Category Archives: Game Analysis

Sentinels of the Multiverse: A Love Letter

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

This is not a game analysis. Game analyses cover both the positive and the negative an an effort to create a more holistic view of the game, and I have zero interest in writing anything negative about Sentinels of the Multiverse. This isn’t to say that Sentinels doesn’t have flaws – it has some significant ones – but it is to say that this article will not be covering them.

With the exception of Magic, which I don’t really sort into the traditional board game category anyway, Sentinels pushed me further down the path of game design than every other game I’ve played combined. In this article, I’ll be discussing what makes Sentinels unique among its peers and what makes it one of my favorite games of all time.

A Heroic Legacy

One of the big draws of experiential games is resonance, the ability for the game to draw you into its world and make you feel like you’re a part of its story. Betrayal at House on the Hill, for example, uses its first half of the game to build a sense of dread, which makes it more resonant with the classic B-horror movies it emulates.

Moreso than its competitors in the genre, Sentinels feels like a game about superheroes. All of the playable heroes are similar to, but legally distinct from the Marvel and DC heroes we grew up knowing, and they play like them too. The Wraith, Sentinels‘ version of Batman, relies on gadgets to be effective, and has a lot of ways to draw exactly what she needs to solve a predicament. Meanwhile, Legacy, the Superman/Captain America equivalent, plays much more simply, with powers that punch enemies and use leadership skills to make his allies more effective.

The villain decks benefit from each villain card having two sides and its own conditions for changing from one side to the other. These frequently reinforce the comic book narrative of the game. The classic example is Baron Blade (a Doctor Doom/Lex Luthor equivalent), whose front side is the Baron concocting an evil scheme to slam the Moon into the Earth, and who, when defeated, flips his card over to reveal an angry Baron in a power suit. When running Sentinels for new players, I always start with Baron Blade, because revealing he’s back and out for revenge after the players think they’ve won is an incredible piece of theatre that has won over a substantial number of people.

The varying flip conditions also help differentiate the villains. Omnitron (Brainiac equivalent) flips back and forth every turn, while vengeful avatar of nature Akash’Bhuta flips according to the neutral Environment deck. This very simple action gives each villain their own personality while not adding too much complexity to what’s already a pretty complex game.

There’s things I could write about the Environment decks as well, but this section is getting long as it is – the best thing it has going for it is adding an element of chaos into the game. I still remember hearing about the game where Baron Blade got his hit points reduced to 0 by a pack of velociraptors and (presumably) got dragged screaming into the jungle.

Never Fear!

When co-op games began gaining popularity in the hobby game sphere with the release of Pandemic, the dominant school of thought of co-op game design was that they should be extremely difficult, with players only being able to win a fraction of the time they played. The main justification for this is adding replay value to the game: Players are more likely to come back to a game if they lose and think they can get it right the next time. While I mostly agree with this logic, it’s a fine line to draw, and players are unlikely to come back to a game they lost because bad luck caused a bunch of stuff to happen that the players had no chance of solving.

Sentinels was one of the first prominent co-op board games to be relatively easy. Unless you’re playing against the hardest villains in the game, your party has an above 50 percent chance of being able to pull out a win. With some of the starter villains, like, again, Baron Blade, it’s actually kind of hard to lose.

This normally goes against my principles of challenging players, but Sentinels does something very clever: Even the easiest villains provide the players with an illusion of challenge. There’s enough going on and enough damage being handed out that even though the players aren’t always in a substantial amount of danger, if often feels like they are. If the narrative is strong, the players feel powerful (something I’m writing an article on in the near future), and there’s a reasonable amount of choices to make, a game doesn’t have to be a brain-burner to be engaging. It’s a lesson I took to heart when designing the similarly easy Tiny Trainwrecks.

You’re The Real Hero

I’ve heard Cosmic Encounter described as a “designers’ game” because of its popularity among game designers. I’d argue that the real “designers’ game” is Sentinels because it turns everyone who plays it into a game designer.

Sentinels inspires a significant amount of fan-made content. Whenever I’ve seen a hardcore Sentinels fan at a convention or game store, they usually have two or three homebrew heroes that they’ve made themselves. This applies to my copy too: My friend and Great Designer Search playtester Christopher, with whom I co-purchased most of the expansions, took it upon himself to tweak some of the weaker heroes. (He described the process as “the only time I’ve had a good reason to use Comic Sans.”)

There’s plenty of games that use similar standalone decks to Sentinels, like Smash Up and my favorite two-player game, BattleCON. So why does there seem to be so much more fan stuff with Sentinels? The answer is because of the simplicity of the core mechanics.

“Simplicity?” you may ask. “But I heard Sentinels is incredibly complicated!” While there is a lot to keep track of in the game, the actual base of the game is fairly simple: Deal damage, prevent damage, draw cards, destroy things. Everything’s written in plain language that even someone learning the game for the first time can understand immediately. This simplicity makes the balance between hero and villain decks easier to understand and to manipulate on your own.

Furthermore, unlike many other games with asymmetric powers, Sentinels decks are truly standalone. As a counterexample, Gloomhaven has many separate classes, but these classes can buy items and apply stickers that are universal across the classes. Thus, if you’re designing a fan-made Gloomhaven class, you have to keep all the items in the game in mind, as well as figure out the inscrutable logic about what powers can be modified with stickers and which can’t.

Compare that to Sentinels, where every deck is static and can’t be changed. Self-sufficient decks are much easier to tweak, as you don’t have to worry about a player finding a broken interaction with a large number of potential modifiers.

These things add up to a game where it’s incredibly easy to pop open the hood, see what makes all of the decks work, and use that theory to make decks for yourself. Sentinels is a game that not only inspires fan-made designs, it almost welcomes them.

And Now, The Thrilling Conclusion

My first serious tabletop game design was a Sentinels ripoff where the players co-piloted a Voltron-esque combining robot. Although the idea was discarded after I realized it was too large a project to take on for a beginner, the excitement that two years of Sentinels playing instilled in me became one of the keystones for much of my experiential, narrative-focused game design.

One of my favorite overheard definitions of a 10/10 game is “a game you love so much you’re willing to overlook it’s flaws.” Sentinels is that kind of game for me, and it’s so important to me I thought I’d write a game design article about it. Hope you enjoyed it!

Pat Lawlor: A Lesson In Impact

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

I visited Disneyland for the first time in 1998, when I was 6. I went on a few rides, but what I reallycared about was the Starcade, a massive two-story arcade plopped in the middle of Tomorrowland. Only one game from the Starcade remains in my memory, 20 years later: A pinball where you could shoot the ball into the vertical “backglass,” normally a static panel reserved for the score display, and challenge a bunch of mean motocross racers. 

What I didn’t know at the time is that this pinball, Banzai Run, was one of the earliest works of the celebrated Pat Lawlor. Lawlor is a pinball designer responsible for Addams Family, the best-selling pinball of all time, Twilight Zone, considered by enthusiasts to be the greatest pinball of all time, and numerous other tables that rewrote the course of the pastime’s history. Most interestingly to me, Lawlor’s pinballs all have high levels of impact, leaving a profound impression among even the most uninvolved or inexperienced. This article is an examination of the techniques Lawlor used to create impactful games in a medium that mainly colors within the lines.

Defying Norms

When someone plays a pinball for the first time, they pretty much know what to expect: A small silver ball that you bat around with flippers to try to make it go up ramps and into holes. There’s a plunger, or sometimes a button or gun trigger, that you can use to shoot the ball into play, and some devious outlanes on either side of the table that make you lose your ball. Of every medium I’ve explored, pinball is by far the most resistant to innovation, and a table made in 2020 primarily differs from a table made in 1985 by how fancy the screen is.

Many of Lawlor’s pinballs tried, in varying degrees of intensity, to buck the trend of normal pinball tables. Banzai Run, as mentioned above, is one of the earlier examples; a few other pinballs like Cirqus Voltairemake use of the backglass, but none other to date has actually sent the ball up there. This wasn’t just a gimmick, either; the increased gravity of being on a fully vertical surface created a unique challenge unlike other tables. Funhousehas two plungers, one of which is used for bonus shots. Twilight Zoneplayed around with the material of the balls, introducing a white ceramic “Powerball” that was lighter and faster than the standard metal model.

However, Lawlor’s greatest departure was 1996’s Safecracker, which challenged the “X balls and you’re out” model that every other pinball uses to this day. Safecrackerinstead used a timed system, where your game ended after around 2 minutes of play. If you were able to break into the vault before the end of the time limit (which used an interesting board-game like system in the backglass), you received a special token that started a bonus round when inserted into the machine. While Safecracker wasn’t particularly well received, it certainly stands alone as one of the most challenging examples of a cookie-cutter medium.

Narrative Resonance

In Postcolonial Catan, an essay that was one of the most formative to my design philosophy, Bruno Faidutti explains that the recurrent orientalism in board game themes is in part due to the fact that board games have a limited thematic palette, so they have to stick to understandable clichés:

“The game designer, like the painter, cannot enliven his work by complex and subtle storytelling, and must do it only by winks and nods – a camel here, a helmet there. As a result, he makes heavy use of orientalist, « medievalist » or « antiquist » clichés.”

Pinball is in much the same scenario, only with additional levels of abstraction. Board games are good at simulating certain scenarios, mostly economic ones, while all pinballs have to wrap the theme around gameplay that’s mostly the same from table to table. There’s a reason so many pinballs, especially recent ones, are about movies – the player can apply their preëxisting knowledge of Star Wars or Terminator 2 without the pinball having to try so hard.

One of Lawlor’s strengths is his ability to convey his source material in interesting, resonant ways. Many of his pinballs are based on natural disasters, and contain simulations of them: Earthquake-themed Earthshaker has a motor in it that shakes the table, and Whirlwindhas not only spinning discs on the playfield but a fan that blows wind into the player’s face. His underrated CSI pinball features a centrifuge that spins the ball around when shot into it, an interesting way of using pinball’s limited set of options to remind players of something that happens in every episode of CSI.

Lawlor’s highest achievement in resonance is the Caddyshack-esque No Good Gofers, which challenges the player to complete 9 holes of golf. The player earns more points the lower they score on each hole (completing certain tasks marks off strokes), and the key feature of the pinball is a “hole in one” placed high above the playfield that can only be reached by launching the pinball off a metal ramp that only lowers for a second or two. This action gives the player the feeling of driving the ball – especially as it’s likely to carom everywhere, including off a plastic golf cart nearby – and makes getting a hole in one immensely satisfying.

Easy to Explain

For the most impactful games, the factors that make them stand out in your memory are often very easy to explain to other people. To use a tabletop example, Betrayal at House on the Hillis more impactful than other games because it’s easy to describe what happened in your game to someone who doesn’t know how to play. Compare “I managed to escape the mansion right before it collapsed into Hell” versus “I was able to link my cotton plants to my harbors in order to have a big sell turn that increased my income to a level that I could build a shipyard.” 

Similarly, Pat Lawlor’s pinballs are impactful because it’s easy to explain their appeal. Some pinballs are prized by enthusiasts for their interesting geometry, promotion of flow, or tricky challenges, but the problem with this is that it’s very difficult for an outsider to “get it”. On the other hand, show someone Banzai Run’s backglass, or Road Show’s talking redneck construction workers (Road Showwas very popular at truck stops), or even how Addams Familyoccasionally makes the flippers do the show’s trademark “snap snap,” and they’ll immediately be interested.

Conclusion

I finally got to play Banzai Runagain earlier this year when I went to Free Gold Watch in San Francisco. (Once the coronavirus has run its course, I heavily recommend you go there too!)  I was about 20 years older, and a lot of my childish enthusiasm has turned into obsessive analysis. But my sense of sheer glee at seeing the plastic motocross racer pull my ball into the backglass to finish what I had started at the now-defunct Starcade took me back, and inspired me once again that all of my games in the future should try their hardest to make players feel the same way.