Matt Thrower: A Titanic Lament

Along with all the other Valley Games pre-order customers I had to wait an extended period of time to get my grubby paws on my copy of the Titan reprint. It eventually arrived last week, which marks me out as the lucky one since it seems there are a lot of people still waiting for theirs to turn up. I had no issue with damp or excessive inky smells with my copy but I left the counter sheets out for a day before I punched them in any case because, well, you never know. Next day, as I sat punching out those counters and tidying them away in the fantastic chit organiser in the bottom of the box, I was assailed by a sudden sense of sadness which, I’m pretty sure, wasn’t bought on by inhaling all that solvent but rather by a feeling that the game I held in my hands represented a number of lost things about game design, things which we might never entirely be able to recapture.

Now, don’t start thinking that this is going to be some pointless wake for all the dear departed Ameritrash games of yesteryear: many of them were awful and best left buried no matter how many nostalgic urgings we might have dig them up again. Nor is it a knee-jerk reaction against modern trends in game design because a lot of what I see going on is clever and exciting: I don’t think there’s been a better time to be involved in the gaming hobby. Rather there are certain aspects of the Titan design which made me wonder whether, if it been delivered to a publisher today without the benefit of having enduring nearly thirty years of repeat play by enthusiastic fans like myself, it would have been allowed in to print. Given that it’s been around for those thirty years I would assume that even those of you who don’t like the game (and I can see why people don’t) would allow that it must have a lot of depth and appeal beyond mere nostalgia value. That it is, in other words, a satisfying and worthwhile game for a lot of gamers and as such, if my hunch is right, we might be missing out of other just as worthwhile games because they don’t match modern design trends. And that would be a shame.

The first thing that struck me when I was examining my new purchases was how stunning the artwork was. I’m not talking about the functionality of the components here. I know some people are complaining about the silhouettes of many creatures being similar or about the board artwork being hard on the eyes and whilst I don’t agree (like they can’t read the word “Cyclops” in large-print caps over the top of the counter. Sheesh) that’s a different issue. The fantasy artwork for the creatures is just jaw dropping, inviting you to pick up those oversize chits and examine the beasties in all their glorious detail. So there’s no denying at all that it’s a great looking game overall, something that would immediately wow you if you were to pass a game in progress. What I find interesting about this is that normally, for someone to make a comment like that about a modern game, it almost invariably has to involve a ton of plastic miniatures. People seem to have been fooled into thinking that the only way to make a visually impressive game is to have it in semi 3-D and I just don’t understand this. Good artwork and clever graphic design can make the simplest games look appealing. Plastic, on the other hand, can make a game look cheap and tacky and worse can actually interfere with playability. This point can be simply made by referring to some examples. On the one hand, I consider one of the best looking games ever to be Napoleon’s Triumph which consists of a few wooden and metal pieces and a board marked out in nothing other than gray, green and blue. On the other hand look at the number of people who have replaced all the plastic in War of the Ring with wooden or cardboard tokens. These are extreme examples, sure, but they illustrate perfectly why wood and card is often better than plastic. As a long time miniatures gamer I would hazard the opinion that the sculpts used for a lot of board game miniatures are actually pretty poor, whereas in games that eschew plastic the graphic designers and artists involved are often inspired to up their game. Look at all the fantastic details of the artwork in Agricola. And, to go back to where we came in, Titan.

Given that so many people demand plastic these days, especially, it seems, the sorts of gamers most likely to buy and play Titan and I can’t help but to wonder that if someone were to showcase a design which positively required flat cardboard chits (as Titan does) whether they wouldn’t be told to go back to the drawing board and tweak the rules until some miniatures could be crammed in somewhere. There are of course a set of miniatures that Valley Games has made available for the game and they look awful, especially compared to the quality of the artwork on the monsters they’re sharing the battle board with. And this is a shame because there are a number of mechanics which you can only realistically do with cardboard or wood. Both are good for hiding information. Or for stacking multiple units into a single space. Or for ensuring that important game information is printed on a game piece for easy reference where required. All of these things are common requirements in wargames, so it’s not surprising that they’ve been flying in the face of fashion and continuing to use a lot of cardboard and wood. But designers and publishers in other genres are shutting themselves off from a whole range of mechanical possibilities by continuing to insist that games need plastic - and I do blame them, rather than the gamers who buy the product, because as Titan demonstrates they’ll still buy and rave over the production values in a game without plastic so long as the art and design is sufficiently good. So the onus has to be on the people orchestrating the design to ensure that these are up to scratch.

The other thing that saddened me as I popped out those tokens and packed them away was the response from a minority of individuals who, thanks to the reprint, have been exposed to the game for the first time and come away asking what all the fuss is about. Now I can think of a lot of reasons why people might dislike Titan: most notably its length and its excessive periods of downtime. As an aside I feel compelled to mention that it isn’t anywhere near as random as some people seem to think - it’s very much a game in which skill will usually predominate, especially when played with four or less players. But there seem to be some people out there who didn’t actively pick something about the game which they disliked but were lukewarm, playing a couple of games and wondering where the strategy was. The fact there are so many long time gamers out there who continue to be fascinated by Titan ought to have suggested that there is quite a lot to the game if you go looking, but it not everyone bothers to look.

I find this rather troubling. In the past I’ve been a vocal critic of the modern “cult of the new” that suggests it’s okay to buy a game, play it ten times and consider yourself satisfied and move on to something else. That’s one thing, but this is quite another: a level of apathy that makes people disinclined to keep pushing a game to find out what’s under the hood. The modern mind, immersed as it is in 24-7 TV and internet culture doesn’t seem to warm to things that take some time to appreciate any more. Most gamers seem to demand immediate appeal otherwise a title is ruthlessly discarded in favour of another one of the many unplayed games in the collection. Other gamers don’t look for that instant hook but nevertheless only respond to games which are particularly hard on new players, providing an incentive for further plays and improvement. Titan is neither of these things: the game appears at first to be highly random throwback to the decade that spawned it, but careful examination will start to reveal subtleties: learning when and what to attack and when and how to split your legions are the first skills that become apparent. Further plays will demonstrate the movement patterns which are key to the strategy and the terrain and “native creature” effects which unlock the tactics. I understand that people are often pushed for time when it comes to game: I am nowadays, and I can only be thankful that I was able to learn and appreciate Titan back in the days when I did have the space for it. But beyond that, there seems precious little excuse for simply picking up and discarding games without another thought unless they offer instant gratification - it’s a sad and worrying trend in modern life.

I’m probably pushing this argument too far. In reality it seems likely that were something like Titan to arise in the modern era it would find a niche somewhere - with a small publisher, perhaps or maybe even as a web-published print and play game. But these sorts of things don’t have the hype behind them that the involvement of a major player in the board gaming world can generate, and the result would probably moulder quietly in a corner unknown by anything other than a handful of devoted fans. I said earlier that there’s been no better time to be a gamer than right now - but with the demands of modern communications, modern marketing and modern culture we’ve maybe lost more than we realise, dazzled as we are by the sparkling thrills of an endless cavalcade of exciting new designs. You take the rough with the smooth, I suppose, but sometimes when I look at a new game - and I got this feeling very much from Dominion - I find myself wishing that a little more of the rough would survive and make it into print.

Comments:

< Back Home