Guild of Dungeoneering (Gambrinous, 2015)

Played on PC

Ghost Stories (Antoine Bauza, 2008)

Forbidden Island (Matt Leacock, 2010)

Co-operative board games, played as solo, 2- and 3-player set ups

Guild of Dungeoneering (2015) is an indie, turn-based dungeon crawler with genre-familiar heroes such as the Ranger or the Barbarian and customary monsters such as Cave Trolls and Frenzied Goblins. The player has to build up her guild, recruit heroes and explore the surrounding caves and jungles to loot as much gold as possible. However, during dungeon crawls, the player can lay down her own path and pick her own fights; she is a Game Master as well as the dungeoneer.

Ghost Stories (2008) is a co-operative board game where a group of Taoists are trying to protect a village from various ghosts and reincarnations of the ancient evil spirit of Wu-Feng. Each turn, new monster(s) are introduced to the board, some of these pose immediate threat, while others just take up space. Players can decide to spend their turn asking for a favour – such as resources or resurrection – from one of the villagers on a village tile, or fight a ghost by rolling three dice. Once all the reincarnations of Wu-Feng are defeated the game is won, however, if players let just three village tiles become haunted or they run out of ghost cards, the game is over.

Forbidden Island (2008) is a co-operative board game in which a ragtag team of adventurers land on a sinking island in order to loot its hidden treasures. Players collect and submit cards to claim artifacts and they also have to keep the island itself from disappearing by flipping back flooded tiles. If the ‘water rises’ twice on a tile, that space becomes unavailable permanently. The goal is to collect all four treasures and escape the island before it is all reclaimed by the ocean.

When we encounter game worlds that are dynamically altered by our participation we experience the satisfying power of agency (Murray, 1997: 128). While agency and interactivity are argued to be definitive elements of contemporary game design, the gameplay price of player choice is also frequently contemplated (Johnson, 2013 and Farrell, 2014). By encouraging gamers to manage bigger inventories, choose from complex options and routes of progress and by offering increasingly more opportunities to customize, games can become longer, more complicated and repetitive (Johnson, 2013). Guild of Dungeoneering (2015) arguably uses this design trade-off to its quirky advantage by taking away certain powers from the players that they would expect to have in a dungeon crawler (direct control over the dungeoneer, for example) and handing over more unusual abilities such as the construction of the dungeon itself from a set of randomly dealt cards. Similarly, as fighting various monsters is a crucial element of the gameplay, the selection and placement of enemies also depend on the player. This can create a sense of agency even in defeat; we only have ourselves to blame if we fail to beat an enemy that we picked.

Nevertheless, as Murray notes, designers of digital games are like choreographers who provide a ‘repertoire of possible steps and rhythms’ to players who ‘improvise a particular dance among the many, many possible dances the author has enabled’ (Murray, 1997: 153). The rules that are set by the creator of the game cannot be broken, the sense of agency over the space created in Guild of Dungeoneering (2015) is arguably lost as we can only use the randomly appearing room cards dealt to us, we cannot cheat by peeking through a deck. In contrast, in board games like Forbidden Island (2010) and Ghost Stories (2008) players are instructed by the rule book to set up their game space by randomly laying down the tiles provided. However, the non-digital nature of these games grants the power of freewill to players who can create ‘house rules’ in order to bend or break the original instructions. They can decide how to lay down the island tiles or set up their village to be exorcised, and therefore gain advantage over the games’ mechanics or potentially increase their difficulty in search for a challenge. In this sense, ‘board games ship with the most powerful mod tools imaginable’ (Smith, 2015); the players’ creativity.

There is a varying importance to the layout in such games; in Forbidden Island (2010) the tiles can determine how large the area that players must protect is. In Ghost Stories (2008) the favour players can ask for on the middle village tile can influence how much they are able to get out of their turns. The middle tile is the quickest route from the board’s one side to the other and therefore often visited by players, not having to completely waste a turn by just moving a space can be priceless in the game. Additionally, by setting up a planned board (organized either by logic or perhaps aesthetics) players can immerse themselves in a game world that they created; they even get to play out an adventure narrative within it to some extent. And this narrative of life and death is where a balance seems to be reinstated in these games’ mechanics; as more and more ghastly monsters randomly appear next to important village tiles, players can feel like the game – and therefore its creator – is truly out to get them. The monsters of Ghost Stories (2008) cannot always be defeated by strategically planning; the calculation of available and needed resources always precedes the fights yet each dice roll is a game of odds and luck. Murray notes that such luck-based games are ‘captivating because we are modelling our basic helplessness in the universe, our dependence on unpredictable factors, and also our sense of hopefulness’ (Murray, 1997: 142-143). We are willing to give up the sense of agency over our fate in order to experience the thrill of a fight where we are only slightly outnumbered.

Koster argues that ‘fun is primarily about practising and learning, not about exercising mastery’ (Koster, 2005: 96), the process of getting better at games can cause more enjoyment than gameplay after we figured it all out. In this sense, cracking Ghost Stories (2008) is a matter of getting better at the prioritization of tasks, recognizing the different threat levels ghosts pose and knowing exactly what needs to be done with each of them. However, the gameplay elements that add randomity such as the dice rolls and the large deck of ghosts ensure that ‘exercising mastery’ is never entirely possible. Similarly, while ‘you can hack through most of [Guild of Dungeoneering (2015)] unlocking just three class types’ (Donlan, 2015) picking the next best monster to fight in order to level up is always a gamble; run into a particularly furious Owl Bear and yet another name is added to your growing cemetery of fallen heroes.

Whether it is invested in players by a creator or they are inadvertently empowered with it by the non-virtual reality of board game play, having agency over the construction of the game world we decide to escape to can be priceless. We are intrigued and tempted to discover the Crimson Forest, the Pavilion of Heavenly Winds and the Mysterious Fountain and it is a thrilling concept to control where these places will appear in our ‘magic circle’ of play. Nevertheless, as the loss of choice can also enhance our gaming experience, luck remains a powerful tool of game design. We can experience the thrills of danger with it and learn to expect the unexpected; the water will rise, ghosts remain relentless and we always only lack one lucky hit to beat the Spider Drill. We can go down our own path and pick our own fights, but ultimately, we are one bad card, one bad dice roll away from defeat. Accepting this struggle and still deciding to practice, learn and fight, is arguably what these games teach us.

Bibliography:

Bauza, A. (2008) Ghost Stories [Board game], Belgium: Repos Productions.

Donlan, C. (2015) ‘Guild of Dungeoneering: An RPG Where You Play as the Difficulty Curve’ on Eurogamer.net [online], available at: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-22-guild-of-dungeoneering-an-rpg-where-you-play-as-the-difficulty-curve [last accessed: 27/10/2015]

Farrell, C. (2014) ‘Player Agency in Board Games and RPGs’ on Illuminating Games [online], available at: https://illuminatinggames.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/player-agency-in-boardgames-and-rpgs/ [last accessed: 27/10/2015]

Gambrinous (2015) Guild of Dungeoneering [digital] PC, Windows, Ireland: Versus Evil.

Johnson, S. (2013) ‘When Choice is Bad: Finding the Sweet Spot for Player Agency’ on Gamasutra [online], available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/197181/When_choice_is_bad_finding_the_sweet_spot_for_player_agency.php [last accessed: 27/10/2015]

Koster, R. (2005) A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Scottsdale, Arizona: Paraglyph Press.

Leacock, M. (2010) Forbidden Island [Board game], US: Gamewright Games.

Murray, J. (1997) ‘Agency’ in J. Murray (ed.) Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 126-153.

Smith, Q. (2015) ‘Don’t Worry, Board Games: Video Games Can’t Steal What Makes You Great’ on The Guardian [online], available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/12/dont-worry-board-games-video-games-cant-steal-what-makes-you-great [last accessed: 27/10/2015]

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