Aaron Lawn

An introduction of sorts—Aaron writes from the San Francisco/Bay Area in California, where he's been running a retail gamestore since early 2001. Playing games long before that, Aaron has alternately dabbled and been obsessed by most genres of gaming you can name. The ubiquitous gaming closet contains wargames, role-playing books, stacks of painted miniatures, boxes of CCGs, and of course, board games.

Part of the Boardgame News columnists since the merger with Gone Gaming, Aaron writes bi-weekly on a random assortment of topics, from classic board games to retail. He likes the idea of writing pithy strategy articles, but never manages to finish them.

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Headlines May 8, 2008 - Aaron Lawn: Trade Show Ramblings April 24, 2008 - Aaron Lawn: On the Road April 10, 2008 - Aaron Lawn: Overdevelopment?  What? March 27, 2008 - Aaron Lawn: Long Surprises March 13, 2008 - Aaron Lawn: Games for the mass(es) February 21, 2008 - Aaron Lawn: Things I Don’t Miss February 7, 2008 - Aaron Lawn: Talking Around My Game? January 24, 2008 - Aaron Lawn: Five Books with Games December 25, 2007 - Aaron Lawn: New, Old, In-Between December 18, 2007 - Aaron Lawn: Not Enough Time December 4, 2007 - Aaron Lawn: Short Note on Retail November 6, 2007 - Aaron Lawn: Persistent Worlds

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Articles

Aaron Lawn: Trade Show Ramblings

Ah, lateness.  This column was written two weeks ago, just missing my Thursday appearance… Hooray!

I’ve just wound my way back into California after a three day stint at the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas.  As you may or may not know, GTS¹ is the trade show for the Hobby Game Industry².  As far as board games, especially Euro-style board games, it’s an odd show to report on.  Why odd?

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Aaron Lawn: On the Road

[Editor’s note: Aaron is on a working vacation in Las Vegas at the GAMA Trade Show. He’ll fill us in next column on what he discovered at the show.]

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Aaron Lawn: Overdevelopment?  What?

Race for the Galaxy.  A game.  Kind of popular currently.  After several months of musing, I feel compelled to discuss Race for the Galaxy.  Hereafter, known as “Race”.  Now, for the lead-in.

Underdevelopment is sadly a common feature in board gaming.  It’s easy to point out when a game (usually self-published, often not) hasn’t received the development it needs.  The few times that I have a drastic immediate dislike for a game is when development has missed some fundamental flaw in design, resulting in a game that only works if played correctly.  Correctly?  pshaw.

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Aaron Lawn: Long Surprises

I enjoy longer¹ games.  But there is definitely a different mindset that I have when I sit down for a long game.  I’ve prepared myself for something long.  But sometimes, a supposedly short game turns long.  The game drags out.  Sometimes it’s clear why.  Sometimes it’s not, and the next thing you know, you’ve been sitting there playing a game that says 60-90 minutes on the side of the box and it’s past midnight. 

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Aaron Lawn: Games for the mass(es)

Most of us are more than familiar with the long-standing tradition of the licensed game.  Many games from the mid 20th century are roll-and-move variants with a popular theme pasted on¹.  The same phenomenon exists today – not only from the giant companies like Hasbro and Mattel, but also the smaller publishers like Fantasy Flight, and even European publishers like Kosmos².  Today, I’m not interested in specific games, I’m interested in why we see so much of it…

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Aaron Lawn: Things I Don’t Miss

I’m not a recent convert to boardgames, or gaming in general, so sometimes it amuses me to look back over the years and notice little changes¹.  A week ago, while we were battling through another game of Das Kollier², it struck me just how long it had been since I had to wade through a horrible fan translation of rules.

I don’t miss it one bit. 

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Aaron Lawn: Talking Around My Game?

What’s the appropriate level of tabletalk for most board games?⁽¹⁾

It’s a hard question.  When you are in an auction game, do you announce how you are valuing the item?  For a game like Modern Art, it is in the Auctioneer’s best interest to talk up the item they are selling by pointing out how much it could be worth.  After all, they get more money if the bidding goes up!  But in other auction games doing an out-loud evaluation of how much the item is worth might be considered poor manners.⁽²⁾

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Aaron Lawn: Five Books with Games

One of the oddities that I like to have on my shelf are books about games. In general, these fall into one of these categories: History of Game, Collecting games, Designing games, and How to play books. These are all How to Play books, but they focus on books that are a bit more readable than a listing of game rules.

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Aaron Lawn: New, Old, In-Between

I qualify as the new guy, I guess. I think I’m still the most recent addition to Gone Gaming, so I don’t have quite the long period of time to look back on and reminisce. When several folks left Gone Gaming at about the same time, either I mentioned writing to Shannon, or he mentioned it to me. Whoever instigated it, the result was me joining on a mostly biweekly basis to muse about the old and the new. I find it amusing to look at the variety of writers at Gone Gaming who were also retailers: DWTripp, Smatt, and myself. Did I miss anyone? If Smatt had admitted to owning motorcycles we could have had even more in common⁽¹⁾.

Group blogs usually do have a short, or at least sporadic, lifespan with flurries of activities, then silence. Gone Gaming has stood out as nicely even, which I hope we can continue at our new home over at Boardgame News.

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Aaron Lawn: Not Enough Time

It’s reaching the end of the year, and the traditional time for a geek to look at what games they played and reminisce. But rather than talk about what I played lots this year, I’m going to talk about what I didn’t play and my regrets.

Invariably (in my life), the shorter games get pulled out more. There was a year when I must have played Circus Flocati almost 20 times. Why? Because we’d always play it while waiting for everyone else to show up. We might have finished the game only ten times, but it appeared on the table constantly. So at this time of year, when I lament what I didn’t play, it’s always the long difficult games. On with the show…

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Aaron Lawn: Short Note on Retail

It’s a busy time of year for the retail biz. One of the oddities of being on the inside of retail is that you learn exactly how early the holiday shopping season really starts. No, not the shoppers, but the sales calls.

Every year, like clockwork, on October 1st, I start getting cold calls⁽¹⁾ from game companies. Usually I already know about three-quarters of the companies that call at that point. These aren’t Eurogame or hobby game companies. (Those companies aren’t big enough to fund cold calls.) These are the larger family game companies. Some have made it into the mass market, some haven’t.

I get frustrated only with the ones who take offense that I don’t want their products. “We’ve won an award!” they cry. I hesitate to tell them that while awards are shiny and the stickers look nice, only one or two award-winning games sell for more than a year. The chances that your game will do well locally? Not very high.

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Aaron Lawn: Persistent Worlds

Long term games. Role-playing, twelve-hour marathon sessions of such-and-such. This post is somewhat inspired by an upcoming (2008?) expansion to FFG’s Descent which adds a campaign system to the tactical dungeon crawl. And some of my recent experiences.

Board games are often beloved for their “play and forget” aspects. You can start a boardgame quickly, and it makes no demands on your time before and after the game. This is a start contrast to other hobby games: Miniatures demand time painting and sculpting; collectibles demand time sorting, planning, and devising (deck-building/army building); role-playing demands prep time from the GM and requires players to carry information from game session to game session.

As gamers age, add families and commitments, board games begin to appeal over other games because of this lack of commitment away from the table. But there still remains in some people the desire to build something lasting within their hobby. Online MMRPGs tap into this. Join World of Warcraft and you are immediately part of something large. The game goes on around you and you experience bits and pieces. Put the game down for a moment and when you return you find your position identical, but the environment has shifted: a living game.

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Aaron Lawn: Collectibles on Your Game Table

I am apparently one of a small group of people in this world who can play a collectible game without getting sucked in. I also have a tendency to be able to wander away from the games and then wander back. This is fine for me, but bad for getting a collectible/constructible game on the table since my fickle nature has caused me to leave behind groups of players because I became less interested in the game (the only game) they played. I’ve wandered into and out of Magic: The Gathering multiple times since its launch, and I still play it with my dad whenever I see him⁽¹⁾.

I’ve played most of the good collectible games⁽²⁾ over the years, either when they came out or once they were cheap. Here’s some mini-reviews on some of my favorites, some of which are odd. I’d love to play these games more often, but the learning curve is high for almost all of them, so even keeping a set of playable decks around doesn’t help get them on the table. You really need to commit to playing one game several times with the same group.

It should be noted that with a few exceptions collectible games require player elimination for victory or encourage player elimination, so if you didn’t know, you’ve been warned.

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Aaron Lawn: Princess of Florence

I’ve always been a fan of Princes of Florence.

Over the years, it’s proven to be an excellent game. It provides a little bit of lots of things: auctioning, planning, spatial layout, etc. All the different bits add up to a complete package that has never struck me as painfully solitaire, scripted, or any of the other complaints I’ve heard. I enjoy the fact that the auction is very new-auction-person friendly because you must raise by exactly one step, and the more you lose, the more likely you are to pay less money.

Over the years of many games of Princes, I’ve seen auction values solidify. The jesters are worth lots of money, the landscapes aren’t. Building is a viable strategy, but only if the auction values are high. To sum up, there are several paths and choices to take in obtaining victory, and the best paths often depend on the auction value of jesters and recruiting cards. If those items are going cheaply to players who know what to do with them....

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Aaron Lawn: Wrestling with Long Games

How do you approach a complex game? Continuing my thoughts from two weeks ago, I’m debating how you can get games of a more rambling nature onto the table. Rambling in this case defined as games longer than two hours, which seems to be the point at which players start saying no.

The big question in my mind is whether it’s worth having the first session be a “teaching” game—that is, a game with a strict time or turn limit with the stated purpose of teaching the rules.

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Aaron Lawn: Investment in Gaming…

It’s been awhile since I managed a post. A short five-day vacation blossomed into illness and the requisite scrambling to catch up at work. It is often easy to ramble on, but I find the starting to be the hard part, and my posts just haven’t been started recently.

I’ve had a gaming meta-question in my head for most of this year. I’ve come to no conclusions on it, but I’ll take the time to ramble on the topic for awhile:

“Are we (as gamers, specifically boardgamers) getting too passive in regards to our games?”

In a more wordy fashion: Are we too quick to discard games based on initial opinions? Are we playing too many different games? Have we lost the feeling of investment that seems to have been a hallmark of the early years of hobby boardgames? If lost, is that a bad thing, a thing to be expected, or what?

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Aaron Lawn: Hated Questions

Ah, retail. Everyone has horror stories, or glory stories, or something. I have my hated questions, questions that I hate to hear. They aren’t bad questions—in fact, they are good questions—but they’re asked by the wrong people or at the wrong time.

Let’s tackle the first one. Person walks into the store, looks around a bit, perhaps with a bit of initial banter betwixt me and them confirming that yes, indeed this is a game store and we sell games. Perhaps a bit of clarification about the lack of video games. Then it comes.

“What’s the hot game?”

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Aaron Lawn: The Card Game

Settlers of Catan.
Puerto Rico.
Caylus.
Tigris and Euphrates.

Four giants of the Euro explosion—tied together by all being twisted into a card game form, which is exciting since four games is almost a genre⁽¹⁾.

What is most interesting to me is how each game justifies its existence. Why was it developed? Simply to make great wads of cash for the manufacturer? Perhaps. But there must be some reason for existence that will spur consumers to part from their carefully horded monies.

When I think of card games versus board games, I usually come up with portability and speed, that is, a card game is smaller physically than a board game, and it takes less time⁽²⁾ to play. Secondly, card games have a slight tendency to be simpler and easier to explain⁽³⁾

So I’ll mimic Shannon for a day and do my own meager analysis of these card games.

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Aaron Lawn: Short Game Thoughts

There’s been a flood of new games⁽¹⁾ recently. Too many to play all of them, and all too many of them have turned out to be sizable time commitments. I’ve been spoiled by Taluva, Ur, Yspahan and the like. Bring back my one-hour game!

So here’s my thoughts on recent games—not really reviews, just impressions and thoughts.

Tide of Iron
Unplayed. Not sure if I’ll actually get around to it. A couple of customers like it though.

Notre Dame
I love drafting cards. Years spent drafting Magic: The Gathering have left me with a passion for “choose one and pass the rest”, so I’m glad that this design space is being explored. Notre Dame is pretty good and also probably the shortest of the latest crop. I think experienced players could play it in under 45 minutes. I still haven’t figured out if one of the seven actions is just completely underpowered, or if there’s some way to exploit it. Not going to blow anyone away, but a fun game.

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Aaron Lawn: Puzzles - Games

My small game group was lightly attended last night⁽¹⁾ because three of us are in the last throes of planning a two-day puzzle race. I’m not one of the three, though I have been conscripted to help with the actual event this weekend⁽²⁾. The last member of the group is wisely uninvolved.

Puzzles and games are closely linked. Some games are obviously based around puzzles, and at a certain point even puzzles morph into games. The SF/Bay Area has a fairly large puzzle-loving community—and a fairly large boardgame community—but the two communities are largely separate. Sure, there are a couple people who cross over here and there, but as a rule the groups don’t often mix.

It probably comes down to time. The puzzle races or puzzle nights that the die-hard puzzlers enjoy suck up time just like a marathon session of 18xx. The upcoming race⁽³⁾ will take the whole weekend for the 15+ teams of players. Teams will be 4-6 puzzlers each, which brings me to what might be the biggest distinction between the communities of gamers and puzzlers: teamwork.

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Aaron Lawn: Current Trends

I spent half of last night playing the 1830’s PA map of age of steam. I solidered on to the end, but some early decisions left me clinging valiently to solvency, only to drop negative in the final turn. A crushing defeat, but the map was interesting enough to pique my interest in another go⁽¹⁾. But certainly not right away.

This is in stark contrast to another recent game, Rüdiger Dorn’s Arkadia, which we finished after a little over an hour and immediately jumped back in for a second game. This brings me around to what I wanted to point out: The current trend towards shorter heavy games. Domestic⁽²⁾ releases in 2007 have highlighted a number of strong 60-minuteish games that pack a fair amount of weight into their shorter game length. Compared directly to the heavier releases of the past couple of years, there are more options for heavy 60-minute games than there were last year at this time.

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Aaron Lawn: Heads Down, Heads Up

I finished a game of Through the Ages recently, and in the post-game debriefing, one of the players said that he thought that he was done with the game because TtA was too much of a “heads down” game. Where time seems to spin and warp, resulting in a feeling of disconnection—not only with the outside world, but also with the other players⁽¹⁾.

At first I was taken aback: “You mean that’s a bad thing?” But the longer⁽²⁾ I thought about it, the more I can see where he was coming from. If a game draws you into your personal planning too much, it can cease being a game and become more like a puzzle—at which point the non-puzzle inclined will enjoy the game less.

A common complaint about some of the longer, more detailed games is the propensity for solitare play. Not outright solitare, but an odd mutated form of solitare where interaction with the other players occurs, but ultimately doesn’t have as much an impact on your play as your own strategy and long-term planning.

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Aaron Lawn: Two Thoughts from the Past Week

Riffing on Other Writers

I feel forced to announce my own membership in the Effete Euro-gamer Game-Balance Wimps Association, despite never playing a game of War of the Ring⁽¹⁾. I was driven by Kris’ founding of the Association to look over the arguments against game balance and was suitably unimpressed.

Like Kris, I came to the current crop of board games from a Avalon Hill, SPI wargame background⁽²⁾. Historical games are often replicating some of the most unbalanced situations ever. While I have never had the desire to play out the Zulu wars, there are plenty of games that allow one player to throw hordes of native Africans against the guns of colonials in a vain attempt to not be completely destroyed. Eastern Front World War II is also a good example of unbalanced situations—the sheer power of the Germans in the initial invasion, and eventually the sheer numbers of Russians as they pushed back the German front lines.

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Aaron LAwn: Magic Realm, Part Two

First off, let me apologize for doing a two-part article with my normal two week delay. It seems like a bit too long to wait to post the second half. Oh well, I’m still figuring these things out. If Part one is missing from your memory jump back two weeks and take a look.

So with all the interesting parts of Magic Realm demanding that it be played, how does the game fail? I’m going to leave the epic rulebook out of this and presume you have someone to teach you the game or you’re willing to undertake the learning of the rules.

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Aaron Lawn: Magic Realm, Part One - Why?

Following up on my theme of games that promote obsession⁽¹⁾, I am left to recount the past two months⁽²⁾ of time spent with an old Avalon Hill flatbox. This flatbox happens to be Magic Realm.

I’ve broken my thoughts into two parts - this one covers why I remain interested in this game, and why i spent two months learning how to play (again note, that is learning -how- to play. Not actually playing.)

Awe-inspiring is the third edition rulebook. Over 100 pages (including index and reference sheets), this tome will consume not only your printer, but your mind. I spent at least a week pouring over the rules, trying to give myself a solid foundation in the rules. While I eventually succeeded, I am still incapable of finding the answer to a question quickly. The index is not as stellar as it needs to be.

So, why should anyone bother with Magic Realm now⁽³⁾?

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Aaron Lawn: Older Games, But Really Potatoes

Let’s be blunt. I love old games⁽¹⁾. New games are great, too—in fact, these days I tend to learn about two new games a week⁽²⁾—but the games that I tend to obsess over are mid-70s titles, primarily from Avalon Hill, but occasionally an SPI game or even older 3M title. Sometimes I’ll slip into the non-hobby games and force a mid-century classic like Careers onto my ever-patient friends.

Interestingly, at least for me, the older titles have a tendency to support obsession in a way most modern games can’t⁽³⁾. The older games have an inelegance that demands lots of attention, not only during the game, but also before and after the game, figuring out how the different parts of the game interact and what decisions are meaningful.

Even the older Eurogames have some of this quality. Last night I finally got to play the potato game, Dicke Kartoffeln from 1989, which I’ve been hoping to play for goodness knows how long⁽⁴⁾. 

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Aaron Lawn: Trains, Math, Computers

I’ve been fighting computer-aided board games for years, ever since I started playing the 18xx series. Numerous 18xx players advocate using one of the various “moderator” programs for the game, which handle any number of aspects of the game, from tracking money, share prices, income, or all of the above. After my first game of Silverton last month, I began to think about computers again, as I looked at the Excel sheet someone has put together to calculate goods price changes.

I keep asking myself, “Do I really want a computer at my game table?”

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Aaron Lawn: First Posts, Dice, Rambling

First Posts

I feel like I’m supposed to introduce myself and let you know what I’ll be writing about, but unfortunately I don’t quite know what I’ll be saying four weeks from now, and the first option doesn’t appeal.

So: Hello, my name is Aaron. Gone Gaming for many years.

I suppose I’ll just ramble on for a bit.

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