I’m always looking for storytelling elements in the games that I play. Here are three games I have not written about before, and some more thoughts about a game I discussed at the beginning of the year.

Takenoko

Takenoko is one of those games for which the words “charming” and “delightful” could have been invented – it’s a game about a garden, the gardener who tends it, and the panda which has been let loose amongst the bamboo to eat its fill of the gardener’s work. Your goal as a player is to guide the panda, the gardener and the (unseen) architect of the garden to satisfy goal cards you draw which dictate bamboo colors to be eaten, bamboo formations to cultivate, and tile arrangements to lay out.

The game is played on a board constructed as you go from hexagonal tiles which come in one of three colors and with various improvements that affect how and whether the bamboo grows, as well as whether the panda can eat the delicious shoots. There’s a consistent aesthetic around the components: stylised Japanese artwork enhances the storyline presented in the game booklet, and the individualized player cards and turn counters make for a unified gaming experience. These components support the mechanics very effectively – it’s easy to follow the rules, because the components and the play card design remind you of them.

All this talk of consistency should make it clear that this is a game with a story: a slice of Japanese Imperial life which starts from the short comic strip in the game booklet and continues throughout the game.

Good for kids, too.

Pandemic

One of my favourite arcade games is Missile Command, not because I enjoy it – on the contrary, it makes me panicky and claustrophobic if I actually play – but because I love the way that its design engenders those emotions. It’s a pressure cooker: limited resources, increasingly dangerous attackers, and ever more hopeless odds.

Pandemic is like a board game version of Missile Command.

The players take on the roles of researchers and operational staff working for the Center for Disease Control, seeking to contain and ultimately cure a set of diseases that are plaguing the world population. It’s a cooperative game designed by the same talented designer who made Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, and it shares some of the same mechanisms.

First, the infection deck. This is the part of the game that routinely makes things worse: it dictates where the next infection occurs.

Secondly, the player deck. This is place where the players collect the treasures they need to defeat the diseases, but also contains the escalation mechanic: there are a number of epidemic cards in the player deck which, when picked, increase the rate of infection and then resets the infection deck with the cards already played shuffled and put back on top. This is the same mechanic I adore in Forbidden Island, where bad things that have already happened are the same ones that are going to happen again.

The third mechanic in Pandemic which meshes with the first two is how diseases spread. When a city is drawn from the infection deck, you put a disease cube on it. You can do that up to three times per city per disease, but when it happens a fourth time then there is an outbreak where disease spreads to connected cities – a disease cubes goes to every connected city. This can trigger chain reactions, and when that happens…

Well, let’s just say that there is only one way to win at Pandemic, but lots of ways to lose.

Red November

Drunken communist gnomes on a sinking submarine: it’s not a situation you’d actually want to be in, but it’s a highly entertaining game.

Your goal as players is to survive on the failing sub Red November long enough for rescue to reach you. To that end, there is a time track which the character markers needs to traverse: once everyone’s gnome has consumed all his* time, then the whole crew is saved. You use time by doing things: moving from room to room, picking up items, wading through flooded rooms, fixing things. For repair jobs, your base chance to succeed is linked to how much time you spend with bonuses for having helpful items.

Where it all goes wrong is that as time passes, Things Happen. On the time track there are markers for drawing an event card, and when your gnome passes over one of these a fire will start, or a room will be flooded, or a hatch will block, or the missile countdown will start. Some of these just make a bad situation worse, but things like the missile countdown set a time limit so that if no gnome can fix it before the time is exhausted then the sub is lost.

And I think this is the brilliant storytelling mechanic in Red November: the goal is use up time, but if you use up too much time on one action then too many events will occur while you’re doing that – spend ten minutes fixing the engines, and the reactor could overheat or go critical in the meantime. More than that, the time track is traversed by every gnome, not the team as whole – three players get three sets of event triggers, four players get four. So many, many disasters await you.

Recommended, as long as you can handle the messaging around alcohol in the game. Drinking is not without consequence (a dead drunk gnome can easily end up dead) but the up-front effects of laying into a bottle of grog in the game are beneficial**.

Elder Sign

Having written about Elder Sign at the beginning of the year, I have now played it a couple of times and I wanted to report back on how story-laden it is.

And it is: the locations are atmospheric, and it’s easy to get the feeling that one adventure or another is cursed as every investigator tries to resolve it but fails messily.

There are a couple of problems with the game, though, which prevent it from being quite the immersive experience that one would hope.

Firstly, the colour text on the adventure cards is unreadable. Even on the large format cards that the adventures are printed on, the text is tiny which makes the “atmospheric” font used almost impossible to decipher. All of the game relevant text is perfectly readable, but in neither game I played could I find someone who could actually read the adventure text comfortably.

Secondly, although the basic dice rolling mechanic is terrific at raising tension, the over-abundance of tokens rather gets in the way of play. As you play, you collect and spend stamina, sanity and clues. The clues never abound (you spend them on re-rolls pretty fast) but both stamina and sanity could have been better handled with some kind of counter rather than the tokens. One player said that he’d used d10s in lieu of these tokens in the past, and I think that’s something I will be doing too (although I will need more dice).

It’s still an excellent game despite these hiccups, as long as you understand that the box is simply lying about how long the game takes. It took us three hours to defeat Shub-Niggurath the other night, rather than the 1-2 hours claimed.

[*] this is not a diverse game.

[**] for example: a gnome can only fight a fire if he has a fire extinguisher, or if he drinks a bottle of grog.

look at the lower stack this time

This is the second post covering last week’s stack of games which are new in the sense that I have only recently started playing them. None of them are especially recent in their release, and Ticket to Ride in particular is more than ten years old.

With that observation out of the way, on to the rest of the stack.

Elder Sign

Those Elder Gods – they’re nothing if not tricky. In this game you need to cooperate to stop them intruding into our space.

I’ve played through this game in solitaire mode so I haven’t quite got my head around all of the mechanics of it, but this game oozes storytelling: different adversaries have different effects on the atmosphere of the game, and each adventure has its own distinct feeling in the tasks to be completed.

Which brings me to the particular mechanic I wanted to describe – the tasks, and the dice you roll to try and complete them.

Each adventure requires multiple tasks to be completed, sometimes in a particular order (monsters may form additional tasks for an adventure). The players have game-specific dice which have faces showing results of lore, terror, peril, and investigation. Tasks are fulfilled by matching rolls of these dice to the required targets – so a task might need to match a total of investigation 6, plus a lore, plus a terror die. The combination of these tasks attached to a location tells a story.

To take an example, one adventure is “There’s Something in the Basement”. Its tasks are:

• investigation x 6
• lore
• terror

The story is clear – the investigator enters the basement seeking an explanation for some strange noise, then recognises something about the situation and must fight their fear in order to overcome it.

That’s the narrative element, but in play the story becomes desperate: each time you roll you may complete only one task, but if you do not complete any task then you lose a die for the next roll. There’s a real sense of rising panic during a turn where the dice pool gets smaller and smaller and you’re looking at some dreadful effect on your character if you fail to finish the adventure.

There’s a lot to this game, and it evokes the feelings of terror appropriate to the genre.

Discworld: Ankh-Morpork

The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork has disappeared – who will rise to rule the city in his absence?

This is a game based on the characters and locations in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels concerned with Ankh-Morpork. The game starts with each player drawing a character card which defines their goals – some characters just want to control as much property as they can, others want to sow discord or suppress it for as long as possible. The Patrician is of course one of characters who may be drawn because that is how the man thinks.

Play proceeds by laying down cards whose effects are based on the character depicted: the Fire Brigade threaten to burn down the house of another player if not bought off, while the journalists (Sacharissa Cripslock and William de Worde) earn money for the player proportional to how much trouble there is on the board. The different effects a character may have include placing minions on the board, removing other player’s minions from the board (assassination), and building in the neighbourhoods of Ankh-Morpork to claim those areas. There may also be random events triggered by magic – a dragon may appear to destroy anything in an area, for example.

This is a splendid and exciting game full of back stabbing and front stabbing – trying to figure out other players’ goals while furthering your own – but it is less about the story of the game played as it is about recalling the characters so memorably written by Sir Terry. If there is a story to be told here it is of a teeming city where everyone has their own axe to grind.

My biggest criticism of this game is that it only supports four players.

Ticket To Ride

Claim rail connections between North American cities to satisfy route cards in your hand. Cities that are further apart will garner you more points – L.A. to New York is worth more points than L.A. to Seattle, for example – but you also get points for each connection claimed (longer connections score more) and lose points at the end of the game for route cards you did not finish.

This is an exciting game, but from a story point of view I am dissatisfied with it. The back story in the rules talks about a competition to travel the railways of the US inspired by the epic journey undertaken by Phineas Fogg, but the game itself doesn’t really carry that through – many players think they are meant to be rail barons instead, which story actually fits the game mechanics a lot better.

The narrative mismatch comes from the fact that there is no progression. The goal is to complete a network to connect the pairs of cities you have drawn, but there is no sense of a journey being undertaken because you don’t start in one place and then move to the next. Indeed, completing the route in a sequential way is weak strategy because it gives other players too much information about your goals.

I’d still recommend the game because it is interesting and occasionally frustrating (one friend calls it Angry Trains, and that seems apt) but it’s not strong on narrative devices.

What new games are you playing?

a stack of good games

I’ve bought a number of new games in the last year, and I wanted to address some of them from a storytelling perspective (as I have done before). I’m going to talk about the top of this stack today.

The Resistance

This is a game about treachery.

It’s a pretty stripped down set of mechanics: 5-10 players, a little less than half of whom are traitors to the cause. Each player is sure only of their own loyalty if they are loyal, but the spies know who everyone is. Then one player picks a team to go on a mission, everyone votes on whether that team goes, and those who are on the mission vote to see if it succeeds (although only spies are allowed to vote for it to fail).

The actual story delivered with this game is pretty sparse, being nominally a battle against a near-future totalitarian regime, but there is nothing in the game itself which ties it to a time or place (indeed, Avalon is a variant of the same game set in the Arthurian court), but that very incompleteness is the thing I find most thrilling – we can tell our own stories of the missions. An early mission might be to procure illegal technology,while a later one might be about breaking into the government-controlled broadcast centre to install the data bridge for later hijacking of the programming.

I hate being a spy, but I love painting the scene as the spies betray their trusting comrades and see justice done.

Forbidden Island

A cooperative game of collecting treasures before the island they are on sinks beneath the waves. Every character has a unique ability, and as the game goes on the island sinks faster.

There are lots of ways for this to game to end badly for the players: if the treasure houses for a treasure disappear before the treasure is retrieved, or of one of the players is stranded, or if the helipad sinks.

The location tiles are two-sided: all the tiles start off dry, and when flooded are flipped – the water is lapping over them. In this state the tile can be recovered, but if flooded again are lost.

There are two particular mechanics which heighten the tension here.

First is the water level: this is an indicator of how many tiles are flooded each turn – this rises when special cards are drawn from the treasure deck.

Second is the fact that the same tiles will flood again and again until they are finally lost beneath the waves: when the waters rise, the already-flooded locations are shuffled and returned to the top of the flood deck. This introduces a magnificently Sisyphean element to the game: you shore up a location, then the waters rise and it sinks again.

It’s worth noting that this game is designed by the same designer as Pandemic, which uses a similar mechanic in deciding where the next disease outbreak occurs.

I will cover the other three games in the stack in another post, but what games are you playing at the moment?