So I spent a good chunk of this weekend playing Civilization, please note that’s not Civilization which I firmly expect to spend a good chunk of… well October playing. I say a good chunk of my weekend but really much of the time spent playing would have been otherwise completely unproductive. I.E. I would have been asleep.
This brings up rule one of Civilization, don’t talk about… no wait wrong club… don’t even think about starting later than midday. Not if you want to get to bed at a reasonable time. Now I’d like to point out, for those in the know, that we were playing the Gibson Games Edition with no expansions. I’ve heard other versions play a little faster, but I’m not sure. I’d love to play a few more games to find out.
I love playing Board Games but for some reason they seem to be treated as second class citizens in the gaming fraternity. You know how it is, people will think of themselves as Roleplayers who sneer are Larpers who both sneer at Wargamers who all sneer at CCG’ers who don’t notice because they are trying to build a deck to beat Jund (ooo look my one bit of topical Magic knowledge). And then there are Board Games, the things you do when you’re not doing your main thing.
Actually that’s not fair, I can generally find a bunch of people for a game of Talisman on a Saturday. Though my position as hand dandy rule book can get a bit annoying (on Saturday while playing Civ there was a game of Talisman going on, and rather than employ the skills of literacy the players solved rules questions by shouting them at me… you know who you are). I think it’s getting together for a big game (like Civilization, Twilight Imperium or the World of Warcraft game) that’s hard to do. The thought of sitting around for 4-6 hours playing one board game seems to confuse people.
Personally I love it, I love the table banter and the focus a good long game can have. Thinking about it I think I know why for many people the idea of playing a game for 4 hours (or more) is hellish. Monopoly and Risk, both of these are games that people may well have played when they are young. They are also games with a pretty open ended structure, they can carry on for a very very long time. Add to this the fact that often one person (sometimes two people) will get in a dominant position and everyone else is basically screwed. I think this is mainly because both games are all about losing, in so far as the only way to win is to make everyone else lose. And once you’re losing it’s very hard to make a come back but the sensible player who is winning will consolidate and take there time to ensure they don’t lose to a bad random event. This means you end up playing a long game that’s extremely tedious for everyone but one person who had a great time.
Civ on the other hand is more balanced, even if a player gets a dominant position it won’t last that long and victory doesn’t depend on wiping out your opponents anyway. In fact the players who did best in our game on Saturday didn’t really get involved in conflicts, our Egyptian player spent most of the game just expanding his lands (and avoiding the occasional flood). Similarly I played a game of Risk I enjoyed last week, but that was the God War version and it has a limited number of turns to play in. One of my most recent favourite game is Chaos in the Old World and that has a ‘You all lose’ time limit that really focusses the attention.
I think my point here, to all those people who came up to us on Saturday night saying ‘Are you still playing the same game?’ in tones of incredulity. Yes we were, it was fun, you should give it a try.
Oh that and I may be a little bit tired now.
Note on the title: I meant to mention this, the last time I managed to get a game of Civ was sometime in the mid 90′s. Hence why it’s a blast from the past.
Add to this the fact that often one person (sometimes two people) will get in a dominant position and everyone else is basically screwed. I think this is mainly because both games are all about losing, in so far as the only way to win is to make everyone else lose. And once you’re losing it’s very hard to make a come back but the sensible player who is winning will consolidate and take there time to ensure they don’t lose to a bad random event. This means you end up playing a long game that’s extremely tedious for everyone but one person who had a great time.
I think that sums up my issue with a lot of the long board games, hence my predicament for suicide moves when I’ve already lost and am waiting for the game to realise it.
Long games in general I really do enjoy and it is good to see a resurgence of them at GUGS. Sometime in the near future I’d really like to get a game of BSG in using the expansion, which will take many hours but because of the co-op nature avoids the one person in a losing position.
I’d be up for that. I’ve also found Shadows Over Camelot went down well with people. Again a game where you can’t ‘lose’ as such.