Brandon the Game Dev

At the geriatric age of seventeen years old, Carcassonne is one of the elder games of the recent board game renaissance. It remains one of the most enduring, nuanced board games on shelves today. It’s the kind of game even your grandmother can learn to play (and also beat you at).

As with any game, it’s an exercise in self-control to put both my thoughts into focused, prosaic form and to limit myself to highlighting just one good quality. I will therefore focus on one of the qualities that lends Carcassonne its status as a classic: the ability to accommodate different play styles.

For those who have not played Carcassonne, here is a primer. Two to five players build the French village of Carcassonne, one tile at a time. The titles are randomized. Piece by piece, you define the features of the village: cities, roads, cloisters, and fields. Tiles must be built to where features are continuous – you can’t simply run a road into the city wall. (What’s wrong with you?!)

The objective of the game is to score the most victory points, which is done by placing meeples on features as they are being built. You score points for completed cities, road construction, and for surrounding cloisters in fields. You can also score fields, but that’s a little more nuanced, so I won’t get into that in this article. You don’t have many meeples to play, so you have to be judicious in their placement.

It’s a pleasant game. It’s pretty. It’s fun. It’s simple. It can be so nasty. It is this dichotomous nature that fascinates me so much with Carcassonne. You can base your strategy on two broad approaches: rising tides and zero-sum. The flexible nature of this game keeps it fresh, surprising, and exciting even as it approaches its twentieth birthday.

Let’s examine what these two approaches look like.

Rising Tides Carcassonne

It’s said that rising tides lift all boats. In Carcassonne, you can keep to yourself while you build long stretches of highway that net you ten or more points and megacities that net you twenty. You can create fields of greenery so vast that your farmers come back with wheelbarrows of points. You and your opponent(s) never have to conflict at all. You can all go your own way and the one who better manages their resources may well come out the victor.

Zero-Sum Carcassonne

Alternatively, you can fill your little French village with paranoia. You can trap farmers in tiny fields, leaving your opponents low on meeples for the whole game. You can curtail the growth of cities by placing tiles that close them off. You can put four-way stops in the middle of short stretches of highway. You can gridlock the countryside of France until nobody scores over thirty points. You can tease your opponents by cutting their opportunities down at every chance.

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Even better? You can change approaches on a dime as it suits you. Is that not fascinating? So many games are so singular in their nature. There is no cutthroat version of Pandemic. There is no friendly game of Twilight Struggle (or War Co., for that matter). Yet Carcassonne can be both at once. If creating a game that can accommodate different play styles interests you, pick this game up. It’s about $20 on Amazon and you’re likely to be able to find it at a thrift store!

Twilight Struggle is the golden child of the board game community, having reigned at the top of the Board Game Geek’s ranking system for an extremely long time before being dethroned by Pandemic Legacy. Despite being a brilliant game, Twilight Struggle is a bit of an oddity for top choice considering its complex rules and byzantine strategy. Its complexity has left it on many board gamers’ shelves, with players waiting for the right person to come along to finally challenge them in this long, difficult game. What’s more, it takes about ten three-hour games to totally understand it. But once you do, it is a masterpiece.

For all the reasons above, I have played only the digital version available via Steam. The physical board game is gorgeous, but I’ve yet to find someone to play it with.

In Twilight Struggle, you play as either the USA or the USSR during the Cold War era from 1945 to 1989. This is strictly a two-player game. The objective is to score the most points by the end, be the first one to reach 20 points, or to run the DEFCON meter all the way up to DEFCON 1 (thermonuclear war) on your opponent’s turn. It’s played over 10 rounds, split into three eras with different cards: Early War, Mid-War, and Late War.

I won’t get too much into the DEFCON meter, since that’s a whole can of worms that’s outside of the scope of this breakdown. To score, you want to have control of certain regions of the board when scoring cards come around. Broadly speaking, if you have more countries in Africa, you get points when the Africa scoring card comes around. Other scoring regions include South America, Central America, North America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Asia, and Europe. Instead of both players racking up separate tallies, the score rather moves along a two-ended 20 point track (40 points total) with an advantage to the USSR or USA.

A little confusing? Yep. That’s my beloved Twilight Struggle. In short: control countries and get points. I’m not going to get into how the cards help you to get points until the end. What I want to instead talk about is how Twilight Struggle masterfully maintains nail-biting, white-knuckle levels of tension throughout the game. That is the true brilliance of the game.

The theme immediately sets the tension.

It is incredibly terrifying to imagine the two world superpowers of the bygone century spending decades on end pointing massive world-crushing weapons at each other. Russian and American fingers lingering over a red button, ready to literally destroy the world. Twilight Struggle uses both historical references and gameplay mechanics to capture the feeling of fear and tension. In fact, it’s clear from the first read-through of the rules that a viable path to victory is to goad your opponent into mutually assured destruction. Yikes.

Both players have opposite strategies.

Without going into too much detail, conventional Twilight Struggle wisdom says the USSR tends to win the early game and the USA tends to win the late game. Imagine the paranoia that kind of asymmetry that causes. The USA is constantly on the brink of sheer chaos in the first five or six rounds, throwing buckets of water out of a sinking boat. The USSR, on the other hand, knows that they have to end the game quickly if they want a chance of winning at all.

You have to maintain a foothold in multiple regions because of the scoring mechanism.

There’s so many scoring cards in the game that you can’t pool your resources in one area and pray for the best. That’s a sure-fire way to lose. At the same time, there are some places that are basically hopeless to win, where you have to cut your losses and hassle the enemy like a fly.

The USA has a good grip on Central and South America, but the USSR has the better located Middle East on lock. Europe tends to split right down the middle. Africa and Asia tend to be toss-ups. Now with all this in mind, imagine the sweaty nerves the American player might get as Russia claims Algeria and Venezuela. Imagine the cold chill the Russian player might feel as America takes Iraq and North Korea.

There’s a lot going on at any given moment, and you can’t win all your battles. Plus, it’s not even clear which ones are worth winning.

You have to make sacrifices to succeed.

You will draw cards that work in your opponent’s favor. It’s inevitable. Playing one always feels bad. When you are forced to make a sacrifice, there’s an inner calculus where you say “at what time can I play this card to cause the least harm to me?” Then you have to ask “what should I do with the reward – mitigate the consequences or bolster a different strategy entirely?”

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If you’re a designer, you owe it to yourself to play this game. It’s cheap on Steam. Give it a good five tries and expect to be terrible until you get your hours in. Study this game. It will teach you a lot about capturing the feeling of tension in your game.

Roll up your sleeves and go to the nearest CVS for your flu shot. Today’s breakdown is for Pandemic, one of my favorite board games of all time. In fact, this is the one for me – the one that opened my eyes to the larger board game community. It is the one that broke me out of the prison of Monopoly, Yahtzee, and other games that many hardcore board gamers love to hate with an irrational vigor.

Pandemic blows the minds of a lot of new gamers because it’s often the game that introduces the concept of cooperative board game play. That alone is enough to make it special, but it’s no one-trick pony. You play as members of the CDC fighting four pandemics, each of which are constantly threatening to wipe whole metropolitan areas off the map. The game excellently conveys this tension with a steady drip-drip-drip of new infections (often in already ill areas), sporadic and disastrous “epidemics”, and extremely well-connected cities. Meanwhile, you have only a handful of players working 24/7 to contain the disease, prevent outbreaks, find a cure, and work within the limitations of your time and resources.

Pandemic is a cooperative game for 2-4 players. All players work together to beat the game. You win together or you lose together. There are four diseases, each represented by a different color cube – red, yellow, blue, and black. The objective is to cure all the diseases by collecting five cards that correspond to each color and discarding the cards at a CDC research station.

Here’s the three main obstacles to success:

• These diseases slowly add up in different regions. When more than 3 cubes of one color end up on one city, there’s an outbreak, and you have to put a disease cube on each connected city (infecting up to SIX others). If you hit 8 outbreaks, you lose. Outbreaks can cause chain outbreaks, too, so if you get one, you’re likely to get two or three or four at the same time.
• If you run out of cards to draw, you lose. This is basically a time limit.
• If you run out of disease cubes, you lose because your disease is too far spread (or the makers of the game were cheap, we’ll never know which).

Pandemic is easier to play than describe, so I won’t get into much more detail. What I’ve said so far is enough background to understand the points I’m going to make. Here are three reasons Pandemic is excellent at getting people to work together.

The goal is simple.

Cure the disease! Somebody collects five cards of the same color and discards them at a research station. Then the disease is cured. Do this for each color and you win.

The simplicity of this objective really pins the game down, since the logistics can get hairy. Some decisions you may face include: passing color cards between players, efficiently moving around within the limits of the four-action-per-turn rule, and containing the disease so you can keep it under control long enough to develop a cure.

Experienced players can do the heavy lifting while neophytes can intuitively understand why the table leaders are doing what they’re doing.

You have to contain the disease to minimize outbreaks, a game of tactics.

Pandemic is a team sport. No player can carry the game – it’s impossible. If you try to collect cards and develop cures while completely ignoring the festering pockets of disease in Jakarta or Johannesberg or Osaka, you’re going to get your respective butts handed to you. Some players may opt to keep diseases under control. Some may set up a network of research stations (for easier transportation and pursuit of the overall objectives). Others may focus heavily on finding the cures. There’s a lot of factors to balance, and communicating with your team for long enough to coordinate actions is critical.

You have to plan around contingencies because of the element of chance.

Epidemic cards are effectively random. They can pop up at any time and put three disease cubes on a city. This can cause already infected cities to explode into outbreaks and completely clean cities to become hotbeds primed for disaster. When an epidemic card comes up, you and your team have to work together to respond very quickly, even at the expense of your previous tactical objectives and your overall objective of curing the diseases.

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There’s a lot of ground I haven’t covered. There are subtle nuances of movement in Pandemic. Extra tactical and strategic elements are provided by different roles. Diseases, because of some niche rules around epidemic cards, tend to – quite sensibly – get worse in cities that are already infected. It’s a well thought-out game that captures the tension and coordination of crisis control.

Now excuse me while I complete this application for medical school.