In order to get across today’s game design point, I need to tell you sort of a story. About boardgames. Or more specifically, about a boardgame. I promise it won’t be too long or excessively painful. The whole thing sort of dawned on me while I was playing Rise of Legends, which probably explains why I lose at that game so much. There is this game called Caylus, which ostensibly is about building a French castle in 1289. Sort of the pre- pre- Maginot I guess. Throughout the game, you place little wooden markers that represent French workers on little cardboard squares that represent stuff that you build French castles with. You collect colored blocks that I assume represent stone, wood, cheese, and whatever else is called for by the backstory, and use them to gain points, which you use to win the game. It’s all kind of abstract, except for the winning, which is very tangible.

I don’t want to interrupt myself, but when you play the Alin, which research track do you level up? Do you have a preference? Maybe you should think about that while you read my story, just like I think about my story when I’m playing the Alin.

I’ve played Caylus a bunch of times, and after each game, I think I have a new insight into how to win. First I thought you needed to send workers to the castle itself. Then I decided it was best to build production buildings. Then I thought I had it all figured out, and built prestige buildings. Then I thought it was all a trick, and tried building the non-standard production buildings – you know, the ones that don’t get used very often, but are worth more points.

I know you don’t know – that was just a figure of speech. My point is that based on repeated playings, my idea of the best strategy kept changing. Each time, I adjusted my analysis, relegated old strategies to the discard pile, and formulated new plans. Sometimes I won, and sometimes I lost. But what absolutely stunned me was that every time I decided that something absolutely, positively could not work, someone came along and kicked my ass using exactly that strategy.

In Caylus, if you don’t actually build the castle, you get penalized for it, because goddamn it this is a game about building a castle. Of course, there is a lot of other stuff to do, and one time, this guy completely crushed me by doing everything except what you are supposed to. It was like he was mocking me. Each scoring round, if you haven’t built any parts of the castle, you lose points. You still gain points for other things, but you not only pay a penalty, but you don’t get royal favors, which is kind of creepy, yes, but it’s an abstract game so just let it go. What this guy did was amass a giant hoard of gold, which most people use to build valuable buildings, but he used to just collect and score points at the end, because yes, you do get points for gold, but nobody really keeps it until the end, because … I dunno, maybe it never occurred to them. It occurred to this guy, and in order to carry out this strategy, he had to build a whole bunch of stuff, in a specific way, and keep me from doing certain things. In the end, I think it was kind of a joke. Like Kobe Bryant beating you in basketball while balancing a fruit basket on his head. If he can do it, then why not? I was the one who had to tell the king we never built his castle.

In the time it took you to read that, you could probably have beaten me at Rise of Legends. Tom Chick sure could, and he has done it. Each time, the only thing I know for a fact is that he has a big hero and some sun jaguars, and those prehistoric flying battleaxe things that shoot lasers and kill all my guys. It’s pretty boring, and yeah, he probably did a lot of really clever strategies. Who knows – maybe he was even wearing fruit on his head. I’ll never know, because each time the endgame looked exactly the same.

Did you decide your favorite Alin research track? Great. I guarantee you that if you don’t tell me, I’ll never know what it is, because if you’re successful, all I’ll see is a high-level hero, a bunch of fire elementals, and a glass dragon blowing up all my stuff.

Did I say glass dragon? I guess I did. It’s one of those game words that doesn’t really make any sense, but sounds vaguely cool just based on the possibilities. Which you use to enhance the stuff that’s going on in the game itself. That’s really the whole point of computer games. You can do so much on screen, but you’ve wasted your screen time if you don’t evoke something in the player’s mind that goes beyond whatever demon art your artists managed to draw up from their years of teenage angst.

I have to sincerely apologize to you right now and admit that the whole Caylus thing isn’t about building a castle. It’s about building a church. A French church. Frankly, when I’m playing, I often forget. The best boardgames (of which Caylus is certainly one) can get away with thin themes if the game mechanics themselves are really compelling. When everything is out in the open, you can appreciate every skillful manipulation of the game, regardless of what it means in the game world. Watching some guy take penalty after penalty and still beat me was all the more amazing because I could see him doing it. He would even make comments, like “Oops, I guess I forgot to build a castle this time.” The first time I thought he was serious, until the fruit on his head became obvious. From then on, he won major style points for ostensibly “playing the game wrong” but still cleaning my clock. If someone were to try that against me now, I could probably stop him. But I would be focused on the mechanics, and not so much on the castle. I mean, church.

Real-time strategy games don’t work that way. Sure, if your opponent builds fallen priests, you build afreets, but the whole deal is about the presentation and not the mechanics. When I look that the endgame stats and see that Tom’s resource gathering was twice mine, I never think back and say, “I’ve gotta hand it to him – I needed to play the joust before the merchants’ guild, and he beat me to it.”

If I did, that would be weird, since that kind of thing only happens in Caylus. Sometimes I think about Caylus when I play Rise of Legends, which is what I said when I started this whole thing. I think that means Rise of Legends failed in some way, despite the fact that it has a lot of really intricate mechanics that fit together just so. I’ve been playing it for three weeks and I think I have the Alin pretty much down. The rest is up to my speed-clicking. No matter what I do, though, you’ll either see a bunch of Alin cities blowing up, or a bunch of Alin monsters blowing you up. That’s all there is.

Rise of Legends depends on this whole alternate mythology where the Aztecs taught the Russians how to space walk, and Leonardo da Vinci invented Mechwarrior. Bam, the end. When you play, it doesn’t really matter. Sun jaguars mean I need fire elementals. You need sand spires because the mine upgrades are crucial, as are the glass bolts if you’re zerging with desert walkers. Sure, there’s probably some story in the single-player campaign I’m never going to play, but good game design can’t depend on some ancillary play mode. And – mechanically – it doesn’t. But that’s less than half the battle.

There are a bunch of different ways to play the Alin. You can go all merchant with the bumblebee caravans, or research up whichever track you guys thought of when I asked you at the beginning of this article. You have to build magus districts to do that second thing. In fact, one of the biggest decisions I’ve had to make was whether to build a third merchant at my capital, or build a magus district that would give me an extra research point when I leveled up to large city. Small decisions, large impact. As you go on, you make a lot of choices. Rise of Legends shows a lot of sophistication in game mechanics. Maybe Brian Reynolds should design boardgames.

Computer games have so much more potential than boardgames, yet they keep blowing it. Rise of Legends is exhibit 1. When I open the Caylus box, the gameboard is fixed. It’s made out of cardboard and has some artwork on it. Because I’m not insane, I don’t blame the designers for limiting my possibilities in this way. Rise of Legends has no such constraints. Role-playing gamers have complained for years about the inability to permanently alter their environment based on game choices. Here is a strategy game where the game mechanics have been specifically designed to produce different results based on the choices, but the game itself doesn’t reflect them in any tangible way. If I choose a mercantile strategy, why can’t my civilization show that as it develops? If I go all land lore on your ass, can’t the appearance of the game world change? Real-time strategy games have the reputation for requiring fast mouse-clicking. It’s amazing to me that a game which attempts to introduce serious strategic choices built on fundamental game mechanics doesn’t represent this in some way that is obvious to the players. How many bumblebees do I have? I shouldn’t ever be squinting at that number I had to go and enable in the user interface. It’s as though the designers are embarrassed about players having to make choices. Guys, mature game design has already been mastered by Reiner Knizia. It’s your job to extend this, what with the demon art and whatnot.

You know how I said Caylus wasn’t about building a castle? Well, it is. There actually is a game about building a church, but it’s designed by someone else and called Keythedral. Yes, it’s a dumb name. But so is Rise of Nations Rise of Legends, to be honest. Seriously, if you’re going to make a game about something rising, you really need to stick to one thing. And develop your milieu a bit more. Why waste so much potential? After all, each time I lose, I can’t see what specific amazing strategy Tom is using. All I see is the fruit.