The Fiction of the Filler

There's been a bit of debate on BoardGameGeek about whether a filler like Dominion should be ranked as highly as it is. There are a number of wild assumptions in that debate, such as:

• Dominion is a filler
• Fillers do not deserve to be rated highly
• Proper games are long or heavy games

That's all crazy talk of course. BGG has a very strong bias towards heavy games - not ASL heavy, but Puerto Rico heavy. BGG's audience loves that sort of game, and people who love that sort of game are attracted to BGG, so it's self-reinforcing.

It's also reinforced by the point of view that if a game is light it's not a proper game. I know a couple of guys who like to play at least one meaty game per game session (and strangely, they all agree that it should be Power Grid.) I almost agree with them. I certainly like to play games that require some thought, and an evening of dexterity games and Bohnanza would underwhelm me. However I do see value in a lot of shorter games which require thought - Hey! That's My Fish! is a perfect example.

However games like H!TMF! get lumped in with games like For Sale! as "fillers", which is almost a derogatory term. What does "filler" mean, exactly? I was under the impression that it was supposed to mean "a game that you play to fill in time while waiting for other players", but I also recently saw it defined as "a game you play to relax between meaty games". That second definition is biased towards meaty games in the extreme... if you never play Power Grid is there no reason to play For Sale!?

The first definition is pretty weak as well. This is what happens at Critical Mass where I experience most of my multi-table gaming... four players complete a game of Reef Encounter. At the other table, phase 3 has just started in Power Grid so they won't be much longer, so when they're done the tables can cross-pollinate. The Reef Encounter people decide to play Ingenious as a filler. Two of the players haven't played Ingenious before so the rules need to be explained, then a great deal of thought is put into each move of Ingenious. The Power Grid people finish, and notice that the Ingenious game is only half over, so they start Through the Desert. And so the evening passes without anyone swapping tables at all.

Obviously, the Reef Encounter players may as well have just started Key Harvest instead of falling for the filler fiction - Ingenious is just as much of a game as any other, and it probably takes 45 minutes no matter how quick you imagine it might be.

The only games that PROPERLY work as fillers are games that can be abandoned in an instant. At Critical Mass I often set up one of these as people are arriving, with the intention that when people come in there's something to play, and they can peel off to other games when they get organised. Games that work in that way are Set, My Word!, Bamboleo and Ricochet Robots. Tsuro is almost as good because the games are over quickly, players can learn the game by watching, and it plays from 2 to 8, so when one game is finished some people can leave and others can join the next game. However almost anything else is not much use as a filler.

As for Dominion, it's a great game, but it doesn't perform many of the functions that I need from a filler. Some people may classify it as such, but they probably like Power Grid anyway.

The Best Four Days in Gaming?

I've just spent the last 4 days gaming at GenConOz. OMG what a lot of hard work! We arrived about 9am each day and gamed until it was time to go home and go to bed. This is what I played:

Race for the Galaxy	4
My Word!	3
Carcassonne: The Discovery	2
Clans	2
Guillotine	2
Pictureka!	2
Puerto Rico	2
Taluva	2
Vikings	2
Africa	1
Chang Cheng	1
Dancing Eggs	1
Entdecker	1
Genesis	1
Jenga	1
Keltis	1
Mr. Jack	1
Nerd Trivia	1
Power Grid	1
Prophecy	1
Relationship Tightrope	1
Rheinländer	1
Ricochet Robots	1
Santiago	1

I'm a bit amazed I played 4 games of Race. I'm also amazed that every time I play I see new cards. In those 4 games I won once and came second all the other times - and they weren't 2 player games.

All the games of My Word! were on Thursday evening when we were too tired to play something more thoughtful. Carcassonne: the Discovery was easy to teach because almost everybody there already knew Carcassonne, and it's not so different. I think it's a bit lighter than the original because there aren't titanic struggles over fields.

Both plays of Clans were on Sunday morning while we were waking up and more people were arriving. The box says it's a game for 2-4, but we played with 5 without any noticeable problem. I think I'm even beginning to understand it now. I definitely want to play it more. Scrabblette will probably like it.

Guillotine was the Saturday morning game. Play at the con was characterised by people agreeing to play a game, someone new arriving, changing the game to accommodate more players, then someone else new arriving... so if you're playing at a time when people are coming in it's probably best to be playing something quick and easy so people can join in and spawn off new groups frequently. Guilltone performed that function for us on Saturday.

Pictureka! is boring and broken. Play it with small kids. The games of Puerto Rico were much more serious. The second game was a massive 5 player struggle where I pursued a corn strategy with a very experienced player sitting to my right and two newbies across from me. It was so frustrating seeing my corn ships always loaded with tobacco! However the one time he skipped taking Captain I shipped 8 corn for 9 points. I won the game by 2 points.

Taluva, Vikings and Africa are all games that I like, and was able to find people to teach them to. I will continue to play all of them when I get the chance.

Chang Cheng was a new game to me, but I found it to be a very uninspiring area majority game in the same style as Reiner Knizia's Samurai, i.e. I play a piece in an area then the player to my left makes some play to take it off me. That sort of game just doesn't interest me.

Dancing Eggs was my idea - I was too tired to think but I figured I could get a good group to play a stupid game. We did play and we had fun, but after the first game finished there weren't more people volunteering to play. Oh well.

Entdecker is a game that I've been interested in for a while. I like the map, but I didn't find the gameplay to be very satisfying. I lacked money for quite a portion of the game, completely failed in everything I attempted, and came convincingly last. Also, the game went for an hour and a half which was pretty long for someone who couldn't win. I'm no longer interested in it. That same group then went on to play Relationship Tightrope which was decreed to be Much Too Bad To Play, so after one round we played Rheinlander instead. This was the first time I'd ever played without CyberKev, and the first time I won. Well, at least I've won one now.

Genesis is a simple game with some interesting tensions between cooperation and competition and the need to do too many things all at once. This was my third play and I'm yet to win.

The con had also organised for a large pile of Jenga boxes to be in the gaming area, which of course were used to play giant Jenga. At one stage when we were wondering whether a player was coming back or not we even had a game ourselves. That game certainly kept the cosplayers amused.

Of course we don't have a real copy of Keltis, but CyberKev made his own in much the same way that McGyver manufactures escapes. He played a couple of times, but I wasn't very impressed and only had one game. It seemed to me that one track with a few clover leaves on it was a big advantage to the people who had those cards... and I didn't. Well, it's only a Spiel des Jahre, nobody said it had to be a GOOD game.

The kid and I played one game of Mr Jack in which I, as Jack, forgot when I would have to declare light or dark and was quickly defeated. We also played a 9 player game of Nerd Trivia with some people we really didn't know very well, so it was interesting trying to bet that they knew the answers to the questions. The kid came second!

I was gaming in a group of 5, and 3 of the others said Power Grid was their favourite game. I only played it once before and wasn't so impressed, but I agreed to play it again. Three hours later, I still wasn't impressed AND the canteen had closed so I'd only had chips for dinner. It just seems to be an awful long build-up to a very sudden and inevitable finish... and the connection part of the game is basically irrelevant. It might be several more years before I play it again.

I think it was Saturday morning when I found myself gaming with some of the very smart guys from Critical Mass. Mikey is not averse to dice rolling so I suggested Stone Age. It's a very nice game with a strong theme and everyone soon got the hang of it. I had 6 multipliers for huts, but didn't realise how difficult it would be to actually buy huts in a 4 player game with everyone else buying them as well. Meanwhile Andrew had been accumulating tools and tool multipliers, and his 56 point bonus for those won him the game.

The same group then went on to play Prophecy which we borrowed from the Funatical stand. We rushed through the rules and didn't really understand them, so we spent a lot of time searching the rule book to find things out, e.g. what the heck was experience used for? After a bit over an hour we realised the game was going to go for a very long time so we agreed that the first player to kill something in the Astral Plane could win... and Mikey did that. It's an OK game but I don't care to play it competitively. Solitaire might be OK.

Early one morning... Friday?... it was all a blur... the kid and I played Ricochet Robots against Tyndal from Adelaide and got completely flogged. I wasn't with it that morning, but I suspect Tyndal is very very good at it.

I also played one game of Santiago. I played it once before and was impressed with the cleverness of the design but thought I didn't like how it played much - too much screwage. This time, I realised that I really HATE the screwage. It's like the provost gone wild. Santiago is a beautifully designed game but it is definitely not a game for me. Although I have nice things to say about it, I rate it a 4.

Finally, I played a game of the upcoming Gigamic title Inside at the Funatical stand. It totally sucked. However subsequent investigation on BGG suggested we'd missed a very important rule which would make the game much more interesting. I'd like to play again with the correct rules, because it sounds much better played properly. The Gigamic series are beautiful games and some of them (such as Quoridor) are absolute classics.

Finally a few notes on the con in general. It wasn't as big as I expected it to be, which turned out to be great. The board gaming area was quite big and often had about a hundred people in it without being crowded at all. LXG had a portion of their game library there, and we took our own as well, so there were heaps of games to play. The facilities were perfectly adequate. We met lots of new people, none of whom turned out to be arseholes. From my perspective, nothing went wrong, and that's basically an achievement to be proud of.

Ratings on BoardGameGeek

There's an awesome article by Joe Grundy over at BGG about the accuracy, interpretation and resilience of the game rating system. By coincidence I went through and rerated some of my less favourite games yesterday after thinking through what those ratings really mean. The BGG ratings are given minutely short descriptions by Aldie which causes problems - 6 means "will play sporadically if in the right mood" and 5 means "slightly boring". I find many games slightly boring but struggle to think of games which I'll play if I'm in the right mood, so I would tend to give 5s rather than 6s. In an ideal world the sum of all BGG ratings would approximate a bell curve, but if everybody liked the 5 description better than the 6 description, as I do, then the bell curve would be warped. In theory, Aldie's descriptions can change the shape of the curve :-).

Consequently I have my own interpretations for the BGG ratings, and I admit that my interpretations aren't guaranteed to produce a bell curve either. But they're close enough for me.

10: Always want to play this and expect it will never change - "NEVER" is a long time, so the only game I can confidently rate a 10 is Scrabble, because it's been 30 years or so. I rate a few other games a 10 because I'm there must be some others, but they might change.

9: Awesome game and I'm always excited to play it. This is about the same as what Aldie says.

8: Very good game. I like to play. An 8 is my default rating for a game that I liked after 1 play. After I've tested the game a couple of times, if I really like it, it might go up to a 9.

7: Good game, usually willing to play. If I play a game and it's decent but I'm not really excited about it, I will initially rate it a 7. If I keep playing it and discover I don't like it, it will fall, but it might climb as well.

6: Games that are just alright. For example, Carcassonne holds some attraction for me, but it's not very interesting.

5: Games that I don't care for but I might one day want to play them. Louis XIV and El Grande are here because although I really dislike area majorities I can see that it's a game mechanic which makes sense.

4: Games that I wouldn't care if they vanished off the face of the Earth, but I might play them one day anyway. I dislike them but I might want to give them another chance or can see some little value in them. Power Grid is in here.

3: I would actively argue against playing this game or even outright refuse. This is where I rate real games that I really really hate. For example, Australia, Andromeda, Railway Rivals. Don't get me started.

2: Yes it's a game, but it's no fun. A game which is so little fun that I won't ever play it again earns a 2.

1: This does not count as a game because I cannot imagine having any fun with it. Very few games are technically broken, though some which are such as Betrayal at House on the Hill are still fun anyway, so I use the 1 rating for games which couldn't possibly be any fun.

Send the Children to Transylvania!

I had a nice surprise waiting for me when I got home yesterday afternoon - my order from unhalfbricking.com had arrived. Woohoo, Hameln and Die Dolmengotter! I had no time to read the rules before leaving for CyberKev's place to play, but I did manage to print the rules to Die Dolmengotter from the publisher's site. We didn't get to play it, but we did play Hameln using the time-honoured but a bit boring technique of reading the rules at the table as we set up the game. Wow, this game has a lot of bits! And it's pretty! And it's complex! It reminds me somewhat of Power Grid (3 phases) and somewhat of Goa (many ways to score VPs) and not much of Shear Panic. There's a whole lot more game than I was expecting.

It's very cute - you have houses with men and women in them. The men produce goods such as meat and the women have babies. The babies can get married and move into houses, and the meat can be sold. There are rats everywhere. When enough rats take over the board, the Pied Piper comes along and may take unmarried babies to Transylvania with him (which costs you VPs). What a good idea that is! But it also means that it's a valid strategy to father children upon other players so they have babies to worry about. Also when the girl children get married they can choose a house and the boy player has to pay. This group had played Funny Friends together, so forcing each other to get married and have children was familiar territory for us and we had some fun.

We did play several rules wrong, but one of the Lamont brothers has a good article on BGG about rules that people get wrong. The one we figured out was that when you activate males or females you can do so in multiple houses. This would have made the game move a whole lot faster and there would have been more money to splash around on the optional actions. We agreed that would improve the game, and might give it another run tonight at Critical Mass.

I had read some disparaging comments about Hameln, and that and the steep price ($A100) almost convinced me not to buy it, but I wanted those mice. Now that I've played the game, I'm glad I got it. Where is my kid, anyway?