all right well here we are we're back again i'm gonna talking about what i consider to be the modern age of board gaming or tabletop gaming kind of based on my own um relatively arbitrary standards but hopefully i think you'll see why i think things changed a lot in very recently in the late 70s early 80s but particularly in the 90s so it's hard to set a hard and fast date but there's about three really influential games a lot of it has been shaped by the formation of uh in 1978 the i don't can't pronounce this it's european uh spiel the jar the award which is like a table top of the game tabletop game of the year award and nomination for this nomination for this this award can increase the sales of a game from a very small number if it's only sold about 500 copies easily over 10 000 and the winner can expect an additional boost of like half a million copies or something just from winning this award it's very very prestigious and so the the qualifications are the criteria for the award are there's four of them so gain concept how original is it how playable is it what's its value it's rule structure is it clear is it comprehensible how is it laid out both the rules but also the way it looks visually the box and the board and then design functionality and workmanship and so a lot of uh very well to me at least some very fairly famous games have won this award uh relatively recently uh to get a small picture but they're on the the far left the gentleman's holding pandemic legacy season one i think it's season one but a couple of others there and this is the list of the the recent award winners for this particular award so if you go down here um you can see some of you may have heard of some of these games code names i know has made its way around uh quite a bit these days um i'm going to have you play a dominion one of these days is a as a lab for one of these classes tickets ride is also very uh and carcassonne are fairly famous uh in their own right um some of these others as well i want to focus though on what i consider kind of the flash point the reason i have this particular thing up here is if you go all the way down there um you know not just 2020 but all the way down look at 1995. so in 1995 we have settlers of catan so this is arguably kind of the the watershed for tabletop gaming and its popularity was the introduction of this game in 1995 so it was uh designed by a guy named a german dental technician uh and this guy apparently when he goes to trade shows and conventions is like a rock star if he shows up now he still still goes but one of the things that made this different from a lot of the other games so if you think about the games that we've talked about thus far these classic games like monopoly and risk right um they're very head-to-head they're very people are butting heads they're not you're not being very nice to other people and so what was really interesting about katan and your your assignment for today your lab assignment is i'm going to have you play place uh they they renamed it now just to katana i'm gonna be play settlers or katan you can do this for free online through through the uh the katan website so it's not through board game arena but um through the katan website and i'll put a link i'll put a link in there for you um but it's in indirect conflict so you're you're kind of in a race against other people but you're not actually going up against them head to head you don't have to like crush another person you there's not as much of a sense of battling with another person you're kind of working on your own but you're trying to work on your own faster than somebody else's working on their own the other thing that was really unique about katan was that unlike something like monopoly or risk where people are more or less pretty passive when it's not your turn players are constantly involved um so even when it's not your turn stuff is happening that's influencing you and where you have to make decisions um and so that means that people are there's not as likely to get bored basically you're not just sitting around waiting for other stuff there's this level of involvement that wasn't really there with some of these other games and so uh it sold more than 32 million copies and has done really well and so here you can see kind of a general layout of the board the other thing that was really unique about katan was the fact that the game changes every time you play it so when you pull out monopoly for example you put the board down everything's the same the board is the same from game to game but you can see here uh what looks like a board is actually a series of individual tiles hexagonal tiles so each of these tiles here just will pick right up and um will stack and so when you when you lay out the board for a game you lay out the board randomly basically and because of that the placement of these hexagonal tiles and their the unique the unique traits that go with them changes from game to game so it doesn't really get old there's nothing that's predictable or at least not as predictable in the same sense of a game like risk or monopoly where the game is the board is always the same and this in this time this way the board is almost always completely different and so that lends a really unique and interesting aspect to it that adds to what's called its replayability so the desire to play it again once you've played it once because it's very different so so other so katan is kind of a this watershed or gateway game for a lot of people into tabletop game but there are some other games here that are worth mentioning because of the important role that they've played so warhammer being another one that may be slightly more obscure but has had a considerable amount of success this cane was introduced earlier than catania in 1987 and it's a miniature table top war game so it's kind of like uh dungeons and dragons on steroids so it's there's some comic books that went along with it but it focuses on these massive armies uh more like war stuff rather than dungeons and dragons is much more kind of an individual character development and i'm not saying that those things don't happen in warhammer but the focus of this tends to be on these large groups of things uh clashing a lot of the time and with warhammer came this increased emphasis and focus on what we'll call miniatures and so we'll we'll talk about these because they're going to play an important role even in even in kind of more sim even simpler board games right um but these detailed creation and customization and painting and so you see here this is an etsy shop for a guy who is selling um he buys these miniatures and you can you can go to uh your friendly local game store a lot of time and buy these miniatures that come in just kind of a solid block gray and the whole point is that you get to paint them and color them as you wish and you're more than welcome to play with them and they're just block gray but the customization and creativity and artistic expression that can come with the painting of it can be a big deal and there are guys like this who will make a lot of money through the painting and selling of them uh and customization of these for four people and so this whole world of miniatures has become a really big deal and particularly with um the advent of 3d printing now you can actually create miniatures at home if you have a 3d printer and customize and design your own miniatures for your own purposes to make kind of whatever you want so it's it's a very cool thing so the third the third thing here would be magic the gathering as a treatable collectible card game so in 1993 again two years earlier than katan but all these three things are all kind of in different different worlds so the reason why i don't classify magic gathering and warhammer on quite the same level as katan is because they require a massive amount of money basically the miniatures can be very expensive especially if you're buying them pre-bought because most of us don't have 350 dollars to drop on something like that but even if you're buying them as they're just their regular plastic gray kinds of things it adds up quite a bit magic the gathering similarly although you can get you can play it fairly simply relatively cheaply it's kind of a play to win or a pay-to-win situation where the more the more decks you buy the more like you are to get these rarer more powerful cards um and i mentioned way back you know in one of the very earliest lectures the black lotus card being one of the most valuable that sells for these massive amounts of money um and so that it makes these two games unless you're a really die hard fan and you're really into them i hope no one takes offense at this if you play them but i feel like they're slightly less accessible to your your average lay gamer than something like katan which is a one-time purchase there are expansions you can get but you know there's still a huge amount of interest and competitiveness that you can have replayability from this one purchase and so that makes it a bit more of an easy segue kind of into the field so the guy who designed this he actually designed it as a game for people to play while they waited in line at convention centers and it was ultimately um bought by wizards of the coast same people who bought uh dungeons and dragons so uh so that brings us up to kind of what i would consider where we are now which starts at 2000 but we've got things like board game geek which is this massive central website resource for tabletop gaming so it's founded in 2000 but it hosts comments reviews and tips for over a hundred thousand different tabletop games it is kind of the the source or the place to go for this kind of thing um kickstarter which was originally originally started as a way for people to kind of get backing for um video and media projects has become the place to go for board games board games and producing and selling board games can be quite expensive and so essentially the idea behind kickstarter is that you present to the public your idea for a board game and you say i need to raise this much money for this board game to happen and then they have they have pledge levels and basically depending on the amount you pledge you'll get different kind of levels of rewards usually the lowest level is you you just get the game and there's other things you can unlock as well so basically you're paying you're paying upfront for a game that you'll get once it's produced so for people who really like board games this can be worthwhile and you can support and get games that are very rare and so on and so forth and so board games are now like i think i think they are the leading category uh on kickstarter i mean hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into uh tabletop games on kickstarter so for example there was a board game um uh conan the barbarian where they they launched it on kickstarter they had they set a pledge they set a goal their target goal for like we need to raise eighty thousand dollars and so they met that goal in about five and a half minutes and went on to raise over three million dollars for this game some other very popular ones gloomhaven is the number one rated board game uh or at least was the number one rated board game on um board game geek for a while and it was kickstarted it was it was done on kickstarter you can see here the kickstarter page for it so about 5 000 people pledged money or donated money it's not really donating because they're hoping to get it back but pledge money towards this and raised almost 400 000 towards this game which which went on to be massively successful and have sequels and so on and so forth so this has become a major resource for kind of the expansion of legal talk gaming in 2013 there's a kind of a video podcast vlog thing that was uh done by will wheaton and felicia day called tabletop which introduced people to kind of tabletop games and got this more popular and so you can be you can find a lot of these kinds of things online now so there's a uh a tabletop simulator on steam i'll talk about steam a little bit later where you can basically now play tabletop games certain tabletop games as video games um there's board game arena which you guys are going to be using quite a bit and there are a variety of different youtube channels i've listed three what i would consider significant ones because others are others out there as well nice tower watch it played shut up and sit down that are talk about um like what are the latest board games how do you put watch it played obviously how do you play a board game if you're not really into reading the instruction manual how do you actually play these games who is rating them what are some changes and so on and so forth so it's become this this this giant world um as it were and just to give you a sense of kind of of how how this whole thing has grown you can look here at a graph of the number of board games released over time right and so this this bottom line here right is a thousand board games this is per year and so you know i mentioned settlers of catan coming out in 1995 uh right so here's here's 1995 and then you can see that uh over from 1995 to 2005 you more than doubled the number of board games that are coming out per year in the space of 10 years and you're adding a lot these orange the orange bar is expansions uh but really things have really grown a lot per year um in the last you know 10 or 15 years basically and it's becoming a very very significant um source of monetary income and it's just growing in popularity and how well it's being known around the globe which is partly hopefully why you are interested in this course is because uh you've played a board game or two and found them to be somewhat interesting okay so that's going to end the this particular section on uh board game board game history i do have a short reading for you and hopefully you can try out playing sellers of catan and then i've got two other types of categories of history that i'll cover in the next sets of kind of video lectures for you so all right thanks very much