The Importance Of Theme And Mechanic When Selecting What Game To Play

A conversation during one games evening

An interesting conversation ensued at our last Monday games evening concerning the games we like and dislike. Not surprisingly everybody's list was slightly different, buy interestingly as much as we enjoy playing games there are equally individual games, or game themes or mechanics that we dislike. This conversation might be summarised as:

• Crispin likes the lighter games particularly ones with more social interaction e.g. Bohnanza and Saboteur, but ‘doesn't do’ co-operative games e.g Castle Panic and dislikes Galaxy Trucker and RoboRally.

• Daniella likes pretty much any game (and wins many) and loves RoboRally.

• Ben likes the generally likes the funnier games including Landlord, Braggart, Galaxy Trucker and Saboteur however he will play pretty much anything but doesn't generally enjoy some of the more thoughtful games such as, Alhambra, Seeland and League of Six, dislikes RoboRally but enjoys games such as Blokus and would happily play an exclusion game such as Bang.

• Gwen and I like pretty much anything but with a tendency towards more medium weight / tactical games but no exclusion games e.g. Bang. More specifically ‘Gwen doesn’t do’ SciFi games and Kevin ‘doesn’t do Railway games’ (Kevin keeps this quiet but you might have noted the absence of Ticket to Ride in my collection).

• It now seems that all of our group dislike Race for the Galaxy, claiming it to be to complex (check out this video for an unbiased assessment and form your own views).

Why do I recount the conversation? Because if this group of people who like playing games (and have probably seen many more games than your average UK resident) find there are games that they dislike, I suspect that if one of those had been their only ever encounter with games it might have left them thinking "I really don’t like games". A view that seems common to a large percentage of the UK population and one that could demonstrably be based on only a limited exposure to the games available today.

No comments:

Post a Comment