The Business: G-Dubs Tries Again With The Boardgame Brand

Yep, new Warhammer Quest box announced.

A reminder: WQ derives from Advanced Heroquest, which in turn derives from HeroQuest, which is a derivative of Dungeon! (and thus of OD&D).

When I talk about boardgames being almost as good at rooking Tabletop as Vidya when it comes to Conventional Play, this is what I'm talking about. This specific edition of the game is designed around 30 minute play sessions, each of which can be played self-contained but can also be played step-by-step in a campaign format. That the game is programmed, so it doesn't need a Referee, and that it is designed for fast set-up/tear-down to speed up actually playing the game moves this as close to an analog videogame as it gets.

You don't have the need for a recurring group. You don't have the need to Schedule Your Fun. You don't have the desire to deviate from the rules, or much utility in doing so, due to lacking the incentives for doing so. You don't have Cognitive Overload due to having so much thrown at you all at once; you can just learn what you need to know as you need to know it.

Tabletop Adventure Game designers have gotten this all wrong for 50 years and counting.

Designers need to figure out what the full scope of their gameplay loop is, where a new player comes on board, and then to parse out how information on how to play the game shall be delivered to that new player. As boardgame design over the last decade and changed reveals you can hard-code this into your product at the design stage. Vidya demands this as a necessity of the medium; boardgames copied this because it works. Tabletop could achieve the same results, but not by blind copying; it requires careful consideration of how the machine works and then engineering the machine to minimize cognitive load upon the end-user so that they can learn by doing and attain mastery via repetition, which is how most people actually learn how to do and master anything.

50 years of Cargo Cult design needs to DIE.