When I was growing up, most board games were variants of Candyland. You’d pull your card (or roll your dice) and then move your guy. Chutes and Ladders added some interesting dynamics by having the board potentially harm or help you. Parcheesi added a lot of interesting dynamics based on whether or not you rolled a 5 or whether you rolled doubles. Sorry and Trouble had interaction based on whether you touched another player’s piece. Sillier board games like Happy Days: Fonzie’s Real Cool Game had a dynamic where the winning condition was not going around the board but collecting “Cool” points and first to 16 won.
The main thing that the games all seemed to have in common was that the outcomes were random and inevitable. Hey, if somebody bumped you in Sorry, there’s no hard feelings. That’s the way the dice tumble.
Games like Monopoly brought out a bit of animosity because, at that point, the game gave enough choice for any given player to feel ganged up on (even though, if you’re playing right, it’s more that one of the players has the mandate of heaven and the others do not).
The introduction of games like Talisman changed everything. Roll the dice, draw a card… THEN ROLL DICE AT THE CARD. Get bonuses for swords or spells! Heck, there are different players you can play as and so each game is different! Play as the Warrior! Play as the Sprite! Play as the Thief! It *FELT* like playing something new. It felt asymmetric… even if it was just, you know, Sorry and Happy Days and Monopoly with a little bit of a D&D skin on it.
Fast-forward a few decades, and there are now some seriously *AWESOME* board games out there that mingle all sorts of different types of gameplay, and asymmetry, and tactics, and chance, and JEEZ LOUISE THEY ARE SO FREAKING EXPENSIVE.
Mansions of Madness? Ninety bucks. Descent: Legends of the Dark? A hundred and forty bucks. Fury of Dracula? It’s out of print! You have to go to Ebay!
Well, thank goodness for Steam. Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition is thirteen dollars.
Well, I’ve been tinkering with it and the number one biggest problem is that most of the games I play with the gaming group belong to either Dman or Jman and they can explain the game easily.
I mean: look at this gameboard:
I’m now going through the tutorial for Fury of Dracula and finding that they go out of their way to say “you know what? Go to youtube.”
So now I’m watching this:
I’ll probably be able to talk about the game itself next week! I hope.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is the gameboard where the author is playing Lord Galdaming on turn one. It’s nuts. All screenshots taken by the author.)
Okay, I got pantsed.
Trying again.Report
Initial review: Online version is okay. Not great. But okay. It will teach you to play the game (after watching a youtube or two).
The boardgame, it seems to me, ain’t worth ~$100.
But I’ll get into that next week.Report
I got a copy of FoD 2nd edition when it was still in print. It’s a fun game, but I haven’t gotten it to the table since I still lived in Lakeland. Too many games, too little time. It would probably be a hit with my current group if I were to take the time to relearn it.Report
Man who grew up playing Avalon Hill games checks in to the discussion…
I stopped playing AH games when I left for college in 1988. Round about 2000, I started to wonder what the current AH selection was like…and learned that the company had (effectively) gone out of business years before. It was one of the first shock-at-changing-times moments I had experienced (they’re common for me now, of course).Report
My group was happy to discover Board Game Arena — not only was it a lifesaver during lockdown, it’s a great way to try out a pricey game before plunking down the cash for the physical copy. It’s saved us from some expensive white elephants, as we discovered after a couple online games that no one felt much like playing that one again.
There have also been several cases where it’s shown us that we were playing a game wrong, after we got over our “WTF? It’s broken!!” reaction and checked the rulebook.Report
My local game store sells used games and there are solid deals there including on relatively new games that someone tried, didn’t like, and turned back.
You can also check out games at stores like that (or, many cases, your local library!)
Tangent reminder: $20 in 1984 is $61.66 now. Dungeons and Dragons books are cheaper for the kids these days than they were for us, in constant dollars.Report