WoW Boardgame Session(s)

Laurent was the only person to make it over for our weekly Tuesday session this time out (I was subbing for Chris) and I thought it would be fun to play the World of Warcraft boardgame. Fantasy Flight has a more strategic game (if that can be imagined) coming out this summer (in theory), so I thought it would be fun to play this again. I have little experience with playing this with actual people - one session at GameStorm more than a year ago, a co-op game with Chuck and Dave at WBC West nearly two years ago, a game with six people at Matt's before I started playing online, and another game with Jesse just about the time I was playing (but before I'd spent any time in Loraedon, which comes up if you're playing Undead or Horde before level 30, but not for Alliance, which was my bag). 

As you can see, this was really the first time I'd played the game other than one solo session after the Burning Crusade expansion (for the boardgame) came out in a little while, and so I was interested as to how well it stood up for WoW players. It's kind of a mixed bag, which I'll describe below. 

My biggest mistake was not helping Laurent pick his powers on the first turn. We were playing with the Shadows of War expansion, which is a small box add-on that more or less doubles the character development options, adds a "Destiny" deck that adds timed special conditions, and also some Blue Quests to make fighting independent (non-quest) monsters more profitable, at least sometimes. I think that all of the additions add to the game and correct some class imbalances, but they do make picking your powers a bit more complicated as now instead of three first level powers you have five, and the corresponding talents (added as you ascend in levels) as well.

As such, Laurent wiped in both of his initial combats, essentially dropping him back a cycle. Like Formula De, this game is about efficiency and not wasting effort. Every time you wipe against an opponent, you lose at least four or five actions. The one you spent moving to fight the critter, the one you spent fighting the critter, the one you spend resting and getting your strength and energy back, and the one you spend getting where you were before all of this happened. That's two full turns out of fifteen each character has to work with, and it's a burden that's difficult to overcome if your opponent doesn't do so well. This is, frankly, one of the reasons I prefer the game solitaire. 

I, on the other hand, did quite well (or so I thought). I was a level ahead of Laurent with both characters for the bulk of the game, and felt I was a shoe-in to take down the boss with a turn to spare. Both of my characters dinged level 4 (the game goes to 5 without the BC expansion), and for most bosses that's a good level to fight them if you're dice totals are decent (and mine were). The problem was that my Shammy had enough energy for a single round of combat, with fewer dice in the second round and almost nothing from there on. 

When I went to take on the Overlord, in this case Ragnaros from the BC expansion, I learned that I really needed to be a little stronger. My Lock did alright, mostly because he had things that lowered threat, but I didn't get enough red or green hits and the 22 damage Ragnaros dealt was only lowered by 12. In the second round, I didn't do very well and wiped. I'd had a card that looked like it would help a lot until I realized you had to roll your opponent's attack value or less on a blue die, and with an eight sided die and an attack value of 22, that was unlikely even after medication. 

During this time, Laurent was slowly building up his forces and leveling, and after I'd wiped there really wasn't anything useful I could do. There were no local quests, no point in trying to take on Ragnaros again, so I sat for about three turns with little to do but regain strength. We ended the game with a PvP fight, one of the few I've ever done, and in the end we both forgot to use various bag items, and Laurent forgot to use one or two talents, and I ended up winning with each of my characters at a single health. 

The really interesting part should not have been a surprise, though, although it's not something I've dealt with much in the game because I don't play on a PvP server. When you fight other players, you may want to gear up differently. Red dice, for example, are your most valuable in normal combat because they prevent hits and cause them. In PvP, however, only the Green dice prevent hits and red dice are taken sequentially in such a way that you can have a huge advantage and still lose. Attrition points are almost useless, as armor removes them *and* one other hit from the Damage or Defense boxes. 

The other interesting element is that powers that are particularly useful in the online game are not so useful in the board game. Rogue powers are a good example. Vanish is vital to a soloing rogue online, as they can get out of very sticky situations and avoid a corpse walk, but it's not that helpful in the game if you've got the right dice (there's little chance of a mob running to pull in more mobs in the boardgame). Potions are helpful to a point, but against a massive boss that is going to inflict losses of more than half of your damage points in a round there just isn't much point (although if that saves the fight for you, great). 

This is not to say that I didn't enjoy the game, just that I think it's more fun with four players if you've got four hours. I like the conferencing that goes on during downtime - "I'll go take out this Murloc, and you travel over to the Hinterlands and grab that boss from the Event deck." When it's just you, the planning is less interesting. We're hoping that Jesse and Iveta will come over and play in another month, as like the online game this is really a more interesting game when it's more social, at least when you play both factions. Solo, it's a puzzle game and also interesting, but with two it's lacking a little bit. 

One final note: the one solo session where I played the BC expansion seemed to go on for a very long time. I liked the dungeons, although they added considerable time to the game (I could usually play an entire game, from opening the box to having it put away, within two hours, but BC pushed that out to four). I had not gotten to Outlands at that point, so the extra critters and map were unfamiliar to me while the rest of the map and critters were. That made things a little odd. The game felt a little more compressed because there were more levels but not any more XP points to gain, so you barely got comfortable with new powers before you were training to get even more. I'll give it another try, but I'm loathe to ask people to play this game for six hours, which is what it would take. That and two extra tables. It's a lot of game.

Balance Board Quick Update

Not 30 minutes after finishing the entry on the Balance Board for the Wii, I did my exercise program for the morning and unlocked a new balance game - snowboarding.

Let's just say that I have never snowboarded before, and it showed. A completely different experience from skiing. 

You do indeed rotate the board 90 degrees when snowboarding. Steering is now front to back, with speed related to shifting left over the front of the board. No idea if the board reacts to the opposite orientation, which is to say so that your right side is over the front of the board. 

Anyway, I thought it was germane to my previous post. 

Combat Commander - Starting To Get It

Matt R. came over last night for a game of Combat Commander. We played scenario 25a, which pitted several German units attacking four Line level teams (heavily armed and entrenched, but a thin line at best) during the initial advances at the Battle of the Bulge. This is an interesting scenario, because it has a companion scenario that takes place in the same location later in the same day, starting with the same players. The scenario has extensive historical notes, which I wish every scenario had. Get rid of the pictures and graphics, and just put up extra info!

Matt played the Germans, who while they have a lot of units have their movement hampered, and about a third of the units are conscript squads or green teams that can barely move, and there's a lot of open ground to cover. The conscripts and greens, however, are worthless for VP, and the Germans have to capture three of the five objectives before they can start getting units off of the board. Matt also drew the Obj5 = 10VP objective, and given my starting setup that was going to be a problem for him to get to.

The Deansian Statistical Distortion Field is apparently much stronger than we ever anticipated, as Mike is currently in Pennsylvania, 3000 miles away, and it gave me excellent combat rolls (except for a single snake eyes/jam result that I used my Initiative card to reroll), while Matt seemed to roll low on just about everything that he wanted high numbers on, and by the end of the game he had lost more than half of his units. His luck even went sour at the time check on Time 7, when I first rolled a 4 to end the game, then rolled a six when he gave me back the initiative. 

It seemed there were a few things that went wrong, and a few things that Matt did wrong (I had a very simple strategy - draw Fire cards and the occasional Recover), and after the game I had a bit of an epiphany. Up until now, I've learned a few operation concepts - save up the cards you want for a big push, as this is a game played by inches. Far better to discard fishing for the cards you want to do what you want to do than to just fire randomly hoping for a statistically improbably result. Instead, you build up the cards you need, such as smoke cards to advance on a strong enemy position (the bunker with the 2 leader in it was impervious to enemy fire with almost any result). 

What I have failed to understand about this game, and I believe I can be excused for this, is that each scenario is a puzzle. ASL players have already figured this out, I think. This is not to say that every scenario has a perfect solution, as the vagaries of the decks ensure a level of chaos that echoes the battlefield (a good thing, I think, and a big selling point for me over ASL's perfect knowledge of the odds) - the events alone make every game different. 

Here's the big thing - because the scenarios are puzzles, they need to be played repeatedly to enjoy. Which is totally unintuitive to wargamers, who tend to be parakeets and collectors, grabbing the next cool and shiny game before moving on to something else. That's me, anyway. As such, when given a game with 12 scenarios, my first impulse is to play them all, then anxiously await the next batch. 

This is a big mistake, and I think that I have been shortchanging my enjoyment of this game. Especially the CC:Med scenarios, which have seemed extremely unbalanced in my group's play. At this point, I think that the relative elegance of the ruleset, combined with the large number of scenarios (I have something like 40, which includes the C3i scenarios, with more on the way in October in the Stalingrad pack) lures you into thinking this is a light game, a la Command and Colors, which does have considerably more similarity between scenarios as the battles tend to be fought on largely similar terrain with largely similar forces. Ancients does a good job of adding some real-life elements, but the luck element of what card you draw has heavier consequences in C&C, while in CC you at least have the ability to choose to discard and work toward executing a plan. 

As such, while I've always thought that the initial setup was one of the more important decisions you make in CC, I'm now thinking that not only is that setup critical, but also having a detailed and effective plan for how to advance on an enemy held position (meeting engagements tend to go pear-shaped almost immediately). That means spending a little time with the board, trying to imagine your opponent's initial placement (both offensively and defensively), and knowing exactly what you need to do to achieve your goals. It's a level of operational awareness that the mechanisms of the game belie, and while the game can be enjoyed on a casual level, I'm delighted that there is a much deeper game underneath, one that encourages you to anticipate problems and have plans in advance. 

I'll use music performance as a comparison. For the casual listener, music is a very pleasant and often exhilarating experience. For the student of music, awareness of compositional techniques, performance issues, and music history do nothing but add to the experience, much as learning a little about cooking enhances the dining experience. For the performer, you must understand the place of every note, every phrase, in the bigger picture. You must know where the difficult and problem spots are in the piece, and have a plan to pick up the pieces if things go wrong. You need to spend time playing the instrument if it's not yours, the acoustics of the hall, anticipation of audience reactions, all sorts of things. The better you plan your performance, the better it will go. As an intuitive musician, one who came to many of these performance mechanisms naturally and without effort or active study, I actually suffer a bit in terms of the discipline of preparation, and repeated "serious" performance has given me a much better idea of what I need to be thinking of when preparing for a concert. 

Combat Commander is exactly the same. If you approach it as a casual, shoot-from-the-hip-with-the-bullets-you-have-right-now game, it's a lot of fun. Knowing how to work your deck for optimal progress adds depth while retaining the fun. But understanding the deep game may, I think, provide the most satisfying experience. I've always thought that ASL players considered the game more of a lifestyle because of the vast ruleset, but it now occurs to me that it's because each scenario, and there must be something bordering on thousands out there now, is it's own puzzle. You don't have the same level of chaos to create the need for as much contingency planning in ASL, but it's still there. In other words, it isn't rules retention as much as the discipline of board and force study.

I don't know that CC will become a lifestyle choice for me in the near future, as I'm not sure I can get the quantity of play necessary without resorting to online play. However, it does throw a different light on the game that will dictate scenario choice and preparation time in the future. Instead of trying a new scenario, I may be wanting to repeat scenarios (on an opponent-by-opponent basis - the last thing I need is people who don't want to play me because I've optimized my strategy on a given scenario when they've never played it before), and switch sides on the shorter ones. 

Sure, I feel a little stupid figuring this out so late in the game, but keep in mind that I absorb and retain rules quickly and well, and always have. It's the same with sight-reading music. The result is that things seem so easy, even if I seem to lose frequently, that I make the assumption subconsciously that the tactics and strategy of the game must be equally accessible and obvious. I even know this consciously, but during play it seems to get lost. Where in a game like Age of Renaissance your play is strongly dictated by what cards you draw, in CC your draws are dictated by how you wish to play. Without that lesson firmly in mind, the next step of detailed understanding of the tactical situation can get overlooked. Especially if there are all of these bright shiny scenarios to play! 

So, who's up for a game?

Wii Balance Board

I've been asked for a little more info on the Wii's Balance Board accessory. I guess I assumed people were familiar with the concept, so here we go...

The Balance Board is about 16" x 12",  about the size of a small bathroom scale. The footpads on the four corners double as weight sensors, so that it both notices that there is a load on it (most programs will have a calibration step involved) and the relative placement of that weight on the board spread among the four corners. Think of a joystick with X and Y axes, but instead of position of the joystick along those axes the BB registers center of mass. 

During some of the wait screens in the Wii Fit program, there is a pulsing green pixilated blob that moves around the screen as you shift your weight. 

The BB comes with four extenders for the footpads if you want to use the device on a carpet. We have a rather thick Persian carpet in our living room, which sits on installed carpet of modest thickness, and the extenders work just fine. The whole point is to get the bottom of the unit above the carpeting so that it can move up and down and register the change in center of mass.

The entire unit sits about two or three inches above the level of the floor, which is just high enough that I'll be nervous when my mother uses it, but it's fine for anyone not prone to falling over. Interestingly, the added height adds considerable tension when you play the Rope Walk balance game on Wii Fit, which is not for those with vertigo. 

Depending on the program, you might only worry about moving left or right, or just back and forth, or both axes. In We Ski, you lean forward to go faster in addition to turning. As you can imagine, with only two axes there's relatively little control you can add, at least compared to the Wiimote, which not only has buttons, but works in three dimension, as well as a fourth dimension of yaw (how much the control is twisted so that the front panel is no longer facing up). At the same time, the control is incredibly intuitive. I haven't skiied in years, and I was admittedly very bad at it, but for just skiing down a slope I felt extremely comfortable very quickly. Just like in skiing, the trick is to learn when to turn and how much, which is more difficult if you want to do moguls. 

Of course, the BB can only do so much, so in We Ski you have to do air tricks using buttons on the controller. If you sidestep up a slope, that requires hand motions, as does skating or doing other special movement. The crouch is a little more intuitive - you twist the Wiimote and nunchuk inward to pick up speed. Snowplowing uses a button as well, as does stopping (although a sufficiently sharp enough turn does the same thing). I would have liked an option to lean forward to crouch, although I think that the word "option" is important here. Interestingly, this is exactly what the Slalom Skiing balance game in Wii Fit does, and it makes the game a little harder as a result. I consider We Ski an early title, and am looking forward to what improvements a snowboard game would make. 

Snowboards and skateboards have a different foot orientation, of course. The balance board has a definite front/back orientation, with the power button in the back. I'm not sure if it works via IR or RF (line of sight or not), but Nintendo *must* have thought of this during design. I know that some elements of the Wiimote seem to be IR dependent, as the hand pointer icon on the screen disappears if I move too far back from the parallax IR sensor, but the button presses work fine even if the Wiimote is pointed up at the ceiling, for example. For a snowboarding game, you'd need to turn the BB so that your feet were oriented correctly - that, or you'd be going down the hill with your head turned 90 degrees. I have no idea how they'll handle when your feet are in a normal over-the-shoulder stance, which I know is part of operating the board when you aren't flying down a hill. With We Ski, you shift to a side view, but at those times the BB isn't providing control. 

Even though I understand that the BB isn't a professionally calibrated device like those used by physical therapists, what it does excel at is the relative position you're in. Some programs will work better if your feet are spread further apart, but the Wii Fit yoga programs are often intended to have your feet close together. There is no way the machine can know if you are doing this when both feet are on the board, of course, as there are only four sensors, but then again you are only cheating yourself.

The Wii Fit feedback is quite good. For a given exercise, a small two-d graph is shown to the side, which represents the possible center of mass distribution, and a yellow highlight zone shows you where you should be. A red dot shows where you actually are. As you do the exercise, the dot moves around on the graph, and keeping it in the yellow area will improve your score on that exercise. For example, the Sun Salutation position (fancy-schmancy touch your toes) has an oblong area oriented along the vertical axis, which corresponds to front/back balance. As such, where your weight goes front to back is much less important than your right/left balance for the exercise. For the Warrior pose, you only have one foot on the pad, but weight distribution is more important so that your knee is bent correctly, so front/back is important (and, I'm guessing, total weight), and the yellow area is a smallish circle that you want to bullseye the red dot in. 

All of which is no substitute for a real Yoga instructor, but at the same time the cost is considerably cheaper and you don't have anyone sticking their foot in your face in a crowded studio. Believe me, I've been there. Plus, unless you had a yoga studio across the street from your house, as we did for a brief time, you probably have to get in your car to get there, so your carbon footprint is probably a little less. We go green where we can. 

As for upcoming titles, I've learned not to pay too much attention to anything until it's actually out, although the fantastic luck I had in picking up a BB could easily have ended with me running around town looking for a BB had I not been at Fry's that one specific day. Games don't seem to be as much of a problem, fortunately. My problem is that if I'm waiting for a game to come out, I typically buy it that day without knowing if it's actually any good. As such, I've learned to wait until it comes out, read the reviews, and then make a buying decision. With the Wii, that's been a really good idea as so few of the games have been well received critically. I'll probably pick up the snowboarding game when it comes out now that I know about it, but probably not the skateboarding. I've tried a Tony Hawk title or two, and my wife even got me a skateboarding controller for the PS1. Having never skateboarded, the damned thing nearly killed me, which may have been the ultimate goal. We ended up giving it to a friend's kid. I'm just the wrong generation for skateboarding - it was a shortlived fad when I was in my early teens, and didn't make a comeback until I was in college, but boy has it stuck around this time. What I'm saying is that skateboarding just doesn't speak to me much. 

There's a hilarious send up of the Wii Fit package put out by Sarcastic Gamer on You Tube, well worth watching. They use the Wii promotional materials with a hilarious voice dub, it's quite good and well worth searching out online. Of course, it missed the point that Wii Fit isn't a game (although it includes games), it's an exercise program for your console. And for those who mock Yoga but have never given it a serious try, I'm here to tell you that it's a whole lot harder than it looks. We ended up getting (and I sh*t you not) a walker to help with my balance - anything that involves one foot leaving the ground that isn't involved in getting me from one physical location to another is a real challenge for me. I use it to balance my elevated knee for Tree position, for example - otherwise I simply can't maintain my balance. Let me tell you, seeing my mother at 85, and knowing that her largely excellent bone health is the product of 15 years of thinking ahead with calcium and vitamin D supplements, and seeing that balance is a huge problem for her makes me want to start working on it *now* instead of after I've tried to imitate Paul Hamm on a staircase sans the stuck landing. 

Anyway, that's my take on the BB at this point. I think it's a brilliant addition to the Wii, and more importantly, it broadens the appeal of the console in ways that I will guarantee Microsoft and Sony will begin to emulate. When you see Wii's used for physical therapy and played by seniors in retirement communities, you know that this is not your older brother's console anymore. I predict that at some point in the next decade the Wii and BB will be in MOMA's Industrial Design wing along with the original Mac, the Newton, the iPod, and the iPhone. And well it should because those designs took their historical predecessors in new directions just as the Wii is taking console gaming into new realms. 

The Wii - One Year Later

I spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to get a Wii a little more than a year ago, showing up at Fred Meyer's at 6am two days a week for a month, even being the *first* guy in line at Toys R Us - that *didn't* get a Wii. My most excellent friend Ben seemed to be a magnet for the damned things, though, and managed to score one just stopping by a store. It's a year later, and through what seems to me to be considerable controversy for a gaming console, I thought it worthwhile to jot down my feelings on the system, the industry, and the continuing shortage of hardware.

First, availability. The Wii is not impossible to get as it was a year ago, but it does require some patience and perseverance. The local Fry's Electronics Superstore gets them in about once a week, although they go quickly. Controllers are easy to find, unlike a year ago when getting a Nunchuk was a bit of a trick. You no longer are forced to purchase Wii Play along with your controllers, which is nice. The new Balance Board controller that comes with the Wii Fit package, however, is nearly impossible to get. Rumor has it that Nintendo is shipping units to Europe rather than the US because the dollar is so weak compared to the Euro. I was very lucky to have been at the store the day they came out, because I'm not sure they've gotten any back in since.

The games have been a huge disappointment to me, at least in part. It usually takes the developers some months to start figuring out the efficiencies of any new system, but with the Wii it seems that they hadn't the foggiest idea of what to do with the new controller paradigm. When they did use it, there was little novel about it (usually shaking it or pointing it at the screen), or in some cases they abandoned the novelty altogether! This puzzles me, as some of the early games, like Warioware - Smooth Moves did a fantastic job of showing genuine creativity. Comparatively, the new Lego Indiana Jones game, while a lot of fun, doesn't really use the controller in anything other than a very traditional way. No shake, no point, no nothing. At the same time, I'd rather play a game using the Wiimote as a traditional controller if it makes sense to do so rather than staple on some non-intuitive elements just to make it more of a Wii game. 

This is not to say there aren't some exceptionally good games out there. It just seems like they were far and few between for quite a while. Some of the titles I think are worth investing in:

• Super Mario Galaxy (do not play if the old Descent computer game messed with your inner ear)
  
• Metroid Prime: Corruption (this is how to do a first-person shooter on the Wii)
  
• Mario Kart (even comes with a little wheel you put the controller in)
  
• Trauma Center: Second Opinion (you use the controller like a laser scalpel!)
  
• We Ski (if you have the Balance Board and don't actually ski)
  
• Battalion Wars 2 (Fun combat game)
  
• Warioware: Smooth Moves (the "koans" they give for the various uses of the Wiimote are worth the price of admission alone)
  

Of course, the original Wii Sports package is still a lot of fun, if limited in many ways. 

The good news is that the quality of title seems to be improving in general after a long drought. The bad news, at least for some, is where the market seems to be going. The Wii can't really compete against the traditional console games on the XBox 360 or even the PlayStation 2 in some respects, but that's also because Nintendo isn't trying terribly hard. What Nintendo decided to do with the Wii was to open the market up to people who werent' twitchers but were instead interested in "social gaming". And it has worked. At the retirement community where my mother lives they play Wii Bowling every night, even those residents in wheelchairs or with walkers. And they have a *ball*. 

The success seems to be drifting over to the Sony and Microsoft camps, where developers are starting to copy the social gamer model. For one thing, you don't need to work so hard on AI or level design when Halo 3 isn't the point but Mario Kart is. Think of the brain trust needed to design Advanced Squad Leader (a wargame whose rules come in a 2" three-ring binder) compared to a game like Times Up, which requires you to think of a bunch of people's names and stick them on cards. I'm not saying I don't like games like ASL, but if the point was to make money putting together a game and selling it, a party game as good as Time's Up will win out every time, and by a factor of about 1000. So guess where the market is going? Not to mention that you have Wii's used in physical therapy, and played by people that previously wouldn't have gone near a console game.

While the networking side of the Wii is just starting to get beyond the Nostalgic Download phase, it's definitely moving in the right direction. Nintendo is starting to sell downloadable games and Mario Kart *finally* allows you to play other people online (and even shows you where they're from, which I really like). The Mii concept, that of designing an avatar that will represent you in the games and even show up as observers or competitors, seemed a little childish at first. Now, however, when I go for a jog using Wii Fit, there's my daughter jogging past me, or people from my game group playing baseball. It's a little corny, but I actually enjoy these games better when people I know are in the game, even if they aren't really there. 

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the physical exercise the Wii can provide you with. Let's establish right now that while I am not what I would consider a fat man, I am about 10-15 pounds over fighting trim and don't do much in the way of exercise. 30 minutes on the Wii Fit gives me a decent aerobic workout, and really surprisingly good feedback. After seeing the sort of trouble that decaying balance causes as we age in my mother (who has been very good about almost every other aspect of her personal health), the Balance Board is mana from heaven. My balance stinks, as anyone unfortunate to watch me try various yoga poses can attest, but now I have an excellent way to practice this at home. And I can't emphasize this enough, give me feedback on how I'm doing. While the Wii Fit is by no means as accurate as the balance machine they use at my mother's physical therapy workouts, it's an amazing first product. If anything would get me to start doing a daily workout in the mornings, it's this. 

I do have a PS2 that I use mostly for Guitar Hero (and Rock Star, which I plan to get later in the summer - it seems that they are unbundling the various elements and I'm hoping my GH controller will work as well as my SingStar microphones), so if I want the old-style twitch gaming I can always get it. Right now, the MMO experience is so rewarding that I mostly game in small increments on the Wii - 30 minutes of Mario Kart, for instance, or even just 15. 

However, what I find so damned rewarding about the Wii is that it tends to engage everyone, from small children (my great-nephew Kai, for example, is a scream to watch golfing at age 2) to my 85-year-old mother, and nearly everyone inbetween. My wife, who dabbled in PlayStation golf and a little Virtua Tennis on the Dreamcast, has started to ask if we can play the Wii in the evenings. She likes the boxing for some reason, but especially the slalom skiing in the Wii Fit program. Even my daughter comes over and plays with us. 

All in all, despite the dearth of decent games (mitigated a tad by the GameCube compatibility - I can still use all of my old controllers and games with the Wii), I can't imagine a more forward-thinking or perfect console for where I am in my life. I suspect that the developer community is finally figuring out how to leverage the unique aspects of the Wii by creating a different kind of game rather than retrofitting the old gameplay styles into new hardware. 

Now if only they would make the Euro-style boardgames available for play online, a la the XBox 360...