Will you be searching eBay for this year's ashcans next year?

Will you be searching eBay for this year's ashcans next year? -- 11/22/2007

I recently had the opportunity to play a couple of games of Shadows Over Camelot (at Dr. Stidd's birthday party in early November). My best man Tom has been telling me to play the game for probably a year, and now having played it I can see why. It's the rare boardgame that's (mostly) collaborative for the players. You're not playing against them so much as against the game itself. (And Tom knows that when I was heavy into video games in the later '90s it was for collaboration against computer AI.) And it's a very very tight game, very nicely balanced. You quickly get some white swords onto the Round Table, and there are only a couple of siege engines out, and you're thinking it's going to be a rout. But damn if the game doesn't manage to create tension and then maintain it all the way to the end. I liked it a lot.

Well, what I've heard is that at some point in 2004, Days of Wonder decided to move the game's release date to 2005, to give it more playtesting and development time. And damn, if that story is true, after playing it, I'd pay ca$h for a prototype from the game session that drove the decision to delay the game. Just for the opportunity to experience the hitches behind the decision and mentally walk my way through the same design insights that solved them.

Posted by Paul Czege at 20:11 | Comments (0)

Defined tags for this entry: design, shadows over camelot

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What I'm Hearing

"It's the normal progression of things--from the edgy early adopter who seeks purity and novelty above all things, all the way through the early majority and then the mass market. As the market grows, it gets, by definition, more average....This creates opportunities and challenges. Last one in with a mass market offering can do very well after the market is pioneered by the iconoclasts. And the iconoclasts have to be very careful of depending on the market they created staying just the way it was, but bigger."

Seth Godin

What I'm Saying

"My own personally significant take-away from the Dancey interview was the realization that the frustrations of indie publishers at the traditional hobby games publishers are as mis-applied as the frustrations of traditional hobby games industry notables at indie publishers. We aren't the market disruption that's hurting them, and they and their customers aren't a stony ignorance that thwarts us. The community of gamers has fragmented under the "good enough" distractions of video games and other entertainments. We are designing for the "challenge and create" community that's left incompletely satisfied by these other entertainments. And because, as Dancey says, the partake and reinforce gamers have always been the decider of what games get played, nothing we design warrants the approbation of the traditional hobby games publisher, because nothing we design can bring partake and reinforce gamers back from their other entertainments. So the traditional hobby games publishers are left to their fight for the attention of the shrinking partake and reinforce community. And our adherents can only get a game to happen with non-gamers or others also in the smaller challenge and create community."

Paul Czege