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"Dune" game: a little online, a little offline
Photo: Maren Hoffmann / DER SPIEGEL
It just doesn't feel right planning a bank robbery with friends.
Morally speaking.
But it's just a game - so what's going to happen?
The four of us happily plot, with cellphones out, how we want to rob the Escondido Bank.
On the table are floor plans, photos, chat logs, train timetables, telephone lists, circuit diagrams - everything we need so that our agents on site are not caught.
In the world of board games, the analogue and the digital are becoming increasingly mixed.
There are also reservations - because some analog players consciously want to be completely offline, whether alone (solo games are also a big trend) or with friends.
Some people get annoyed when their beautiful board game doesn't work at all without an app, such as "Reise durch Mittelerde", "Forgotten Waters" or "Descent".
The border is softening on both sides
All great games, the respective app basically only relieves the players of administrative work, shortens the regular reading and spreads a bit of atmosphere.
In the meantime, however, the border is softening on both sides: analog giant hits like the board game »Gloomhaven«, which weighs a good ten kilos, are available as a pure computer game, while computer games such as »World of Warcraft« or »Minecraft« have completely undigital offshoots on the game shelves.
There are also quite a few computer games that use the real world - the best known was “Pokémon Go”, released in 2016, which suddenly drove pale young people out in droves to capture digital beings in real places using smartphones.
But this open world has little to do with the closed cosmos of a classic board game in which you play a clearly defined game.
It is the same with the bank robbery that we want to plan - and that then runs in real time.
"The Heist
"
is the name of the game, published by the small German publisher iDventure, which co-invented the live mission game genre.
In the beginning there is only the box with a lot of stuff that you need to plan the coup - and the note on the box that you can only play this game with the Telegram app.
The story: We are agents who are supposed to incapacitate an evil cartel by looting its house bank.
The game is extremely immersive: it all feels very real.
First the planning phase, in which we work together with photos and plans to figure out how our attack can work;
We also have to do research on the Internet and make one or two phone calls.
Then it starts with Telegram: Each of us is assigned an agent who is set up as a bot in the app and simulates an on-site operation, sends us pictures and films from the fictional crime scene and asks for our instructions, just as if would really be someone there.
We players have to communicate with each other so that everything works, it gets hectic, and we feel as if we are in the middle of the Netflix series "House of Money" - everything seems to happen in real time, there is seldom so much tension at the gaming table .
However, it also feels a little questionable to mix up the fictional world of the game and the real world in such a way.
Because we have our own real accounts on Telegram, and the platform itself is controversial.
Even if the exchange with the agent bots takes place in isolated chats, the feeling remains uncomfortable.
This has been the case with many players in other games by the publisher;
For the first game in the Detective Stories series "Fire in Adlerstein" you had to find out on Facebook.
Your own, self-contained solution, for which you don't have to go into the digital wilderness, would have been even better with "The Heist".
Even if Telegram is convenient for game developers because you can set up bots so easily in the chat app.
“Amelia's Secret” by the French computer graphics studio XD Productions
, on the other hand, comes with its own app.
The atmospherically gloomy game, which transforms your own home into an escape room via augmented reality, is to appear in German next year, but if you can speak a little English or French, you shouldn't have a problem with these versions either, most of it is language-neutral.
The game contains 16 cards that you have to hang up or put down at designated points in the apartment, for example at a certain height on the wall or on a table. With the accompanying free app, a virtual reality is now superimposed on the physical: Suddenly there is a sink full of blood - and you have to find out what is going on and how you can leave the mysterious haunted house into which your own home has been transformed. Just the right game for the next lockdown.
You only have a limited amount of time to solve the puzzles, but you can extend it; and like "The Heist" you can also pass this game on to others who don't know it after the game. It's a poetic 3D setting full of surprises. Even if it is basically just a nice accessory that you have to walk back and forth between the individual places in your own apartment, you actually get an escape room feeling. More information about the game can be found on this website.
The gameplay of integrating digital elements is already practiced in the highly acclaimed and award-winning "Detective" series, the first game of which was released in 2018 and is published in Germany by Pegasus Verlag. The latest addition to the series is
"Dune - the secrets of the houses".
Here, too, the players act together and make decisions that advance the story - you can only have a limited number of encounters per game and you have to decide which ones should be.
On the associated website, on which you log in, you will then again and again see content, videos and text sequences specially produced for the game - depending on where you are in the game.
Actually, the fusion between the beautiful game material - encounter cards, character boards, tokens, a map of the desert planet - and the database is a good idea and also consistent for Dune fans, but unfortunately this game falls short of its possibilities.
Often it is more a matter of taste or luck which one ultimately decides because there are no criteria that would enable a classification;
and those who do not yet know their way around the world of Dune will be overwhelmed by the multitude of names and other elements of this fictional world.
It is also superfluous that you cannot actually pass the game on after playing it, because you have to change the characters' boards with stickers.
Experienced players do not accept this, however, but make do with printed color copies in the old-fashioned way.
