Ancient Games

Over the past few weeks, every Thursday we have been getting our hands on some ancient games, the first of which was Senet (The game of 30 squares) and The Royal Game of Ur (The game of 20 squares).

The Royal Game of Ur is a race game in which each player has to get all of their counters onto and then back off of the board, while being chased by their opponent, the way in which the two players can reset the position of each others counters by landing on the same square meant that the two players had to use strategy to get to the end of the board making the game fun and competitive.

Senet shares many similarities with Ur as it is a race game in which each player has to get their counters from one end of the board to the other and then off, however in Senet their are certain ways that players can block the other player from advancing along the board, such as by having three spaces occupied in a row.

Overall I found both games relatively fun to play, although I do feel that some of the rules in both games could do with a slight tweak to both make the rules clearer to the players and also to make the game better overall

The second game we played was Duodecium Scripta which is a two player racing game, played with 15 pieces of their colour choice, plus three six sided dice. The game starts with the players pieces off the board and build up in each players starting location, they can't move out of the home place in the middle until you have filled and stacked the board, once this starting row is filled then the player may move up to the top right of the board and move left along the top of the board and then once that is done down to the bottom and move right till the final phase of the game where they must roll the exact number to get off of the board. The only problem with the games was that it had a mechanic that allowed players to stack counters and move the stack as if it was one counter, this meant that all one player had to do was get all of their counters in one huge stack and race to the end, defeating the object of having multiple counters.

Lastly we played Tablut which is again is a two player game but this time it isn't a race game Tablut is a game with each player being either white or black, white has to protect the king and get him to the corners of the board and black have capture the king by surrounding him on all sides. This makes the game compelling from the idea of movement on the board however king will more likely win then lose due to 1 piece movement and how you are forced as black to get 4 pieces around, when I say you can win with nothing but a king due to the movement style of rooks from chess, because of this the king can run away unless boxed into 2 or 3 boxes and then crushed slowly by the black team.

 

 

 

SissyFight 2000

Sissyfight 2000 
This was the game played in Robs lecture last Friday. The game involved using a set of cards (Team, Defend and Solo) to either attack one of your opponents or defend yourself you also got a set of colours, one of which you take for yourself and the others of which indicated the player you wanted to attack, So one of the main mechanics, is this hidden information factor, as players only know what card they have picked and who they are going to be attacking, any successful attacks/ defends get a set deduction from their counter pile, this mechanic leads to players trying to team up with each other to try and mount an attack on someone else or double bluff someone and then go attack someone else, creating a sense of backstabbing and tension.

We played three games before we went on to iterate the game, our first iteration was to add a mechanic that allowed on player to use a certain card so that any other damage done to a player would be doubled, this created an even stronger sense of people teaming up, as it ended up that everyone just tried to form alliances to get someone out of the game as quickly as possible, our second iteration was to add another colour card that when used would do damage to every other player in the game however if more than one person used the card only the people that used that card would take damage, this lead to people just trying to use it every round and the game ending very quickly

 My thought on the game is that I didn't really enjoy it, this is mainly due to the fact that I was for the most part, the person that was being targeted at the start of every game, mainly due to the friends I was playing the game with, haha

Game Classification

On Wednesday we learnt about how to define video games and how to categorize them.

We looked at the studies of James Newman who referred to Roger Caillois who came up with the idea of putting games into two main categories Paidia and Ludus.

Paidia can be simply explained as, “play” for pleasure

Ludus is defined as more constrained by rules, with a clear outcome (E.g. “Winning”)

He then furthered that by bringing in the following:

Agon: Competition - a competitive multiplayer game

Alea: Chance, Randomness - A gambling game or equivalent

Ilinx: Movement, Vertigo: - Outdoor sports, skiing, skateboarding

Mimicry: Simulation, Role-Play – Cinema

Games that came to mind when I thought of Ludus were board games as they have a clearly defined set of rules that have to be followed for the game to function properly. Board games also have an element of competition to them as most of them involve players playing against each other to see who can get to the goal first.

World of Warcraft is a game that offers the player a huge sandbox  world to play in and gives people the freedom to do what they want, whenever and how they want to, which is why I feel like it has elements of Paidia however it also has elements of Agon with the competitive PvP, Alea as the loot system is based on a roll between 1 and 100.