In April of this year I reported about a Kickstarter board game called Bardsung, where I first was enthusiastic of receiving it ahead of schedule (which is very unusual for Kickstarter projects), but then found out I didn't like the game, and ended up trading it in. Now Bardsung, like many other games, is a game of two parts: A core activity, which is a dungeon crawl in this case, and a campaign linking a series of these repeating core activities together into a greater whole. Just that in this case the core activity was kind of okay, and the campaign totally sucked, offering very little narrative, and very little change from one dungeon crawl to the next.

Since then I had a few more experiences with board games which made me think about campaigns in board games. Tonight I am having friends over for an evening of Return to Dark Tower, and that game simply doesn't have a campaign mode. We will randomly choose a main quest and a main adversary, and then we play for around 3 hours; at the end we will either have won or lost, but nothing of what we do tonight will in any way influence our next game night with this game. On the other extreme, with the same game group we played through a whole campaign of 11 game nights of Clank! Legacy - Acquisitions Incorporated. And while the individual plays were fun, the main fun was the legacy campaign, where new elements were added to the game, and we put stickers all over the game board.

Earlier this year my wife and me played all the way through a campaign of Roll Player Adventures. Gameplay was on the simple side, but we loved how over the campaign not only the story evolved, but visibly decisions we did in one game session were remembered by the game and led to different outcomes in later game sessions. Like Clank! Legacy, Roll Player Adventures also had 11 adventures to the campaign. Much more is problematic: Bardsung trying to stretch their campaign over dozens of sessions is probably what made me feel that there was too little story and too little change from one session to the next. And even Gloomhaven, which has a decent amount of story, and lots of variety in its 95 scenarios, failed to keep me and my wife interested for more than about 20 sessions, at which point we just gave up. I am one of the few people in the board game space that didn't back Frosthaven, which should be out late this year or early next year; but I looked at it and just thought "why would I need *more* Gloomhaven, I already have more than enough".

In Hoplomachus: Victorum, which I recently reviewed, a campaign consists of 4 acts, with each act being 12 weeks, and each week being one event, which often is one arena combat. But each arena combat can be short enough to not really fill a complete play session, and depending on how fast you play and how long your sessions are, you could play a whole act in one 3-hour or so session. Here is justification for having a campaign is not story, but the mini-bosses at the end of each act, and the main boss at the end of each campaign. If you played the arena fights without a campaign, you wouldn't have the character progression and wouldn't have the sensation of getting stronger to beat the bosses.

As I recently reported, I backed Tainted Grail: Kings of Ruin including the 2.0 update pack to the original Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. And that was clearly a case where in the 1.0 version many players and reviewers said that they liked the core gameplay, but found the campaign progression too grindy and repetitive. It is easier to fix a flawed campaign than it is to fix flawed core gameplay, so I think it is a very good idea for the developers to have gone back to streamline the campaign. Tainted Grail is a game where the core gameplay is relatively short, so some sort of campaign or adventure structure to string several encounters together is certainly necessary even to fill one play session.

One other game I own is Hexplore It Volume I: The Valley of the Dead King. Which used to be a game without a campaign. But the Kickstarter of Volume IV of Hexplore It added Klik's Madness, and 500-page campaign rules and story book to Valley of the Dead King. I haven't had the time yet, but I am interested in how well adding a campaign to a board game a few years later works.

I don't have many games which could be described as "Euro" games, the kind of game which very often is about collecting the most victory points at the end of a session. But I recently bought Wingspan, after having tried the app version. And Wingspan is a game that doesn't have or need a campaign. But somewhere a game like Wingspan has something similar: If you buy a game like Wingspan, it would probably be best to play it repeatedly with the same group of people, who shouldn't already know the game or play it with somebody else. The problem with these Euro games is that there is a strong correlation between your victory points and how well you know the game. If you learn the game with a group of people, and play with them, and they only get better at the game while playing within that fixed group, the challenge for everybody is balanced. But if you play Wingspan the first time against people who already played it repeatedly, the experience would be rather frustrating.

At the same time I bought Wingspan, I also bought Charterstone. Which at its core is also a Euro game with worker placement and counting victory points at the end. But in Charterstone there is a legacy campaign. Which means that the game can start simple, and add more complexity over the campaign. And the campaign structure keeps everybody playing equally often. I don't think there is all that much story in Charterstone, but I can see the interest of having a legacy campaign to structure the repeated session experience of a game group for a Euro game.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 2:40 PM Permanent Link