Kris Hall

Kris Hall's collected columns from Gone Gaming. Kris has a new column appearing on BGN each Friday. Here's what Kris has to say about himself:

Kris Hall has been interested in wargames for decades, but his interest in designer games increased after joining the Appalachian Gamers, the small but active gaming group that is centered in Charleston, West Virginia. Kris grew up in Rhode Island, and has lived in New Jersey, Manhattan, Los Angeles; he now resides in Hurricane, West Virginia with his wife, two daughters, one dog, five cats, fish, turtle, hermit crabs, and one White’s tree frog.

Along with gaming, Kris enjoys white water rafting, although he gets to go rafting about as often as Mitt Romney goes hunting. Kris has trekked in the Himalayas and has seen (not climbed) Mount Everest.

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Headlines January 18, 2008 - Kris Hall: Alan Paull and Confucius December 28, 2007 - Kris Hall: A Plain Vanilla Gamer December 21, 2007 - Kris Hall: A Return to Perikles December 14, 2007 - Kris Hall: Why Write? December 7, 2007 - Kris Hall: Brass Impressions November 30, 2007 - Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Supernova November 23, 2007 - Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Power & Weakness November 16, 2007 - Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Albion November 9, 2007 - Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Pandemic November 2, 2007 - Kris Hall: Respect, Not Love October 26, 2007 - Kris Hall: A Short Happy Look At 1960 October 19, 2007 - Kris Hall: A Short Rules Comparison of Cuba and Hamburgum

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Articles

Kris Hall: Alan Paull and Confucius

Alan Paull is best known to gamers as the man who designed Tara, Seat of Kings, and as one of the men behind Surprised Stare Games.  When I came upon a detailed and very favorable review of the prototype of Confucius, Mr. Paull’s latest game, I was intrigued.  Mr. Paull agreed to tell me more about the game.

Kris: What inspired Confucius?  Why create a game about politics in medieval China?

Alan: Interestingly, NOT the Olympics :-).  I started designing the game several years ago, when there very few China themed games around, and I was looking for a theme that had not yet been overwhelmingly covered by others. I’ve always been fascinated by Chinese history, particularly the period of ocean exploration under the Ming, because there are so many aspects that contrast with the European experience. They were mainly exploring for tribute and trade with local people, not for settlement, and they used huge fleets with as many as 20,000 crew and soldiers, effectively large floating settlements. By contrast the early European explorers had ships a fifth the size of a Chinese junk and fleets of only a handful of ships. In addition to this aspect, I read an interesting article about the giving of gifts in exchange for political influence in China, which was a way of cementing social and political alliances and establishing relationships based on patronage. I wanted to try designing a game mechanic that would model this kind of relationship, which is rather different from a more conventional one of either conflict or diplomacy

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Kris Hall: A Plain Vanilla Gamer

This Christmas I asked for and received not a single 2007 boardgame. Instead, I asked for and received two older games that I thought should be part of my collection. The games are Manhattan and El Grande. You don’t get Euro-games more classic than these. I believe that both are Spiel des Jahres winners. Manhattan is a quick-playing light strategy game that I expect to play with non-gamers like my in-laws. El Grande is…well, if you’re reading this, you already know what El Grande is.

Now that I’ve come to the end of my Gone Gaming blogging career, I think I’ve earned the chance to be both lazy and to pontificate for once. In other words, here is a list of recommended games. This is not a list of all the games I own, or even a list of all my favorite games (although it comes pretty close to being the latter). But it is a list of ten strategy games that could be the foundation of any good Euro-game collection. (I have a different list of easy-to-play games to be pulled out when non-gamers are around; that list includes Manhattan).

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Kris Hall: A Return to Perikles

Fantasy Flight recently had a sale in which Martin Wallace’s Perikles went for $10. A couple of the Appalachian Gamers took advantage of the offer, and as a result we had Perikles on the table again last night.

Perikles is one of those games that is smack in the middle of the No-man’s land between Eurogames and wargames. A real Eurogamer would probably find Perikles complicated and fiddly, and a real wargamer might find Perikles excessively simplistic and un-historical. But if both took the time to learn the game, they would find a smart design that rewards intelligent play and that remains challenging to even experienced players.

In fact, Perikles is one of those games that has so many dimensions to think about that I believe I’ll have to play several more games just to train my mind to consider all appropriate elements. The only other game that evokes the same feeling in me is Reef Encounter. Someday I hope to play Reef Encounter and pay as much attention to the coral tiles and algae cylinders as I do to the reef tiles that I hope to consume or have to defend. But so far I haven’t managed that feat, and James Lilly, the Appalachian Gamer Reef Encounter champion, regularly defeats all comers.

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Kris Hall: Why Write?

A couple of things have put me in a contemplative mood this week. For one thing, a college friend of mine just turned fifty. He is older than I am, but the implication that time is passing for all of us is inescapable. Someday soon I will be fifty, and that just sounds so darn mature.

For another thing, this is the first time that I can remember that I have had back-to-back columns. No one seems to have posted on Gone Gaming since last Friday. No doubt the other writers have more important things going on in their lives than writing for free to an audience of unknown size (but that probably rates a description somewhere between small and miniscule).

So why write? Why is this worthwhile for me? I guess for three reasons:

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Kris Hall: Brass Impressions

The Appalachian Gamers got to try Martin Wallace’s Brass for the first time this week, and the initial impressions were favorable. I heard several comments along the lines of “There’s a lot to think about in this game, and it may be one of those games that needs to be played two or three times before I really know what to do.”

Martin Wallace may be my favorite designer; I certainly cannot think of anyone whose games I look forward to with greater anticipation. I will need to play Brass several more times before I can determine where it ranks in my esteem compared with Railroad Tycoon or Struggle of Empires, but at the very least Brass will be among my favorite games of this year.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Supernova

Once upon a time there was a wargame company called SPI that completely dominated the wargame field (at least in terms of numbers of games produced). When SPI got around to producing some science-fiction empire-building games, they made a couple that differed in terms of scale. Their biggest-picture game was called Outreach and the scale was so big that hexes didn’t represent star systems but rather whole chunks of the galaxy that contained dozens or hundreds of star systems. If I remember correctly (and this is a big if—I haven’t seen the game in decades), the grand scale made the game so generic and abstract that the theme was almost pointless.

I was reminded of Outreach when reading the rules for Supernova. This is not because Supernova seems likely to be a bland game. Or because the two games have the same ultra-big picture scale (Supernova has individual planets and their moons on the gameboard). Rather, Supernova recalled Outreach because Supernova is a tile-laying game, and the forces of each space empire seem to be a tad abstract. In Supernova, players don’t move plastic ships around the board, but lay tiles outward from a central sun. When a player places a tile on a hex that has been previously claimed by an opponent, combat begins.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Power & Weakness

Last week I wrote about the rules for Albion, an area-control game set in medieval Britain. Today I’m writing about the rules for Power & Weakness, an area-control game set in medieval Britain.

There are a couple of big differences in the games. For one thing, Albion is a multi-player game and Power & Weakness, designed by Andreas Steding, is strictly two-player. Another difference is that Albion tries to be loosely historical, but Power & Weakness focuses on magicians as well as on conventional forces.

The heart of Power and Weakness is a mechanism in which conventional and magical conflict alternates as players struggle to control regions on the board. A cycle in which players move knights from regions to adjacent regions to combat enemy forces is followed by a cycle in which magicians teleport all over the board between regions that share the same magical symbol.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Albion

This one I am excited about. I’m talking about Albion, the upcoming area-majority game from the new game company Troy Press. Albion covers a lot of the same territory as Britannia, but looks like it is a quicker, less complicated game.

In Albion, players try to become the dominant force in various regions of the British Isles in order to score victory points. On his turn, if I player has the most cubes in a particular region, and he has the appropriate card for that region, he may play a kingdom card to score points. Petty kingdoms are kingdoms that consist of just one region. After a player has scored at least three petty kingdoms, he may attempt to score a high kingdom which consists of two regions and is probably worth more victory points. And at the end of the game, players see who has the most units in the three final kingdoms: England, Scotland, and Wales.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Pandemic

In one of my early columns for Gone Gaming, I listed a few hypothetical games that I wished someone would create. One of my hypotheticals was a game I called NGO (Non-governmental organization) in which players try to stop famines and cure plagues to earn victory points. Now, I’m not so arrogant as to think that Matt Leacock was inspired by my blog to create Pandemic, the upcoming co-operative game from Z-Man Games. But I can at least congratulate myself for being ahead of the curve in predicting what kinds of new subject matter game designers will find interesting.

Z-Man has made the rules for Pandemic available on-line, and when I saw that it was a co-operative game, I knew I had to take a look. There are all too few co-operative games, and some of them (Arkham Horror) can take a long time to play. Pandemic has only about eight pages of rules, and the rules claim that the game can be played in forty-five minutes.

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Kris Hall: Respect, Not Love

I didn’t get to the Appalachian Gamers meeting this week (and thus missed what will probably be the only game of Arkham Horror played by us until next Halloween), and I missed my usual blog inspiration. But as I was pondering what to write about this week, it occurred to me that there are games I admire, but don’t actually love. Probably the epitome of this contradiction is Knizia’s Modern Art.

Modern Art is a sophisticated and elegant auction game that can inspire amounts of truly Machiavellian mind games. Each round players are dealt a hand of cards that represent paintings by several different artists. Players take turns auctioning off cards from their hand. If another player buys a card, the auctioneer keeps the cash. The auctioneer can bid as well, and if she wins the auction, the money goes to the bank. Each sold painting is left on the table in front of the owner. When the fifth painting by one artist is sold, the round is over. Players then collect cash for their paintings in proportion to their popularity; the paintings of the most popular artist generate the most cash, while the works of less popular artists generate less money.

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Kris Hall: A Short Happy Look At 1960

CharCon, the gaming con of Charleston, West Virginia, was last weekend, and for me the big event of the con was the appearance of Jason Matthews, the co-designer of 1960: the Making of the President (co-designed with Christian Leonhard). Mr. Matthews taught me the game, and I played two games of it, and I would have gladly played two more.

1960 is a card-driven, area majority, presidential-election game in the same vein as Twilight Stuggle, the game of Cold War conflict designed by Mr. Matthews and Ananda Gupta. In 1960 players play cards for their events or campaign points as they try to increase their support in the most important states of the U.S. Players can also use cards to advertise in each of the four regions, and thus handicap the opposing players. Or they can use their cards to dominate three important issues in the election (defense, the economy, and civil rights) with the most successful player gaining endorsements and momentum points.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Comparison of Cuba and Hamburgum

As usual Essen will be showing gamers some resource-churning games that will come our way in the next month or two. Two of the more promising ones are Cuba from designers Michael Rieneck and Stefan Stadler, and Hamburgum from designer Mac Gerdts. In Cuba players try to earn the most victory points by shipping goods, constructing buildings, and paying taxes. In Hamburgum players produce and sell beer, sugar and cloth to gain the money needed to build the citiy’s churches. The player who makes the biggest contributions to the churches will win.

I’m not going to examine the rules of the games in minute detail here, but instead I will show how they handle some of the same basic game mechanisms.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of King of Siam

The parade of area-majority games continues with King of Siam. In this upcoming game (to be published by Histogame and designed by Peer Sylvester), two to four players use cards as they strive to place followers from three political factions in the eight provinces of the southeast Asian nation. Players also claim followers for themselves in order to dominate one or more of these factions.

One of the more things that should make King of Siam different from the vast horde of similar games is that each player starts the game with an identical set of eight action cards, and never receives any more. Players had better be darn careful about when they play each particular card.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of History of the Roman Empire

In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been doing so many rules previews lately (and I have no indication that anyone is interested in the slightest), it’s because scheduling conflicts have cut down on my gaming lately, and I can’t count on having Thursday nights free to write these blogs. It’s sometimes necessary to write these far in advance, and checking out some newly available rules is one way to stay in the blogging game.

This week’s rules are from History of the Roman Empire, an upcoming game from the Italian game company UGG (but which can be pre-ordered through the GMT website). History of the Roman Empire was designed by Marco Broglia, but I know nothing about this designer except his name.

The downloaded rules run only six pages, and that includes an index and moderately-lengthy bibliography. This not an overly-complicated game. Grognards looking for another Pax Romana should look elsewhere. The game system reminded me more of History of the World than anything else.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Brass

Martin Wallace is one of my favorite designers. And so it was with great pleasure that I discovered that Brass, a new Wallace design, was nearing completion this fall. When I saw that the rules were debuting on the Warfrog website, I knew I would have to download them pronto.

Brass is a game of industrial development in Lancashire in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Players build coal mines, cotton mills, iron works, and shipyards in various cities, and try to connect these cities with canals (in the first half of the game) and railroads (in the second half). In fact, many industries cannot be built by a player until he connects the building location to his other industries by canal or rail.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Review of El Capitan

I don’t know what to think after reading the rules for El Capitan, the upcoming game from Wolfgang Kramer and Horst-Rainer Rosner and Z-Man games. Actually, it is a re-themed version of an older game called Tycoon, but I don’t know of anyone who has played the older game. Of course, maybe it’s just West Virginia that is out of the German gaming loop.

Anyway, back to first impressions. The rules seem simple and elegant, and experienced gamers could probably read the rules and start playing within ten to twenty minutes of opening the game. But it is also an area majority game, and on alternate Fridays I sometimes wonder if we haven’t had enough of these kind of games. Then again, I thought the same thing when reading the Midgard rules, and I ended up loving Midgard.

To the rules!

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Kris Hall: The Zooloretto Expansions

No, it’s not a Robert Ludlum novel. The Zooloretto Expansions are free downloads that are available on Boardgamegeek.

I became aware of Zooloretto only after it won the 2007 Spiel des Jahres. Once it showed up on my radar, the award, the zoo theme, and the family-friendly aura of the game made it an easy purchase. Michael Schacht’s game certainly seems to be the kind of easy-to-play and low-complexity game that usually wins the Spiel des Jahres.

And that seemed to be the problem with the game for some of the Appalachian Gamers. After one play, they decided it was too simple. Not many tough decisions, not much strategy. Next game, please. 

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Kris Hall: A Rules Comparison of Hellenes and Athens & Sparta

This week, I noticed that two separate game companies have upcoming block games based on the Peloponnesian War, and both of these games have rules that are available for download. GMT Games may eventually publish Hellenes: Athens vs. Sparta, a game designed by Craig Besinque. Columbia Games hopes to publish Athens & Sparta, a game designed by Tom Dalgliesh, in the near future. I believe that Mr. Besinque’s game was originally going to be published by Columbia Games, but the backstory on the production of these games is of little interest to me. I just want to compare the rules, and note the similarities and differences.

Both games seem to be based or inspired by Jerry Taylor’s Hammer of the Scots system (although Mr. Besinque might say that it is based on EastFront or Rommel in the Desert—two of his earlier block games), and gamers familiar with the HotS will have little trouble learning these new games. Players get a hand of cards every turn, then play these cards for their action point value or to trigger certain events. Card play also determines which player goes first in a turn.

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Kris Hall: A Short Rules Preview of Asia Engulfed

This week I am taking a cursory look at the rules for Asia Engulfed, the upcoming Pacific theater wargame from GMT games that was designed by Rick Young. I play a lot more Eurogames than wargames, and I can’t compare it with the large number of pacific theater games that have been created over the years. But I own Europe Engulfed, and I can spot a few obvious things of interest.

The first thing I noticed is that the rules aren’t any longer than the rules for Europe Engulfed, the sister game of Asia Engulfed. In fact, EE—with all its complicated nation-specific rules—may be the more complicated game. This surprised me because the combined naval/land war in the Pacific theater has a habit of causing designers to generate complicated game systems (just skimming the rules of Empire of the Sun was a daunting experience for me). Asia Engulfed looks big enough for me to consider it a monster game (anything that takes more than a day to play is a monster game to me), but its rules may be manageable.

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Kris Hall: Rules Preview of Galactic Emperor

Last week I wrote a preview of 1960: The Making of the President based on the rules that are now available for download. This week I saw that the rules for Galactic Emperor were available for download, and I saw the opportunity to do a series.

I like empire-building games, and within the past month I tried my first game of Twilight Imperium 3rd edition which seems to be the reigning monarch of galactic conquest games. But based on the rules, I’d say that Galactic Emperor has a shot at getting into the galactic throne room, if not actually deposing the king.

Like Twilight Imperium, Galactic Emperor uses a choose-a-role mechanic that seems borrowed from Puerto Rico or Citadels. Unlike Twilight Imperium, Galactic Emperor streamlines every aspect of the game so that most of the eleven pages of rules are taken up by descriptions of the roles players can choose. Everything in the game that players do is related to these roles.

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Kris Hall: Rules Preview of 1960: The Making of the President

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about games that the Appalachian Gamers were looking forward to. I don’t remember who put 1960: The Making of the President on the list, but I don’t think it was me. I had other priorities.

But Z-Man Games just posted the rules for 1960 (designed by Jason Matthews and Christian Leonhard), and I’ve become much more intrigued. The game seems to be fine combination of Twilight Struggle and Die Macher without being quite as complicated as either.

In spite of its presidential election theme, 1960 is derived from the card-driven wargame model that has been made very popular by GMT games. In this kind of game, players spend their turns playing cards either to activate an event on the card, or to use operations points (also listed on the card) to do various activities. Twilight Struggle (designed by Mr. Matthews and Ananda Gupta) was one of the first games to use this model in a game about a non-military struggle, and 1960 further demonstrates the adaptability of the card-driven game system.

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Kris Hall: What Makes A Long Game Good

Last weekend some of the Appalachian Gamers tried our first game of Twilight Imperium 3rd edition. We finally abandoned the game after five hours when it seemed that Travis was certain to win. But although the game flirts with being intolerably long, some of us were eager to try it again.

During the week, I rediscovered Civilization, the Sid Meier computer game that is now in its fourth edition. Civ is another game that can last many hours, and yet it is extremely addictive.

And so I started thinking about what makes a long game good. None of my observations here are particularly original—I think Jonathan Degann may have made some of these observations in his Journal of Boardgame Design—but I write about what I’m pondering at the moment, and long games are this week’s concern.

So what makes a long game good?

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Kris Hall: What We Are Looking Forward To

Just out of curiosity, this week I submitted a list of soon-to-be-published games to the Appalachian Gamers and asked them to check off which games interested them most. The list was mostly middle-weight Euro-games, although I included a few of the lighter wargames that I thought might appeal to our group. I let each person (including myself) only choose three games--which means that the list of games we came up with is smaller than it could have been. For example, if I had allowed myself to choose four games, I might have added Martin Wallace’s Brass, but with a limit of three games, Brass got left out.

Now, this is a ridiculously small statistical sample, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about the interests of the gaming community at large. But here is what we are looking forward to:

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Kris Hall: Three Middle-Weight Games, Light on Theme

At this week’s meeting of the Appalachian Gamers, we played three games that I had never played before. They were Notre Dame, Rheinlander, and Maya. All three are decent games, each can be played in about 90 minutes, and I would not hesitate to play any of them again. But each was a little light on theme, and I’m not going to go out of my way to acquire any of them.

If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably heard of Notre Dame (from designer Stefan Feld), and there’s a good chance you have played it already, so I’m not going to describe the mechanics in detail. Suffice it to say that it is a game about playing cards to take actions that either earn players victory points, or earn players resources (cash and wooden cubes) that can be used to later get victory points. Complicating the game is the arrival each turn of plague-bearing rats. Players must also take actions to fend off the rat invasion or they risk forfeiting victory points and cubes that have already been placed on the board.

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Kris Hall: Font Wisdom

A concern has been growing in my mind over the past few months. This is something that could threaten the enjoyment of gaming for a large percentage of the gaming community. I am, of course, talking about font size.

I guess there is no way to convince anyone that this is not a geezer issue, so I’m not going to try. I’m getting older, and so are my eyes, and I don’t like squinting at small print on cards and game boards. I suspect that there are quite a few gamers with me in this boat. Hobby gaming may be a relatively young hobby, but gamers are not an especially young population. Some sub-groups within the gaming community (I’m thinking of wargamers) seem to have more than their fair share of gamers that I will call experienced and mature. Out of a regular group of Appalachian Gamers of six or seven members, there are at least three of us who are near or past fifty years of age.

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Kris Hall: Mechanics Trumps Theme

I am a theme guy. I once wrote a Gone Gaming essay on games as theme delivery systems. But recently I had a lesson on how mechanics can trump theme. This came about because within the span of a week I played both Age of Discovery and Before the Wind.

Both Age of Discovery (designed by Alfred Viktor Schulz and published by Phalanx Games and Mayfair Games) and Before the Wind (designed by Torsten Landsvogt and also published by Phalanx and Mayfair) are cards games that deal with the Age of Sail. Age of Discovery is about the great voyages of exploration that sent Europeans to every corner of the globe. Before the Wind is a game of warehouse management. Obviously, Age of Discovery wins the interesting-theme contest hands down.

The difference in appeal is due to the games’ mechanics. Age of Discovery is primarily about buying colored ship cards and matching them to same-color contract cards and same-color voyage of discovery cards. The primary strategic decision is about when to use your ship cards to fulfill contract cards (which generate cash) and when to use them to complete the voyages of discovery cards (which generate victory points). There is relatively little interaction between the players; they may be racing to grab certain ships, contracts, or voyages before other players can snag them, but there is little that any player can do to hinder an opponent.

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Kris Hall: It’s Alive!

Who would have thought that re-animating a corpse could be so simple?

Last night, the Appalachian Gamers played It’s Alive!, a quick card game designed by Yehuda Berlinger and published by Reiver Games. It’s Alive! is an auction game with a Frankenstein theme.

Each turn, a player draws a card from the deck. Most of the cards are parts of corpses with various numerical values ranging from 2 to 8 (if I remember correctly). The player can purchase the card by paying the card’s value in gold. Or he can cash in the card to his graveyard and collect half of the card’s value in gold. Or he can auction off the card in the hope of collecting more than half of the card’s value from other players, or of winning the card without paying the full cost.

The goal is to collect the eight body parts needed to complete your monster. Once one person has all his necessary body parts, he calls out “It’s alive!” Players then total the value of their body parts and gold. The player with the highest total wins.

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Kris Hall: “Boy, I stink at this, and golly it was fun”

We played High Society again this week as a short game to cap the evening. Once again I lost. I scored no points whatsoever. As readers of last week’s column may remember, I frequently do poorly at auction games with unclear ending times. I keep pulling back from paying high prices in an auction while thinking that in the long run my thriftiness will net me some bargains. But there frequently is no long run.

But I still had a good time.

This week’s question is why we like games we are no darn good at. I can think of several games that I enjoy in spite of my poor performance. Hammer of the Scots, Imperial, Struggle of Empires, and Age of Empires III are games that I like—but have never won.

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Kris Hall: Time Is Fleeting

During the first half of last night’s game of Tigris & Euphrates, I drew only red and blue tiles. For approximately the same period of time, Dave drew no red tiles. I took this statistical oddity in stride, but Dave felt the need to denounce the goddess of fortune for playing her little practical jokes on him (which may be the reason why she gets so much satisfaction focusing on Dave).

One reason why the odd luck didn’t bother me was because of my subconscious feeling that there was plenty of time for statistics to travel back to the norm. As it turned out, Dave probably had a more accurate view of the situation than I did, because neither of us ever got the correct balance of victory cubes to win the game.

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Kris Hall: Shooting Zombietown

We had a lot of unfinished games at last night’s meeting of the Appalachian Gamers. Usually we stop in mid-game if we’re just playing a filler and a new arrival walks in. But we were playing Zombietown (from Twilight Creations) for the first time, and we found an excuse to quit. Zombietown is not meant to be just a filler game (unless your definition of a filler game is a lot different than mine). I actually can’t remember exactly what caused us to stop playing, but I know the motivation behind the stoppage: We found the game hard to swallow.

Sorry, Zombietown is a game that inspires tasteless humor. This is a game that glories in ultra-gory brain-blasting zombie-killing imagery on combat cards. Not that that’s a bad thing. While I wouldn’t describe the Appalachian Gamers as a small horde of Ameritrash dice addicts who crave red-meat combat games, neither are we a bunch of sherry-sipping wooden-cube-loving elitists who disdain any game that doesn’t require a calculator to tabulate victory points. In fact, the majority of the group expressed fondness for another zombie game—Mall of Horror.

So what were our beefs with Zombietown?

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