Gaming pieces. Plastic, Wood, or Cardboard? Which one makes a game sing for you?
I picked up Agricola this week. I know, I know, it came out ages ago and I'm behind the curve. Everyone who was interested in it has already got it. Except me, of course.
So, why do I mention it? Because, inside the Agricola box is a small forest worth of wooden bits. If there is one thing I really like around here, it is wooden bits for games. The more the better. In fact, one of the chief distinctions between a Euro game of the Catan, Carcassonne, Power Grid variety and American games like Risk, Descent, and Ticket to Ride is the prevalence of wooden versus plastic playing pieces.
To me, there is something very pleasing about a wooden game piece. Maybe the texture or the way they are colored or just the sort of rustic charm they add to a game is what does it for me. Plastic is all right and certainly has it's place when it comes to accurately representing what you are moving around the board, but it lacks a certain warmth and personal feel.
Risk, when it first came out, much like many other games at the time, used wooden pieces. I have an old Risk game from 1959 that use to belong to my Mother. Individual units are the, now typical, wooden block, but the pieces representing ten units together weren't easily defined shapes necessarily. They are strange, kind of oblong, pinched in the middle, wooden triangular shaped bits.
And the colors! No one in their right mind today would produce pink army units in a 'serious' war game. Yet here they are, in their own individual slots, right next to the more traditional red, blue, black, and green. There is something fascinating about considering what was going through the minds of Parker Brothers when they produced the game.
You lose that sort of thing in the shift to plastic pieces. Plastic bits are the thing they are supposed to be when you look at them. There are no secret mysteries to consider when you look at field guns or soldiers, they're field guns and soldiers.
Some games need the plastic pieces, though. They drive home the theme of the game. Games like Twilight Imperium and Space Hulk just wouldn't work as well if you weren't shuffling around all that plastic. The problem is, all that plastic tends to drive the price right through the roof what with having to design them, make molds and get them produced.
No, for me, the wooden block is the way to go. Even those are getting more sophisticated though. Look at Carcassonne and realize that this is where the trend of amusingly shaped wooden pieces began. Those meeples, the little farmers/workers/what-have-you, began cropping up all over the place. And soon they were joined by much more diverse brethren.
Now you can find not just meeples, but witches, fedora wearing adventurers, clergymen, detectives, Dracula, Gandalf, lumberjacks, pirates, vikings, cavemen and much, much more. Those are just the human variants, the realm of animal shaped meeples is even more diverse. Polar bears, sheep, cows, dogs, kangaroos, penguins and a veritable zoo of other animals are all out there in meeple form.
The real home of little wooden blocks seems to be war games though. Anyone who has experienced the Commands & Colors games from GMT Games can tell you that they come with a bevy of blocks. All of which need stickers applied to them, on both sides. Not something to be undertaken lightly.
It is probably here though that my love of wooden blocks really developed. Applying all the stickers and then seeing them come to life on the board of this light war game really brought it all home for me. There was something almost majestic about the way the troops marched down the battlefield combined with the uncertainty of just which troops would be doing the marching. Equally magnificent was their retreat back up the field as my opponents Elephants routed them.
Lately the trend seems to be working away from both wooden and plastic bits. The recent economic downturn seems to have dictated a savings of resources in the games industry and brought about the advent of the cardboard chit as a reasonable substitute. Not that cardboard chits are necessarily new, as any fan of the former Avalon Hill can tell you.
The current batch, however, are a step above those of earlier times. Thicker, more colorful, and with better detail, they can now be made to represent something other than a square mono-colored troop unit only identifiable by a number in the corner. Many current games are making full use of new printing and die cutting processes to bring their games to life in both a thematic and a practical way.
Properly good cardboard bits strike a happy balance between wood and plastic. They can capture the theme of a game in a concrete way while, with different finishes on the paper, they can provide an equally satisfactory tactile experience to wooden blocks.
Games like King of Tokyo and Small World, while two very different styles, make excellent use of their cardboard counters. In King of Tokyo's case, the giant monsters appear vibrant and colorful in ways that wouldn't be possible with wood while also appearing dynamic and full of action in a way that would be prohibitively expensive to do in plastic at that scale.
Small World, on the other hand, takes the much more flexible die cutting methods available to cardboard and makes it almost a key implementation of one of the games core mechanics, the mixing and matching of various races and creatures with a selection of variable powers that help to make each game played different. Again, the vibrancy of the printing process makes the game pop and enhances it's visual appeal, too.
Still, wooden pieces really draw me in. Whether it is the little wooden houses, cities, and roads of Catan, the meeples of Carcassonne, the blocks of Commands and Colors, or the pieces of the cathedral in Pillars of the Earth, their tactile and visual appeal increase the enjoyment of a game for me. It is a pretty clear preference, too; the vast majority of my games make use of wooden bits in at least some capacity, by at least a factor of 3:1 over plastic based games. Agricola, being as wood heavy as it is, looks very promising indeed.
What about you though? What playing pieces do you prefer to use? Is plastic your preferred piece for it's ability to portray theme? Does cardboard make your games pop? Or is wood the touchy-feely champion at your game table? Share your thoughts in the comments below and tell me why you prefer one over the other.
I picked up Agricola this week. I know, I know, it came out ages ago and I'm behind the curve. Everyone who was interested in it has already got it. Except me, of course.
So, why do I mention it? Because, inside the Agricola box is a small forest worth of wooden bits. If there is one thing I really like around here, it is wooden bits for games. The more the better. In fact, one of the chief distinctions between a Euro game of the Catan, Carcassonne, Power Grid variety and American games like Risk, Descent, and Ticket to Ride is the prevalence of wooden versus plastic playing pieces.
To me, there is something very pleasing about a wooden game piece. Maybe the texture or the way they are colored or just the sort of rustic charm they add to a game is what does it for me. Plastic is all right and certainly has it's place when it comes to accurately representing what you are moving around the board, but it lacks a certain warmth and personal feel.
Risk, when it first came out, much like many other games at the time, used wooden pieces. I have an old Risk game from 1959 that use to belong to my Mother. Individual units are the, now typical, wooden block, but the pieces representing ten units together weren't easily defined shapes necessarily. They are strange, kind of oblong, pinched in the middle, wooden triangular shaped bits.
And the colors! No one in their right mind today would produce pink army units in a 'serious' war game. Yet here they are, in their own individual slots, right next to the more traditional red, blue, black, and green. There is something fascinating about considering what was going through the minds of Parker Brothers when they produced the game.
You lose that sort of thing in the shift to plastic pieces. Plastic bits are the thing they are supposed to be when you look at them. There are no secret mysteries to consider when you look at field guns or soldiers, they're field guns and soldiers.
Some games need the plastic pieces, though. They drive home the theme of the game. Games like Twilight Imperium and Space Hulk just wouldn't work as well if you weren't shuffling around all that plastic. The problem is, all that plastic tends to drive the price right through the roof what with having to design them, make molds and get them produced.
No, for me, the wooden block is the way to go. Even those are getting more sophisticated though. Look at Carcassonne and realize that this is where the trend of amusingly shaped wooden pieces began. Those meeples, the little farmers/workers/what-have-you, began cropping up all over the place. And soon they were joined by much more diverse brethren.
Now you can find not just meeples, but witches, fedora wearing adventurers, clergymen, detectives, Dracula, Gandalf, lumberjacks, pirates, vikings, cavemen and much, much more. Those are just the human variants, the realm of animal shaped meeples is even more diverse. Polar bears, sheep, cows, dogs, kangaroos, penguins and a veritable zoo of other animals are all out there in meeple form.
The real home of little wooden blocks seems to be war games though. Anyone who has experienced the Commands & Colors games from GMT Games can tell you that they come with a bevy of blocks. All of which need stickers applied to them, on both sides. Not something to be undertaken lightly.
It is probably here though that my love of wooden blocks really developed. Applying all the stickers and then seeing them come to life on the board of this light war game really brought it all home for me. There was something almost majestic about the way the troops marched down the battlefield combined with the uncertainty of just which troops would be doing the marching. Equally magnificent was their retreat back up the field as my opponents Elephants routed them.
Lately the trend seems to be working away from both wooden and plastic bits. The recent economic downturn seems to have dictated a savings of resources in the games industry and brought about the advent of the cardboard chit as a reasonable substitute. Not that cardboard chits are necessarily new, as any fan of the former Avalon Hill can tell you.
The current batch, however, are a step above those of earlier times. Thicker, more colorful, and with better detail, they can now be made to represent something other than a square mono-colored troop unit only identifiable by a number in the corner. Many current games are making full use of new printing and die cutting processes to bring their games to life in both a thematic and a practical way.
Properly good cardboard bits strike a happy balance between wood and plastic. They can capture the theme of a game in a concrete way while, with different finishes on the paper, they can provide an equally satisfactory tactile experience to wooden blocks.
Games like King of Tokyo and Small World, while two very different styles, make excellent use of their cardboard counters. In King of Tokyo's case, the giant monsters appear vibrant and colorful in ways that wouldn't be possible with wood while also appearing dynamic and full of action in a way that would be prohibitively expensive to do in plastic at that scale.
Small World, on the other hand, takes the much more flexible die cutting methods available to cardboard and makes it almost a key implementation of one of the games core mechanics, the mixing and matching of various races and creatures with a selection of variable powers that help to make each game played different. Again, the vibrancy of the printing process makes the game pop and enhances it's visual appeal, too.
Still, wooden pieces really draw me in. Whether it is the little wooden houses, cities, and roads of Catan, the meeples of Carcassonne, the blocks of Commands and Colors, or the pieces of the cathedral in Pillars of the Earth, their tactile and visual appeal increase the enjoyment of a game for me. It is a pretty clear preference, too; the vast majority of my games make use of wooden bits in at least some capacity, by at least a factor of 3:1 over plastic based games. Agricola, being as wood heavy as it is, looks very promising indeed.
What about you though? What playing pieces do you prefer to use? Is plastic your preferred piece for it's ability to portray theme? Does cardboard make your games pop? Or is wood the touchy-feely champion at your game table? Share your thoughts in the comments below and tell me why you prefer one over the other.
