Mutability and Materiality in Star Trek - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 109

Expeditions allow a diferent reading of the paratextual connection between the
game and the original cult media text, as they highlight the continual revision
and modiication that occurs within the Star Trek world.
Both games hinge on a sense of randomness. For game designer Greg
Costikyan, “randomness can be useful. It is one way of providing variety of
encounter.” 28 hat is, by varying and distributing elements within a game in a
random way, the “replay value” of a game increases because the outcome can be
inluenced by the diferent random elements. Replay value is a type of afective
capital generated by a game's ability to be entertaining despite having already
been played. Replay value can be enacted in multiple ways. Some games have
a high replay value because of complex human interactions at the heart of the
game. Whether one is a Cylon or not in BSG08 , what set of cards one gets in
Game of hrones: he Card Game , whether one has diferent character abilities
in he Lord of the Rings —these change the way the game can be played and thus
inluence the diferent outcomes. Some games have a high replay value because
of a large amount of randomness with the components, as demonstrated by the
twenty-four ships, ity “galaxy” cards, four hundred “command” cards, ity
“encounter” cards, and seventy-six “mission” cards in Fleet Captains , each of
which may or may not be used in any particular gameplay session.
Conversely, a game with a low replay value may simply use more luck than
personal choice within the randomness: in BSG78 , players use a spinner with a
one in six chance of hitting any particular number. he outcome is still random
but the mechanic is stolid. “If a game has inadequate variety,” Costikyan goes
on to write, “it rapidly palls.” 29 A game without randomness quickly becomes
stale: the outcome is either assured or is never truly in doubt. As demonstrated
by Alain d'Astous and Karine Gagnon, a board game's replay value is oten tied
to stimulating players' imagination. 30 Of course, replay value is culturally and
contextually determined—my board game group particularly enjoyed BSG08
although many groups may not have done so—and the relationship between
replay value and actual replay may vary. Games must therefore be mutable in
order to be entertaining to a mass audience. Additionally, as expensive as many
of these paratextual games can get, the afective replay value is oten linked to
economic value. Fleet Captains costs $80, a hety price for a game that, without a
signiicant amount of replay value, might just sit on a shelf.
As I mentioned above, one consequence of a game's mutability is the fact that
it becomes diicult to point to any iteration or gameplay session as indicative
of the game itself because a suiciently randomized game will vary with each