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× Talk about the latest and greatest AT, and the Classics.

Good & interesting BGG blogpost on 5 Schools of Design

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17 Jun 2014 14:31 - 17 Jun 2014 14:31 #180675 by dragonstout
Last edit: 17 Jun 2014 14:31 by dragonstout.
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17 Jun 2014 15:40 #180681 by san il defanso
I like stuff like this.

I've often thought that the defining element of Ameritrash design is drama, which is something I value most in a game. I'd rather have a memorable experience, though I'm learning to find those in other places. I also wonder if some weaker designs are weak because they're murky in what their actual design philosophy is.

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17 Jun 2014 17:40 #180692 by Michael Barnes
There's some good work here, I appreciate the effort, insight and depth that he's after here but I'm just getting hung up on the whole "ameritrash" thing. When I see TI3, Arkham Horror and Eclipse (???) paraded as examples of "drama" and the AT genre in general, I see something that really isn't at all what Robert and I were thinking of back when this was all starting, things that weren't on that original list not only because they weren't available- but because they're more correctly identifed as hybrids.

When it comes down to it, "Ameritrash" was never really about "drama" as a defining characteristic. It was about low overhead, high impact games. Quite frankly, it was originally about STUPID games that were just FUN to play. Talisman, Nuclear War, Dark Tower, Heroquest, Wrasslin', Survive, Dungeonquest, Really Nasty Horse Racing Game. Games that did not care about balance or elegance but were completely committed to out-of-fashion ideas like player elimination and wild luck. or subject matter that at the time was very, very out of vogue with the BGG hivemind. That was a time when games with space or sci fi settings were largely regarded as unsellable by publishers.

The irony is that what I like best about the German family game design school is the same exact thing as what I like best about "Ameritrash". Low overhead, high impact.
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17 Jun 2014 18:18 - 17 Jun 2014 18:20 #180695 by dragonstout

Michael Barnes wrote: The irony is that what I like best about the German family game design school is the same exact thing as what I like best about "Ameritrash". Low overhead, high impact.

Really, what he classifies as the design school of "German family games" should better just be classified as "family games". I don't think that "engagement" is a goal unique to the German school (not to mention that it is the haziest goal listed); it just so happens that a lot of the BEST family games are German.

Just like "Eurogame" started meaning an entirely different kind of game from when it started (from Modern Art to Princes of Florence), you're claiming that "Ameritrash" has strayed from Talisman to Arkham Horror. Near the bottom of the article (or maybe it's in sgosaric's comment?), there's talk about the recent hybridization...but that hybridization, or cross-pollination, indeed started years ago. I think the problem (for you, at least) is that, just like "Eurogame" started meaning "Stefan Feld games" in the boardgamer's mind, Ameritrash now denotes FFG games, more than anything else. No one talks about the old AT games anymore just like no one talks about German family games anymore (for a while, at least). Sounds like you need to start an ATRP.

I like the post and linked to it mainly because it gathers together and consolidates the ideas from a LOT of interesting/important articles. I think the most interesting section is the one on Eurogames, specifically talking about how the desire for "challenge" has led to all these bizarre recurring traits (how they've been tuned, for example, to work consistently in a "playing against randoms at a convention/store" environment). I think of myself as being much less ameritrash-y than most of the folks here at F:AT, and more just in love with German family games as well as a few isolated games (MTG, CE) that I adore, but I find that when I'm criticizing a game, it's largely due to its lack of "drama" or "engagement"; "challenge" just isn't that important to me at all in a game, and I find that when I read the Eurogame section of that article, I find myself cringing. "Challenge" is pretty clearly David Sirlin's top goal, for example, which partly explains why I found Yomi so repellant; all that fine-tuned incremental improvement shit, blegh. Same goes for other games I didn't like as much as other folks here, like Mage Knight and Ascension: I see "challenge" as being a major design goal in both of those games. I just never quite realized so clearly how much that turns me off.
Last edit: 17 Jun 2014 18:20 by dragonstout.

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17 Jun 2014 18:19 #180696 by Bull Nakano
Barnes, I feel like you're getting hung up on minutia. Every stupid game you listed has drama in ways German games like Settlers, TtR, and Ra could never have. It's the drama that creates the narratives we all love, not the tension, or the hard and fast.

You've been gaming a lot longer than I have, I've only been in the hobby 3 years now, but AT has never to me been about going against the grain, I go into an AT game the same way I go into a Euro game, to have fun. It just happens that those offer fun in different ways.

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17 Jun 2014 18:21 #180697 by Bull Nakano

dragonstout wrote: Really, what he classifies as the design school of "German family games" should better just be classified as "family games".


Agreed, I think the German title is an antiquated word from a time when we discovered German family games were generations evolved from our own. I'm not against it, but I'm much more comfortable calling Poker a family game than a German game.

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17 Jun 2014 18:35 #180699 by dragonstout
I also beg to differ with his clear classification of Eclipse as Ameritrash, just because much of the game is indeed preoccupied with figuring out the details of a system in a very Eurogame-y, challenge-focused way. I would say, though, that Twilight Imperium 3 is the same way, and at least Eclipse's system gets out of your way more than TI3's. However, TI3 is more Drama-focused in its victory conditions than Eclipse, by far: achieving a VP in TI3 is a dramatic event, whereas Eclipse is more Challenge-focused in its victory conditions: VPs are not individual events but things to be maximized.

Speaking of TI3 and Eclipse, one of the more interesting minor observations in that article is the comment that Eurogames frequently have some sort of extra system to determine player order, and that control over such subtle things becomes important when luck is low and you're trying to maximize the ability to leverage small advantages, whereas fiddling with player order is irrelevant when the rest of the game is much more chaotic. But this why you see people worrying about player-order variants for Eclipse, as they come from a Euro-background...but it's fucking RIDICULOUS to worry about piddly shit like that when there's so much other randomness in that game from the tile draws and dice rolled. Clashing design/player goals.

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17 Jun 2014 18:49 #180700 by Michael Barnes
That is a great point Andy about the "drift" of meaning. It's to be expected, I suppose, once a term is out in the wild as it were and others apply their own interpretations and you wind up with this mutant thing that really doesn't resemble what it was to begin with. Telephone game and all that.

Bull, you pointed out a pretty interesting generational difference. Ten years ago- and this may seem kind of crazy- but it felt like Robert and I were the kids wearing Sex Pistols shirts to the prom when we would turn up at gaming cons with Zombies!!!, Thunder Road, and so forth instead of the "approved" games. On BGG, it really felt like there was a crushing sense of conformity- you were almost expected to be a Eurogamer exclusively. Back then, even wargames were at the back of the bus (and really more centered around Consimworld). There was very little criticism, very little _honesty_ about things. Lots of glad-handing, back-patting and a general agreement that These Games of Ours were not for the Sheeples or whatever. The folks that were there- and there were many- experienced this kind of rude awakening and suddenly people were NOT talking about Talisman as some worthless piece of shit that had fallen into obsolescence.

If you weren't there for it, a lot of what the whole "fight" was over is kind of lost now and "Ameritrash" is about as rebellious as hearing an MC5 song on a Kia commercial.

TL;DR- it was VERY much about going against the grain in 2006, 2007.

I think there is a larger issue with this article, being about schools of design as it were. In the best games- regardless of "design school"- the PLAYERS are what generate drama, engagement and challenge. The mechanics are there to frame those up and give them structure, not necessarily to create them from base rules. It's the old alchemy metaphor I used a long time ago- the designer gives the players, the players make it gold.

Gets into all that subjectivity that we can never seem to escape in game theory.

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17 Jun 2014 19:07 #180702 by dragonstout

Michael Barnes wrote: I think there is a larger issue with this article, being about schools of design as it were. In the best games- regardless of "design school"- the PLAYERS are what generate drama, engagement and challenge. The mechanics are there to frame those up and give them structure, not necessarily to create them from base rules. It's the old alchemy metaphor I used a long time ago- the designer gives the players, the players make it gold.

Gets into all that subjectivity that we can never seem to escape in game theory.

But isn't that not too different from ANY artform? It's more explicit and unavoidable in games...but as far as I understand modern literary theory (which is, not much), a lot of the focus is on what the reader brings to the table; a book is nothing until the reader reads it, and if the readers read things into the book that the author never intended, that is still equally as valid as the author's intent.

Just because you can play Princes of Florence in a hootin' and hollerin' way doesn't mean that you can't recognize that there are many design decisions made to discourage that, and the same goes for playing Battlestar Galactica with your heads down.
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17 Jun 2014 19:32 #180703 by ChristopherMD

Consider a game like Eclipse (which I think is almost entirely AT).


Eclipse is practically the poster child of hybridization. I mean that in a good way. 90% of my forever shelf is hybrids and family games.

A lot of what people consider "modern AT" is actually hybrids. TI3 and most of the other FFG games are remakes/re-imaginings of older games but influenced by the Euro mechanics of their time.

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17 Jun 2014 19:40 #180704 by Bull Nakano
So in the current day how would you describe AT then? The grain is very accepting of designs like Zombicide, Mage Knight, and Firefly it seems the AT movement and the AT design ethos are being mixed together here, and I feel like what you did was drama. Being part of a movement that goes against the norm is dramatic, starting your own website is dramatic, referring to bgg as tos is dramatic, showing up to cons and giving out DX crotch chops is dramatic, because you were making a statement, and your statement seems to have been heard as there's greater acceptance of games derived from those you listed.

But because there's acceptance doesn't mean AT is dead, so I'm wondering what you consider it today from a design standpoint.

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17 Jun 2014 19:42 #180705 by Bull Nakano

Mad Dog wrote:

Consider a game like Eclipse (which I think is almost entirely AT).


Eclipse is practically the poster child of hybridization. I mean that in a good way. 90% of my forever shelf is hybrids and family games.

A lot of what people consider "modern AT" is actually hybrids. TI3 and most of the other FFG games are remakes/re-imaginings of older games but influenced by the Euro mechanics of their time.

I don't think mechanics can inherently be Euro/AT/German/whatever.

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17 Jun 2014 19:49 #180707 by dave

Bull Nakano wrote: Every stupid game you listed has drama in ways German games like Settlers, TtR, and Ra could never have.

Maybe I define "drama" differently from you, but I love old-school German games *because* of the drama, something that most VP accumulation Euros lack (and make Princes of Florence and Puerto Rico look good in retrospect).

Settlers - feast; famine; monopoly; road cut off; trade tension; in-hand VPs

TtR - route cutoff (which is why I hate hate hate stations in Europe)

Ra - set collection competitions; end-of-round Ra race

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17 Jun 2014 19:51 #180708 by Bull Nakano
That's a fair argument, I find those things to be tension, and a game without tension isn't worth the time of day.

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17 Jun 2014 19:59 #180710 by Shellhead
The pictures are saying some things that are not explicitly mentioned in the article. The only person clearly having fun is the girl in the first Ameritrash picture. The people playing the German Family Game don't look especially engaged or entertained. The guys in the EuroGame picture are completely disengaged from each other and are all lost in solitary thought. They look like they are at a meeting at work and just received a complex report.
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