Tabletop games fill the niche left by typical LAN party / split-screen games as more and more of them move to only allowing internet connected matchmaking rather than some local network equipment / friends that won't look on your half of the TV.
Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
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Re: Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
#12As an avid player of both video games and board games, I'll say one thing: video games have really fallen afoul of the diminishing marginal utility of interesting decisions. A 2-hour game of Agricola, to me, has far more interesting decisions packed into it than 20 hours of Civilization V, despite having orders of magnitude fewer options per turn and turns per game.
I agree, but only because Civilization V is a train-wreck. Civilization IV is by far the superior video game. Even then, I would much rather play a game of Agricola with some friends than Civ.
Re: Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
#13One factor that I think has helped a lot is Kickstarter / crowdfunding, which helps mitigate the costs of a first production run. Another factor is DRM in video games -- why spend 4x$60 on four licenses for a multiplayer video game and hundreds more on hardware, when you could just spend $50 on a board game and have it support four to six people?
Pathfinder in particular is booming because all of its game content is literally open source... inherited from the D&D 3.5 "Open Game License".
There are plenty of online databases and apps that get you the entire rulesets of Pathfinder. Paizo's official one is here: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/
You can literally play all of Pathfinder (including all of their optional rules) without spending a single dollar. But the books, adventure paths, and art is so lovely that the GMs and hardcore players are willing to buy them up anyway.
Re: Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
#14Recently finding myself hating staring at screens more and more, I've dove pretty deep into the world of board games and its incredible. It reminds me a lot of the earlier days of the web — the group is still small enough to be niche, and there isn't competition so much as there's a general willingness for everyone to succeed together.
People create new ideas and then other games will iterate and improve the mechanics until you end up with some I pretty genius stuff. And if you try to create your own games (which I am), then you'll find another sub-niche of people that are even more awesome. Nearly everyone is friendly and really happy to set aside generous amounts of time aside from their undoubtedly busy schedules (because there are very few full-time game designers out there) to help you out.
It's the same feeling I used to get from Internet stuff.
As for the games themselves, they've come a long way from the days of Monopoly and Sorry, and they're not all games about slaying dragons or waging war. Check out games like Scoville, where you're a pepper farmer growing new peppers to aid chili recipes, or Camel Up, a game of racing and betting on a wacky camel race, or Tokaido, where you're traveling on the road between Kyoto and Tokyo trying to have the best experience along the way. Anything might make good game fodder, and people aren't scared to try it all.
Board games are so fun and low tech. It's a great way to get away from staring into a screen and to actually find a way to be social while keeping people of their phones for entire hours at a time.
Re: Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
#15One reason why table-top games are booming amongst my friends circle is that a lot of us aren't into drinking, yet we still want to socialize with an activity anyone can jump into.
Re: Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
#16Got tablet, laptop, desktop, mobile phone. Still prefer paper books and print outs for long form reading.
Re: Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
#17As an avid player of both video games and board games, I'll say one thing: video games have really fallen afoul of the diminishing marginal utility of interesting decisions. A 2-hour game of Agricola, to me, has far more interesting decisions packed into it than 20 hours of Civilization V, despite having orders of magnitude fewer options per turn and turns per game.
I don't think it's about number of choices, but how impactful and interesting those choices are.
Re: Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
#18As an avid player of both video games and board games, I'll say one thing: video games have really fallen afoul of the diminishing marginal utility of interesting decisions. A 2-hour game of Agricola, to me, has far more interesting decisions packed into it than 20 hours of Civilization V, despite having orders of magnitude fewer options per turn and turns per game.
I can explain some of the reasons behind this in video games. Design is hard and in some cases impossible because you want the game to be everything to everyone regardless of their play style or level of competence. This is why you get so much optional content and every decision you make has trivial or superficial consequences. Imagine mario kart rubberband mechanic outside of racing games. If done well it gives you the feeling of agency and achievement whatever you do, if done poorly you feel like the game plays itself. I remember when my innocence was shattered when I was given the task to write code that would subtly "fix" user inputs to do the "correct" thing. Makes my laugh today but back then it felt wrong for that reason.
Re: Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
#19As an avid player of both video games and board games, I'll say one thing: video games have really fallen afoul of the diminishing marginal utility of interesting decisions. A 2-hour game of Agricola, to me, has far more interesting decisions packed into it than 20 hours of Civilization V, despite having orders of magnitude fewer options per turn and turns per game.
Out of curiosity are you referring to vanilla Civ 5 or with Brave New World?
I only played with BNW expansion and from what I have heard it improve the game immensely.
Re: Table-top games are booming in the video-game age
#20As an avid player of both video games and board games, I'll say one thing: video games have really fallen afoul of the diminishing marginal utility of interesting decisions. A 2-hour game of Agricola, to me, has far more interesting decisions packed into it than 20 hours of Civilization V, despite having orders of magnitude fewer options per turn and turns per game.
Out of curiosity are you referring to vanilla Civ 5 or with Brave New World? I only played with BNW expansion and from what I have heard it improve the game immensely.
I've played both and while the expansions do make the game better it's still nowhere close to as good as Agricola in the interesting decisions department. There's still way too many trivial things for you to manage and way too few situations where you have to stop and think for several minutes before proceeding.