This might sound like a battle, but it’s not. It’s something that I have been thinking about, and you can see why if you check out my Back of Brick of Stormsunder. There are a lot of different types of games, but I think that there can be some confusion and overlap between the types. Games can give you a lot of different experiences if you’re ready to look for them and to jump into them.

Normal Games

It is what it sounds like, these are your normal games. The Tickets to Ride, Pandemic, Catan, Carcassone, Monopoly, and any game that you can sit down, you play it once and you get the full game experience. These games are meant to be played in a 30 minute to 6 hours, if you’re playing Twilight Imperium or other big 4x games. But even with those games, you get the full experience of the games without having to do anything else. These are the type of games you’re probably going to get to the table most often, though, you’ll probably play a specific game less than in some of the other categories. Even as someone who likes some of the other types of games just as well, most of my collection is made up of one off games that I use for board game nights and just pulling out and playing a game.

Story Games

This one is the next step in, in my opinion. The others are larger in terms of what type of game they are as I’m going to define story games as any game that tells a story. Now, that can encompass other games, Gloomhaven has story elements, but is primarily a campaign style game, but definitely fits in this category as well. But games like Near and Far, Above and Below, Arabian Nights, all of those games have story and you can play them as a one off game. The story doesn’t have to be the only thing in the game, but it’s going to be a heavy focus for the game. These games can take 200 hours, like Gloomhaven but Near and Far can be played in a couple of hours or less. This is starting to get into those bigger games. Whereas what I call normal games can have story, again Above and Below and Arabian Nights are played in a single sitting, they are more focused on the story and telling the players a story than something like Pandemic where the game has theme and story as it plays, but it doesn’t provide story beyond how the game mechanically plays out.

Campaign Games

Next step up, and probably the second longest, or longest, of the games. These campaign games are going to be steeped in story. This is where a game like Gloomhaven or Sword and Sorcery falls. It’s going to be chaining scenarios together, telling you story as you go, and each time you play, you are possibly progressing the story and finding out more as to what is happening in the world and game that you’re playing. Some of them have simpler stories like the two I’ve mentioned, and some more more emerging stories like Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, where you have some ideas of what you need to do at the start, but the ending of the game is less clear. This is going to push two things, first, you are going to see more character development and leveling up, so it leans into an RPG like feel. The other thing is that this is going to be more of a time commitment. Gloomhaven has been 200 or so hours for me, and Sword and Sorcery is probably nearing 24 hours or so of game play. There are going to be shorter campaign style games, Near and Far technically has a campaign of 6-7 games, I believe, never played it, but that’s 12-20 hours, let’s say for the whole campaign, but a lot of them are going to fall into that longer format because they want the RPG like feel for the game.

Legacy Games

This one is a sister to the Campaign Game. It is going to be a campaign game, but it adds in a destructive element. You are going to be adding stickers to cards, destroying cards, changing the map, and unlocking new things. Now, you might be able to go back and do it again, Charterstone, and play through the legacy experience again, but that requires an additional purchase. Legacy games are meant for you to play through the campaign once, generally, and then some of them allow you to continue to play the game without the legacy elements. Charterstone, Betrayal Legacy, and Clank! Legacy are all games that you can come back to and play again. Pandemic Legacy Season 1 and 2, however, once you’re done with them, you’re done with that game unless you put in a lot of extra effort to make it replayable. While campaign games raise the stakes because you are going further and further into a story so you don’t want to hit a point where you’ve lost and have to restart (and most do a good job of keeping you from having to do that), Legacy raises those stakes even higher. You’re probably always going to progress at some point in time in a legacy game, even if you didn’t win, but you don’t feel like you can go back and try again because of the legacy nature of the game, so even with less story the stakes can be higher. Charterstone is the only example, I have, of a legacy game where the stakes don’t feel that high.

RPG

This one I’m saving for last, because it moves away from a board game experience and into a role playing game. RPG is that step where you want that massive campaign, that massive legacy feeling and story experience. But you can also do a one-shot which would just be a 3-4 hour single sit down experience. So you can tailor and RPG to whatever you want, but, I personally prefer an RPG when it takes those bigger campaign, legacy and story elements and turns it into that epic experience which is guided by the GM and created by the GM and players. This can be the biggest time commitment of them all, because a campaign could, theoretically, take forever if you wanted to continue playing with the same characters in the same world and didn’t care about leveling up. But for me that’s part of the fun of the game is coming up with ways and reasons for your character to progress and grow through the game, and leveling up is part of that progression.

That’s an overview of what I’d consider to be the five types of games. As someone who likes all of them, I think that there should be a space for most of them on people’s shelves. If you haven’t jumped into RPG’s, consider it if you really enjoy campaign style games, because it’s a freeing experience in terms of being able to craft and create your own story with even less confines. If you love RPG’s, consider adding a campaign game, something like Aeon’s End Legacy or Clank Legacy would have that RPG bit of a feel to it as you level up characters (especially Clank Legacy which is based on Acquisitions Inc. a D&D game), but that would give you something new to try. And if you’ve only played that I termed normal games, try a story game, a stepping stone into a potentially more epic gaming experience and see how you like something that a little bit of that RPG flavor lightly added to it.

I don’t think that there’s a right type of game to play, or that you need to have all of them in your collection, but it’s certainly something you can consider for expanding your collection. I have something like 4-5 legacy games, 5-6 campaign games (which is a lot), 150 normal games, and probably a handful of story games that I’m forgetting about right now, and a ton of stuff for D&D. But that’s just what my collection is. Maybe you have a consistent group for D&D or any RPG so you just focus your collection on that, or maybe you just have changing groups over for playing board games, so you have more normal games, and that’s a great collection as well.

I’ll leave you with a question, do you have a preferred game style? For me, I love Legacy Games and Campaign games, though I play Normal Games more because we play more on a board game night, but I’ve played so much of some games. What do you play most of as well?

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