These are the anti-Monopolys

German- or Euro-style board games--the best-known of which is probably Settlers of Catan, at least here in the States--are a revolution in analog gaming. They're everything Monopoly is not: often simple but fiendishly clever, designed with a minimum of boring down-time and a maximum of player interaction, without the indignity of getting eliminated or the any semblance of luck. (Dice are pretty much verboten in these games.)

A Euro-style game fan I spoke to referred to Monopoly, Life, and the like as "Amero-trash games." Settlers of Catan originated in Germany, as did most of the rest of its ilk; Germans are famously crazy about board games, and mainstream German magazines often review games along with new movies and music releases. It's rare for Americans to seek out new games; we tend to have our mainstays, our Trivial Pursuit and our Scrabble and our Risk, but Germans are always experimenting, creating, and trying new games. There's even an award for games, the much-coveted annual Spiel des Jahres.

The games themselves are totally different, too: they're tightly designed (these games are also sometimes called "designer games"), and the designers become minor celebrities. Game creators like Reiner Knizia, Klaus Teuber, and Wolfgang Kramer create dozens or even hundreds of games, and their names are stamped on the box in the same way a movie might have the director's name in large type. In the past five or ten years, these games have started to take hold in the States, and they're causing Americans to see board games in a totally new light. They're not just for family game night anymore; these are difficult, interactive, strategic, and super fun games, and there are always more to discover.

I spoke to Daniel R. Nelon, from Seattle's famed Card Kingdom--it's housed in a former BMW showroom, hosts tournaments, has a cafe and bar attached, and is stubbornly located on the opposite coast from us at PopSci headquarters in New York City--to get an expert's point of view on the history of the games. He was also nice enough to provide a primer for beginning, intermediate, and expert players.

PopSci: So what makes a German-style board game?

Daniel R. Nelon: A Euro-game has little to nothing in the way of chance mechanisms, so there's very little luck involved. They tend to stick to wooden pieces over plastic, it's their preference. There's very little text on the board; only the rules have text on them, so you can actually play with people who speak other languages as long as you both already know how to play. They tend to value economics [themes] over military, and one of the most interesting things about [this style] is that there's no player elimination, so when people are playing the game, everyone is in it until the game is finally over. So nobody's sitting around waiting for the game to end.

Another really nice thing about Euro-style games is there's usually a nice catch-up mechanic, where if you are falling behind, there are other ways to catch up. So there's not necessarily always a runaway player.

PS: A friend of mine told me about playing in a Settlers of Catan tournament in which he pulled way ahead and got embargoed by the other players--they all stopped trading with him.

DRN: Yeah, that's what's interesting about Settlers of Catan, there's that trading aspect which allows everyone to be interactive during everyone else's turn, which a lot of Euro-style games focus on. So there's not a lot of down-time waiting for your turn.

Also in games like Catan, a lot of the more popular Euro games, they tend to be historical and based around worker placements, politics, and/or worker placements, and resource management.

It's interesting that those subjects are not inherently appealing to too many people, but these games are so popular.

DRN: Oh, definitely. I get that a lot from customers who come in and aren't traditionally gamers. There are games that we at the store consider "gateway games," and Settlers of Catan is definitely one of them. [Catan] was published in 1995, and it spread like wildfire, and now we're starting to get to the point where Settlers is replacing the normal household games, replacing Monopoly of Life. You can find it on peoples' shelves who aren't really gamers.

PS: When did you first start to see German- or Euro-style games pop up?

DRN: Euro games started getting popular around the '80s, that was when the rest of the world started to take notice of them. But one of the things that really helped open the world up to German- and Euro-style gaming was the internet. Before the internet, people didn't really know what other countries were playing or what kinds of games there were. One of the things people were really trying to do in the '80s was import games over here.

Then there were publications like Mike Siggins' SUMO, a quarterly publication focused on reviews and English translations of German games. Games at the time were mostly appealing to war-gamers and strategy gamers, things like Advanced Squad Leader.

At that time, a lot of the American games were kind of falling short--they were too light for war and RPG fans, and a little too dense to be family games. So when people started learning about other games [thanks to the internet], certain games started coming to light, like Scotland Yard, Metropolis, and Die Macher.

PS: Are those games still around?

DRN: Yes, those are still in print, which is surprising because in the board game world, most games don't actually stay in print all that long.

DANIEL'S MOST UNDERRATED GAMES

Ra: "It's a Reiner Knizia game," says Daniel. "Reiner Knizia is probably the most famous board game designer from Germany, he's published over 300 games. It's a really cool, interesting bidding game. It's a pretty tough game, because you have to guess what your opponents are going to bid on.
Hansa Teutonica: "It's a store favorite here, but overlooked in the States a lot," says Daniel.
Dungeon Lords: "Not a lot of people know about this game. It's definitely a 'Euro-game,' in the way it plays mechanically, but the theme is something that not a lot of Euro-gamers are used to--it's not the typical medieval, agriculture theme."

DANIEL'S PRIMER TO EURO-STYLE GAMES
For the beginner: "I usually send them to the more popular games, not because it's popular, but because they're easy to learn and they get non-gamers into gaming, basically. The three I usually rely on are Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, and Dominion. Those are the three best-selling games in the store. Most of the time when I suggest those games, they come back for expansions or they want something similar to those games."

Something "similar, but a little overlooked," says Daniel, "is a game called Cartagena. It's based a famous escape from an impenetrable prison in I think the 1600s [ed. note: it was the 1672 pirate-led prison break]."

Daniel also mentioned Ticket to Ride more than once--it's a game in which you try to navigate a complicated train system. Like almost all of this style of game, Daniel promised that it's much more fun than it sounds.

For the intermediate: "I would usually go with a game like Blue Moon City, which is a beautiful game, component-wise--the artwork is really great--and it's actually a Reiner Knizia game too." It's kind of a post-apocalyptic game in which you try to rebuild a city according to the guidelines of the dragon overlords. "I haven't had anybody dislike that game," says Daniel.

Dungeon Petz is another one Daniel likes. "It's a worker placement game, it takes a little while to learn and about two, two-and-a-half hours to play, but it's very, very entertaining. But what's fun is that you're dealing with entities on the board that behave on their own." You have to raise the pets on the board, keeping them entertained and fed and contained (they can be destructive if allowed to break out of their cages).

Kingdom Builder, from the same designer as the wildly popular Dominion, is another good one. "The cool thing about it is that it's very easy to play. It is strategic, but it's not going to be too confusing for people. A family could play it, and a game lasts about 20 minutes, and it has very high replayability."

For the expert: "I'd recommend a game called Mage Knight: The Board Game. It's based on an old tabletop miniature game but it has really nothing to do with it aside from theme. This game is fantastic. I'm a little biased towards it because I think it's one of the best games to come out in the past five years. It's not very popular yet, and it's a little more difficult to find, but they're about to do a reprinting in the next few months."

"The board is modular; it has tiles you lay out as you explore. So the more you explore and wander, the bigger the board will get. It has a similar mechanic to Fable, so you basically get to decide if you want to be a bad-ass, really evil, or if you want to be good and noble. But you're not punished for being evil or rewarded for being good, necessarily." It's a deck-building game, in which your deck is determined by your behavior. It's also not for the faint of heart; Daniel describes the rulebook as "basically a short novel," but says it's also the game he currently plays the most.

Nearly 100 years of questionable games in the pages of PopSci

See the gallery.

An 1892 issue of the magazine spells out the purpose of games, in case you didn't know: “They afford needful relaxation to the mind, pleasant diversions to the invalid and afflicted, promoting acquaintance and fellowship.”

Here are ten games that range from mildly exciting to about as fun as sorting laundry (literally--see "Wash Day" from 1931). Nearly all of these articles came with DIY instructions. Would you still play Scrabble if you had to carve each piece yourself?

Those other people can be the application owners themselves, or they can be third parties like marketers or ad providers like Google AdSense. Different apps share different info with different entities. Some, like Tweetdeck, make sense--it shares information with Tweetdeck itself as well as things that interface with Tweetdeck, like Facebook, Imageshack, bit.ly, and--of course--Twitter.

Others are a bit more questionable. For instance, did you know that Pandora--according to WSJ--is sharing various information from your phone with eight different third parties? We didn’t either, but we hope it’s sharing our listening preferences as well so all that incoming marketing will at least be sonically pleasing. Take a spin through the interactive graphic at WSJ to see exactly what your apps are saying about you.

[WSJ]

The Sony PlayStation TV beams a different image to each player's eyes, so no more splitscreen--which means no more "screen-cheating," and no more half-size screens

The popularization of networked consoles brought disarmament. The art of screen cheating became less essential. And now, 10 years after the internet solved the problem for most of us, Sony has made sure that gamers who still compete on the same TV can enjoy the same benefit--a whole screen for both players. This feature, what Sony calls SimulView, is the highlight of their new Playstation 3D Display, a 24-inch screen that projects two separate, fullscreen, HD feeds to two different people playing the same game.

This technology is really the reason we're excited about a 24-inch TV, so it’s good that SimulView works perfectly. I played the bundled-in racing game Motorstorm: Apocalypse with a coworker, and decades of screen cheating proved so ingrained that several times I instinctively looked at the bottom of the screen to try to see his position on the course. Throughout the races, I only saw the dirtbike of my co-racer a handful of times, when he was just ahead of or just to the side of me. It is an indisputably cool piece of tech: during our first race, my coworker and I kept saying “wow”, two children of the 1980s accustomed to squinting at a fraction of the screen realizing we'd no longer have to.

If you watch a race without glasses on, you see the perspectives laid on top of each other, producing a ghostly effect that gives you a real appreciation for the double duty that the set is pulling. My only reservation after a few sessions with Motorstorm is that the bright colors of the game, in SimulView, take on a light grey varnish. To me, though, faded colors seem a fair tradeoff for full-screen two-player multiplayer. Five games currently support the technology, and if you have any desire to play these games competitively against “IRL” friends, this set will be very tempting.

The technology here is great, but this particular TV has some issues. The bundle comes with only one pair of 3-D glasses, so you can’t use SimulView out of the box--you need to buy another pair, at a steep $70. Since the display does not come with a remote, I immediately noticed that the set-top buttons are tiny and hard to find. The display itself is too small to work as the main television anywhere except in the smallest rooms; you wouldn’t want to sit further than five or six feet away from it. The only logical use that comes to mind for a set this small is a dorm room--and would dorm-dwellers be looking to spend $400 on a TV that'll be discarded as soon as they move out?

The set doesn't look like Sony's other HDTVs; instead, it keeps with the aesthetic Sony has developed for the PlayStation brand since the launch of the Playstation 2 twelve years ago. It is sleek and black, with rounded sides that call to mind an oversized PSP. Fans of the brand will like the look but it does nothing to dispel the idea that the display is a novelty device rather than a versatile media machine or, you know, a real TV. Oh, and 3-D is not compatible with SimulView, so we were unable to play multiplayer Motorstorm in its very impressive 3-D mode. (3-D does work very well without SimulView, in a single-player mode.)
 
So the machine has a lot of faults, but I didn’t find them sufficient to diminish the initial “whoah” factor of SimulView. As a demonstration of a genuinely impressive piece of gaming technology, the display serves its purpose. As an actual consumer device people would want to put in their homes, it leaves a lot to be desired. Still, I can easily imagine SimulView in a larger televisions, branded less aggressively to a hardcore gaming audience, setting the future standard for a retro form of gaming--local multiplayer.

The Sony PlayStation 3-D Display is available now for $400.

Gamers with a penchant for puzzles are having fun answering the most tedious questions in science

For now, for me, the computer game EteRNA is a fun diversion. But maybe someday, if I get really good, Adrien Treuille and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University will bring one of my RNAs to life, synthesizing it in a lab and checking whether it could lead to new drugs or new research in biotechnology. I would so love to find out. And this is exactly the point.

Across all disciplines of science, researchers are realizing that with some creativity — and an open mind — they can access entire armies of free helpers who will log in to online games and help them classify galaxies, solve puzzles or twirl virtual shapes, completing tedious tasks for them and generally enhancing their work. For the most part, these information games take advantage of humans’ natural proclivity for pattern recognition; we are simply better than computers at sussing out visible details. But future projects may go beyond puzzles or other visual tasks. Any problem can become a game, if you approach it the right way.

“If you think about it, you are able to increase the population of biochemists focusing on a specific problem by a factor of three or four,” said Zoran Popović, co-creator of Foldit, the protein-folding puzzle game at the vanguard of games for science’s sake. “If you could do a similar thing for all the problems that are facing humanity today, it would help not just science, but society at large, a huge amount.”

Already, there are so many examples: In Foldit, you twist virtual proteins around in search of optimal designs that use the least amount of energy, the way nature would want them. In Moon Zoo, you can zoom in on high-resolution pictures of lunar craters and flag weird rocks that NASA might look at again. You could listen to orcas on WhaleFM and match up similar-sounding calls. And let me tell you about Planet Hunters. Did you know you can classify the Kepler Space Telescope’s light data all by yourself, potentially finding a new exoplanet on your own?

Data games enable new questions about the way things work, and the way people think, that no one has asked before. Even DARPA is getting in on the action. The blue-sky research agency created a puzzle challenge last fall that asked solvers to piece together documents that had been shredded into more than 10,000 pieces. “Some at DARPA involved in the challenge did not think a solution could be found,” Daniel Kaufman, the Shredder Challenge project manager, said in an email. The winning team used custom-built computer vision algorithms to suggest puzzle pairings, and humans put them together. In total, the winning team spent nearly 600 man-hours developing algorithms and piecing together documents, beating DARPA’s deadline. DARPA is doing it again for other “wicked” problems, generally considered insolvable by conventional means. The first is a project called Crowd Sourced Formal Verification program, which seeks new games that will allow experts and novices to verify software code for DoD systems.

The possibilities seem endless, and they may indeed be, according to game creators like Popović and Treuille.

“All human tasks, certainly all knowledge tasks, are amenable to this kind of movement to the Internet,” said Treuille, who was part of the team that created Foldit and went on to create EteRNA (sounds like eternal). “In some sense, Foldit and EteRNA reflect a larger trend in which the Internet has dramatically broken down barriers in communication and expertise, and barriers for who gets to do what in society.”

There are benefits for the hard scientists here, too. The games are not only providing new answers; they’re also enabling new questions about the way things work, and the way people think and learn, that no one has asked before.

In EteRNA, players have discovered patterns — like a recipe for an RNA that works every time — that don’t fit with existing models of how RNAs work. “It’s like they’re discovering laws of nature,” Treuille said. And image-based games can shed light into human nature, too. Eric Fischer tracks location data to make sense of human motivations. He plots the locations of Flickr and Twitter photographs and has learned new insights into the way we live: People take vacations where they can walk around, but live where they must drive; and tourists and locals cluster in segregated areas. PopSci turned his geodata analysis of Flickr photos into a game, in which you guess whether photos of New York were shot by tourists or locals, and see if your assessment matches what the data predict.

PLAY POPSCI'S TOURIST-OR-LOCAL GAME HERE

Computer scientists like David Anderson are interested in how people learn online. In some ways, his research on SETI@home was the seed of this entire movement — a similar passive-computing project based on the SETI program was the genesis of Foldit. Anderson, a research scientist at the University of California-Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, built an active gaming project called Stardust@home after the Stardust spacecraft returned the first interstellar dust particles to Earth in 2006. UCB physicist Andrew Westphal and other investigators needed to make sure they found every dust grain, but there were 1.6 million images of the dust collector, and computers couldn’t search them well enough, Anderson recalled.

“We didn’t do it for novelty or publicity; it was critical to the scientific outcome. We needed to know with statistical confidence that we had found all of the dust particles that there were to find,” he said. In building Stardust@home, Anderson and Westphal realized they had to calibrate their volunteers, just like you would any instrument — there was a learning curve. They devised a system to check false positives against players’ real scores to come up with a confidence level. Ultimately, more than 25,000 volunteers signed up from across the globe, and devoted an average 40 hours of work. In 2010, an Ontario man found the first particles.

Anderson turned his Stardust@home calibration methods into an open framework for any type of data game, and he nicknamed it Bossa. Several scientists have approached him looking to develop their own data-analysis games, including a research team examining satellite imagery of the Brazilian rainforest. The goal is to identify forested and deforested regions and detect very early, within days or weeks, when new deforestation is happening, Anderson said.

Foldit proved that distributed thinking done by collectives of online gamers can be more successful than distributed computing. But it requires more dedication and expertise than your average video game — Popović has seen top-ranked players take a break for a couple months, return and then fail to break the top 20. Players share skills and new tricks, so the entire community quickly advances to a higher level. In that way, Foldit is also a unique experiment in the power of games as teaching tools, he said. People can become micro-experts without even realizing it.

“You can just skip a college degree and a Ph.D and everything else and do even better than all these Ph.D scientists. So imagine you can do that for education in general,” he said. “Not only are people learning more, but they think math and science is fun, and that is rarely the case.”

The learning curves can be steep, but players also get invested in a game after they’ve tried, failed, tried again and improved. Humans learn naturally in a way that will never be easy for a computer, said Treuille, who admits he is not nearly as good at his game as the players.

“When we started EteRNA, the players kind of sucked, I’m not going to lie to you. They were much worse than the computer algorithms,” he said. “But we made it a game, we made it fun, we incentivized people to play, and we said ‘It’s up to you. Make RNAs that fold properly.’ And they learned and learned.”

Players shared hypotheses and strategies on message boards; some players excel at finding anomalies, and others are good at answering questions, Treuille said.

“Every single week the players got better, and within three to six months they were soundly beating the computers,” he said.

Even in complex games like Foldit and EteRNA, the games are largely about image recognition, if for no other reason than it’s simpler to design a game around such problems. But Popović and Treuille don’t plan to stop there.

Popović is building a new web-based game, tentatively called Biologic, that will ask players to create new synthetic molecules, an even bigger problem than protein folding. He plans to launch it in April. He also wants to build a game that would create maps of computer programs and ask players to find every security lapse or bug. He even imagines a game to eradicate corruption, he said — it would take all public records in a given country and map all possible connections between them. Players would find all possible feedback loops or payment correlations, which would then be investigated.

“All these whistleblowers would be all over the world, tracking down people who cheat,” he said. 
“In general, we are trying to see if we can tackle and solve really hard problems, that computers by themselves cannot solve and people by themselves cannot solve. That’s what’s exciting about games. I don’t think there is anything out there that is capable of keeping people so engaged for so long.”

The trick is convincing hard scientists that making games out of their most pressing problems is a good idea. This is still not easy to do, Treuille admitted.

“The successful games have involved very talented game designers, but also really extraordinarily open-minded and committed hard scientists, who are willing to put yup with people who don’t know what they are talking about, talking about making games out of their research in the vain hopes that someday it will tell them something useful,” he said. “That's a really adventuresome outlook on the world.”

Let’s face it — some of the tasks, and several of the projects on the Zooniverse, are inherently pretty tedious. But imbued with purpose and scientific meaning, these boring tasks suddenly become interesting; I love the idea of finding exoplanets by myself. And I’m not alone — players lose interest when developers dampen the science, Treuille said. Add incentives like rankings and message boards, and a whole community blossoms.

I started playing EteRNA because I was writing about it, but I don’t plan to stop, at least not for a while. There’s something so satisfying about clicking little dots to make a new chemical bond, locking a virtual molecule into place and earning that trilling harp sound that means you got it right. And if it someday means something real for science — that'll be the real win.

An emulated arcade in your pocket

1. FIND EMULATORS
The Android Market has several emulators, but some of the best ones exist in a separate app marketplace called SlideME or as a mobile app. Search for “yongzh” (the name of a software developer) on the site or app to get the emulator files. Apple generally doesn’t allow emulators in the App Store, so you’ll need to jailbreak your phone or tablet. Go to Lifehacker for instructions. Once the device is ready, the icon for a new app store called Cydia will appear on its home screen. Note that some emulators have confusing names [see table below].

2. GET ROMS
The next step is to find game files, called ROMs, and transfer them to the phone or tablet. Start by checking Emuparadise and CoolROM. If these sites don’t have what you’re looking for, Google the title of the game and the word “ROM.”

On Android, ROMs can be stored on an SD card or internal storage. On iOS, many emulators have an integrated Web browser for downloading ROMs. For others, connect the iOS device to a computer and transfer them manually. An application such as iExplorer, (free) will let you access your device’s file system and copy ROMs via drag-and-drop. The location to place ROMs varies depending on the emulator, so consult its Help files. Once the games have been transferred, open them in the emulator and start playing.

3. ADD A CONTROLLER
It’s generally easier to play with an external controller than a touchscreen. Emulators for iOS let users pair (via Bluetooth) a Nintendo Wii Remote or a controller designed for mobile gaming such as the attachable iControlPad ($63). Simply turn on Wii Remote support in the emulator and follow the onscreen prompts to pair the controller. On Android, gamers can download Bluez IME to pair controllers to a phone. The free app tells Android that the controller is an input device and helps set up the buttons.

#emulators
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font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
width:100%;
border-collapse:collapse;
}
#emulators td, #emulators th
{
font-size:1.2em;
border:1px solid #f37022;
padding:3px 7px 2px 7px;
}
#emulators a
{
font-weight:normal;
}

#emulators th
{
font-size:1.4em;
text-align:left;
padding-top:5px;
padding-bottom:4px;
background-color:#f37022;
color:#fff;
}
#emulators tr.alt td
{
color:#000;
background-color:#f79f6a;
}

THE BEST RETRO GAME EMULATORS

Original System
Android
iOS

Atari 2600
Ataroid
2600.emu

NES
NESoid
NES

SNES
SNESoid
SNES4iPhone

Sega Genesis
Gensoid
Genesis A.D.

Game Boy and Game Boy Color
GBCoid
Gameboy4iPhone

Sega Game Gear/Master System
Gearoid
iMasterGear

Nintendo 64
N64oid
N64iPhone

Sony PlayStation
FPSe
psx4iPhone

Note: all of the iPhone apps are available from the Cydia app store--just search for their names. All Android apps can be found through these links on SlideMe.