The writer types an emphatic last few characters and saves the document for the final time. The story is complete. Months upon months of world-building and story-crafting are at an end. The files go off to the printer and thousands of copies of the book are lovingly tucked into thousands of boxes. What a bittersweet moment. The writer knows that - but for a small percentage of players - their adventure will never play out in the minds of others. Their story will forever go untold.
So, the cue for me writing this post is a discussion I had with some other people on a social channel. We were talking about campaign and legacy board games, and I told them that as a general rule, I won’t buy, review, or even play campaign games anymore. For me, that’s down to time and people. I know I don’t have the time to play through a hundred-hour campaign, nor do I have a regular group of players I can undertake one with. Not if I want to get it finished within a year.
I’ve played a few campaign games through to their end, but only those with short campaigns I could play by myself, and only those that really grabbed me. I’ve started so many others, but even as I tear the shrink from the outside of the box my heart starts to sink because I already know the reality of the situation.
I bought Jaws of the Lion to sample Gloomhaven, and I’m glad I did. It wasn’t for me, and I moved it on after a handful of scenarios. I since got the digital version of the full game and felt the same apathy. The King’s Dilemma - I had a wonderful time with this, but real life scuppered our escapades when two of the group members split up. I’ll never know what happened in our world. I bought Sleeping Gods with the intention of getting lost in its adventure. It sat in shrink for a year and a half before I sold it.
I’ve grown to accept the inevitable. I will never finish these games.
Irrational sadness
I’m left with a tangible feeling of sadness when I think about this. If you’re reading this there’s a good chance that at some point in your life, you’ve read at least one book that really got its hooks into you. You were absorbed in the story, the world, the characters. You lived that book. You might even have re-read it time and again. It’s a part of you now. That’s the power that a good story has.
Good writing isn’t limited to books. A good film or TV series has good writing behind it. We play video games with incredible narratives. The story isn’t tied to the method of delivery. Take the video game Thomas Was Alone for example. A platform game about maneuvering rectangles around barren levels. Yet the storytelling in that game is enough to move you to tears. I’m serious, try it if you haven’t.
Tabletop games have that same power. We live in a time when we have an embarrassment of riches available to us when it comes to playing games around a table. RPGs are an obvious first thought here, but much of the magic of an RPG comes from the shared storytelling. The DM might be trying to steer things, but the reality is often a case of a car full of raccoons trying to drive it as one (please check out Grant Howitt’s Crash Pandas for my inspiration there).
I’m specifically talking about boxed campaign games. Gloomhaven. Oathsworn. Pandemic Legacy. Tainted Grail. Sleeping Gods. The 7th Continent. Descent. Folklore: The Affliction. The list goes on, and on, and on… Take a moment to think. How many of these types of games have you played? Now try to think of how many of those games you’ve completed.
I’m willing to bet that for the majority of you, that number is very, very small. Think about those games on your shelves. The lands undiscovered. The characters never encountered. The stories never told. How does it make you feel? Do you feel anything at all?
Respect is due
Firstly for the writers who pour their heart and soul into these games. To spend so much time on something so personal, knowing that much of it may never get read. Even for those who do finish your games, how many players go back and replay their adventure to take all the different branching paths and side-quests? How much of that world went undiscovered? Maybe it’s something you learn to live with, but I know if it were me, I’d want to grab each and every player by the collar and explain all of the amazing things they never experienced.
The players of these games too. I doff my cap in your direction. Having the resolution and determination to play through these games, sometimes spanning years of real life. To sit with friends and family for hours upon hours, repeating the same gameplay steps, just to experience it together. I know the satisfaction that comes from seeing through even a short campaign to its end, so I can only imagine what it’s like to reach the end of something you sank hundreds of hours into.
If you’re the writer of a campaign game I never finished, I’m sorry I never saw your vision through to the end.
Over to you
Do you have any particular experiences with campaign games that you’d like to talk about? Please let me know. Either comment here, or better yet, head over to my friendly Discord server and start a conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Adam
I played Pandemic Legacy Season 1 with friends of mine who I haven’t seen regularly in five-plus years, and even still when I think about those friends — and I’ve known one of them for 20 years — I think about that campaign. I think about how, at one pivotal plot point, an in-game event occurred that shook my friend for days.
It’s not that the dialogue was masterfully written or the story was captivating to an outside party, but being a player in the cast heightened the feelings of surprise and despair. It serves as a reminder to me that board games have an unusual power, and that magic circle can unlock an emotional weight.
I’m also reminded of a non-campaign RPG I played with friends across the country, Alice is Missing. We played just once, but the story we told together had a heaviness to it that I’m not keen to revisit. That is an entirely different feeling than I have toward dramatic, upsetting film and literature, which rarely affects me as deeply. (Save the funeral scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Waterworks every time.)
I, too, haven’t played many campaign games, despite the emotional impact I’ve felt from a few — and, of course, the excitement of unlocking new concepts and mechanics with which I can play. Sometimes, I’d still just rather play something new.