The revenge of analog, p.12
The Revenge of Analog, page 12
Tassie manages a staff of half a dozen gurus, visits gaming conventions to source new games, and creates regular videos, blogs, reviews, and podcasts for Snakes & Lattes’ website. But his most important role is the curator of the café’s games library, its core asset, which is constantly being edited. One day, I joined Tassie (in a shirt printed with vintage Cadillacs) and Todd Campbell, another guru, for a test play of new games. The upside of the boom in the board game market is that there is a constant influx of new titles for Snakes & Lattes to feature in the café and sell at its retail store and online. But with thousands of new games published a year, there is also a huge variance in quality, and everything that gets featured at the café must be play tested by Tassie and the gurus. Tassie took several boxes to a table and set them down.
The first one, Say Cheese!—a selfie-themed matching card game from Taiwan—was quickly discarded for its strange art, including what Tassie deemed a “weird insistence on bunny rabbits” and borderline racist depictions of minorities. Next up was Red 7, a simple-looking card game of numbers and colors that turned out to be more complicated than it should have. Before they had even finished unpacking What the Food?!—a food-fight card game—Tassie and Campbell were putting it back in the box without even checking the rules. It had way too many small, easily lost pieces for a game with a fun, easy-sounding premise. “I’m a curator,” Tassie said. “I’m there to make sure stuff on the wall is there for a reason: good games that should be getting played.” The last game was a small one called Samurai Spirit, where seven different samurai warriors with magic powers defend a village against ghosts. It is what’s known as a cooperative game, where players work together, rather than against one another, to achieve a common goal.
Good games are difficult to create, and Tassie primarily credits the renewed interest in board games to a shift in game design. Previously, games were split into two camps: “Ameritrash versus Eurogames,” Tassie said with a smirk. Historically American games tended to be simpler in their play, and yet they would go on for far too long, with stretches of inaction for most players and no definite conclusion. When was the last time you actually finished a full game of Monopoly? Exactly. European games were heavier on the strategy, but they were so rule intensive you could hardly play without contacting your lawyer. Also they were dry, both in content and design, especially next to the great, poppy graphics and characters of American games.
“Over the past five to ten years, there emerged a real hybridization between the continents,” Tassie said. The result is a new breed of designer games that look American in their production values, but play with a European sensibility. These games are strategic, often cooperative, and inventive. They take less time to get started and have definitive conclusions, with a victor emerging in an hour or less. Many in the industry say that we are living in a golden age of game design, and most credit the emergence of this to the success of Settlers of Catan, a game invented by a German dental technician named Klaus Teuber.
Originally released in Germany in 1995, Settlers of Catan has gone on to sell more than 23 million sets, including various editions in over thirty-five languages. The game tasks players with settling the island of Catan, the topography of which changes with each game. Players gather resources and sell or trade them to finance settlements and roads, until someone achieves victory. It stands out because the board is always different, the rules are clear, and the game is played in under an hour. Yet the capacity for deploying strategy, by building alliances or using emotions to foster deception, is limitless.
Settlers of Catan was the first big European crossover tabletop hit in America. It initially gained a foothold in colleges and the technology industry (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly a huge fan), but as its cult following turned mainstream, it woke the nation up to this new concept of play. “The rise of Eurogames parallels the rise of digital games, but Eurogames are insistently analog,” Adrienne Raphel wrote in the New Yorker, in a profile of Teuber. “They can be as complex as video games, but, because there’s no fixed narrative, groups of people play together over and over.” Wired magazine and the Wall Street Journal hailed it as the successor to Risk and Monopoly.
Klaus Teuber’s son Guido, who helped his father create Settlers of Catan and runs the US division of the company from Oakland, California, says the game’s success initially surprised his family. “On the face of it, it was boring,” he said, “but there was something beyond that. When you explain the rules, people yawn, but once you do your first play, there’s a spark. We didn’t realize it had the potential to go beyond the core gamers. Even today, when I explain the game, people yawn. But once they start, it triggers something.” This certainly mirrored my first Settlers of Catan experience, after I bought a copy at Snakes & Lattes to play with my wife and our two friends. It seemed as if we were reading rules and staring at cardboard pieces for half an hour, until our friend Vanessa, who had played it before, urged us to start. Once we did, a fierce colonialist landgrab ensued, with cutthroat construction, merciless trading, and deception galore. “Wow,” my wife said, when she suddenly claimed victory, “that was awesome.”
There are digital versions of Settlers of Catan, but they have not proved popular in nearly the same way as the original, cardboard game. A lot of that comes down to the fundamental role of tabletop games as an excuse for human interactions. “When people want to have the analog experience, they really want the analog experience,” Guido Teuber told me. “Yes, there’s skill, there’s luck, but also the ability to communicate. . . . If you use emotional expressions, you can be successful at the game.” This cuts across lines of gender, class, and culture. Although Catan is played around the world, in extroverted cultures (Brazil, Italy, Israel) and introverted ones (Germany, Japan, England), Teuber says the game creates a level playing field, which gives permission for open people to be more guarded, and soft-spoken players to get aggressive. To win at Catan requires strategy, but also a high degree of emotional intelligence and instinct. That is the key to its success in an entertainment market still dominated by digital games. “Settlers of Catan is about negotiation and organic, woolen concepts; bluffing, lying, deception, etc.,” said Paul Dean, a former professional video game critic who cofounded the popular tabletop gaming blog Shut Up and Sit Down. “A computer can’t do that well. A computer can do chess well.”
Arguably, Catan didn’t even start the tabletop comeback. Ticket to Ride, a railway-building strategy game produced by Days of Wonder, a company founded by two successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, preceded Catan’s American success by several years. Today, there are lots of new titles in this category, from the cooperative medical crisis game Pandemic to games that are based on movies and TV shows, such as The Walking Dead and X-Files. Not all these new games require heavy bouts of strategy. They also include fun party games; for example, Kwizniac and Hey, That’s My Fish!
Perhaps the most significant factor behind the tabletop game boom is the way that digital tools opened up tabletop game design from a closed industry to one brimming with new entrepreneurs. First came the online community Board Game Geek, created in 2000, which provided a forum for tabletop lovers to discover new games, share ideas and advice on design and commercialization, and organize in-person gatherings. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter expanded on this with fan pages, news about games, and game review videos. The best-known voice in the industry belongs to Wil Wheaton, the actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and whose hilarious YouTube board game review show, Tabletop, can clock over a million views per episode. The show is so popular that game industry insiders refer to the sharp spike in sales a game receives after it gets featured on the show as the “Tabletop effect.”
Other digital tools include low-cost, open-source game design software and templates, 3-D printers (it’s a lot easier to print a small dragon than carve one by hand), and print-on-demand services, such as DriveThruCards, which lets designers upload a card-based game, printing off each order as it comes in. By far the most disruptive and powerful technological tool behind the revenge of tabletop games has been Kickstarter. Since the crowdfunding service began in 2009, it has quickly become the de facto launchpad for tens of thousands of board and card games, large and small. At any given time there are roughly two hundred new tabletop game projects raising money on Kickstarter, and roughly half reach their fund-raising goal. Tabletop games are one of the most popular projects on Kickstarter, in terms of both dollars raised and the success of fund-raising campaigns. Kickstarter does not regularly break down its statistics for the games category (which includes both video and tabletop games), but in 2013 the company told the New York Times that tabletop game projects raised $52.1 million that year, compared to $45.3 million for video games.
Kickstarter has done more to fuel the creation of games than anyone since Milton Bradley. Almost every single designer I spoke with for this book had launched games on Kickstarter. There are certainly runaway successes, such as the silly card game Exploding Kittens, which raised over $8 million in a matter of days, but most projects raise a few thousand dollars to pay for a game’s production. Some games start out small on Kickstarter, and eventually grow huge. One of the first to do this was Cards Against Humanity.
Cards Against Humanity is a game that asks players to complete a sentence, such as “This season, Tim Allen must overcome his fear of ________ to save Christmas.” with choices that include “Anal fissures like you wouldn’t believe,” “Ribs so good they transcend race and class,” “The shambling corpse of Larry King,” and “The Jews.” The goal is to complete the sentence with the most offensive card, theoretically gaining points. But no one really keeps score when playing Cards Against Humanity, especially because the players tend to be drunk. There are no winners to the game—just the gradual erosion of polite society, wearing down, as one of the game’s answers puts it, like “the tiny calloused hands of the Chinese children that made this card.”
Cards Against Humanity is the cocreation of eight childhood friends from the Chicago suburbs, who invented it at a New Year’s party while home from college and made it available for free online. Over the next two years it gained a cult following, and its creators turned to Kickstarter in 2011 to see whether they could get it printed. “Kickstarter gave us an incredible opportunity,” said Max Temkin, one of the game’s creators, who manages the business part-time. “We had an idea we wanted to make and weren’t sure other people thought it’d be funny. We also needed $4,000 to do the first game, and print it at a print shop near me here in Chicago. We didn’t have $4,000. It was our only option.” In the end, they raised more than $15,000.
In print, Cards Against Humanity subsequently took off beyond all expectations. The company does not disclose sales figures, but some estimates have put the number of sets sold (with an average price of $25) at more than a million. It is consistently the top-selling game on Amazon, and makes up 60 percent of games sold at Snakes & Lattes, its Canadian distributor. “Prior to Cards Against Humanity, we were a tiny little operation,” said Aaron Zack, who helps run Snakes & Lattes’ online retail and distribution business. “Now we have our own postal tier, thanks to them.”
Temkin and his cohorts aren’t above using their success to make a point about the excessive culture of consumerism that fuels it. For Black Friday 2013, they sold the game for $5 more than usual, advertising this price gouging explicitly. The overpriced sets sold more than the previous year’s. The next Black Friday, they removed the game from the online store, and promised to sell their customers a box of “bullshit” for $6 instead. Thirty thousand eager fans scooped up this deal in under thirty minutes. Weeks later, each received a box of actual dried bull’s shit in the mail, with a note stating that the proceeds were donated to a foundation supporting financial transparency in American politics.
Cards Against Humanity’s success has certainly made it a target for critics within the industry, who object not only to its offensive content, but to the way it gets lumped in with other, more sophisticated games. Gamers feel it debases the entire gaming experience. Instead of being an entry point for a hobby people can grow to love, it is a crude, one-off gimmick, no more likely to get a neophyte into tabletop gaming than a porn film will get its viewer into cinema. Others say the gameplay itself isn’t nearly as clever or funny as its reputation would have you believe.
These criticisms are fair, but they miss a key point about Cards Against Humanity: it was never created to be part of the great movement of designer tabletop games. It was the ultimate game as social lubricant, so stupidly simple, ridiculous, and juvenile that any group with a strong enough constitution can pick it up and start laughing in seconds. Although it sits on the entirely opposite end of the spectrum from Settlers of Catan, it equally distills the appeal of the analog gaming experience down to its essence: human contact.
“We’re a very lonely generation,” Temkin, who is twenty-nine, told me. He and his friends who created the game (all card-carrying nerds) grew up on the Internet. In high school, they hung out in chat rooms and played Starcraft online. By the time they were in college, they hungered for real connections. “There is a tension between the ubiquity of tools of connection, which share carefully curated images of our lives, and the reality of our own lives not meeting up to that on a real basis. You have a million friends on Facebook, but none to hang out with in real life. How perfect does Instagram look compared to the sad reality of your life? Once you start feeling that loneliness, you’ll turn more to social media and risk-free forms of connection, looking for a quick fix, going back, clicking and refreshing that feed again and again. Everyone has that experience of getting into that cycle of newness and trying to find a connection.”
Temkin called digital social media the anesthetic of loneliness, paraphrasing David Foster Wallace. “That’s why it feels so good to sit down at a table with friends in real life and play this game,” Temkin said. “You do it and the connection is immediate, you know what the rules are, and it’s an easy social relationship to navigate in our context. Cards Against Humanity was made by us as friends to socialize and laugh together. Cards Against Humanity answered that need at the right time. It was a great excuse to have a gameful, safe way to push boundaries of taste. My hope is that it led people to real moments and connections together.”
Many of the same critics of Cards Against Humanity also believe that Kickstarter is bad for the tabletop game industry. They see easy crowdfunding money flooding the market with poorly designed games, projects that never get made, or games delivered long past their deadline. These not only turn people off tabletop games, the critics say; they saturate a relatively small market with more product than its consumers can healthily support. Perhaps there is some merit to that, but the alternative—creating a game from spec, spending your own money on a prototype, having it tested at various game and hobby shops, and then trying to sell it to a traditional publisher at a convention—is not a process game designers are eager to return to.
One night, I walked over to Snakes & Lattes to meet Alejandro Vernaza, who was in the final week of a Kickstarter campaign for the game Deal: American Dream. Vernaza is originally from Bogotá, Colombia, but now works as a teacher in Toronto. The game is a coventure between himself and a team in France, including Tristan Frobert, with whom Vernaza shared a cramped train cabin on a six-day voyage across Russia in 2010. During the trip, they quickly grew bored and began making games out of paper, but shortly after the trip, Frobert wrote to Vernaza and told him about an idea he had for a Risk-style game based on drug cartels. Over the next few years, they worked to develop the game, and took early prototypes to board game industry trade shows, including Germany’s massive Essen Spiel, where they learned about Kickstarter. When they launched their Kickstarter campaign in late May 2015, the goal was to raise €29,000 to fund Deal: American Dream. I met Vernaza with just six days left, and only €20,000 raised.
“No one tells you how much Kickstarter is a ride,” he said, as he unrolled a prototype board for the game and set up the cards. “It’s really a ride.”
Deal: American Dream sets competing criminal networks against each other in the drug-producing and -consuming markets of the Americas. You pick a gang (Chicago mafia, Mexican cartels, Vancouver yakuza, etc.), raise funds, buy soldiers, take over territory, then move and sell dope to earn respect points. The first player with ten respect points wins the game, but to get there you have to cope with competitors trying to fleece you, invade your turf, and kill you with all sorts of weapons. As we kicked off play, with Notorious B.I.G. appropriately playing on the café’s stereo, I consolidated territory along the US East Coast. Vernaza took the Southwest, and I fended off his attacks in the Midwest and Texas until I controlled Miami, and finally his home nation, Colombia, where I shipped enough dope back to America to win. Deal: American Dream was a fun, fast-paced, original game. I pledged $10 to the campaign, and followed Kickstarter over the next week. With five days to go, it looked increasingly unlikely that Vernaza and Frobert would reach their goal, but a sudden surge of backers in the last three days pushed them past their goal. The game should now be commercially available.
Deal: American Dream had filmed its Kickstarter video at Snakes & Lattes, and I first encountered Vernaza there just before it launched, during one of the monthly game designer nights the café holds in its back room.
If Kickstarter and Board Game Geek are the digital communities driving the revenge of board games, then these evenings are their analog equivalent. Each month, twenty to thirty game designers, ranging from well-known professionals to first-time amateurs, invite their peers to play and give feedback on prototype games. The crowd is less diverse than Snakes & Lattes normally. It is more male and geeky (Star Wars T-shirts abound), but the breadth and scope of the games on display are truly representative of the creativity this new age of game design has unleashed. There were simple card games about bike couriers and home contractors, tricky-looking number games, funny trivia games, games that were written on cut-up scraps of paper, hand-carved wooden boards with intricate player pieces, and slick-looking games that looked store ready. I saw a game based on the tale of the Pied Piper and another on postal carrier pigeons crossing the English Channel in World War II, and many, many fantasy games.
