1995 Called: It Wants Settlers of Catan Back

It appears Wired Magazine has only just discovered Settlers of Catan. Stay tuned for their groundbreaking follow-up article, "Computers: The Next Big Thing?"

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game

Fantasy Flight Games are, hands down, the majestic emperors of the licensed boardgame market. These guys know how it is done. They make really excellent games that play well and capture wholesale the spirit of their source material.

I loved War of the Ring, I was an enthusiastic convert to A Game of Thrones, and now I am thrilled to bits with Battlestar Galactica.

This is, naturally, a game based on the modern incarnation of the show rather than its prehistoric origins, and most of your favourite characters are involved. You can play as obvious choices like Adama, Starbuck or Baltar, or some less overexposed characters such as Tyrol, Zarek and Helo.

Gameplay focuses on the first season-and-a-half of the show and, although the box art shows the bearded Baltar of Season Three, you won't find anything in the cards or rules that spoils stories further along than the discovery of the Resurrection Ship. Every player is, at least notionally, a human, and the co-operative goal is to guide Galactica and her civilian fleet safely to Kobol (not Earth).

However, every player is dealt a "loyalty card" at the start of the game, and another one halfway through. These cards can reveal to a player that they're secretly a Cylon, at which point they begin discreetly sabotaging the fleet either alone or in conjunction with another Cylon player. The Cylons, naturally, win if Galactica runs out of any of the key resources: fuel, food, morale and population.

Play revolves around the handling of crises, one of which is randomly drawn from a "crisis deck" each turn. These are problems which typically involve a choice between two unappealing options (lose 1 food or lose 1 fuel, etc), or a "skill test". In skill tests, players play numbered and coloured cards from their hand secretly into a pool. Cards of the correct colours for the test count towards a goal and cards of other colours subtract; if the total goes over the difficulty of the challenge, the humans pass, but otherwise they fail with disastrous consequences. Cylon players, of course, will normally be secretly playing aganist the vote, masked in their schemes by the contribution of a "destiny deck" which adds random cards to every vote and thereby obscures any toaster shenannigans going on.

The real hook to the game is finding and identifying the Cylons; this can be a really gripping political challenge, with everyone prevaricating as though there is no tomorrow. There is no way to test for Cylons (barring a quirky ability of the Baltar character), so if you think you've figured out who the robots are you'll have to send them to the brig - an action that involves a skill test. Brigged characters are essentially powerless until voted out.

The Cylons can also reveal themselves, which results in them getting shot in the head and sent to the Resurrection Ship. Once revealed, they gain new powers but lose the opportunity to sow dissent; it's clearly intended to only be a valid gambit once the jig is well and truly up.

Looking for Cylons is great fun. This is the core of the game, and it's what brings you back for more. The characters are also really interesting, each one packing unique and surprisingly well balanced abilities. Baltar, for example, is more likely to be a Cylon, but has the ability once a game to test if one other player is a Cylon. Saul Tigh can steal the Presidency and give it to the Admiral. Helo, the ship's "moral compass", can turn a traitorous decision upside down when pressed.

Unfortunately, if there are no Cylons in the first half of the game (because they're coming up in the later "Sleeper" phase) or if all the Cylons have been revealed, the game gets quite dull. With the "possibly a Cylon" factor eliminated, there is generally a clear "best" move in any given situation - the game can practically play itself. Playing a revealed Cylon is also not terribly exciting.

The game also uses a "Sympathiser" mechanic in games with even numbers of players as a way of balancing out the game - Sympathisers join whichever side is losing at the halfway mark - but this mechanic doesn't seem to work very well or be much fun for anyone. Another role that isn't much fun is being a pilot, who's typically expected to fly around Galactica shooting Cylons, but this gameplay is far shallower and less fun than what's happening on ship so few experienced players will volunteer for it.

There's a lot of pieces in Galactica, and the setup time is about 10 minutes, but the profusion of components is generally justified. The pieces are high quality, starting with a really excellent board and moving on to full-colour cards featuring art assets from the show. You get little plastic Cylon Raiders and Human Vipers, and the tokens for each character are a thick piece of card wedged vertically into a plastic base.

Battlestar Galactica isn't a perfect game, but it's still a strong game, and the thrill of playing something which captures the feel of the show so well more than compensates for its mechanical weaknesses. Trying out different characters provides a lot of inherent replayability, and the dynamic also substantially changes with different numbers of players, so there's always something new to see and do when you sit down for a round of Galactica. If you're not a Galactica fan the game is strong enough on its own to support you for two to three playthroughs, and it generally makes sense without having to understand the scenarios and characters involved.

If you're a fan of boardgames and of Battlestar this is a must-buy. It's excellent. For everyone else, it's still strongly recommendable, and a steal if you happen to see it at budget prices.

Loose Morals And Go Fish

In case you're not yet sold on the videogames-and-violence controversy being largely a case of selective reporting, boardgaming blog Purple Pawn has taken the effort to round up no less than nine stories in the last week linking violence to traditional family boardgaming. Go check it out.

These probably came about because people bought playing cards whose contents were not adequately classified. The inherent difficulty in keeping unclassified boardgames out of the hands of children is a real and ongoing issue in our modern society.

Excerpts:

State College, PA: Man plays board games with a few guys, and then one of them later breaks into his apartment and wakes him up by molesting him.

Winona, MI: Sex offender charged with molesting a 6 year old girl during a game of Go Fish.

Chicago, IL: Four women beat and stab a man to death after he breaks one of their cigarettes at a card game.

Alameda, CA: Man stabs to death his friend over a game of chess.

Monopoly

Monopoly is a bad game. Monopoly is a bad game that people play. Monopoly is a bad game that prints money as if it had secretly shackled an army of gold-summoning leprechauns to its factory floor.

Monopoly, as a study in game design, is all about the difference between quality and the perception of quality.

We've all played Monopoly, right? I'm talking about the Parker Brothers game on the square board where you're buying property and charging people rent. The one with the fistfuls of paper cash and the little plastic dog.

Yep. It's a bad game.

What does Monopoly do wrong?

Accounting
The game uses an unfeasibly large amount of paper money that players are forever having to pass around the table. You spend as much time adding, subtracting, and making change as you do actually playing the game. To make matters worse the game regularly uses the concept of "ten percent" just to make things that little bit more complex. Admittedly, to some extent the accounting is the game, but I can't help but feel that the satisfying feeling of passing cash around the table could have been retained without turning every player into a mathematician-slash-retail-clerk.

One way to do this would be to standardise the denominations. Remove the $1, $2 and $5 notes and have everything come in denominations of $10. You'd have less change-making over trivial amounts, less game components to sort through, and the maths would be simpler throughout. (You could just as easily deflate the currency and remove the $500 note but (a) humans find big numbers and multiples of 10 satisfying and (b) the big numbers are part of the flavour of the game.)

Slow resolution / exclusive victory condition
A game of Monopoly is decided in the first three passes around the board (often even sooner). After that point the relevant property has been bought, and, barring some truly unlikely dice rolling, the rich are only going to get richer and the poor poorer.

Despite this, it can take hours to actually meet the victory condition in the game. The victory condition is, specifically, to be the last man standing on the board, so you're not winning so much as being the last to lose. Losing is based on running out of assets, and there are relatively few ways for wealth to leave the table, so with each player bowing out everyone else tends to become comparitively better armoured, making it take even longer until the next elimination.

The game should instead declare a victory condition of a player accruing a total of X cash, or being the first to build X hotels. The rulebook does include two alternative victory conditions; one finishes the game after two player bankruptcies, while the other sets a real-world time limit. These are both sloppy solutions to an easy problem. Victory conditions should be based on specific criteria, they should be individual (ie contingent on the success of one player rather than the failure of others), and they should be easily and quickly achievable as soon as any player displays a clear and sustained edge over their competition.

Jail
Jail is just not fun. It might be an icon of the game, but there is nothing exciting about being arbitrarily removed from play for one to three turns. If the element was going to be included in the game, it should have been tactical - contingent in some way upon deliberate player actions.

Mortgage and bankruptcy
First up, mortgage and bankruptcy are just not fun words. Playing a game about mortgages and bankruptcy is not inherently entertaining. Secondly, the rules for both of these parts of the game are complicated, slow, and heavy on accounting. No surprise, then, that these are the two most heavily house-ruled aspects of Monopoly, at least in my experience. It seems everyone I've played with has their own custom way of handling these situations, and almost all of them are better than the game as printed.

An example of the problems with these rules: you can avoid bankruptcy by selling swathes of your property. This is a losing move - you don't recover from selling property in Monopoly. The rich will get richer faster, and you, without a source of income, will get poorer faster. You're still losing, but not straight away, so the game has been unnecessarily prolonged while you continue not having fun. The rules for bankruptcy use, in one paragraph, the terms "one-half", "10 percent", and "principal", which really makes the whole thing sound more like tax law than a family boardgame.

Few meaningful choices
It is always the correct choice to buy property when given the opportunity. It is always the correct choice to build houses once you can. The only meaningful choices come in trades with other players, and trades are easy enough to assess that two good players won't enter into one as both will only offer deals that advantage themselves over the opponent. A lack of hidden information makes for poor trading gameplay.

What does Monopoly do right?

It's tactile
It's fun to play with the Monopoly pieces. Bundles of fake money, tiny little houses, title deeds to property and so on make your accrual of assets feel very real and immediate. You can see and hold your successes.

Expressive avatars
Monopoly wouldn't be the same if you couldn't be a dog, a cannon or a top hat. These icons have little to nothing to do with the gameplay, but they give players a way to express themselves. Everyone has a favourite marker (I like the top hat), and if you've played with young children the idea of "being the doggy" is disproportionately likely to lure them to a game that otherwise has "grown-up banking game" written all over it.

Primary colours
The Monopoly board is bright, clean and distinctive. It's full of primary colours, thick black lines, and iconic cartoons. The board suggests that things in this game are easily understandable and clearly delineated.

The "if only" moment
Humans assess long odds poorly. The hotel on Mayfair happens late in the game, rarely gets landed on, costs a lot to set up, and by the time it gets triggered is unlikely to really upset the apple cart. But the penalty for landing on the Mayfair hotel is so big that rookie players will quite happily descend into bankruptcy while claiming that if only someone had landed on the hotel, everything would be different. The "jackpot" is akin to the "shoot the moon" scenario - the highly unlikely situation that, if achieved, would turn defeat into victory. It doesn't need to ever actually happen - it just needs to be clear that it could. People love these things.

Fast turns, interactive turns
Turns go by quickly. You need to pay attention on other players's turns as you can only collect rent on your properties if you notice someone landing on them. This keeps everyone at the table engaged in the proceedings.

Summary

None of Monopoly's successes make it a good game. The gameplay is, objectively, broken. What it does do is make the process of experiencing that broken gameplay as enjoyable as possible. This makes it an attractive game for casual players, who will be able to enjoy the novelty of the setup for at least a couple of games before they realise its deficiencies. It also makes it a good game for young players, who aren't able to interact with a game on its competitive level but are able to use it as a tool for imaginative and social play, particularly in conjunction with older players. (Monopoly is also pretty good for kids who are at the right age for learning addition/subtraction math.)

Monopoly is not a good game. But it is a good product. It sells, and to some extent it sells deservedly (although it continues to float on brand recognition far more than on its inherent worth). If you have created a game which is, genuinely, a good game, you should probably spend some time looking at Monopoly to work out how to make it a good game that sells.

BONUS POINTS: If you made a list of why Monopoly works (which I just have), and then made a list of why World of Warcraft works, they would be, largely, the same list. Not coincidence.

Mondayitis

Not feeling particularly gifted with the eloquent tongue of language this morning so instead of substantive comment I leave you random observations.

- I've turned off the 360 for a while in order to go back and play Beyond Good & Evil on the PS2. I was exactly in the mood for Metal Gear Solid meets Prince of Persia, which is, largely, this game, so I'm feeling a little silly for having had it sit on my shelf for two years without being played.

- Saw Slumdog Millionaire the other week, which is truly as good as everyone says. Danny Boyle's made some fine films in his career but to some extent I've sat through them all just wishing he'd make another Trainspotting. Now he has.

- Some boardgames that are good: Battlestar Galactica and the expansion to Race For The Galaxy. Some boardgames that are really not very good at all: Last Night On Earth, which is officially the worst of the five zombie-themed boardgames that I have played.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a boardgame from Z-Man Games (Grave Robbers From Outer Space) in which 2 to 4 players co-operate to fight a global disease apocalypse.

Despite some B-grade box art this is actually an excellent game. It's hard, which is what you want from a co-op boardgame - you'll feel lucky to win one in three games. And it's fast - setup is about three minutes and games finish in around half an hour, so the best response to one of your inevitable defeats is simply to play again.

The aim is to find cures to four diseases ravaging the Earth before they wipe out the human race. Each player takes one of five roles. The medic can treat infections more effectively, while the scientist finds it easier to develop cures. Other roles include a researcher, a dispatcher and an operations manager.

Infections are depicted on the board using coloured cubes. At the end of each player's turn, more cubes are added to the board, and if more than three cubes build up in a single city an outbreak occurs, causing infection to spill over into neighbouring cities. A total of eight outbreaks over the course of the game results in defeat, and as outbreaks can cascade it's possible to lose the game in a single turn.

The game's roughly the same difficulty and length with any number of players, which is great, and while a lot of the setup is random you never really feel like you've experienced an unusually hard or easy configuration.

There's really no other games out there quite like Pandemic, and the combination of uniqueness and quality makes it a worthy addition to anyone's collection.

Colosseum

As far as European boardgames go, one of my best recent finds would have to be Colosseum. Designed by Wolfgang Kramer (El Grande, Tikal) and Markus Lubke, and published by Days of Wonder, Colosseum charges players with running an ancient Roman Colosseum over five rounds, or "days", and attempting to put on the best show possible during that period.

Each player starts with a colosseum. On each turn, players have the opportunity to buy one and only one investment, which range from colosseum size upgrades to new performance blueprints through to a loge for the Emperor. Then players bid on groups of tiles in the "marketplace" which represent assets for use during performances, such as gladiators, boats, lions or scenery. Finally players put on a performance, which scores points based on how ambitious the performance is, how many of the required asset tiles the player possesses, whether any consuls or senators came to see the performance, and a variety of other factors.

The first interesting part of the gameplay is that performance scores aren't cumulative - only your highest scoring performance over the five days counts. However, when you put on a new performance, each previous unique performance you've done counts for five spectators. Also, the investment system means you'll only be able to put on the epic productions in the final game turns.

Successful performances pay the money you'll need to expand and perform well during marketplace bidding. Being in first place also scores you free "podium" upgrades which provide additional spectators at your shows. However, each round the player in last place gets to take an asset of their choice from the leading player, which can be crippling. Deliberately setting your pace over the five turns is a critical component of optimum play.

The asset tiles themselves have interesting connections and assymetries. For example, every performance that requires "lions" also requires "cages", so investing in one without the other is a losing strategy. When you have "boats" you don't need a lot more to put on a performance, but they're an all-or-nothing gambit as they're not used in many programs and are needed in high numbers to be effective. Some asset tiles reward you with a "star performer" token when you have the most of that sort of tile in play, which guarantees you extra spectators when those assets are used.

The driving force behind the game, though, is the five turn structure, which forces you to be brutally efficient if you want to put on five shows in five turns. You start with only two shows you can perform, so you'll need all five turns to buy the three programs and two arena expansions necessary for optimum endgame. A system of "Emperor's medals" means that lucky players may get an additional expansion, providing they have the cash to pay for it.

The contents of the game's box are gorgeous, with a vibrant board, colourful cardboard components, and some painted wooden pieces depicting the Emperor, senators and consuls which are absolutely some of the cutest markers ever seen in gaming.

Games run for about an hour. The gameplay is very easy to teach to new players, and the included rulebook is easy to understand and well illustrated. Becoming competitive will probably take most people a couple of games, though, as despite some included reference sheets the relative merits of different investment strategies are not immediately intuitive.

The game supports three to five players, remaining equally enjoyable at all group sizes, and retails for $50 USD, or $60-85 AUD depending on where you buy. If you're tired of endless games of Settlers of Catan and are looking for something new and exciting in Euro-boardgaming, Colosseum is well worth your time and money.

Starcraft: The Board Game

With your desire for steamy Zerg/Protoss slash fiction whetted to a keen edge by the forthcoming release of StarCraft 2, you may have found yourself in your local game retailer, face to face with one of the cyclopean boxed sets of the associated board game and quietly exclaiming, "My God, it's full of stars."

A mere $160 AUD will make you the proud possessor of StarCraft: The Board Game, and in the interests of the enlightenment of my fellow man I've made the necessary sacrifice to acquire myself this oversized item of merchandising.

Carrying the thing is a bit of an enterprise in itself. I’ve seen ten year old children that are smaller than the box this thing comes in. By the time you lug it back your domicile or place of abode you’ll be wheezing so hard that you'll barely be able to make humerous references to spawning more Overlords. It’s entirely possible that your last words before keeling over from a massive coronary will be “Left heart ventricle... requires more... vespene gas!”

The perpetrators of the boardgame, by the way, are Fantasy Flight Games, who by and large have an excellent history with licensed boardgames. Their War of the Ring remains one of the finest strategy games I have ever played and comes highly recommended. So it’s a bit odd that Starcraft: The Board Game comes across more or less as a mish-mash of reasonably original ideas with no clear focus or genius. It’s deeply hit and miss, and while fortunately the hits outstrip the misses, the sheer quantity of glaringly obvious game design errors it makes is sufficient to induce epilepsy in small children.

It’s got a lot of pieces. It’s got a LOT of pieces. If you’ve dealt with one of FFG’s previous licensed efforts you might have an idea of what you’re in for, but Starcraft still completely outstrips even the massively epic War of the Ring for quantum of ridiculous minutiae. Each of six players will get a double handful of plastic miniatures, a deck of 40 odd cards, 15 cardboard worker tokens, a score marker, cardboard bases, cardboard buildings, cardboard modules, cardboard dropships, and cardboard order markers, and that’s before we get into the shared card decks, giant cardboard planets, space connectors, z-axis markers, first player tokens, score tracks, rulebooks and other detritus that FFG have shoved into the box.

There’s actually too much in the box. Literally. Some of my plastic pieces came pre-broken, because they’re quite delicate pieces, and to fit them in the box they needed to be jammed in there by (I presume) some kind of piston-driven robot. The flying pieces in particular have ridiculously fragile stands that they sit on, and a great number of them were snapped like the flimsy mass-produced pap that they are.

The surviving pieces look pretty great, though. Hydralisks and Dragoons look notably wonderful, and the Ultralisk model is almost worth having all by itself. Pushing them around the board is exactly the sort of fun that makes you want to pay $160 in order to have it.

The game gets off to a promising start by not attempting to perfectly recreate its computer-powered parent. Instead of fighting intricate battles planetside, you’ll instead be looking at things from a galactic perspective, and attempting to take territory on a variety of different colonies.

The board is created dynamically by linking together planets to form a map in a manner reminiscent of something like Settlers of Catan. There are six different factions to choose from; as Terrans you can play Jim Raynor or Arcturus Mengsk. The Zerg get Kerrigan or the Overmind. Protoss are stuck with choosing between Tassadar or Aldaris. Each race gets a couple of reasonably interesting special rules, and each faction of each race gets a slightly different starting setup.

You win by achieving either a normal victory or a special victory. A normal victory is achieved by reaching a certain number of conquest points, which are gained by holding key territories at the end of a turn. Special victories are different for each faction, and this is probably the biggest problem with the game, in that some factions have special victory conditions which are just flat-out better than others. Tassadar in particular is incredibly cheap, requiring him merely to be in the lead at any time during the endgame in order to win. We’ve played about five games now and we’re talking next time about removing special victories entirely before we’re forced into fisticuffs over who gets to be Tassadar.

The best aspect of the game is probably how orders work. You have three types of orders, being build, research, and move, and in one round you’ll lay down a combination of four of these orders around the board. Where it gets tricky is that each order has to be assigned to a planet. Orders on a planet stack, so that when you place an order it sits on top of all orders already assigned to a planet. Also, orders are executed in a last-in-first-out manner, so that you have to plan backwards by placing the things that you want to do last down before the things you want to do first. What’s more, players take turns placing orders, so that your orders can get buried beneath someone else’s, so that the build order you desperately need won’t get executed until the jerk to the left has used his move order to attack you. It’s a wonderfully deep tactical exercise that’s responsible for the majority of the game’s success.

The game does reasonably well at stopping itself from focusing exclusively on an optimal first economic turn. Very tight unit limits and a reasonably flexible build system mean that a subpar opening does not necessarily lose you the game.

The game’s second major weakness, after victory conditions, comes from the way it handles technology. To research a technology, you have to spend a research action. You then must pay the cost of the technology. Technologies come in the form of cards that are placed into a deck of combat cards which you use to resolve battles. As technologies are only effective on at most a couple of types of unit, you’ll only want to research technologies for units you’re actually using, or risk diluting the power of your combat deck. What’s more, a large number of the technologies are just bad, requiring very specific scenarios in order to be effective or providing little advantage.

Some units (notably detectors and support units) are completely unable to do anything until you’ve bought them technologies. This doesn’t mean you’ll by them technologies – it means you’ll ignore the units. I’ve yet to build a Zerg Defiler or Zerg Queen, and I haven’t seen anyone bust loose a Templar or a Science Vessel yet either. The game seems to contemplate an ongoing cloaking vs detection metagame that never really emerges, largely because cloaking is not really useful even when there’s no detectors about.

Still, if you’re prepared to slice off large sections of the game as not worth your time, what remains is pretty decent. The three races seem reasonably balanced once you discard the special victory conditions, and there’s no doubt that what you’re playing is recognisably Starcraft.

One thing that seems a bit cheap is that there’s none of the characters or units from Brood War present; it’s a move that seems calculated entirely for the purpose of selling an expansion, and it’s just coldly commercial enough to feel annoying. Still, you’ll forgive the game’s makers each and every time you build an Ultralisk; deploying your top end units is just that satisfying.

The game works best with about four players, although the two player variant is not entirely without charm. Games go for about two hours at the four player size (once you’ve already sorted the pieces and learned the rules) and the rules are clear and require little interpretation. The game looks and feels gorgeous and it’s not hard to see where your money went once you examine the cornucopia of full-colour crap inside the box. It’s just a shame that the tech cards and the special victory conditions are so obviously and deeply rubbish.

Is the game worth $160? Probably not, unless you have a lot of friends who are going to want to play a lot of this game. If you’ve got the crowd, however, Starcraft: The Board Game might well be worth the investment.

Edit 14 January 2008: It turns out we've been playing one of the rules a little wrong, so in light of us now understanding it, I should say that Special Victory Conditions are not quite so extremely unbalanced as depicted above. They're still unbalanced, and the tech tree is still broken, but it's just a little bit better than we had thought.

Checkers Solved

If you've played Tic-Tac-Toe for any length of time you've probably reached the stage where you can win or draw any game simply because you can envisage every possible combination of moves, and pick the move which is best not in a subjective sense, but in an absolute sense.

Now with the aid of brute force computing the same situation has been reached for Checkers. An electronic solution has been found which can win or tie any game.

It's good to know that modern technology has successfully trivialised a rather banal game that I've never really liked. If you ever play it and win again, just remember it's not because you played well, it's because your opponent played sub-optimally.

Full story here, courtesty of BBC News.

The Death of the Board Game, Part 2

My post The Death of the Board Game from last week has raised a fair bit of commentary and attention, so I thought I'd go back and flesh it out a little more.

The hypothesis I put was that:

• (a) board games are already a highly marginalised area of the gaming world
• (b) that a large part of the traditional market of board games has been taken over by video games
• (c) that those who still play board games rather than video games do so because they are (i) social, (ii) tactile, (iii) less threatening than video games, and (iv) require no console or system buy-in
• (d) that video games are likely to overcome all four of those obstacles within the next seven years.

To support point (d), I provided the following points:

• (i) Many people currently do play video games in the physical proximity of others; this will only become more common as gaming devices become smaller, cheaper, and more portable. In any case, audio and videoconferencing hardware and software is becoming cheaper, more reliable and more effective.
• (ii) A variety of innovations including the Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, and force-feedback touchscreens are continuing to make gaming a more tactile and physical experience.
• (iii) As videogaming moves into the mainstream, you can expect that within 7 years over 90% of people will be engaged in a game-like digital space at least once a fortnight. Whether this be a traditional videogame, an avatar-enabled multi-user desktop, or a chess game via mobile phone, gaming will be something that a majority of people are familiar with. Also, design of both software and hardware will continue to improve and lower the entry barrier to game spaces for the casual user.
• (iv) Convergence will likely mean that you will buy a gaming device in the next seven years without meaning to. This is likely to be either a mobile phone/gaming system, a media disc player/gaming system, a portable music player/gaming system, or a pocket PC/organiser/gaming system. It's likely that within seven years the number of people who own a gaming system will be comparable to mobile phone ownership.

All this seems fairly logical to me. It's touched nerves with a lot of people, though, who (rightly) feel that all this in some way threatens their beloved hobby. I'm one of them. I'm a board gamer. I don't want to stop. But I will.

The arguments put by the naysayers amount to the following:

• (a) No matter what market share video games gain, there will always be some people still playing board games.
• (b) No video gaming system can replace the social and tactile elements of board games, no matter how advanced.
• (c) Video games are just inherently less flexible than board games.

All these are true to some extent. But I think the premise is faulty. The people making these arguments are suggesting that as long as they are correct to any extent, the board game will survive. And that's just not the case. There's an extinction threshold.

The board game, as you know it, in the form of an illustrated box containing a heavy card board, printed cards, and manufactured pieces, just cannot survive. To make a game on this level takes money. It takes money to print and manufacture, to advertise, and to stock in stores. It requires stores which are willing to stock it. All of this only turns a profit in a market where there is a certain threshold of consumer interest. And from everything I understand about the market, that threshold is only barely there at the moment.

If videogames continue to advance and capture even another 25% of the board game market, it's going to make it very hard on gaming companies to keep publishing their products. And believe me, that 25% will happen, and it's a conservatie estimate. It's not a 25% that's going to come out of the Settlers of Catan end of the market, it's a 25% that's going to come out from the market of Monopoly and Connect 4 and Guess Who?. It's a 25% that represents a new generation of parents who are comfortable playing video games with their children. It's a 25% that sees traditional family activities moving into digital spaces.

And these games are the bread and butter of boardgaming. They're the games that teach children to like board games; those children then grow up and become the purchasers of Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne. Digital gaming over the next seven years is going to erode that entry level platform, and that's really what's going to move the gamer threshold into the unprofitable area.

On the point of whether videogaming can replace the tactile elements of boardgaming, I honestly don't see why not, but let's revisit that point when everyone involved has had the chance to try out the Wii and maybe some force feedback technology.

There's no doubt that board gaming is a social activity. And I'm sure that everyone who board games can relate to the hassle of trying to round up four to six people for a decent game. It's hard. It's likely that in your mind you have a subset of your acquaintances marked "people who are up for a good board game". If you're lucky, you have a good six or seven people in that folder.

Within seven years, those six or seven people will become two or three.

It's another extinction-level phenomenon. One of those people you know is going to spend less time with board games as a personal choice. One of those people will be video gaming more because that's what their partner, child, or close friend is doing. After that point, you'll lose another two because they just start getting sick of how hard it is to get people together for a game.

Gaming is about stories. You can't spend time with a gamer of any persuasion without hearing them tell a game story. If they're a roleplayer, they'll tell you about that one time when their halfling cleric was fighting a grey ooze. If they're a boardgamer, they'll tell you about that game of Diplomacy where they did this amazing thing playing as Germany. And if they're a video gamer, they'll have a story about what their night elf was up to last night.

Trust me, you're going to be hearing a lot more about that night elf. And if you want to be able to meaningfully interact, you're going to want to have a night elf too.

I'm not talking just the hardcore gamers here. Within the next two years, you're going to have a conversation at work about video games. Within three years, a digital game-like space will be a regular topic of chat at your work environment. Within four years, if you're not gaming you'll be missing pop culture references in your favourite shows.

They're going to leave you behind.

Lastly, there's the issue of whether video games are inherently less flexible than board games. And we're talking here about the ability to use house rules, to cheat, to cut the new player a break, to take a handicap, and so forth. And - well, video games are less flexible. They can only do the things the programmers thought fit to include. But they don't have to be as flexible to squeeze board games out. They only have to be close enough.

Sure, there'll probably always be a couple of tiny niche markets for board games which are either (a) Cheapass Games affairs where you make most of the pieces yourself, or (b) luxury collector's pieces at insane prices. But for board games to continue being viable as well-produced, affordable, tactile, family experiences, there needs to be a certain number of people willing to buy them. And within seven years, that number just won't be there.

You can count on it.

The Death of the Board Game

I have a copy of the Warcraft board game. It's a fairly decent game, certainly not one of the worst I've ever purchased. It's got attractively designed pieces, an understandable instruction manual, and you can get into a game without too much set-up. It does a fantastic job of capturing the original computer game's dynamic of base building, resource management, and strategic troop deployment.

It does such a good job, in fact, that you'll find yourself wishing you were just playing the original game.

People still play board games. A fairly large number of people. And there are some fantastic board games still being made. My friends and I still get a bunch of fun out of Betrayal at House on the Hill even on the twentieth or thirtieth game of the thing.

But to some extent computer gaming has made board gaming redundant. It's now possible to engage in a multiplayer strategic game over the internet. Better still, in a computer game there's no set-up, there's no packing away to be done when it's over, and all the dice rolling and inconvenient maths is done for you. Plus there's sound, graphics, and a potentially much faster pace.

Are the reasons people still play board games anything more than a lacuna of technology's advance? Will there still be a market in a future where (1) everyone owns a handheld gaming device (possibly incorporating a mobile phone), (2) everyone is comfortable using gaming technology, and (3) such devices are capable of reliably networking with other devices globally or locally from any location?

I asked Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games this question when I met him at Conflux this year; his reply was that he felt there'd always be a place for social, tactile gaming. As far as social gaming, I don't disagree. I think people will want to bring their gaming devices together in one place even when they could play the same game from remote locations. It already happens in the culture of LAN parties, and I think it would happen more often if top-end gaming rigs were inherently more portable.

But tactile gaming? It's an attraction to physically hold the pieces, but when it's the last and only attraction that board games still have, I don't know that it'll be enough.

Given current trends in the design of both handhelds and mobile phones, it seems likely that within five years a majority of the western world will own a gaming device capable of playing wirelessly networked games. And within seven years, there will be multiplayer high-quality multiplayer games available for that platform which reach a casual mainstream audience.

And at that point, I think we'll be witnessing the death of the board game.