How many card drafting games does one person need?
a short treatise on why Games have more in common with Food than books, movies, or music
Before we get started on this week’s article, a follow up from my series on Daily Games.
Words with Friends is jumping on-board the daily gaming trend! The Verge is reporting a series of games from the social game maker to “take on” the NYT Games section. While I did expect a huge social game company to jump into the space, I did not expect this to happen quite so quickly…
And… an upcoming Indie Game, LOK, is using Daily Games as part of the demo to get people excited to play. The Daily Gaming onslaught is here!
When people talk to me about my game collection, it feels like an unspoken question hovers just below the surface: “why do you need so many games?” It’s not a malicious question, it’s fair. Why own so many games that are mostly similar but slightly different? Why own both Slay the Spire and Cobalt Core? What’s the value of having 7 Wonders Dueland Duel for Middle Earth?
It’s a funny question because it feels specific to games. You wouldn’t really ask that question about books or movies or music. When you finish one you start another one, maybe a new one. What’s the difference with games? In part because of how long they can be and how consuming they can become, along with how the theme can feel stapled on top of the mechanics.
And given the sheer speed that new games (video and tabletop) get yeeted into the public consciousness, the sheer number of YouTube channels dedicated to keeping up with the latest crowdfunding releases
Well, it’s understandable if from the outside it can feel like this is all just a consumerist stampede towards glitzy art and flashy deals. The board game community even has a term for it: “the cult of the new”.
Why Would Anyone Reuse the Same Mechanic Twice?
Other forms of art are made up of units of information. This is a weird and overly technical way of framing it (that admittedly does something of a disservice to books and movies and music). But at the root, each component is a new piece of information our brains are sorting and filtering into spots that make sense.
That piece of information can hit us in lots of different ways. Maybe we’re different so we experience that information differently, but it’s the same unit of information. I think for that reason you’d never ask someone why they’re interested in a new song or a new book. We have this innate understanding that new information is more valuable than old information. Once you’ve listened to it or read it, you might want something new.
But if we apply that same logic to games we come away with the perspective of why would you consume something that’s effectively old information?
But games are not units of information. So if we try to look at them like that, they fall apart. The small tweaks in mechanics and art (and their relationship) can drastically change how we experience a game.
The most common catch-all is to call games experiences, which is a weird and sad intellectualization of something that doesn’t actually explain what that games are and how they are different. Books and Movies and Music are experiences. Food is not an experience. Well, I guess it can be, but if you start referencing it like that you’re going to end up in that one seen from Always Be My Maybe with Keanu Reeves on loop for eternity.
Why does this matter? Because no one asks why you would want to buy different Reeses shapes at different times of the year.
Games are Food
This might just be the result of me growing up in an Italian family where food was a huge part of our lives, but I think games and food share a lot in common with each other. They both have close relationships to recipes that get built up and transmuted over generations, an uneasy tension between craft, art, and commercialism, and a penchant for re-invention and “house rules”. Games and food satisfy deep urges, permeate our social spaces, and communicate through suggestion and association more than direct implication.
The reason I think this is useful is because most people already have a bunch of knowledge they bring to food. No one looks at a recipe as a meal (how you cook it matters). No one assumes that substitutions don’t change a dish, even if the result is mostly the same. And if you show up to a restaurant and the chef tells you a story about how this specific cured ham brings out the flavor of cheese in this pasta carbonara, you will instinctively know this is probably different than the bacon and parm carbonara you make at home. But you also know they’re very similar dishes.
We have all of these intuitions about how recipes evolve and change overtime and lots of appreciation for what role chefs play in how recipes evolve. And we don’t have these expectations of food that it will “say things” in order to be considered art.
Like ingredients, subtle tweaks in mechanics, presentation, and context work together to change how we think about and interact with a game. That’s why it can be endlessly interesting to see and understand how a new designer’s take on the deck building genre differs, or how an established designer revisiting a genre they know well (Reiner Knizia releasing a new auction game comes to mind) can be so exciting.
These aren’t things you can understand simply by reading rulebooks, you actually have to experience the tweaks for yourself in order to get a better perspective.
Evolutions
Recently a game came out called Duel for Middle Earth. It’s a re-theming of sorts of the very very popular 7 Wonder Duel which is itself a two player implementation of a fairly popular drafting games 7 Wonders. 7 Wonders is a distillation of a style of play popularized by Magic the Gathering called card drafting, where you actually build your tableau while you play the game rather than have the pieces pre-built for you.
Duel for Middle Earth uses mostly the same underlying mechanics as 7 Wonders Duel, a sort of royal solitaire style draft, where you alternate taking cards with another player to gain victory points of various flavors, and then count them up at the end to see who has accomplished the correct victory condition.
If 7 Wonders: Duel that’s because it is. It is a tight design, but most of the game comes from the appreciation of the strategy around figuring out how to best block your opponent from taking the cards they want. Duel for Middle Earth mostly keeps these same mechanics, but it tweaks the theme (setting it in Middle Earth), and a couple of core concepts to tighten the gameplay and improve resonance (the feeling that your’e doing the thing that the theme is telling you you’re doing).
Instead of researching technologies, you are rallying the various peoples of middle earth and receiving boons as a result. And instead of investing in politics you are chasing the ring (or being chased). And instead of building up an abstract military, you are competing and spreading over a very real (but smol) player board.
Jon Perry (a somewhat prolific game designer in the indie board and video game spaces) puts it best:
The beauty lies in the iteration and refinement of the underlying theme.
It Happens in Video Games Too
Cobalt Core, released late last year, is itself an iteration on the genre that Slay the Spire popularized, Roguelike deck-builder. It was one of my favorite games of 2023.
Much of the structure of the games are the same. Over a course of increasingly difficult challenges you create a deck of cards to defeat your enemies. The big tweak? Unlike in Slay the Spire where you don’t have to take position into account, in Cobalt Core you are a spaceship, and as a result have to concern yourself with things like making sure your cannons are pointed at the enemy ship and theirs are pointed away from you.
The small tweak completely transforms the feel of playing the game. While Slay the Spire feels like a game about landing sequences of combos to overwhelm monsters, Cobalt Core is a game about carefully building the right set of moves to defend and attack, making sure to lead with the right amount of risk to grind your enemies into the dust.
The Spice Must Flow
There are lots of other implications for games “being food” that I would like to dig into more in the future, but for now I want your main takeaway to be this:
Try not to worry so much about whether or not the game is good or bad, or if it’s a “waste of time”. Instead, when you play games in the future, think about what other experiences it reminds you of. How does this game fit into your life? And who do you want to share the game with?