W. Eric Martin

This section contains the columns of W. Eric Martin. Eric will be posting his column on Tuesdays.

About W. Eric Martin:

Eric is a full-time writer with nearly ten years of experience. In addition to various business, technology and nutrition articles and co-author credit on two books—The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting and Running a Coffee Bar (The Complete Idiot's Guide) and Tools of Timekeeping: A Kid's Guide to the History and Science of Telling Time (Tools of Discovery series)—he's been writing for GAMES magazine since 1997 and for Knucklebones magazine since its inception in late 2005.

In 2006, he started placing reviews and coverage of games in mainstream publications such as Discover, Scuba Diving, The Bark, Chile Pepper, Coffee, Tropical Fish Hobbyist, and Sheep! (Truly there's a magazine for every specialty.) This led him to dream of bigger things for games in the wide wide world, and in October 2006, he started Fun and Boardgames, a review site aimed at a mainstream audience, as a way to present games to would-be gamers in a friendly, inviting manner.

When Rick Thornquist decided to step down from Boardgame News, Eric thought this would be the perfect time to dump the technology and nutrition articles he had been writing and devote his writing to games, first and foremost. We'll see how that plan works out for him...

Eric lives in Concord, NH with his wife Linda and two big dopey cats.

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Headlines May 10, 2008 - W. Eric Martin: Forty Thoughts on Gamers and Gaming April 12, 2008 - W. Eric Martin: Kid Love/Adult Hate March 1, 2008 - W. Eric Martin: Playing in the Dark February 16, 2008 - W. Eric Martin: The Long Tail of Gaming February 2, 2008 - W. Eric Martin: Unity Games XIV / Vineta, Possibly January 19, 2008 - W. Eric Martin: Short Takes—Star System, Jamaica, Age of Gods January 5, 2008 - W. Eric Martin: Game Expections, Great and Otherwise December 25, 2007 - W. Eric Martin: Christmas Present, or Games for Soldiers 2007 December 18, 2007 - W. Eric Martin: Publisher Profile—Make A Game (MAG) Ltd. December 11, 2007 - W. Eric Martin: I Won, So This Game Sucks! December 4, 2007 - W. Eric Martin: Games ≠ Fun? Or, What Is a Game Anyway? November 27, 2007 - W. Eric Martin: 570 Games (And Nothin’ To Play)

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Articles

W. Eric Martin: Forty Thoughts on Gamers and Gaming

1. You should always carry a game with you when you leave the house. You never know when the opportunity to introduce someone to a new game might arise, and showing always trumps telling.

2. These opportunities happen more frequently if you talk about games every chance you get. I used to be reticent on the topic of games and didn’t bring up the subject around people whom I had just met. Thankfully I’m no longer that person, and I play many more games as a result.

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W. Eric Martin: Kid Love/Adult Hate

I’ve started to post my impressions of new titles from the Gathering of Friends elsewhere on BGN, so this column will be somewhat short, although still longer than the previous two I was supposed to write. My freelance writing has been sucking up mucho time in the past few months thanks to a ghostwriting project (with me joining a half-dozen other writers on a health book that the original author couldn’t complete in time) and lots of smaller assignments, so the columns have had to be put aside in favor of news.

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W. Eric Martin: Playing in the Dark

Yesterday I finished writing 10,000+ words for chapters in a book that I’m ghostwriting with others. This assignment was on top of other rush work, and I now have two more rush assignments due March 7. Not that I should be complaining about quick money, mind you…

Aside from work, my free time has been spent shovelling snow. Concord, New Hampshire has had 102 inches of snow this winter, only 19 inches short of the record set in 1870-something – and we’re supposed to receive another 6-10 inches in the next 24 hours. Ideally we’ll nail the record after only one more snowfall, then we can crank the sun up a few notches and melt all the two feet of snow that covers everything.

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W. Eric Martin: The Long Tail of Gaming

The Long Tail, written by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, was born out of a conversation he had with the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company. Unlike ye olde jukeboxes of my parent’s time – or, to be fair, my time – an Ecast machine has a broadband connection that enables users to choose from thousands of digital musical tracks. Asked by the Ecast CEO what percentage of the 10,000 available albums had sold at least one track per quarter, Anderson (sensing a trick) guessed 50%, a high number given business’ standard 80/20 rule, that is, 80% of sales coming from 20% of the products.

The real answer? 98%

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W. Eric Martin: Unity Games XIV / Vineta, Possibly

Last Saturday, January 26th, I attended Unity Games XIV, a 15-hour convention organized by folks in the greater Boston area that drew more than 300 participants.

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W. Eric Martin: Short Takes—Star System, Jamaica, Age of Gods

Rather than wait for additional plays in order to write full-blown reviews, I thought I’d go ahead and present half-blown thoughts on a trio of new titles.

Star System

Any game with a deduction element usually gets slapped with the “deduction game” label, even when the game has more going on than the mere deducing of hidden information. Clue and Mastermind, for example, are deduction games plain and simple. Once a player has sussed out the solution to the murder or mystery pattern, the game ends.

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W. Eric Martin: Game Expections, Great and Otherwise

Every creative medium has its own quirks, elements unique to the manner in which something is presented to the observer. I was reminded of this while reading T.C. Boyle’s novel Talk Talk over the holidays. While many of Boyle’s books skew towards the literary, Talk Talk is more of a thriller—a literary thriller, mind you, but a thriller just the same.

The main character, a deaf woman who’s the victim of identity theft, spends much of the book chasing after the antagonist, but when the characters nearly crash together in a car chase in the middle of the book, I felt no real thrill, no sense of impending resolution or rise towards a climax. Why? Because the event took place in the middle of the book.

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W. Eric Martin: Christmas Present, or Games for Soldiers 2007

Ideally you will have unwrapped a new game or six this holiday season and encounter many chances to play them with family members and friends before you have to (ugh) return to work.

Thanks to the generosity of several BGN readers and a couple of businesses, U.S. soldiers serving in the Middle East and Afghanistan will receive a few gift games of their own. The Games for Soldiers drive that I ran back in November 2007 raised nearly $700 through BGN memberships and renewals (as I was donating $10 of each $25 fee) and outright donations.

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W. Eric Martin: Publisher Profile—Make A Game (MAG) Ltd.

Designer and publisher Simon Hall released his first game, Caveman, at Spiel 2007. Caveman—co-designed with Magdalene Vrijland, Terry Shaw, and Matthew Hall and published by Make A Game, Ltd. (MAG)—has received a decent reception in its first few months, and FRED Distribution picked up the game for release in the U.S.

What inspires someone to launch a game company in a crowded market? In this case, nothing more than a desire to try.

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W. Eric Martin: I Won, So This Game Sucks!

Like many BGN readers, I learn and play dozens of new games each year. Since I do most of the game buying in my New Hampshire group—in addition to having review copies to push on others—I’m often the one teaching games, which means I almost always have more experience with a game than other players. Either I’m playing a game for the second (or third or fourth) time, or I’ve played a few turns of a practice game, or I’ve just assimilated the rules better than others since I’ve had more time to think about them.

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W. Eric Martin: Games ≠ Fun? Or, What Is a Game Anyway?

Last Friday, Boardgame News published a column by Yehuda Berlinger titled ”Games Are Not Supposed To Be Fun”, and as you might expect with a provocative title like that—not to mention the contents of the column itself—it received strong responses from several readers.

To summarize Berlinger’s argument: Game designers, publishers and players have tended to think about games only in terms of how much fun they can provide, but games should be viewed as a creative medium similar to movies, books and painting. Creators working in other media have a lot of freedom as to what they create, so why shouldn’t game designers approach their creations the same way? Game design has been hampered by the notion that games have to be fun.

As Yehuda pointed out, if someone defines games as “things that are fun,” then there’s no arguing with them about this aspect of game design. An analogous definition might be the notion that clothes are “things that are comfortable.” While everyone might desire and welcome comfortable clothes, nothing in the definition of clothing requires them to be comfortable. If you were scanning the racks at JCPenney and saw a new hairshirt design by Ralph Lauren—don’t you know that penance is hot this season?—you wouldn’t argue that because wearing a hairshirt causes discomfort, it isn’t clothing. You’d instead say something like, “Ralph Lauren must be cuckoo if he thinks I’m spending money on clothes like this.”

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W. Eric Martin: 570 Games (And Nothin’ To Play)

I met my wife of thirteen years in high school, and if you stop to think about that for a moment, it seems ridiculously far-fetched. I mean, what were the odds of me finding just the right person in a building holding 2,000 students? Isn’t it much more likely that my perfect spouse—the person who best suits my taste and personality—would be located somewhere else in the world?

If I were a teenager today, I wouldn’t be limited to the people surrounding me in high school. I would be chatting online with other teenagers that I found through MySpace or Facebook. I would belong to Internet groups and develop relationships with strangers from around the world. I would meet many more people than I ever met within the confines of one building—and there’s a good chance that none of them would have eventually become my spouse.

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W. Eric Martin: Alternate Reality

[Voice of Gisele Bündchen] Previously on Project So You Think You Can Iron America’s Next Top Game Designer Model Chef Idol Bachelor Runway:

[Shot of the design workroom]

[Claude] You know the game already includes dice, right?

[Will] Yeah, but—

[Claude] And there’s an Event Deck that also serves as a deck of dice?

[Will] [Silence] Are you serious? [Silence] I am so hosed.

[Designer solo shot]

[Sarah] It was hard for some people to get a grasp on how much has already been done in the Catan universe. Gardens, though, gardens are hot. That and farming.

[Workroom]

[Daniel] So you can attack the people who live inside the settlements and cities owned by other players, right? And here’s a whole deck of body part cards to serve as another resource.

[Vanessa] That is so sick.

[Daniel] C’mon, The Cannibals of Catan? It’s the bomb, man.

[Vanessa] That is so stupid. You are so beeping stupid I can’t believe you remember to breathe sometimes.

[Solo]

[Daniel] Wood for sheep? That’s easy. Wood for Vanessa? Aaaaaaah, not so much.

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W. Eric Martin: One of These Days, Nicolas…

For me, the summer of 2000 will forever be associated with the Binary Arts puzzle game Lunar Lockout and one man’s effort to conquer all forty of its daunting levels. That man was not me.

In 1998, my wife Linda and I hosted our first foreign exchange student, a Japanese teenager named Masatomo. Masatomo reminded me of myself as he was a loner; he didn’t want to associate with his fifteen male classmates who were scattered at other homes and apartments in southeastern Massachusetts. Instead he wanted to hang out with the two of us.

Our Japanese was non-existent, his English just a step above our Japanese, so we struggled to find activities where we could interact. Naturally games turned out to be one of those activities. We played a ton of O’no 99, a card game from the Uno family that’s akin to the recent Amigo title Fettnapf. In O’no 99, you play number cards from your hand onto a central pile, keeping a running total of the cards as you do. Special cards reverse the play order, skip your turn, subtract ten from the total, or force the next player to play twice. Bring the total over 99 and you lose a chip; lose all your chips, and the game ends, giving the victory to the player with the most chips. I managed to explain the game, then Masatomo got to practice counting in English while we played over and over again.

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W. Eric Martin: Postcards from Berlin #21: The Unexpected Columnist

German word of the month: Geil (cool—see the bottom of this column for details)

Editor’s note: The Postcard from Berlin this month bears a secret American postmark. Postcard columnist Jeff Allers was kind enough to show my wife Linda and me around Berlin for a day, so I’m returning the favor by doing postcard duty—although I’m not sure how all this will fit on a 3x5.

Even most of my travel into, out of, and around Europe has been by airplane or automobile, I still think of trains as the archetypal European mode of transportation—and after driving five hours from the Spiel game convention in Essen to Munich in mid-October, I was looking forward to riding the train to Berlin on the Tuesday after Spiel. I could sleep, eat, read, goof around, and otherwise do things that are impossible to safely do while driving a car.

The book on the table is The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall, which was recommended by a BGN reader after I expressed admiration for House of Leaves. So as not to spoil the plot for others, I’ll say only that the idea behind Raw Shark was enticing, but the execution failed for me as the last third of the book read just like a certain shark-based novel and movie from decades past with no literary extras to make it more interesting. The graphical tricks seemed largely wasted or overblown compared to what might have been used, and the promise of the book wasn’t met. I wish authors lifted ideas as freely as game designers do because I’d love to see someone else tackle the concepts in this book and reinterpret them.

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W. Eric Martin: Predatory, Irrational, or Patently Detrimental

As I noted in an accompanying news item, Mayfair Games has announced a discount cap for its line of board and card games. What’s relevant from the end user’s point of view is that retailers must now offer no more than a 20% discount on Mayfair products or else risk losing the ability to carry Mayfair titles in the future. For reference, here’s the announcement as it appeared on game industry forums:

Dear Trade Customers, Greetings from Mayfair Games! Our team wishes you all well. After all, we wouldn’t be looking forward to our 27th year of publishing fine games without your strong, enduring support. We’re writing to you to outline our retail pricing policy. Our manufacturer’s suggested retail prices ("MSRPs") reflect our firm belief in a healthy balance between “free trade” and “fair trade.” Mayfair Games embraces and supports healthy competition. We feel that in order for our market—and thus our company—to prosper now and over the long term all our partners in the distribution chain need to respect this balance. Whenever a firm threatens healthy competition among our trade customers, and thus endangers this balance, we must act in a vigorous, even-handed fashion to police the distribution and sale of our fine products. Mayfair Games doesn’t intend to specifically dictate how its customers do business… but we will act in cases of predatory, irrational, or patently detrimental trade activity.

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W. Eric Martin: Hidden Depth

I recently ran across a quote from Greg Aleknevicus, editor of The Games Journal—a fantastic (and unfortunately defunct) online gaming magazine—that struck a chord:

I’ve come to the conclusion that the vast majority of games have depths that are hidden to those who play only a few times. So much so that I think it’s unwise to assume that you’ve seen all a game has to offer after your second play, no matter how simple the game appears. [For example,] I agree with another gamer’s assessment of Coloretto—there just doesn’t seem to be much there—but experience has taught me that this is most likely due to the fact that I don’t like the game enough to seek any depth it may have.

Many gamers complain about a vast flood of games being released on the market, claiming that they can play a game only once or twice before their fellow players (or they themselves) move on to something else. While this habit is, of course, self-imposed and one that players could eliminate if they really wanted to, I understand the desire to try out new games and see what designers have created. Who am I supposed to be, and how do I interact with others? How are we moving the bits around this time? And so on.

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W. Eric Martin: Peter Olotka on Cosmic Encounter and D*ne

Fantasy Flight’s announcement of new editions of Cosmic Encounter (due out in Summer 2008), “Dune” (Winter 2008), and Borderlands (Summer 2009) made many people very happy, while simultaneously enraging others. To find out more about what gamers can expect to see next year, I turned to Peter Olotka, co-designer of all three games and founder of Future Pastimes, LLC, which runs Cosmic Encounter Online.

Asked about previous editions, Olotka says, “Avalon Hill never got its act together as far as we could see.” Even though the Eon crew—the folks who created Cosmic Encounter—offered advice to the AH development team, the Hasbro edition of CE was released with a relatively small number of alien powers, planetary systems incompatible with previous editions, and an upper limit of four players. “We begged them not to do it that way, and there was very little acceptance of the Hasbro design in the Cosmic community.”

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W. Eric Martin: “What Do You Have to Play?” Asked Tom Gamely

One aspect of life (and fiction) that appeals to me is how a single action can spur a chain of related actions that take you (or a story’s characters) into unexpected locations and fields of research. In fiction, those discoveries interest me far more than what happens to the characters, so I tend to stick with idea-based fiction from authors like Jorge Luis Borges or José Saramago over character-driven fiction.

My favorite books of the last few years, for example, are Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai—a novel that blends higher mathematics with Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai as a young genius named Ludo goes searching for his father—and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which meshes multiple narratives in a gloriously over-designed book that centers around a house that’s larger on the inside than it is on the outside. I know some people view books like these as pretentious and self-indulgent, but seeing those words in a review actually makes me more eager to read the book.

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W. Eric Martin: Everything from C to J

Today I’m taking the Scott Tepper approach to writing a column and posting a question that invites you to write far more than I’ve written. In late August 2007, Scott asked what you want to see in a game review. I’m shooting for something bigger.

I’ve been editor of Boardgame News for just over nine months, and while I’ve made a number of changes to the site, I still have a huge to-do list of possible projects and long-term goals. One topic I’m interested in getting feedback on goes back to the fundamentals of the site, namely the types of games covered.

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W. Eric Martin: Games, Games, Games, Baked Beans, and Games

Last week, I answered two questions that I’ve seen posted in a number of places, although Ryan Bretsch bears responsibility for this particular bee in my bonnet. His questions are:

1. Are there too many boardgame companies out there today?
2. Are there too many game releases coming out each year?

And my answers to the questions are no and no. No one is obligated to play every game that hits the market, and anyone who does feel compelled to do so will quickly learn the folly of this Sisyphean task. There aren’t enough hours in the day to play them all, and many of these new games will be awful—or at least not to your taste—which means you’ll actually get more enjoyment out of not playing them.

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W. Eric Martin: Too Much Is Never Enough

Occasional BGN columnist Ryan Bretsch took on the role of firestarter recently in an online mailing list about games and posed the following questions:

1. Are there too many boardgame companies out there today?
2. Are there too many game releases coming out each year?
3. Do you feel the games hobby industry can support the number of new game releases that are now appearing each year?
4. Do you feel that newly released games are labeled as “hot,” then quickly supplanted by the “next big thing”?

My short answers to these questions: No, No, No, and No.

My long answers to these questions are more nuanced but still consist of a chorus of No. Taking the first two questions, which are related yet still distinct, I find the notion that there could be too many boardgame publishers or boardgames themselves somewhat odd. “Too many for what?” is the obvious counter-question. What objections could there be to an increased number of boardgames?

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W. Eric Martin: Click, Click, Click, Click, Click, Click—Victory!

Last week I confessed a general disinterest in video and computer games, but one area where games and computing have successfully overlapped for me are online gaming websites. Over the past half-dozen years, for example, I’ve played nearly 500 games of Cartagena on YouPlay.it, 80+ games of Dvonn on LittleGolem.net, and almost 500 games of Ticket to Ride on the Days of Wonder website.

While some people complain about the loss of face-to-face interaction in online play, I view this anonymity and distance as a good thing. In the hierarchy of game players, I’m mostly a Johnny, which means that I love to look at game systems and figure out how they work. I tend to view games as puzzles, and the actions of my opponents are complicating factors that I need to keep in mind and react to while attempting to solve the puzzle.

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W. Eric Martin: Does Not Compute

For all my game-playing fervor, I’ve never been a rabid fan of video and computer games. The most recent video game system that I’ve owned also happens to be the first that I owned: an Atari 2600. (More specifically, the system was a “Sears Telegames,” which was a licensed version of the Atari system sold in Sears department stores.)

While my brother Russ and I played Atari games daily for years—logging wins and high scores, mapping the underground passages in Pitfall, finding the Easter egg in Adventure—I never advanced to newer video game systems. Around 1990, I worked in a toy store that let me borrow the Nintendo Entertainment System, but despite some good times with a Pitfall-style adventure game, I didn’t make the leap to actually buying the system. At the time alternative comics were too big a percentage of my shopping list to leave extra funds for video games.

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W. Eric Martin: Designer Profile—Kory Heath

Kory Heath’s list of published games is an eclectic one: the party game Why Did The Chicken...?, in which players create punchlines for randomly generated situations; the inductive logic game Zendo, in which players try to determine rules for constructing figures; the bluffing game Criminals (BGN first impression); and the abstract game Uptown (BGN preview).

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Heath’s gaming background is similarly spotty. “I almost don’t consider myself a boardgamer, in the past or now,” he says. “Of course, I played the standards as a kid: Monopoly, Battleship, Hungry Hungry Hippos—you know the drill.” His parents taught him various Rummy games, trick-taking games and push-your-luck dice games, while high school brought experience in chess.

“I’ve never played Risk or Axis and Allies (and probably never will). Somehow I even managed to miss D&D and Magic,” says Heath. “I did, however, play tons of computer games. One of my favorites was (and still is) M.U.L.E., a strategy game about settling a colony on a new planet. And one day I saw this game called Settlers of Catan on the shelf of a hobby store, and I thought to myself, ‘That looks like a boardgame version of M.U.L.E.!’ That’s how I discovered Eurogames.”

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W. Eric Martin: Time Management Skills…

...are something that I lack. No column this week (again!) as I typically spend all day Monday catching up on weekend news, answers to emails, and so on. In addition to all the announcements and Essen updates from yesterday, I have two more Age of Steam previews lined up for later this week. That will have to do for now!

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W. Eric Martin: An Epic Farewell

One of the strengths of American-style games is that they lend themselves to storytelling, often because they have moments during the game that are more critical or important than everything else. Eurostyle games tend to be more processional; you have an overall strategy, and you work your way towards a goal in tiny increments. Yes, random factors might force you to adapt the strategy to a shifting environment, but the environment varies in limited ways compared to the swings of fortune in an American-style game.

I tend to favor Eurogames—possibly due to a mathematical frame of mind that likes to tinker with inputs to see what changes over the course of a game—but I do play other games as well. Epic BattleLore has come out twice recently, and I’ve had a blast both times, mostly because of the extreme moments when a player’s or team’s fate is decided. (Look elsewhere for a review of Epic BattleLore; in this column, I’m diving right into the games and avoiding rules details.)

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W. Eric Martin: The Curse of Knowledge

The Spiel des Jahres 2007—Germany’s game of the year award, which translates into huge sales for the winner—was announced on Monday, June 25th, and Michael Schacht’s Zooloretto took home the prize. In hindsight, Zooloretto is the perfect candidate for the award: The rules aren’t daunting, it has an adorable theme with cuddly animals, and players can approach the game intuitively or play with a bit more brain power.

Before the nominations for SdJ 2007 were announced in late May, a number of people predicted that The Pillars of the Earth was a lock for a nomination, if not the award itself. They often noted that the rules were perhaps a bit more complicated than the typical SdJ winner, but to them the game still fell within the boundaries of a family game. They thought it was perfect for players both young and old.

They were wrong.

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W. Eric Martin: Rules For Rules

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Everyone appreciates having a good rules reader and game teacher in their group, but the first step to rules success comes from the rulebook itself. If the rulebook is well-organized and clear, then much of the teacher’s job will be done for him because he’ll be able to learn the rules easily, remember important details, and find references quickly when needed.

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W. Eric Martin: Has This Bean Done Before?

Alas, the column will be a short one this week. I’ve spent most of my game-writing time for the past week contacting companies for Essen information and preparing more game previews along the lines of the Key Harvest, Amyitis and If Wishes Were Fishes previews that have run over the past couple of weeks.

As for my game playing, it has consisted largely of daily games of Qwirkle, although I did give Hammer of the Scots a try this past week. I have no background in war games, and despite reading the rules at least four times, I had a hard time keeping all of the details in mind prior to playing: these two nobles have multiple homes, this one noble doesn’t exist for the English, Edward can winter one year in Scotland but not consecutive years, and so on. If I knew the history of the English-Scottish conflict—or had at least seen Braveheart—perhaps all these exceptions would seem normal and easy to absorb. As it was, I referred to the rulebook again and again throughout the game.

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