Matt Thrower

The collected writings of Matt Thrower, who will post new material on Boardgame News on alternate Mondays. Here's what Matt has to say about himself:

Matt grew up in a tiny, isolated fishing village in eastern England, and during the mid-1980s the sheer tedium of that existence drove him into playing D&D as a pastime. This inevitably lead to miniatures and Warhammer and the early GW boardgames. Miniatures games and role-playing filled the bulk of his gaming years until one day, when complaining loudly on a Games Workshop forum about how poorly designed Warhammer was as a game, one of the designers stopped by and asked why, if he was so keen to play games and not paint miniatures, he wasn't playing board games instead? This seemed like very sound advice and indeed in a relatively short time, he'd abandoned almost every other aspect of the gaming hobby to focus down on board games.

He now lives in Bath in western England, as far away from the place he grew up as he could possibly get, with his lovely partner and daughter. Having a baby in the house for the first time meant a lot less opportunity to get out and game, so he tried to fill the gap by writing articles about games on BoardGameGeek instead. Eventually, deciding that the games he loved deserved their own forum and wanting to pretend to be clever by writing the sort of pretentious pseduo-intellectual analysis pieces that don't sit well on BGG, he founded the Fortress: Ameritrash site. He continues to contribute there, standing on the shoulders of several more talented writers.

Matt Thrower: The Next Level

I’ve been waiting to play Conflict of Heroes for a long time. The idea of a relatively lightweight yet demanding World War 2 tactical game really got me excited and the only reason I didn’t dive in right away was because the historical background of the first game didn’t interest me much. I almost bought Storms of Steel but eventually passed on that because it looked like what I really wanted, a Normandy campaign iteration of the system, was coming up next. So until that time I was reliant on a friend getting a copy to try the game. Someone eventually came up trumps with Awakening the Bear and I sat down to get my fill of squad level Operation Barbarossa action.

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Matt Thrower: Q & A With Martin Wallace

I’ve been meaning to ask Martin Wallace for an interview for ages: I’ve often thought that he’s one of the more innovative designers working today and I love the manner in which his games retain the basic feel of a Euro whilst usually allowing a very high degree of player interaction. And of course, just like me, he’s British and in the US/German-centric world of board gaming us minorities need to stick together! But what finally gave me the impetus to ask was the fact that Brass turned up very high on my latest game ratings article and it seemed an opportune time to ask him some questions about it. To my great pleasure he agreed to take time out of his busy schedule to field my inane queries. I found the answers frank and quite surprising - I hope you do too. 

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Matt Thrower: The Credibility Gap

I have an amazingly poor record when it comes to finding bargain copies of games in charity shops. But about this time last year I came close - I found copies of Civilization and Kingmaker in my local charity shop. I didn’t buy either, the former being one very long game too many and the latter being something I already own. But what was particularly interesting about this experience was that both games were ones that any gamer worth his or her salt would recognise as being classic titles which are heavyweights in terms of both complexity and strategy, whilst the staff in the charity shop had stacked them with the children’s’ books, and the adult books were being kept company by any number of god-awful cheap shot party games and TV quiz show spin-offs. This demonstrates, I think, the perception in which board gaming is held by the general public: something that kids do.

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Matt Thrower: Tunnel Vision

Perhaps it’s just me, but I seem to be noticing of late a lot of people bemoaning the fact that modern game design - particularly in the great American tradition - is lacking in innovation. A little while ago Micheal Barnes caused something of a stir when he proclaimed design had hit a ceiling. More recently I’ve seen several different comments about upcoming ‘dudes on a map’ games bemoan that the genre is stale and uninteresting. For my own part I’ve devoted column inches on the lamentable state of fantasy adventure games. So what’s with all this negativity from the fan community? Have the games I love really hit the end of the road?

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Matt Thrower: AT Game Ratings 2009

Around this time of year, for the past few years, I’ve made a habit of listing a top fifty games according to the boardgamegeek ratings of people who hold the “ameritrash” microbadge. The idea originally was to get a better handle on what, exactly, the term was supposed to describe but as time has gone on it’s become more of a matter of interest onto itself, simply to recommend the best games to fans of the genre, even as the term itself has, perhaps, become even more ephemeral. This year, due to time constraints I’m barely able to find the space to keep up my article output, let alone make lists on BGG, so compiling an article around the statistics instead seemed an obvious solution. Hopefully in a few weeks time, when things have calmed down a bit, I’ll be able to post that list with some actual numbers on it and you’ll see the exact ratings and positions of the games I’m going to talk about. In the meantime I’ve picked out a few highlights for you to enjoy.

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Matt Thrower: Luna Llena (Full Moon) Review

I’ve never actually been to a game convention myself, and I don’t plan to start at my time of life. After all - why go to the trouble when I can sort through the recommended new releases pre-filtered by people whose taste I trust? Out of that pre-filtering process as applied to this years’ Essen there was actually only one game that I found that I felt merited personal attention according to my own game tastes. That game was Luna Llena (Spanish for Full Moon) from Gen-X games who were kind enough to respond to my interest with a review copy for me to check out. As you might guess from the English translation of the name this is a game about Werewolves. I was extraordinarily lucky to get my first play on a raw December night in which a howling wind was pushing wisps of ragged clouds across the face of - you guessed it - a full moon. I didn’t plan it, but it certainly added to the experience.

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Matt Thrower: Richard III Review

Being English, I’ve often lamented a dearth of wargames representing English history. My woe is further compounded by the fact that as a Casual Wargamer my choice is further restricted to those games which have sensible caps on complexity and play time. I was therefore delighted when Jerry Taylor announced he was designing a game based on the Wars of the Roses, and further delighted when Columbia games did me the honour of sending me a review copy. The title it seems has changed to Richard III, one of the four monarchs England enjoyed during the wars which has the unfortunate side effect of making me hear Baldrick saying ”Oh dear, Richard the Third” in a deadpan tone whenever I think about the game. But it’s the play that matters, not the name, so on with the review.

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Matt Thrower: The Tyranny of Choice

My little girl, age three, seems to be neither more or less interested in playing structured games than any other three year old. She likes to get my “grown up” game off the shelf and play with the pieces though - recently a couple of cavalry pieces from Battles of the Third Age became horsies and a board of Helms’ Deep became a fair. But I digress. Recently I played two games with her in consecutive days that made me think, very hard, about an aspect of game design which has become so sacrosanct as to be almost a religious commandment: the need for a game of any length to present the players with “meaningful choice” in order to be a good design.

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Matt Thrower: Witch of Salem Review

Given my usual abhorrence of co-operative games I’m not entirely sure why it was that Witch of Salem from Mayfair games originally crept on to my radar. Perhaps it was the theme, and the recurring description of “Arkham Horror lite”. Perhaps it was the art. Perhaps it was some personal comment or other that I’d read somewhere about the original German edition “Der Hexer Von Salem” (perhaps the only instance I’ve come across where the German name of a game is actually better than the English translation). Whatever the reason, Mayfair kindly agreed to provide me with a review copy so I could check out whether or not this would be a rare co-op title that would get a positive reaction from me and my gaming group.

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Matt Thrower: Whatever Happened to Hybrids?

A couple of years ago I became convinced that I’d seen the future of gaming. I was totally inspired by a bunch of recent and not-so-recent releases that seemed to have deliberately chosen to walk a path between all the common genres of games, blending the best of this, the finest aspect of that and a little of the cream of the other into something new and satisfying. Games like Imperial, Through the Ages and Shogun which remain favourites with me to this day. What convinced me that these sorts of titles were the direction that the hobby was going to take was that their shameless theft of ideas from multiple genres made them appealing to a very wide range of gamer taste. But forward on to today and no-one seems to talk about hybrid games anymore. I was obviously wrong. So what happened?

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Matt Thrower: Expansionitis

For as long as I’ve been gaming, game companies have been publishing expansions. It may be that this has something to do with the roots of the modern board gaming hobby in the early role-playing and miniatures game releases: those games virtually require expansion material and it’s something that the world of war gaming seems largely to have avoided. And for as long as there have been expansions I’ve had mixed feelings about them: for all that they can be fun they also offer marketing traps to the unwary consumer. As expansions become more and more commonplace, it seemed like a good time to sit down and take a good hard look at some of these issues.

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Matt Thrower: The Hell of Stalingrad Review

Anyone who follows my columns or reviews will know by now that I have an ongoing obsession with war games which are capable of supporting multiple players and don’t take days to play. I was therefore immediately interested when I came across mention of The Hell of Stalingrad by Steven Cunliffe, which claims to re-create aspects of the Battle of Stalingrad for up to four players. Further researched revealed it was a card-only game and quite clearly an unusual take on the battle. The designer and publisher, Clash of Arms Games, kindly agreed to send me a review copy and after a number of games I can certainly attest that this is something new and innovative: but is it any good?

I’ve read elsewhere that a lot of people were impressed with the graphic design on this game. Not me. I found the artwork garish, and a lot of the custom icons used don’t seem to have been printed at very high resolution. However the game does make very heavy use of historical photos, a commendable choice that really brings the players closer to the battle the game purports to be simulating. Almost every card has a relevant photo, and I found the ones which illustrate the actual district cards where the action takes place to be particularly interesting, furnished as they are with actual photos of the burnt-out city, and as a bonus a map is included showing the position of the buildings on the battlefield. However there are other production quality issues - in particular my copies of those same district cards with the great photos on them are printed on thin stock and refuse to lie flat: back-bending helps in the short term but they always seem to curl up again. This is a minor problem, and may be isolated to my copy as others have not complained, but it is annoying as during the course of the game you’ll be adding and taking away a lot of counters from these cards, and they don’t sit properly on top of the curl. The game also has a relatively high price point which makes the slightly disappointing production quality seem all the more unfortunate, although the cost of printing five entirely different card decks is apparently partially responsible.

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Matt Thrower: Lifestyle Choices

During the discussion which followed a recent column about classic board games, the subject of whether or not “lifestyle games” should be included came up. The term was used as a descriptor for games which some gamers follow to the exclusion of most other titles, usually because they have an appeal beyond that of simply playing the game itself such as collectability or modeling. I found this an interesting point to raise because mentally I never lump these games in with board games, whether they actually have a board or not. And yet examining these games casts, I think, an interesting light on the current state of the gaming hobby.

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Matt Thrower: Alone Again Or

Everyone has some common phrase or idiom that makes them angry. It might be because it’s overused, or because it’s nonsensical, or maybe because they dislike the connotations of the meaning. Being an angry sort of person, I have quite a lot of them, and being a gamer many of them are from the world of gaming. Like “broken” for example because it’s a dreadfully overused term that doesn’t actually mean anything with regards to games, because the criteria for what constitutes “broken” varies hugely from player to player. The most recent addition to the list of phrases that makes me cringe when I see them is, hypocritically enough, one I’ve used repeatedly in the past myself. That phrase is “multi-player solitaire”.

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Matt Thrower: Memoir ‘44 Campaigns Review

For some reason, I was struck relatively early on in my plays of Memoir ‘44 that it was a game that would clearly benefit from a campaign system. I’m not entirely sure why this was - perhaps it was a reflection on the relatively limited scope of most of the scenarios, or maybe because the pleasing simplicity and speed of the game left ample scope for an extension of both for those that wanted it. I can’t have been the only one because several home-brew versions appeared fairly quickly after the game was published. I was thus immediately interested once the semi-inevitable official version was announced, and Days of Wonder were kind enough to supply me with a copy to review.

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Matt Thrower: Virtual Strangers

If you’d told me a couple of years ago that I’d do the majority of my game-playing on-line, I’d have thought you were mad. Yet there’s no getting away from the fact that one way or another, via e-mail or live play, through a third party appliaction or a website, I play far more games on-line nowadays than I do against real life flesh and blood opponents. It’s a crazy, topsy-turvy world in which I regularly play games I don’t much like, get beaten playing games at which I excel and end up buying physical copies of games that never get played. Like it or not, the advent of on-line board gaming has had a major impact on our hobby, but this is an area where I feel the smooth is very much balanced by the rough.

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Matt Thrower: Mare Nostrum Review

You might be curious about the title of this column. You might read it and say to me “Hey, Matt, why are you bothering to review a six-year old game that a lot of people have played, discarded and moved on from and which now appears to be out of print”? It’s a valid question, so I’ll answer it. The reason is because the more I’ve played this game, the more I’ve become convinced it’s been the victim of one of the most unjustified hatchet-jobs the internet has to offer. And after mentioning it my previous column I wanted to take the time to tell you why. 

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Matt Thrower: Six Months On

Those of you who are blessed with both an excellent memory and an unusually high degree of tolerance may recall that I started this year on a quest to demonstrate that I was definitely playing my existing games more through the use of John Farrel’s stats pages. Six months in, I’m sure that no-one cares how I’m doing, but I thought I’d tell you anyway. And then maybe devote a bit of space to thinking about patterns of game-playing generally, which might be marginally more interesting. 

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Matt Thrower: The Art and Science of Game Design

I’m not a game designer. I have some ideas, but I doubt that I’d ever have the patience and perseverance required to see a design through from inception to endless rounds of play testing to a final finished product. This clearly limits what useful commentary I can make on the design process, but that doesn’t seem to stop me from trying - I’ve become very fond of repeating a certain mantra about what constitutes a workable design goal and what doesn’t, the idea being that “must tie in strongly with ancient Roman theme” is a goal likely to lead to a good game, whereas “must play within 90 minutes” will likely lead to something shallow and forgettable. But this is a pretty negative way of approaching the subject so I thought for once that I’d turn the tables and suggest a process which might help designers to focus on the positive goals and bypass the negative ones. Apologies if the following sounds like I’m trying to teach people to suck eggs on a subject in which I have limited knowledge. That’s not my intention. Rather I’m throwing out this rather abstract piece in the hope that some of the ideas herein might encourage debate and some better suggestions.

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Matt Thrower: The Casual Wargamers Club

People don’t tend to like to think of themselves as part of a minority, and especially not a minority of a minority. Such a position can engender a perverse sense of pride in being one a small number, even when membership of that clique requires nothing more than less-than-mainstream taste. I find myself in the unfortunate position of being in a minority of a minority of a minority, and I have that perverse sense of burning uniqueness as though it’s something special - it burns so bright, in fact, that I’m planning to dedicate an entire column to telling you about it. I belong to the Casual Wargamers Club.

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Matt Thrower: Hot Fun, Cold Fun

Fun n.
1. A source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure.
2. Enjoyment; amusement: have fun at the beach.
3. Playful, often noisy, activity.
- American Heritage Dictionary

1. The employment of time in a meaningless and non-practical way
- Arnold Rimmer (quoting Kryten)

I offer you these definitions as a means to demonstrate what it perhaps painfully obvious - that the meaning of “fun” varies widely depending on the individual. Many people I know wouldn’t class games of any sort as being “fun” at all. Even within our shared hobby, we have such a diverse sense of what makes a fun game that we routinely engage in slanging matches over the concept, partly because gamers often like to see their hobby as somehow deep and intellectual. This facet of what interests us in games means, I think, that these sorts of divisions run rather deeper than stratifications in other hobbies and pastimes - some gamers seem to become positively obsessed with them. Compare it with video games, for example: Whilst many computer gamers have a favoured idiom, there is general agreement that the very best games in a given category will usually appeal to almost anyone interested in playing video games.

It is therefore pretty much impossible to come up with a concrete description of what makes a game “fun” because it’ll mean different things to different people, and yet it nevertheless seems that there are games which manage to cross boundaries of taste and become genre classics, beloved by the vast majority of gamers in spite of the taste differences that we’re so fond of shouting to the rooftops. One that springs to mind is the eternally-youthful Cosmic Encounter. I suspect a big part of the appeal of that game is because it manages to shoehorn much of the fun of a many-hour multi-player conflict game into a sixty-minute play time which has obvious cross-platform appeal. So you might be tempted to say that a short playtime is the hallmark of such a game. And yet I wouldn’t hesitate to highlight Through the Ages as another such genre-defying game, but that actually runs fairly long and seems to have gained its popularity on the back of a set of mechanics that seems to offer something to fans of a wide variety of game styles. So it seems that even though we can say for definite that there are some shared concepts behind what hobby gamers can universally celebrate as a “fun” game, it seems equally definite that we can’t pin them down. And for me, at least, this is a terribly irritating conclusion to draw.

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Matt Thrower: Happy Endings

Let me paint you a picture: one which will likely be horribly familiar for most of you. You’re playing a game - a long game, but a good one. The first two or three hours were utterly fantastic and had everyone buzzing, focused on the table, totally immersed in the experience. The hour after that it became pretty clear who was going to win so, even though the mechanics of the game allowed for someone to come from behind to take the win, everyone eased off a little bit. But it went on: for one reason or another, the lead player just could quite make the leap to the finish line and another hour dragged by before it ended, an hour where everyone was pretty much bored and fed up because they felt the game was a foregone conclusion. The group sits back and, in post game discussion, they all agree the game actually ended a good hour, maybe even two, before the victory conditions were achieved. Which begs the question of why, if it was so clear cut, did everyone keep on playing once the game ceased to be fun?

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Matt Thrower: Diamonds from the Rough

The explosion of the game scene on the internet has had a series of unexpected consequences. I’ve discussed one or two of the negative ones in the past but on the whole its been excellent, positive stuff. If you’d have asked me four years ago that I’d play the majority of my games by email and that doing so would open up access for me to a whole new genre of games I’d previously dismissed - wargames - I’d have laughed in your face. The internet means we can often check rules and opinion before we buy a game, it means new designers can self-publish without the help of a company, it means that we have easy access to games across the globe, it means we have easy access to other gamers across the globe. Because of all this, another knock-on effect is that games can be, and often are, playtested more - a lot more - than they were in the past. Which ought to be a good thing and for the most part it is - but I’m starting to notice a slightly strange trend in some recent titles that indicates to me that its possible to playtest or discuss things in a game too much.

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Matt Thrower: Age of Conan Review

Age of Conan first caught my eye when I heard it described as a simpler, shorter, multi-player version of War of the Ring. Being someone who loved WotR but thought it suffered somewhat from being complex, long and two-player only I was instantly intrigued. Further investigation revealed that the game appealed to me on a number of different levels: I’m a sucker for multi-player conflict games of any type, but the fantasy theme has proved the hardest for designers in this area to pin down. I was quite content to pursue my usual policy of waiting until the dust had settled before reviewing the opinion and deciding on making a purchase, but FFG kindly decided to provide me with an early copy to review - so here are my impressions on the latest offering from the Nexus design group.

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Matt Thrower: Gaming in Tongues

I have a confession to make: in spite of it being a favourite whipping boy of many gamers whose opinions I respect, I’ve been nosing around Race for the Galaxy recently, although I’ve never played it. What’s caused this is not a sudden delight in efficiency engine games but the forthcoming release of the Rebel vs Imperium expansion and its promised “interaction”. Contrary to popular belief I’m an enormous fan of many Eurogames which feature high levels of direct player interaction such as Imperial and a recent discovery Traders of Genoa, so an expansion to a popular and highly lauded Euro which promised lots more interaction was certainly of interest, although I shall certainly hang fire and see whether this turns out as real, red-blooded interaction or the sort of “interaction” that the Agricola I-deck offered. My money is on it being the latter - but we’ll see.

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