Board game designers Mike “Kodak” Hanft and David Sherrer spent an hour with moderator Brian Schoner on the Table Top Gaming’s “Quick & Easy Board Games” panel on Friday 2:30PM, Augusta (Westin). The trio organized a list of published board games containing easy rules for newcomers and gameplay depth for veterans. Each slide in the presentation included the game’s primary mechanic for the title, the game’s cover art, name, and designer on the left, and a marketing tabletop graphic of the game to the right.
Schoner plays a variety of games, including board, video, and role-playing. Hanft streams video games on Twitch. Both Hanft and Schoner host The Ascent of Board Games podcast where they discuss the current and future of board games. Sherrer is also a board-game enthusiast and loves cat-themed games. He runs Chenoweth Games, a tabletop game company that produced Outflanked, a successfully crowdfunded board game based off his wife’s novel Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus. Sherrer also made a panel-relative cat-themed print-n-play called Don’t Spell CAT, that he distributed to panel attendees.
Tile-laying and tile-drafting games called Tsuro and 10 Days In USA, respectively, led the slide show. The group highlighted the simplicity of the decision space that drafting and playing a single tile per turn afforded the player however, how the player uses the tile on their turn can also be simple or complex depending on their experience level. Codenames received cheers from the crowd, to which Sherrer commented on gameplay with his wife and how he brought her up to speed on ‘80s trivia through the game’s social deduction mechanics.
Hanft highlighted Neuroshima Hex!, a post-apocalyptic strategy game with more than twenty factions available to play. On their turn, players draw faction tiles from their bag and then play one of three units or actions from their hand to the board. Orientation of each unit on the board determines their impact on the future battle. When a battle is initiated, units on the board attack each other simultaneously in numerical rank order from highest value to lowest. Hanft mentioned a simple decision space of three options in hand but added the depth of gameplay when placing the chosen unit on the board.
The group transitioned to bluffing games, such as Skull, a game where players are dealt four cards—three flower and a skull. During each player’s turn, they either place a card face-down or guess the number of non-skull cards they can reveal from other players in turn-order without hitting a skull. The mechanics are simple with a deck of cards but the possible mind games with veteran players give it depth.
The trick-taking mechanic received some applause from the audience, especially when The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine was on the screen. In trick-taking games, players play one card at a time. The highest card in the suit (following the lead card) or the trump card (pre-determined) wins the round. The goals of each game title incorporating trick-taking may be different but the mechanic is similar, which means exposure to it once reduces the learning curve of other games in the category.
During the area control slides, Sherrer mentioned Couch Kittens. The theme instantly enticed him to try it, but the gameplay didn’t excite him initially. Sherrer played and then loved the game, which required players to fill a couch with their colored kittens. He loves the kittens. Schoner mentioned another area control game called Blokus, where players dropped Tetris-like shapes on a board following the legal placement rule of placing a new tile caddy-cornered to an existing tile in their color.
A game called Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza drew laughter from the audience. Sherrer met the game’s designer at GAMA Expo, a board game convention in Baltimore, Maryland, and instantly fell in love with the game. Players take turns flipping facedown cards in front of them while saying “Taco”, “Cat”, “Goat”, “Cheese”, and “Pizza” based on their turn order. If in turn order, a player says a card name that matches the card they flipped over, all players rush to cover that card with their hand. The last player to slap the pile takes that stack into their hand, moving them further from the goal of emptying their hand. The mention of a Halloween and Christmas expansion solicited gasps from the crowd.
Deck-building games like Ascension generated a lot of conversation. Ascension was praised for improving on the original Dominion deck-building mechanic by adding an additional resource without complicating the gameplay. Like trick-taking, deck-building is often a mechanic intertwined with others in larger board games.
Sherrer almost started a controversial topic when he said Candyland wasn’t a board game by definition because players don’t make any decisions, but instead, are along for the ride. A topic for another panel.
Schoner closed the panel out with a couple titles of legacy style games that are easy to pick up and play, such as Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West. In legacy style games, player’s decisions and actions change the game permanently. Newer board game titles have used removable stickers to give players additional replayability.
