Without an appreciable way to demonstrate rich or lasting gameplay, crowdfunded games have to win the consumer over with visuals. Then, Kickstarter cranked that jack-in-the-box like Lincoln Hawk. Titles like Smash Up, Earth Reborn, and Legendary followed. Other games started to slowly incorporate a focus on content diversity. The tenor changed and discussion concerning variability shifted to the physical as opposed to the abstract. It didn’t radically alter designer or consumer reasoning immediately. That’s antithetical to Dominion’s ideology.
Eventually, you would see enough patterns in the original game’s setup that the card selection would feature a repetition of basic strategic patterns. It hooked us up to an intravenous line of content and we’ve been trolleyed ever since. In many ways, Dominion is defined by variable setup in order to vary the strategic puzzle, as the bulk of decision making is front loaded to the moment before play begins. This is significantly different than a game like Cosmic Encounter which would stand up to many plays using the exact same alien powers. Dominion’s structure requires variable setup in order to experience it anew. Hundreds of games came before it with variable setup, but none presented it as such a crucial element of the play experience. It’s overshadowed by the creative genesis of deckbuilding, but it’s equally as significant to the evolution of thought and culture. Nothing else did such a thing in 2008 and it was wild.
This was the first game to really emphasize variable setup as an anchor of its central loop. There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. You look at the set of Kingdom Cards in the center of the table and devise a rough shopping list and hierarchy of purchases. It’s the essence of Dominion’s strategy landscape. I’m not talking about the mechanism of deckbuilding, but the notion that setup was entirely variable. Vaccarino’s influential 2008 title changed the game. No two plays will ever be the same.ĭonald X.
We live in the age where games sell themselves based on the number of tokens, cards, and miniatures they contain the box. Four extra expansion boxes so every time you encounter a foe, it’s a one you have to dig out of its tray and find the matching ability card. A campaign with at least four branching narratives. A fresh asymmetric faction for each of the 23 plays we imagine for the future. A game’s capacity to be re-experienced with satisfaction is framed around each play seeing a new piece of content. In modern times, content discovery is the primary factor associated with replayability. Strategic depth and system exploration has retired, phased out like a horse being run into the ditch by an automobile. Now, often replayability is appraised through the lens of content. Certainly the best do.īut that’s not what we talk about anymore. Most games I examine have such a quality. Is Wiz-War worth returning to when we could be playing Galaxy Trucker instead? It could even be thought of as an opportunity cost. Replayability is also whether we desire to explore that dynamic tactical puzzle again. A player utilizes developed pillars of strategy to make on the fly judgments and respond to current circumstances as best they can. No two plays are the same because participants continually find themselves in unfamiliar precarious positions. A title like Tigris & Euphrates boasts strong replayability due to the multitude of tactical and strategic intersections as a result of player input. Replayability was once evaluated on very broad terms of strategic depth and emergent game states. Every title is graded out the same way, expected to stand up to endless plays and continue blowing our mind over and over again, indefinitely.ĭespite how flawed that reasoning is, I say fair enough.īut something happened. It’s something we value because every prospective purchase exists conceptually as our next favorite game.
A game that is highly replayable is one that players want to explore repeatedly. Our hobby has conjured the niche word ‘replayability’ to describe how well a game cultivates a desire to return to it.
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