2/1/06
THE GAMES WE PLAY
9 PAGES

A couple months back I was doing research for a parenting article about the pros and cons of “letting kids win” when you’re playing games with them.  The article never really went anywhere, but it has had a profound effect on my life since.  As part of my research, I interviewed several “gaming families” who had a lot of good and specific insight on the matter.  The piece of advice that rang true with me was that the best games to play are the ones that are fun regardless of whether you, or your child especially, wins or loses. 

One father I interviewed specifically, Dave Jones, actually runs his own board game store online, www.timewellspent.org and he made several suggestions for games that fit that description.  During the course of his interview, he mentioned a term that I’d never heard before: German-style games – as opposed to American style.  If you’re a serious gamer, or really if you just love playing board games a lot, then German style games are probably the ones that make up the better part of your collection.

As Dave described it to me, German style games are not as “linear” in their motion or flow of play.  You don’t roll the dice, move, roll the dice, move.  Often times, you have several options to choose from on your turn.  You’ll be drawing cards, playing cards, placing pieces, moving pieces (forward, backwards and sideways), cashing in special cards, points or tokens that grant you special moves or attacks or powers.  The basic rules are often simple but there’s generally a lot more strategy involved in German style games – strategy that goes beyond whether or not to build a hotel.  Yet at the same time, there are varying degrees of difficulty, so you don’t feel like you’re playing an epic like Risk all the time.  One game that Dave suggested that will easily introduce people to the German style was a game called Ticket to Ride.

The conversation with Dave piqued my interest and when I told Lauren about it, it piqued HER interest.  One rainy Saturday afternoon, we decided to give this new interest a try.  We decided to head to the mall and buy ourselves a German style board game.  Our travails that afternoon could have been adapted into a board game of its own.  Our first attempt was a store just down the road called The Game Stop.  Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that this place was specifically a store for VIDEO games.  We asked the kids behind the counter if they knew where we could find a store that sold board games.  The first clerk was genuinely confused.  I doubt, in this age of blinking lights and games that are designed to entertain their participants with very little creativity on their own part, that the pimply-faced adolescent even knew what a board game was.  The slightly older clerk suggested we try Toys-R-Us or Target or the mall several miles away. 

I knew the former two suggestions would yield nothing.  Department-type toy stores generally only have your typical Candyland’s, Connect Four’s and whatever product tie-in has been rushed through production in order to match the release date of the latest Hollywood blockbuster.  But I figured, hopefully, that the mall would have a store that specialized in board games.  We drove slowly through a torrential downpour.  Upon arrival at the mall a half hour later, I realized that the only store that had any kind of “games” was yet another Game Stop with yet another batch of the latest bleeping, blooping video games. 

Once again, we asked the spacey-eyed clerk if she knew where we could find a store that sold board games.  Once again I got a dumb blank look that said only one thing: “What generation are you FROM?”  Knowing it was a losing battle, I changed tactics, asking the clerk if she had a Yellow pages I could borrow. 

“A what?”

“A Yellow Pages.”

“Um…”

“You know, a phone book.”

“Oh… I don’t know.”  She did a cursory check of a couple of drawers in the counter and asked her manager if he knew where a phone book might be.  He said they didn’t have one.  I didn’t even bother saying thank you before leaving the store.  I walked straight next door into what I foolishly considered to be our most likely option: The Verizon Wireless store and asked the first suit-clad clerk if he had a Yellow Pages I could look at.

“A what?”

“A Yellow Pages.”

“Um…”

“You know, a phone book.”

“Oh… well you can dial 411 from any Verizon phone.” (I swear this is how the conversation went)

“Yeah, but I don’t know the NAME of the place I’m looking for, which is why I need a Yellow Pages.”

“Oh… let me check.”  Thirty seconds later he came back empty-handed with a now-familiar blank look on his face.  “No I’m sorry, we don’t have a yellow pages.”

“Are you kidding me?  You’re Verizon.  You MAKE the Yellow Pages!”

I didn’t say that to him.  I just turned around and left, again without saying thank you.  We’d seen a Target on the way into the mall.  In desperation, but with no real hope of success, we made our way, via a series of extremely difficult left-hand turns over there.  As expected, Target’s entire wall of board games consisted of typically boring, non-engaging American fare, several variations of Monopoly with everything from Harley Davidson to Star Wars themes, several editions of Twister and Trivial Pursuit, as well as a gluttony of Dora the Explorer and Elmo games – all of which have their time and place for sure, but neither of which fit what we were searching for right now. 

Yet again, I found myself asking an empty-headed teenager for a Yellow Pages.  And yet again I received an answer that made me worry for the future generations:

“A what?” 

I know in this day and age of the internet and Google, with the answer to any question quite literally at your fingertips, we don’t necessarily NEED a physical phone book anymore.  But my god, are we so far removed from that phase of existence after only a few years that an entire generation of people doesn’t even know what the Yellow Pages ARE?

Furious, I left the Target, ready to just give up and go the hell home.  Lauren lingered behind a bit to see if there was perhaps a grown up authority figure, a manager perhaps, who might actually know what she was asking for and then perhaps by some miracle locate a bloody phone book.  As I stormed to the car in the pouring rain, I spotted something that gave me yet another glimmer of hope.  A Hallmark store.  I cannot remember a single time when I have ever need anything from, nor had a reason to go inside, a Hallmark Store.  But as I looked at the cursive red and yellow logo, a trite but profound thought popped into my head:

Old people work there. 

People who grew up their entire lives knowing what a Yellow Pages is.  I walked in with renewed energy, walking right past the twenty-something girl working the counter and making my way straight for the sixty-something lady I saw stocking the shelves.

“Excuse me, random question… do you have a Yellow Pages I could look at?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  I’m not sure that we do but I can check.”

It wasn’t the best answer I could have hoped for, but at least for the first time all day I didn’t receive the kind of vacant stare that makes me want to punch every teenager in the head.  The lady disappeared into the back for several minutes and just as I was preparing myself once again to give up and drive home, she emerged with two battered but viable books made of bright yellow paper. 

By this point, Lauren had spotted me through the window and come to my side.  We flipped to the game & hobby section and with the help of the Hallmark lady, deduced which of the listings were close to where we were.  I dialed the number for Abington Game and Hobby and asked the guy if they sold board games.  He said yes.  I felt stupid asking, “Do you sell German Style games,” so I asked, “Do you have Ticket to Ride?”  Again, he said yes.  This was our store.

We thanked the Hallmark lady profusely and we all had a nice little lament over the state of intelligence of the younger generation, making me feel like an old but justified fart.  These kids these days I tell ya…

Abington Game and Hobby was just a mile or so down the road from the mall and we were there in minutes.  It’s a small privately owned shop that’s easy to miss if you don’t know where it is.  We walked in and the placed was packed, with probably a dozen or so people in the midst of some kind of gaming tournament.  The atmosphere was animated with gaming geeks (I use that in the best and least derogatory sense of the word) shouting challenges good-naturedly at each other as they one-upped their opponent’s moves and brought themselves closer to victory.

Lauren and I made our way to the back room where all the board games were and began to peruse.  Poor Allison had been cooped up in the car all day long so we put her down so she could run around a bit.  We were the only ones back there so she fortunately was in no danger of being trampled by an over-excited player from the tournament.  Ticket to Ride was the name of the game Dave Jones had praised for its ease and fun and introduction to the German style of gaming.  But reading the description on its box, it didn’t sound like very much fun to me.  Something about building train routes between cities or something like that. 

I had printed out several reviews of various games that sounded interesting from www.boardgamegeek.com, but AG&H didn’t have any of those specifically.  Lauren and I spent maybe twenty minutes pulling out games that piqued our interest, finally deciding on one called Monsters Menace America.  It had everything you could want in a “first game”:

A fun concept: You play the role of a monster and a branch of the military as you attempt to stomp and destroy as much of America as you can before turning your might on fellow gamers.

Good artwork: Not only do the board and cards have beautiful and well-drawn depictions, but also the monster pieces go beyond a simple cardboard cutout, instead crafted from colorfully painted plastic making them resemble little action figures.  

While we waited to pay for our game, we watched with interest and amusement the tournament being waged at several tables in the main room.  The players, many of whom seemed like they were regulars at the store, were what you would stereotypically expect a bunch of board-gaming geeks to look like.  Mostly guys, generally quite skinny with glasses and clothes that would never win any awards for groundbreaking fashion.  But that’s just a superficial surface observation.  Every single person in this store and in this tournament was incredibly nice, smart, good humored, and obviously knew how to have a raucous good time, and I would have gladly hung out with any one of them before I would even consider wasting my time on the illiterate Abercrombie and Fitch clones I’d been dealing with all day who didn’t even know what a freakin’ Yellow Pages was. 

After leaving the store, we stopped for dinner and to give Allison a chance to work out some of the energy that had been pent up over the course of long day driving from place to place.  The whole evening, on the drive home and as we were putting Allison to bed, we kept saying, in that baby pet voice that couples make, “I can’t wait to play a game with you.”

That night after Allison was asleep we opened up the box and laid out the board and realized pretty quickly that this was indeed not your typical, roll-and-move-roll-and-move board game.  (In fact in retrospect, we would come to realize that this particular game was a little too complex for its own good.)  It took us awhile to read through and understand the somewhat confusing and complex directions, and while we played our first couple games we had to constantly refer back to them.  In fact even in later sessions we would still have to reread certain parts when we became unsure of the order of moves and whatnot. 

In Monsters Menace America you take on the role of one of several classic movie monsters with slightly altered and comical names – for instance, the giant ape monster is named Konk.  It’s the monster’s job to move around the board, which depicts the United States, and “stomp” major cities and other sites to collect health points, mutation powers and infamy points which give you extra attacks later in the game. In addition to your monster, you also control one of the four branches of the military defending the country from your opponent’s monster.  After a certain number of cities have been “stomped” the Monster Challenge begins and you turn your might on your fellow monsters in a last-monster-standing face-off. 

Lauren and I played this game several times that first night and then again the next night.  We soon realized however, that the enjoyment on this particular game is a bit short-lived.  Once you get past the novelty of the artwork and the fact that you’re pretending to be a monster (I for one had a blast making monster noises and sound effects of crashing planes and exploding tanks), the game really kind of drags.  There are certain games that lend themselves to complex movement and strategy.  But Monsters Menace America, by its very design was never intended to be one of those games.  What should be a lighthearted stomp-fest becomes a complex and slow-moving game as you move your monster, deploy your military units, attack a city, fight other units, assess damage and health points, collect mutation cards and infamy tokens as well as military research cards, keeping track of what cards you can play at the beginning of a turn and which can only be used once and which ones will actually have an effect on your opponent…  It’s too much hassle for a game where, let’s face it, you’re playing the part of a fire-breathing dinosaur.

Over the next few weeks, I spent some more time on BoardGameGeek.com, looking at reviews of games that sounded interesting and ended buying two more online from TimeWellSpent.org: Cartagena and Hera & Zeus.

These games are both awesome and, with a couple months of retrospect behind us, lend themselves to playing over and over again without getting sick of them. 

Cartagena (said: car-ta-HAIN-ya) is advertised as a “prison break” game where you’re trying to get a band of pirates down a tunnel and into their awaiting sloop.  I’ve read reviews that call Cartagena “Candyland for adults,” and I think that’s an accurate, if overly simplistic description. 

It’s similar in that you draw cards that correspond to spaces on the board in order to move your pieces down the path and the first person to get to the end wins.  But this goes beyond merely flipping a card and moving, flipping a card and moving.  Players control six pieces (pirates) and have the choice on each turn of playing a card and moving forward, or moving backward to collect more cards. 

The rules are simple and easy to pick up and teach to others, but the game still allows for plenty of strategy as you maneuver your pirates back and forth along the tunnel, creating chains that allow you to jump farther along and then breaking those chains before your opponent can take advantage of them.  So it’s simple enough to be fun, yet strategic enough that you don’t get bored. 

As we began getting sick of Monsters Menace America, we kept telling ourselves, “This game is probably a lot more fun if you have more people playing.”  A lot of games from what I’ve read SAY that they are for 2-8 players but in reality they were designed with the higher number in mind.  With that in my head, I set out to find some fun 2-player-only games.  That’s how I came across Hera & Zeus.  (Incidentally, Lauren and I have changed our mind about Monsters Menace America.  We think this game pretty much just sucks in and of itself.)

Hera & Zeus is a two-player card game which is REALLY hard to learn at first but once you play a couple times becomes second nature and is a LOT of fun to play.  The gist of that game is that each player takes on one of the title roles from Greek mythology.  In the story, each of the gods has kidnapped the other’s favorite mortal: Argus in the case of Hera and Io in the case of Zeus. 

Players build up their god’s armies by laying cards of varying strengths face down in three columns in an effort to locate the Argus or Io card in the opponent’s deck.  In addition to fighting cards, there are also mythology cards that allow special functions but cannot attack, as well as fighting cards that can beat every other card on the table except for one – which in turn is usually quite weak whenever it attacks anything else.  The initial difficulty as you can probably already see comes from the fact that there are a LOT of cards with different strengths, weaknesses and functions to keep track of. 

The first time Lauren and I tried playing this game we got fed up and quit before we got two turns into it.  There were too many cards to keep track of and we kept getting confused about who did what and what went where.  To be fair though, we were exhausted at the time and didn’t have the energy to figure it out at that exact moment.  The next night we did it right.  We went through each card one by one and figured out what they did and who they beat.  That gave us a good perspective on how to proceed and even though we still referred back to the directions several times in the first few games, we at least had a working knowledge of the game’s mechanics and flow.  After that, we’ve had nothing but fun with this game with it’s multiple strategies and frequent use of bluffing tactics, which serve to ratchet up the excitement and tension, especially toward the end of really close games.  

We’ve been playing Hera & Zeus and Cartagena constantly since we bought them.  Friday and Saturday nights, as well as slow weeknights, we pull them out and what starts out as “just one or two rounds” ends up becoming five or six until we realize it’s almost one in the morning and we’ve both got work the next day.  New Year’s Eve this year was spent at home in true “lame new parent” style, sitting on the couch with a movie on in the background, playing round after round of Cartagena and Hera & Zeus. 

I told Lauren, again in that baby pet voice that couples use, “I don’t care how lame we are, honey, I’m having fun with you.”

And it’s true.  For a while there, I actually started worrying about how much game playing we were doing.  I worried that we were using games as a substitute for talking and spending quality time together as a couple.  I was worried that we were already turning into one of those old and boring couples who just sit around playing board games because they have nothing better to do.  But then I stepped back and said, “No, it’s okay.”  I realized that this is just the newest mini phase in our life and there’s no need to fight it.  It’s just like any other mini phase that we go through.  Rather than constantly looking around for the better and cooler and hipper and more exciting things that you think you “should” be doing, just live in the moment and enjoy what life has given you RIGHT NOW.

It’s like this past summer, Lauren and I went out for our anniversary.  It was the first time we’d been out without Allison in a long time.  All during dinner we kept trying to find things to talk about other than Allison.  The typical parental thought of, “The kids are at home, let’s talk about something else,” was in our heads.  But the conversation was strained.  It was like we were reaching for things to talk about.  And I can remember thinking, “Wow, have we run out of things to talk about already after only three years?”  And the thought that followed that immediately was, “No, we HAVE something to talk about, but we’re not talking about it!”

And at that instant we started talking about Allison and about being parents.  And it occurred to me, THIS is what God has given us for this time in our life.  THIS is His gift to us right now, and there we were, trying to fight it.  Rather than living in the exact present moment and talking about what was obviously important and interesting to US right then, we tried to talk about everything BUT that.  That night reminded us to trust God and to trust in our relationship, and know that as we grew together, God would constantly give us new things in our lives to keep us going, new things to talk about and do together.  Our only responsibility was to recognize them and embrace them when they came, rather than worrying about “what else” was out there.  Like the manna in the desert, He only provided just enough for each day.  To take anymore than what you needed was a sin.  So we’ve learned to take our portion gladly and in the faith that tomorrow there will be another portion.

That was a long roundabout way of saying that I’ve let my fears go about our games.  So what if it means we don’t talk a lot during those gaming hours?  For now, this is what excites us and what we’re into.  So we’re embracing it in the knowledge and faith that if and when we get tired of these games, something else will come along that will usher us into our next little mini phase. 

With that embracement, Lauren and I recently went out and bought another game; the one that started it all (for us anyway)… Ticket to Ride.  I hadn’t thought much of the description of the game when I first read it, but every review I read raved about it.  All but the most hardcore gamers loved this game and said they played it often with their friends and family and that THEY loved it too.  It had been the top selling game on TimeWellSpent.org for like the last year or so.  With all that good press, we decided to give Ticket to Ride a shot.  We headed back down to the familiar digs of Abington Game and Hobby and picked up the latest addition to our game arsenal. 

And I am SO happy we took everybody’s overwhelming advice.  This game is a ton of fun.  The board represents the United States with a series different-colored “train routes” between various cities, which vary in length from one to six spaces.  Players start out with 43 train pieces and four train cards, which are colored to correspond to the various route colors on the board.  They also start out with two or three “trip tickets” which I’ll get into later.  On each turn, players can either draw cards, draw trip tickets, or claim a route.

Players earn points by claiming routes with their trains.  The points go up exponentially as the route’s length increases.  For a route one space long, you get a single point.  For a route six spaces long, you get fifteen.  Players claim routes by laying down enough cards of the appropriate color for the route in question.  To claim the five-space green-colored route between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a player would lay down five green cards and then place one of their train pieces on each space in the route.  Obviously, with the way the points are tallied, it’s in a player’s best interest to claim longer routes, the obvious caveat of that being that it takes longer to draw six cards of one color than three – especially when it seems like the cards you need never seem to come up when you need them.

At the beginning of the game each player draws trip tickets showing two cities that they have to connect with a continuous line of their trains by the end of the game.  Each trip ticket has a certain point value, with the longer routes obviously giving more points than the shorter ones.  At the end of the game, you gain the given number of points for each ticket you complete and LOSE the number of points for whatever tickets you fail to complete. 

The game is played until one player runs out of trains, at which point you tally up the points for each route and trip ticket.  An additional bonus is given to the player who has the longest continuous route.  The player with the most points wins.

We’ve only been playing this game for a few weeks now but we’re loving it.  It has exactly the right amount of complexity and options for strategy so that you can feel challenged yet still have a nice laid back game without thinking too much.  Part of the excitement comes from the fact that you really don’t know who’s going to win until the very end of the game when all the points are tallied.  The rest of the excitement, or tension, comes from the fact that since nobody can see the other players’ trip tickets they can end up inadvertently (or on purpose if their particularly perceptive) blocking somebody’s route, forcing them to take the long way around. 

My only beef with this game is that it involves minimal direct competition with the other players.  By and large, you’re so concentrated on completing your own trip tickets that you don’t really have time to worry about blocking your opponent’s route.  And even if you did have time, you can’t be completely sure WHERE they’re actually going, so you may end up wasting trains that could have been put to use elsewhere. 

But other than that, it’s a great game.  In fact, it’s so great that we finally pulled it out to play with somebody else other than just the two of us.  A couple weekends ago, Lauren’s sister Lisa and her husband Tim were visiting and we spent the entire evening playing Ticket to Ride and having a blast.  This was such a different kind of game from what most of us are used to playing, that I expected Lisa and Tim to just kind of say, “Okay, that was interesting,” but otherwise, be unimpressed.  Instead, Lisa went with Lauren the very next day to Abington Game and Hobby to buy the game herself. 

It made me so happy to rope more people into our German web of games. 

As for Lauren and me, the more we play, the more we want to play.  I honestly cannot wait to be that family that has a game night every Friday where we play a few different games, and teach our kids grace and sportsmanship while still having a good time – win or lose.  There are several games I’ve seen online that I still want to get, though at upwards of forty dollars apiece – as well constructed games often are – it’s a hobby that can only grow slowly.

For a full description of all games listed here, check out my list of Board Game Reviews.