Games Within Games

Boardgames
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Reading through S. John Ross’s Points in Space RPG supplement earlier, I noticed that it includes a printable 54 card deck and rules to play Face of Emoch, a popular game within the setting. It reminded me that Tékumel has at least one “in-game game” as well, a dice based gambling game called Kévuk, for which special dice used to be available.

There are certainly other examples of playable games based on the pastimes enjoyed within fictional settings (as opposed to a game based on the fictional setting itself), some of them settings for RPGs. Have any of you played a game like that? and did it stand up to being worthwhile in itself, without the attachment to a different game or property?

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Gary Gygax invented Dragonchess and cross-promoted it in at least one of his Gord the Rogue stories.

At the other end of the scale there’s Dream Park, in which (as I know Jon is aware) the characters are people in its science-fictional world playing a high-tech LARP. I always felt this missed a trick: what made the books work for me was the tension between the characters’ own goals (such as needing to find someone smuggling stolen information out of the park, and knowing only that they were in the game) and the actual gameplay, and the RPG simply ignored the former.

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Not a board game, but the cyberpunk PC games System Shock (a.k.a. the best computer game of all time) and System Shock 2 (also very good) each include a virtual gaming console on which you can play other games (which you’ll find from time to time as you explore). These are mostly little arcade games, but SS1’s “Trioptimum Fun Pack Module” includes a little “Wing Commander”-esque game called “Wing 0” which was pretty neat in context, and SS2’s “Game Pig” has its own turn-based RPG called “OverWorld Zero” which I understand would take many, many hours to complete (I never played it much myself).

I guess “mini games” within computer games are a dime a dozen, but I’m not sure how often they get presented as little gaming consoles your character can choose to play with. The other example I can think of is Day of the Tentacle – the sequel to Maniac Mansion – where you can find a PC in one room on which you can play Maniac Mansion in its entirety.

(Maybe this kind of thing is common nowadays, though; I am well out of the PC gaming loop…)

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Witcher has Gwent. i never played but my partner claims it wasn’t all that great in the game.

there’s some kind of dice game in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Orlog. it seems to be based on some original Norse game. it was later published in Kickstarter as a physical game. i didn’t play much in the game. my partner says it annoyed him due to the luck factor and the necessity to play it to advance the actual game. I quit Valhalla before needing to do that due to competition for PlayStation time😊

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Judging from bgg, Gwent had been published as two separate physical games.

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I’ve played Gwent (in Witcher) and I think it’s rather good… it’s “obviously” based on Condotierre, which I really like. It’s basically Condotierre with CCG and ranks, both of which are interesting elements.

The Final Fantasys (I don’t like that pluralization, but here we go) often have significant mini-games. FFVII had a bunch in a arcade-game-location (Sub Hunter, Chocobo Racing, and a few others). Cyberpunk 2077 has a Witcher-themed mini-game (Roach, Geralt’s horse, runs away and has to jump over holes and monsters et al).

The first I remember is an old NES game called… Blades of Steel I think? It had a little Galaga mini-game played on the jumbotron screen between chapters.

Wait. No… uh… periods! Played between periods.

There is a game called Tak that’s based on a Patrick Rothfuss (I believe) game from one of his books, and Player of Games by Iain M. Banks features a man who is very good at playing games who is inserted into a foreign nation’s game tournament to try and stop an intergalactic war. It’s shockingly good. The unreadable and awful Ready Player One obviously features numerous video game references but also a small handful of board games, and of course Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game uses a game as a central plot element (wargames, natch, but still).

The original Witcher game had a semi-mini-game where you would sleep with women in order to collect playing cards or… post cards… of the naked women. That was one of the first time I ever played a game and a part of my brain fired and went “Huh… is this a sexism?”

The answer is yes. Yes it was.

Horizon Forbidden West has a battle-chess analog that’s fine (it became a chore pretty quickly, but thankfully a self-contained chore that you didn’t need to play for any reason), and a lot of Star Wars video games have some version of Sabacc but the rules and cards change constantly. My favourite version is basically a fancy version of Blackjack, but you have a small hand of modifier cards (like a +2 or a -1), but only 4 of them you can use over best-of-9 hands. I think it was from the original Knights of the Old Republic? Oh, and Mass Effect had a casino with a version of blackjack (which, eventually, leads to a mini-game where an illegal AI is cheating and stealing money to install itself on a starship).

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My favourite of the Culture books. I am sad I will not get to play that, or the fictional boardgame that the Sithi play in Tad Williams’ “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” (which I forget the name of) which is set on a large map rather than a board, and can be won by following the seasons and benefitting the land instead of by war with troops.

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Life is Strange: Before the Storm has a bit where you can play D&D an RPG with a couple of other characters.

Steph, the GM, then shows up in True Colours and you can play in a LARP she’s organised.

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I would even suggest this as the first Culture novel you read rather than Consider Phlebas

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