The A to Z of Board Games – A

In this new series of articles we are going back to school to learn our ABCs… Of board games! An opportunity to explore random corners of the board game hobby, to highlight influential games, designers, concepts, and maybe to dig up the odd surprise here and there. Hopefully sensibly, I’m starting from the beginning… With A.

Abstract – Concept

While all board games are in some way abstractions, Abstract games go the whole way and do away with theme and often artwork entirely to leave you with a purely cerebral affair. Chess, Go and many classical games fall into this category, but there is an entire genre of these games in the modern hobby. Widely regarded examples include the GIPF Project series, Onitama, or Hive. Many games are also seen as being dangerously close to Abstracts, with mechanics that do little to represent the theme they have on the box. This is not a genre of games I’ve explored very much, I appreciate a nice theme. These can often be rather specialist games with very nice components and a price to match.

Accessibility – Concept

Accessibility is an important topic in board gaming, well, in everything really, but it’s really been coming to the fore thanks to enhanced coverage in the media by various people, most especially Meeples Like Us (who correctly recommended the topic). Accessibility is the general concept of how easy it is for various groups to enjoy a board game. The easiest example might be colour blindness, and whether a game’s components are double coded so that players who can’t distinguish red from green say, can still play the game without difficulty. The topic is much deeper and more nuanced than that though, and I recommend you check out this discussion piece by Meeple Like Us to find out more.

Action Point allocation – Mechanic

In games using Action Point Allocation, you may have a certain number of these “action points” available in a round that you spend on doing things. For example, a dungeon crawl might have you spend action points on moving, attacking and casting powerful spells, getting you to decide how to prioritise your turn. The mechanic was brought to the fore by Tikal, a game of exploring and exploiting the temples of a South American rainforest, and since then it has appeared in games like Descent, Cthulhu Wars and Zombicide to name only a very very few.

Advanced Squad Leader – Game

Advanced Squad Leader is one of board gaming’s seminal war games. A system that has spawned an endless quantity of chits and hex-maps and campaigns to let you explore WW2 in stunning depth but, as with so many war games, that depth comes at a price and the rules… Manual is something you might use to fortify your house in the event of war. War games, although often seen as a niche within a niche, have a history that long out lasts modern euro games and the like, especially here in the UK. Their influence has been huge, and Advanced Squad Leader has certainly earned the right to represent them on this list! (Shout out to Axis & Allies which almost took this spot!)

Agricola – Game

A game that defined a genre for many, Agricola was one of the first big worker placement games, a type of game that came to dominate the market for a few years. It is famously one of the most punishing too, as you try and keep your small family fed from a Middle Ages farm. In many ways it is seen as having been surpassed by its younger brother Caverna, but Agricola remains a classic that made board gaming what it is today.

Scott Almes – Designer

Our first designer is a relatively new kid on the block, but one who has risen to fame amongst the Kickstarter community, to the point where his name is now enough to sell a game. Scott Almes‘ big break came with the Tiny Epic series (which is now far from tiny!) but he has gone on to become quite prolific with a large number of light to medium weight games. Examples of his work include Tiny Epic Galaxies, Harbour and the Great Dinosaur Rush.

Ted Alspach – Designer

Ted Alspach is the lead designer, and publisher, behind Bezier Games, most famous for their One Night Ultimate party game series, and city building/tile laying games Suburbia and Castles of Mad King Ludwig. I am a big fan of those last two games, although I never really got into One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Ted is also the author of a huge series of computing books and used to write a comic strip for the opinionated gamers website! (It’s very wordy).

Ameritrash – Concept

Ameritrash is a half-insulting turn of phrase to describe a particular design style. It was the dominant style of tabletop games in America in the 1980s and 90s before games from European market made their way across the Atlantic. An Ameritrash game is typically recognised by its heavy emphasis on thematic elements, story and aggressive player interaction. Classic games in this genre include Arkham Horror, Descent, Twilight Imperium, and Fortune & Glory. They stereotypically care less for balance and have a larger emphasis on luck resulting from rolling lots of dice. They are seen insultingly as inelegant compared to a lot of their German designed rivals, but also more exciting and fun!  The classic ‘Beer & Pretzel’ games. Today the distinction between Ameritrash and Euro game is becoming less and less relevant as the best designers now bring the best elements from both design spheres into their games

Analysis Paralysis – Concept

Area Control – Mechanic

This is a widely used game mechanic in which having the most pieces in a given area or region will typically have some benefit (often, victory points). The game which demonstrates this mechanic most purely is El Grande, where players look to have the most influence in various regions of Spain in order to gain control of the Spanish crown. It’s a mechanic that lends itself to representing political influence and voting as in Tammany Hall or Twilight Struggle, or sometimes territory control in a game with limited direct conflict, like Mission Red Planet or Inis. It is one of the more confrontational mechanics in Euro games, as every action you take impacts your opponents and can trigger endless tit-for-tat exchanges in a closely contested region. I do enjoy a good area control game for precisely this region.

Arkham Horror – Game

Plausibly the perfect antithesis of Agricola, Arkham Horror is the poster child of Ameritrash excess! It is a sprawling tribute to Lovercraftian fiction, featuring every tentacled monster and madness inducing spell as you race around the fictional city of Arkham attempting to fight monsters, seal gates and defeat the overall Big Bad before all the horribleness gets too much. It is something of a seminal game in the genre, leading to all manner of spin off games, including the recent card game that I am thoroughly taken by.

Asmodee – Publisher

The board game publisher that ate everybody. You can’t swing a meeple in this industry without banging into something owned by this gaming behemoth. This massive process of expansion kicked off a couple of years ago and triggered a phase in this industry’s life that had not really been seen before and has had some controversial side effects. On the one hand the increased investment is bringing more people into this hobby than ever before. On the other a near monopoly on distribution and publishing is a worrying thing, and pricing restrictions on online sales has already caused upset. Whether you like their impact or loathe it, Asmodee is now a byword for the big, professional processes that are cropping up more and more within this hobby.

Avalon Hill – Publisher

A now mostly defunct publisher that was responsible for some of gaming’s biggest titles, like Axis and Allies, the original Cosmic Encounter, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Diplomacy, or Acquire (which are some of my favourites, well not A&A but I haven’t discovered wargaming just yet). They were founded back in 1958, specialising in war games, before eventually being bought by Hasbro in the late 90s. Since then some games continue to feature the Avalon Hill label, but its major contribution to the hobby is left to the past.

 Isaac Asimov – Surprise!

Oh yes! Did you know esteemed Sci-Fi author Isaac Asimov actually has a couple of board game credits to his name? Sadly they are the unexcitingly named “Isaac Asimov presents Super Quiz“, a series of trivia games. I… er… haven’t played them. But I bet they were amazing.