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Board games and Card Games - Research
Mindmaps for the two themes. Mario Party,which focuses on players controlling characters from the franchise, navigate a virtual board using dice to determine how far the player can go. There are different spaces with different affects, different boards with different events, and mini games to play at the end of everyone's turn, items can be used much like chance cards.
The game series Fire Emblem plays much like Chess, being a tactical rpg with board spaces, units moving in specialised ways, yet there's an added rock/paper/scissors element to weapons and their effectiveness. Any tile based tactical rpg also counts as a war game, and has links to Chess, Fire Emblem developing the core game with visuals, actually seeing these units do battle.
Many classic board and card game have been digitized, Solitaire used to come pre-installed with most computers and can be played on the iPads of today, many digital games bundle a wealth of these analogue games together in a single product, seen in many portable titles. The game The Political Machine serves as parody to the American Presidency, small figures representing current real life leaders travel around a virtual America, converting states to their party and gaining money, making a virtual bourd game of a real life event in human culture. Tharsis is a game set in space, where a digital dice roll determines what happens to the crew of your ship, whilst Talisman which is based on an analogue game, that works off older generation digital rpg tropes, features item cards, magic spells, an experience system, skills and stats, much like Dungeon and Dragons, the imagined fantasies of these analogue games better realised through games- see Eye of Judgement.
Guild of Dungeoneering has you laying out a dungeon from cards, creating a sort of board of play, as a small warrior makes their way through the map, battling the monster you've set through cards representing attacks, the highest winning. A card based battle system appears within Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, where every action during battle is a card, if your enemies card has a value that is higher, you cannot use that action, exhausting all your cards has you reload the deck you constructed for the fight, whilst stacking cards of a certain type and numeric value allows the player to use aquired skills.
The popular card game Yu-Gi-Oh featured a spin off, that took the monsters of the game and put them in a board game setting, players constructing the board with cube nets with every dice roll. A lot of games with pre-order bonuses come packaged with novelties, a pack of playing cards printed with characters from the game is not uncommon. The game series Persona heavily references Tarot cards, as core features and mechanics, categorising summoned monsters based upon the characteristics of the Major Arcana, acquiring new cards (new monsters) has you plucking a card from a deck and tarot spreads are used to fuse them, to gain stronger ones. Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales featured a card dueling system, where you pitted cards representing monsters against one another, using special abilities and various effects, its complexities comparable to the aforementioned Yu-Gi-Oh.
The Eye of Judgement was a game for the PS3 that made use of a camera peripheral that went by the same name, collectible trading cards where distributed with the game alongside separate decks and booster packs. These cards when placed on the 3x3 grid also given with the game, which under the camera, would bring forth 3D AR digital creatures. The aim was for one player to claim 5 squares on the grid, each summoning monsters, trying to populate and defeat the other to achieve that goal, spell cards were also used, held to the camera to activate. The fantasy within Yu-Gi-Oh becomes somewhat of a reality here, online matches possible with many cards to collect.
Nintendo themselves, before video games, produced Hanafuda cards, a version of playing cards that were produced during the ban on gambling under the Tokugawa Shogunate. This set had 12 suits, one for each month. with a set of 4 that correspond to a flower in each, usually 2 were normal and 2 were special. There were many games that could be played with these cards, much like the contemporary decks we still use today.
Yu-Gi-Oh itself as a card game was originally a spin off from the popular Japanese Manga, that developed into the incredibly successful collectible trading card game it is today. Kazuki Takahashi wanted to base his story around the theme of games, inspired by role playing and tabletop games that create communication between real people, he feels that a true connection or communication cannot be achieved via the Internet. His story's protagonist transforms from a child into a cool, invincible adult when he plays games, Takahashi believing a player becomes a hero when playing- entering Huizinga's magic circle.
It could be argued that this Japanese card game, being based around monsters, is due to the culture of Japan. Yo-kai being an incredibly important part of Japan's heritage, these monsters are still present today in games and other media, looking at Pokemon and a further iteration, Yo-kai Watch which has players battle and collect these familiar creatures. Games that heavily feature monsters, often come from Japan. Japanese Role Playing Games are rich in monsters; slimes, skeletons, ghosts, dragons- one merely has to gaze at the popular Final Fantasy series to see a wealth of mascot monster characters- perhaps this is why mascots and other cute creatures are so celebrated in the East. Collecting and trading them was a large part of the appeal of Pokemon, which in turn became a well loved card game, trading and collecting the cards as you would the monsters. There's a sense of community, as mentioned by Takahashi, from playing card games, and by extension, board games- the fact there are still modern analogue games being produced is testament to the fact there is still a place for these games today next to their digital counter parts. Games bring people together, there are sprawling online communities dedicated to video games, people meet up in real life to discuss games at expos- from first hand experience, a lot of these people will also take part in games such as Yu-Gi-Oh when socialising.
Some interesting strands here are the collecting and social aspects of card games and bourd games, as well as the iconography of monsters, that has deep roots in Japanese folklore.
The Persona games as mentioned earlier, heavily feature monsters and the Arcarna, each card of the major Arcarna being part of a cycle of continued growth. Certain characters represent "social links" within the game, representative of each card and the struggles towards growth when following this path. The minor Aracana features suites of commonly cups, pentacle, wands and swords- a link could be made to the four suits of contemporary playing cards- complete conjecture here- The Fool of the major Arcana could be the Joker in the pack. These four suits deal with more minor problems and tasks in our everyday lives, wealth, social interactions, creativity and rational reason are circles of knowledge they cover, the people on these cards represent the people we meet in our every day lives. These smaller tasks could be linked to side quests in RPG games, if this was explored much further.
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