Jordan Weisman is frustrated with a monster he helped create.
Gamers are spending too many hours, he says, sucked into their screens facing off against online opponents they may never see, and not enough time playing with people — you know, in person.
“We’re animals. We’re supposed to play face to face in the same space together,” Weisman says.
He thinks he’s found a way to bring the best of both worlds together in a strangely named game dubbed “Golem Arcana” that he calls the “the world’s first tabletop massively multiplayer online game.”
If anyone understands those two worlds, it’s Weisman.
While you may not know his name, you might be familiar with some of his titles.
He’s the guy who created the “MechWarrior” franchise, one of the bestselling video game series of all time, which grew out of his pen-and-paper roleplaying game “Battletech.” Other credits include the diesel-punk air-pirate shooter “Crimson Skies” and the gritty “Shadowrun” future-fantasy franchise, which started as a tabletop game before morphing into a long-running video game series, with its most recent release last year.
He also had a hand in developing the Army’s first tank simulator and served as a Pentagon consultant to help bring no-kidding war games into the digital age.
Oh, and he was the first creative director for Microsoft Entertainment, responsible for launching a new gaming console in 2001 ... a little thing called the Xbox.
No surprise IGN named him one of the “Top 100 Game Creators of all Time.”
Bringing a monster to the table
“Don’t get me wrong, I love video gaming, but there’s something wrong when kids’ idea of playing together after school these days usually means just meeting online from their own houses,” Weisman says.
So he’s trying to bring the online monster to the table by pouring all that creative energy into his latest project.
“The passion to find a bridge point between the digital and the physical, to make face-to-face gaming more accessible while still maintaining the rich depth and fun of online games, all comes together in ‘Golem Arcana,’ ” Weisman said during the recent PAX Prime gaming expo in Seattle, where he led demonstrations of “Golem Arcana.”
At first glance, the game looks like so many other tabletop, miniatures-based games. Think “Warhammer 40K,” “Pathfinder” and the like.
In“Golem Arcana,” set in the world of Eretsu, players build armies of giant, knight-driven golems — a kind of fantasy version of mechs, says Weisman — represented by the intricate figures moved around the board like chess pieces.
Look more closely and what you won’t see are the tedious rule books and charts usually associated with tabletop war games. Instead, players use a Bluetooth-connected stylus tethered to their smartphone or tablet to manage game play.
Touch a figure with the digital pen and everything you need to know about that character comes up. Touch the board to see your movement options and unleash your strategies.
The game’s free app not only teaches you how to play, but also acts as referee, scoreboard and narrator. Before head-to-head games, players use the app to build their armies, join factions and develop strategies.
While “Golem Arcana” is a one-on-one board game at its most basic level, it can scale up into more epic multiplayer battles.
'This is the next level'
Clashes start with last-man-standing-type battles but expand into “a very robust set of victory conditions ranging from protect the Alamo to capture the hill, escort missions, seeking missions, and we can mix all these in very different ways,” Weisman says.
The basic starter set, which retails on Amazon and at gamer stores for $79.99, includes six figures — three for each side — along with map board tiles, the digital pen and some other accessories.
More figures will be released monthly.
At PAX Prime, new players — ranging from kids to old-school gamer dads — were jumping into the game in no time.
“It’s definitely one of the hottest games coming out right now,” says Rob Hubbard, a former Air Force captain who left active duty in 2010 and now helps manage a chain of tabletop wargaming stores in Washington state.
“If you’re a fan of ‘Warhammer 40K,’ this is the next level,” he says.
Meanwhile, all game play is uploaded to the “Golem Arcana” servers from the app, which then delivers new scenarios and story lines every month as play develops.
This is where the MMO part comes in, Weisman says.
The game’s storyline isn’t a static pre-determined narrative, like what you’d find in the campaign modes of most video game titles, but “a living world that will change and adapt over time” as developers aggregate player data, Weisman says.
“So you can have two players facing off in a last-man-standing-type scenario, but one player advances into a square and suddenly a woman pops up in the app asking for help. Some bandits have kidnapped her son and they’ve taken him to a town, and the app shows you where the town is. Will you help rescue her son? All of a sudden you’ve got a quest in the middle of this board game.”
Players can reject the quest “and focus on kicking your opponent’s ass, or accept the quest and still kick his ass while you’re saving the son. Either way, those kind of choices become part of the data record we accept into our server.”
So as the story develops, “it’s not just about who won. It’s also the moral and contextual choices that the players make during the game. If we see one faction tended to accept the quest to go rescue the boy more often than any other faction and they succeeded more than they failed, then part of the lore, the story, becomes how that faction’s leader accepted the quest and is now viewed by the public as more magnanimous.”
Weisman says he thinks military and veteran gamers in particular will like what they see.
“This is a great off-duty kind of game, especially for people who like a tactical challenge. Sure, if you’re in the military, that’s part of the job, but it’s great when you can use that knowledge in your entertainment,” Weisman says.
“This game is all about battlefield tactics.”
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