Transcript of the podcast published on March 7th, 2011.

Let’s just take a break and reflect on the past developments in the gaming world. Where do we go from here? It is clear that board gaming as a whole is a very healthy hobby at the moment. It might not have the breakthrough fad or trend of past decades, like a new concept to sell huge amounts of cards like in Magic the Gathering, but all in all there are lots of very good companies who each have found a niche in which they have a relatively healthy life. Fantasy Flight Games has basically grabbed the Fantasy, Horror and SF niche market, GMT is catering to the Euro-influenced and opinionated war gamer, Days of Wonder successfully delivers great accessible family games and so on. Also in Germany the game market has been relatively stable – the old great companies can still exist and deliver good product and there has even been a possibility for young and upcoming companies like Argentum games to grow and prosper somewhat. The same is to be said about the European market as a whole – Eastern Europe has expanded as a market with many of the best games of the last years coming from the Czech Republic for example, but now also from Poland and other places. Italy, France, Holland and England are also strong as countries in which game design is practiced an art and the population is increasingly interested in it, not to forget Belgium, Switzerland and Austria. Essen attendance is still growing every year, and the number of published games as well.

If there is any kind of problem it is the problem of over-saturation. At the Westpark Gamers we have already found that we return to older games that we like instead of playing the new Essen games, which is unusual, because the last Essen is not that long gone. Usually we were busy until at least the middle of the year before a certain expectation for new games kicked in. But we are already returning to established games for entertainment.

It’s not that last Essen’s games were a worse than usual – quite the opposite! In fact 2010 was quite a good year most remarkable for a high level of general quality and relatively few disappointments. That it was not the year of a standout game like Dominion should not be something to be expected every year – that would just be silly. Still – we have super fantastic games like 7 Wonders or Dominant Species, and that’s really something.

In fact if you took any, and I really mean ANY of the top games of 2010 and put them in a time machine to travel back to 1980 or even 1990 they would all be huge hits that the whole gaming world would talk about. But today they just go under in a huge torrent of quality. It is very difficult to get noticed with a game when already even small companies or DTP publishers manage to bring out product that is equal to the best games of the past years in both production values and content.

In a way we now repeat the situation that computer games found themselves in a couple of years back. When the computer game market emerged, many new and spectacular ideas for games were born: the RPG’s, the RTS games, the Adventure games, the Ego-Shooter games, etc.. All these genres were defined like the different board gaming genres, even taking cues from them in many ways. But looking at computer games now one seems to notice that there are very few new ground breaking ideas anymore, it is just the technology like the graphics of games that is still developed. Another area is bringing games to where there have been no games before. I was once told that the fastest growing market in electronic games is the so-called social games market, where people play games via facebook or through their browser. These games are quick and accessible and don’t need any preparation to jump in.

This does not surprise me as I see the time-factor as the biggest enemy for physical board games in the future. Once the electronic game table market really kicks off in the near future – and I firmly believe that this will happen – board games with physical components will increasingly have a difficult time except perhaps with spectacular miniatures. But already many Fantasy Flight Games like Arkham Horror for example are clustered with so many card decks, counters and paraphernalia that I for my part would welcome if a computer all set it up for me in a millisecond and I could start right in. Even FFG themselves have realized this and start publishing ipad and iphone apps that actually reduce the time needed for playing their games.

The games of the future will also use sound effects and videos to enhance the game experience, I am sure.

But fact is: We are at a crossroads right now. Not a moment to despair, but a moment to take note of what we like about gaming and to pave the roads for what gaming will become in the future. One thing is sure: the social aspect of gaming, the table banter, the camaraderie, the real people with which you interact will always be the biggest asset of face to face gaming. Let’s try to preserve that!

Transcript of the podcast published on February 25th, 2011.

After 10 segments about game companies of the past I want to add a bonus segment about a company that nobody of you has ever heard of, probably: Gray Giant Games.

Gray Giant Games was the brainchild of Tim Bedford and Lisa Peterson, 2 students of MIT who were caught by the Fantasy Roleplaying game craze of the 70s. They both became avid game masters to their game group, the MITfits, and revered for their colourful and literary campaigns that spanned whole worlds. Soon enough they became tired of some of the clichés of D&D, especially the munchkin like amassment of XP’s and levels. This is how “Foragers into the Unknown” was born, their first roleplaying game, a radical reinvention of the RPG genre with an ingenious combat system that was elegant and realistic at the same time. “Foragers” had some success in gaming circles and soon Tim and Lisa began to professionally package their product, naming their company after the first monster they had invented for their game, and to sell it at gaming conventions. This was about the time their first daughter was born, so they lacked time and especially money to really run the publicity that sells a product to a bigger audience, but in specialist circles their fame increased. Soon 2 supplements followed: “Foragers into Space”, and “Foragers into Horror”, both equally excellent RPG’s.

At this point they noticed that they had less and less time to be GM’s, but their players wanted to adventure on in “Bellaphon”, their fantasy roleplaying world. Long before paragraph adventures were invented they thought of a role playing game that needed no Game Master and could be enjoyed by a whole group. This is how “Endless Adventure” was born, a truly unique fantasy board game that could be enjoyed by 1 to many players, and that is only rivaled by “Magic Realm” in atmosphere and scope.

In “Endless Adventure” the game simulates a complex dungeon expedition. The dungeon is randomly created during the game, but there are also certain predetermined quests that fit into the bigger game, much like today’s fantasy computer games are designed. “Endless Adventure” could be played either in short or continuous sessions, as a never ending campaign that also enabled players to develop characters, an idea that was later also realized in “Warhammer Quest”, but in a much simpler way. “Endless Adventure” is a truly magnificent, albeit complex game. Its biggest bonus was its expandability – in later supplements players could explore the wilderness, cityscapes and the sea. It was also possible for them to engage in world politics, to wage wars or to found a shop and sell their treasures. With each expansion – all of which are hard if not impossible to find nowadays – the game became richer and deeper, nearly reaching philosophical dimensions. Some players are still playing this game and have not yet explored every part of it.

Encouraged by this success the now husband and wife team thought about new ways to use their creativity. This is how one of the weirdest games in existence was created: “Serenade”, a game with a completely empty board and no rules to start with. Through a complex web of secret decisions, bidding and alliances the game was literally created on the spot – when you started the game you didn’t know yet if you would end up playing an economical game, an abstract strategy game, a historical simulation or a racing game. The only thing one could set up at the beginning was the game length, which could be anything from 30 minutes to many hours. The theme of the game would be decided by the wishes of the players, so that every player would play the game he or she liked the most in the end. “It’s an experience, not a game” was the tagline, and the revolutionary concepts behind this game were never equaled. Unfortunately a great part of “Serenade”s first print run was burnt in a mysterious fire and only a few copies have survived.

But Gray Giant Games was just starting it’s great run: The next game was simply called “Euro”, and was the pinnacle of European board games design: an elegant, incredibly thought-through design that gave each player the possibility to win until the very last moment without invoking the least of luck, but which was also – a feat that not all Euro Games manage – highly thematic and full of weird and crazy humour, with players trying to create the perfect European parliament, an impossible task as every European knows.

Tim had dabbled in wargames now and then, so he started a new project that was supposed to revolutionize the wargaming world: “Waterloo 3000” was the most ambitious wargame ever produced: a double blind game using ingenious hidden movement and doing away with any combat tables and odds, instead using an intricate paragraph system like in fantasy gamebooks to decide the outcome of a battle. The accompanying “battle book” indeed had 3000 entries, and few players have explored them all.

After that Lisa Peterson approached another, nearly impossible task: to create a witty party game for intelligent people that doesn’t embarrass and doesn’t bore. The result of this was “Betty Boop”, a game so fast and furious that it was impossible to not break out into wild laughter during it. One reviewer literally said that this game was so much fun that it could revive a coma patient.

Slowly a trend became clear: Gray Giant Games took on established game genres and tried to create the best possible game for it. But there were factors which always stood in their success: Tim getting a professorship at MIT and Lisa getting the Nobel prize for her work at the decryption of the human genome. Not out of failure but simply because they had no more time for their games, Gray Giant Games closed business in 1987.

And they lived happily everafter, like in a fairy tale. Like in this segment.