Let'sTalk About: Splendor

''''Splendor''''' is a fast-paced and addictive game of chip-collecting and card development. Players are merchants of the Renaissance trying to buy gem mines, means of transportation, shops — all in order to acquire the most prestige points. If you're wealthy enough, you might even receive a visit from a noble at some point, which of course will further increase your prestige.

I'm all for light shorter family games, but I'll pass on this one.

I totally agree with this. I feel like Amertrash designers and players got sucked into all that "I play games for the intellectual challenge," and "I need meaningful decisions" bullshit, and what we got were a pile of games that were complex, difficult to learn and hard to play. As if playing a game with a 40 page rule book and two more systems than were necessary proved that you weren't an illiterate hillbilly.

YES, YES, YES. Exactly this.

Somehow we got from Nuclear War, Thunder Road and Survive to Arkham Horror with umpteen expansions and, as Bull put it, "overwrought" games straining to tell stories and express themes with CLUTTER and JUNK rather than through simple, direct mechanics and gameplay concepts. And you are absolutely right, Shellie- the AT movement got caught up in the EXACT SAME problems that the Eurogame designers did by supporting the whole "intellectual challenge"/"meaningful decisions" thing. Well, what if I want to make stupid, meaningless decisions like nuking my man Ryan just because he shopped at a Hobbytown USA a couple of years ago?

I hit the wall too, I got really tired of teaching these tremendously complicated games and games that require five plays to really get going...but that are shuffled off to the side after three (at most) sessions. The investment in some of these monsters just isn't worth it. It is NOT that some of these games are BAD or not well designed...but I'm at a point where I want the beer and King of Tokyo instead of the 50lb monster.

Tamanny Hall was really kind of the turning point not just for me but my group too. They had all been pretty excited about playing it for some time and I finally got a hold of it. I spent all of about five minutes explaining how to play, and by the second turn everybody was into it and enjoying it. We did not have to constantly check the rulebook, we did not have to spend 30 minutes setting up, there were not piles and piles of cards to paw over. It was a simple, direct game without any overhead. And we had MORE trash talk, nastiness and fun than we would playing...I dunno, fucking Descent or whatever.

Ameritrash was never about complicated games, piles of flavor text, tons of cards and all that. It wasn't even really about miniatures. It was about fun without a bunch of folderol.

But there too, two of the best games I've played in the past year were Robinson Crusoe and Archipelago...and both are TERRIFYINGLY complicated compared to Tammanny Hall. And, coincidentally, both are BEST played solitaire. As is Mage Knight. If I want to dig into something like that, I'd rather do it by myself. If I want to throw chairs and act a fool with my friends, I'd rather play a game with like three rules, one of which is how you fuck somebody over.

All of which really has nothing to do with Splendor...

Are you sure this doesn't have to do with life cycle stage instead of what is happening in design trends?

I say this because I've scaled back in the complexity of my games from hardcore wargames to mainstream AT and euro stuff (e.g. Robinson Crusoe, Clash of Cultures, Nations, that kind of thing). My sense is that I did it because now I have a job and am no longer a graduate student, so I spend a lot more time at work and the complexity level of wargames is not acceptable anymore. I don't think it has to do with different design aesthetics dominating. I feel like maybe you're mistaking YOUR transition as a gamer, now that you have several kids, less time to yourself, etc, with changes in the market or what is coming out regularly.

Basically, hypothetically, I wonder if we'd feel differently about "trends" if you still didn't have kids or if I was still back in early grad school.

I was actually just thinking about that...

I think that is definitely a factor, but rather than it being a "life cycle" thing, I think it's kind of a generational thing.

By the time Settlers came out and the German games thing started happening, you had a generation of gamers that had come up in the mid to late 1980s that were fatigued with the whole Avalon Hill style thing that was dominant at the time, consims, RPGs...and Magic. Not coincidentally, that generation of game players was also heading into college, careers, families, etc. and "smaller and shorter" became VERY appealing. But then that turned around in 2004, 2005, 2006 when the AT movement got mixed up with the Fantasy Flight style hybrid and we started down the road to games like Horus Heresy and Runewars. Now, that style of game (and game player) is fatigued, I think, and just like with Eurogames there is a drive to reduce and streamline. Right now, the biggest trend I think we're going to see over the next year is SMALLER games in general. Like Splendor or Star Realms. I think we'll see lower price points but much less extravagant production. Kickstarter has pretty much cornered the market on grossly overproduced, expensive games. So we'll see more ala carte titles with lower entry prices.

The thing is, this is something that goes on not just with game players- me and you- but also with designers who are not only engaging in generational change themselves but also responding to prevailing life cycle trends among hobbyists. There are also market considerations at work, and there again I think so much money going to "back" Kickstarter bullshit is sapping the ability for publishers to find purchase with bigger, more expensive games.

But think about it...someone that got into games via Arkham Horror is now, at this point, ten years into the hobby. That's difference between 20 and 30 or 30 and 40. Those are big jumps.

I definitely agree that right now, what makes the most sense (and generates the most fun) for me are tighter, smaller and more streamlined games. The people I play with mostly would agree, although there are some younger folks in my group that do still want to do the six hour Here I Stand marathons and the like. So there is an argument there for what you're saying.

But remember too that I'm an observer. I watch what's going on, what people are talking about and how, what publishers are doing.

To loop it back to Splendor, I think that if it wins SDJ (I will be shocked if it doesn't, it's practically designed to SDJ parameters) that is going to cement a trend for the European designers to move away from the elaborate Vlaada/Rosenberg style designs that have become so popular and back toward the "German style" games. I hope this happens.

There is something to what you're saying about market segmentation and publishers finding where they can make money. They're losing out to big, expensive kickstarters on the taking money out of early adopters with high limit prices, so it might make sense that they would start selling cheaper, simpler shit, figuring that the hardcore audience is already gone to kickstarter.

No statistics backing that up, but it makes theoretical sense.

You know, it's funny...I can remember as far back as 2007 or so when Robert was already kind of railing against the new, FFG style games that were really kind of assumed to be AT because of...I dunno...pictures of dragons? I was getting into that stuff at the time and I didn't really get why he wasn't into all of that but I get it now. He was holding out for those heavy theme, light rules games.

When I think back a little further to 2004, 2005...what really felt edgy or maverick about AT was when we would walk into the Atlanta Game Fest with Zombies!!!, Thunder Road, Nuclear War, Talisman and Omega Virus and people would literally turn their noses up at us. We would have people literally come by our table and scoff or act condescending. Because we were playing simple games that were more about fun than mechanics. I dunno, maybe that was the Atlanta scene at the time. But at any rate, seeing a FFG game at an event now is like hearing an MC5 song on a Volvo commercial.

That is a great point about gestation...but are we going to see more "BGG pleasing" games going in he opposite direction, following on from Mage Knight and Crusoe? I am really interested to see what happens in the Euro field because they TOTALLY got caught up in the hybridization....hard to believe that it was just a few years ago that Euro publishers wouldn't touch anything with a sci fi theme. I really believe the AT movement help change that.

I started to type out this long response about the past few decade being a design renaissance with all these genres blending creating an explosion of innovation and design advancements...But then I realized I wasn't buying what I was selling.

Games of all makes/models shapes/sizes have come out, are coming out and will always come out. The "problem" is that they don't get the glitz, glamour and promotion because they are "flawed" for being too simple, too pedestrian (like the gamers turning their nose up at Omega Virus).

They got overshadowed so they got missed...Unless you start looking for them. Over the past few years there's been a lot of noise praising the layered, complex and multiple system designs...But to be blunt, I'm calling Bull Shit in saying that there is suddenly a new development with games going back to simpler roots.

Now, in reality we have gone through a bit of a renaissance with rapid innovations and experimentation and I do think we're hitting a point where things are coming back to a normality.

To say that we've been in a rut of complexity and systems ignores games like:
Red November, Wings of War, Small World, Ticket to Ride, Nexus Ops, Last Night on Earth, Mall of Horror, Mr Jack, Incan Gold, Dice Town...and that's just a handful from six/seven years ago.

As it connects to age as well, I think my own tastes have mellowed the older I've gotten. When I first got into the hobby I was defiantly in the Euro camp, but stuff like BSG and Cosmic shifted me over to the AT side. I was part of that tribe for a while, but now as I get older I'm less inclined to be part of a tribe at all. I suspect that for me it's a mark of maturity to care less about fulfilling a specific expectation of what Nate should like.

Last night I played Cosmic Encounter and Panic on Wall Street with some folks who were all younger than me, the youngest being 18. I'm known in my normal group as a guy who loves big raucous games like that, and I do. But I found myself also wanting to get in something bigger and more serious at the same time, and with folks closer to my own age. There's a general desire for balance in my own gaming diet. I don't want just a steady stream of trashy goofiness anymore than I want a steady stream of heavy Euros, or light German games, or wargames, or whatever.

I wonder if a lot of us are starting to experience something similar. As the rush of the "Ameritrash revolution" winds down (indeed, it's barely a memory for me), I wonder if some of us are actually realizing the whole AT thing might have been as much about image and response as it was about the actual games themselves.

It's not my intent to sound presumptuous about this. It's just something I've noticed in myself, and I was wondering if other people have seen that too.

As I think about this more, what I'm realizing is that for me who I am gaming with drives what gets played and subsequently what I pay attention to as far as new releases go. My tastes vary across a wide spectrum...And I've always have and I'll always be that way. But who I'm gaming with is what points me towards the style and genre of game I pay attention to and therefore notice.

And I do find myself caught in a "Grass is greener" mentality where after week after week of lighter thematic games, because that's what I play in my group, I find myself wanting to get into deeper, complex and multi-layered games.