Busy Lives Prompt Speedier Board Games 153
BusylikeBum writes "Michelle Hastings admits she's sometimes cheated to get through a game of Candy Land with her 5-year-old daughter, Campbell. The board game can take just too long, she said. Disney Monopoly is another big offender.
'A game like that, it could literally take you days,' said Hastings, of Holliston, Mass. 'A lot of times, you don't play games because they take so long.' Board game makers are heeding pleas of parents like Hastings and introducing games tailored to busy lives and shorter attention spans that take only about 20 minutes to play." This is especially interesting to me, given the US adoption of more serious, lengthy German board games in the last few years.
Lengthy German board games? (Score:3, Funny)
You mean such as Sprockets: Touch my monkey!?
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Re:Lengthy German board games? (Score:5, Informative)
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The World of Warcraft boardgame is also surprisingly decent, heh.
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LAME
Re:Lengthy German board games? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wholeheartedly agree that the German board game industry has done woonderful things over the last 15 years. I don't agree with the article that it's the German board games that take long. They usuallly take about an hour. A game is long if it takes 2 hours. It's always been the Anglo-saxon style games that can take an entire day.
This is mostly due to them being more simulationist. Anglosaxon style games invent a new way to model some part of reality (often in a very primitive way) and tweak that into a playable game. German style games invent an interesting and highly playable game mechanism and make up a nice theme around it. The German approach leads to very playable and accessible games. The anglosaxon approach can lead to highly detailed that touch your imagination. Both have their attraction, but if you want speed, German is the way to go. (I personally am more leaning towards anglosaxon games at the moment.)
Note that the designations "German" or "Anglosaxon" don't mean the game actually comes from Germany or the US/UK. Cheapass Games, for example, is a US company that leans much more to the German way of doing things (but with more humour), whereas German companies have also produced games that definitely lean more in the anglosaxon direction.
(This difference in approach can also be seen in the 18xx [wikipedia.org] games hobby. Lots of hobbyists make excellent games in that genre, but Americans tend to start with a region, research the historic background and try to model that, whereas Europeans think of an interesting concept they want to model in the game, and then look for which region is most suitable for a game implementing that idea.)
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I thought you said 18 XXX. I need some more of that!
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I really hate to disappoint you, but 18xx games are about trains. Can also be arrousing, ofcourse, but only if you're extremely nerdy.
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If memory serves, the estimated playing time is either 100 or 200 hours. That's a pretty good estimate...
Cliff's Notes? (Score:5, Funny)
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From my experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
Simpler games, such as UNO or Mancala, or even more complicated games, such as Rummikub, offer more entertainment for longer periods of time simply because a turn lasts at most 30-45 seconds.
Re:From my experience... (Score:5, Interesting)
I introduced a variant to Monopoly that ensures the game will not take too long: I give everyone six times the normal starting amount in cash. Every time someone passes Go, he has to *pay* $200. This ensures that the total flow of money is negative for everyone.
On another note, did anyone else chuckle at the fact that there is a "Disney Monopoly" boardgame you can buy?
Solomon
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Re:From my experience... (Score:4, Informative)
http://richardwilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm [tripod.com]
This one says that the bank auctions off all the belongings of bankrupt players. It also says that the limit for late rent is two turns later. It also says that a whole color must be un-house'd before one of the properties can be mortgaged (a sensible rule, but the rules I have read only required that property to be empty, meaning one house could remain on the others). Contrary to the grandparent-linked "Official Monopoly Rules", it says you can unmortgage property for 110% immediately upon buying it, instead of paying the (unheard of) extra 10%.
There is no single set of "Official Monopoly Rules". There are many variants, many of which are or were official at some point in some place. There are many rulesets. Some are good, some are bad. Some people make up house rules (like auctions) that happen to be printed rules in other sets.
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http://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/monins.pdf [hasbro.com]
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Avalon Hill is the worst offender (Score:2)
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No-one ever wants to play Monopoly with me.. (Score:2)
Re:No-one ever wants to play Monopoly with me.. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my experience, if you play Monopoly RIGHT (by the official rules) and focus on the game instead of gabbing about other things the whole time, it can take two hours or less, sometimes as little as one hour.
Monopoly is also a lot more brilliant a game than most people think. Most people who "like Monopoly" don't have a clue what most of the rules are, and they insist on playing with house rules that completely mess up the game's economy and add too much luck (*cough* Free Parking Jackpot *cough*). Another offense is allowing as many houses/hotels as you want. The game has a carefully chosen limit of 32 houses and 12 hotels -- there must NEVER be more than that on the board. Many don't want to play with the auction rule, where all properties landed on that aren't immediately purchased must immediately be auctioned. Not to mention other silliness like trading immunities to paying rent for trades.
Hint: All "house rules" are bad, but the ones that run counter to the game's goal -- bankrupting every player but you ASAP -- will make the game last longer. Play it right and you'll fly through it!
SOMEBODY GETS IT!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Ugh. No wonder it would take hours.
damn (Score:2)
apparently all my time playing monopoly was diverted from learning html. sorry.
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Regarding immunity deals, here's my interpretation: The rules obviously don't allow them. BUT since the rules also do not require one to collect rent when an opponent lands on your property, it is possible to make a gentleman's agreement not to collect rent on X number of lands on your newly developed property. However, since it is nothing but a gentle
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I'm not sure, but a chess game mi
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In the 1930's Monopoly was brilliant. In contrast with modern games, its flaws are thrown in sharp relief.
Game design:
1) It is an elimination game with a platykurtic expected duration distribution. If you are going to knock players out, you need a strongly defined endpoint.
2) Deal-making games are more interesting with more players; deal-making games with elimination get less interesting as the game progresses.
3) It has indeterminant leng
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People play Monopoly because of:
1. The play money. Replace Monopoly's play money with something else and people will be like "hey, where's the play money."
2. The cute little tokens that look like various things. (Including the player tokens and the little houses an
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If you're going to say something, it might be sensible to use real words. Then people might actually know what you're talking about.
Has anyone g
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In most games of Monopoly, it only takes two or three trips round the board for one person to be obviously in the lead, largely due to the luck of their landing. Then the next hour is just playing out that ineviatable result; usually quite some time after the first person got elimina
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And I've successfully paid hotel rent on Boardwalk before, its easy when you own all the Red and Orange properties! People obsess about getting Boardwalk and Park Place, and are willing to trade you Red and Orange for way less than their market value should be. Statistically, they have the highest possibility to be landed on, and the orange properties have some of the best payout:hotel cost ratio on th
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This is because of Jail. The most likely number to roll on two dice is 7, and 7 squares back from Park Lane is 'Go to Jail'. So, you go to Jail and on coming out you're very likely to land on Bow Street, Vine Street or Marlborough Street. You can ge
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For a game that is supposed to focus on trading, handing out properties at random is a nice way of priming the pump. Ending the game after 1 or 2 players is good since at that point the snowball of dominance starts rol
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when i was young, i have designed a board game with some strange and flexible rules which could be played for a couple of days, or even weeks.
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Along with his sidekick Apparent Boy (Score:5, Funny)
Will Captain Obvious save the day from the evil Duh League? Find out next time, on IB Times!
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How generous of them. (Score:2)
Oh, how generous of board game manufacturers to deign to give us shorter games.
This is all nonsense. If you've got a good game store in your neighborhood, you can walk in and say, "I'm looking for a game that takes less than 30 minutes to play." If they can't show you at least a dozen games, you probably don't have a good game store.
If you want shorter games, look for games specifically designed to be short and quick. Hacking an existing game to be shorter is neat and all, but you'll get a better exp
Re:How generous of them. (Score:5, Funny)
Then I announced loudly that I wanted to find a game that would take less than 30 minutes. One of the girls looked at me and said, "Honey, you want one that will take less than 30 seconds," and then they all went "Mmm-hmmm!" in unison and did a head-bob.
I want to know where the hell you guys get your games.
Speaking of German Games (Score:3, Informative)
Well, first, it is more than the past few years. Settlers of Catan was one of the earliest BIG cross over games. I was playing it since college, means the cross over started about a decade ago.
Secondly, I get the distinct impression that the original audience doesn't take these games nearly as seriously as US players. Settlers says on the packaging that its running time is about 1-2 hours (If I recall correctly, my original packaging has been lost to the sands of time), yet my games regularly run 3 or more hours, as trades and debates and discussions of beat-the-current-leader happens. This ratio of about twice-as-long seems to be consistent with most of the German Board Games my group plays/played.
(On the other hand, it could just be false advertising. Witness the order of the Stick game that takes ages to play, despite the packaging).
And I STILL can't find anyonre to play Kingmaker with me, and very few who play Magic Realm.
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I once played in a game of Settlers (Seafarers) where each time it came to a particular persons turn it would take 20 minutes or more for them to decide what to do. It made for an exceptionally long game. :(
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Secondly, I get the distinct impression that the original audience doesn't take these games nearly as seriously as US players. Settlers says on the packaging that its running time is about 1-2 hours (If I recall correctly, my original packaging has been lost to the sands of time), yet my games regularly run 3 or more hours, as trades and debates and discussions of beat-the-current-leader happens. This ratio of about twice-as-long seems to be consistent with most of the German Board Games my group plays/played.
It's just your style of play. The group of people I regularly play with are much quicker. We haven't played Catan in a long time (we generally prefer games with less luck), but when we do games do not often exceed an hour with 3-4 people and I've never had one go over 2 hours. Most other games we play in a much shorter time than packages states. It's just a matter of knowing the rules well, focusing on quick play, and not getting distracted.
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Disclaimer: Order of the Stick playtester. Buy the expansion, coming soon to a store near you!
Stick can be completed within the listed time, if you're playing with board gamers. However, their target audience is the RPG crowd. These are people who play one game within an eight hour session, as opposed to about four games. They're working on alternate rules to al
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I remember the last game of Kingmaker I played. It was suppose to be a "quick" game, and it ended up taking us 11 hours to finish, with three of us playing.
H.
Define "lengthy German board game" (Score:2)
Days? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't know if they've changed the rules for Disney Monopoly - usually variants just change street names and graphic design - but Monopoly should never take days, unless players are deliberately buying property from each other at inflated prices to prevent anyone going out of the game. Or unless people are refusing to trade cards so that nobody can form a complete colour group and build houses, in which case it's stalemate and you might as well call a draw.
After an hour or two of Monopoly the board should be full of houses. At that point the game ends fast; the ASSESSED FOR STREET REPAIRS and MAKE GENERAL REPAIRS cards are ruinously expensive to a big landlord. As a result, money comes out of the game a good deal faster than it comes into it from people passing GO. All those fees go to the Bank, leaving players with less and less money to pay the ever-larger rents, and the game must end soon.
You could, I suppose, invent a new game in which money did not ever leave the game and return to the Bank - perhaps you could put the money from fines and fees and so forth into some jackpot, and designate a square such that anybody landing there would collect all the wealth accumulated there - but that game would last forever, become incredibly frustrating once everybody had so much money that they didn't care about landing on Mayfair, and would basically not be Monopoly.
Re:Days? (Score:5, Informative)
It's CLEARLY in the rules, but somehoe that rule isn't followed, which slows down games because all the properties are not bought as fast as they should be.
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http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Monopoly/Official_Rul es [wikibooks.org]
There are other reasons why the games take forever, players are overly cautious. Even if the walls are caving in around them as a the one player with a monopoly begins to clean house, they will desperately hang on waiting to land on that one property that will give them a monopoly rather than have
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Monopoly's a game that often rewards the bold. For instance, your archrival has landed on Free Parking (where he receives no reward and incurs no penalty, and moves on as norm
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Yeah! Right...Piccadilly...ROTFL...That anywhere near Marvin Gardens??
You've probably never even been to the eastern seaboard [wikipedia.org] before, have you pal?
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* buying/selling houses at any time
* paying extra interest when trading mortgaged property
* using 'get out of jail free' immediately on landing on Go To Jail
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This is unspecified in the rules booklet that came with my Monopoly set (the British version with London place names). It just says you can buy houses. Obviously it would be a gaping hole in the rules to allow buying houses just after a roll of the dice and before another player lands on your property. We usually play with the rule that house buying or selling (or indeed any other kind of trading) can happen before each dice roll. It's hard to believe that whoever wrot
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Another terrible house rule that lengthens the game.
TWW
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No, if we're talking about Disney Monopoly, it's a very abbreviated form of the game. There's just castles, not houses and hotels. The properties are more like $2 and feature all of the princesses and their doofy animal friends. Even when your young child understands the money math and can follow the rules, they can still get restless and bored before the game is half done. "It's your turn, sweety" starts out gently, and gets more tedious and more edgy as the energy saps right out of you. By the end o
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not sure about the 50s, but in the mid-70s when I was a kid in Europe we had only two crappy tv channels and no video games, so in the summer we spent most of the day playing outside, save when it was super hot (around noon-2pm) or rainy and then the board games came out: together with Risk, Monopoly was one of our favorites, we were between 7 and 9 years old and we had absolutely no problems with following the official rules and/o
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My family has played such a varian
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The commodore 64 version of monopoly actually had that as a "rule". Perhaps people remembered the old computer days in which that was applied..
Setup Time vs. Actual Play Time (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I don't see a way to address the issue without ruining the game. Part of the attraction of the game is the varied unit types, and its the very presence of varied units that makes setup so difficult.
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Yeah, that was why I stopped playing Mall Madness [boardgames.com] a while back...
It is true! (Score:3, Interesting)
That is why I play chess with friends via correspondence.
I can use a program/site or just use IM/Email using chess notation. The site offers a ton of features, but after a while you should be able to play chess games without ever having to see the board physically. Instead you just read it with notation.
Of course, most games cannot be played via notation, but via correspondence, it is surely an option.
Edit: Average game of ~30 moves takes about anywhere from 3 to 30 days for me. Most finish within 3-5 days.
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I used to play a lot of chess in school, but now that I'm in college I'm having trouble finding people at my level to play against. Everyone I meet seems to be a newbie or (more commonly) way too advanced.
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Once signed up, you can challenge me if you wish, I am not that great at all. My name on there is the part of my username here on
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I'm signed up now and my user name is the same as my slashdot user name.
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short attention span theater (Score:2, Interesting)
Luxury (Score:2)
This is nuts (Score:3, Insightful)
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You want a short board game? (Score:2)
they last how long?! (Score:3, Funny)
Did anyone else misread this as:
more serious, lengthy German board games which last a few years
?
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"Did anyone else misread this as: more serious, lengthy German board games which last a few years "
Like "Invade Poland!"
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The problem with long games (Score:4, Insightful)
If the game isn't well balanced in one way, or if the players' skill levels are mismatched, then one or more players are going to pull ahead while everyone else falls behind with no hope of catching up. This might be fun for the players in the lead, but it can get very frustrating to the others. _Especially_ if they're not as much into board games. This can make convincing non-board game geek friends or SOs to join you for a game very difficult.
If the game isn't balanced in another way then the results become based more on luck than skill, especially if it's possible for one player to jump up from behind suddenly at the end and wind up on top. This can be acceptable if the game is of a more silly nature, one designed to make everyone compete in crazy antics and the enjoyment is more in the journey than the goal, but not so much in a "serious" game. "Apples to Apples" is a good example of a game that manages to have a goal to compete for but which no one really cares a great deal who wins.
An ideal game allows players who are behind to catch up, but in a way that is at least theoretically foreseeable and preventable. Allowing ways for the players who are behind to gang up on the person in charge often helps with this. And often times setting alternate goals for yourself when it seems that victory is out of your grasp can be entertaining if you can maintain the right mindset. If you're already out of the running then sabotaging the person in the lead to give the game to the person who was second can be a fun goal (assuming you're playing with people who won't hold grudges of course =)
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priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
there has always been a talk going about how story based video games take too long for working parents to be able to play them, and I can understand that perspective. It's hard to get time away from work and responsibilities of being a parent for that long when you work and have kids, but this seems to be a different issue entirely.
Seriously if your business life is so busy that you can't sit down with your 5 year of daughter long enough to play a game of candy land the problem is not candy land. It's time to rethink your priorities.
You mean, Quiddler? (Score:2)
Sounds a lot like Quiddler [setgame.com], a card-based game that's like Scrabble for the impatient. My friends and family are hooked on it. (The other Set games [setgame.com], including the eponymous "Set", are also fun, quick, and brain-
The Young Ones (Score:2)
Monopoly was featured prominently in the Young Ones "Boring" episode [wikipedia.org]. I first saw it as a teen, and I was amazed at how universal the close association between Monopoly and boredom is.
I admit that the auction rule would make the game move along. I first came across it last year while teaching the game to my kids. I didn't teach it to them because I had never played with it, and I thought it was some new addition to the game. Plus, it was pretty hard to get the kids to understand why they'd want to buy t
Are you stupid? (Score:2)
Days? Are you brain dead? I ahve a 6 and nine year old, and we play it in an afternoon.
Here is a clue: Figure out a way to get MORE time with your kids.
Maybe adjust your expenses so you can live on one income? Magically you will have more time with your kids.
You might not be able to afford Cable TV, and buy 2 year old cars, but where are these peoples priorities?