Saturday!

The greatest advancement in board games in the last few decades is the whole “no two games are alike” thing. I mean, every game of Monopoly is pretty much the same. Risk? Heck, every game of Risk is the same. Even awesome tactical games like Axis and Allies or Shogun (or Samurai Swords, I guess) end up being the same.

One of the things I’ve discovered in the last duration is asymmetric games. Games in which each player plays completely differently than any other player. There are both one vs. many games such as Descent where the dungeon master has a completely different experience than the heroes (and even the heroes don’t map to each other 1:1) to games like Cosmic Encounter where each player gets two random powers (one out in the open, one to be revealed at an opportune time) and it’s very unlikely that any given player will get the same two powers twice (given that the game comes with 50 alien powers and expansions get this number over 100).

While the essential mechanics of the game are easily taught (attack opponent, ask for allies, deal with opponent and his or her allies, resolve conflict, next turn), the big deal comes when each player says “I change the game by doing *THIS*” and, in response, each of the other folks at the table say that they change the game using one of the multitude of options at their disposal… and, each time I’ve played, there has been a completely different narrative of what happened in the game… when, if you’re telling the story of what happened during a game of Monopoly, you’re pretty much going to be telling the same story each time.

And that’s the sort of thing that keeps me excited over what Fantasy Flight (and similar publishers) are going to keep doing in the coming years.

So… what are you playing?

(Photo is “The Game” taken by Mo Riza, used under a creative commons license.)

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