The Joy of Galaxy Trucker

At my former workplace, where it often landed on the table at lunchtime, the boardgame Galaxy Trucker had a nickname: "Tucker Fucker." Okay, so it's not the cleverest of nicknames, but there's a good reason why the moment the name was coined, it stuck.

The Joy of Galaxy Trucker is...

Punishment

Galaxy Trucker is a game about building a spaceship and then putting it to the test. It's one part pipe game and one part racing through random encounters. What both parts share, though, is the quality of never making things easy on you. So, yeah: Trucker Fucker.

The charmingly cynical theme of the game (sprinkled throughout the rulebook in a way that makes it delightful to read the first time and frustrating to sift through for clarifications later) is that you're a pilot for a corporate entity doing the necessary job of transporting sewer systems to the galaxy's various settled systems. For efficiency's sake, rather than packing the sewer lines in a cargo hold of a standard hauler, the ships are built out of those very sewer lines--with useful accessories like guns and shields bolted on to them. This is Galaxy Trucker kindly establishing from the start that no matter what you do, your ship is going to be a shitheap.

Building a ship requires sifting through a bunch of randomized tiles laid face-down on the table in front of the players. You can pick one up at a time, and then you have to connect it to your ship or return it to the table face-up. The key is learning to work with what you get, not what you want, because that laser you really need may end up only fitting when pointed off to the side (halving its combat value). Or that engine fits perfectly... except there's another piece directly behind it, which--so sorry!--is illegal placement. And, oh, did you just finish your ship only to realize you never added any shields? That's okay because you don't have the batteries to power them anyway. Good luck! (Tucker Fucker.)

Building isn't just a competition between players for the pieces they need. It's also timed. Well, it's supposed to be, anyway, but my group never plays with the timer. For one thing, teaching new players the game with the pressure of time is cruel even for Trucker Fucker. For another, we had too many players who obsessed over building the best ship they could and would have up-ended the table if they were forced to quit part way through. There's still a reward for being done quickly and a penalty for being last: the first player to declare their ship finished gets "pole position" for the race through space, and that leading player always gets first pick of any goodies and first shot at any enemies and their loot. (Players with more working engines on their ship can eventually overtake those ahead of them... or make their lead that much more insurmountable.)

A quick catalog of the components available in the sea of tiles on the table might help to convey the dizzying number concerns you have to balance while scraping your ship together: 

• engines for speeding past opponents
• laser guns for blasting asteroids and enemies
• crew modules (they salvage goods from derelicts, and also, you know, keeping the ship flying)
• storage for carrying precious goods
• batteries for powering certain components
• shields that cover half the ship (you need two, properly oriented, to protect the whole ship)
• alien life support (when next to a habitation module for an alien that gives useful bonuses)
• also super lasers and super engines--twice as effective but they consume battery power
• oh and connectors, which do nothing but fill holes when you're really desperate

(The gratuitous expansion adds, among many other variants and features, more components: hibernation modules to hold extra crew, a furnace that burns goods for battery power, indestructible armor plating, luxury quarters for tourists who bring extra income if they survive the trip, and a modules that lets you super-charge an adjacent module for super-effect... which then melts that module in the process.)

The key to doing well is building smart: watch out for modules that leave dead ends, check periodically for critical modules you're short on, don't stress about open connections on the edge of your ship (although these make you vulnerable to otherwise harmless small asteroids).
You also have to make sure all your connections are legal. What this ultimately requires is a practiced eye--or at least a more practiced eye than your opponents, who are encouraged to scour your ship once you're done, looking for illegal connections. If they find one, not only do any offending modules get tossed in the trash heap (along with anything that thereby ends up unconnected to the rest of the ship), but you lose any pole position you earned by finishing early. So to be clear: you've got a whole table of Trucker Fuckers trying to take your ship apart before the trip even starts.

Now this ship of yours--awkward, but lovely in your eyes after the harrowing experience of creating it--is ready. Ready to be carved up piece by piece by the perils of the galaxy. Trucker Fucker!

The journey takes the form of a stack of random event cards. There are worlds that dispense goods, derelicts to be looted, and open space where you can open up the engines and try to overtake your opponents on the player order "racetrack." But just as commonly there are asteroid fields, pirates, slavers, and other baddies whose job it is to slice your beloved bird into floating scrap. Damage typically comes at you in a sequence of rocks and/or laser blasts, each approaching from one of four directions. Dice are rolled to determine the precise row or column that the shot comes in at. As the current player shakes the dice, you look at all those weak spots on your starship's left side and, like a desperate prayer, ask that it be anything but a 4. I've seen a ship lose fully half of its components from an unlucky shot to one critical piece. Trucker. Fucker.

And yet what's beautiful about the game is precisely that these things are possible. Your ship doesn't have that most vulgar of game abstractions, the hit point pool. It's a big, sloppy conglomeration of inadequate technology, and Trucker Fucker--God bless it--treats it as such. The fun that's here requires you to buy into this punishment. If you expect to see your ship fighting its way through swarms of pirates, gathering valuable goods as rewards, you're playing the wrong game. Your ship will suffer. Your cute little plastic astronauts will be lucky if they're not sucking vacuum before the journey is over. Yes, you get paid when your ship makes it to port--you get money for goods collected, for being the among the first to arrive, and you bank any loose cash you harvested in space. But don't focus on that part; you'll only get your expectations up. After all, you also get penalized for each piece that's blown off your ship. And, yes, in the next round, you'll get to build a bigger ship, with more guns, more engines, more cargo space. Sounds great! But really this just means more competition over the same number of modules while building, and more charred sewer pipe ship chunks that you have to pay for at the end of the round.

What makes Galaxy Trucker my favorite game about starships is how the component-based ship construction pays off in both the major sections of the game. In building, it makes for a frenzied, confused scramble of a puzzle game. In flying, it makes for the most delightful kind of punishment, like a gambling game where the only open question is just how badly you're going to lose. Achiever-style players will hate its deflating power arc. Competitive players will chafe at how the game screws with you more than you can screw with others. Artistes will get nauseated watching their creations' agonizing demise. I've also found that some people are just much better at building ships efficiently than others, so there's not always a level playing field. But if you're worrying about who is winning, you're probably playing it wrong. The biggest pile of space bucks is the least interesting story that emerges when you subject yourself to that son-of-a-bitch we lovingly call Trucker Fucker.

Three Metaphors For Shadow Watch

I.

Shadow Watch is a fist.

Four fingers and a thumb, squinched up tight and cocked for quick release.

It won't lay you flat out, if you're a seasoned opponent: Your stagger backwards is its prize, and your surprised eyes.

II.

Shadow Watch is a shadow play of an action movie.

Nineteen scenes acted out in slices of time. The motions are the thing, not their meaning:

Invisible bullets. A crumpling figure. A sidle to the left, and a gun raised coolly to the shoulder.

III.

Shadow Watch is the joy of competence.

Skill stacked on skill; like bodies, dropped with efficiency, three wide and three deep.

These six keys tumbling six hundred locks, first noisily, and bloody, by the end are quiet and clean.

The Joy of The Oregon Trail

It's a shame, and a little bit surprising, that more educational games didn't follow in the footsteps of the historical simulation The Oregon Trail (MECC, 1985). Perhaps there aren't a lot of non-wartime historical periods that could really grip a grade-schooler the way that frontier settlement did, but I'm not willing to concede that point without someone at least putting some significant brain power into the question. Viking exploration? The life of a native American tribe? The space race? I think a game about running a newspaper--digging up and researching stories, being the first to break a scandal, managing your readership--all throughout the whole sweep of American history would be fascinating and educational.

Hm. On second thought, maybe that last idea is flawed, and maybe Oregon Trail tells us why. A newspaper editor finds stories, selects stories, and shapes stories, but those stories are made by others. Oregon Trail is the opposite. The Joy of The Oregon Trail is...

Storybuilding

Simulations are underappreciated for their storytelling capabilities. What do I enjoy more in Civilization? Strategically managing my military units to recapture a valuable city from the computer AI? Or the story of when Ramses liberated the captured Thebes from that weasel Napoleon using Egypt's advanced chariot technology? Even simulating Gettysburg has the narrative thrill of rewriting--or simply replaying--history.

We shouldn't let the scope, the openness, the mathiness, or the spreadsheety qualities of simulations convince us that their stories are secondary or non-existent. I think it's Civ V designer Jon Shaffer who says that a game is always really happening in the player's mind. Isn't this true of story as well? Obviously so-called story-driven games like Grim Fandango or Mass Effect or The Walking Dead have stories that work their way into player's minds, but they're delivered there, not built there; they're built in the designer's mind. A simulation, in contrast, is a strategic scaffolding on which the player's imagination hangs its story, and this is a powerful difference.

Oregon Trail builds more powerful stories than most for the simple reason that it takes place on a more personal level. Each story is the story of a family. You know where they come from, you know what they hope for, and you know how little they have to get them there. And you not only know their names, you chose them. The leader is probably named after you, and in the second slot is your brother, and then your two best friends and your dog. And one of these brave travelers is going to get typhoid, force you to rest until winter hits the Rockies, and then die anyway. Probably your brother, because that's the kind of jerk he is. Oregon Trail also leaves a customizeable tombstone behind where failed expeditions meet thier end--possibly the most brilliant and appropriate hi-score system ever devised, and clearly an effective device precisely because we want to know the end to every great (or even not-so-great) story.


X-COM:UFO Defense is another simulation game that takes place at this personal level, and that's part of its magic as well. But Oregon Trail surpasses X-COM for narrative power because the tribulations of the frontier family--not enough food, influenza, technology failures--are so much more imaginable by your average person.

While not many games have adopted Oregon Trail's systems, it has inspired many parodies, a testament, I think, to the fact that it captures players' story sense as much as their "game brain." (It's also a testament to childhood nostalgia, of course.) There's the recent Organ Trail, where you're driving a station wagon west through a zombie apocalypse. There's the stupendously silly and shooty Super Amazing Wagon Adventure (Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo--and unicorns). And there's So Long, Oregon. Let's go Find El Dorado (or its more charming original title: "Fuck Oregon, Let's Go Find El Dorado!") which plays like Trials or Excitebike, but with Indians and cholera.


Footnote
No Son of Mine Plays Oregon Trail Like That.

The Joy of 7 Wonders

I wanted to write about the way 7 Wonders (tabletop - Asmodee, 2010) does such an amazing job of focusing the players' attention, distilling its gameplay down to just a few choices, and wrapping you in a little bubble of concern that doesn't have to encompass the whole table.  However, if I'm going to stay true to my mission of describing the joy of a game, I have to be honest and say that this is a mechanical innovation that makes the game play better.  Obviously, immensely important.  But what does the game build on top of this tightly focused play experience that brings so much delight?

Consider how concentrated the game's theme is.  There's so much stuff in this small game.  The Joy of 7 Wonders is its

Compact Comprehensiveness

We're talking about a civilization game that plays in 30-40 minutes, after all. Compared to the lean 7 Wonders, this genre is full of the gaming equivalent of a bacon buffet:

Civilization (AH): 430 minutes

Through the Ages: 280 minutes

History of the World: 220 minutes

Rise of Empires: 220 minutes

Sid Meier's Civilization (both): 220 minutes

Antike: 144 minutes

Age of Empires III: 144 minutes

(Times extended by about 20% from their publisher-reported times.  It's the responsible thing to do.)

The only real competitor with 7 Wonders is Roll Through the Ages, also a fine small civilization game.  But Roll Through the Ages can't quite match 7 Wonder's feeling of comprehensiveness.

In 7 Wonders, you can (in somewhat simple gameplay terms) corner the market on a good or become a trading hub. You can become learned in many things or specialize your civilization's knowledge. You can escalate a war with your neighbors or capitulate to their empire.  You can festoon your cities with the institutions of culture and government or build one fantastic monument.  You can (and will) do many of these things in a variety of combinations.

Sure, other civilization games are richer, painting a historical narrative of sometimes epic scale.  Also epic is the time between your turns.  You know when it's your turn in 7 Wonders?  RIGHT NOW.  Build a stone quarry or a coliseum or a lighthouse or a marketplace; build a library or the freaking Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  Just play a card, already!

The Joy of Trine

The whole idea of finding the "joy" of a game is to side-step all the talk of whether it's fun and why.  Assume fun.  What else does a game provide once it's supplied you with the sine qua non of the medium?  That's the JOY.

Well, this one's easy.

The Joy of Trine is THIS.

Also: More, more, more, and more.

The Joy of Metroid

It was when I printed out a map for Metroid (Nintendo, 1986) off the internet and felt a creeping unease and remorse that I really started to understand what makes the game work.

Why did it bother me to look at that map--sweeping my eyes over it to find Energy pods I missed, identifying the boss rooms--why did that seem so wrong? Five minutes at my PC and this venerable game felt somehow... broken.

Some games, it must be said, are all the better with maps. Might & Magic without maps? Absurd! Grand Theft Auto III without that paper map unfolded next to you (at least for the first few hours)? Why would you do that? Etrian Odyssey??-- well, I haven't played it, but I've read enough to know: MAPS!

So what's with you, Metroid? Is there something under that power suit of yours that's too simplistic or fragile to be laid bare like that?

"Me?" this game responds, eyebrows raised. "I'm Metroid. If you need a map, you're playing me wrong." Further shamed, I look away, because I know Metroid is right. Because the Joy of Metroid is...

Familiarity

It's built up slowly, as familiarity has to be.  Here's the short hallway with cracked bricks under me. And the broad wall I have to roll under. Ah, and here! Here is the tall vertical shaft room. Up a bit and through the non-descript hallway and I'm in the gold vertical shaft room.

If you've played Metroid, you'll remember these shaft rooms. With their dozen branches and sub-branches, these two rooms are the twin trunks at the core of the game--at least the early stages. They're the axis of the world.

If you passed through these rooms just one time, as you might in another platformer, you wouldn't remember them--they would be simply a couple challenges to be bested. And not very good challenges, at that. Repetitious. Obvious safe havens and generous angles for firing on enemies. The biggest setback they offer is slipping and falling down a few screens (assuming you're on your way up). But these vertical rooms aren't built for that kind of challenge, and for good reason. In Metroid, form follows function: these are throughways, meant to be driven not quite on auto-pilot, but with the sure, steady confidence that comes from... well, familiarity.

The mechanic that produces this effect is Metroid's trademark backtracking structure. You see obstacles early on that you only get the solutions to much later. And so you come back to them, threading your way through rooms you've already (maybe) mastered.

Replaying stuff, even in reverse, is not really why it works. The magic happens in your mind. The first time you visualize exactly how you can get from one far end of the game world--through the green brick area, down the gold shaft, down to the short corridor...--then actually follow that mental map to your destination, you feel a singular thrill. This world that confronted you at first with its stark alienness has become your own.

If you had done that by following some paper map, the world would still be out there... it would still belong to the designer, like a book belongs to its author no matter how many times you read it.

Patterns of Behavior

Why doesn't familiarity breed complacency? Or dullness? Well, of course there are always new branches to explore and then absorb. But it's also because while the environments stay the same, you change. Returning to a vertical shaft with the freeze gun turns every side-to-side skimmer into a potential platform to stand on. It's a bit like revisiting a poem you read in high school: the words don't change but your vocabulary has grown.

The enemies in the game, with their at-first surprising, then perfectly predictable, behaviors serve as their own distinct layer of familiarity to achieve. Maybe this is less revolutionary than what's being done with the environments--enemies with deterministic patterns to learn are as old as... Centipede? Space Invaders, I guess. But it's still effective: There was a time you hated those fly-like things with two big dangling claws. They drop down fast, take a ton of shots to kill, and slide on the ground just below your gun's firing line. Now? Now you roll underneath them, tease them off the ground with a jump, freeze them with a shot, jump up, and plant bombs on their icy blue heads. Whether you deal with enemies by avoiding them or shooting them, success hinges on familiarity.

Even the game's music reinforces the theme. An hour into the game, you respond to a certain sparse bleep-bloop theme with a tingling anticipation: It means that mere screens away is one of those peculiar bird statues holding a juicy new power-up. You check your missile display because you know you'll need 5 missiles at the end of the room to open the red missile-locked door.

A Strange New World

Playing recently, I was struck by the paradoxical phenomenon that familiarity somehow enhances the genuine sense of alienness to the world of Metroid. You don't really get this in, say, Super Mario Brothers. Sure, the world is as bizarre as anything in Metroid. But how long does it take before the newness consists of nothing more than a series of abstract challenges of dexterity you haven't seen in quite that configuration before? Metroid provides an ebb and flow between comfort and anxiety as you pass back through familiar areas to take a strange new branch previously inaccessible to you. Emotionally, it's not unlike the airy calmness of riding your horse in Shadow of the Colossus between the stress of confronting and solving each colossus.

Reading up on Metroid, I learned a fascinating historical fact: Metroid flouted the expectations of gamers in 1987 in its very first moment by allowing the player to simply move left. Left of the starting area, in fact, is the game's first crucial power-up. But how many players just assumed that, like every side-scroller before it, Metroid was a game about moving from left-to-right, forever?

Right-to-left, left-to-right, up and back down! For the first time, a game made the player retrace and revisit. The result is a world that is more than a string of challenges; it is a place to inhabit.




Footnote
Okay, actually, this?  This is just beautiful.

The Joy of Blog

Inaugurated August 8, 2012, The Joy of [Game] blog will be a series of analytical essays on individual games. The goal with each essay is to expose those qualities of a game that foster engagement, memorability, and delight.

Boardgames, video games, and sports are all open for discussion.

My name is Chris Floyd, a professional video game designer, amateur boardgame designer, and lifetime game enthusiast.

I encourage any readers to contribute with your own comments, memories, and analysis.

I am indebted to Tadhg Kelly for planting the seed that has become this blog. Whether the future finds it bearing fruit or lying barren is entirely my own doing.