| Title | Qt3 Boardgames Podcast: Forgotten Waters, Super-Skill Pinball, Dune Imperium |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Games podcasts |
| When | February 26, 2021 |
Mike Pollmann hits the open seas, Tom Chick hits the flipper buttons, and Hassan Lopez hits the spice..
One of my favorite podcasts. I have so missed you guys. Let’s see if you can talk me into buying Dune Imperium.
The three Qt3 podcasts are now back. That is awesome. @hassanlopez, has the pandemic had any impact, positive or negative, on your game design work?
In the middle of a Forgotten Waters game with my family right now! I tried playing using the remote assistant with my game group, but it was too light and too much downtime (I think there were 6 of us, and I had to describe the options for each action, so I was busy the whole time but there was a lot of waiting for everyone else).
Also, c’mon guys, it’s not really fair to compare Dune Imperium to Dune (the '70s Avalon Hill game). It’s like saying you’d rather play One Deck Dungeon than D&D. They basically have nothing in common except the theme. I mean, it’s fair in the sense that you can like one more than the other, but I don’t find that information very useful; I’d be more interested to hear if you like it more or less than, say Clank!, or Quest for El Dorado (other deck-building games that have something going on besides deck building).
Is it really a “70’s Avalon Hill game” anymore? It’s a 2019 release!
Seems like a far comparison to me, especially for people to whom theme matters a lot. If I want a Dune experience with my friends, I would absolutely opt for Imperium over the Avalon Hill game or Gale Force Nine update.
As for how Imperium compares to other deckbuilding + [insert gameplay mechanic here] games, doesn’t that largely depend on what gameplay mechanic is being added? I haven’t played Ruins of Arnak yet, so I can’t really speak to that comparison. But playing a deck-builder mixed with a worker placement game is pretty different from playing a deck-builder mixed with a race (i.e. Clank and Quest for El Dorado). Of those two, though, I’m not a big fan of Clank, which didn’t really find its way in the two iterations that I played (the initial release and the underwater expansion). I’m sure it’s come a long way since then, but I bailed on it before it got where it was going.
As for Quest for El Dorado, which I think it the bee’s knees and is probably one of my favorite Knizia designs, I’m not sure how I’d compare it to Dune: Imperium. In fact, how is that comparison any more or less useful than the thematic comparison between Imperium and the other Dune game?
Of course, I haven’t gotten to play Dune: Imperium with my friends yet, so all I can say for sure is that I feel it’s a terrible solitaire game.
-Tom
Unless you have four or five friends, in which case that isn’t an option. Or maybe you have three friends, but one of them has to leave in two hours, in which case the older Dune isn’t an option. Or you have a friend who hates deck-builders, or you have a friend who hates dudes-on-a-map games.
I just have never had a time (and I can’t imagine a time) when I sit down with a group of friends and say “I feel like playing a Dune game, which one shall we play?” any more than I can imagine saying “I want to play a game with dragons” and then arguing whether we should play Magic Realm or Res Arcana.
Oh, I would definitely push Dune: Imperium as a Dune game, though! I think the theming is a big part of what makes it work, which is another reason that I don’t really find myself comparing it to Clank so much as the earlier Dune game, even though the same guy made Clank and Dune: Imperium. Imperium is very vividly Dune.
And I can’t really accept your dragon analogy, because fantasy is a crazily broad setting. And it absolutely colors some people’s preferences and playing decisions. There are plenty of times I simply don’t want to play fantasy, regardless of whether it’s worker placement or a dungeon crawl or a tactical battle game or resource management.
Actually, how does your group decide what to play, Josh? My group is usually so deferential that I’ll usually pull down a few things that are intentionally very different from each other and see which one gets the most enthusiasm. I’d love to hear how it works for other folks’ groups.
-Tom
Exactly. I could absolutely see a group deciding on which Firefly game to play, or even which Cthulhu game to play, or which Sherlock Holmes game to play. “Dragon games” aren’t really a thing in the same way.
Ugh, who remembers. Nowadays we play mostly on BGA, and we have a sort of soft rule that says whoever won the last game picks the next game (it’s not a strict rule because sometimes we’ll have 6 or 7 players so we’ll play an opening game of 7 Wonders or Welcome To, and then we’ll split into two groups, because good lord there aren’t many good 6 or 7 player games on BGA, or, for that matter, off BGA).
I think in the before times someone would buy a game and we’d play that, and maybe it was a game that would get played several weeks in a row (we played Star Wars Imperial Assault for a while, and Near and Far for a while), or sometimes it’ll go into the rotation of games we play once in a while (I think some of the ones in rotation when everything fell apart were Outer Rim, Underwater Cities, Tzolkin/Teotihuacan…) As for which game actually gets played… well, it was often a difficult decision, where nobody wanted to express a strong preference for one game, but would often veto something. Usually it just came down to the game everyone found least objectionable!
Also, our in-person gaming was generally at someone’s office (since our houses are fairly widely spaced), so the choices would be limited to whatever people brought that day, which made things easier (and we were generally only 4 people in person).
Alright, I’m gonna tell this story. This story happened probably almost 20 years ago, but at least 15 years ago.
I was at my friend’s house, playing a game with the game group I was part of at the time. I don’t remember exactly what game we were playing, I want to say it was Betrayal at House on the Hill, but it might have been the old Chaosium Arkham Horror game, something where you explored a haunted house and drew cards to see what you found.
On my turn, I moved somewhere that meant I drew a card, so I drew a card, looked at it, and it had a picture of a knife or something, and my eyes slid down to the bottom of the card where it said “All players lose one sanity” or whatever it was. So I read that part out loud, and put the card in the discard pile, which was in a corner of the table which meant not everyone at the table could easily read the card.
So my friend turns to me and says, “what happened?” I’m confused for a moment, figure maybe I mumbled, and say clearly, “Everybody loses one sanity point”
He is obviously annoyed, and he says again, “No, what happened?”
I think he had to clarify that he wanted me to read the flavor text. Oh, there was a banshee moan or something that scared everyone or some damned thing.
Look, theme is important. A game where the theme doesn’t work for the game, or where it isn’t well integrated, is generally less good than a game where it is. Theme can help you determine what you’re supposed to be doing and how to accomplish it. It can make a game about pushing cubes into a great narrative about building railroads or escaping a dungeon or winning a war. That haunted house game had a poor integration of the theme, because it was just random events that could happen in any order. That’s not how a haunted house works! Things have to build up from mysteriously stacked chairs to giant demon heads poking out of closets.
But I don’t care much what the theme is. I care if the game is engaging, challenging, interesting, and gives me a chance to show up my friends with my cleverness (or, more often, vice versa).
I would never choose a Dune game over, say, a Star Wars game because I liked Dune better than Star Wars, if I thought the Star Wars game was a better game that I enjoyed playing more (that’s just an example, please don’t ask me to name a Star Wars game that’s better than either Dune game).
Besides that, given the constraints on game choice based on the number of players, time available, and proclivities of the players involved, sitting down and saying “we’re going to play a Sherlock Holmes game, now let’s figure out which one” is madness, at least in my group.
Also possibly I’m being a bit defensive, because I happen to think that the Avalon Hill Dune game is an all-time classic. I’ve played it two or three times in the past year (on TTS). There’s really nothing quite like it. It can be quite long, no argument there! In fact, it can also be quite short. My single biggest complaint about it is that the length is so unpredictable. You clear your schedule, get everybody to the table, refresh everybody’s memory on the rules, then the Atriedes ally with the Harkonnen and the game ends on turn 2! What do you do then? Reset and play again? But what if the 2nd game goes long? Play something else? Now we gotta argue about what to play…
This particular example is perhaps poorly chosen, because I can easily imagine choosing between different Consulting Detective versions. But, yeah, in my groups I don’t think we ever pick a theme first. One group has a pretty small rotation of games as it’s mostly a low experience group so we just pick whichever one of the five or so that grabs our fancy that day. The other group has a bit of a bias to new games, so if someone has bought something recently we’ll often play that, or if not it tends to be driven first by player count and length of play, and then by mechanics (eg have we played a dexterity game recently) or by a desire on the part of a player for a particular game.
It’s great to be back, thanks @marquac ! The pandemic has mostly had a negative effect on design, as you might expect. First, my cult compound game to-be-published with Grey Fox has been delayed substantially, as the company had to shift it’s entire queue (reasonable). Second, all the stress and time that comes with additional parenting/schooling the kids had absolutely impacted my creative energy. Having said all that, I did have a productive winter break where I put together what I think is a pretty neat alien spaceport solitaire game. I’m continuing to work on it, and trying to get some local playtesting in, but as you can imagine, that isn’t super straight-forward.
Oh lordy, you’re one of those. :) Look, I can understand skipping flavor text. I do it all the time mainly because I find most flavor text is horribly written. But it drives me batty when people don’t even read the name of the card. To them, games are just an assortment of mechanical interactions among various systems and it doesn’t matter one whit what it’s all supposed to represent. So it’s not “Banshee Moan: all players lose one sanity”. It’s simply “all players lose one sanity”.
Yes, the original Dune is a fine game. Even a classic! It is, however, from a time before good boardgame design had been invented. So there are far better ways to jockey for position among asymmetrical factions. When you say “there’s really nothing quite like it”, I disagree. There are plenty of games that have a ton in common with Dune. So unless you’re looking for a Dune game – in which case, there’s just Dune Imperium – I think the original Dune is pretty obsolete. You can make far better use of your seven friends’ four hours.
-Tom
Did I mention I enjoyed the podcast? Thanks for the podcast! Keep 'em coming :)
Versailles 1919 is a super-hardcore wargame? “As hardcore as you can imagine?” What??
Re: the stuff about publishers supporting mods on the Steam workshop for TTS or not: I don’t think it’s accurate to say that FFG has a problem with TTS mods. There was a vast and thriving panoply of FFG game mods for many years, including the Arkham Horror LCG mod that was mentioned and the Twilight Imperium mods and while I don’t think FFG ever officially signed off on them, they never seemed to care, either. Then not long after the pandemic really got going and people started pivoting to TTS to play the boardgames they owned, there was a single round of takedowns on a bunch of popular FFG stuff, particularly Arkham-related. Including, sadly, the Arkham Horror LCG mod in question (though it’s still being developed in a more clandestine fashion). Those takedowns were by no means comprehensive, and they don’t seem to have been repeated - some stuff that was taken down has been put back up or replaced by someone else and are still floating around. Twilight Imperium’s still around. There’s a very heavily scripted and comprehensive Marvel Champions mod. Etc. I don’t think FFG’s ever officially said anything about the takedowns and my personal theory is someone at Asmodee happened to notice, got fussy, and then has moved on to other things. But we’ll probably never know.
As far as Terraforming Mars mods - there’s a bunch currently but it used to get aggressively taken down and the most extensive one (known as Make Mars Green Again) is still developed off-workshop for that reason.
I personally consider them a value add, certainly not a replacement for owning the physical game, and find publishers who refuse to make a digital format for their games available frustrating. Fortunately at this point I have the tools and at least enough rudimentary ability to put together my own mods to implement things like Dice Throne Adventures (which Roxley has been very clear they don’t want any more of on the Workshop than the demo mod they officially offer, which is just 6 of 16 characters and 2 of 8 DTA scenarios) so I can play with my friends still.