I should also say that only the video refers to older designs. My answer was about the board aspect. But those are definitely not pre 2008 games and thus not good examples of great older boardgames.
I am a great fan of trick taking games (one reason my family and I like The Crew) and was playing them regularly in the 90ies. But even then, I don’t know most of the ones covered by SUSD.
Knizia’s three-year output from 1998-2000. Sorry, other game designers.
Samurai and Battle Line are straight-up masterpieces.
I’m not going to argue that they’re bad games or anything, but the only one of those I had even a thimble’s worth of interest in playing was the LOTR coop game, and I can’t see any reason to go back to it in an age when so, so many deeper, richer, more thematic coops exist.
Honestly, the only Knizia I particularly rate (at least, that I know is a Knizia design, he’s all over the place so I might have missed something) is Blue Moon. And even that I wouldn’t probably seek out or play over a bunch of other two player head-to-head games. I realize that the man is very very prolific, but his design sensibilities and what I like about boardgaming are almost completely opposite one another.
Hmmm, I’m old so…
And probably another 100 or so war games lol.
Relax, I acknowledged that in my own post. I’m not interested in a semantic debate. I honestly didn’t know that card games were considered board games. And “reductive”? I suppose all categorization can be tarred with that brush.
I’m pretty relaxed, thank you. :)
Apologies if my post offended. It wasn’t intentional. I was just offering a counterpoint with popular current board games being still being merely card games.
I really like Boggle (more specifically, Big Boggle). Great family game.
Among traditional, French-suited card games, Bridge still owns pretty hard.
Candy Land is an excellent and important game. It’s just not for you and me.
Candy Land is made for very young kids, and although it has no strategy and scant choices to make, it teaches them a ton: How to take turns. How bad things can happen to you in games and you can recover. It gives them an opportunity to be good sports about winning and losing without feeling judged for playing badly (because no choices!).
Don’t slander Candy Land!
(This basic point was stolen from James Ernest, who wrote an essay along these lines about Candy Land for the book Family Games: The 100 Best.
Yes, I am playing games with a 4 year old exclusively now. It’s quite interesting to watch how the extremely simplistic rulesets work with a person for whom basic math skills, rules following, turn taking, and the mechanics of dice throwing and card handling are all works in progress.
That said, I suppose games for very young children aren’t really in the scope of what is being considered good design here.
Incidentally, even for a grownup, there can still be excitement and elation in a simple toss of the dice, which I suppose accounts for the appeal of craps. (That plus the money.)
Those are interesting points and probably worth another thread - what are good stepping stone games, games to foster an interest in games while also helping develop a child’s mind? Not necessarily educationally focused, but helping develop ideas of teamwork, fair play, strategy, stuff like that. My kids both definitely went through their Candyland phase, which I’m not sorry to see the end of. Right now they both really like King of Tokyo though neither ever wins because they haven’t really worked out when is good to move into Tokyo and when to retreat. We’ve tried Azul which both kids enjoyed a little, but didn’t really get grabbed by. I’m hoping to move them up to more complex games so I have my own little gaming group one of these days.
Mark Rosewater, the head designer for Magic the Gathering, has a drum he beats every now and then that Candy Land isn’t a game. His position is that it has the trappings of a game but isn’t technically a game because there’s no player choice, skill, interaction, or systems of any kind. Once the deck is shuffled, it’s just a deterministic outcome that everyone watches unfold together.
I think I agree with the sentiment. Candy Land is a tool you call a game so that you can teach kids how to take turns, draw cards, and win/lose with grace (and cheat).
Chutes and Ladders also has no player choice, although each turn is randomly determined.
Yes, and I think he also categorizes Chutes and Ladders as “not-a-game”.
Pretty much the original “roll and write”.
I beg to differ. Yahtzee precedes it and must be the original roll and write (or, probably more correctly, the previous iterations Yahtzee derives from).
Isn’t the writing in Yahtzee just scoring?
Isn’t it as well in roll and writes like ganz schön clever? I haven’t played it so I’m unsure. Seems like some roll and writes are simply about deciding where to place what you rolled.
Anyone ever play an old AH/3M bookcase game called Feudal? I think the original edition was the late 1960s. One of my older brothers had it.
It’s fairly chess-like, but also the setup has elements of Stratego to it with the hidden initial placement.
I’m not sure the actual game of Feudal as it was executed is great, by any means. But some of the design ideas strike me as fantastic…and I’d love to see someone take a shot at tweaking the mechanics, because then I think there might be a legit great game in there.