Beyond the Table: A series where our Co-Founder Hero talks about inspiration, trends, and experiences beyond the table. Hero has seven years of experience in foresight and trends observation and analysis in consumerism, fragrance, food, and beverages, which she applies to the tabletop game playing space and beyond.
The best games have you enter a zone where the rules become second nature to the fun.
Near my home in central New Jersey is a town called Lambertville. It’s nestled close to the Delaware river as the water makes its trek down to the sea, dividing New Jersey from Pennsylvania. Across the water is New Hope, a twin town to Lambertville, with both towns overlooking the river as it rushes by. Within both towns is a nostalgic atmosphere of antique purveyors and coffee shops, consignment boutiques, and Italian and Mexican restaurants, with the niche but trendier specialty food place here and there - a vegan cafe, a kava bar, and juice shops. I often like to go to both towns to walk, explore, and find something unique to eat - like the ice cream pie-sandwiches from Peace-Pie or anything off the menu from Jess’s Juice Shop. Like a relic of bygone days, I sit in the cafe at Jess’s and read a Sunday paper while enjoying a meatless BLT. I have a fantastic time soaking up this carefully coiffured atmosphere of specialty New Jersey city-town, where the buildings are old, and every shop is quirky and curiosity-inducing.
While visiting Lambertville one Saturday afternoon and eating at the local Greek spot, our waiter took one look at our 12-year-old and told us we should check out the new game arcade in town. Little did he know that our ears perked up at this, maybe more so than our daughters’. “It’s very cool,” he said. “When you walk in the door, 80’s and 90’s music is playing.” We finished our kebabs and bifteki and walked off to find the arcade. Near the end of a quieter street, we found the Del-Vue Deluxe Arcade; its retro sign made the understated building hard to miss. We slipped inside. The darkness enveloped us, but for the glow-in-the-dark multi-color-star-patterned carpeting and the neon glow of the standing arcade games lining the walls and centerline of the open space. Much to my delight, my ears were indeed met with classic rock music, and I saw the source was a totally analog quadraphonic 8-track player. A digital 90’s jukebox also rested by the door, where the top hits from the last 40 decades could be played for a few credits each. Billiards, a ping pong machine, and claw games were also in attendance, along with a slew of local kids and adults. It was like an amalgamation of arcade games and styles throughout the decades, a 60’s music machine here, an 80’s Martian game there, red vinyl benches by a stainless-steel snack bar over there, all coming together to form the combined arcade aesthetic and mood of 2023.
My family wasted no time exchanging dollars for quarters and grabbing the joysticks, plastic guns, and red-buttons of the various games with computer monitors straight out of the 80’s with rolling text across the screen and the pixelated 8-bit art styles. I felt nostalgic remembering our first game computer in my house - the Commodore 64 - where my brother taught me how to play DOOM and ROAD KILL. With every game we played, we inserted our quarters and got started right away, pressing the buttons and maneuvering through the proverbial playing fields.
As a girl growing up in the 90s, I remember feeling intimidated by arcades and a perceived "boyness" about them that made me feel lost or excluded. Today, as a fully grown adult (but never in spirit), after adjusting to the darkness and noise, I found that there was something for everyone, and the barriers to entry for play were minimal. Far from being excluded, our 12-year-old daughter could pick up and play anything, just as her two thirty-something parents could.
I'll keep this story short and get to the point. Games, like the ones we encountered at the arcade, are better when they are more simplistic at the onset. Layers of complexity can be added, but only once the player has been familiarized with the simulation. With little barriers to entry and easy access to the world of the game, the ruleset or mechanics should serve as the foundation that holds up the fun, a fluid and sturdy system underneath it all, without ever emerging into the forefront to overburden the fun. The best games have you enter a zone or semi-flow state where the end goal is in your focus, and how you get from A to B to C is rapidly firing in your mind. This is the fun that we all came here for.
In this way, games that quickly transport you to the fun flow state are the ones that stretch across demographics, age gaps, and decades, bringing a sense of joy and accomplishment to all who step up to play.
Do you have a local arcade in your town or city? It's worth checking out to see how it has evolved to bring delight to a modern audience.
If you're local, check out Del-Vue: https://montco.today/2023/03/arcade-grand-opening-bucks/
Thanks for reading.
Love and games, Co-Founder Hero
Adventure Together
Adventure Together is a tabletop publishing and technology company dedicated to creating immersive gaming experiences for enthusiasts and casual gamers alike. Our flagship tabletop experience, TimeScape, is an accessible and family-friendly miniature wargame set in a captivating sci-fi and fantasy universe at the end of time. TimeScape's unique gameplay experience is enhanced by the Scape system, a modular board game system that offers endless terrain customization and replayability - so you can adventure across countless worlds. Discover the fascinating worlds of TimeScape and other exciting gaming experiences from Adventure Together by joining our community Discord or signing up for our monthly Kickstarter newsletter.
