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| Types of Board Game |
 Title text: I can't believe Candles of Vienna caved to commercial pressure and added the Goku expansion. |
Explanation
This comic is about types of board games.
| Boring | This is a very simplistic and boring board game style, where the players simply move around the board aimlessly. While a number of family games fall into this structure and still have something resembling skill and game-play (like Pachisi-variants and Monopoli), the simplest examples -- such as Snakes and Ladders, Mouse trap, and Candy Land involve no player choices at all, and are thus aptly viewed as boring--at least for adults. While Monopoly strategy exists, it can also be described this way and is widely hated (as well as popular), so it's possible Randal is referring to it here. The described game however seems even more boring than Candyland, as it has no end condition at all (which is a common failing, in effect, with some badly designed games, which may be very difficult to end). |
| Abstract | This board game has more abstract tones, with less of a tangible goal. |
| Hyperspecific Theme | This board game takes place on a specific date and time, and appears to have little room for flexibility. The Congress of Vienna was a gathering of diplomats from many different countries at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. There exists an actual board game about the Congress of Vienna, see https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/296578/congress-of-vienna, but it has nothing to do with lighting candles. |
| Overcomplicated | Twilight Imperium, while "only" having a weight rating of 3.75 on Board Game Geek, is widely regarded as being an extremely complex board game. Cones of Dunshire is a joke board game (first shown on the TV show Parks & Recreation but eventually turned into a real game) where its extreme complexity was key to the joke. Combining them would therefore be far more complex than either. |
| Cooperative | Cooperative board games center around players attempting to reach a common goal, winning or losing together. Many feature impediments to communication that make this more difficult; for instance, players may have secret cards they are unable to reveal before playing, or be restricted from saying certain words. The game in this panel appears to forbid all communication between players except for hand gestures. The punch line likens it to a very mundane activity, sorting a junk drawer, made artificially more difficult due to silence, and suggests the game is just as boring. |
| Branded | Some board games are published and marketed as tie-ins to other forms of media, using settings, characters, or events from the source to appeal to its fans. The theming often has little to nothing to do with the gameplay, as the many branded variants on Monopoly can attest. The game in this panel is themed after the sitcom Friends, with the unlikely addition of Son Goku from Dragon Ball Z. |
| Party | It can be hard to determine what makes a party game, other than it generally doesn't have the kinds of gameplay and strategy in other kinds of board games. However, party games marketed as "for adults (such as the well known Cards Against Humanity) do tend to have one thing in common -- swearing or references to sex. |
| Social Deduction | Social deduction games revolve around the players attempting to deduce the roles or allegiances of other players, based both on special abilities provided by the game and the players' native abilities to tell which of their fellow players are being dishonest. Commonly, they involve an 'uninformed majority,' who do not know the allegiances of other players, attempting to discover the 'informed minority,' who know the members of their team. The minority is often framed as 'evil,' with the ability to 'kill' other players and remove them from the game; their victory condition often revolves around killing most or all of the 'good' players. The game in this panel revolves around finding a 'secret murderer,' but evidently has required clarification that discovering a real murderer does not count, implying that one or more of the participants has actually killed someone in real life. |
Transcript
[There are 8 cells, each with a different type of board game.]
Boring
Megan: Each turn, roll a die and move your token. Turns proceed clockwise around the table until we get bored and go home.
Abstract
Cueball: Each turn, you can place any number of red triangles or blue squares on a hexagon, or move any hexagon to a...
Hyperspecific Theme
Megan: It's October 2, 1814. The Congress of Vienna convenes. You are each in charge of distributing and lighting candles for the opening ball, which was held at these three locations...
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