Shannon Appelcline

The collected columns of Shannon Appelcline, from those that first appeared on Gone Gaming to his current writings every other Thursday on BGN. Here's what Shannon has to say about himself:

Shannon Appelcline is a writer, reviewer, computer programmer, and casual game designer who enjoys Eurogames, role-playing games, and any number of other entertainments. He started playing Eurogames several years ago, by way of doing research for a computer game design that never came to be, but the Eurogames turned out to be a frequent entertainment.

In Gone Gaming at Boardgame News, Shannon writes about the industry, discusses games, talks about design, and takes a closer look at specific designers. The focus is sometimes eclectic, but it's usually analytical and thoughtful.

You can also read Shannon's writing scattered across the net. Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities is his other current column, focusing on computer game design, writing, and community. He also administers the sites RPGnet and Xenagia. You can find his board game reviews at the first and columns and other discussions at both.

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Shannon Appelcline: Age of Industry vs. Brass

In most entertainment industries, we, the entertained, don’t get to see a lot of the creative process. We’re delivered a finished product and--absent rare exceptions like the monthly rereleases of the Star Wars movies--it doesn’t change. Sure we can listen to DVD tracks, read authors’ notes, and understand some of what went into the creation, but that’s all afterward.

The gaming industry is different because game products do change from one edition to another and that gives us a fairly unique view of what goes into the games creatively. Which brings me to today’s topic: the brand new Age of Industry release from Treefrog Games. It’s an iteration of the same system published a few years ago in Brass. In this article I’m going to talk about some of the things that have changed, not to offer a definitive listing (though if you want to read about some of the biggest changes, they’re here), but instead to muddle over what some of those changes have done to the game.

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Shannon Appelcline: Neat Card Tricks

Decks of cards are a common feature of many Eurogames on the market. In their most rudimentary forms, card decks do what they’re supposed to and not much more. They add a bit of randomness and variety to a game. However, decks of cards are not the same thing as dice, the other main randomizer in games. Because of their constant and arbitrary nature they can cleverly support a lot of different game systems.

So, after a recent play of a certain game that makes clever uses of its cards, I’ve decided to dedicate this week’s columns to some neat card tricks found in great Eurogames--from the mundane to the truly novel.

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Shannon Appelcline: Dominion & Thunderstone Fight!

So Dominion has its 73rd expansion out today, the small-box Alchemy release. I don’t think there’s much doubt that the game has become a phenomenon. To commemorate that release I wanted to take this week’s column to talk a bit about Thunderstone, the Dominion-like game that AEG released last year.

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Shannon Appelcline: However Improbable, Part Two: Clue-Like Games

In my first article in this series on deduction games, I talked about some of the most notable classics in the field. This week I’m following that up with a look at some of the top Clue-like games.

Generally, Clue is what the casual gamer thinks about when you say talking about a “deduction” game (or more simply a “mystery” game). Thus, it’s not a big surprise that Clue is the game that most designers have considered when figuring out what to create on their own. Following are what I think are some of the top games in the subgenre--based on quality, popularity, or both.

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Shannon Appelcline: More Tao of Board Gaming

Koans I-III can be found in The Tao of Board Gaming (December, 2009).

IV. The New Release that Went Up in Smoke

There came a time when the interwebs began to fill with stories of a new gaming release. It was to be created by That Game Designer who everyone looks up to and it would be a return to The Classics of his Golden Age. When it was previewed in the city of Essen, there were those who, without irony, called it “The Next Puerto Rico” and when it was released in the city of Nurnberg, there were some who prophesied that it would achieve the premier spot on a Certain Website within the month.

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Shannon Appelcline: However Improbable, Part One: A Look at Classic Deduction Games

Next week, Days of Wonder is releasing their newest deduction game, Mystery Express. Not only did I enjoy it enough to give it a glowing review, but it also got me thinking on the whole theme of deduction games. Thus, I’ve decided to write about the genre a bit, starting in this week’s article with a look at the three games which founded the genre, and which continue to define it, 50+ years later.

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Shannon Appelcline: The Good & The Bad of Tobago

My articles often arise from my gaming experience. Usually, ideas arise from individual games, but once I’ve got a topic I then try and generalize it, so I can talk about a commonality among many games. But every once in a while, some thing stands out originally enough that I really only have one game to talk about, and that’s the case this week.

So, though it may look like I’m picking on Tobago this week, that’s in part because it’s doing some neat and new stuff--even if I don’t like the final form that it took.

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Shannon Appelcline: Small Press Interviews: Tasty Minstrel Games

Tasty Minstrel Games made its big premiere this month with the release of Homesteaders and Terra Prime. This article continues my Small Press Interviews series by talking with Tasty Minstrel Games’ founder, Michael Mindes.

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Shannon Appelcline: Turning Reiner Knizia’s Money into an iPhone Game

I spent the last several months of 2009 working on turning Reiner Knizia’s Money into a fully functional iPhone game. Some 8,000 lines of code later, Money is now available from Apple’s iPhone store. If you’d like to support the continued development of good Eurogames for the iPhone platform, please consider picking up a copy; we’re offering it for a sale price of $1.99 through Sunday (that’s January 24, 2010, if you’re viewing this article from the future), at which time it’ll pick up to our normal price of $2.99.

With that crass commercialism out of the way, I’m going to spend the rest of this article talking about three of the particular problems that I faced adapting a Eurogame for the iPhone environment, focusing on depicting and playing the game. If you’d like an inside look at this sort of thing, read on.

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Shannon Appelcline: 2009 in Review: The Board Games

As 2010 dawns upon us, the time has come to look back upon 2009 and see what trends and major events affected our world. In recent years, I’ve turned this question toward the gaming world, in articles such as 2008 in Review: The Board Games, The Year in Review: 2006, and The Year in Review: 2005.

Today, I’m going to continue that with a look at 2009. In short, it’s a story of domination, repetition, cooperation, bifurcation, and maturation.

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Shannon Appelcline: The Tao of Board Gaming

I. The Student of Catan

There was once a young student named Bonnelyn who, to every Board Game Night, brought but two games. The first was The Settlers of Catan and the second was Puerto Rico. Whenever she was asked what games she would like to play, she would softly smile and say, “I have brought The Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, and they are both games that I enjoy.” Sometimes others would join her in these pursuits, but sometimes they did not. Yet, if another game won out, Bonnelyn would play that alternative with a good heart as well.

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Shannon Appelcline: Intrigue by the Seaside

There’s no doubt that Dominion is one of the great success stories of 2008-2009 in the boardgaming world. I’ve played it more than anything since my gateway games of Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Memoir ‘44. Though I adore the ability to just pull out any 10 decks of cards and have it work, I’ve also enjoyed the sets of carefully constructed cards found in each Dominion rulebook. Thus, I was disappointed when I started playing Seaside and learned that there were no preconstructed decks that combined Seaside with previous expansion Intrigue.

What follows are three preconstructed decks with do use cards from both sets--the last of which also throws in a few cards from the base set. Each of these sets has been playtested to make sure that they were fun (though I only modified the third set, which took three tries to get right). I’ve included some strategy notes which you may or may not want to read before you try out each deck.

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Shannon Appelcline: Some Thanks for Alea Games

At the start of 2009, I decided to play through the entire corpus of Alea Games. Too many of them sit forlornly on the shelves nowadays, not as cool as the new kids like Agricola (aka Puerto Rico Killer), Dominion (aka San Juan Killer), and Twilight Struggle (aka Mammoth Hunters Killer). So I opted to spend some times with old friends and remember why they too were hoopy froods in their time.

Last Thursday I finished the play of my 22nd and final Alea game for the year, In the Year of the Dragon, and this Tuesday I finished my write-ups of the first twenty-one Alea games on my personal blog (with Alea Iacta Est still waiting for a few more plays after an American release ... someday ... before I discuss it). Today I’d like to share with you some lessons learned, some high points, and some low points.

And I also want to say thanks to Alea developer Stefan Brück, who’s added some really fine games to our joint collections.

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Shannon Appelcline: With Strange Aeons Even Dice May Die

Once more Halloween is upon us. It’s a time of year that always gets me thinking about ghosts, goblins, and other things that go bump in the night. However, as I wrote last year in The Problem with Horror Games, the horror genre hasn’t transferred very well to board games.

Despite that, there’s one horror subgenre where publishers--mostly American publishers--have been very active in for many years. That’s the subgenre of Cthulhu games (or Lovecraft Games or Mythos Games, as you prefer). This Halloween I’m going to spotlight them by taking a creepy tour through about twenty-five years’ worth of Cthulhoid ludographics.

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Shannon Appelcline: Don’t Think About it Too Much

We all know that one player’s analysis paralysis can sometimes wreck everyone’s game. Many of us have also considered the fact that in some games going slower can be a really competitive edge, because it allows you to compute more possibilities and thus more readily determine which moves are superior. In my mind, that’s another strike for AP, because it not only bores everyone else, but it also gives you an unfair advantage.

But none of that really covers when I find AP the most annoying, and that’s in a don’t-think-about-it-too-much game.

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Shannon Appelcline: Designer Spotlight: Martin Wallace, Part 2: War & Taxes

A few months ago I wrote an article about Martin Wallace highlighting some of the many unique design elements that he tends to bring to his games. However in that listing, I left out two general categories of design which many of his games fall into: warfare games and economic games. That’s what I’m going to be covering this week, talking about about some of the general design elements that he uses in both categories and also about some of the ways he makes them unique.

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Shannon Appelcline: A Game Designer in Every Box

In the starry-eyed days of 1995 an increasingly notable company called Wizards of the Coast put out an innovative roleplaying game called Everway. It was widely lauded for its originality and the way that it moved away from the dice-based quantitative mechanics of the rest of the genre. One of its most interesting mechanics was the way that it resolved actions, using a Tarot-like “Fortune deck”. When an action was attempted, the gamemaster would determine the result by assessing how the meaning of a card and its orientation related to the situation.

Despite its critical acclaim, Everway was a commercial failure. Almost 15 years later you can still find very cheap copies of the boxed game. It was probably a surprising failure for the folks at Wizards, who had loved the game when they’d tried it in-house. But, years later, the employees have an explanation for the failure. “The problem,” they said, “is that we couldn’t include designer Jonathan Tweet in every box.” Not only had his originality and ability to think on his feet driven the fun of the in-house games, but he’d also set the tone of how the game should be played.

I think there’s an important lesson in here for board game designers too, one that struck me last week as I tried yet again to find the fun in Fifth Avenue.

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Shannon Appelcline: 62 Game Plays, in Brief

In July I had the good fortune to play a total of 62 games, running from 11 games Dominion to a whole slew of games that I played just once (as is often the case). This was helped along by both some extra gaming time and some very short games. Nonetheless, it’s the most board games that I’ve played in a month since December, 2004. So I’m going to take this week’s column to tell you a bit about my 62 game plays and what I thought of them.

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Shannon Appelcline: Automobile Mechanics

One of the things that makes Martin Wallace’s games truly notable is the thoughtful and analytical strategy that you can bring to their play. There’s enough depth to them that I’ve been able to write two mathy strategy articles about past offerings: Brass Tacks (covering Brass) and Flooded Dreams (covering After the Flood).

This week I’m offering another Wallace strategy article, this time covering his newest release, Automobile (following up on my review of the same).

In many ways I think that Automobile returns to Wallace’s Warfrog roots, sharing more with his earlier and deeper designs like Brass and Age of Steam than his 1-2 hour Treefrog games. The result is that there’s a lot of economical information that you can really lay out and analyze. In this article I’m going to offer some strategy for Automobile by looking into a lot of the tactical and statistical questions that you might ask during play. There are a large number of somewhat unknowable variables entering each question, but I’ve done my best to offer some broad answers and some ways to think about them in specific situations.

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Shannon Appelcline: Designer Spotlight: Martin Wallace, Part 1: Interesting Mechanics

Last year I took the opportunity to play through as much of the Martin Wallace catalog of games as I could. Whereas I’d often found Wallace games a bit long and a bit heavy before, playing them more purposefully and more seriously gave me a chance to better appreciate them. It also gave me a chance to better appreciate the unique design elements that Martin Wallace includes in his game, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in today’s column.

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Shannon Appelcline: An Ode to Games

One of my brothers, Jason, got married on Saturday. My wife and I selected a wedding present straight from our hearts, rather than from a registry: two German board games. Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne, to be precise. We thought that both Jason and his new wife would enjoy them, as they both enjoy games, though they more frequently play Monopoly than something from the German family.

But, it wasn’t just about fun. We gave them games for another reason: because of their particular ability to draw people together.

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Shannon Appelcline: Unaussprechliche Spiele, Part Two

In my last column, I talked about five German games that I’d played recently, to offer insight on the sort of releases that might not typically make it to this side of the pond. This week, I’m going to look at German games one more time, but this time I’m going to focus on the four top German-language games that I’ve recently played, including some of the SdJ nominees and recommendations. Unlike my previous set of games, most of these are scheduled for American appearances.

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Shannon Appelcline: Unaussprechliche Spiele, Part One

Over the past several weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to play several brand-new German games from Essen and Nurnberg, thanks to a Swiss game reviewer who’s been visiting us at Endgame. I’m going to spend a few articles highlighting some of the games I’ve played--including some of the recent SdJ nominees & recommendations, both to offer some insight into games that might be coming to American shores in the coming year and to take a look at some of the games which just aren’t making it to this side of the Atlantic at all.

Be warned, most or all of these mini-reviews are based on a single play, so consider them first looks and nothing more.

And over the fold, you’ll see why I call these games ‘Unaussprechliche Spiele’, as most of them don’t have English names yet, and thus for this American, the names are all but unspeakable.

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Shannon Appelcline: Five Unusual Auctions

The Eurogame field is full of auctions. Reiner Knizia has put out sufficient auction games to fill any lesser designers’ career, starting way back with early games High Society, Medici, and Modern Art. And you could surely find auctions games from many other designers, from Fresh Fish to Industria, from Fist of Dragonstones to Tinners’ Trail.

However what really intrigue me are those games which pretend not to be auctions, but really are, and those which pretend to be auctions, but sort of aren’t. I’d like to highlight five of them this week.

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Shannon Appelcline: Interview with Mike Fitzgerald

Mike Fitzgerald’s game design career got started with the publication of Wyvern, an early CCG. However, he’s best known for the Mystery Rummy card games. After a 5-year hiatus the newest game, Bonnie and Clyde, was published by Rio Grande Games last month. The following interview helps to commemorate this new release; it covers the whole Mystery Rummy series, from Jack the Ripper, up to the present.

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