videos that show you how to reach the tutorial area, which is very easy to miss. And even with the tutorial you understand only a fraction of the game if you haven't played previous incarnations. Experience in other games doesn't help much, because things are very weirdly balanced. As an Astrologer I start with a cheap spell, Glintstone Pebble, that fires a magic missile rather quickly, and for a low mana cost. Then I find a sorceress selling expensive other spells (Glintstone Stars, Crystal Barrage), only to realize that these "improved" spells actually deal less damage than my basic spell. I don't think I fully understand the magic system yet.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:06 AM Permanent Link (4) comments
Saturday, February 26, 2022
Elden Ring - An experiment
As I discussed in my previous post, I think that I am too slow to execute the moves necessary to kill a boss in Elden Ring. However, Elden Ring has a lot of content that is not boss mobs. And with a Metacritic score of 97 and many comparisons with Breath of the Wild, I would really like to experience this game. So I decided that I will do an experiment:
- I bought Elden Ring, and am currently installing it. I will play the game regularly and see how far I get, whether I can make progress at all, and whether a sufficient accumulation of progress then is enough to actually kill a boss mob.
- If, as expected, the reaction time difficulty of Elden Ring is too high for me, I will use WeMod to cheat. But for starters I will only use the unlimited hitpoint cheat, and not touch other aspects of the game.
- Once I know the game much better, I might try more subtle means of cheating, e.g. I see options in WeMod to "decrease game speed" or "edit max HP". Or I could try cheating only on boss encounters.
The fundamental problem, and thus subject of this experiment, is how to use available cheat methods to make the game easy enough for a slow player like me to enjoy, without completely removing all fun from it. Many games have a god mode cheat in one way or another, but there is an obvious risk that this makes the game *too* easy, thus being not any more fun than the too hard original version.
I have to say that modifying difficulty is easier in a board game. I have successfully "modified" Roll Player Adventures to make it more difficult, and Dragonfire to make it easier, both without breaking the game. For PC games there are tools like Cheat Engine or WeMod, or built-in cheat modes, but often these tools tend to be somewhat limited in options. A god mode can change the difficulty of a game from 100% to 0%, when what you were looking for was 75% or 50%.
I am choosing Elden Ring for this experiment because from what I hear in the various reviews, there is a large open world exploration part to the game. I love exploration. And frequently the fun of an exploration part of a game is not related to your reaction time. I loved Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and was able to play all the way through without cheating (which would be difficult on a Switch anyway), in spite of the fact that I wasn't really great at BotW combat, and couldn't do the "Master Mode" of the DLC.
Somewhere this is a desperate attempt of an elderly gamer to still experience the current hottest game on the market, even if that game normally requires the reflexes of a much younger person. I am aware that I am not the target audience, but I refuse to be totally excluded.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:25 PM Permanent Link (8) comments
Friday, February 25, 2022
Fun and challenge
Today Elden Ring was released and already sold over a million copies. In spite of currently only 59% of positive reviews on Steam, where a lot of people are complaining that the game isn't running all that well on the PC, and that the user interface and controls are horrible. Fortunately for me, there was never any likelihood that I would buy this game. Because I am pretty certain that I wouldn't be able to play very much of it. Like the Dark Souls games before it, Elden Ring doesn't have any difficulty settings.
All of the Dark Souls games, including Elden Ring, are what is called "challenging". But not challenging in the sense that a Times crossword puzzle or an university exam is challenging. Rather, for these type of games, challenging describes the necessity to learn what moves a boss mob is doing, and then be able to precisely press buttons on your controller with the exactly right timing following certain signals about impending attacks. So there is at least a part that requires "learning", but even perfect learning wouldn't help you much if you couldn't get the timing of the button presses executed right.
I was never any good at timing button presses right. And as I am approaching retirement, my reaction times are significantly slower than those of the teenage / young adult average customer for a game like Elden Ring. I would simply fail a lot more than most other players, and most likely get stuck at some point, presumably already the first boss mob.
I do believe that "challenge" in general can be fun. The idea that challenge is fun was pretty widespread in game development circles, until idle games and the like demonstrated that some people also like games that have absolutely no challenge at all. But at least a solid portion of the gaming population prefers to be challenged in some way by their games. However, different gamers find different things challenging in different ways. And the "fun" part of challenging games is to recognize that something is hard for you, and then ultimately to overcome the challenge and to feel good because you succeeded. If the challenge of a game is too hard, and you either never succeed, or it takes you bloody forever to make even the slightest progress, chances are that you won't find the game fun at all.
Given that a number of people likes games with little or no challenge, and that others like to be challenged at their personal performance level, but that performance simply isn't very high, many video games, and even some campaign board games, have different difficulty levels. Including "easy" or even "story" difficulty, designed to be playable by just about anyone. FromSoftware, makers of Elden Ring and the Souls series, apparently doesn't believe that a game should have variable difficulty. As a result, some customers, like me, will simply not buy their games. It's a bit like a "must be this tall to ride" sign in an amusement park, just on a reaction time scale instead of a height scale. I am simply not fast enough to play.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:12 PM Permanent Link (5) comments
Thursday, February 24, 2022
Dragonfire
Last week my wife and me did a short city trip holiday. And in walking distance from our hotel were two game stores that had the sort of more advanced board games we like. We ended up buying 4 games: Robinson Crusoe, Dragonfire, The Lost Expedition, and Cartaventura: Vinland. (The latter two are smaller games we bought for easy transportation on holidays). I haven't tackled Robinson Crusoe yet, which has a reputation for being scary hard. But I started playing Dragonfire.
Dragonfire is a deck-building game, which means that you start each game with just some very basic cards, but you can buy better cards over the course of the game. In this case the game is D&D flavored, so the classes, abilities, spells, items, and monsters are all from 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. And to complete that theme, there is a campaign with 5 adventures, getting you from level 1 to level 4.
That sounds very nice, until you realize that "level" doesn't mean the same thing in Dragonfire than it does in Dungeons & Dragons. In D&D a level 4 character would have about 3 times more hit points than a level 1 character, and have not only more, but also more powerful spells and abilities than a level 1. In Dragonfire, a level 4 character still has the same hit points, and same cards/abilities/spells than a level 1. You only gained one or two "features", with very, very weak effects. You also might have gotten some "magic items", but the common ones you are most likely to have are single use only, and also rather weak. Even the uncommon items aren't all that powerful. Which means that at the start of a level 4 adventure, you are not really stronger than you were at the start of the level 1 adventure. But as the challenges get significantly harder, the game is much harder at higher level than at lower level. That isn't much fun, since the game is hard to start with.
The polar opposite to this is the previous big campaign board game we played, Roll Player Adventures. In RPA, the challenges went up slower in difficulty than your power progression, to the point that the latter adventures of the campaign were a complete pushover. Moreover, Roll Player Adventures generally works on a "fail forward" model, where you still succeed in your adventure even if you fail a lot of challenges. Dragonfire has more of a "cascading failure" model, where an unlucky draw in the first round that summons more monsters is very likely to presage a failure to complete the adventure.
I think I will do some solo games of Dragonfire, playing 4 characters, and see if I can balance the game better with some house rules. The "cascading" nature of the game makes it hard to find a good balance, because you might either experience "cascading failure" or "cascading success".
Overall I like Dragonfire. It turns out that the game is out of print, with several expansions not available at all anymore. I still found a few scattered remnants at different online outlets, so I ordered an additional campaign, an adventure, and some more treasures. The content in the base box is a bit thin for repeated play, but I think that with a few expansions and house rules this could become quite a good game.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 1:04 PM Permanent Link (0) comments
Monday, February 21, 2022
Not Critical Race Theory
I was watching a discussion of US politics / culture wars, and the fight of the right against what they call "critical race theory", which has very little to do with what critical race theory actually is. For once Florida made a good point by calling their legal proposal the "stop woke act", which has the clear advantage of being more to the point and easier to understand. However, if I look at the fundamentals of this fight, it appears to me that this is a part of the culture wars that the right can't actually possibly win.
For thousands of years people have argued where the personality of a child is coming from, the so-called nature vs. nurture debate. That discussion ended up pretty much in a tie, with most people these days agreeing that *both* your genes *and* your upbringing influence what kind of a person you will become. In an increasingly polarized society, there is a definitive risk that a child will become exposed to and possibly pick up values that are offensive to his parents. The further the values of the parent are far off from whatever the center of society is, the bigger the risk.
While this general problem would apply to both extreme left and extreme right parents, the right has a bigger problem here, due to the specific socioeconomic factors of schools. In case you hadn't noticed it, teachers are rather badly paid in the capitalist system. The reason for that is that there are people who want to become a teacher not for the money, but because they believe in the greater good of education. In a capitalist system, people are being paid the lowest possible amount they would do the job for, so people who work for "a purpose" instead of "for money" decrease the market value of a profession. Pretty sad actually, but a good explanation of why jobs that involve helping people, e.g. nurses, are usually paid so badly.
Now if you look at the very nature of political "left" and "right", it becomes pretty obvious that there is a strong correlation of being of a helpful nature and trying to do good for society with the political left. Somebody who is of the political right and strongly believes in the individual rather than society and in self-interest is less likely to become a teacher, because underpaid do-gooders are making these jobs not financially interesting. As a result the average teacher is politically left of center. At the same time, there is less and less "nurture" going on between parents and children. In 2020 among married couples with children in the US, nearly 60% had both parents working full-time. The more society relies on schools to provide all day long care for schoolchildren, the more children will pick up values not from their parents, but from their teachers.
So there you have it: While there is no such thing as critical race theory being taught in primary school, education today has moved way past the point where it would only teach the "3 R's: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic". A school also teaches a lot of things that are inherently political, like history. A parent that is leaning towards white supremacy then is shocked when his child comes home with some left of center ideas about systemic racism in US society. No "stop woke act" will be able to change that.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:04 PM Permanent Link (9) comments
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Kingdoms Forlorn
The latest hot Kickstarter board game right now is Kingdoms Forlorn. And I am quite unsure what to think about it. On the one side it has a lot of people praising the game on YouTube, and putting high hopes into it. There are over 5,000 backers having already pledge €730,000 to the game. With 16 days still to go, this will most probably collect over a million in funds. On the other side, I see a lot of potential red flags.
My main concern is based on their first game, Aeon Trespass: Odyssey. During the Kickstarter of that one, the core game pledge cost $129. But if you press the "late pledge" button now, the price for the same core game today is $299, more than twice the original price. Being aware of the current problems of producing board games in China and then shipping them, and the huge price increases of that, I assume that $299 is actually a far more realistic price than $129. But Aeon Trespass: Odyssey still hasn't been delivered to its over 8,000 original backers. And to me it looks as if the original price was miscalculated; maybe understandably so, as they couldn't foresee COVID and the manufacturing / shipping crisis and inflation. Still, I'm guessing that their overall cost is higher than the money they collected from Kickstarter for Aeon Trespass.
In fact, there is no "good" version of interpretation of events here. Either they can deliver the game for $129, in which case the price increase to $299 looks like daylight robbery. Or $299 is a realistic price with a realistic profit margin, in which case the $129 looks woefully inadequate. This isn't a large company that can eat a loss like that without problem. In other words, the money that Kingdoms Forlorn is now bringing in might in part be used to fill the financing gaps of the previous project. It is very hard to get back from a Ponzi scheme financing like that, there is a significant risk that they'll get into even more trouble financing Kingdoms Forlorn to the end. And on Kickstarter, it is the backers who carry most of the risk. When things go south, they might end up having paid a lot of money for a game that never gets delivered. Of course all of this is pure speculation, the finances of small companies on Kickstarter are completely opaque. It is up to the backers to look out for red flags and beware.
My second concern about Kingdoms Forlorn is the state of the prototype they sent out to various YouTubers to play. This is a relatively common practice. And yes, a prototype isn't supposed to be a finished product. However, I have seen many Kickstarter campaigns presenting prototypes of their games, and compared to these other prototypes, the one of Kingdoms Forlorn is comparatively unfinished. One of the YouTubers, who was relatively hyped about the game, admitted that he spent 16 hours trying to understand the rulebook. And the Kingdoms Forlorn Kickstarter page has a section where they are already showing design improvements over the prototype. And somewhere this loops back to my first concern: Wouldn't it have been better if they had waited a few more months for both their first game to deliver, and their prototype to be actually ready to play? It concerns me when obviously the *miniatures* are finished, but gameplay and rulebook are an afterthought.
The core game pledge of Kingdoms Forlorn, including shipping, is €170 ($190). The elite pledge including shipping to Europe is €250 ($280). So the game isn't cheap, and I would be seriously annoyed if the project didn't deliver, or the game turned out to be a dud. On the other hand, in hindsight, the Kickstarter price of the previous game looks like a bargain now. And the Kingdoms Forlorn campaign is one of those campaigns that pile up a lot of stretch goals and daily unlocks, so that by the end of the campaign you are promised a vast amount of stuff. It is designed to trigger your FOMO (fear of missing out), and it is working. So I haven't totally made up my mind yet. There are red flags, but hope springs eternal; this is after all how Kickstarter works. Up to now, all my Kickstarter pledges worked out fine, so should I risk my money on hope? I'm not sure.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 5:15 PM Permanent Link (1) comments
Monday, February 14, 2022
Protected from Lost Ark
I am not really into MMORPGs anymore. Especially not the modern, more action-oriented type. Nevertheless, it was kind of hard to miss the current buzz around Lost Ark, a Korean MMORPG that now got released to a western audience via Steam, and is very popular. While at the same time being very unpopular, for being Free2Play/Pay2Win/expensive. So I thought I could have a look at the free version and see what the hype is all about. And then my government intervened and protected me from Lost Ark.
Here in Belgium, Lost Ark isn't even visible on Steam, because of "predatory commercial practices" falling foul of an anti-gambling law. Apparently the legislation that prohibits games with heavy use of loot boxes isn't limited to just loot boxes, but also covers other more convoluted game mechanics. Interestingly, one factor appears to be player-to-player trading. Genshin Impact, which has loot boxes but no trading, is legal in Belgium. But as soon as players can trade with each other, they can use a mix of in-game and out-of-game systems to pay each other cash for virtual goods. Thus you could theoretically pay money to Lost Ark, be lucky and get something very valuable, and then sell that valuable virtual item for more money to another player. Voila, gambling!
As I obviously can't see for myself, it is kind of hard to judge whether this is justified, and in how far "gambling" is actually possible. But it clearly shows the limitations that government restrictions have: If these "predatory commercial practices" make a lot of money, and are declared illegal by only a few, small countries, companies simply block these countries from these games, and get their money from everywhere else. They wouldn't consider changing their commercial practices until at least the whole European Union and/or United States used the same anti-gambling laws.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:44 AM Permanent Link (12) comments
Thursday, February 10, 2022
The right to be only human
On a personal level, I am not 100% in how far I should today limit my social interactions in view of the current COVID situation. On the one hand the number of cases is very high, due to the omicron variant.
My guess would be, that most people feel like this. Even with perfect information, you can't really know how much danger COVID poses to you today. We don't have perfect information, and some people are downright misinformed. The less information you have, the more you are "sure" of your point of view. Opinions on what the best course of action is vary widely. And a lot of factors can influence those opinions. You can imagine that somebody who makes his living in the hospitality or event industry has a very different opinion on this than somebody caring for an elderly relative in bad health.
What we forget sometimes, is that politicians are only human too. I do not think that any politician of any party in any country really knows the exact effect that COVID rules will have. Even scientists can't exactly calculate how much economic damage some restriction does, compared to how many lives it would save. Even if you could calculate it, it would be an impossible decision to make: How many lives is 1% GDP worth?
So to me it isn't surprising that governments everywhere differ widely in their response. The UK government plans on lifting all restrictions and wants to present a plan of "living with COVID". Meanwhile the Austrian government is the first to have implemented a vaccine mandate, where you can be fined if you aren't vaccinated. People have strong opinions about both of these extremes, but I really can't tell which one of them is more right or wrong than the other. There is presumably some end point in which nearly everybody is somewhat protected against the harsher outcomes of COVID, either by vaccination or by having had the disease, and all restrictions on social contacts are being dropped. But if we can be sure of one thing it is that nobody really knows when we will reach that point, neither scientists nor politicians.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:27 AM Permanent Link (7) comments
Sunday, February 06, 2022
Character creation and minmaxing
Among all my Kickstarter pledges, there is only a single video game that I ever backed: Solasta: Crown of the Magister. That turned out rather well: The game is good, and while on Steam it now costs $40, I got from just a $18 pledge. I'm not saying you should back lots of video games on Kickstarter, they have a much higher failure rate than board games; but in this case, I am happy I did it. So I played the beta of Solasta last year. And then I left it unplayed for like 10 months, waiting for full release and additional content. Since then the sorcerer class was added, and I also bought the DLC that adds the barbarian and druid classes. I also noticed that there are now additional adventures available, besides the main campaign. Time for a new playthrough!
Now I remembered that in a previous run I was a bit miffed that due to certain character creation choices I had made, I didn't have access to certain crafting skills. To avoid that, I looked up Solasta character creation to make sure I choose the right options for crafting. While I didn't find a good website talking about crafting character options, I did come across a site ranking the various character classes. The site gave a rather bad "C" ranking to the barbarian class. But of course for my playthrough, I do want to play the barbarian, druid, and sorcerer, because these classes are new to me!
Now in real Dungeons & Dragons, it doesn't matter if you don't have the most optimized class and build. A good DM will always adjust the challenge to the group composition. But in a video game, the challenges are fixed in advance, maybe modified by a chosen difficulty rating. But if for example you don't take a rogue or other character with lockpicking skills and you come across a locked chest or door you don't have the key for, that is on you. The game expects a certain mix of skills and abilities. You don't have to take the classic fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue party, but it is advantageous to take something similar. Fortunately the barbarian can replace a fighter, the druid a cleric, and the sorcerer a wizard, so I'm taking a rogue as 4th member and should be fine. But I might not have the best possible party, if the barbarian is really less good than a fighter or paladin. I guess I will have to live with that.
In other games, I have followed character creation advice to minmax an optimal party. In Pathfinder: Kingmaker I actually stopped playing my first campaign, because I wasn't happy with the main character I made, so I restarted with a better one. However, I am aware that this optimization and minmaxing has serious disadvantages: I reduces your options. Having more possible choices for character classes is fun, and if you exclude some of them for being suboptimal, you are reducing that fun. On the other side, if a game isn't very flexible with its challenges, you can also reduce your fun by having made bad choices during character creation and now not being able to do certain things. It's a bit of a dilemma, especially if you don't know the game yet, and don't know what will be needed.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:15 AM Permanent Link (2) comments
Thursday, February 03, 2022
Charterstone
I have been playing Charterstone: Digital Edition for several days on my iPad. This is an official digital adaption of the board game Charterstone from Stonemaier Games. The digital edition costs $10 on iOS and Android, $20 on Steam, and $25 on the Nintendo Switch. Yeah, right, video game pricing is weird. As the game plays perfectly well on a tablet with touch controls, I'd recommend the cheap mobile version.
Charterstone the board game costs $70. Of all the legacy board games I am aware of, Charterstone is the most extreme, with the largest amount of stickers. The rulebook resembles a Panini sticker album, it is mostly empty at the start of the game, and gets filled with more rules over the course of the campaign. If you wanted to play the campaign more than once, the board has two sides that start out identical, so you can buy a $25 recharge pack with all the stickers and play again. Or you use Tom Vasel's suggestion and use the recharge pack to build a balanced post-campaign game. Because in the real campaign it is totally likely that some player sections (called "charters") are built with a perfect engine, and in others something went wrong and the different buildings don't work together well. Especially since if you play with less than 6 players, the empty charters get filled randomly.
The digital version can of course be reset to the initial state as often as you like. And with the computer handling all the opening of the crates and applying the virtual "stickers" to the board and rulebook, the digital version plays a lot faster. You can solo a campaign against AI opponents in an afternoon. The board game takes 12 "games" of at least 1 hour each, and even if you play 2 or 3 of those games in a session, it will obviously take you several sessions to finish the campaign. Depending on how often you meet, it can take months to finish the campaign. Even more so than for other legacy games, you can't really switch out players, you kind of have to play the whole campaign with the same group. Most decisions, especially constructing buildings, have a big impact on the subsequent games; and at the end of the campaign there is an overall campaign score for every player.
While the digital version is a lot faster and more convenient, I do hope I will be able to play the physical board game with friends around a table later this year. While the gameplay of the digital version is identical, the social interaction of playing a game with real people face to face is missing. And there is some joy in the physical application of the stickers. But to everyone who isn't sure, I would surely recommend playing the $10 mobile version for a day first before deciding to invest $70 and several game sessions into the physical board game.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 12:27 PM Permanent Link (0) comments
