Monday, November 22, 2010

Wood or Cardboard

We have come to an interesting point in game components:  they pieces we move around can be either wood blocks or cardboard units. (There are some other possibilities, but they are rather rare.)

Wood blocks provide a 3-D sense of physicality. However, they are usually bland, even when colored.  Some games do allow you to paste information onto them, a process i find tedious and, in game design terms, medieval.

Cardboard has none of the physicality, but - and especially with the graphics of the day - they do often present some rather marvelous pictures/icons.  They also allow the units to have a fairly large number of ratings.

Which do you prefer, and why?

rhb

5 comments:

  1. Cardboard for the very reasons you mention. Less tedium and at least to me, better art. Or perhaps better said, greater opportunity for better art.

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  2. Depends on the game. Information intensive / high counter density / crowded map games would seem to require cardboard. Too much to put on a block, too many blocks to paste up, and on a normal small hex map blocks take up too much space. On the other hand, blocks provide a reasonable fog of war approach (started with Napoleon IIRC), for games like CC:A, which would seem cheaper with cardboard, they provide a reasonable alternative to miniatures/plastic, and for games where the counters would be just chits (like Dominant Species), they improve the overall feel of quality in the game. I wouldn't want blocks for Combat Commander nor would I want cardboard for Risk.

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  3. Well, fog of war is not a factor in linear warfare at a battle level.

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  4. what about plastic blocks? You could put a counters worth of data on them.

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