Wingspan: This Isn't Just a Game Anymore

Late in 2018, I saw a preview video for a board game. It was an absolutely gorgeous game in every aspect--artwork, components, design, just everything--and I immediately knew I wanted it, even though it wasn't going to be out for a while and I wasn't even fully sure of all the rules or even the price yet. My reaction was so immediate and so strong that it took me awhile to fully unpack it.

Dominion's "Solitaire Problem" and 21st Century Competition

The card game Dominion, designed by Donald X. Vaccarino and released originally in 2008, has risen to stand alongside games like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride as a mainstream Eurogame classic both in Europe and the US. The game has received multiple prestigious awards, released nine separate expansions, and sold well over a million copies worldwide. Despite all this praise and popularity, however, the game has received criticism for its supposed “solitaire problem.” Specifically, the solitaire problem points to the game’s lack of not only direct player competition, but any kind of significant player interaction at all. The solitaire problem has failed to impede Dominion’s popularity, however, perhaps because the game remains highly competitive despite the lack of interaction. In many ways, the indirect conflict exhibited in Dominion captures the ways in which the Western view and practice of competition in general has changed in recent decades.

To better understand this claim, one must be a little more familiar with the rules of Dominion. Dominion helped widely popularize the genre of card game known as deck-building, meaning one of the game’s primary mechanics involves the players building a personal deck of cards from a communal pool. Essentially, these games remove some of the problems of collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering by allowing all players access to all the cards in a given game, while also integrating the personal deck-building into the actual gameplay. To build their decks, players must buy cards from a “Kingdom” of ten different action cards to add to their decks. Players may also purchase higher denominations of coin cards, which becomes essential to succeed as player hands consist of only five cards per turn and any unused cards on a given turn are discarded only to be reused when their deck runs out and is reshuffled. However, players must balance the purchase of coin and action cards with purchases of the third kind of card, known as victory cards. Victory cards represent parcels of land and are the only cards that provide points to the player, and only these points matter for victory in the end. However, victory cards provide no other benefit to the player during play, and so purchasing too many victory cards too early will weaken the player’s deck and slow their progress significantly. The challenge to the players, then, is balancing coin, action, and victory card purchases to optimize their personal decks such that they end up with the most victory points in their deck by the end of the game, which comes when the pile of “Province” cards (the highest denomination of victory card) is gone, or any other three piles of cards are gone.

            

With a basic understanding of the rules, one can see the logic behind the solitaire problem. The game has no combat, no auctioning, no trading, no negotiation—indeed, no direct conflict or interaction at all. The only agonistic element of the game is the race for points before the cards run out, and the only time other players’ actions matter to you is when they buy a card you wanted to buy or buy the last card in a pile that will end the game. Indeed, it is possible to play an entire round of the game in complete silence, without the players speaking to or acknowledging each other at all. Limiting competition and player conflict is a common trait of Eurogames, the tradition of game design from which Dominion springs, but some view that this game takes that principle too far. This would at first seem quite the flaw in game design, especially with Stewart Woods claiming in his book Eurogames: The Design, Culture, and Play of Modern European Board Games that social interaction is by far the element most players derive the most pleasure from in playing games, and “while the design of eurogames tends towards indirect or asynchronous interaction, the fact remains that the intellectual challenge to which players attribute so much of their enjoyment       is focused specifically upon engaging in competition with others” (172). However, while the competition in Dominion is anything but direct, it reflects well on contemporary attitudes toward competition in general in the Western world.

            

Competition in Western civilization has changed significantly in recent decades; everywhere, conflict is less direct and more about the subtle and persistent positioning of resources in relation to others with the same interests. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker proves this to some extent in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he outlines how the course of human history has actually tended toward less violence, not more. While Pinker deals specifically with violence and not competition, this large-scale decline in violence necessitates other avenues for conflict resolution on both macro and micro scales, and civilization has adapted accordingly. In politics, this shift is evidenced by the Cold War. In business, this results in the odd dances that have grown up around product launches, perhaps most visibly in the technology sector. Take, for example, the recent release of new gaming consoles by Microsoft and Sony, both very calculated affairs to try and woo consumers while never directly attacking the competitor. The two companies even tweeted each other congratulations on their console launches as if the success of each did not at least in some measure depend upon the other’s failure (PlayStation, Xbox). This is the kind of polite competition Western culture has grown used to, causing increasing discomfort with direct attacks of any kind. Dominion has proven that this sensibility spills over even into spaces of play, and this kind of indirect competition is still competition enough to make for an exciting game.

            

Ironically, then, perhaps the game’s true flaw is its medieval theming. The game attempts to simulate competing monarchs racing to grab up land, but history proved several times over that such competition was seldom so polite as a game of Dominion. A medieval land-acquisition game would be a much more accurate mimesis of the period if it included some system to simulate violent conflict over disputed land; however, such conflict might overcomplicate the relatively simple rules of Dominion that arguably have helped make the game so popular, and one can easily understand why Vaccarino skipped over such a system for this particular game. On the other hand, as Dominion already reflects the sort of polite competition common in both business and diplomacy of the twenty-first century, perhaps the game could benefit from a theme that reflects that. Instead of monarchs competing for the land, the exact same mechanics could be used to simulate technology companies snatching up patents, for instance. The lack of direct conflict would not be an arbitrary limitation, then, but a reflection of the situation executives find themselves in daily—competing for limited resources but never able to directly fight for them, only strategize for superior positioning in the market. Perhaps part of the fun for players of Dominion is the possible role-playing a time period far removed from their own, but with Wood’s conclusion that the theme of a eurogame is “considered less important than the production quality” (163), why not make the shift to a more appropriate theme for the mechanics?

Yes, Dominion has a solitaire problem—but only as far as Western civilization today has a solitaire problem. If games really are as reflection of their times and culture as Marshall McLuhan suggests, then perhaps the lack of direct player conflict is one of Dominion’s most admirable traits, not its most glaring flaw. Perhaps Dominion helps teach a better way to compete, the more civil way human history has taken thousands of years to develop.

Works Cited

Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.

PlayStation. “Congrats, @Xbox @Microsoft! #NextGeneration #GreatnessAwaits.” 22 Nov 2013, 6:00 a.m. Tweet.

Wood, Stewart. Eurogames: The Design, Culture, and Play of Modern European Board Games. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2012. Print.

Xbox. “Congrats @Playstation. From, #Xbox. pic.twitter.com/XnQIzXIHQ9.” 15 Nov 2013, 7:00 a.m. Tweet.

The Mechanic is the Message: The Agents

I've played a lot of games while I've been off from school for a couple weeks. Thanks to Christmas gifts and Kickstarter, I've been able to play a lot of new games with new ideas. One thing that's particularly stood out to me about the games I played over the holidays is how game mechanics can communicate meaning. This is especially true in two games I played this past week: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and the tabletop game The Agents. I'll cover The Agents in this post, and Brothers in the next.

These Cards are People
Let's start with The Agents. The Agents is a "double-edged cards game," a name they apparently trademarked for themselves. The core mechanic of the game, which is explained in their Kickstarter video below, is placing cards either facing you or facing your opponent to get either points or abilities. Abilities help you control the game, but points help you win, so you have to balance the two to succeed.

                   

The Agents is smart in a lot of ways, but specifically it connects its mechanics to its themes better than any other tabletop game I've ever played. The premise is that all these agents have been disavowed by their home governments and are now working rogue, using their skills to whatever ends they see fit. As such, the individual agents' relationships to the player are different than you'd expect in a traditional card game. In most card games, each player has their own cards that serve them faithfully and always give benefit to the player who lays them down. Thanks to the mechanics of this game, though, cards can literally turn on you at a minute, and suddenly these cards aren't slaves to a game, but people--agents with their own agendas.

This is accomplished in two ways. First of all, the Agents breaks the sense of ownership between player and card. Yes, you have cards in your hand, and yes, you play them how you want, but any card you play gives two separate benefits, one to you and the other to someone else. Additionally, you play agent cards on a faction, but no one owns any one faction. Instead, factions are shared between two players, and both players try to influence the faction in such a way that the most advantage goes to them. With cards being "double-edged" and faction control being decentralized, suddenly the agents themselves are players in the game as well.

I've played this game several times now and taught it to 5 or 6 different people. Invariably, there comes a moment in each person's first game where they're holding a card they want to play, just looking from one faction to the next, considering all the implications of each possible placement and direction of the card, and then they'll just stop and blurt out, "Oh, crap." The Agents makes it very difficult to figure out exactly which play is most advantageous to you, and it's also very good at making other players present you with unexpected opportunities as they put points or commands in your direction that you didn't see coming.

Gameplay considerations aside (for now, though seriously that's great game design in itself), I realized in a rush in one game just how well these mechanics combine to represent the game's themes. "These cards are people," I suddenly thought. Rather than serving me like my slaves, the cards in the Agents are characters--skilled agents who have their own agendas and will serve whom they will serve, how they wish to serve them. This effect is enhanced by the extremely careful balance of the cards. It's nearly impossible to get a "mega turn" in The Agents, because each agent only has one ability, and those abilities most often only affect one other card at a time. In this way, the Agents becomes a true tactical game, where you constantly have to look at what's in front of you and consider all the possibilities. All combined, this makes the Agents feel extremely like a tense game of politics and juggling loyalties with real people and real consequences to each decision.

At this point, all the game's subtle puns start coming out. "Double-edged cards" doesn't just mean the mechanic of points and commands, but the duplicitous nature of the agents themselves. "Turn," one of the commands in the game, literally means turn the card around, but it also represents turning loyalties from one player to the other. These and other commands and verbiage in the game serve both gameplay and theme, at times ingeniously.

Games are a language in themselves, and like any language, there are multiple layers of expression going on at once. Functional games present you with mechanics that are understandable and work together well. Good games make those understandable and functional mechanics more robust and complex, and give clever nods to the framing theme of the game to splash in more fun for the players. Great games, though, are like great language: functionally elegant, but exploiting the functions of the language itself to communicate higher-level associations and observations. Great language can be consumed on a functional level without the audience recognizing its subtle greater accomplishments along the way. With a little training and thought and a keen eye, however, great language unpackages its greater meaning as the proper eyes study each bit of functional elegance. The careful study of such language can reveal meanings applicable far beyond the moment of the language itself. Truly great games are also great language--they function properly, but they also make themselves available to extended critical thought that goes beyond the game itself to discussing bigger and broader things.

It is in this sense that the Agents is a great game to me. Functionally, it's genius already, but careful study of the game lends easily and profitably to broader thought and discussion on human nature, ambition, and loyalty, a fact attested to by many a game table dispute as the game heats up,  agents start spinning like tops and the final points come rushing in.

Update: First Person Scholar, an eBook, and Tabletop Games

I haven't posted anything here for awhile, but don't worry, it's not because I've been idle. I've been busy with finals and final projects for school, of course, but I've also been working with the guys over at First Person Scholar to get something published over there in January. Definitely go check them out and I'll keep you updated as that moves forward.

Also, as it happens, one of my final projects was for a print publishing class and I had to typeset a book, so I took a lot of my stuff from here and made a little book out of it, and it turned out looking really good. I also made an ebook version which you can download and check out here.

Finally, with the break I'm going to take advantage of the time to do a mini series of essays a little bit off topic--board and card games. I love tabletop games and I especially get into them around the holidays because I'm with family a lot and we all have free time. So for the next couple weeks be looking for my readings of a few of my favorite board and card games, including Dominion, 7 Wonders, and the recently Kickstarted The Agents.

Happy holidays!