Archive for Articles
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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(This column first appeared on BoardgameNews.com on Sept. 25, 2007. —WEM)
I recently ran across a quote from Greg Aleknevicus, editor of The Games Journal – a fantastic (and unfortunately defunct) online gaming magazine – that struck a chord:
Quote: I've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of games have depths that are hidden to those who play only a few times. So much so that I think it's unwise to assume that you've seen all a game has to offer after your second play, no matter how simple the game appears. [For example,] I agree with another gamer's assessment of Coloretto – there just doesn't seem to be much there – but experience has taught me that this is most likely due to the fact that I don't like the game enough to seek any depth it may have.
Many gamers complain about a vast flood of games being released on the market, claiming that they can play a game only once or twice before their fellow players (or they themselves) move on to something else. While this habit is, of course, self-imposed and one that players could eliminate if they really wanted to, I understand the desire to try out new games and see what designers have created. Who am I supposed to be, and how do I interact with others? How are we moving the bits around this time? And so on.
One consequence of playing games only once or twice, however, seems to be a willingness by some to categorize games quickly and be done with them. I experienced this recently with Galaxy Trucker when two first-time players started discussing the game's flaws the minute it ended. "It's too luck-based in the spaceship construction," they claimed. "Maybe you should be able to ignore the component connections and just place pieces anywhere. And the adventure cards are too harsh. There's no way anyone can survive their intergalactic journey."
Sixty minutes after learning about the existence of this game, they had already dissected it, catalogued its flaws, and filed it away mentally. They knew the game cold.
To be fair, both of them said they'd be willing to play the game again. They didn't think it was awful or even bad; they had merely detected certain problems with it. What fascinated me, though, was that rather than change the way they played the game, they wanted to change the game itself.
I've played Galaxy Trucker all of three times, but even with that meager level of experience, I could see what would improve their chance of success in the future:
• Knowing the components I: The first time you play a game with a puzzle aspect, such as Galaxy Trucker's building of a spaceship in real time in which you grab components from a central pile of parts, you'll likely stink at it. You don't know what type of components are in the game; how common the different type of connectors are; whether you should settle for a piece with two smooth sides (cutting off future building possibilities) or put it aside and keep looking; which parts you should hold in reserve for use later in the build round; whether to add the laser cannon now or hope to draw a piece that will fit between it and the rest of the spaceship; and so forth.
After three games, I now have an idea of when sections of my spaceship are good enough, but I'm sure that my opinion of when to settle will change after more experience with the game.
• Knowing the components II: A game of GT lasts three rounds, and the adventure cards you encounter in the second and third rounds are tougher than those in the first. Until you see those cards, you don't know what to expect during the spaceflight, which means you don't have a good understanding for how to build the ship.
• Using the tools the game gives you: During the spaceship building round, you can spend time examining some of the adventure cards that you'll encounter in that round, which can give you a huge advantage over other players.
In the first game I played, my opponent looked through all the cards he could, then loaded up his ship with cargo holds, especially ones that held hazardous cargo. I focused on building my ship and paid no attention to him, so I was surprised by the slow, barely defended ship he had built – but once the round started and we turned up planet after planet, with him grabbing lots of high-scoring goods while I had almost no storage room, I could see the advantage of planning ahead while building your spaceship.
(I relearned that lesson in my third game after we encountered pirate after pirate in the third round and all died. None of us had installed many cannons on our spaceships, and once laser fire knocked off a few of those cannons, we were easy prey for the pirates that followed. If I had thought to look through the cards, I would have installed cannons on every possible surface.)
•••
Perhaps a better example of Greg's statement in action is the way in which people dismiss the abstract game Qwirkle as not having much there or of being an exercise in who draws the best tiles. I've played the game more than sixty times, mostly with my wife and a friend in my local game group, and our playing has definitely evolved over time. We've become better judges of what the other players are trying to do when they make a certain play: Is that all that he can do, or is this a set-up to encourage me to play something that he'll add to again? We can block off scoring opportunities better. We know when to throw away tiles in the hope of something better and when we're better off dumping junk on the board. We manage our hand of tiles better to shoot for the endgame bonus. We create a tight board with more interlocking plays, akin to expert Scrabble players.
I happened to teach Qwirkle to a Scrabble fan recently, and although he's a smart guy, it was interesting to see him make sub-optimal plays similar to what other first-time players do. He was blessed with multiple hands that had four matching tiles, but he made long, spidery rows for few points rather than sit on the tiles and build toward larger scores. Despite his awesome draws, I beat him because I knew the game better and outplayed him.
Obviously not every game is right for every person. For any given title, you'll find people who think it plays too quickly or drags or is too luck-based or has a rich-get-richer syndrome or benefits the player to the left of the new guy or any of a dozen other problems. But the problems aren't always inherent to the game; perhaps the game just doesn't suit your tastes.
Another possibility, and the one that seems the most probable given my experience, is that you're not willing to give the game a chance to reshape your tastes.
•••
A related story: Back in 1997, I bought an album by The Chemical Brothers called Dig Your Own Hole. I'm into electronic and dance music and had gone nuts over the lead track "Block Rockin' Beats", so I bought the album the first time I saw it. While most of tracks were enjoyable, if not all up to the level of the song I already knew, I despised one song so greatly that I would skip past it whenever it came on. The track, "It Doesn't Matter", exemplifies all the worst traits that people ascribe to electronic music: It's repetitive, hollow and soulless.
Or at least I thought it was. But every so often I wouldn't skip the song, and after a few listens, I started to get into its booming rhythm. I was entranced by the droning vocal, which functioned like a vibrating chair for my mind. I like this awful, unartistic song.
Two years later, I bought the next Chemical Brothers album, Surrender, and went through the same process with the opening track, "Music:Response". Part of the keyboard work sounded like an angry electronic bird from an Edgar Allen Poe adaptation, sitting above your bedframe and emitting an endless peeping that doomed you to never sleep again. Speaking with a friend who sings in clubs helped me listen to the song in a new way, and I grew to love it.
Naturally the next album had yet another song that irritated me ("It Came From Afrika"), but by this point I had learned to trust their abilities and just listen to it in the context of the album.
What I've learned from these and other experiences is that I'm a poor judge of what I like. That might seem like a ridiculous statement – after all, who else should be able to judge your tastes better than you? – but I've seen it proved again and again with television shows that I initially found unwatchable, books that at first seemed tedious, food that I couldn't stomach, and so on.
So why should I dump on a game that I've played only once or twice? I know that I haven't seen all the game has to offer, so I try to keep that in mind when writing about it. That doesn't mean that when a game hits you the wrong way or leaves you shrugging your shoulders you need to build a long-term relationship with it. No one is forcing you to play a game repeatedly until you learn to love it or throw yourself, Alex-like, through a window to escape your misery. Just keep in mind that the game might not be the problem. The problem might be you.
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Cameron Browne
Australia
Brisbane
Queensland
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1. Summary
This article describes an upcoming experiment in automated game design, a new game system called the Shibumi set, and a contest called the Shibumi Challenge intended to produce a range of high quality base games for this experiment. The overall aim is to compare the dynamics of evolutionary versus Monte Carlo search methods for game design, and to gauge the usefulness of the computer as a creative collaborator in the game design process.
2. Background
In 2007 I ran an experiment in automated game design, in which a program called Ludi evolved the rules of existing games into new combinations and tested them for quality. This process produced a few interesting games, the best of which was Yavalath. (That story is summarized in the June 2011 BGG News post "Yavalath: On Evolutionary Game Design".)
Yavalath has been well received by players, and its novel mechanism of "win with 4-in-a-row but lose with 3-in-a-row" has inspired a number of subsequent game designs. It seems to have tapped into a new sub-genre of games which involve a tension between achieving condition X without achieving a subset of that condition X'. This raises some interesting questions:
• Did Ludi invent or simply discover Yavalath and its mechanism of rule subset tension?
• Was this a creative act?
• If so, should the mantle of "creator" lie with the program or the programmer?
I believe that the invention of Yavalath was an act of combinatorial creativity. Other designers might have provided the raw material in the form of the base rules, and I might have coded up the algorithms, but Ludi found the serendipitous combination of rules and more importantly recognised it as a good combination. If a human designer had achieved this result, it would certainly have been described as a creative act.
Ludi perhaps even mimicked the creative process of human game designers in the sense that it searched for interesting new combinations of known rules, as the invention of truly original rules and mechanisms is a rare thing. Puzzle designer Raf Peeters touches on this point in his blog entry "Inventing and Serendipity", in which he argues that serendipity (which he describes as the act of searching for something but finding something else) is central to the creative process in game/puzzle design.
Raf describes two requirements for serendipity to occur:
1. Active searching: The designer should not simply wait for inspiration to strike, but should immerse himself in ideas and look for harmonies between them.
2. Finding: The designer must recognise the potential in each new thing he finds.
This is exactly what Ludi did.
3. The Problem with Evolution
Ludi used an evolutionary approach for its active search, in which rule sets were bred, crossed over, and mutated. This eventually produced useful results, although some shortcomings of this method for game design became apparent.

The search seemed quite unfocussed. Evolution is at heart a random process, and there was no guarantee that the combination of rules that make up Yavalath was going to be tried, or ever would be tried again, no matter how long the program runs.
The search was not systematic. Ludi produced a game called Lammothm that was almost identical to the great connection game Gonnect except for one important detail: diagonal connections were allowed. This made Lammothm a mediocre game that barely made the cut and would be quickly forgotten by any player. One small mutation would transform this mediocre game into a truly excellent one, but there is no guarantee that this mutation would ever be tried.
Compounding this problem is the fact that rule sets are fragile, and generally any random change to a game's rules will break it. While one particular mutation would have transformed Lammothm into a much better game, almost any other mutation would have ruined it entirely. In computational terms, small incremental changes to a rule set will not necessarily result in a gradual climb up the local maximum. In biological terms, rule sets do not display the gradualism assumed in a neo-Darwinian approach and instead rely on saltations (large changes from one generation to the next) to make evolutionary progress.
4. Monte Carlo Game Design
Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) might provide an alternative way to find optimal rule combinations that may address these shortcomings in the evolutionary approach. MCTS works by running a large number of random simulations and learning from each one in order to build a search tree that gets more accurate as more simulations are run. It has a natural mechanism for balancing exploration of the search space with exploitation of learnt knowledge, and a feedback mechanism in which continued simulation improves the tree, which in turn improves future simulations.
MCTS has two inherent qualities that make it attractive for game design:
1. Inherent local search: Whenever a new state is reached, the search does not progress beyond that state until all actions (mutations) have been tried upon it.
2. Inherent restarts: From time to time, the algorithm will naturally try less promising combinations of actions, until it is sure that they lack promise.
These two features mean that if any slight change will improve a game then it is more likely to be found, but that the search will still occasionally jump from the local maximum to visit other parts of the rule combination space. Further, MCTS can learn from previous simulations using a history heuristic so that combinations of rules that proved fruitful in previous contexts are more likely to be tried in future contexts. Heuristics based on this idea have allowed recent breakthroughs in computer Go that now see MCTS Go players challenging top human players.
5. Shibui Game Design
The ideal game system to test these ideas would be:
• Tightly constrained and with a small, clearly defined rule set.
• Simple enough that most of the rule combination space could be searched.
• Complex enough to provide a range of interesting games.
• Small enough that its board state would fit into a single integer (for efficient implementation).
• Novel enough that its search space was largely unexplored.
While I was looking for such a system, abstract gamer Tom Gilchrist mentioned a concept from Japanese aesthetics called shibui. Shibui objects balance simplicity with complexity; they may initially seem deceptively plain, but will reveal hidden depths and become more interesting the more time is spent with them.
The Western world has been gradually exposed to shibui through popular culture. Elizabeth Gordon described it as "the highest form of beauty" in a series of 1960 House Beautiful articles. It has since been described in Trevanian's novel Shibumi as "elegant simplicity" and "understated beauty", and in Michener's novel Iberia as "acerbic good taste", recalling the term's origins as a description of a sour but appealing taste. It is used by Matthew May as a philosophy for personal growth in his allegory The Shibumi Strategy.
There are obvious parallels between these principles and those of combinatorial game design, especially the notion of simplicity hiding depth, as exemplified by the old cliche "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master". A rule set that works harmoniously can produce a thing of both beauty and lasting enjoyment, reminiscent of John Holland's description of emergence as "much coming from little".
May also notices the parallels between shibui and elegance in creative design. The elegance of an object is often defined not by what it includes but by what it excludes, much as a game designer seeks to produce the simplest possible rule set for a given game. The apparent simplicity of a well-designed object is usually the result of much complexity and refinement in design that may go unnoticed by the end-user. These ideas resonate with most of the key aspects I was looking for in my experimental game system, and influenced the final design.
6. The Shibumi Set
After several months of deliberation and recovery from information overload after running around Spiel 2010 trying to see every small game system in existence in a single weekend, I finally decided on the system that is now called the Shibumi set and published by nestorgames. The term shibumi is a noun form of shibui used to describe particular instances.
The Shibumi set consists of a 4x4 square board and 16 balls in each of three colours:
The basic mechanisms are to place, move or remove balls on this board. Balls may be stacked on 2x2 platforms of other balls as follows:
Balls may also be removed to cause higher level balls that they support to drop and fill their place:
A completely filled board forms a 4x4 square pyramidal (SP4) packing. The 4x4 base allows a total of 4x4+3x3+2x2+1=30 potentially playable points. The state of each may be described by two bits:
00 = Empty
01 = White
10 = Black
11 = Red
Hence the entire board state may be described in 30 x 2 = 60 bits, or a single 64-bit long integer, as desired, with a few bits left over for storing the current mover and current winner (if any). More details can be found at http://www.mogal.ai/shibumi/.
The rule combination space of games playable with this set was almost entirely unexplored prior to its release in October 2011. The only known prior example was Pylos, which can be played with a Shibumi board and 15 white and 15 black balls, but otherwise there is a surprising lack of SP4 games. Note that 2D games that can be played with a subset of the equipment (such as Tic-Tac-Toe) are not counted as Shibumi games. Some related marble stacking games can be found in the Stacks of Spheres Geeklist; there aren't many.
While the equipment is extremely simple and the rule space quite small, it is still possible for interesting games to emerge, a couple of which are shown below. Moves can create 2x2 platforms that open up points that were not previously playable – the 16 physical board points imply an additional 14 potential ones – and removals can trigger changes in board state that can be surprisingly hard to predict. The human brain has trouble visualising abstract 3D manipulations, and that's what Shibumi games are all about!
The fact that higher level points do not become playable until the lower levels start to fill up constrains the branching factor (number of possible moves per turn), as the full 30 points are never playable at any given time. The average branching factor will be similar to that for a comparable 4x4 game in 2D while the state space complexity will be similar to that of a comparable 5x5 game in 2D, which tilts the apparent simplicity : actual complexity ratio even further towards shibusa.
6.1 Spline
Spline, by Néstor Romeral Andrés, is a prime example of shibui. Two players, White and Black, take turns placing a piece of their colour at any playable point. The game is won by the player who completes a line of their colour (orthogonal or diagonal) that spans the pyramid at any level. For example, the game shown has been won by White.
The rules are extremely simple and intuitive (players generally need to hear them only once), but the game can throw up some surprises and has a nice mathematical elegance in that every game must produce a winner before the last ball is placed. Spline shows how simple a rule set can be while still producing a non-trivial game. A variant called Spline+, which includes a drop mechanism, provides a deeper game at the expense of rule clarity.
6.2 Spargo
Spargo, by Cameron Browne, shows how deep Shibumi games can be. Spargo is a form of 3D Go played by two players, White and Black, who take turns placing a ball of their colour at any playable point that will have freedom after the move. (A ball has freedom if its visibly connected group is adjacent to an empty board hole.) Enemy groups without freedom are captured and removed, except that balls that support enemy balls at any level remain on the board as zombies. Passing is not allowed. The game ends when a player has no moves, and is won by the player with the most balls in play.
Zombie pieces are so called because they have been technically killed, but remain active in the game and can come back to bite you if you're not careful. For example, the position shown is a puzzle with White to play. White appears to be in a hopeless position; Black has a strong group with two eyes, dominates most of the board, and outnumbers White by more than 2:1. However, the fact that passing is not allowed and that all White pieces are zombies allows White to force a win from this position, which is most counterintuitive. The full proof of this solution can be found at http://www.cameronius.com/games/spargo/.
The Shibumi set is therefore a simple, constrained game system with a small set of well-defined rules that still allow the definition of interesting and non-trivial games. The rule combination space is small enough that a representative uniform coverage should be possible, but this space is still almost entirely unexplored. The set epitomises the notion of shibui and is ideal for the upcoming experiment in automated game design.
7. The Shibumi Challenge
Given this minimalist game system, the next step is to define a complete set of component rules in order to seed the automated searches. It would also be convenient to have a core set of Shibumi games created by human designers in order to provide a yardstick for what is possible within the system. The Shibumi Challenge was designed to address these needs.
The Shibumi Challenge is a game design contest currently being run by Cameron Browne and Stephen Tavener of the Computational Creativity Group at Imperial College London, and Spanish game publisher Néstor Romeral Andrés. Contestants are invited to submit the best (and most shibumi) games that they can devise for the system.
Response to the Challenge has been excellent so far, with over twenty new games already submitted at the halfway point. The Challenge continues until 31 January 2012 and is open to all comers. Once the deadline is reached, the entries will be judged by the Challenge organisers and prizes awarded to the three best and most shibumi games. The entries shall then be coded in software and used to seed parallel evolutionary and Monte Carlo searches for new Shibumi games in order to compare the dynamics of each search method for game design.
Note that this is not a Turing test! The intention is not to see whether computer-designed games can be passed off as human-designed ones, or whether an automated process can produce better games than humans. The intention is to see whether automated means can help human designers find good rule combinations that they might otherwise overlook, and act as creative collaborators in the game design process. I expect that similarly good results might arise from small tweaks to existing games as well as from quantum leaps to completely new rule combinations. If so, this will hopefully go some way to demonstrate the usefulness of machine learning approaches for automated playtesting and rule-tuning, to remove some of the combinatorial burden from the designer and reduce the occurrence of games being released with flaws that are easily detected and fixed.
Cameron Browne
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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In two recent posts on BGG News – a news item about Ares Games' second edition of War of the Ring and Touko Tahkokallio's designer diary for Eclipse – the phrase "sold out at the publisher level" appears. I answered one reader's question as to what the phrase means, but thought I'd go into more details in a standalone post.
Will you be able to buy these games soon? It depends...
• "Sold out at the publisher level"? What does that mean? – The short answer: The publisher has no copies in stock, which means that distributors, retailers and gamers cannot order the game from the publisher.
• Does that mean the game is out of print? – No, it doesn't. The two statuses are similar in that games that are either "out of print" or "sold out at the publisher level" cannot be purchased directly from the publisher.
In the former case, that of the game being out of print, the publisher is effectively done with the game; it has decided to print no more copies and is running out its contract with the designer. (Many contracts have clauses that state a designer can reclaim the rights to a game - to relicense it, to publish it himself, etc. – after the game has been out of print for a certain period of time. For games designed in-house, as with something like Mansions of Madness from Fantasy Flight Games, the publisher will likely retain the rights as the designer is an employee.) You might still find a copy on store shelves or via a distributor, but the publisher has washed its hands of the game.
In the latter case, the publisher has no copies on hand but intends to print more – or might already be in the process of printing more, as is the case with both titles shown at the top of the page. Those copies are either in transit or still being manufactured or being assembled at the component level or being revised to fix typos or planned for in the future once funds, timing and other matters align the right way. Whatever the case is, more copies are almost guaranteed to be published at some point. (One must always keep in mind the possibility of meteor strikes, thermonuclear war, someone accidentally killing his own grandfather, and other such complications.)
• If I preordered this game from a retailer, will I receive that copy? – Almost certainly, but maybe not. When a game sells out at the publisher level, there's a good chance that the publisher didn't have enough copies on hand to fill all orders from distributors. (Not always, as sometimes distributors say, "I want a minimum of X copies, but I'll take up to Y more if you have them." In the early days of Magic: The Gathering, for example, distributors would beg to get as many cases as possible, then everyone got all the copies they wanted – and much, much more – with the release of Fallen Empires and the market flooded with thallids, homarids and unexpected marriages between a demon and a giant rabbit.)
If a publisher can't fulfill every order from a distributor, it typically prorates the orders. If, for example, distributors ordered a total of 2,000 copies while only 1,500 are available, then they will each typically receive only 3/4 of their order rather than some receiving their entire order and others being shafted. After all, publishers want to stay on the good side of distributors to ensure future business.
If a distributor doesn't receive all of the copies it ordered, then it likely can't deliver all of the copies ordered from it by retail stores. (Again, that's not always the case as distributors often order stock to keep on hand for subsequent orders from retailers.)
Thus, a distributor might have to prorate shipments to retail outlets, and if a retailer has taken orders for five games but receives only four, then the last order goes unfulfilled. Sorry, dude.
• Will copies be available for sale? – Possibly. As with distributors, retailers often order extra copies of a game beyond those preordered to place on the shelf. If a store received five preorders, when normally it receives only one or two, it might view the game as a potential strong seller and therefore order, say, ten copies for the shelf (rather than one preorder and two for the shelf). If the store now receives eight copies instead of 15, it can fulfill preorders and still have a few available for those Johnny-come-latelies. Maybe you'll be one of those lucky fellows...
• How could the publisher be sold out? Why didn't it print enough copies?! – And here's where things get tricky and prickly, with gamers being upset that copies of some hotness are not available. Surely Ares Games knew that War of the Ring, a high-rated proven seller, would be in large demand, right? How could they run out?
The answer is multifold, starting with the production costs. The second edition of War of the Ring has a MSRP of $90, which roughly translates to a production cost of $20. (I base this estimate on what I've learned over the years as well as a comment from Ludo Fact's Frank Jaeger on the production costs of Ora et Labora.)
Thus, every 1,000 copies in a print run costs $20,000. Do you as the publisher look at your credit line and say, "Well, we've got a credit line of $100k; let's print 5,000 copies"? No, you would not – not if you want to stay in business, that is.
In addition to knowing how much you can spend, you need to know what the demand for the game might be – and to do this, you approach distributors and give them marketing materials so that they can solicit orders from retailers. Anywhere from one to three months before a game becomes available from a distributor, the retailer will receive an order packet and place orders for everything expected to be released in, say, 2-3 months.
How do these retailers determine how much to order? First, they might have a monthly budget based on sales in prior years and make sure that everything they order sums to that number or less. (This process is complicated by games not arriving when initially promised, a topic for another article perhaps.)
Second, for extensions to existing game lines, they look to past sales and extrapolate: We always sell X many copies of a Carcassonne expansion within the first three months of release, and Y copies of a Descent expansion, and Z copies of a Munchkin booster. In many ways, those sales are guaranteed dollars, so they'll be placed "first", that is, no matter what the budget, the retailer will order these items.
Third, customers preorder games, which is sometimes due to a retailer saying to a customer, "Hey, you liked game R; how about this forthcoming game S from the same designer?" and sometimes due to a customer finding out about a game on his own. Even with preorders, though, these sales are only 75% guaranteed since customers move or change their minds or ignore one retailer to save a few bucks elsewhere. (Statistic from the Dept. of Made-up Statistics. Adjust as needed.)
Fourth, retailers just wing it, looking at titles about which they know nothing and making vague assumptions about how they may or may not sell. "This Stinky Bricks and Slimy Chicks looks weird, but we've always sold a couple of everything from Digging Dog Productions, so we'll get one to start with. And we never sell anything related to the production of hamburgers, so we're going to pass completely on Patty, Patty, Two By Four." And so on.
However they do it, retailers set a preorder number. The distributors compile all these numbers, then order copies from the publisher. The publisher then looks at all these "guaranteed" sales, compares the production cost of that number with its credit line, determines whether the cash flow from expected payments will allow continued operations, and decides how much to produce. Boom – the production number is now set, possibly.
As the release date for a game nears, sometimes retailers take additional preorders from customers, or hear good things about a game via early reviews, or receive a midnight vision of copies flying out the door – and as a result they call their distributor and raise the number of copies they want to receive. If enough retailers do this, the distributor in turn goes back to the publisher and asks for more copies. And if enough distributors do this, the publisher might raise its print run to ride the wave – except, of course, if the game has already been produced or the manufacturer has no time available to produce extra copies. In that case, the production number is locked and distributors will have to settle for whatever they ordered at some earlier point. (In some cases, however, as happened at both Spiel 2010 and Spiel 2011, the manufacturers will not be able to supply the quantity of games asked for by the publishers. Publishers will again prorate sales and delivery of the games, typically first come, first served.)
Thus, the blame for this problem falls on many parties: Publishers for not being able to afford to produce an unlimited number of copies and for doing a so-so job of marketing its games; distributors for holding less stock on hand than they have in years past, thereby increasing the odds of a game not being available for retock by retailers; retailers for also holding less stock on hand and for not ordering more copies in the first place, which would thereby increase the size of the production run; and gamers who talk about preordering a game without actually doing so, as they prefer to play the game first to see whether it's really all that.
Do you get the sense that no one is really to blame for a game not being readily available? The real issue, as was the case with the comic book industry in the 1980s, is the sheer number of titles hitting the market. If a retailer was previously confronted with 20 new titles per month, now it will be faced with 50 or 100 or more – while its sales will likely not have risen at the same rate, which means it can't just buy multiple copies of everything and hope for the best. Some titles will not be ordered, period. Only a single copy will be ordered of others, whereas previously the retailer might have ordered 2-3 – and when that one copy sells, the retailer will breathe a sigh of relief and say, "Okay, we're done with that game." If anyone wants to place a special order, sure, the retailer will get a copy for the person, but otherwise that copy is effectively off the market at that retailer.
Distributors likewise have many more titles to juggle than they did years ago and have trimmed their excess to have enough to fulfill retail orders with a scant amount in reserve for restock orders (with the exception of reliable sellers of the Ticket to Ride, Munchkin, Catan variety). As with retailers, in many cases they are happy to be done with titles when the stock runs out, even though a game might still be in print. If they get enough restock orders from retailers for last month's releases, sure, they'll order more from the publisher, but otherwise they'll let it go and worry about the dozens of new games arriving this month. (This is what Tasty Minstrel Games' Michael Mindes is complaining about in the Kings of Air and Steam forums, which is what led to TMG and other smaller publishers to Game Salute as a way to sell to retailers directly and consistently without worrying about whether distributors stock their titles.)
• Phew, that was a vast torrent of words, Mr. Talkypants. Keep it shorter this time. What can I do as a gamer to get these games? – Your best (albeit least feasible) option is to invent a time machine, go back a few months, and place a preorder before anyone else does to ensure that you receive one of the previous few copies available.
Alternatively, you contact retailers and see whether you can preorder the game now. Given the limited supply of copies (at least for now), you're not guaranteed to get one, but preordering gives you better odds than just walking into a game store and finding one on the shelves.
For the future, your best option would be to place preorders for games that you know you want. What's more, you'd place preorders for games that you're pretty sure you want but on which you aren't completely sold. Yes, you risk buying a game that ends up not being to your taste, but the alternative is to not get games that would be perfect for you.
In some ways, this is all a real life game of risk management: Retailers and distributors are lowering their risks of being stuck with goods by having less stock on hand, which puts you, the gamer, in the position of taking more risk in terms of missing out or of buying something you end up not liking. (Publishers, particularly new ones, are also at greater risk because they have a tougher time breaking onto store shelves and staying there month after month.)
In some ways, this situation is akin to stepping back to the 1980s. In those years, you had little to go on as to whether you'd like a game or not other than the (unsurprisingly positive) game description on the back of the box, or the questionable opinion of the retailer, or feedback from a friend of a friend. You just screwed up your nose and decided to take the plunge anyway. These days, with unimaginable quantities of data flowing through BGG and elsewhere on the web, you can find almost all of the opinion and background and game details that you want - but the game's print run has possibly already been set and if you wait too long to find out all that you want to know about a game, the game itself might not be available to you. What to do, what to do...? Buy or wait?
Okay, I'm spewing again. Let's stop here and call it a day.
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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While I spend much of my time researching upcoming games, contacting designers and publishers, and navigating a thousand-plus RSS feeds, newsletters and websites in my role as editor of BoardGameGeek News, I also spend a fair number of hours working on the BGG database on these tasks:
• Adding games/designers/artists/publishers
• Editing and approving/declining/asking for revisions to submissions from BGG users (pending lists of games, publishers, and people)
• Adding and editing links on game/publisher pages
• Requesting images/finding them on a publisher's press page and adding them to the game/publisher pages
Mostly I do such things in order to link to a new game in a BGG News post (which means I need to create or approve the game listing first!) or add a link to newly available rules for an upcoming game, but I also work on improving the BGG database as a result of my obsessive desire for comprehensive information. I want everything to be as complete and detailed and (most importantly) correct as possible!
Thus, I rewrite ho-hum game descriptions after reading the rules or ask a publisher for a sharp, large logo to replace an tiny, scanned logo from years ago. Yay, one more step towards comprehensiveness!
The problem, however, is that I find way more information and images and links than I can possibly add to the BGG database, especially since I need to focus first and foremost on getting news about games in front of you, dear reader.
As a result, I created a new blog – Not Necessarily the News – to try to crowdsource this material and make it accessible for all BGG users thanks to the efforts of whoever picks up the shovel I offer. Ideally, someone will say, "I'm a fan of this designer/publisher, so I'll spend a half-hour and take care of this." My job will be to keep posting these raw data finds so that you and others can make the material available for all. Well, that and dangling Geekgold carrots to help encourage folks to participate.
If you're a fellow obsessive, want to earn Geekgold, or are otherwise interested in helping improve the content in the BGG database, please visit NNTN and subscribe for news of future projects. Thanks!
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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The Spiel 2011 Preview keeps getting bigger, but for those who haven't been paying close attention to every update and addition I make to the list of what gamers can expect to find at the game convention in October in Essen, Germany, here's an overview of what's been added since my previous update on Sept. 16.
2F-Spiele (preview link)
-----• Funkenschlag: Der Liefervertrag
-----• Funkenschlag: Die Roboter
Adlung-Spiele (preview link)
-----• Tuareg
alea (preview link)
-----• Puerto Rico: Die Jubiläumsausgabe
Argentum Verlag (preview link)
-----• Coney Island
GameHeads (preview link)
-----• Das letzte Bankett
Gen-X Games (preview link)
-----• 2 de Mayo: Assault on Palace Grimaldi
-----• Air Show
-----• KARMABUSINESS
-----• Stalag 17
Hans im Glück (preview link)
-----• Hawaii (added a cover image and short description to a previously blank entry)
-----• Pantheon: Neue Untermieter
Hurrican (preview link)
-----• Dr. Shark
Le Joueur (preview link)
-----• Déluges
Kanai Factory/Japon Brand (preview link)
-----• Master Merchant
Kuźnia Gier (preview link)
-----• Top-A-Top
Mayfair Games (preview link)
-----• Urbania
OKAZU Brand/Japon Brand (preview link)
-----• String Railway: Transport
Pigphone/Japon Brand (preview link)
-----• CryptidsTV
Placentia Games (preview link)
-----• Diluvium
R&R Games (preview link)
-----• Ticked Off
Ravensburger (preview link)
-----• Elfer raus Master
RightGames (preview link)
-----• The Enigma of Leonardo: Quintis Fontis
Rio Grande Games (preview link)
-----• Power Grid: The Robots
Schmidt Spiele (preview link)
-----• Space Mission (greatly improved the game description)
Spielteufel GmbH (preview link)
-----• 1314 A.D.
-----• Das Geheimnis von Trelleborg
-----• Westwärts
Spielworxx (preview link)
-----• Zietalter der Vernunft (now listed on its own and not as a version of Struggle of Empires)
StrikerZ GameZ (preview link)
-----• StrikerZ
Surprised Stare Games (preview link)
-----• On the Cards
Troll Factory (preview link)
-----• TF22
W. Nostheide Verlag GmbH (aka, Spielbox) (preview link)
-----• Asara: Die Gaben des Kalifen
Woo! Believe it or not, before I compiled this update, I was thinking about how little I got done during the previous week. Guess I'm merely at that tipping point when I start to lose track of the days and have no clue when I edited which game description or added which game link or price or image.
And there's still much, much more to come. My in-box is a frightening sight. Publishers and designers, if I don't respond to your email, Geekmail, fax or ear tug right away, it's not because I don't love you – it's because I'm hiding under the bed.
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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And the games keep coming! Here's a summary of the games and publishers that have been added to the Spiel 2011 Preview since my previous update on Sept. 11. Note that the list below includes only new additions; I've also been editing game descriptions, adding prices and booth numbers and updating preorder information for titles already on the list.
"Preview link" takes you to the Preview entry for the first game under a publisher's name; each game is also linked to its individual BGG game page. Now, onto what's new...
Self-published (preview link)
-----• Haunted Village
Amalgam (preview link)
-----• Uskoci: The card game of Croatian pirates
Ascora Games (preview link)
-----• Nefarious
Black Dove Games (preview link)
-----• For Fame & Fortune
Blackrock Editions (preview link)
-----• Kairn
Cambridge Games Factory (preview link)
-----• Montana
-----• Pala
Copag (preview link)
-----• Convocados (available through Galápagos Jogos in limited quantities)
DEINKO (preview link)
-----• Cupeed
-----• Help Me!
-----• Illusion
-----• Jack and the Beanstalk
-----• Master of Pizza
Galápagos Jogos (preview link – all titles are available in limited quantities from a Galápagos representative; I'm still waiting for contact and ordering info)
-----• O Último Grande Campeão
-----• Recicle: Tempos de Crise
-----• Robin Hood
-----• Vale dos Monstros
Gung Ho Games (preview link)
-----• Pirates of Nassau
Hyptic (preview link)
-----• Shroom Boom
Ilopeli (preview link)
-----• Jurassik
-----• Sherlock
Le Joueur (preview link)
-----• Cité
-----• L'Aventure c'est dur
-----• Sandwich
Pegasus Spiele (preview link)
-----• Mondo: Zusatzspieler Pack A & Pack B
-----• Quest: Zeit der Helden - Der dunkle Kult
-----• Lots of German editions of items previously released in English: Munchkin expansions, Bézier Games' Werewolf expansions, and more. I didn't even add the dozen or so Munchkin booster packs, figuring that one German-language Munchkin expansion can stand in for all of them.
Queen Games (preview link)
-----• Lancaster: The New Orders
Rio Grande Games (preview link)
-----• Friday
-----• Power Grid: The First Sparks
StrataMax (preview link)
-----• Let's Take a Hike
StrikerZ GameZ (preview link)
-----• StrikerZ
TSL Enterprises Ltd. (preview link)
-----• Numenko
-----• Numenko-in-a-bag
Z-Man Games (preview link)
-----• Undermining
Still plenty more to come in the less than five weeks remaining before the opening of Spiel 2011 – just enough time for me to lose all connection to reality...
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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Time for a round-up of what's been added to the Spiel 2011 Preview since the beginning of September 2011. I won't summarize every change to a game description, every addition of game's price and other such details, but rather I'll catalog the games that have been added, grouping them under their publisher and including a "Preview link" to the first listed game under each publisher.
Unpublished (preview link)
-----• A summary of what won't be at Spiel 2011, whether due to publisher delays, the publisher never intending to be at Spiel, or other circumstances.
Abacusspiele (preview link)
-----• Airlines Europe: Flugverbot
Argentum Verlag (preview link)
-----• Coney Island
Asyncron Games (preview link)
-----• Copié Collé
-----• Fief
Brave New World (preview link)
-----• Dragon Rage – the only supplier of German rules for this game, while Flatlined Games has rules in English, French and Spanish
Cocktail Games (preview link)
-----• Foutrak
-----• Manga Party
-----• Ouga Bouga
Cranio Creations (preview link)
-----• Horse Fever – second edition
Drei Magier Spiele (preview link)
-----• Die geheimnisvolle Sternschnuppe
-----• Hexenhochhaus
dV Giochi (preview link)
-----• Bang! Gold Rush
Fata Morgana Spiele (preview link)
-----• Siebenpunkt
H@LL 9000 e.V. (preview link)
-----• Ostfriesisches Schafe-Schubsen
Hans im Glück (preview link)
-----• Stone Age: Mit Stil zum Ziel
Heidelberger Spieleverlag (preview link)
-----• Dungeon Fighter – previously listed only under Cranio Creations, but now listed here for this German edition
IELLO (preview link)
-----• Innovation
Queen Games (preview link)
-----• Kingdom Builder – I'm expecting more details from Queen within a week or so
Runadrake (preview link)
-----• Galáxia S.A.
Selecta Spielzeug (preview link)
-----• Kullerei mit Drachenei
-----• Pyjamaparty
Spielworxx (preview link)
-----• Zeitalter der Vernunft
Stolitsa Design Group (preview link)
-----• Evolution: Time to Fly – this and the next two are expansions to games being presented by Russian publisher RightGames at Spiel 2011, but since these expansions come only with English rules (with the Russian original), they are listed under the original publisher
-----• Potion-Making: Guild of Alchemists
-----• Potion-Making: University Course
University Games (preview link)
-----• Ninjutsu: Battle of the Ninjas
-----• Querdenker Deluxe
-----• Suche die Unterschiede
-----• Wer Wo Was: Male das!
WizKids (preview link)
-----• Mage Knight Board Game
-----• Quarriors! Rise of the Demons
-----• Star Trek: Fleet Captains
And a few other Preview-related notes:
—When possible, I've been updating and rewriting game descriptions as I add titles to the list. Not every description is polished, but I'm getting there.
—Regarding freebies and giveaways, if the base game is being released at Spiel 2011 (as with Drum Roll), then I list promo items under the game itself; if the game debuted earlier and isn't listed on the Preview, then I include the promotional item itself (as with Airlines Europe: Flugverbot) or note it under the publisher heading.
—I still have many more games and updates to add to this list, not to mention game images, player counts, prices, booth numbers and other minutiae. Geekmail me with additions, but please understand that it takes time to work through everything, confirm details with publishers, and so on.
Feel free to Geekmail questions/suggestions or add them as comments below.
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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Since BGG News kicked off in January 2011, I've been reprinting articles, previews and columns from Boardgame News. Sometimes the reprinted piece ties into current news (such as my 2007 interview with Ed Carter at Cambridge Games Factory), sometimes a reprint fills what would otherwise be a blank space, and sometimes one or more readers request something that disappeared when BGN went poof.
Today's reprint, my BGN column from February 9, 2010, is an example of the latter, thanks to Anders Tyrland, one of four brothers in the newly founded Swedish publisher Ticking Clock. Michael Mindes of Tasty Minstrel Games had linked to this column in his blog, noting that I discuss "a topic that is extremely important for rules and rules editing. If you want to publish or be published, make sure you read this and fix up your rule books." Anders pinged me when he couldn't find the column, so here it is again, for the edification of all publishers. —WEM)
In early February 2010 I played the published version of Stefan Feld's Macao for the first time, and while I found the game intriguing in the usual alea/Feld manner of not knowing how everything fits together on the first play and making somewhat random moves that may or may not pan out (see In the Year of the Dragon, Notre Dame, Rum & Pirates), the other players and I were confounded by card text that exhibited a common grammatical problem, namely non-parallelism.
Parallelism, also known as parallel construction, is the practice of words, clauses and phrases agreeing with one another when they are used in series in a sentence, e.g. "I came, I saw, I conquered." The verb in each clause is in the simple past, which allows a reader or listener to process the meaning of the sentence more easily than she would with something like "I came, I saw, I was conquering." (Let's ignore for the moment that the two sentences don't mean the same thing – I'm considering structure for now.)
We tend to overlook non-parallelism in casual speech – "I'm going shopping, taking in a movie, and will see you tonight" – but such mismatches strike the ear abruptly when encountered in more formal situations. Take this example from Macao's back cover: "Who will have the best plan and can acquire the most prestige by the end of the game?" While not incorrect, the "will have" and "can acquire" are jarring. Far better would be this sentence: "Who will have the best plan and acquire the most prestige by the end of the game?"
Wobbly sales text on the back of a box may affect whether someone purchases a game, but it won't affect the game play – unlike the non-parallelism on Macao's building and person cards, which could. Half the cards use the imperative –
Quote: • Take 1 black AC.
• Return 1 blue AC to take 1 GC.
• Pay 1 GC to move your ship up to 4 spaces.
– while the other half use the second person pronoun "you":
Quote: • You take 2 GC.
• You take 1 GC for each ware tile you deliver.
• You need not return the AC to activate one card, but you must have the necessary AC in your action cube supply.
• For each 3 of any AC you return to the general supply, take 1 GC.
(For those who haven't played the game, "AC" means "action cube" and "GC" means "gold coin," and yes, if you don't like cube-pushing games, you should not attempt to play Macao.)
In some cases, non-parallelism is not jarring or confusing. "Take 1 black AC" and "You take 2 GC" will be clear to anyone who speaks Eurogame – but why are they different? "Take 1 black AC" and "Take 2 GC" would be better. The advantage of parallel construction is that once readers start to read and interpret text, they can use the same "mental framework" for everything else that fits the same pattern. Adopting the imperative for every building and office card would fit the way that the cards are meant to be used during the game: I use the card and am then directed to do something, whether that something is taking action cubes, scoring points, earning extra money, or moving my ship more spaces. (Note the parallel construction – taking, scoring, earning, moving.) With a parallel construction, you don't have to pause to reinterpret a sentence that doesn't fit the expectations already presented to you by other materials within the game.
In some cases adopting the imperative would require slight changes in the card text. The second card, for example, might read, "Take 1 GC for each ware tile you delivered this turn." The third card is trickier, but could read, "Take back the AC for one card that you activated this turn." Or perhaps "Activate one card for which you have the necessary AC in your action cube supply, but keep the AC instead of discarding them."
The main problem with the non-parallelism in Macao is that players can misinterpret how cards are meant to be used, despite the note on the back page of the rulebook "that the rules are intended to be read and followed with reason and normalcy". Take the last non-imperative card described above, the Prospector: "For each 3 of any AC you return to the general supply, take 1 GC." The format of this card matches that of the second one – "You take 1 GC for each ware tile you deliver." As written, this latter card sets up a condition that can be fulfilled multiple times for the remainder of the round – deliver a ware, take 1 GC. The former card has a similar structure – return 3 AC to the general supply, take 1 GC – but the two are not meant to be equivalent.
The German cards pictured above may be parallel, but their text isn't.
We realized our error only two-thirds of the way through the game when the Noble came up. (The Noble's power: "For each 2 GC you give to the bank, take any 1 AC.") "A-ha!" we said at the same time. "The Noble clearly isn't meant to give you AC when you pay GC for prestige as that would be far too powerful, so the Prospector must work the same way – which means Joey has been inadvertently cheating since turn three. Asterisk game!" (For the record, I caught up to Joey despite his cheaty, invalid lead and won by a few points. No asterisk needed!)
How should the Prospector be written? "Return any number of AC to the general supply. For each 3 AC that you return, take 1 GC." This direction matches our expectations: Choose this card, then do this. You have one chance to take the action, with nothing spilling over into the remainder of your turn.
Rules writing is difficult – I know as I've edited rules for a number of companies – but the goal of rules writing isn't: You want the rules to be invisible to players. The players should not have to interpret what a rule means or decide which interpretation is correct. Yes, this goal is tough to achieve, but by doing the hard work up front, you can make everything easier for those who want to play your game.
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Mary Prasad
United States
Hillsborough
North Carolina
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Editor's note: This article first ran on BoardgameNews.com on Feb. 11, 2009. —WEM
Have you ever wondered how board games are made? This article will give you a glimpse into the making of many popular board games, including the products of Rio Grande Games, Kosmos, Abacusspiele, and Amigo Spiel.
After attending the Spiel game convention in Essen, Germany in October 2008, my husband Snoozefest (a.k.a. Ravindra Prasad) and I stayed in Germany to travel around. A friend of ours, Tom Hilgert, kindly arranged for us to tour Ludo Fact GmbH and Ludo Packt GmbH – those being, respectively, a game production company and a logistics firm that manages the inventory and shipping of games. The tour took place on November 7, 2008. Our tour guide, Gertrud Geiger, sales leader at Ludo Fact, did a fantastic job explaining how the factory works.
Facts, Facts and More Facts
Ludo Fact is located in Jettingen-Scheppach, Germany about 25 miles from Augsburg, a city you may remember seeing on the game board of Thurn and Taxis – a game which was likely made at Ludo Fact. Owner and President Mr. Horst Walz started the company in 1995, taking the name from Latin: Ludo from "ludere" (play) and Fact from "facere" (make). Mr. Walz wanted the name to reflect his main business, the production of game boxes and playing material.
Assembly line, boxing up the game inserts and pieces
Today Ludo Fact can produce 2,500 game boxes per hour, per assembly line, with some variability depending on the number of components in the games. This production rate results in an average of 40-50,000 units per day, and over the course of a year, the company produces somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million games and puzzles. Its busiest season is from August to February when employees often work six days a week. The company employs about 170 staff members, with 30 or so in the offices (sales, purchasing, planning, etc.) and around 140 in production. Those numbers may fluctuate depending on the season. Currently, approximately 100 publishers from roughly 20 countries put their trust in Ludo Fact, and Ludo Fact plans to increase these numbers in 2009. (Whew! I was running out of ways to say "approximately.")
Fun Fact: When a game wins the Spiel des Jahres (Germany's "Game of the Year" award), the publisher must be able to quickly produce hundreds of thousands of games. Ludo Fact has been able to meet these requirements to the satisfaction of their clients.
Ludo Fact is a full-service company, producing game boxes, game boards, puzzles, and die-cut punchboards, in addition to purchasing game components (e.g., wooden cubes, pawns, cards) from all over the world to be included in games as needed by its clients. This gives customers "one-stop" shopping convenience and the ease of one point of contact for everything from determining prices to nailing down a delivery schedule.
Once the games or puzzles have been boxed up, they are handed over to Ludo Packt, a logistics company established in 2000. The Ludo Packt warehouse can store as many as 15,000 pallets and fills about 20 trucks a day. During its peak season, the company ships at least two containers a week just to the USA; a 40 ft. (12.19 m.) container can hold about 26 pallets (6.56 ft. high/2 m.), or if filled only with game boxes (i.e. with no wooden pallets), about 40 pallets. (More on pallets later.)
Ludo Packt offers clients state-of-the-art web access from which they may generate dispatch orders, as well as view their stock availability and dispatch information. The company also provides special services such as supplying shop-floor ready displays directly to the client's retail customers or adding promotional material, display holders, and other items to their shipments for trade fairs.
Fun Fact: Rio Grande Games alone ships 30-35 containers a year with about 40 pallets in each container.
The Process
Ludo Fact receives printed paper and cardboard from outside sources. These are fed into machines specifically made for gluing and will eventually become box tops, box bottoms, game boards, puzzles, or game pieces.
Stacks of cardboard and printed papers await gluing
Large customized dies are used to cut cardboard – after it has been glued – into game pieces or puzzles.
Dies for cutting cardboard pieces
Close-up of the die used for cutting Elfengold
Some of the boards will be partially or fully punched out in order to fit into game boxes. Below you can see Ubongo boards as they come off the die-cutting machine. Of course the game boxes are not that big!
Stacks of Ubongo boards, off the die-cutting machine
Different machines are used for making boxes, depending on their size. I've included a shot of the small game box production machine with some of the cases of papers in the background. The machines for making box tops and bottoms do both the gluing and assembling so that a full box top or bottom comes out of the machine.
Empty boxes are stacked until they can be assembled with game pieces, inserts, and rules. Note the workers assembling a game in the photo near the beginning of the article.
Once the games have been put together, and the lids put on, they are shrink-wrapped. Here is the same game from the assembly line going into shrink. Can anyone identify the game?
Into the shrink-wrap machine!
Next the games are stacked and placed into corrugated cardboard boxes. Here's that same mystery game.
Placing games into the corrugated cardboard boxes
The corrugated boxes are in turn stacked on a pallet (the wooden base) and put into another machine that wraps them for shipping. Pallets vary in size from about 4.27 to 6.56 feet (1.3 to 2 meters) for UK and the U.S.
Pallets of boxes, ready to go out
Some pallets are loaded onto trucks while others are placed into temporary storage racks. Note the worker in the truck, near the bottom right of the photo – this will give you an idea of just how tall those racks are!
Pallets in temporary storage, waiting to be shipped
Ludo Packt will ship all sizes of boxes, even single games. You can see some of the smaller items in storage at the bottom of the racks in this next photo.
Rows of boxes and pallets in storage. Can I just have one box? As a souvenir??
I want to thank Tom Hilgert for arranging the tour, Gertrud Geiger for being our tour guide and for providing most of the information in this article, and Jay Tummelson for providing additional information when my memory failed me!
My husband Ravindra Prasad and our friend Tom Hilgert outside Ludo Fact, empty-handed...
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