What to Do If... You Don't Remember (or Fully Understand) the Rules

Imagine that it's game night at your home. You've invited four of your best game buddies to join you in learning a somewhat complicated game like Power Grid. All of your buddies have some experience with board games and even own some of their own, so you anticipate a not-so-steep learning curve. With this in mind, you spent a little time reading the rules, skimming sections because you have to commit time to actually cleaning your living room and bathroom (personal note: please clean your bathrooms before game day; your guests will quietly thank you for it).

Anyway, your guests arrive. Wisely, you already had the board and components laid out on the table and the rules ready for easy reference. After a few appetizers and drinks, you invite your friends to sit as you explain the rules. At first, people are comprehending and nodding their understanding. Yet, partway through the explanation, you stumble. What was that rule about cycling in new power plants? Is it last-to-first place turn order during bidding or during the connection of cities? As you feverishly rifle through the rulebook, you lose your place and your guests' collective attentions begin to wander. You spend five minutes reading through each phase of the game until you think you have a firm grasp of the game flow, which prompts you to restart your explanation... until you realize that you didn't quite understand the flow after all. After that, it's all sweaty palms, reading, and your guests turning on the TV to watch reruns of Last Man Standing...

This scenario is not a strange one. I would wager that almost all of you have experienced this when teaching a game you own. Getting stuck on misunderstood or forgotten rules, befuddling yourself on why certain game events happen, and even forgetting basic setup are not uncommon during the teaching of games. However, in this article, I want to focus on an aspect of rules that has needlessly stymied many a game session: not knowing certain rules OR forgetting rules. Here are a few tips and tricks I have for what to do if you don't remember (or understand) rules. These tips are not in any particular order:

Read the Rules Well Before Game Day
The obvious solution for not remembering rules is to read the rules long before you have your game day. I would suggest both reading the rules and playing a mock game on your own to acquaint yourself with the machinery of the game itself. For note-taking, you may want to print a separate copy of the rules that you can highlight and notate. Of course, if you don't mind marking up your rulebook, feel free to do so.

Read Forums and User Comments
Board Game Geek is a great online resource for acquiring more information about rules and frequently-asked questions. Read the comments pertaining to the game in question; I would even recommend bookmarking the URL for that game and having that handy before the event you are hosting, but a better solution would be to compile handy knowledge in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet.

Now, if you didn't do your homework and study the rules, then here are the tips for you:

Wing It (and Tell People You're Winging It)
When teaching a game, the worst thing, besides not knowing a rule, is taking an inordinate amount of time reading the rules while your friends languish in their semi-comfortable dining room chairs. I recommend skimming the rules, and then informing your guests that you are just going to start the game and proceed with your tenuous grasp of the rules. Tell your friends that you may make mistakes during the course of play, but you will adhere to the rules as you understood them at the start. Then, after the game is over, let people know what your mistakes were and how the game should be played. This sounds sloppy, but playing a game incorrectly and having fun is more important than getting mired in rules reading for an hour before you start the game.

Ignore Certain Rules
It is perfectly acceptable to excise rules from the game for the sake of starting the game and enjoying each other's company. For instance, some people play Carcassonne for the first time WITHOUT farmer scoring. Sure, this takes away a key part of the scoring process, but at least you introduce your friends to the concept of tile-laying and feature scoring. If you finish fast enough (note: Carcassonne games can take only 75 minutes if you play with the base set), then you can incorporate that rule you ignored.

Set House Rules
A variation of winging it is telling people that you are going to run a game with a certain interpretation in mind, which is basically setting house rules. For the sake of learning and starting a game, there is nothing wrong with this as long as people are made aware of it. Yet, if you set house rules on the fly while someone decides to read the rules during gameplay, he may feel cheated if he discovers that the rules state something different from your house rule.

In general, if you don't understand a rule in the moment, especially if you're reading and teaching at the same time, tell everything that you are going to proceed with a certain approach and ask for their consent. Be flexible, though: some people may disagree with your house rule, which is actually a great thing because they are now engaged in the learning process and may help you better execute that particular stipulation.

Play a Few Practice Turns and Reset
If you have several hours scheduled, you could play two or three demo rounds of a game for people to get a feel for the game while you work out your comprehension of the game. After you've identified pain points in the rules and negotiated with others to lay out how the game should be played, take a break, reset the board, and play the "real" session.

Learn Together
If you have a patient group of close friends, you may want to entreat them to read the rules with you and learn the game together. To do this, I recommend sending the rules to each of them by email or even message service, and then going through the rules in unison. With the right group, this learning session becomes a hangout in and of itself, especially for really involved and complex games. Some people relish these opportunities: if you identify these folks, hold on to their friendship with both hands!

(For Experts Only) Make Up the Rules!
Now, there comes a time when, despite your improvisational abilities, you cannot make out enough of the game's rules in the moment to develop a working understanding of the game that you can even communicate to your friends. It happens; you are not alone in these moments of confusion. Considering this, based on your experience with games, make up the rules!

An example of this was the first time I played Robinson Crusoe. In retrospect, Robinson Crusoe is not that complicated, but the rules are not the most clearly-written rules and do leave new players to a boatload of reading during gameplay, so I remember having to make up a rule about the in-game items that you can construct in which each item, unless explicitly stated, could be used over and over. For some reason, I was confused about whether items were used one time or able to be used repeatedly, so I just made up a rule. Indeed, you may end up perpetuating incorrect play, but remember: your goal is to guide your friends through a game by playing it and having fun. Do not get mired in reading and waiting.

Before I proceed, I should note that you must let people know that you are making up the rules because you do not want to perpetuate incorrect play. Doing so is like spreading a disease: you not only affect your friends, but they affect their friends. Even worse, once your friends discover your malfeasance, they will NOT trust you to teach another board game, so give your friends fair warning. Funnily enough, some of your friends may object to your making up rules and help you out by reading the rules for themselves.

When All Else Fails... Fall Back!
If you are not an expert on ad hoc rule generation or with tap-dancing through a rules explanation, you may want to declare that you need more time to learn the game and move on to a game that most of your friends know. Sure, you may have a friend or two that would be disappointed in not learning the new game, but sometimes simply playing any game is the best course of action.

Thanks to my direct influence, my two teenage sons own and play board games. My older son, who is 15, is less interested in board games than at least seven other interests, but he does play games to get out of doing homework and as a general diversion. As it does happen, he has moved beyond board games as a personal preference. Not so conversely, my younger son, who is 13, still likes receiving games as gifts and will opt on his own to play them with little prompting. I mention both of my sons because, despite their being at different points of what I call the "board game interest lifecycle," they have one thing in common: they both dislike teaching people board games because there is a lot of pressure to know and understand (almost) every rule. Thankfully, though, with the tips and experience I've shared, you can spend less time stressing out about rules explanations and more time enjoying your friends' company and, oh yes, playing the game you wanted to play. Your friends might even appreciate the game enough to read the rules, yell at you for the mistakes you made, and then demand that the game be played correctly next week. To me, in this case, everyone wins!

Rules Discussion: Using One Token to Track Multiple Game Elements

There is an intriguing little (for lack of a better word) mechanic I have observed in Eclipse and Glass Road. Honestly, it's neither a mechanic nor a rule, per se, but a nifty way of accounting for gained resources, and this design element is becoming more popular, as far as I can tell. In those two games, removing chits or tokens reveals new abilities or income. In Eclipse, as far as I have observed, if you deploy one of your cubes onto another part of the board, a higher income level is revealed, as if by deploying a worker you make more money. Something similar happens in Glass Road; by removing or "spending" certain resources, a glass piece or a brick piece is revealed, enabling you to building something or accumulate items. In both cases, what is happening is simple to understand: you are tracking income or accumulation in a clever way.

Let me explicitly state my point: as time has passed and modern games have been created on the backs of games before them, newer and more elegant ways of tracking your stuff have been introduced. In the past, tracking accumulation was fiddly: you had to maintain piles of tokens or you slid a dedicated counter down a scoring track of some kind. If you look back 10 or 15 years ago, you may notice that these "older" board games were like accounting spreadsheets in which had to balance every column by retaining piles of chits. This is apparent in Uwe Rosenberg's earlier games, such as Le Havre and Agricola; in both games, you tracked your stuff by keeping piles of... well, stuff.

However, a few years ago, Rosenberg created Glass Road, which is, in many ways, a huge refinement of those past games in one regard: instead of maintaining piles of junk, you simply turn a dial and slide one token representing each resource along the dial to indicate how much you had of each resource. This was a genius move and worthy of distinction because Rosenberg succeeded in instilling that beloved complexity into a game, yet streamlining the bookkeeping to a few deft moves of tokens and a dial. Brilliant!

There are numerous reasons why fiddly bookkeeping has given way to elegant tracking through subtraction. One reason is because, by moving a piece or a dial, you track two trends -- resource accumulation and revelation of a new level of play -- which is expeditious for gameplay. Another reason is because with game designers interweaving more systems, tracking those systems must also be more streamlined lest a game night devolve into so much cube-pushing and chit-moving that turns take twice as long as it takes to make decisions. Yet another reason to consider is that, frankly, including more material in a game makes it more expensive to manufacture and buy; by limiting the tokens and the chits, game costs stay relatively low without sacrificing complexity.

The odd irony is that even elegant tracking mechanisms can feel fiddly, which is why Eclipse indeed seems like an old game. Interestingly, Eclipse is not an "old" game, per se, though it did come out in 2011, which is kind of long in the tooth for board games. Eclipse was ahead of its time, though Eclipse represents that awkward period of transition when popular trends shift, early adopters struggle with those new trends, and then those trends become publicized to the extent that people understand them better. On the shoulders of such games as Eclipse, game designers may have discovered those novel ways of tracking resources, improving on the old designs.

Nowadays, I see more games using a method of tracking two or more items by simply moving one piece or one dial. Great Western Trail and Mombasa, which are both Alexander Pfister games, employ this approach to accumulation. In Mombasa, for example, when you explore a region of the board, you deploy a house piece representing a company's interest in that region; at the same time, if a coin space is revealed, then an end-game scoring bonus is definitely forthcoming. All it took to account for this was the game designer using the removal of that house piece as the bookkeeper for that end-game bonus instead of using a dedicated tracking dial or slider.

This is the bright future of board gaming with more complex games mitigating all that fiddliness with more elegant ways of keeping your books balanced by tracking two or more items with one element. In that way, even the bookkeeping itself is a game mechanic because you are moving pieces from one space to another whilst revealing a higher level of income, a new resource, or even a bonus to end-game scoring (see Mombasa). Any thoughts on that?

Rules Discussion: Movement by Ruler or Template

Recently, I've been playing a bit of the X-Wing Miniatures Game, in which players move ships from point to point using pre-measured maneuver templates. For example, if you want to move a ship one ship-length ahead (it actually works out to be two ship-lengths), you use the 1-straight maneuver template to advance the ship by placing the back of the template against the front of the ship base and then sliding the ship base to the front of the template such that the back of ship base touches the template's front. In X-Wing, during the Activation phase of each turn, players move ships in order of pilot skill, which means that the lowest pilot skill moves first. However, after all movement and actions happen, the Combat phase begins and the highest pilot skill attacks first. Basically, this reflects the concept that the lesser pilots can fly wherever they want, but the good pilots hit first.

There are numerous challenges with this mechanic. One challenge is planning ahead to ensure that your ships do not collide with each other or opposing ships; in X-Wing, if ship bases overlap, then the ship that overlapped the existing ship is unable to perform an action, such as performing a barrel roll or a target lock on an opposing ship. This can be a major gaffe during a critical time in the battle because you may need that action to increase your chances of hitting a foe's ship. Another challenge is predicting where your opponent's ships will finish their maneuvers; in X-Wing, everyone decides what their moves will be in secret, locks their moves, but then announces and executes moves in order of pilot skill. This means that you don't know where your opponent's ships will end up. In my case, I often find my ships completely out of position to target anyone (which further reflects my inexperience with this game, while seasoned players would know how best to maneuver their ships to address the most probable attack vectors). Yet another challenge is the element of stress in X-Wing. Everyone uses a maneuver dial to decide which move their ships will execute; some moves are "green" maneuvers, which clear any "stress" tokens from a ship, but some moves are "red" maneuvers, which add stress to a ship, thus limiting the maneuvers a ship can complete during the next round to only green maneuvers. Stress constraints ships to a smaller subset of possible maneuvers, which makes your future maneuver choices more predictable. You have to balance stress clearing with stress accumulation, all the while trying to execute your own strategies and NOT be predictable.

Movement by ruler or template is nothing new in gaming, but what I have found to be most challenging is conceiving where my ships will conclude their supposed maneuvers at the end of each turn while trying to anticipate where my opponent's ships will end up. Of course, knowing the maneuverability of each individual ship type helps, as well as paying attention to stress tokens on each ship, but this level of two-dimensional spatial reasoning is one that is largely absent from board games. Typically, with most Euro games, pieces serve as markers or reminders of how much of each resource you have, or whether a particular action was taken or not, or of scoring. In miniatures games, though, the pieces are the attackers, with each piece possessing one or more defining and unique attributes; moreover, the position of one piece in relation to another determines attack range, hit probability, and damage intensity. There is also a fastidiousness to moving miniatures that further signals how important position is; in X-Wing, for instance, every inch counts because moving one way or another can be the deciding factor of if a desired target is in your firing arc. Even nudging pieces accidentally can trigger tableside heart attacks as all opponents argue over where your piece should really be. To me, it's a different way of viewing the tabletop... but it's a welcome difference because I am stretched as a gamer to understand and use game pieces with attention to table position.

The telltale mechanic of any miniatures game is movement by measurement, and it's a mechanic that I urge every gamer to dive in and experience at least for a few games. There are "easy" games that introduce gamers to spatial reasoning, such as Memoir '44 and Battlelore; though movement still happens hex by hex, range and position are crucial. Games like X-Wing, Wings of Glory, and Star Trek Attack Wing ratchet up the difficulty even more because you no longer have hexes -- you have to use maneuver templates. The ultimate miniatures game experience comes from actual use of a bonafide ruler, such as in Warhammer 40k. When you're measuring range by centimeters and being off by only a tiny few millimeters can affect an entire turn, you are truly feeling the headache and thrill of tabletop positioning. Of course, in a few months, I may change my mind and grow to loathe movement by template. I mean, I may rather place workers and accumulate resources than worry about whether I nudged my A-Wing accidentally or not.

Rules Discussion: Sanctioned Cheating

I haven't written anything for Rules Discussion in a while, but I do have a topic today: sanctioned cheating, which is the concept (not necessarily a mechanic) of being allowed to "cheat" within the rules of a game. I'm not talking about deception of an opponent with misdirection or baiting tactics that prevail in miniature and/or war games; to convince your opponent that you're attacking one region when you're actually targeting another region on the board is endemic to such games. I'm also not talking about using distraction or "table talk" to fluster or confuse an opponent, though some may consider this "cheating." Instead, I'm discussing the concept of breaking or bending rules in a game as being encouraged by the rules of the game itself.

One form of sanctioned cheating is outright lying, which happens rampantly in Sheriff of Nottingham (in which you are encouraged to deceive the Sheriff to smuggle contraband into Nottingham) and the classic Balderdash (in which you try to convince others that your false definition for a word is the "real" one). I'm very much on the fence about this topic because encouraging one's children to lie (even in a game) may send a conflicting message. Lying can happen to humorous effect, and the rules allows for it in these games, so it is actually "wrong" to do it? Hmm... As a Christian, I am truly conflicted by this idea, yet games like these can be fun if it is understood that lying is only "acceptable" when sanctioned by the rules... That's really confusing!

Another form of sanctioned cheating is the one on which I'm focusing: rules that allow you to break the rules, which is complicated, so I'll focus on one game to explain: Cheating Moth, or Mogel Motte in German. This game involves a simple objective of ridding yourself of cards to win. Each player starts with a hand of eight cards. Depending on the face-up card in the discard pile, each player places the appropriate card on top of the discard pile. For example, if there is a "1" card on the pile, you can place a "5" or a "2." There are several cards that incur special conditions, such as a "mosquito" card which requires all players but the active player to slap their hands on it; the last player to do so receives one card from each player's hand. Anyway, there isn't much to say about the hand evacuation aspect of this game... except that the rules allow players to not only rid themselves of cards in the conventional way, but also in any other way they see fit! This could involve, say, dropping one card at a time on the floor, or placing them up a sleeve, or playing each card on the discard pile out of turn, all the while convincing the other players that it's one's turn.

Of course, this sounds like anarchy, but there's yet another catch: at the start of each game, one player is the "Guard Bug," whose job is to catch cheaters. For instance, if someone drops a card on the floor and the Guard Bug sees the act happen, he or she calls out the cheater, who must then receive one card from each of his or her opponents. Then, that cheater becomes the Guard Bug. The Guard Bug is the only player in Cheating Moth who cannot "cheat," which is a huge burden because he or she has to rid themselves of cards the conventional way AND keep a wary eye on all the players to not only stem the tide of cheating, but also to get rid of the Guard Bug title for themselves!

Sanctioned cheating is a dynamic that doesn't necessarily interest me as a gamer, but it's an intriguing, also mind-bending paradigm to consider. In the case of Cheating Moth, the "cheating" is sanctioned in that you have a game "layer" in which there is a basic mechanic for getting rid of cards, and then there is a kind of social layer on the game layer that allows you to circumvent the rules in the game layer. This is when sanctioned cheating works in a game: if there is an elementary game mechanic and victory conditions in place, the rules can allow for a subset of stacked rules that let players get around the game mechanic. For games with simple objectives and rules, it would be easy to place a cheating social layer on the game. However, for complex games like Twilight Struggle or Agricola, cheating would confuse everyone and throw the game into chaos; can you imagine if players could steal sheep from the central area, or even the "bank?"

In order for sanctioned cheating to work, I believe you have to have a strong and direct core of simple rules and victory conditions. If goals and rules are complex, cheating actually works toward undermining the entire game, but with Cheating Moth, you have an easy goal (i.e. get rid of cards) which is dull if played in that way, but the cheating layer (and the "Guard Bug role) adds another layer to the game that doesn't undermine the rule layer. Sanctioned cheating is a difficult topic to broach because one may have strong convictions against cheating, and yet there may be a social layer that allows for cheating in a game. To be honest, this is not really my cup of tea, and yet Cheating Moth is quite fun because you are required to be creative with how you remove cards from your hand.

What are your thoughts?

Rules Discussion: Set Collection

Set Collection is a category recognized on Board Game Geek that refers to the game mechanic of collecting sets of something to make something happen. This is not a new mechanic by any stretch of the imagination because classic card games like Gin Rummy and Poker involve collecting pairs, threes-of-a-kind, and straights (i.e. three or more cards in numeric order), but it's a mechanic that seems to get a fresh facelift with each new game released. For example, when Settlers of Catan was published in 1996, I'm sure that collecting sets of cards (i.e. resources) to build cities and gather development cards was not new, but the look and feel of the game was certainly novel. When Ticket to Ride was released in 2004, it stoked heightened interest in board gaming with its gorgeous artwork, top-notch production values, and easy-to-learn, tough-to-dominate gameplay; yet, at the heart of the game is a simple set collection dynamic in which you collect cards of like color to connect cities. Set collection is a core mechanic of many games, whether they are venerable classics or upstart new releases.

What makes set collection feel new with each game is not the mechanic itself as much as what you have to collect. For those aforementioned card games, a "set" is defined by cards of like or sequential value, and, in Poker, one set is often valued over other sets. In Settlers of Catan, what defines a set is what you intend to build; in Ticket to Ride, a set is determined by the color and length of the route connecting two desired cities. As more games are released with a set collection mechanic, gathering the requirements for fulfilling the sets is different, which makes it a time-honored mechanic that rarely fails...

Or does it? Set collection is often subject to the randomness of the deal or the flop, as well as the interference of the other player. Though the latter is a welcome attribute of many games, the former is an annoyance that can stymy even the best-laid plans. What happens if you don't draw that sixth orange card to complete a connection? What about those times in which you don't get the roll necessary to collect that last ore card? Either case is heartbreaking or irritating, though wild cards and other in-game items can help mitigate randomness at the cost of game speed, such as when you take one Locomotive card in Ticket to Ride instead of taking two cards, thus slowing down your acquisition of train cards. In any case, set collection can represent the most fun and grating aspects of gaming, sometimes simultaneously.

As a mechanic, I enjoy collecting sets, but it's not a mechanic that compels me to buy games. To be honest, I didn't buy Ticket to Ride because of the set collection mechanic; I bought it because the gameplay was easy to grasp, it was beautiful to behold, and it is as cutthroat or friendly as you and your opponents want it to be. Nonetheless, many of the more accessible games employ this mechanic. If it works, why fix it?

Rules Discussion: Multi-use Cards

Multi-use cards in games are fascinating to me because they challenge our preconceived notions of resource and hand management. To explain, multi-use cards are cards that serve more than one purpose in a game. For example, Twilight Struggle employs cards as events that are favorable to a player, events that happen despite the active player's wishes, or for influence points; as a result, a player has to weigh the consequences of playing an opponent's event just to use the influence points, or ponder whether playing a favorable event card for the event or for points is best. Many of GMT's card-driven strategy games work on this premise of using your or your opponent's events.

Another example I've experienced recently is Oh My Goods, in which cards serve as either resources, processing buildings, or as raw materials and/or goods if played face-down on a building. This dynamic introduces many uncertainties into the game, such as which resources/buildings are face-down as goods on a building (which affects the distribution of certain resources and/or buildings in the deck), or how many resources of a certain type are left in the draw pile, or what the heck does your opponent really have, even if you can see the discard pile and there's only one or two cards left in the draw pile...

A third example is a guilty pleasure game: Monopoly Deal. In this game, almost every card can be played for its primary purpose as a property or event card, or played as money to be pooled in your personal bank. By playing properties as money, they permanently become money cards and are thus removed from circulation, which in turn affects the distribution of certain property colors in the deck.

I'm sure that there are other examples of this dynamic in gaming, but multi-use cards complicate the finite nature of in-game resources and introduces some uncomfortable uncertainty into any game. No longer are cards just played straight; you have to consider that you are, say, reducing the number of a particular resource in a game, or you have to absorb the negative effect of playing an opponent's card to take advantage of a card's other purpose. Anything that monkeys with card or resource distribution in a game appeals to me, so when I find a game that features multi-use cards, my eyes widen. Sometimes, I like a bit of the unknown in a game.

Rules Discussion: Player-to-player Trading

One of the finest, most laudable aspects of any board game is the positive social dynamic that is engendered during gameplay. There's the regular chit-chat small talk, the "catching up" with occasional friends, and even the heartfelt sharing of burdens with family. Through the social dynamic of board games, we sharpen our abilities to read facial cues and semiotics, detect deeper pragmatic aspects conveyed through intonation and body language, and we even treat each other better in person than in online games, during which people can declare the most awful lies about other people in forums and chats. Yet another benefit of the positive social dynamic of face-to-face interaction in board games is player-to-player trading, through which we learn how to negotiate to achieve a mutually beneficial result -- a useful skill for children and adults.

As far as I know, player-to-player trading is not unusual in gaming. Outside of the mainstream rules, trading is allowed in Monopoly, in which people can broker deals for property, money, and/or free passes. Pit is another classic trading game in which players frantically trade commodities until one player, unbeknownst to the others, collect a complete set of a commodity. One game that I own from a favorite designer of mine is Bohnanza, by Uwe Rosenberg. In that game, players trade beans, but the difficulty lies in the requirement to plant beans each turn; if you have two fields of beans already, players have to choose which field to sacrifice to plant beans that they cannot off-load. Better than these games, however, (or at least, more highly regarded) is Settlers of Catan, in which a player's fortunes rise and fall depending partly on how well they can acquire necessary resources from others without trading away too much. In all of these games, the ability to negotiate with other players is indispensible, often leveling the playing field by giving those who are normally not board gamers a tool they can use. I have participated in numerous gaming sessions in which casual gamers or self-described non-gamers have done quite well because they were adept at talking people into giving up something useful.

Player-to-player trading in a game, quite deliberately, adds a much needed social element to many games, such as Settlers of Catan and even Monopoly, and several more (such as Chinatown, which I have yet to play, but I have watched Shut Up & Sit Down's review of it) -- that element being face-to-face interaction and negotiation with other people. Many Euro games lack this element, mostly because it is a built-in constraint for players to have to deal with the resources they have on hand instead of escaping tight squeezes by trading away that unwanted wood for some clay. However, games like Agricola and Stone Age would certainly be loosened up if player-to-player trading could be performed because food, which is essential in both games, could be acquired from a player who has a lot of it. In turn, the other player would benefit from more of a necessary building material, enabling him or her to, say, build a four-segment fence to enclose two cattle or to buy that development card. For games that openly feature trading, player-to-player trading opens up any game not only socially, but tactically, allowing players to escape nigh-impossible situations by acquiring a crucial item from a neighbor.

In my opinion, trading is one of those game-learned abilities that helps anybody beyond the confines of a game; I can imagine that children that grow up with trading games would be skilled negotiators in the future because they practiced at the family dinner table. This is also why I favor board games over video games because you are forced to bargain face-to-face with other people, which has greater application in daily life than negotiating with a screen.

Rules Discussion: Dice Manipulation

As much as anyone, I love chucking dice and seeing what happens. The thrill, the anticipation, the excitement of a good result, and the disappointment of a terrible result: dice can engender all of these feelings, sometimes sequentially, but sometimes simultaneously. Yet, I didn't used to feel this way about dice. From my childhood, I have traumatic memories of losing battles to a vastly inferior defending force in Risk, and of never landing on the three or four properties I needed to complete sets in Monopoly. Unfavorable dice rolls even dogged me when I played RPGs, as if rolling poorly was a ravenous bloodhound intent on devouring any sense of fun I could derive from gaming. Dice rolls in games conspired to filch the joy out of my gaming sessions, but I have come to discover a mechanic that is more like a game design paradigm: dice manipulation.

Dice manipulation is actually a time-honored idea, and I'm not referring to loaded dice with weighting to favor certain sides. No, I'm talking about in-game elements that allow players to change dice roll results to favor them. One way this is done is allotted roll attempts, which Yahtzee, in all its underrated glory, manifests beautifully; in that game, you can choose to reroll as many dice as you want to try to achieve a desired result. King of Tokyo, a modern classic, appropriates this approach, and is a wonderful filler game because of it. Another way to manipulate dice rolls is through bonuses or items earned in the course of play; Alien Frontiers, for example, not only employs dice as "ships," but it provides Alien Tech cards that let players change their rolls when they choose to activate or discard those cards. Castles of Burgundy provides workers that afford players opportunities to change rolls, as well. Kingsburg has a similar mechanic in which earned +1 chits can be applied to rolls. A third way dice are manipulated is team resetting, which is endemic to the Escape series of games; in those games, when all of your masks are locked into their black sides, teammates can help you out by granting you their gold "masks" or "faces."

Yet another method by which dice are manipulated does not really involve changing dice rolls as much as changing the role dice play in a game (pun intended). A brilliant exemplar of this is the Dice Masters system created by Eric Lang and WizKids. In Dice Masters, each die is either a Sidekick, a character, or a basic action die. All dice can provide energy of some kind to purchase character or basic action dice or to deploy characters, but the nice twist is that character dice, when rolled on one of three possible sides, are actually played as "characters" on the field. For example, a Captain America die has a Level 1 side, a Level 2 side, and a Level 3 side; Level 3 sides are the strongest offensively and defensively, but considering all three character sides of a six-sided die, you have a 50% chance of deploying a character, a 16.7% chance of generating two energy points, and a 33.3% chance of even generating one energy of a particular type. In addition, Sidekick dice have five energy-generating sides, but also a sixth side that serves as a "sidekick" with an Attack strength of 1 and a Defense strength of 1. In other words, the dice are THE playing pieces, as well as the determiners of the amounts of energy generated, but Dice Masters also involves re-rolls, "spinning" dice up or down levels (i.e. changing the faces of dice to match a certain Level), drawing more dice, putting more dice in the draw bag, and even removing dice from play. If anything, Dice Masters encompasses many dice manipulation principles.

I'm sure that there are more ways in which dice are manipulated or employed, such as in Panamax in which dice determine what kind of cargo is being carried and are placed on the ships themselves. I do invite comments about other examples of dice manipulation. What are your favorite ways by which dice rolls can be altered in a game? Have you encountered any unique mechanics that use dice?

Rules Discussion: Catch-up Mechanisms

Catch-up mechanisms are a somewhat polarizing concept in gaming, for it involves enabling players in last place or close to last place to catch up to the leaders. The prime example of this is in Power Grid, in which the last place player (who does bid for power plants last) purchases resources first and connects to cities first, as well. This affords those back-dwellers opportunities to "catch up" with better deals on resources, which lets them conserve money to add to their networks. It's a mechanic that defines Power Grid and (as I heard in a Long View podcast) German politics and utilities in that the lagging company is helped, while the leaders are distrusted enough to be penalized. American business is the opposite, which leads to massive oligopolies and disappearing mom-and-pop shops.

Based on my somewhat limited knowledge of board games, I can only say that there are other games that have some kind of catch-up mechanisms, though I'm not familiar with them. A possible example is Star Realms because certain cards let players draw another card, either by simply playing those cards or depending on the presence of allies. If a player plays enough "Draw one card" cards in quick succession, damage can accumulate rapidly, leading to a 30-point attack on an opponent who may have been way ahead in Authority points. However, this is not a catch-up mechanism as much as it is an example of a game that has single cards or actions that can turn the tide of a game for a player. When I talk about catch-up mechanisms, I'm talking about a general rule or mechanic that is inherent to each turn of game play, not singular events that can change the game. I suppose I could refer to those events as "game changers," but that would be employing a terribly hackneyed expression in its proper context; that just bothers me...

Anyway, catch-up mechanisms are controversial for a few reasons. One is because they can serve to hand victory to the lagging player; for some, this is a nice leveling element that offers the newbie a chance to win a game; for others, catch-up mechanisms can cheapen a game, denying a front-runner the victory mostly because he or she was in first place most of the game. Another reason is a causal effect of the first reason: because experienced players may be well aware of the presence of a catch-up mechanism, they may hang back on purpose to yield the benefits of the lower position, and then surge ahead at the end. Much like running, cycling, or auto racing, you can "draft" off your opponent as he or she faces the full brunt of wind resistance, all the while conserving energy until the final straightaway. A third reason why catch-up mechanisms are controversial is a broad one: they feel oddly un-democratic, as if the "nail that sticks up gets hammered down," as they liked to say in Japan (I speak from six years of experience living there). Who wants to feel like they are fettered by a mechanic just so that the trailing players have more opportunities to win? You're almost better off stinking for most of the game...

Personally, I haven't played enough of Power Grid to truly understand the impact of its catch-up mechanic, but I understand it enough to see its value, which is mainly that it levels the playing field for new players to keep up with experienced ones. The funny thing, though, is that experienced players would know well enough to NOT run in front until the end, which is very much like running, cycling, or auto racing. The sweetest victory would come when a front-runner can stay in front despite the catch-up mechanism, but the more plausible road to victory involves staying with the peloton (the cycling group behind the leader) until you see the finish. In this way, veterans can negate the catch-up mechanism, and instead use it as the means to surge in front, which would mean that the catch-up mechanism isn't really for catching up at all... It's just a way to "draft" behind the leader. I guess catch-up mechanisms aren't so bad, after all.

Rules Discussion: Rule-Breaking Pieces

There is something about the sanctioned breaking of rules in a game. Sure, cheating should be anathema to any board gamer worth his or her salt, and wanton disregard for rules should be the rationale for banishing any gamer to the outer reaches of society. I would even proffer that gamers who flaunt the rules in favor of "house rules" should be hung by their pinky toes in the town square (that's humor, by the way). Okay, that's a bit extreme (especially since I sometimes resort to house rules when I don't understand a game's mainstream rules AND I don't have time to research the rulings), but being given license to break the rules is an intriguing concept. What if someone told you to ignore your dice roll in Monopoly and just buy whatever property you wanted, but at double the price? What if you could attack a territory far from your own in Risk? What if you could decline the card exchange in Hearts? Such "rule-breaking" adds a spicy element to a game, confusing long-time adherents, but in a beneficial way. 

Sanctioned rule-breaking is often in the purview of house rules and game variants, though you also find it in game pieces that change the fundamental rules of a game. For example, i

n the Abbey & Mayor expansion of Carcassonne, there is a Wagon piece that not only allows a player to claim a feature, but to move the Wagon on to another attached feature upon completion of the feature the Wagon was occupying. For example, if your Wagon is on a city tile with an attached road and you complete the city, the Wagon moves onto the road after scoring. In Carcassonne, this is a hugely important rule-breaking piece for one reason: even though you complete a city, road, or cloister, if you have no more followers to place, you cannot claim any adjacent feature on the tile that finished that city, road, or cloister, even though the follower is returned to you because follower placement happens before scoring, not after scoring. If you have no followers, you cannot take advantage of the tile you just placed. With the Wagon, though, you can move it onto an attached feature, potentially scoring that feature, as well.

The Wagon is probably my favorite follower in Carcassonne (the Barn is not a follower, but it is also an awesomely powerful piece). I must admit that the Wagon is not necessarily a rule or mechanic in and of itself, but it is the only piece in Carcassonne that breaks the follower placement rule. Rule-breaking pieces or cards can be found in many other games. Another example (though a minor one) are the gates in Alhambra, which allow you to place a walled edge of one building tile against the wall edge of another building tile, yet preserve the "being able to walk to the fountain" rule of tile placement. Yet another instance is the station in Ticket to Ride: Europe, which lets you connect to a city when all other routes into that city are taken and thus blocked.

I have found that rule-breaking pieces are often found in expansions to games, as if breaking the rules of a base game is in the strict purview of expansions (though base game variants and the aforementioned house rules are also viable means by which a game's rules can be altered). In other words, we buy the base set to learn the rules of a game, and then we buy expansions when A) we are bored of the rules in the base set, and/or B) we feel oddly compelled to discover how it feels to break or tweak the rules of the base set. Both sentiments are similar, but there's a difference: while option A encapsulates that feeling we get after playing a game ten or more times (or less), option B speaks into that innate pioneering spirit to explore the unknown or test the waters. Or, it may just be the effect of our sinful natures to feel the compulsion to break rules. I hope that's not the case, though, because I really enjoy expansions...

In any case, rule-breaking pieces can enliven a once-moribund game experience and renew interest in a classic; this is how Settlers of Catan stays alive, in my opinion. Carcassonne is no different, which is why my interest in the game remains piqued after all these years; expansions have breathed life and vitality into the game. Yet, to be fair, Carcassonne's base set presents a strategic depth that people don't often realize unless it is played repeatedly; once you know the game's tile inventory, you know the frequency of certain tiles, and thus you know how to prevent your opponent from finishing key features in the game. Absent that, though, expansions do add spice to many games and are an undeniable means by which a one-hit-wonder designer (like Klaus Jurgen-Wrede, though he did create Pompeii) can stay gainfully paid with his or her one masterpiece.

Do you have any other base game or expansion pieces or cards in any game that break a base game rule or mechanic that you would like to discuss?

Rules Discussion: Varied Currency in Board Games

The concept of money and "currency" in board gaming is not a new trend. In fact, some of our classic (or, I should say, time-worn) board games are predicated on money, such as Monopoly and Life. Money is something to which people can relate readily, since we use it in our daily lives. As board games have become more varied in their themes and sophisticated in their designs, not many games employ game money, as if money was too jejune an idea to incorporate into (what some cynics may consider to be) "hoity-toity" connoisseur games (I'm being facetious, of course... if not needlessly verbose). Of course, games like Alhambra, Puerto Rico, and Power Grid use money outright, but you get what I mean...

Anyway, there are a vast majority of games that use many other countable items or points as currency to execute actions or even "buy" items. Case in point: Village (by Markus and Inka Brand) not only employs gold coins as currency, but also colored cubes, time (one unit of time can be used to perform an action), and even family members, who can (in a way) be swapped for goods and/or placement in the town Chronicle. Another fine example of varied currency is Five Tribes, which uses victory points to bid for turn order and purchase cards from the Marketplace, as well as white meeples and/or Fakir cards to purchase djinns. A third example of varied currency is Core Worlds, which uses "energy" and actions as currency.

Varied currency may include resources, as well, though I tried to avoid that inclusion for the purposes of this discussion because trading resources for in-game actions (though very much like a currency) crosses over into the realm of... well, "resource conversion." Village does straddle that dividing line in its use of colored cubes, but those cubes are odd concrete representations of abstract concepts like "knowledge" and "commerce," so I don't think of those cubes as resources. Nonetheless, the incorporation of victory points, time, actions, energy, and other abstractions as currency is a fascinating mechanic in and of itself because it's an attempt to quantify that which we don't often quantify as spendable, though we should... I mean, we do "spend" time performing actions; we do "spend" energy to exercise or perform daily functions; and, we do "spend" life points to fight evil (as in Shadows over Camelot).

Rules Discussion: The BINGO Mechanic

Thinking about mechanics as I drove to work this morning (though my car could use a healthy dose of mechanical attention), I pondered Rise of Augustus, which is basically a BINGO game, but with some agency over what you do. In Rise of Augustus, you draw four (or five?) objective cards; each card has three to six symbols on them, such as a chariot, a catapult, short swords, and so on. One person reaches into a bag and put out a pog (a large round chit) with a symbol on it and then declares what he or she drew. If you have that symbol on one of your objectives, you can deploy one of seven legions to that card by placing a meeple on the corresponding space. If the symbol is one more than one objective card, you have to choose to which card you deploy your meeple. This process repeats until the herald (the one who is pulling pogs out of the bag) pulls a wild card symbol. Then, he or she places all drawn pogs back in the bag. However, at any time when a person completes an objective by deploying enough meeples to cover all symbols space, that person shouts, "Ave, Caesar!" and removes all meeples from it, having completed the objective. Gameplay ends when one person finishes seven (I think) objectives.

Okay, I haven't played this game in a while, but the BINGO mechanic of drawing a tile or chit from a bag and declaring the number or symbol on the item is a mechanic that has a bad rap... How many of us have attended BINGO game nights and realized that there is NO strategy involved and you have NO choices to make? How many of us have played some kind of BINGO-inspired educational game and found that the game was more about, say, recognizing words or colors than actually "playing a game?" Yet, this bad rap is a bit unfair because BINGO is not a game, but a social activity that does involve letter or number recognition, tactile manipulation of cards and stamps (or pieces to cover the called spots), and you can even win prizes, depending on the event. If seen with the right perspective, BINGO does very well what it sets out to do: it engenders a fun atmosphere where people can relax, listen to an enthusiastic caller yell out numbers and letters on Ping-Pong balls pulled from a spinning wire-mesh ball, and get a little excited about winning an alarm clock... or it's an excuse to hang out with Grandma and Grandpa (which is extremely important).

The BINGO mechanic is difficult to implement in a board game because there is no inherent free will to it; you just pull tiles and hope for the best. Rise of Augustus, though, uses the BINGO mechanic, but does provide some room for players to choose to which card they deploy their legions. Also, when an objective card is completed, players can draft the objective they want from the central area (the time-honored drafting mechanic). Moreover, you only have seven legions at the start of the game, so if you have already placed your legions, you face the difficult decision of whether to shift a legion to another card or not. Admittedly, Rise of Augustus is a lightweight filler game, but it's one of the few games that adopts and adapts the BINGO mechanic and then provides players with decisions after each pog pull. If anything, the BINGO mechanic is a good randomizer besides dice and cards.

Rules Discussion: Resource Conversion

Lewis & Clark has some nifty mechanics interwoven into a fine racing game; one such mechanic is resource conversion for movement. Basically, in order to advance up river or mountain spaces, you need one or more characters that convert resources to movement, and you need characters or Native Americans to gather the resources you need. The key is to find the characters that most optimally convert resources to movement. At the start, everyone gets a mission commander, who can convert two food into two river spaces, one canoe into four river spaces, or one horse into two (?) mountain spaces. This is the bare minimal conversion rate, so you have to keep your eye out for characters who convert fewer resources into more spaces. For example, one character converts three wood into four river spaces, which cuts out the "conversion to canoe" intermediary step. Ultimately, Lewis & Clark boils down to setting up an efficient resource conversion engine.

Resource conversion is prevalent in European games. Two examples I can recall are Uwe Rosenberg games: in Le Havre, you process simple resources into things like smoked fish, steel, and coke; and in Agricola, you can convert wood, clay, or reed into food with the right occupation or major improvement. I'm not counting using resources to build final products, such as in Stone Age, in which you convert resources to huts or civilization items, or in Puerto Rico, in which you convert cargo into victory points (though it is a kind of conversion), but changing one resource into another is common to Euro games and a welcome, time-honored mechanic.

Do you have any examples of resource conversion to share?

Rules Discussion: Deck-Building

Many of my favorite games are considered deck-builders, which means that you build your decks as an integral part of the actual gameplay and then you compete with the deck that you built. Now, games that require players to compile their own cards to construct decks aren't new to gaming; Magic: The Gathering, Legend of the Five Rings, Netrunner (circa 1996), and the old Star Wars and Star Trek collectible card games were the forerunners of deck-builders. However, as time has passed, deck-builders can be differentiated into three basic types: the collectible card game (CCG), which requires a large investment to buy randomly packed decks and booster packs to acquire cards so that you can build your deck BEFORE actual gameplay; the living card game (LCG), which requires a relatively smaller investment in prepackaged decks and booster packs to acquire cards for deck construction BEFORE gameplay; and what I will simply call deck-builders, which involve playing with a shared inventory of cards and building your deck DURING (or as an integral part of) gameplay. Today, games like Dominion, Core Worlds, Eminent Domain, Thunderstone, Ascension, Star Realms, Trains, and even A Few Acres of Snow utilize the deck-builder mechanic in their gameplay, often employing an in-game card drafting method to distribute cards and more mechanics for accelerating draw, trashing/scrapping/removing cards from decks, denying opponents' their card draws, and forcing opponents' to discard cards.

In contrast to LCGs and CCGs, which requires some investment in decks, packs, or singles, deck-builders are much less expensive to play and need just one shared set of cards (and maybe some optional expansions). More importantly, deck-builders present a more level playing field because, unlike CCGs in which the most expensive cards often tip the odds in their owners' favor or LCGs which may require a complete collection to be competitive, all deck-builders require is one person to bring one set of cards and game elements. Wanna play Dominion? All you need is one friend with the game. This doesn't mean that you will win in your first or even tenth game (after all, the more experienced player of any game has greater odds of winning), but you are less likely to get blindsided by an unexpected card or hosed by an overpowered card that costs $200 on eBay to buy a playset of four. In this way, the "modern" deck-builder is more egalitarian than CCGs and LCGs, and are more welcoming to the new and inexperienced player (though you do miss out on the thrill of opening a booster pack, hoping for a prized rare card).

Any thoughts about deck-builders, CCGs, or LCGs? Feel free to offer your opinions and insights.

Rules Discussion: The Flop

A nice little mechanic in any game is the ability to draw from the discard pile. Gin Rummy is a classic example of using the discard pile as a resource, but there are numerous games that actively draw from the discard pile. A few that come to mind are 7 Wonders (which allows you to pull from the discard pile by activating the ability on certain Wonder boards), Magic (which, like it or not, set a lot of standards for modern gaming), and even Twilight Struggle (which allows it with a couple of key cards).

Now, I should differentiate the discard pile from the "flop" because the flop is there for people to draw face-up cards, but the discard pile is intended to be the landing place for played cards or cards that were discarded because of a game effect. Ticket to Ride, Core Worlds, Star Realms, many of the Cryptozoic deck-builders, and Poker are exemplars of games that employ flops for drawing.

Anyway, do you have a favorite game that involves discard pile drawing?

Rules Discussion: Player Asymmetry

Player asymmetry is the concept of having each player assume a role and/or in-game abilities that differ from other players. A prime example of player asymmetry is in Pandemic, when each player assumes a role AND has abilities or enhancement that are unique vis-a-vis other players. Twilight Struggle is another great example: one side is the USA (who is always second in each action round and has its own specific cards) and the other side is the USSR (who is always first in each action round and has its own specific cards). A third example is Memoir '44, in which both players play two sides with different game abilities (particularly in the expansions) and starting positions. Eclipse also comes to mind, as you start out as a human or an alien race with a couple of special bonuses.

Player asymmetry is broader than a rule or mechanics discussion not only because it's pervasive in gaming, but also because each player works essentially under different rules from each other. The benefit of this asymmetry is variety: you can play one of two or many different roles; you have different abilities each game; you can explore different in-game strategies and tactics each game; and, even the material differs between players, whether it's pawns of various colors or other meeples. The downside, though, is that the playing field is not necessarily level and it's difficult to compare player performances when they are fundamentally dissimilar.

Do you have any thoughts on player asymmetry?

Rules Discussion: King-making

Last week, a buddy of mine mentioned a concept that is somewhat rampant in board games: king-making. As far as I understand it, king-making involves when one or more players have no chance to win in a particular game; in that game, those players may choose (together or individually) to elevate a particular player who has a good chance of winning. Obviously, this is an element of directly confrontational multi-player games; a prime example is Risk, in which one or more players can ally to battle a superior foe. It's also an element of games that involve acquisition of a finite amount of resources or positions to occupy; in games like Stone Age or Alien Frontiers, you can block an opponent by seizing a spot and/or collecting resources before that opponent.

I can't think of many excellent examples right now, but king-making can be frustrating for the front-runner who is playing extremely well, but is squashed by two opponents who think that the fourth player in the mix should be the victor. Based on my experience, this is often not a conscious decision, per se, but rather a response to being in an untenable position. Players never start a game thinking about what they would do if they are losing; yet, when they are position in which victory is nigh impossible, they may make a snap judgment to play some kind of role besides "also-ran"; in other words, when all else is lost, you might as well play the "spoiler."

In my opinion, king-making is a kind of "cheese" because one loses not because he or she made a mistake or just didn't get favorable outcomes, but because of other people and their machinations. I've always thought that the sweetest victory is when one plays his or her best game and wins, especially when all other players have played their best games and there were few, if any, mistakes made by anyone. To win because you played better than a bunch of great players is truly an exhilarating experience, but losing to king-making doesn't feel fun at all. Instead, one feels like victory was robbed from him or her by also-rans so that some other player could win. I suppose this is inherent to gaming, but, unlike many things in life, the self-imposed drive to win should spur every player to play their best, even when they cannot win instead of trying to knock the current leader out. In a way, by being a selfish game player, you are being generous by giving all other players the best competition you can; this makes games fun, whether those games are board, card, video, or sports games. King-making rings of "sour grapes" to me.