Tom Rosen: Survival Games

From trains to farming to a cathedral in Paris, it doesn’t matter what a game’s setting might be if I have the opportunity to fight the game system itself, in addition to my fellow players. While a game isn’t traditionally thought of as an opponent, a handful of titles let you struggle against the gears of the game just as much, if not more, than you struggle against plain ol’ human opponents.

These games don’t appeal to everyone because they tend to feel negative and oppressive, yet I find myself drawn to this loosely defined genre more and more. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what is so enjoyable about this type of game, but I think it’s that you feel a sense of accomplishment once the game ends – even if you lose to your fellow players – because you’ve beaten the game system just by managing to survive.

Before I go any further, perhaps it would be best to give examples of games from this genre since it’s harder to grasp in the abstract. When I think of games in which a significant part of the activity involves combatting the game system itself, the six titles that immediately come to mind – with the first three being the best examples – are:

• Age of Steam
• Antiquity
• In the Year of the Dragon
• La Citta
• Agricola
• Notre Dame

All of these games confront you with famine, bankruptcy, and plague, subjects that hardly come to mind as ideal for a fun board game. Prejudice against such distressing motifs – not in a negative context, but rather in the sense of pre-judging – turns many people away from this genre of games, but for me, that fight for survival is what makes them so compelling. I say motifs rather than themes because as I mentioned in the opening paragraph, a Survival Game can take on any number of themes. The one constant throughout these titles, though, is suffering. (I considered dubbing the genre “Punishing Games,” but that term serves to reinforce the pain and suffering of barely holding on, whereas “Survival Games” emphasizes the positive aspect of surviving the bruising and battering that you’ll inevitably take.)

Survival Games can be less about the end-point or goal and more about the journey; think of them as The Odyssey of board gaming. In most Eurogames, nothing bad can happen to you, which makes the game simply a matter of being the most efficient or least picked-on player while accumulating victory points or money. Survival Games lack that feeling of coming up short, of losing due to lagging behind other players, due to the accomplishment of staving off starvation or narrowly avoiding bankruptcy.

Age of Steam is a classic Survival Game because its economic system is brutal and unforgiving. You begin the game with $10, but unlike the vast majority of games in which your starting capital magically appears, in Age of Steam that money comes from you having issued two shares (each worth $5) in a railroad company. That doesn’t sound so bad – until you learn that you have to pay your shareholders $1 per turn for every single share that you’ve issued. Furthermore, there’s no way you’ll survive this epitome of a Survival Game without issuing additional shares, yet each share saddles you with an additional $1 payment at the end of every subsequent turn. Oh, not to mention that you lose three victory points for every share that you issue. That said, the victory points are secondary to simply surviving and avoiding bankruptcy – if you manage to make a single dollar in your first game, you should feel very proud indeed.

I’ve played Age of Steam 29 times to date, and escaping from your starting debt and building a profitable railroad that isn’t in jeopardy of going bankrupt is still a huge challenge. Not only do you have to pay for every share you’ve issued, but you also have to pay based on how good your locomotive engine is. And once you’ve finished paying everything you have (and sometimes owing even more), the game kicks you when you’re down with a phase called Income Reduction. The meager income that you’ve managed to slowly build up is viciously cut down, turn after turn after turn, to represent wear and tear on your railroad track and cars. You need to keep building and expanding (if you can afford it) to even stay where you are. It feels like treading water in a giant whirlpool that is trying its best to suck you under.

I suppose I can see why some people have difficulty enjoying the game, especially those with large student loan debt, who I’ve found can have trouble appreciating a game all about suffering through debt and trying to escape the clutches of a debt that attempts to consume you and thwart all your efforts – but this is exactly why I love Age of Steam. Unlike games in which players simply try to earn the most money and money is never in short supply, even good games like Chinatown, For Sale, and Medici, Age of Steam does a wonderful job of making you appreciate the moment when you finally manage to go from being in the red to being in the black.

Antiquity takes Age of Steam to the next level in many ways because you go from struggling against bankruptcy to struggling against both famine and pollution. I won’t go into much detail on Antiquity because I’ve discussed the game at length in my ”Surviving in 11th Century Italy” article, but I will say that it belongs firmly in the genre of Survival Games (or Punishing Games if you’re a glass-half-empty kind of person) because Antiquity is another game with back-to-back phases at the end of every round that kick you when you’re down. After you construct buildings and collect resources every turn, you’re faced with the Famine phase followed by the Pollution phase. In the former, you’re forced to fill your cramped city with a number of graves equal to the difference between the ever-increasing famine level and the amount of food that you’ve managed to stockpile; in the latter, you must add three pollution markers to the map in the fields surrounding your city (or six pollution markers if you’ve managed to build a second city). These pollution markers block the spaces on which you place them, making them unavailable for collecting precious resources.

Ending each turn with these two phases not only makes the game extremely difficult, but can serve to trap you in a downward spiral of building graves and placing pollution, which in turn makes it difficult to prevent graves and pollution in the future. Soon you’ll find yourself drowning in a sea of pollution with a city overflowing with graves, and thus with no room to harvest resources or construct useful buildings. It’s certainly not a joyful game, but then again, neither was living through the Middle Ages, I imagine. While playing Antiquity is not a joyous or raucous occasion by any means, it’s an exceedingly challenging and mentally stimulating game that will leave you thinking about it and pondering your choices long after the game is packed up and back on the shelf.

While Age of Steam pits you only against imminent bankruptcy and Antiquity makes you suffer through just famine and pollution, In the Year of the Dragon takes it up a notch by making players contend with drought, Mongol invasion, imperial tribute, and contagion, plus the possibility of decay after each of those fun challenges.

In the Year of the Dragon is a game in which players reenact one year in ancient China around 1,000 A.D., which was not a particularly pleasant time, I gather. The game takes twelve turns, each representing one month in the, say it with me, year of the dragon. Each of these twelve turns consists of players first having the opportunity to take one action (e.g., expand their palace, collect rice, collect money) and recruit one loyal subject (which will make certain future actions more powerful), but then the game makes every player face one of the many possible disasters (e.g., drought, contagion), which will take your money, kill your loyal subjects, take your resources, and possibly destroy parts of your palace. You’re lucky if the game leaves you with anything in the end.

I used to think this game was about cycling your resources and loyal subjects, having resigned myself to be losing them constantly to myriad disasters, but after playing a few times, I encountered a game in which one of my opponents avoided killing off any of his loyal subjects throughout the entire game , pulling out a win in the end. It was quite a feat and one that makes me wonder what my fellow players and I are doing wrong. I wonder whether I’ll see that feat replicated as it seems nigh on impossible to withstand the persistent onslaught of catastrophes that the game throws at you. The parade of horrors makes this a downer of a game that I hesitate to introduce to many people. Unlike most Eurogames, In the Year of the Dragon isn’t about seeing who can become the most prosperous, but rather who can be the least devastated, which is the trait I cherish most in Survival Games: the sense of accomplishment that comes from simply making it to the end, regardless of how you scored relative to human opponents. Simply taming the game system is enough to satisfy me.

For me, Age of Steam, Antiquity, and In the Year of the Dragon are the top three Survival Games, although I’m open to suggestions for other entries in this genre. That said, a few other games loosely fit the Survival criteria, and while they may not be quite as punishing, they do pit players against famine and plague.

First, La Citta is probably number four on this list as it’s another game in which players are constantly scrounging for food and barely hanging on to avoid the clutches of famine. When teaching La Citta to new players, I always tell them that if they can’t decide which action to take, they should default to building another farm because additional food is always good.

Your goal in La Citta is to grow your population since each person in your cities at the end of the game is worth one victory point (the primary source of VPs), but you need to feed your population each turn. Don’t have enough food? Then you lose people down to the level that you can feed, in addition to losing an action on the next turn or 5 VPs if you’re in the final turn. That 5 VP penalty is solely responsible for me losing one game of La Citta.

Another wrinkle in La Citta is that right before you need to feed people, you steal people from your opponents’ adjacent cities (based on the otherwise relatively useless buildings in your cities, such as statutes, universities, and hospitals). Since you don’t know exactly how many people you’re going to steal, you don’t know exactly how much food you’re going to need. This sometimes results in the amusing situation in which Player A is unhappy because his people (and the 1 VP per person) were stolen by People B – but Player B is also unhappy because the people stolen from Player A (which is an involuntary occurrence) made his population larger than his food supplies. It’s a rare thing for one player’s action in a board game to make both players miserable.

Agricola is yet another game in which the constant pressure to feed all of your people makes it a candidate for the Survival Games genre. Not only do you have to gather sufficient food for your family, but the intervals that you have in which to do so get progressively shorter over the course of the game, from four turns to three to two before crashing to one at game’s end. The game continuously tightens the screws on the players, or rather it eases players into a warm vat of water that slowly heats up, but is boiling before you know it. If you fail to feed your family, then you are forced to take a Begging card for every food that you are short, which translates into negative three points at the end of the game. Unlike in La Citta, you don’t lose people for being short on food, but both games make players contend with the ever-present threat of famine.

Notre Dame, like In the Year of the Dragon, was designed by Stefan Feld, and that won’t surprise players who have played both games. While In the Year of the Dragon cranks the pain up to eleven, Notre Dame allows players to briefly enjoy a beautiful Parisian setting before letting loose hordes of plague-bearing rats in this otherwise family friendly game.

While players may want to focus on building the cathedral, they are forced to beat back a persistent onslaught of rats. Each turn the rat marker moves forward, and if you let them get out of control, you’ll lose both people and points. You’ll probably have to resign yourself to suffering that penalty at least a few times, and while the rats don’t threaten your very survival, they do make this game an uncomfortable experience for those who can’t cope with the constant pressure and tension that comes with fighting the plague. As such, perhaps Notre Dame is a good candidate for the gateway game of the Survival Games genre. You can use Notre Dame to test the waters with your fellow gamers to see whether they enjoy being challenged by the game system itself or prefer traditional Eurogames in which you compete only with human opponents. If the idea of being overwhelmed by the plague doesn’t appeal them, then you should avoid the even more painful motifs and punishing game play of the full-fledged Survival Games. And if Notre Dame does go over well – then start bringing the pain!

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in a somewhat different form on Rosen’s NYC Gamer blog. Reprinted with permission.

© 2008 Tom Rosen

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Comments:

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Something that boosts Notre Dame, though, is that you have three forms of abuse - the rats are just the thematic one.  If you run out of money, you start missing 1/3 of your actions.  If you run out of influence cubes, you have to start mutilating your personal game engine in order to do each subsequent action until you remedy the situation. Tom, great list of games!  Clearly I’m a masochist like you.  Heh heh. Posted by Nathan Morse on Aug 8, 2008 at 09:01 AM | #

If you don’t mind a survival game that replaces nail-biting tension and a sense of accomplishment with hair-pulling frustration and a sense of being despised by the powers which govern our universe, try Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean.  For a game that doesn’t feature dice, it has the most enormous swings of high-impact luck that I’ve ever seen. Obviously, I don’t like the game, but I think there is some justification for categorizing it as a survival game. Good list.  Antiquity and the two Feld entries are three of my all time favorite games.  Agricola will probably join them when I try it out this Sunday. Posted by Eric Clark on Aug 8, 2008 at 10:14 AM | #

Many cooperative games seem like they would fall into the survival category, since the punishing game system is the primary opponent. Lord of the Rings and Pandemic both came to mind as I was reading your article. Thanks for a very interesting article. Posted by David Lund on Aug 8, 2008 at 11:20 AM | #

There is a game called S.P.I.V.S. that is not at all Euro, but is my high-water mark of the sort of game where the game just freaking hates you. You move and kidnap alien creatures off planets to sell them to intergalactic zoos. Zoos pay you money, which is the only nice thing that will ever happen to you. The rest of the rules and game elements are designed to wreak random havoc. Even the alien creatures usually try to wreck your ship. It is the kind of game where an alien can pull an asteroid into your ship, causing you to run out of fuel and be sucked into a black hole to spend 6 or 7 turns lost in the VOID space between worlds. There is also the occasional tour through the digestive system of a giant space amoeba. Posted by Frank Branham on Aug 8, 2008 at 12:00 PM | #

Nice article, Tom.  I hope to read more from you on this site in the future! Posted by Jeff Allers on Aug 8, 2008 at 05:23 PM | #

Good list of games there.  I actually use In the Year of the Dragon sometimes with relative beginners.  I describe it as all these bad things that happen and you just try to survive.  The strong theme helps to introduce the game. I wonder if one of the aspects of these games you like is the “tight"ness of the game itself.  A bad judge of an action here or there has long reaching consequences and it is difficult to recover.  A non-survival game that might be similar would be Princes of Florence. Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Aug 8, 2008 at 05:34 PM | #

Nice article, Tom.  Another second tier “survival” game is Through the Ages.  Beginning players find they’re fighting the system more than their opponents, and the challenge of keeping all of the game’s elements in balance is a considerable one.  Then, once you get your feet wet, you have to take on the Full game, where you lose two precious population counters each age.  Brutal! Posted by Larry Levy on Aug 8, 2008 at 07:27 PM | #

Come to think of it, Civilization and Advanced Civilization could be categorized as survival games as well.  The Civil War card hurts a lot more than anything your opponents can do to you. Posted by Eric Clark on Aug 8, 2008 at 07:37 PM | #

Thanks for your comments everyone.  I really appreciate all of your feedback.  Thanks also for the suggestions of additional games that fit into this genre.  I certainly didn’t mean to provide a comprehensive list of the genre, but rather just to sketch the outlines of it with a few examples, and am happy to see others identify additional Survival Games.  It’s helpful to increase the body of games since I think, regardless of how different these games are in terms of gameplay and mechanics and theme, people who like some of them would do well to try out others from the genre since they may nonetheless be predisposed to enjoy them, although it’s certainly not an absolute.  Thanks again! Posted by Tom Rosen on Aug 16, 2008 at 09:36 PM | #