504 Revisited

boardgamegeek.com/video/76249/504/q-frie...about-504-tom-vassel

at 1 hour mark, the interview begins.

I'm more and more drawn to this.

It's an interesting interview, I like how he describes the game as being a kind of multi-verse. There is an over-all theme above and beyond 'play lots of games' - 504 is fucking pricey though... it's listed for pre-order already on my internet game providers web page and it's 108$ ... which is a discount compared to other places... Huge is what this game is.

I will be buying this, I'm just too fascinated with the whole thing not to buy in.

I admire the concept, but I expect that even 504 different barely-themed games will fail to entertain me. I just don't have the time to spare for bland procedures masquerading as a game. Without an engaging theme expressed through art, chrome rules, and distinctive mechanics, I would rather spend the time just having a conversation with some friends.

Some specific comments at BGG by people who have played the games pointed out other possible problems. These games tend to all be short. Really short, like 3 to 5 turns per player. I personally don't care for filler games and look for at least enough gameplay to get some immersion in the setting. Every game is going to feel like a new game, so there won't be any room to explore or develop strategies of a specific game. Sure, you could keep playing the same specific iteration repeatedly, but if you really wanted to do that, you wouldn't have bought 504 in the first place. And because of the brevity and newness of each of the 504 games, there isn't enough breathing room for a player to recover from a weak start, and many of the games seem to give a distinct advantage to the first player.

$70 for a preorder here. www.miniaturemarket.com/sg4002.html I'd like to use it as a game designing workshop.

It sounds interesting but only from an academic standpoint, which is weird to say for a board game, I guess.

Imagine how quickly this would wear out in electronic form, a sort of sad WarioWare of board gaming with the same 9 modules looping in 504 different, exciting combinations.

Shellhead wrote: I admire the concept, but I expect that even 504 different barely-themed games will fail to entertain me. I just don't have the time to spare for bland procedures masquerading as a game. Without an engaging theme expressed through art, chrome rules, and distinctive mechanics, I would rather spend the time just having a conversation with some friends.

Some specific comments at BGG by people who have played the games pointed out other possible problems. These games tend to all be short. Really short, like 3 to 5 turns per player. I personally don't care for filler games and look for at least enough gameplay to get some immersion in the setting. Every game is going to feel like a new game, so there won't be any room to explore or develop strategies of a specific game. Sure, you could keep playing the same specific iteration repeatedly, but if you really wanted to do that, you wouldn't have bought 504 in the first place. And because of the brevity and newness of each of the 504 games, there isn't enough breathing room for a player to recover from a weak start, and many of the games seem to give a distinct advantage to the first player.

I've been following the comments on BGG myself too and I've heard the games can last from 30 minutes up to around 2 hours plus. With different numbers of turns depending on the game. The other things I've noticed is that looking through comments on BGG less then half the games have been discussed so any assumptions about what the majority of the games are like is kind of bogus at this point. In all honesty though I imagine that wasn't the tipping point for you, from what I do know of your tastes I don't see how this would appeal to you even if all the games were two plus hours and had 20 turns each. It just doesn't sound like your kind of thing either way.

In fact this game seems tailor made to piss off the FAT crowd in some ways. It flies in the face of what we believe about theme, it tries to tell us that theme is all in our minds and that we choose to feel it or not. It tries to tell us that slapping a game together (and really, 'slapping' is incredibly unfair to FF considering the amount of work this must have been to design) with a few modules can give all the theme we need. In some ways it seems to fly in the face of what most gamers, even over on BGG, think of game design and playing. That is what appeals to me, the desire on the part of the designer (or artist if you prefer) to push boundaries and try something new.

Like all of you here I've been playing games all my life, seriously since I was nine... that's 31 years of taking games pretty seriously. At this point I've played most of what I wanted out of the gaming world and looking over the new games on offer from year to year I see almost nothing that jumps out at me as something different, I see almost nothing that asks me to think about gaming in a new way. Occasionally someone will change how I thought certain actions could take place or how I thought game procedure worked but rarely does anyone throw the book out and completely surprise me. This is one of those odd games for me. The idea of it is so ballsy, so out of left field that I can't help but find it endearing and even if it sucks or most of the games suck I still admire the effort and imagination required to put this thing together. I'm not asking anyone to think this is the most amazing idea ever or even to buy and try this game five hundred and four times.. I'm simply saying that this game is not designed for us on FAT and that even if you don't like the idea you have to at least admit that it is very interesting ... I've noticed that whenever this game comes up more people want to talk about it even when they are sure they won't buy it... threads go by and if no one is interested they just pass and that's it... but with 504 people read them, people are curious. It's just too audacious not to be.

I agree, it's a board game that almost had to be made at some point. There are so many computer engineers in the field that someone had to take the concept of modularity or object-oriented programming and apply it to a board game design.

It's also definitely ballsy in concept, a board game auteur creating a framework that takes some authorial intent out of the picture and adds an aleatory element similar to William Burroughs cut-up or John Cage's indeterminacy.

I think what turns me off personally is the sacrifice of emergent gameplay within modules for emergent synergies between modules, a sort of design fascination with form over content, but I really haven't looked into the design of the game with enough depth to call this anything but an impression.

I'll probably play it eventually, but much like casually dipping into something like The Naked Lunch or a prepared piano piece, I probably won't walk away from it with anything more than an academic appreciation of the experience. I don't think it'll really grab me as a game.

I stumbled on this tonight and found it kind of fascinating. Basically Friedemann discusses each of the nine modules three priorities (since each one can be placed in a different spot in your rules creation stage). It's an interesting list, even just to see which game he references for each part, but more than that it got me even more excited to get a hold of this. I'm starting to see how I can tailor my experience for my own tastes and thinking about which combinations would most appeal to me. You can get a bit of an idea of how certain systems would work just from reading through this and I like how one publisher even wanted to publish a specific combination from the game.

boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/192869/504-fr...-27-chambers-secrets