Secure Immaturity

Retrogasmic is a monthly column designed to educate you about all-but-forgotten geeky shit and why you should care about it today.

——

“I’m into board games.” This phrase alone will stop me in my tracks on any online dating site. It is the moral equivalent of perfume infused with geek pheromones. It is a freak flag whipping in a wind traveled from exotic islands. It is almost always too good to be true, because, inevitably, “I think Monopoly is awesome!” Also, “I love to laugh!”

No. Just… no.

Pick any garden variety geek and they’ll tell you, sometimes in the context of an ancient secret war against the Muggles, of the terrible stereotypes foisted upon them by society and how every conversation about their passion is a battle to slough off these false images. For the most part, the “Mundane” they’re talking to has at least heard of Star Wars or Dungeons & Dragons or Batman. They may even know someone who owns an epic mount!

As a board game geek, I long for the day when I am stereotyped in a way that at least suggests knowledge of the existence of my hobby. Please, at the very least, say “Oh, so I guess you’re into Settlers of Catan and that sort of thing?” But no. According to the masses, board gamers are into Risk, Monopoly, Scrabble, Life, and, if you want to go nuts, Stratego.

This isn’t going to be an evangelistic screed introducing you to Eurogames. Why? Because Eurogames have been modern and popular for over 10 years. Retrogasmic is about even older shit, delving into the niches of other niches. Yes, friends, we are setting the Wayback Machine for 1977. Get your education about awesome Eurogames elsewhere, because we’re blowing past that entire era to land at the dawn of Ameritrash board games.

As a child, my geekdom still in a larval stage, I was exposed to the same board games as you probably were. Monopoly and Scrabble came factory installed in households of the 1970s and 80s. I was also into chess, a game I had much aptitude but little patience for. My careful strategies inevitably fell away to my desire to send some knights out there to fuck up White’s day. With every board game I played, I eventually reached a point where I was no longer satisfied with the out-of-the-box Vanilla Mode. Inspired by the futuristic games imagined in the sci-fi novels I read, I wanted chess pieces that could fire arrows or teleport, a playing field strewn with different terrain and obstacles, and ways of customizing your army instead of accepting the standard loadout. I wanted the Chess Plus expansion set. I’d have to wait some years before Bruno Faidutti delivered Knightmare Chess, so my geek heart went in search of the game to sate this desire.

In my early teens, I had fallen in with what my church and private school would have deemed the “wrong crowd”. They played Dungeons & Dragons, pirated computer games and anime, knew what a head shop was, and were probably Democrats. If only I had started smoking and having premarital sex rather than treading the dark path towards Satan worship, then there might have been hope for me. Instead, at one of the Saturday gaming sessions at Akron University, someone put Cosmic Encounter on the table and I was lost forever.

In Cosmic Encounter, each player is trying to take over the known universe by landing five of their pieces on planets controlled by other players. The mechanics of how this is done is only slightly more complicated than that. What makes Cosmic Encounter so fantastic is that each player is controlling an alien race whose special power breaks one of the games rules or otherwise introduces some crazy new element into play. So if you are playing the Macron, for instance, each of your ships count as four ships. The Warpish gets to raise dead ships and use them in a fight. Then you get into the crazy powers, like the Schizoid, who has “the power to alter reality” and change the goals of the game. Cosmic Encounter was one of the first games to employ this mechanic known as “variable powers”. It continues to be popular in games like Puerto Rico, Citadels, and Twilight Imperium.

Cosmic Encounter was originally available in a basic boxed set with expansions that came in plastic bags. The expansions added more alien powers, new game components and wacky styles of play. Because almost every element of the game could vary, no two games of Cosmic would ever be the same. Inspired by this variability, a young Richard Garfield would later try to capture that style of play in a card game called Magic: The Gathering.

I was hardwired for this game. Cosmic celebrated creativity and invited customization. And I was all about making up new rules and modifications for anything I was interested in. This obsession got completely out of hand with a game called Talisman.

I don’t know if I had seen an ad in a magazine or I just happened to pick up the box while perusing Spellbinders, one of the few game stores near where I lived. The cover bore a standard fantasy image of a warrior squaring off against a dragon, under the glittery gold letters “Talisman – The Magical Quest Game”. I read the back of the box. It must have been compelling because I walked out of there with the game and the first expansion.

In Talisman, each player takes on the role of a fantasy character (Warrior, Elf, Prophetess, Ghoul, etc.) on a quest to obtain the Crown of Command, located in the center of the board. Your character journeys around the Outer Region of the board, fighting monsters, visiting strange places and finding magical objects. If you think you’re tough enough, you move into the Middle Region and tool around in there. Once you have reached Level Badass, you can try to breach the dreaded Inner Region. But you can’t even get in the door unless you have obtained the eponymous Talisman.

My friends and I obliterated entire days hunting for the Runesword, stealing Talismans back and forth, challenging the Sentinel, and ultimately vying for control of the Crown. For me, it was the best game ever conceived. Except… it could use a few more characters. And a couple of more interesting monsters to fight. And wouldn’t it be sweet if there were more spells? The first two expansions covered some of that, but what I really wanted to see were my own creations running around the board.

So, at the next game session, my friends found themselves drawing cut up index cards with the word “Adventure” written on the back in green magic marker. And what’s this? New characters too? Isn’t that a poorly-rendered version of The Doctor and his TARDIS? Perhaps my friends didn’t see the fantastic cross-over potential Talisman had with other franchises. Thus began the saga of my “home grown” expansions to Talisman. I designed a separate dungeon board (which, according to my young mind, Games Workshop stole and released as an official expansion), a city expansion (Ditto, miserable thieves!), and a complete high seas adventure expansion (Ha ha, suck it, Games Workshop! Got you that time!).

My friends’ snickering at my sad doodling card illustrations haunted me into my adult life and was partially responsible for me becoming a graphic artist. [ADVERTISEMENT] A few years ago I released House of Whack, the ultimate expression of my desire to customize a game. I simply made my own. [/ADVERTISEMENT]

So what makes these games “Ameritrash”? First of all, I use the term with great affection, a self-deprecating moniker in response to the sometimes elitist attitudes of European game enthusiasts. Cosmic Encounter, Talisman, House of Whack, and others are what I like to call “experience” games. They create a certain type of play style which taps into the players’ emotions and imaginations more so than their intellect. Often, this comes at the expense of “good” design. Most Eurogames eschew play mechanics with a high amount of luck and you will rarely find dice inside those boxes. Just about everything in Talisman is resolved via dice rolling, even movement (a huge faux pas in Eurogames).

Eurogames are typically about making wise choices and being rewarded with victory if your choices are better than your opponents’. If you lose, it is because your opponents had a better strategy, not because you randomly ran into a Demon with Craft of 10 while you were strolling through the hills. Are Ameritrash games fair and balanced? No. Can you execute elaborate strategies, planned many moves in advance? Sometimes, but I wouldn’t advise it. Are they fun to play? YES! While I do enjoy building castles in the French countryside or trading coffee or creating train routes, sometimes I want to blast zombies with a shotgun.

Both Cosmic Encounter and Talisman have storied histories of going in and out of print, moving from publisher to publisher. But now, like an impossible geek fantasy, they have both found a home at Fantasy Flight Games, loving remaker of lost classics and one of the greatest board game publishers on the planet.

So if you’re just used to passing Go with a thimble, I encourage you to broaden your horizons and get trashy! Check out the latest editions of Cosmic Encounter and Talisman.

Oh, and [ADVERTISEMENT] buy House of Whack. [/ADVERTISEMENT]

Resources
Cosmic Encounter – Info on the new Fantasy Flight edition.
Talisman - Ditto
House of Whack – The awesome board game created by yours truly.
Board Game Geek – The go to repository of all worldly knowledge about board games.
Bruno Faidutti – Faidutti is one of my favorite game designers. His games bridge the gap between Eurogame sensibilities and Ameritrash chaos.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS