Tonka or Meccano?

Both companies are known for their metal mechanical toys. They are both still in business today, and cumulate together nearly two centuries of existence.

When comparing two toy crane trucks, a Tonka crane truck and a Meccano crane truck, we immediately see how different the experiences they propose are.

Right out of the box, Tonka will grab your attention, with its robust, attractive and quite realistic looking crane truck, ready to be used by your imagination. On the Meccano side all you’ll have is a set of metal parts of various sizes and shapes, screws, gears, belts and wheels—and an instruction booklet.

Even once the Meccano truck is built, they still differ greatly, and Tonka still has an edge over Meccano. Because in comparison with its robust molded steel truck, streamlined yet realistic, as well as dirt and water proof, Meccano offers a rather coarse, rough-looking truck, with holes and screws all over, with its mechanisms exposed, that does not have anything like the Tonka finish, and looks more like wireframe, like a prototype.

So if Meccano is still around, after more than a century—since almost twice as long as Tonka, in fact—, if its toys are still relevant today, it is not because they look anything like their real-life counterparts. It is because they do a trick completely out of reach of Tonka’s—they transform. Once you’ve understood how the Meccano crane truck works, you’ll have fun applying this new understanding and changing its shape, size and function. And create truck variants. At leisure. Meccano doesn’t only make us play with a crane truck, it makes us play with the very concept of crane truck.

While Tonka offers a ready-to-play toy that is fun to operate, Meccano offers a toy that is fun to build.

On the one hand, a result; on the other, a process.

There must be some Meccano enthusiast in every board gamer. Because with rulebooks, fiddly bits and interlocking mechanics that need to be understood before one can play at all, what board games really promise are processes. Transformations. Whether they admit it or not, tabletop gamers prefer their pleasure in pieces, and above all enjoy rebuilding a different pleasure along the same lines every time.

And this is even more true of historical board games—which are nothing but historical model kits, events to build. With which one can explore circumstances, actors, causes and effects or currents of ideas, distilled into a miniature working model. A model that must first be understood, and can then be manipulated, assembled / disassembled, and explored at leisure in these small historical cardboard labs. Just to see. What if…

Both Tonka and Meccano survive because they satisfy two distinct facets of our curiosity. They come with their very own set of questions. How does it feel to operate a crane truck? What can be done with it? are very different from How does a crane truck work? How can I make it stronger, lighter?

Tonka and Meccano are two essential toys, which go in two opposite directions.

Result, process.

What do you enjoy the most?

What type of gamer are you?

If board games told stories, we would know about it.

We would read and listen to these stories. We would write down game sessions, record them, attend them, and replay them by all means, to get to their story. We would find these stories outside the gaming room, filling book and movie shelves as well as theaters. Like any other stories, they would have a life of their own. They would get translated, sung, filmed, played. If board games tell stories, where are they?

And where is their audience? I mean, their non-gamer audience? For, after all, a story is a story and as such can reach anybody, not only gamers. Just like sports, music, cooking or cinema, gaming would have an audience outside the hobby; there would be non-gamer fans.

If board games told stories, players would have fans of their own, just like actors, athletes or cooks. Faithful and passionate non-gamers, thrilled at the idea of sitting and watching them play. And more than happy to pay for it.

Lay audiences would gather to see board games played. Celebrating their favorites, their heroes, their sacred monsters. That’s how we would know that board games manage at least to express emotions.

Games wouldn’t be a niche if they could tell or express anything.

Let’s not tell ourselves stories: board games do not tell stories.

They make stories.

Likewise board games do not express emotions, they generate them, in their practitioners. Board game players are both the artisans and the audience. The beginning and the end. Board games run in closed-circuit.

And little does it matter that the scope of the stories they make is so minimal, most often limited to the magic circle of players and to the moment they happen. Because the real joy, the vast and unique pleasure lies in making them.

What is a story that can’t be told? Which can not easily, effectively, be shared beyond the circle of insiders?

It’s more of an experience. And board games offer a lively, immediate, hands-on experience to players.

But an experience is still so very far from being a story.

A game is an experience, but a story is an experience that is narrated. An experience that has been fixed, crystallized, then taken apart, rebuilt and polished.

While a board game has practically no life beyond its practitioners, a good story becomes all the more alive as it is told to more people, regardless of surroundings, culture, language, time period or any other barrier.

Conflating games and stories is misunderstanding them, not seeing how special and precious they are, each in their own way.

Board games are way too sophisticated to tell stories.

At least as much as stories are way too sophisticated to be told by board games.

Why does solo board gaming seem to absurd to some?

Most games are multi-player. But aren’t the players a means to an end?

That end is interaction. Without interaction there is no game. But does it have to be human interaction? I find that it is becoming less and less true as the means at our disposal to design systems capable of interaction are getting better and better. On the computer as well as on the cardboard side.

It also has a lot to do with the kind of tabletop game we’re talking about. Some kinds of board games are more suitable to solitaire play.

Cooperative games. In Mage Knight as well as games such as Pandemic, all players (or most) are on the same side. The game’s mechanics are designed to provide the opposition and will do so in the same way regardless of the number of players. So that kind of game works consistently well in solo play.

In a similar fashion, some Eurogames, in which the interactions happen mostly between the players and the game’s mechanisms, the so-called multi-player solitaire games, are therefore often good candidates for solo play. Most of Uwe Rosenberg’s games are good examples of this category, and as a result require virtually no rule adaptation to be played solo, with great results: his Odin, Loyang or Caverna can be great solo experiences.

Simulation

Maybe the games that are most conducive to fruitful solitaire play are games that use simulation. One way of doing this, and that we’ve been seeing more and more lately, is to include a “paper AI” (Artificial Intelligence), a set of rules that simulate (in some cases with surprising accuracy) the play of one or several opponents. We find that kind of programmed opposition, or robot (or ‘bot) player in most (Eurostyle) games by Vital Lacerda. In the wargame genre, the games in the COIN series by GMT games may be the more advanced incarnation of this.

But simulation isn’t limited to paper AI. Board games that aim at representing, depicting actual events, facts and circumstances, thus most historical or war games, are at their core simulation games.

And simulation games work consistently well as solo games because they contain a model.

Any model has its own autonomous existence and does not rely on the sequence of a script, but cannot be considered in abstracto, independently from what it aims at representing. A model encapsulates its own rules and translates them into behavior. So simulation tabletop games behave, do expose behavior. They react to our decisions, sometimes in surprising and interesting ways, and they keep presenting the player with hard choices. Simulation games are excellent consequence engines. And having to deal with the consequences of our decisions and our actions is the most basic, immediate form of interaction.

That may be why wargames have always been so frequently played solo. It’s totally normal, even kind of expected. Wargamers are known—and often mocked—for their willingness to sit alone in front of their multiplayer monster games, their military strategy sagas, quite happy to lend themselves to the schizophrenic exercise of playing every opposing faction in turn. Of course, the fact that it can be difficult to find opportunities and opponents to play those huge and complicated games could explain why they are often played solo, but certainly not why playing them solo is still very much interesting, let alone at all feasible. After all, there is no great tradition of solitaire backgammon.

Any game that exposes a strong, rich model, that a player can examine, study, compare and test under every angle, endlessly, is a game that will reliably deliver engagement and satisfaction, with or without the participation of other players. Such a game is a totally different kind of experience and represents a rather different way of engaging our curiosity; not to see who will win, but what can happen if…

Solitaire board games are sometimes dismissed with this snarky line: they’re mere puzzles, not games.

Well, that’s a bit short.

Such games are not puzzles, but models. We don’t always recognize that it is the model that drives them as well as engages us. The source of pleasure is the model, not the game. Let alone the other players, the “social experience”.

A model is way much more than a puzzle; it resists, it amplifies, it surprises; in Dan Verssen’s words, it’s a puzzle that fights back.