Can everybody sort of see this even like vaguely because it's got jokes on it and it's quite
important.
If people around here want to laugh along with everybody else, that would be good.
So hi everybody, my name is Quinton Smith, I'm a games journalist of about 10 years standing
and a board game journalist of like 2 years standing.
Everybody's having a good festival so far, it's all, it's all, that's good, cool.
So yeah, I want to talk to you about board games today, I want to talk to you about them
because they're going through something really, really exciting at the minute.
Well I'm calling a golden age and people within the industry also agree with me.
But first of all I want to define my terms.
When I talk about board games I'm talking about niche board game.
I'm talking about games like these, I'm going to walk you through a few just to make sure
we're all on exactly the same level here.
So first of all Catacombs, this retails at like 40 pounds, this is again with the most
trite, tedious sort of theme imaginable.
Catacombs is fantasy heroes adventuring through a dungeon to try and slay some big evil at
the very end of it.
The problem being you're all wooden discs and it's not played with sort of tactics as
much as it's played with dexterity.
If you want your barbarian to hit a monster you flick it at the monster.
If you want to hide from a spider you flick yourself behind one of these stone pillars
right so it can't hit you with its webs.
And the amazing thing about Catacombs isn't when it works and it does work, it's an amazing
really really fun game.
What's amazing about it is when it doesn't work, that makes it way more fun.
If you flick your barbarian at two trolls to hit them both and the token flips on its
side and rolls between them very slowly, that's amazing.
What's even more amazing is when the elf fires an arrow and it bounces off the wizard's
head to kill a skeleton, that's just like super super cool.
So next up we've got Galaxy Trucker, this is a bit more expensive, this is like 4550
pounds.
It was bought a few years ago and it's unbelievable because it captures everything that makes
people watch and enjoy Top Gear Super Tests, right?
What you get is you have this shit, you have to build yourself with one hand from a pile
of these tokens in the middle of a table that will face down so you pick it up and look
it's a labor.
You put it down and anything you put down is stuck there, can't be moved, right?
Which means if you build like say this, has a discard container sticking out to the end
of your ship where it can be hit by an asteroid, you can't move that, you have to work with
it.
The amazing thing about Galaxy Trucker is when people build your ship, before you take
off and go into space, you all spend between three to five minutes making fun of each other's
ships.
Somebody forgot to put any engines on this or no room for cargo or somebody builds a
ship that's just shaped like a cock.
Really, really important.
And then you take off and the amazing thing about the modular design is that when you
fly off your asteroid fields or get shot up by pirates, bits start falling off again.
It's entirely possible but if you have like say one connector that holds together two
sides of your ship and that gets shot by a laser from behind, your entire ship is sheared
in half.
And again, because it's modular and every piece has its own characteristics, your half
of a ship can keep going and it happens and it's amazing.
These little crew cabinets, you might end up sort of crossing the finish line with nothing
but two crewmen in a room floating through space.
So yeah, that's super amazing.
This came out just last month, right?
This is City of Horror and it's a zombie game and it's the best zombie board game ever
made because it understands the great thing about zombie fiction which is it's not about
the zombies.
The zombies are only a backdrop.
Zombie apocalyptic fiction is all about how people react under pressure, which is to say
this is a game where zombies appear every turn and you'll have survivors in the armory
or the church or up in the watch tower and it's all about arguing with the people in
that room because when there are enough zombies out there, you have to throw somebody out.
So in the last game I played, I had a teenager up in the water tower, a friend had a priest
and there were too many zombies down there and we had to decide which of us we were going
to throw out and all your characters are worth different points and sure enough, yeah, the
priest said use your gun on the zombies and I said no, I've got only so many bullets and
my teenager was thrown out and fed to zombies.
In other words, this is a game about zombies that you play only with your mouth.
It's all about talking.
It's also the only horror board game I've played that has elicited a genuine scream from a
player because the vote goes like three, two, one and then you all point.
My friend knew the voting was going to go and so he knew he was going to be thrown out
of the church and he was going no, no, no, no, no, no, and then the vote happened and
everyone pointed at him and sure enough thrown out or blitzed through a couple more.
Shadow Hunters is a Japanese board game.
The last one was called City of Horror.
Cool.
Shadow Hunters is a Japanese board game.
Board games are made all over the world.
Shadow Hunters is amazing because it's quite a trite theme.
It's very anime.
You have demons.
Some players are demons.
Some players are demon hunters.
But the problem is that nobody knows who's on which team.
All your roles are secret.
You have to work out who the other players are and then try and kill them, which means
you might end up stabbing your own teammates.
Basically, it's cluedo, but instead of trying to laboriously solve a murder, you are trying
to kill people and not be killed yourself by working out who people are.
That's super exciting.
A puzzle strike is just, ah, so there was a puzzle fighting game, video game that came
out a while back called Puzzle Fighter, Puzzle Fighter HD, I think, yep, and Puzzle Strike
emulates that and it's a card game, but it uses chips instead of cards.
So what we have here, and I hope I get this right, is a chip game simulating a card game,
simulating a puzzle game, simulating a video game, simulating a fight.
So yeah, all of these games that I'm walking you through have one thing in common, which
is that they are, they're really interesting examples of game design is the way I put it.
Now here's the thing.
So this is my board game site.
We started it like two years ago, and I was wondering, right?
I was wondering if there was a reason we started it when we did, and it's not just us.
We've got Penny Arcade doing not just blog posts about board games, but actual strips.
We've got Rock Paper Shotgun's weekly column on board games.
We've got Continue Magazine just launched.
This is a magazine that covers video game culture and board game culture both.
And something's happening here.
So I started doing some homework, and I went and I talked to a stadium game to distribute
board games in the UK, and I talked to them with regards to sales figures.
And what's coming up is not a real graph, really, but the intent behind it is real.
For the last 10 years, board game sales have been going up every single year by between
10 and 20%.
That's like enormous, and there are two things that are amazing about this.
First of all is the sort of Phoenix-like return of board gaming.
Why did that happen?
And the other thing is that the sales are still going up.
We are in a golden age right now.
It's not just the sales are getting better, because it's not...
Board games themselves are getting better, and the really interesting thing is the sales
of things like Monopoly have flatlined, or they're in decline.
People are realizing there are better board games out there, they're buying more of these
amazing board games.
We are in a golden age, and I'll talk about that, and this was just really lucky before
my talk.
Like three days ago, I saw that in the collector's edition of Bioshock Infinite, you get this,
which is a miniature from the upcoming Bioshock Infinite board game.
So that's mad.
Three years of war board game, that came out a few years ago, but this is the first case
of a triple-A game launching a board game before the game's even out yet.
Something is happening.
It's mad, and it's weird, and it's strange, and it's mostly to do with cultural cross-pollination,
which is a really good series of words that make me sound super clever, so I'm glad I
can say them.
But this is important, right?
So around here, if you were a board gamer, if you were a hardcore board gamer, you spoke
German in the same way that...
That's not like a figure of speech, the hardcore gamers in my local board game club spoke a
little German, because German board games were being imported, because board games are huge
in Germany for much the same reason that violent video games are super, like, they're
really stringent restrictions.
Even today, if you want to release a video game in Germany, you have to remove the blood.
So board games, by contrast, are good, clean, fun, and they're huge in Germany, and they're
designed in a radically different way.
So 10 years ago, when we started importing them, we got Western designers making games
along the same lines, and the things I'd point to that were relevant in German games at the
time is that they were just nice objects.
We've got wooden components, we've got really thick quality cardstock, German games embrace
the physicality of the medium, which is a huge deal, because Western games didn't even
have color manuals 10 years ago.
This is massive.
This is Settlers of Katarnikische.
This is like the biggest selling niche board game that's sold, millions.
And what you're basically trying to do is you're all trying to colonize a virgin island
with two problems.
There's not enough resource, there's not enough space.
So if you want to build a road, you are blocking somebody else.
So it's SimCity, but as you build, it's a sort of tactical building thing where you're
trying to block your opponent.
Anyway, it's fun.
So when I say that German games are good examples of design, I'm talking about the physicality.
I'm also talking about the actual game.
It's sort of roughly like with Western games at the time, you could expect a 20-page manual.
With German games, you expect like two, four pages.
They're accessible.
They're accessible for the whole family.
They're accessible for everybody.
They have really simple clever bits of board game design, like you don't have leaders.
You don't have people sort of winning the race and you know who's going to win early.
Everybody's kept close.
So yeah, another German game that was part of the invasion, which of German games in
the West at the time, Formula D. And this kind of, this is a racing game and it evinces
German design because it's an evolution, it's a brilliant, just smart idea.
It's just good design of a roll and move game.
Roll and move being things like Monopoly, being things like Cludo, in which you roll
a dice and then move around a track.
Now Formula D knew that was sort of entertaining, but it figured out how to evolve it, which
is that you all start off as your cars and you all roll a D4, which is a pyramid-shaped
dice and you roll it, then at the end of your turn you can choose to gear up, and then you
roll a D6, and then you turn it to D8, and then you get all the way up to a D30, which
is like the size of a ping-pong ball.
Oh Jesus.
Yeah, that was going to happen at some point.
My point is that you want to roll the D30 because it's just a physical object, so you
have actual sort of weird simulation of speed-freakery.
And the problem though is these red sections, the corners, depending on the severity of
the corner, like you see a 1 there, that's the amount of times you have to stop in that
corner to not crash and die.
So you're gearing up in the straights and then you have to gear down and you're sort
of doing risk-reward, the whole game is super tense, and yet again super simple because
it's just roll and move.
There's a problem though with German games.
We do have like one feather in our cap with Western board game design, which is that German
games have super thin theme.
In the West, if you look at like games workshop, we're about simulation.
You're a space marine, you're a soldier in World War II.
This is one of the highest rated German games, and it's about beans, bonanza to bean or
not to bean.
This is not me sort of like making a straw man, this is your way Rosenberg, he went on
to design agricula, if you know your board games.
Yeah, there's some beans being traded.
And this doesn't really fly in the West, it doesn't work at all.
But what we got is when German games started coming to the West, you have these Western
designers saying, okay, can we combine European design with our storytelling?
And the answer is that they could.
And this is why board games are getting better.
We've got sort of this mixing schools of thought and taking the best from both sides.
And Twilight Imperium is actually a really good way of evincing what happened, because
this came, there were three editions of this, one in I think 99, then in 2003, and then
another one much later.
And you can see how it evolves during the culture clash.
So Twilight Imperium is like, no, it's a space opera game.
It's sort of along the lines of Civ, where you all have different races and you're all
trying to colonize planets and you're building ships, it's a war game, very, very West and
heavy theme, not really accessible, massive manuals.
And you have the second edition where Fantasy Fly had more money and there's a space lion.
I love that, yeah, we're in deep nerdery here.
But the point is that they had more money to spend and they gave you plastic miniatures,
but they still weren't really paying attention to these German games.
It's just glossier, but it's really the same game.
And then you have TI third edition.
And this is huge.
This is one of the best board games ever made.
And what's amazing about it is it's actually a nice, well, the box art, nice.
What's also amazing about it, though, is they made it a nice object.
They made it desirable.
When you see this on your table, it looks badass, all these ship miniatures and colorful
planets and then not just that, but the cards and the player sheets are gorgeous.
They're so nice.
I need to get something from my bag, because here's the thing, I couldn't find a decent
picture of something in Twilight Imperium.
Then I realized, board gaming, I can just bring it with me.
So yeah, it's a nice object, but more than that, they wanted to improve the design.
And so they implemented these trapezoidal strategy cards.
They were saying, okay, one of the big problems of Western strategy games, and this is actually
true in video games.
So this is one of the areas in which board games are pushing design forward, is that
this player has his go, and everyone watches, and then this player has his go.
And then this player has his go, at which point this player is asleep.
This player wants to kill himself.
And so the question is, it was just a really interesting design problem.
How do we make it more flexible?
The answer is, with these, these sort of like polychromatic cards, at the very beginning
of each round, before everybody's taken their multitude of turns, you pick one of these.
And it's like, we've got political diplomacy, initiative trade, warfare, tech.
And you can move your ships on your turn, or you can trigger this phase.
So the politics phase, you work with politics.
And the thing with that is that all the other players get involved in this politics phase
as well.
So you get this oil on water thing where the colors are actually shifting all the time.
And even if it's not your go, you pay attention to the game because you don't know when you're
going to have opportunities to do cool stuff.
So it's actually an evolution.
And this is German games meeting Western games.
And of course, it has that really strong theme where you're telling this amazing story to
do with bombardments and politics and race war, basically.
Other examples of the state we're in now, then, are the amazing, amazing, amazing Game
of Thrones game.
This is just awesome because it's a perfect Game of Thrones game in that it just lets
people be dicks to each other.
It's just horrible.
I've seen people get in amazing, amazing fights with regards to Game of Thrones because you
have your house.
Let's say you're playing Lannister or Stark, but it doesn't matter because everyone has
the same restriction, which is that you can't really fight a war on two fronts.
So you have to make friends with people.
Like if you're Lannister, you have to sit like at Greyjoy, Serious League, we have to
be friends.
And the only thing more powerful than an alliance of two or even three players is backstabbing
your alliance because you all choose your moves simultaneously and you put tokens down
on armies and then you flip them to reveal what you're doing.
So you say, can you support me?
And you go, yeah.
And then when you all flip your tokens, you're actually invading them, which is fine because
they're actually invading you as well.
But as you can see, it's actually gorgeous.
You've got this lacquered plastic.
It looks amazing on your table.
So this is Western Ingenium Design meeting, fucking, the X-Wing Miniatures game came out
last month.
These are pre-painted miniatures.
They're just gorgeous.
And again, it's an evolution of traditional war gaming because you pick the movement of
each of your ships with dials simultaneously.
So you select your tie fighter, you're going to bank hard to the right and you put it down
and then you flip your tokens and your tie fighter banks right as the X-Wing thought
you banked left and you, ah, and then, so that's all exciting.
It's tense.
It's just better.
But it's not all glossy licensed stuff.
Of course, it's interesting enough that X-Wing, like Star Wars games, Game of Thrones games,
these are coming back.
These are evincing how much money there is in this scene now.
But the cultural thing has also resulted in games like Space Alert.
And Space Alert, I love.
Space Alert, I love holding up to people because it shatters every single preconception you
have of board gaming, right?
First of all, you're working together.
You're running this ship and it's actually a Czechs of Akin game and it has this wonderful
vision of the future.
It's not American Star Trek blu-ray thinking, but what if the future was shit?
The elevators in your ship can only hold one person.
The shields are all powered down to save them on battery life.
There's a screensaver, which you have to, you have to nudge the mouse, otherwise the
entire ship powers down.
And it's funny because, okay, so that's one thing it does.
The other cool thing about it is that you think board games are slow, right?
Everyone has that memory of playing Monopoly with their family and getting bored.
But it's basically that takes 10 minutes.
And those are the most 10 terrifying minutes ever because they're played in real time.
You have a CD that comes with the game and that's the ship's computer and it will say
threat detected off whatever and then your communications officer, go out and we've detected
a threat and the captain goes, shut up, what is it?
You flip a card and it's a black hole and you go, fuck.
And it always combines these things.
So you've got a black hole you're flying into here, you've got an alien attacker flying
in here, you've got commandos that have beamed aboard in here.
You're all running around trying to solve these problems and it's exhausting.
And I love it because it let me experience briefly, when I was the captain and everyone
looks to you, you say, sort out this and put energy there because you've got these cubes
and briefly to get into the mechanics.
This is your central reactor.
If you want to fire the laser, there have to be cubes in the port side of the ship, which
means you have to put in a fuel rod and then draw it over and then fire it.
We technically need three people.
So three people to deal with one threat except you always have to deal with at least three
or four threats and there's only five of you.
That's the central problem.
But yeah, let me experience being a captain and experience all the things humans must
have felt throughout history when they just didn't know what to do.
I was just petrified and my crew said, what do I do?
And I didn't know.
And I couldn't say I don't know because then the entire game is broken.
So I had to fake that I knew what I was doing.
So yeah, this is what's happening.
But I can tell you these games are good.
But that doesn't speak of the energy in the scene.
That doesn't speak of, wow.
And so what I instead hold up is dominion and not just dominion by itself.
What happened to the dominion?
Right?
The dominion came out in 2008 and I don't know these people.
And dominion's central thing is that you're all sort of medieval land though, which is
German games with the themes very thin.
You don't really know what it is.
But the point is you have a deck and you have all these cards you can buy and your deck
to begin with is this really thin, reedy deck of cards and you draw a few cards off it and
you use them.
And mostly you use them to buy more cards and the object is to get these green cards,
which are victory point cards.
They don't do anything.
So they clog up your deck.
But the reason dominion is thrilling is it taps into the part of the human brain that
enjoys watching something grow and your deck is basically a tiny child and it starts off
and it has all the potential in the world and as it grows it starts not doing what you
tell it to.
You have this engine and you go, oh yeah, I'll put in a watch tower and a bridge and
that let me do this combo and then they never show up at the same time.
And so gradually you have this thing where you have a sort of beginning game where it's
full of potential, mid game where everybody's trying to get a rain on their deck and then
by the end you'll see who's made a wonderful engine and who's made a mess.
But yeah, it only takes 40 minutes, 45 minutes, super accessible.
You can explain the rules in 60 seconds.
And then Thunderstone came out the year after that and this was the West saying, okay, dominion
is cool but it's got no theme.
So Thunderstone is the most masculine game ever where your deck is not bland or whatever,
but it's heroes descending into a dungeon.
You have torches, you have weapons, you have heroes and when those heroes level up, you
remove the cards from your deck and you put in bigger cards and you kill amazing things
like the unchained and when you fight it, you gain a disease because that's how hardcore
this game is.
But it's just dominion.
It's dominion but with theme.
So we've already picked up this idea.
We've already evolved it.
The very next year we had Puzzle Strike, that game I talked about earlier, and Puzzle Strike
said yeah, okay, this is cool, we've got this theme, we've got this amazing game, but players
are still playing their own game.
Players aren't playing with each other.
So in Puzzle Strike, rather than trying to amass monster card or victory point cards,
you have these gem chips and you're trying to do combos that'll knock gems into your
opponent's pile because to win you have to be the last man standing because when you
fill up this thing on the other opponent's player sheet with gems, they're out the game.
So you're not playing your own game, you're pushing gems into their stack and it has this
amazing mechanic where the more gems are in your stack, the more cards you can draw.
So the closer you are to dying, the harder you fight, resulting in like amazing back
and forth.
The very next year!
Oh, the very next year!
We have A Few Acres of Snow and this is a sickeningly well-designed game.
This is just beautiful.
It's a war game between the French and English fighting for control of their Canadian colonies.
Which sounds like whatever it sounds like.
But it uses deck building to simulate the logistics of running a war in a foreign country.
And again, okay, I'm not selling this.
The point is you have your deck and your deck represents all your soldiers, the Indians
you've recruited, the priests, the sort of home support, the boats.
More importantly, it contains cards for every piece of territory you control.
And the territory cards are relatively useless, which means the more you spread yourself,
the more land you spread yourself over, the less control you have.
And you have these, every hand of cards you draw is a story because you need soldiers
and then your deck, which is basically your subordinate, says you don't have any soldiers,
not now.
We need boats, no boats, they're all somewhere else.
And you just can't do this.
And the amazing thing is, it's a war game, but really you're fighting your own logistical
battles and it's amazingly tense.
Because if your deck would do what you wanted it to do for just one turn, you could hit
Montreal and you could take it and you could end the game, but it never gives you that.
And the coolest thing about this is there's actually a sort of administration card.
As a general, you can say, this is a mess.
We need administration.
And the administration card, when it comes up in your hand, lets you remove cards from
your deck permanently with the twist that there's no way of getting rid of the administration
card.
So if you build a military administration, there's no way to remove it.
Like you are sort of permanently deciding, we need more desks, we need people sort of
running the war for me.
And then that starts getting in your way as well.
So that was four evolutions of the same idea in four years, which is faster than triple
A games do it.
So yeah, absolutely.
There's an energy here that's a big deal, but as far as sales going up, there's boring
reasons as to why sales are going up, which I'll cover briefly, which are like the idea
of Amazon basically means you get these amazing board game sales because people don't need
to live near shops anymore.
Because if you live in a sort of, if you live up a mountain in Aberdeen, and I don't know
if Aberdeen has mountains, but if you do do that, then suddenly you can order your games
from Amazon.
There's the web culture of reviews that let you see exactly what games you should be buying.
But I think a big reason board games are coming back is this, and this.
It's the couch co-op that we all remember that gaming has actually dropped the ball
on recently in it.
And here at Game City, you have a lot of indies trying to bring that back.
But still, the commercial scene isn't quite there.
And board games fill that gap.
We are hard coded to sit down with our friends and just enjoy one another's company as animals.
And board games let us do that.
And that's especially important in England, because it's especially important in England
because we have real trouble sitting down with people we love without alcohol.
And I say that not as a joke, I think it's true, and I think it's a tragedy.
This is me and my friends actually sitting down, and I love this, because we're not
even drinking alcohol, that's coffee, and this is my friend laughing, and this is him
invading him.
And it makes me smile when I look at it.
The point is that board games are there for us if we want to sit down with people, and
the fact that video games can't do that at the minute means that board games are picking
up the slack.
So yeah, this is why all this is happening.
And I think at this point, I've probably convinced you that something cool is happening,
just with sort of blunt figures and facts.
And the next bit of the talk is really for people who aren't necessarily playing board
games in the minute and buying them.
Because I think anyone of you now, having heard what I said, you could walk past a
game shop like this, and if you don't play board games, you'd go, oh, board games, yeah,
that scene's getting big, but I don't know if you'd be convinced to go in and buy one
of these.
I think there are barriers in your way, and I've tried to identify those, and I want
to bring them up on the TV one after another, and I want to judo chop them into submission,
because none of them are true.
And I think we get tangled up in our own thoughts, sort of.
So this is the big one, I think.
Why play board?
You're all busy, you're all playing video games, you're all having an amazing time
playing video games, and so why play board games?
You're having fun already, you have your leisure time filled.
And the answer is that, and I don't, it's not really a pleasant truth, but video games
are functionally disabled.
We are so blinded by everything that video games can do, because they're a new medium,
that we forget what they can't, and there is a massive thing that they can't do which
is talking, and talking actually defines humans more than anything else, and video games
just can't do bluffing, they can't do alliances, they can't really do joking.
I mean, there are exceptions, broadly.
Video games are fundamentally like, yeah, they just don't do that whole mechanic, and
board games do cater to that.
This is an amazing, this is the Battlestar Galactica board game, which I'm sure lots
of you have heard of, and again, it's sort of a space alert thing where you're all trying
to guide a ship through all kinds of troubles, with the thing that at the beginning of the
game you receive a card telling you whether you're actually a human or an asylum, so whether
you're actually trying to sabotage the ship or work with it, and there are facilities
to put people in jails or even execute them.
If you know they're asylum, but nobody knows who the salons are, so ultimately you just
end up bickering.
There's a base star outside, and you've only got two nukes, and the admiral says, fire
the nuke, and you go, why would you say that, we're fine, because that would, why would
you throw a nuke at a base star when you're actually okay, and then let's put the admiral
in the brig, and this all happens.
The talking mechanics can actually be even more solid than that, so this is the resistance,
and this is super important.
The resistance is one of the sexiest and most entertaining games I've ever played, and it's
just talking, it's just talking.
At the beginning of a game of resistance, which is for between five and ten people,
you're all given a card that again tells you whether you're an actual member of the resistance
or a double agent, a spy, and the game then simulates all the meetings that you have,
all the meetings that you have as a sort of resistance cell, and who you're going to send
on those missions, so we might say, okay, I'm going to send Louis and Cara, and then the
mission comes back, and it's a sabotage, it's failed, which means I know that one of them
is a spy, we don't know who, okay, see, now you're all pointing at Louis, and maybe Louis
isn't a spy, or maybe they're both spies, and it's just talking, it's saying, I don't
trust you, it's a game of lying to your friends' faces.
It is a game where you watch your friend and his girlfriend argue and accuse each other
of being spies for an hour, and at the end of the game it turns out they were both spies
and just tricking the entire table, and so my point with my chatter is that if you want
to consider yourself a gamer and you don't think board games are important, well you're
actually not getting all the genres, it's like saying I'm a video gamer so I don't
need to play strategy games, it's a whole new field, and I think any of us would be
shocked if there was a genre of video games that we just didn't know about or weren't
part of, and then there's the stuff board games are doing which video games could be
doing which they're just not, because there are so many ideas out there and video games
just haven't had time to explore them yet, or it's not commercially viable.
So this is Descent, and it's another game of heroes exploring a dungeon and one player
controls the monsters, but here's the thing, Fantasy Flight released for Descent, and it's
insane, is they said, okay, what if every single dungeon that you play, which takes
like four hours, was one sort of level in a massive big campaign, it turns Descent into
Lord of the Rings where the evil guy is sieging cities, and it takes 300 hours to finish and
the heroes are having entirely in character accidental discussions like, well, we could
travel up the rivers to forge, but we really need that magical sword that's in Greyhaven.
And then you have these amazing sort of fights where the heroes actually do occasionally
face off against the lieutenant, and that's like in Lord of the Rings, you know, who's
a, oh my God, I'm drawing a blank, can somebody shout out a bad guy from Lord of the Rings,
who was in Sauron, the Witch King, that's your actual showdown with the Witch King.
And then Fantasy Flight said, okay, what if the heroes had a boat, and you can see here
that the card stock kind of raises over the boat, that's because you can pay money to
extend your boat and get more cards, and then they said, we're going to have an island
and more cards and weapons, and this is maximalist game design, all right, I don't know anyone
who's ever finished a game of this, but I know loads of people who said, this is the
most badass thing in the world, let's get our friends together and do it, and video
games, it's just not commercially viable, so yeah, why should you play board games in
addition to video games, because board games are exploring other sides of our hobby, you
know, and then there's stuff that video games really should be doing, and they're not.
This is Cyclades, or Cyclades, depending on whether you're right or wrong, and it's a
game where all the players are sort of Greek soldiers trying to capture each one of the
other's islands, you're building boats and soldiers and invading and temples and the
object of the game is to build two cities, but to do anything, to build ships or move
them, you need to win a bid on Poseidon with all the other players, for soldiers you need
to win a bid on Ares to build, you know, if you want philosophers you have to win a bid
on Athena, which means you have auctions, really vicious auctions, where like, before
the battle even happens, you know that if you can actually beat the guy on a bid for
Ares, then he can't even invade you at all.
And auctions are an amazing piece of game design, again, mostly to do with talking,
and why don't video games do auctions, board games do all the time because they're amazing
fun, auctions are just cool, especially because they lend yourself to bidding too much and
then realising you've actually ruined your entire gaming experience.
So, yeah, right, so, yeah, there is stuff happening in board games that video games
aren't quite exploring, that's reason enough alone to get into the hobby.
And then we have the next issue, which I think is kind of a thorny one, which might not apply
to people in this room as much as it might apply to people watching online, which is
that board games are a nerdy pursuit.
And if you don't know if you believe that, then the question is whether you would be
comfortable playing one of these games in a pub, or whether you'd be comfortable reading
a manual or having a dummy game at home in your own apartment, or whether you'd be comfortable
trying to persuade six of your friends to play Twilight Imperium for eight hours.
And that's weird, that's weird and it's very strange and it's interesting because it means
your head goes to this and it ties into the public image problem that board games have
at the minute, and your head doesn't go to this.
And there's a really important thing about board games that I want to express, which
is that board games within all of gaming are about the only aspect of it that allow the
players to be cool, right?
Video games have reached a degree of cultural acceptance, but even the coolest video games,
like I don't know, a fighting machine arcade cabinet or dyad or something, if you play
those games, you're just in this vegetative state and it's the game that looks cool.
But because board games are about the players, they're only ever as cool as you are.
And again, with the pub analogy, you might think board games are nerdy and I could never
possibly play them in a pub.
But if you walked into a pub and you saw a bunch of good looking, entirely confident
people laughing over a game and you didn't know what it was, they would be cool, wouldn't
they?
And I think so.
I think so.
And I think the reason that board games have this degree of cool is because they're actually
sort of endemic throughout human history.
There is imagery there, there is really powerful imagery because they are ancient, you know?
Board games and card games and table games in general have been kicking around as long
as the human race has and play has been kicking around for longer.
I mean, to say that board games aren't cool is one thing and then I say, what the fuck?
Like, it's built into our actual language, you know, like metaphors to do with rolling
the dice, to do with playing your cards close to your chest.
And that's interesting and it's interesting and it bugs me because I think we should be
taking this back.
It really weirds me out when we have gamers saying we're part of the legacy that dates
all the way back to the 1960s.
And, you know, like, and that's odd, that's weird and that's what I'm trying to think.
The, probably because I'm thinking about 5,000-year-old Babylonian backgammon sets, which we did actually
excavate recently, but we should be taking this back, shouldn't we?
We should be claiming things like Twister as ours.
And I think Twister is fucking cool because, I mean, we can point a video and even say
what's happening in our culture is amazing and cool, but we have never achieved anything
as awesome as letting teenagers rub up against each other.
Twister actually circumnavigated certain social norms by letting us rub up against each other
like cats and that's awesome.
That's massive.
We should take this.
We have a statue of Kip Marlowe.
I want it to be raised and Kip Marlowe was Shakespeare's nemesis and he was stabbed in
the eye after a card game.
These are our people.
It's not fucking Peter Molyneux.
And I'm saying this without a shred of irony.
I think it's really important that we reclaim gaming as a history rather than leaving it
to the wolves and letting it, I think it's a shambles that we've let board games become
uncool and monopoly be the buzzword for this 5,000 year old hobby of ours.
And I think reason enough to buy board games is that they need our help right now.
It's like games are okay.
Games have sort of reached cultural normalcy and now as gamers we need to take back sort
of this injustice.
So yeah.
And also the fact that if board games are in the golden age right now and I'm right,
then in getting involved in board games and playing Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition now,
that's like Zork in 1992.
That's Half-Life in 98.
In board game terms, it's the Sex Pistols in 1977.
It's massive and I don't want any of you to have that slip you by.
And I'm sort of coming on super strong at the minute and I'm sure some of you are thinking,
okay, no, seriously, like we've got video games, surely I can sit comfortably in knowing
that I'm looking forward and that I'm looking at amazing games like Half-Life 2 or Metal
Gear Solid 3 or Brave.
Amazing examples of game design rather than board games which, I mean, in some light seems
like this sort of like brackish milk which video games have grown out of like mold.
And that's wrong because board games are actually the bedrock of game design.
You can't think of board games as separate to video games because board games are just
game design in exactly the same way that video games are.
I mean, a brief show of hands.
Who's played and loves the new Axcom?
We've got some people.
I thought it would be more, but that's okay.
It's incredible, but the lead designer, Jake Solomon, has an interview stated that when
he was designing this, it didn't work.
And he went to Sid Meier's house, Sid Meier of Civilization fame, and they designed a
board game with little plastic men and dice because that let them get back to the earth
of game design.
And the game that Sid Meier designed is the game that's in the new Axcom.
It's massive and it's important.
And paper prototyping is yet more evidence that we can't really shrug off board gaming.
Paper prototyping is this movement where Indies make their games in paper to make sure
the mechanics work.
And that's a thing.
And it speaks of the strength of board game design tools because there's a problem that
video games face.
Another problem that we're not really willing to look at quite in the face, which is that
if we want to design a game, if you have this amazing vision for a game about a rhino who
solves problems and crimes, rhino that solves problems would be better than rhino that solves
crimes, I think.
But the immediate question is, do you know how to code?
Do you have an artist?
Do you have a sound guy?
Do you have a...
Whoever he is?
And that's a massive, massive problem.
Whereas all you need to make a board game is this.
And it's not just the accessibility of these tools that it's amazing, and I'm not being
farcical when I say that because look how close this is to this, which is String Railway,
which is a massive game in Japan at the minute, which literally has you placing railway tracks,
which are just pieces of string.
And it's amazing fun.
But the accessibility of these tools is super important.
Anyone can pick this up and make a board game, which I think is what we would all want
from video game design tools, that kids can pick this up and make a game.
That's a huge deal.
And there's another thing, which is that this is lossless game design.
Again, you can't say board games are the past when the tools you use for making board games,
you are using for making board games, provide a degree of lossless game design, which is
peerless within video games.
Every one of these games is a shrink-wrapped idea.
There is no...
The coder couldn't quite get the mechanics to work.
There's no...
It's too short.
It's a person's vision in a box and you can buy it, which is amazing and just super, super
important.
And more than that, more even than that, every board game ever shipped comes with the most
powerful mod tools in existence because you can just set fire to the manual.
The board game remix kit was made by London design firm, Hyden Seek, and it just takes
monopoly scrabble, trivia pursuit, and Cludo, and remixes the rules, resulting in things
like war, scrabble.
Well, you're not competing to make the most words, but the most dangerous thing.
And then you have sort of fights.
And it needs an adjudicator because otherwise you end up having an argument, so who would
win in a fight of a UFO and Batman?
But yeah, this is a thing.
I mean, shouldn't we all be sort of encouraging...
I'm just going to go back to that last slide.
This is so important because before anyone can even use a computer, we can have them
designing games.
And what I'm showing you Half-Life 2 and Brayden and all that stuff, we love those games, not
because they're great video games, but because they're great examples of game design.
And as long as board games have the best tools in existence for making them, we cannot ignore
them because that would be to sort of just make everything harder for everybody who
comes after us.
We should be encouraging people to play board games because it will be encouraging game
design purely because you can't not do it.
If you ever play a board game with people who don't like it, they immediately start
trying to fix it with house rules.
And I want to sum up all three of those points, which is that board games are cool, the mod
tools are powerful, and board games are cool, the mod tools are powerful, and they're doing
stuff that games don't with risk legacy, which came out two years ago and I think proves
all of my points.
Risk legacy is a version of which it comes in a little suitcase and you sit down to play
it with five people and you will sign the board.
And you sign the board and you can do things like found cities and sort of arms caches
around and your game will slowly evolve.
More than that, the box comes with sealed sections and it says open in case of two cities
being destroyed.
So after like two or three games, the games evolving, the rules are changing, there are
more miniatures, more cards, your game by about five games of risk legacy is unique to
every other game of risk in the world, which video games have never done and board games
are experimenting.
And remember when I was telling you that Dominion evolved like once every year?
This is going to evolve too.
And it's going to be doing phenomenal stuff in three years time.
And the absolute coolest thing about it is that my friend who owns it was lifting up
the inlay to make room for it and he found another pack of cards sellotape to the inside
that read do not open ever.
And him and all of his friends have decided that when they finish their 15 game campaign
and you can keep playing after that, the campaign's 15 games, they're going to set fire to these
cards.
They're going to burn them.
And I love that board games are actually encouraging ritual.
And that's super cool and super, super exciting.
Yeah, so we're sort of at the end of the talk now and I wanted to end it, well, originally
with me parroting Riga Howe's speech at the end of Blade Runner with the things I've seen.
I've seen the tag ships on fire off the shores of Orion in board game form.
And then I realized, you know, like her sort of, I've seen entire species crushed onto
the heels of angry robots who were just bored and houses collapsed, killing the children
inside all that.
And it would be true, but it wouldn't be what's cool about board gaming.
So instead, I leave you with this.
My name is Quinton Smith, and I am a board gamer.
And I have seen my friend Paul close himself off to the world and not talk to anyone for
several days.
I have seen my friend Phil almost punch a man clean out for basic incompetence.
And I've sat down to table and fallen in love with someone because they remembered to toggle
a screensaver.
And that won't mean anything to you until you go out and you play Space Alert.
Thank you all very much for your time.
