You know what nobody ever novice gamer ever said? 'Well, I'm ready to move onto something more challenging, not in the rules, but just in having how the game scores be more obtuse and take much longer'. And making the scoring more complex is really not what you should be looking for in a 'next step' game. (Side point: I am deliberately using words like complexify, complexification, and gamerfy to annoy you in exactly the same kind of artificial way gamerfied games often annoy me). There are also trait cards in the game, which while adorable (I particularly love the dog type which escapes the house to scavenge food) does complexify the scoring. You can stumble into powerful tricks early in the game which allow you to take four or even five cards on your turn, and if the other players can't match it, you get a big leg up them through no skill of your own. The addition of supposedly gamer friendly elements like tricks not only increase the game time, but actually make the game more luck based. While the cards you can take might only be a little bit different, tricks add a lot of time to the game, and are the primary culprit in having a sequel which is over twice the game length of the original (an hour for my group vs. This leads to players constantly rotating the cards on their turns, trying to figure out which cards they could possibly take before they even assess which cards they want to take. Whereas the original game featured simply drafting a row or column of three cards from a 3x3 grid, Dog Lover features tricks, cards you can acquire which allow you to grab a certain polyomino shape of cards from the grid which is decidedly not 1x3. The gamerfied sequel Dog Lover is almost that, with the slight but crucial difference that the word 'quick' no longer applies. The original Cat Lady was a masterpiece of theme, quick but tricky decisions, and perfectly fitting artwork. Let's start off mildly with a game I actually enjoy. Stealing mechanisms from another game where appropriate is just sensible design - deliberately complexifying (that word again) a simple design is not. Before I jump into examples, I should be clear that I'm not talking about iterative design generally. Gamerfied versions of existing designs often suck, succeeding at adding complexity and play time but failing at adding more compelling gameplay. What I'm trying to say here is that gamerfying simple games is exactly the wrong way to create medium-light games, whether they're the next step for new gamers or not. While I could rant for a while about how light-medium games are at their best as unique designs, not expansions of previously existing light games (and I will), where things can really go off the rails is if these terms get combined with 'gamerfied' games, by which I mean taking a simple design and gamerfying it with more complex elements which (supposedly) more experienced gamers will enjoy. The problem with these terms, and sometimes these games, is that there's the implication that they should build on what came before, which might involve a complexification of a previously existing game. In either case, these games are supposed to allow relative gaming neophytes only familiar with family or gateway games to take that next step into somewhat more complex games without it being too big of a step up in difficulty. I think my issues with these games begins with the nomenclature, whether it's this or 'next step' games.
#Ttr beancounter plus#
If you would prefer to listen to a rant rather than read one, you can hear it on the latest episode of the Two Wood for a Wheat podcast, which also includes my co-host Pat's contrary (and thereby wrong) opinions on the same subject, as well as a review of Luna Capital:Ī confession and a teaser: this origin of this post is rooted not so much in a desire to discuss gateway plus games as a whole, but to bitch about a certain kind of them.
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