New Games Suck!

I'm in a club that has a real 'cult of the new' problem. They are ALWAYS looking for the next big game. Sometimes, they're ok. (Dust comes to mind). Sometimes, they're terrible. (the new Warrior Knights).

But I'm getting tired of playing a wargame for points. Twillight Imperium, Dust- when I play both of these games I feel like I'm in some Gin Rummy game, trying to maximize my hand for the points that I score that round, and not caring about anything past that turn.

I'm tired of playing a game that doesn't have a REAL endgame. Conquest of the Empire II is an ok game- but what part of the endgame REALLY feels like the Augustus-Marc Antony Showdown at Actium? You just go along until turn 4, and then someone 'wins!'. *ugh*

I'm also tired of games that are 'cute'. Heresy on this site, I know, but I just can't get the thought out of my mind that Starcraft is just too many intereting mechanics for its own good.

So I find myself playing more and more the older classics of AT- DUNE. The OLD Warrior Knights. Supremacy.(flawed as it is). Not saying that these games are necessarily 'better' than newer ones - except for Dune, which kicks your new games ASS even at the hoary age of 38! Its more that I just find older games, right now, to be a lot more FUN. Maybe because I take the game for what it is, and don't try and 'rate it' in my mind against every other new release. Maybe they get a bit of a 'grade curve' in my head because they ARE so old. Maybe I'm reliving my childhood. Who knows?

Anyone feeling the same- that there's 'something' missing in some of the newer AT titles, but you just can't put your finger on it?

Darilian

I'm of two minds here. The old "classic" games have some great mechanics, but the production value is usually for shit. In contrast, the new games looks like solid gold, but have moved away from some of the classic mechanics to be "new" and "fresh", but not always for the better. Just be an informed consumer, and play games that are fun. That will guide the market.

I'm the game guru in my group, and I try to mix up Euros, wordgames, and classics. I want everyone to play fun games and have a good time. Not everyone can get "into" AT the way we can, and as it's a lunch meeting, the game can't get too long. We've played Settlers of Catan, Boggle, Win Place & Show, Niagara, Ticket to Ride, etc. Pretty easy to learn, lots of fun and competition. It doesn't have to be new to hit the table--in fact, something new gets a strike against it as an unknown quantity.

HERESY~!


It's a mixture, man. The stuff that's good that's old is still good. But today's games are good too (at least the right ones.) American games revived themselves from the grave because they took some tips from the Euro boom and came back better than ever. We still get our theme and our killin' but now everything's better produced and cleaner.

That's not to say the new games are better, but there are MORE games now that are good than we used to get. You have fond memories of the old games because you'd get like two a year and play them until the box fell apart. Now "good" games come out at such a crazy pace, it is easy to get swept up in the frenzy sometimes.


But don't let someone tell you that just because it's new, it's better. And that's not what I'm saying either.

I get your point about playing to victory points. Somehow a game doesn't feel finished until you grind your enemy into dust!

BillN

I think some of it, honestly, is time. Some of the newer games haven't had time to really show their longevity and really develop in the way the older games have. And some of it too is exposure...we're exposed to SO MANY games now, it's not like it used to be where even if you were a serious gamer you'd play maybe anywhere from 1-5 different games a year.

Another point is that older games had a lot more freedom and less structure...so older games can offer a fundamentally different type of gaming. And it helps that the extra complexity and interaction older games have lend themselves to a lot of replay. I think an interesting paper topic could be "are modern games overdesigned?"

I fluctuate...sometimes I really want to do nothing but play old games, and I actually like and appreciate the old, often cruddy production...but then there's times when I feel like I want something really cutting edge, modern, and attractive.

On the victory points thing...I've never really had a problem with VPs...as long as they're judiciously applied and demonstrate an overall level of success/performance. I think Frank Branham said something that made a lot of sense, that a game shouldn't have more than 10-15 victory points...which makes total sense to me because that creates a situation where players are still playing to win the game, not just to squeeze out points here and there when you're looking at winning scores of 50-100 points.

Victory Points-
I guess it really depends on the game. If its a game about 'money' or something intangible like 'power', I don't really mind. But if the game is about CONQUEST, I hate an endgame where someone wins on 'points' even though its obvious that their faction is on its way to the ass kicking of its life...It doesn't that the game 'sucks' or is 'broken' in any way- its just that 'points' get in the way of the GAME for me. Instead of making deals, telling lies and kicking ass (or, getting my ass kicked), you become a certain type of person who looks for the most amount of points to score in one turn rather than trying to better your overall board position. (Not necessarily the same thing.)

As for Older Games in general....
I like playing Newer games sometimes, but there's something nice about being able to JUST PLAY an Older game that I like. Newer games, you're always thinking "How did that work again?" "What is the better move here?"- Just trying to learn the langauge of a newer game is tiresome (even if its a VERY GOOD new game). But then, there are some newer games that 'make the cut' as it were- Friedrich, for instance, I've been playing a lot of recently. (I know, I know, its not 'strictly' AT, but if you call it a Euro/Waro/Weuro I WILL kick you in the nads.....)

Then again, I am learning a lot of new great Miniatures games recently- which is probably making me reluctant to learn new Boardgames.

Darilian
Its not you, its me.

See, that's the thing...victory points should be a measure of overall success, and at the end of the game they should demonstrate how successful a player has been...if somebody is in a terrible position at the end of a game but has a billion points, then something hasn't worked right.

You're really touching again on that whole "replay old or play new" conundrum...

FRIEDRICH is an awesome game...definite replay value there, it's a shame it hasn't reached a wider audience.

The problem is that a lot of these modern games are trying to be two things at once - they're trying to be "elegant" to appeal to the no-luck crowd which really should just be playing chess, and they're trying to be thematic to appeal to the rest of us. Look at Warrior Knights. The game is so "clever" in all of its ways to trick you into thinking that it is "elegant" that it isn't any fun to play. Game designers back in the good ol' days just went for the jugular and didn't sit around worrying about what some Fun Murderer on the internet would say if dice were included.

I think the argument could be made that the internet is a terrible thing to have happened to gaming. All things considered.

I reckon this comes down to a matter of extremes.

It seems that we sometimes forget just how damn awful the majority of 80's games were. They were just terrible, lame, lazy designs that recycled tedious mechanics and concepts from Talisman. Many of them had virtually no strategy, no worthwhile decisions and didn't even create a narrative or drama worth caring about. On a number of occasions I've come across someone mentioning some 80's game or other in a forum thread and I'll think to myself "hey, I played that!" and had completely forgotten about it because the game was so godawfully mediocre.

A lot of these games got published anyway because the whole concept of marketing and Q&A was a lot less developed back in the 80's. And because the concepts of marketing and Q&A were applied a lot less tightly, a small number of staggeringly brilliant games made it to the market in forms that nowadays would probably be rejected by some focus group or other, or at the very least seriously watered down.

Looking back, there really doesn't seem to be that many games in the middle. There was a sea of crap, punctuated by islands of brilliance.

Nowadays what we tend to get is a steady diet of "good" games and very little crap. Which is to be applauded. But along with the crap it seems that we've reduced the number of brilliant games event more, down to a mere trickle. Which, on consideration, is what modern marketing has done to the output of a lot of creative industries. The FFG redesigns of FoD and WK are a good case in point - to my mind, by trimming off what the modern market considers "rough edges" in these games they've made tame versions that might make it to the table more often and to a wider group of gaming tastes, but they've lost much of what made the old games so astonishingly memorable in the first place.

Nice idea for a thread BTW.

That's a good point...old games tend to be complete shit or absolute masterpieces...I think that's because the middle-of-the-road stuff has been sorted out by now and most of that's pretty much fallen by the wayside. It sucks to turn up another crap old game, we did that the other day with Tyranno Ex. It's much rarer to discover an arcane masterpiece.

I'm not that against "cover" versions of old games, like WK and FoD...I do think that they emerge as fundamentally different games in a lot of ways, but it's rare that I really think that a game is somehow ruined by modernization. Redevelopment can be good, but in the long run it's the straight reprints that seem to be the most successful.

But then there's something like ARKHAM HORROR, which may as well be an entirely new game altogether.

Darilian wrote:

I'm tired of playing a game that doesn't have a REAL endgame. I'm also tired of games that are 'cute'. Heresy on this site, I know, but I just can't get the thought out of my mind that Starcraft is just too many intereting mechanics for its own good. Darilian

I love Dune but if came out today rather than in 20 years ago I wonder if you would say it had too many
'cute' or interesting mechanisms. Because Dune does have some interesting but great mechanisms.

But I'm here to defend StarCraft. StarCraft is the real deal. Which cute mechanism would you get rid of in StarCraft? I think they did an amazing job keeping things so similar to the computer game. The computer games is about attacking and defending at the same time you're trying to build stuff and R&D. In the computer game most of the missions have some unique objective so I'm very cool with how they use Special Victories (I wish there was a deck of random special victories but knowing FFG that will be in the expansion). Last game, I played the Overmind so my objective was to have 3 bases in stage 3. I ended up losing battle after battle during the game but I was able to win the game by using Clocking, Scourge and Shifting Troops around board. I felt more like Ho Chi Minh or George Washington than Hitler or Napoleon but I enjoyed being able to win in a different style for a change.