A Nuanced Parable Of The Steam/Epic Debate

Uncategorized

Imagine you’re a sex toy manufacturer.

Imagine you make some of the best vibrators the world has ever seen. You’re one of the best at it in the whole world. Your marital aids have won major awards. Your best work has routinely sold out faster than you can make them. Jenna Jameson has enthusiastically endorsed your work and your company – and uploaded personal demonstrations to Pornhub. Your lead dildo designer has been referred to as the ‘Michaelangelo of Personal Massagers’.

And your next creation is gonna be amazing. It’s got 6 speeds. It’s got several attachments that look like they came straight out of a Hentai. It’s dishwasher safe. It’s got wifi so you can pleasure your girlfriend from 500 miles away. It automatically pulses in time with whatever’s playing on Spotify. It transforms into a robot, and its got a built-in cappacino machine for when you’re done.

Everybody is eagerly awaiting your newest vibrator. Your new toy was the most discussed topic at the latest DildoCon. Sex toy aficionados are buzzing about your joy buzzer all over Reddit. You’ve been making magic wands for a long time, and everyone expects great things.

Now then, for years and years, you’ve sold your selfie sticks primarily at Dildo-Mart. And they give you the same deal you’ve gotten for years: we’ll give you $39 dollars for every orgasmatron you manage to sell. This deal has been good for a long time. It’s tempting.

But a new upstart has come along. Vibrators R’ Us wants to sell your new lady sticks too, and they’ll give you $53 per vibrator they sell – even though they’ll still sell it at exactly the same price. That’s… a lot.

But wait, says Dildo-Mart. We’re the biggest sex toy shop in the world. Everyone in America is within 10 minutes of one of our fine, upstanding family stores. Also, if you sell a whole BUNCH of dildos, we’ll improve your take to $45 per dildo.

And Vibrators R’Us responds, well, $53 is still substantially more than $45. Also, while we’re not quite as close to everywhere as Dildo-Mart, everyone in America is within 15 minutes of one of our stores.

Dildo-Mart says ‘but wait! We have forums! We have trading cards of dildos! We have ratings on our web site!’

And Vibrators R’ Us responds “We’re going to add all that, but how relevant is that, really, once you’ve turned the vibrator on?” Then they pause and say, “$53. Dollars. Per. Vibrator.”

If you were a generic, crappy sex toy manufacturer, you might be crazy to take that deal. After all, most people go to the store that’s closest to them. But you’re not. You know that people have been waiting years for this sex toy. They’re planning on taking time off work the day it comes out.

So why on earth would you sell your new toy at Dildo-Mart? If you are fairly sure that everyone is going to actively seek out your amazing new creation, you know that
they’ll drive the extra five minutes to get it. Making it available at DM is costing you $8-13 bucks per vibratogachi sold. And almost everyone will choose to buy it there, because it’s just easier to do so.

Sure, Vibrators R’ Us may offer you something in exchange for an Exclusivity deal just to be sure you don’t switch if offered a better job but at those numbers, you don’t NEED it. Your customers are still paying exactly the same price. It’s availability to pretty much exactly the same set of customers. You get somewhere between 17-36% more money for every vibrator you make. In exchange, your customers are minorly inconvenienced. After which, they get an amazing new crotch rocket.

The disconnect between developers and gamers around the Steam/Epic store split centers upon a basic mental disconnect: gamers don’t realize that Epic isn’t competing for their business. Epic is competing for Gearbox’ business.

Game developers and publishers work with partners all the time. It may be contract art for the game, or purchasing rights to a graphics engine, or help marketing the game, managing communities, performing user testing, or even printing CDs. Most of these choices are invisible to the player – so much so that if, say, we do a crappy job printing CDs, you’ll likely blame us rather than whoever we hired to do it for us. And that’s fine.

Before recently, there was really no choice for developers in terms of partners to sell and distribute your newly released PC game: you could either roll your own solution (as Blizzard did) or use Steam. Yeah, yeah, there are options like GOG and Humble Bundle, but these retailers specialize with selling older games (which is part of the reason Steam is willing to work with them).

Epic is trying to build a new store, one which offers developers a new option for selling their game that is more attractive to developers. But they have a big problem: steam is so much the ‘normal’ way to game on your PC that getting players to switch to the Epic Games store is really, really hard. Especially since you can’t really use consumer price to compete.

Gamers want Epic to compete with Steam, but Epic can’t until they build a customer base, and the only way to do that, really, is exclusive content. And the only way to do THAT is to make developers a deal they can’t refuse. Gamers looking at Epic ‘trying to build a monopoly’ have it backwards, actually. They are trying to break what is effectively an entrenched monopoly, and to do that they need to combat a decade plus of habit and inertia.

If Epic succeeds, then Steam will forced to get better. If that happens, everyone wins. Game developers will have better choices of where to sell their games. Gamers will have better tools for launching games and discovering new product. Price wars AFTER the initial launch window become likely.

But this only works if customers have compelling reasons to open a second launcher.

The Epic/Steam War is Here And Game Devs are All For It

Big Corps Are Evil, Business Models, Industry Musings, Uncategorized

It is possible to both think that Steam has been a remarkable and amazing part of the gaming ecosphere, and still be excited that they’re no longer getting a free ride.
I’m not kidding.  Steam is great.  It’s the first thing I install on any new computer I acquire. It’s intuitive at what it does, full featured, and run by a generally responsible organization.  It probably single-handedly saved PC gaming, definitely has been the engine that drives indie gaming for the last decade, and will be a pillar of the industry for years to come.

That being said, I’m super excited by the Epic Store as a developer, and I hope they get more exclusives.  I summarized my theories in this thread – this blogpost expands that thread.

Let’s back up.  This week, it was announced that Gearbox and their publisher would release the PC version of Borderlands 3 on the Epic Store as a six month exclusive.  This prompted the easily excited outrage monkey portion of the video games audience to lose their shit — I mean, really stupid shit.  So let’s break this down a bit.

The economics of the games industry are dumb.  AAA games have cost $60 bucks for a long time.  It’s a weird purgatory – the price hasn’t increased with inflation, largely because the beancounters think that if you go higher than $60, a game is more expensive that something that Grandma will want to buy little Timmy for Christmas.   On the flip side, and I swear this is true, gamers are so used to $60 price tags for games that they immediately suspect that any game with a lower price tag is automatically lower quality.  So AAA games have stuck at $60 as the default price for a while.

You ever wonder, when you spend $60 bucks for a AAA game, where it goes?  Here’s one breakdown.  If you buy the game at Best Buy, less than half of that ($27) goes to the developer/publisher. If the developer and the publisher aren’t the same entity, the developer gets a small portion of that – 20% maybe.  So call it $5 bucks, and the developer doesn’t see a cent until the development costs of the game are recouped.

Eagle eye observers will note that a lot of these costs just don’t APPLY to Steam.  Steam games (and all box PC games) don’t pay platform royalties.  They don’t have to print CDs.  The costs of handling unsold inventory are unnecessary.   So while Steam demands a slightly higher percentage (30%) than Best Buy (25%), the lack of other costs meant that Steam was a better deal for developers.  Put another way, Activision makes about $27 selling a Playstation Call of Duty at GameStop, and about $42 selling a PC CoD to you on Steam.  That’s… pretty awesome!  Developers vastly preferred it if you bought their games on Steam, because we like paying our mortgages. Yay Steam!

In late 2018, Steam improved that number dramatically for AAA developers (because screw indies, amirite?) so that once you sell more than $10M, their cut drops to 25%.  Sell more than $50M, their cut drops to 20%. Suddenly a megahit like Call of Duty is earning $48 per copy (once they sell a few hundred thousand copies).  Outstanding!  And you also get Steam features like Cloud Saving.

But then Epic upset the apple cart.

The Epic Store deal is really good. Epic is undercutting this deal significantly, taking only 12% of a cut. Suddenly, devs/publishers are splitting nearly $53 per box.  You don’t have to meet any kind of minimum threshold to get this.  This is really good.  REALLY good.  Yay Epic!

But it’s more than that.  Sales on the Epic Store also wave the licensing cost of the Unreal engine if that’s your engine of choice.  I believe that Borderlands 3 is using the Unreal engine. If that’s the case, that’s another 5% in their pocket that they don’t lose if you buy on steam.  Put another way, Take 2/Gearbox puts $52.80 cents in their pocket for every copy they sell on the Epic Store, and only $39-$45 for every copy you buy on Steam. 

According to Steamspy, Borderlands 2 sold 5-10 million copies on Steam.  Now then, not all of those copies were actually sold on Steam and certainly some of those copies were sold at discount prices during Steam Sales and the like.  Still let’s do some back of the envelope math here and pretend that B3 ‘fails’ by only reaching the lowest number there (5 million)

  • If 5M people bought the game on Steam, Gearbox/2K would enjoy a royalty rate of 30-20%, and they’d have to pay a 5% engine licensing fee to Epic anyway.  They’d get $222 Million, or $44.4 bucks per copy
  • If 5M people bought the game on Epic, no engine licensing fees, and a 12% cut, gets them $264 Million, or $52.8 bucks per copy.  

So in the worst case scenario, Borderlands stands to make $42 Million more dollars for 2k/Gearbox.  That’s a LOT of enchiladas.  I don’t know if Epic paid Gearbox/2K for the right to exclusively launch on the Epic store but they didn’t really NEED to – If Epic launched on both, they’d lose about 9 bucks per copy of Borderlands 3 sold on Steam.

The very nature of the Steam Revenue split encourages exclusives. Look at the revenue split for AAA again.  You only get the GOOD revenue split if you hit $50M in revenue.  My back of the napkin math means that you need to sell 834K copies before you start getting that number — on all copies AFTER that.  What this means is that, if you’re on Steam, every copy you sell on Epic Games or Discord or whatever is a copy that’s not pushing you to that threshold.  

The guys who came up with it probably thought they were encouraging developers to choose between one platform or the other.  They were probably right.  They’re probably just surprised as to which direction developers (especially those around the Metro-Borderlands size) are going to decide is the logical direction to go.

Exclusives are how platforms are sold. People keep saying ‘Epic should compete on its own merits, and not have to depend on exclusive content’ but, um, exclusive content has always sold new platforms – and that’s definitely what this is.  It’s a cornerstone of console gaming, for example, with great exclusives like God of War, Horizon Dawn and Spiderman being a cornerstone of why Playstation is kicking XBox’s butt this generation.  Console developers do this by buying studios entirely usually. But yeah, paying for the privilege of exclusive content is NORMAL.

And unlike exclusives for PC, there is a $400 price tag on the console if you want to play Horizon on top of the cost of the disc.

It’s not just games.  Exclusive content is the cornerstone of the business model of HBO and Netflix for example.  And let’s face it, Steam has thousands of de facto exclusive games, because that’s the only place those games can be played. 

In the absence of exclusive content, players will typically choose the platform that has the most inertia.  And to repeat, every copy of Borderlands 3 that is sold on Steam costs Gearbox/2K about 9 dollars.

Gamers should want more of the money they DO spend to go to game developers and publishers.  Games are expensive to make, and they get more expensive every year, as salaries rise, technical complexity increases and the costs of making content go up.  And yet, the box price of games has stayed constant. 

If more of this box price goes to the people who design, art, engineer and market these games, it reduces the need for us to have to resort to sell sparkle ponies and loot boxes or to increase the costs of the games in order to cover those increased costs. 

 People who think that the Epic Store means significantly fewer sales than Steam are probably deluding themselves.  First off, Borderlands is a huge, well-respected and beloved IP.  People will seek it out.  Selling your small, funky indie title on the Epic Storefront may not be a great idea because the store doesn’t yet have a critical mass – it’s not a place people go to shop for games yet.  But if you have a big, well-anticipated game like Borderlands (Borderlands 2 is still in the top 10 for daily plays on Steam), players will go and seek it out.  Being a seperate launcher didn’t hurt Starcraft, or Destiny, or the Sims.  Players will find Borderlands 3, wherever it lives.

And where it lives is pretty good.  Epic has the ability to drop an ad for Borderlands 3 in front of 250 Million Fortnite players with over 78 Million Monthly Active Users.  This is actually greater than Steam’s 67 MAU, although Steam still has a higher daily concurrency and everyone who opens steam is coming to shop, not play Fortnite.  Still, the people who think Devs selling on the Epic store think it will have a much smaller reach are probably in for a disappointment.

But still, the proof is in the pudding. And we have one test case so far, where Epic’s first exclusive (Metro Exodus) did 2.5 better on the Epic store than its predecessor did on Steam. And to some extent, you have to wonder if the relative sparseness of the Epic Store is helping.  Epic’s store is currently a highly curated experience of high quality titles.  In Steam, Metro was competing against dozens of similar titles, some years old.

Yes, this is capitalism — and the audiences are what’s being sold.  A lot of gamers are saying things like Epic is trying to be ‘monopolistic’ or that this isn’t capitalistic.  That’s because they’re mistaken about which customers are what are being fought over here.  

This is an EXTREMELY capitalistic, EXTREMELY competitive dance happening. But the customers being courted are developers/publishers like Gearbox/2K and 4A Games. What is being sold is the playerbases. YOU’RE the product.

Steam’s sales pitch is a 30%-20% revenue split, with the strongest PC customer base in the world and a robust, full featured back end and well-integrated payment systems that work with almost any payment system on planet earth.

Epic’s sales pitch is a 12% revenue split, with an audience that is as large (but unproven spenders), a free engine license and a much more curated store. And did I mention just a 12% revenue split? Did I mention that Borderlands is looking at somewhere around 40 MILLION DOLLARS in additional revenue that goes to game creators and publishers instead of the store?

Valve could end this quickly if they REALLY wanted to.  Their install base is hugely attractive.  If their revenue split were suddenly match Epic’s – or even get close – choosing Epic would be a very hard choice.  But doing so would mean losing a HUGE amount of revenue.  Valve is, I believe, taking a ‘wait and see’ approach to see if Epic congeals into a serious threat to their bottom line.

Anyway, if Red Dead Redemption also goes the Epic route, things are going to get heated very quickly.

I don’t want Epic to ‘win’ this war.  That would be just as bad as Steam keeping a monopoly on the marketplace.  I don’t want any one store to have a monopoly everything.  I want competition.  I want these guys competing for games to publish.  I want these guys to compete for customer eyeballs. 

Competition is GOOD. I’m happy that we may end up in a situation where there are two stores competing to make lives easier for game devs. I’m happy that Steam will be forced to clean up it’s act, and that Epic is hungry to offer innovations. And I’m disappointed that gamers are pissed off about it, and that some observers are milking this outrage for clicks and views.

Politics in Nerd Media Part II: Representation Matters

Games and Politics, Social Justice Stuff

So what we’ve talked about so far is Representational Politics, which is basically the cornerstone of the War on Diversity or the Scourge of Political Correctness.  Of the avenues of political expression in games that are possible, this is the only one that has really changed or increased, as more game developers pursue more diverse models.  The fact that games are clearly evolving on this front is what prompts the Outrage Junkies to claim that, for example, having a woman in a warzone is shoving politics ‘in your face’.

I’d be lying if I said the motives of game makers were purely about inclusion and social justice. This may drive some individual game makers, but the big corps are all about making money.  The bet is that, for example, making the main Jedi in the new trilogy a woman will add more female fans, and is unlikely to cost many core fans.  In most cases, this bet is correct.

One undercurrent that may be lost on gamers is the importance of emerging marketplaces.  Ever wonder why so many action movies (Transformers, Pacific Rim, Avengers 2) nowadays seem to take a detour into Asia?  That’s because Asia is a dominant movie market nowadays, and the Chinese like seeing Shanghai in film just as much as Americans like to watch the Hollywood sign get incinerated by aliens.  This representation means that the film just RESONATES with these audiences more, and that resonance turns into greater fervor and bigger sales.

And that resonance is what the Outrage Junkies don’t understand.  If you are a straight white male, nearly all American geek culture has that level of resonance to you.  You may not know what it’s like for people who represent you to be rare.  A movie like Black Panther, where your kind is the outsider, is the exception and not the rule.  You don’t know what it’s like to cling to even imperfect representation because you crave validation of your identity. Examples of this abound on the Internet, but my favorite still remains this writeup of an amputee describing the sheer joy that was her witnessing Furiosa kick ass in Fury Road.

That sense of validation is what all this has to do with politics.  When you create a world where minorities are equal in power, where women kick ass, where gender fluid options are represented as no big deal – you create a vision of the world that maximizes the odds that any single individual will feel empowered by your game.

You also create a vision of the world that may be very different than the one that exists today.  And that’s a political statement.

My favorite example is still Far Cry 3.  In this game, the only women were your nagging girlfriend, the exotic sex priestess and…. well, that’s about it.  Oh, the guys you crept up to kill would often talk about the whores that gave them the clap.  All these things add up to a very firm idea of what role women have in this society.  Which is gritty and hardcore – and also somewhat alienating to roughly 50% of the human race.

Far Cry 4 improved on this somewhat, most notably by adding women to the revolutionary groups who fought by your side when you retook outposts.  Far Cry 5 improved it farther by having random women enemies in the NPC enemies you fought.  This is very different than ‘one of the main characters is female’. It made Far Cry’s Montana a world where a woman who kicks ass isn’t an exception, but part of the core rules of how this world works.

Does this mean that game makers can’t or shouldn’t make games where women are rare, where blacks are all slaves, or where gay people don’t exist?  It’s a free country, and free speech means you should be able to make whatever game you want to make.  But game creators need to be aware that how they represent various minorities in their game world SAYS SOMETHING.  Do you want your game to say ‘this game is not for you’?

Politics in Nerd Media Part I: The ‘Politics’ of People Who Don’t Look Like You

Game Design, Gamergate, Games and Politics, Geek Culture, Social Justice Stuff

So yesterday, I tweeted a throwaway tweet.  It… got some attention.  Let’s break this down.

For a long time, there has been a contingent of people demanding that we ‘get politics out of games’.  This was a cornerstone of GamerGate, of course, but these diseased outrage junkies have attacked creators in almost every genre of popular culture you can think of.  Right now, the pathetic manbabies that populate the ranks of Comicsgate gets the most attention, but they’ve also attacked movie directors and studios, television creators, and in gameing, communities around Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering and Board Games in general have had to deal with this simpering fuckwaditude.

The outrage junkies are peddling falsehoods, of course.  Politics have been inherent in all of these media since their early inception.  The first megahit movie was basically a Klan recruitment video.  The first issue of Captain America had him punching Hitler in the face, and his best runs have been about the line between patriotism and nationalism.  Radio’s finest moment may have been when the Superman radio serial humiliated the Klan.  I could go on.

But then again, the same people who rant about ‘politics infecting my media’ aren’t mad about V for Vendetta being an ode to anarchy.  They somehow manage to love both the Winter Soldier and the Dark Knight despite the fact that the two movies give pretty much opposing views to the concept of citizen surveillance.  They have no problem with the fact that most realistic shooters have a political message being ‘the only solution here is to kill brown people’, or the fact that winning a game of many flavors of Civ often requires you to embrace ecological responsibility.

What bothers them – the thing that gets them riled up – are putting a woman in the battlefield in World War 2.  Having the two leads of the new Star Wars films not be white.  Making Thor a woman.  Giving Iceman a gay kiss.  Making Heimdall black.  Having a female Doctor Who.

They’ll criticize these as decisions driven by ‘politics’.  They aren’t, really – in most cases, they are decisions driven by a desire of media creators to leverage diversity to reinvent their brands and expand their markets.  But the results ARE political, and by attacking these as bad politics, the outrage junkies are making it clear which politics they prefer – one that leads to a world where straight, white males are the only significant movers and shakers.

Gee, what political movement does THAT sound like?

#1: Magic: the Gathering

Board and Paper Gaming

Designers: Richard Garfield, Mark Rosewater, Many Others

In Magic, you are a mighty mage (called a ‘planeswalker’) who is locked in battle with another mage. You place land, activate (‘tap’) that land to gain mana, and use that mana to summon an army of creatures, or cast powerful spells in an attempt to defeat your opponent. If you do 20 points of damage to him or her, you win.

Magic:the Gathering is an easy number one game for me. It was already a brilliant, if rough, game when it was released in 1993, and since then has been constantly tuned and refined, and is now a finely honed machine. Each color has strong, unique mechanics. Multiple play styles are strongly encouraged. They release a new set of cards roughly every three months, which continue to evolve and reinvent each color, and to some extent, the game itself. Which is to say, the decks you are playing now – based on their delightful recent release, Ixalan, which is based on vampire conquistadors invading a lost world of dinosaurs and aztec-inspired mermen – will bear little relation to the decks you want a year from now.

It’s worth noting to would-be designers that Mark Rosewater’s Making Magic is probably game design’s longest running and best active game design blog.

The down side to Magic is, of course the price tag. If you want to play competitively, it’s going to cost you a pretty penny to have a top end deck. That price tag will only go up if you decide to play older formats such as Legacy that allow use of the full back catalog of cards that time has otherwise forgot. However, less spendy players can have quite a bit of fun with just some duel decks at their kitchen table, or build a decent collection just doing drafts.

Key Mechanic: The Stack. Magic has had so many good mechanics over the years that I literally could list a dozen I love (note to Mark Rosewater, ‘Evolve’ really needs to make a comeback). However, if I could choose one, I’d have to choose the one that makes Magic cast-and-respond work at all, which is the stack. The gist of it is that spells cast at instant-speed are resolved in last-in, first-out order.

The classic example is that if you cast a Lightning Strike, dealing 3 damage to my 1/1 creature (the second number is his toughness), I can cast my Giant Strength on that creature, giving him +3/+3 in response. These would resolve in reverse order – my Giant Growth lands, followed by the lightning strike, which would mean my 4/4 creature only takes 3 points of damage – enough to survive! However, if those spells were reversed, his lightning bolt would kill my creature before my giant growth had a chance to take effect.

It seems complex, but is actually shockingly simple and elegant, and is the cornerstone of reactive play in Magic: the Gathering, which makes it a highly interactive experience. And it’s an example of the great design thinking that has made Magic: the Gathering my #1 Game Of All Time, Or At Least For Right Now.

#2: Clank!

Board and Paper Gaming

Designer: Paul Dennen

My easy winner for best new-to-me game of the year, this game first hit the table in late 2017 and instantly became a mainstay of the group. Clank! is a basic deckbuilder but with a board game attached. You are a thief trying to creep into a dungeon, grab more treasure than everyone else and try to get out. The cards you play determine how far you move, what you can fight, and how much dragon attention you draw (see below).

Clank’s only flaw is that the game can effectively be short-circuited by a player grabbing the closest treasure and just heading out. Other than that, it’s a silly but deep experience that generates a lot of excitement around the table, especially as the game ends. I’m very excited to try the recent expansion pack (Clank! Sunken Adventures), and the followup (Clank! in! Space!)

Interesting Mechanic: Clank (the mechanic). When players play cards, some of them may have ‘clank’ as an attribute. If so, you end up putting your health cubes aside. Other events may cause the dragon to attack. When this happens, you put all of those cubes in a bag (with any cubes from previous attack events), and draw out a number based on how angry the dragon is. If your cube is drawn, you take a point of damage. Take too many, and you die.

The ‘Clank’ mechanic adds a real push-your-luck factor to the game, which adds real excitement and variance to the experience, especially near the end of the game. I’ve now had multiple games where everyone manages to escape the dungeon, and a couple games where literally everyone died, once with 3 people dying one room from the exit.

Other Favorite Thing: Mister Whiskers. You’ll know why when you see him.

 

Image result for clank a deck building adventure

(Photo Credit: Here)

 

 

 

#3: Pandemic Legacy: Season 1

Board and Paper Gaming

Designers: Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock

The players are all a crack response team, responding to a worldwide epidemic. Based on the original Pandemic ruleset, Pandemic Legacy is a legacy game, meaning that your failures leave a lasting mark in the world. There is one scenario per month of the year, and by the time December rolls around, it’s very likely whole continents are smoking rubble as a testament to your failure.

Here’s how awesome Pandemic Legacy is:  It is not uncommon for players, at the end of a season, to frame the game board.

Pandemic Legacy also has serious narrative moments in the game. At key events in the game, players add new rules to the game, and open new boxes of entirely new characters, disease vectors and other game components. By the end, you’re playing an entirely different game.

Interesting Mechanic: Destroy This Card. When some guys say ‘destroy a card’ they mean ‘throw it into the discard pile’ or some other namby pamby bullshit. In Pandemic Legacy, you actually pick up the card and rip it in half. The first one of these happens in month one of Pandemic Legacy, and it immediately communicates to players the permanence of their decisions.

The original Pandemic is a classic, but I’d played it so many times that I felt I was pretty much done with the game. Pandemic: Legacy takes the classic game formula and completely revitalizes it. I can’t wait to try Season 2.

Image result for pandemic legacy season 1 red

(Photo Credit: Cool Stuff Inc)

#4: Trajan

Board and Paper Gaming

Designer: Stefan Feld

A brilliant worker placement game, and arguably Stefan Feld’s best work. The Dice Tower guys rag on Trajan for being just a standard worker placement point salad experience with a Mancala tacked on – and they aren’t entirely wrong. However, the Mancala is central to the game experience, and brilliantly executed.

The game’s not perfect. It’s not a very attractive game, and the trade action is kind of clunky and hard to describe. It’s also got limited interaction with other players. Still, trying to plan 2 or 3 turns ahead is very difficult, and breaks your brain in very interesting ways. Trajan is a game I’ll constantly push to the table if given a chance.

Key Mechanic: The Mancala-based action selection. Scholars estimate that the Mancala is a game that has existed at least 1300 years, and a variant of it is the centerpiece of Trajan’s worker placement engine. Each player has a six bowls in front of them in a circle, which correspond with six actions the players can take. On his turn, the player takes all the beads in a single bowl, and puts them into consecutive bowls. When he places the last bead, the bowl that bead goes in dictates which action he takes (military, merchant, trade, etc). Beads are different colors as well — getting certain colors into certain bowls can trigger secondary actions or benefits – edges which are necessary to succeed.

The mancala is an absolutely delightful gameplay element.  That being said, it can really befuddle players if they try to plan too many turns in advance. Which is frequently hilarious. If you like games that break your brain in interesting ways, this is a great one.

Image result for trajan board game

(Photo Credit: Metagames)

#5: Terraforming Mars

Board and Paper Gaming

Designer: Jacob Fryxelius

You lead a corporation that stands on the precipice of colonizing Mars, probably for the express purpose of strip mining it aggressively. However, to do so, you’ll need to earn resources and money to engage in various tactics that make the planet more livable, which includes tactics such as developing predators that eat your opponent’s pets, and frequently throwing a wide variety of asteroids at the planet’s surface. You know, for fun!

The core mechanic of the game is to purchase cards, and then spend resources to put them in your tableau in front of you, which generally makes you more efficient and helps you to heat the planet, provide it oxygen, and colonize it. As you play cards, you’ll try to maximize synergies, which means it very much is what many consider an engine-building game.

Interesting Mechanic: Starter Corporations.  It seems like a minor thing, but I love the way they handle corporations for new players. In most games, you ask new players to choose a role, class or whatever before they understand the game. This creates an early bit of choice paralysis for those players, and a sense of dread they aren’t playing the game correctly because they miss the trigger or using powers they have. Terraforming Mars gets around this by creating very simple Starting Corporations that players can choose for their first game. This corporation gives them a mass of money and a wad of early cards, but has no ongoing benefits to track beyond this. While these corporations are nowhere near as powerful or useful as the other Corporations, they eliminate the early problems for learning players, so those players can instead focus on what’s in their hand, and learning the game in general.

Terraforming Mars is really one of my favorite games right now, and one of the real pleasant surprises of the last year. It does tend to get a little long if you play with the expert cards that come in the base box, but in general, no one seems to mind the longer game if it’s not their first. Highly recommended.

Image result for terraforming mars board game

(Photo Credit: Geek & Sundry)

#6: Chaos in the Old World

Board and Paper Gaming

Designer: Eric M. Lang

There are many territorial control games, but this is the best one where you will regularly scream “Blood for the Blood God!”

Chaos in the Old World is a wargame that involves the four gods laying waste to an Old Earth where, to be clear, it very obviously sucks to be a human. On your path to conquest, you will populate the realm, go to war with your other gods, and kill just oodles of human flotsam that manages to wander in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Interesting Mechanic: High Assymetry. The interesting thing is that the four gods have entirely different mechanics, which are driven by their action decks. Khorne favors the direct approach of just killing everything, for example, whereas Nurgle seeks to infect the world with his plague, Tzeentch seeks to unlock hidden mystic arts, and Slaanesh seeks to help the world get its freak on. Not only are the actions each god can do strongly different, but the objectives they are trying to complete each turn is very different as well, and each is pursuing a very strongly different avenue of victory points.

Chaos in the Old World is a fantastic game – easily my favorite ‘wargame’. It’s pretty quick to teach, but can take a couple games for players to really master it (the assymetric nature of the Gods means its hard to understand what your opponents can and want to do until their second game). The game’s biggest flaw is that it pretty harshly requires 4 – the assymetric sides stumble a bit when one of the Gods no longer has to deal with certain mechanics meant specifically to counter it.

Also, the Horned Rat expansion makes the game even better. FIrst off, it makes the game play 5 pretty well, and it does a balance pass on some of the gods power cards. The new god that is added is just a crazy, crazy sea of rats that just add to the titular chaos.

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(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)