I am too old for this site and it's children who refuse overt abstraction.
Starcraft isn't immersive. You have dudes who appear out of tiny buildings. WHERE DO THE MARINES COME FROM, HUH?
Cards and Dice are a great metaphor system for many game designs.
Next you'll be saying Disco Elysium was garbage.
Dominion is a great board game, sure, but it's an incredible video game.
i'm just in this thread looking for recommendations of video games with good boardgame mechanics
Disco Elysium checks are 2d6 rolls but they're kinda in the background so idk if you'd count that
Edit: oh shit HAND OF FATE! HoF is one of the best deck builder games. classic. 2 was great too
Lucky dice seem to be an in-universe maybe real thing in that setting
i apparently have 2 in my library from a humble bundle or something, should i try to play the first one first or does the order not matter
starting with 1 is a good idea but if you dont wanna shell out 20 bucks for it its fine to skip. 2 is more narrative and its story directly follows the events that happen in 1 so theres some story stuff that wont make sense if you dont play 1 first, but it doesnt ruin the game or anything.
gameplay wise it doesnt matter at all, 2 is just all around better.
I really enjoyed Cultist Simulator, but don't look up a guide. its strongest mechanic is making you feel like you're spending time uncovering forbidden knowledge
exception: when the videogame literally is a real life boardgame that is just made virtual so I don't have to spend an hour setting up/putting away the board (looking at you gloomhaven)
StarCraft would be better if you had a bunch of cards fucking and dice getting it on
Video games with board game mechanics are just that: video board games. They want to be like board games so they have mechanics like board games. Of course Starcraft wouldn't be great with cards and dice, because it's not trying to be a board game. But being run by a computer instead of the players entirely or some GM allows for interesting board games that couldn't exist otherwise.
It's also just a lower barrier to entry to make and even play a video board game. Creators don't have to make any physical objects (either through DIY or by custom ordering things) and can get a lot more people playing their game. Players don't have to obtain physical objects so it's easier to just find and get right in to. And for multiplayer games it's a lot easier than getting people together in person.
But even if you don't specifically want to play a board game, but rather just something simple and easy, those board game mechanics can provide that.
I agree. If I click on a game and see that is has some kind of "cards" mechanic I'm skipping it 99.9% of the time. Nothing against people who like card / board games but I just think its not an interesting use of the medium most of the time.
That's because gloomhaven is literally a board game. Your dad literally gave you an electronic copy of one of the most popular physical board games of all time.
electronic versions of physical board games have become extremely popular over the past couple years. but yes, in most cases, it's literally just digitizing the physical board game, and that's what the target audience for those games wants
Magic the Gathering really did a number on the gaming scene. Lots of people won't play a game with no cards. If there are no cards in it, it's not like MtG (or Pokemon, or Yugioh). Therefore it must suck.
gamists want to engage with the mechanics of the game, so exposing them allows them to min/max more, percentage change for anything to happen is just a dice roll, 95% is not any more or less in your face than "roll 4 or better with 2d6"; cards reflect the uncertainty of the situation, etc.
simulationists just want the game to be one very complex sandbox macine organism thing that has internally consistent rules and can make cool things happen by them messing with the simulation
narrativist people are interested in a game as a conveyance to tell a story, while simulations are great, and computing what the best decision at any point is fine; they'd rather make choices that make their playthrough be an interesting story from start to end
of course, none of this matters, because these distinctions were made by pnprpg losers, which are not real games, also rpgs are not real videogames because they're just digitalized versions of that, the only good game is Bad Rats 2 and we've been going downhill ever since
I will concede, I can't tell you what you think is in your face or not and trying to do so has detracted from my original point. I have played a lot of games involving dice and when I read "95%" i literally think 2d10, because that's what it is. As for showing you the roll, XCOM has a problem with people yelling bullshit when they miss a 95% chance shot. Behavioural studies indicate that showing people the number they actually rolled will usually make them shut up and not be little shits about it. In this case, XCOM fails badly on this metric, with a whole cottage industry of people theorizing that the XCOM RNG is stacked either for or against them when they do well or poorly in a game, when the banal reality is, they're all random independent rolls.
edit: I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong for your beliefs, I'm trying to communicate why it seems like a bunch of other people are fine with it
:deeper-sadness: Card battlers are one of my favorite genres. I just finished Tainted Grail today.
I'm totally with you. It's why Civilization 5 and 6 just don't "click" for me, even though I recognize that they're well-designed games - Civ 4 was the last one where I could get immersed in the story of my Civ without constantly getting yanked out by the notion of conforming to a hex grid or whatever.
I sucked hard at it but civ4 felt good to play with all the civic options. They felt like meaningful options rather than the lite version of tech trees in the other ones.
without constantly getting yanked out by the notion of conforming to a hex grid or whatever
I don't see where conforming to a square grid would be much different.
I mean a grid is a grid, but the way that military units in Civ 5&6 can't stack up, the way that districts take up tiles on the map, etc just seems a lot more artificial and "gamey" than the way the previous games did it.
Same with Civ 6 especially. Feels like a shitty board game rather than a civilization simulation game.
Lots of people like slot machines. They are literal Skinner boxes. They have been refined over the decades to be perfect. Slot players achieve a state of flow, like when you're busy cooking in the kitchen and everything is coming along nicely. Pro level slot players in Vegas actually hate hitting a big jackpot, because it disturbs the state of flow.
I like cards in video games because I find them intuitive, and I think they can work well in giving you a limited number of meaningfully distinct choices, as opposed to incessant minor tweaks. I think Slay the Spire is a great example, I've put a lot of hours into it and it has a lot of replayability, with interesting decisions both in how you build your deck and how you play your hand. A lot of games kinda have this "spam A to make number go up" gameplay that's not very interesting, or with 4X games often you make a decision and then have to spend a lot of time on micromanagement to implement that decision.
I don't really get wanting mechanics to be covered up? Generally I want to understand the mechanics of a game so I know what I'm doing and I'm not just bumbling around.
StarCraft with cards could be interesting. As it is, people figure out the mechanics of the game and what strategies work best and then it's just a question of who can execute them the best. Cards could introduce a random element that could reward more adaptable strategies, you don't get the card you were hoping for but you pulled a powerful card for another strat so you switch over to that, even though you don't usually play it.
I don't get it. I'd be fine with that, in fact I've played games like that where it spins a ticker with successes and failures marked. It's a game, I expect it to look like a game.
video games are for babies. board games are for adults.
tell me how much better and more immersive Starcraft or whatever would be if you had a bunch of fucking cards and dice going on
i liked the starcraft board game when i played it
