Game Night Recap
Posted by Rob Herman at May 7th, 2007
I would like to propose a rule that if the rules for your game include a morale check of any kind, you may not bill it as “light.”
I got to play two games Monday night: Seismic and Battleground.
Every review of Seismic I’ve seen has referenced Carcassone, and with good reason: it’s very similar. The mechanic where earthquakes can remove certain tiles is cute and it’s not without strategy, but it feels too much the same to invest much energy or thought in. If you like Carcassone and are planning to buy a tile-laying game, give Seismic a try if you can to make sure you don’t like it better. Or consider it if you kinda want to buy Carcassone but your friend already owns a copy.
I also tried out Battleground: Fantasy Warfare. This is a wargame, no two ways about it, that uses collectible cards instead of minis to represent the units. It’s billed as “light” and I guess it is… relative to a regular wargame. To my Euro-attuned gamer sensibilities though, it seemed heavy and tedious. I refer you to the tagline of this article: when a unit takes enough damage, a morale check is involved. Ouch. The rulebook is not particularly well organized and is printed on a tiny little rulebook the size of a playing card–I thought CCG manufacturers learned not to do that ten years ago. Fans of wargames might feel entirely differently, thought, and want to take a look. Although the portability of the game is a big plus, I’m still not sure that there’s room in wargamers’ hearts for both this game and Clix-type games.
I agree about Battleground. It’s not a bad idea — cards are cheap, portable, and for most practical purposes can do the same things that figures do. And the fact that you can track the units’ status by writing on the card with dry-erase marker is a stroke of genius.
But I lost all interest when I tried to read the rulebook. (48 pages, people. 48 pages!! I’m much more into non-Euro games than Rob, but I still had no patience for it.) The target audience for this should be people who want a lighter wargame; The kind of wargamer who is willing to learn all those rules is the kind who is going to want to stick with real figurines.
Yeah, dry-erase on the cards is really neat.
Trying to understand the rulebook was miserable. I don’t have a problem reading through large chunks or rules–Goa, for instance, has easily more rules text than Battleground–but flipping around that tiny little book trying to figure out what’s going on was a drag. It’s not written as a reference and it’s not written as a guide for new players, which makes me wonder what good it is at all.
Huh. Must be really bad, because I can personally attest that even compared to most gamers, Rob loves rules.
Let me put it this way: I used to play HeroClix.
I quit that game, but that’s more because the community is bad, there is too much of collector’s mentality that goes with it, and it’s too expensive. The game and the rules themselves were fine for me. Most people think that it’s too complex, though.
So unless you think that HeroClix is too rules-light, you probably don’t want to play Battleground.
(Admittedly, both Rob and I could have been mislead by the ugly, poorly-organized rules. Maybe if they were nicely formatted, we would have gotten into it. But it still says a lot if both of us got the impression that it wasn’t worthwhile.)