Avalon

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

On November 1st, I begin my job as a designer on Magic: the Gathering.

This is, of course, immensely exciting, and I’m looking forward to working with other incredibly talented designers on a game that’s captured my imagination for 15 years. However, this time of joy and new beginnings is also a time of bittersweet parting, as it means that Phantom Knight Games will be ceasing operations indefinitely. I will no longer be publishing games or writing blog posts on my own for as long as I work for Wizards of the Coast, though I hope to keep the blog archives and print-on-demand games up.

There were a number of reasons I began Phantom Knight Games. Perhaps one of the largest was the influence of the game Sentinels of the Multiverse, which convinced me that designing board games was fun and within my abilities. (I write more about Sentinels and its influence on new designers here.) However, another large reason, and the one that kept me going despite the cost and trouble, was a burning internal need to create. I found in tabletop games what I wasn’t getting from playwriting: The ability to give myself fully to a creative pursuit without worrying about how hard it would be to get an audience to see my work. It nourished and fulfilled me throughout some of the hardest times of my life.

Without my work in the trenches at the most independent level of game design, I wouldn’t have developed what I needed to be a Magic designer. While of course I got better at making and playtesting games, I also gained a number of other things from the experience: A design philosophy based around excitement and emotional impact, a sense of confidence from people loving my work so much they’d pay for it, and, most of all, the burning conviction to keep honing my skills until they carried me into the sky and pierced the vault of Heaven.

While I am proud of the games I made, especially Stand Back, Citizen!, I always felt a sense of inadequacy in the back of my head. I’ve never been particularly good at marketing, and I knew that I had to either promote myself more and better – either to pitch to external publishers or launch a Kickstarter – or keep puttering around local cons, selling a few dozen games a year. At times, I felt afraid that this was all my work would ever amount to. Being chosen to work at one of the most prestigious tabletop game companies in the world on the basis of the skills I developed through making these games validates this work I did, and I finally feel without reservation that all the effort I poured into Phantom Knight Games on (k)nights and weekends was worth it.

To everyone who ever bought one of my games, playtested one of my prototypes, or read one of these blog posts: Thank you. I’m afraid I must go now, but I’ll carry your kindness in my heart for as long as I live.

Jeremy Geist

Designer, Wizards of the Coast

Jelle’s Marble Runs, Blaseball, and the Joy of Chaos

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

“Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.”

– Attributed to Eric Hoffer

This week marks the return of the Marble League, an Olympics-style competition hosted by marble racing YouTube channel Jelle’s Marble Runs. In it, a couple dozen teams of differently colored marbles, with their own team names and audience chants, participate in various sporting events like hurdles, collision derby, and underwater racing.

Simultaneously, the idle sports game Blaseball enters its 21st season, with teams including the Baltimore Crabs and Chicago Firefighters jockeying for championship glory through murderous rogue umpires, rains of peanuts, and the mysterious “ownership” who seems determined to feed the entire league to extradimensional sharks.

Niche but deeply passionate audiences have been built around both of these media franchises. People will pick a team, buy merchandise, and debate their relative merits and demerits in the social media of your choice. Team mythologies spring up constantly in both – the dominance and unique chant of the O’Rangers*, the perpetual mediocrity and tiny fanbase of the Miami Dale**, and so on for every team or name that appeared even briefly.

Passionate fanbases arising for odd media is nothing new. What interests me here is that Jelle’s Marble Runs, and Blaseball less so, are essentially random – not only does the audience have no control over what happens, neither do the creators, who set the mechanical (in the case of Jelle’s) or virtual (Blaseball) gears in motion like some kind of distant god and proceed to let everything run itself.

What makes this total chaos so fascinating, and how can we capture this in our game designs? Read on for some of my theories about it.

* I am an O’Rangers fan.

** I am also a Miami Dale fan.

Real Fake Athletes

There’s something to be said about narratives constructed through chance. This was a subject frequently attended upon by artists belonging to Dada and other surrealist art groups in the early 20th century, who would do activities like Exquisite Corpse that eliminated the ability for the people participating in it to meaningfully control what was being written. While surrealist movements have been, depending on your stance, either out of favor for a century or democratized into Internet memes, procedurally generated narratives remain extremely popular because of their authenticity.

What do I mean by authenticity? Let’s look at an example of a very popular procedural narrative: Sports. While some people watch sports regularly so they can vicariously succeed through their regional team, and others like to watch athletic accomplishments writ large, the overarching appeal of sports viewing is that whatever happens on the field isn’t prewritten.

A champion so dominant his batting average enters the realm of the gods; an underdog team succeeding against all odds to prevent them from folding; an athlete overcoming hardship after hardship, only to shatter an existing world record. These things are the stuff of cliché in sports movies, and we go into it largely expecting these things to happen because that would be the most exciting option the writer could give us. We roll our eyes at them, in fact, because we feel the creator is pandering too much to our expectations. But these exact same things happening as the result of chaos – of people doing things at random with no overarching “plot” – they’re rare and therefore more meaningful and valuable.

Sports simulators like Jelle’s and Blaseball build the same environment of procedurally generated stories like “real person” sports do, but in a more condensed way. Notably, games are much shorter than their real-life equivalents would last: Jelle’s Marble Runs‘ equivalents to F1 races or Olympic events that might take most of a day only last five minutes, while the longest game of Blaseball ever played lasted around an hour and a half. For most nerds, who don’t have the patience or cultural buy-in for traditional sports, having these narratives become quicker to achieve and more likely to happen by virtue of sheer numbers is immensely appealing.

These games also possess humor elements that help liven up otherwise by-the-books gameplay. Jelle’s has announcer Greg Woods, who uses placid commentary that treats marbles on a track as flesh-and-blood athletes with mental states and training regimes. Blaseball goes much more absurd, with player names like Freemium Seraph and Mags Banananana and baseball-themed surreal horror elements like an enormous, vengeful peanut god.

However, jokes and short games aren’t enough to create a procedurally generated narrative that truly moves an audience. That requires careful attention to a randomness generator that is capable of telling stories.

To the Corner, You Fiend!

If random outputs were enough to get people excited, we wouldn’t have people writing stories at all, and just create fancier and fancier dice for people to stand around and goggle at. Chance-based narratives need to have room to create moments of special excitement or interest in order for audiences to center around those moments.

I wrote an article a few years ago on replay value that roughly covers this – in any game with a variable setup or gameplay, the random elements need to create meaningfully different outcomes. The most effective way to do this is to have a few “special” outcomes buried in a sea of otherwise unimportant noise. Cat Manning and Sam Cabo Ashwell talk about this in the context of Blaseball in depth in an article on Medium – Blaseball excites its audience because the truly special things only happen every so often, while most games are largely mundane affairs where the weirdest thing that happens is you might get a decimal point in your score. Chorby Short hitting 200 foul balls in the first game of a season is only interesting because there were so many other games and players who didn’t do anything that special.

You could boil this concept down to its barest essentials with bouncing screensavers that make it into the corner on rare occasions. If this screensaver always went into the corner, or travelled on a path that brought it into the corner about 50 percent of the time, it would be largely uninteresting – it’s both the promise of something out of the ordinary, something distinct, and the exceptionally rare fulfillment of that promise that keeps people so fixated on something so simple. The fact that it’s a corner is also important because corners are distinct – if the screensaver missed some middle inch of the bottom screen most of the time, nobody would notice it and nobody would really care.

Conclusion

Jelle’s and Blaseball are spectator sports, so they have the luxury of making their results 100% reliant on chance. As a designer of presumably interactive games, you can’t transplant the techniques that these games use one for one into your game, but you can draw lessons about meaningful chance-based outcomes that are useful in all but the dryest of Euros. How can you make random outcomes meaningful? What results can you make players strive for that might not even happen in a game?  How can you make a component that someone might root for? These questions could be the difference between a mediocre game and a great one.

Gimme Your Lunch Money

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

Being mean to other people is actually really good and cool.

Sorry, I meant in board games. I should have been more clear about that.

Being mean – significantly and intentionally setting back other players – has developed an unfair reputation as being a universally bad thing in board games. Games where you can destroy your opponents’ forces or set back their plans are usually corralled into the “take-that,” “thematic,” or “Ameritrash” corner as the grown-ups sophisticatedly block each others’ plans in Eurogames, where everything is so indirect it doesn’t feel like the players are competing at all.

This isn’t without reason, either. Being mean often makes people mad. Everyone has a limit to what they’re going to tolerate in a game, and if a game makes players angry, it’s usually failed in its goal of being a fun experience for everyone. But “being mean” and “making people angry” aren’t necessarily linked on a one-for-one basis. This article goes in depth about how to walk this fine line.

Before we get into the meat of it, note that this is a post about emotional responses to games, so I only have my own observations to go on. Your experience about what makes players angry could be very different, and in fact I’d love to hear your input on the matter via my Twitter.

Mean Girls

People generally don’t get upset when bad things happen to them in a game because they signed up for that game to have bad things happen to them. (For more about this topic, please read this article.) For example, you would only get upset about drawing bad tiles in Scrabble if you were already on tilt. However, once the bad things happening to them in the game start being caused by other players, it starts to generate bad feelings. Continuing with our Scrabble example, your opponent playing a high-scoring word onto a triple-word score space you had your eye on is much more infuriating than not drawing high-scoring letter tiles. 

So why is having something bad happen to you in a game worse because someone is doing it to you instead of the whims of fate/the game? It might be easy to write this off with a single, breezy answer, but I believe that there’s a number of factors that add up to this difference.

One is that a setback feels worse when it’s a conscious act of cruelty on the part of the opponent. If you don’t draw the right tiles, there’s no malicious intent behind it unless you believe in a weirdly petty higher power, but if your opponent invades your territory or makes you discard cards, they have chosen, of all actions and targets, to set you back specifically.

Another is that being mean is more tolerable when it directly benefits the bully’s strategy and isn’t just detracting from their victim’s. That’s because, when we play a game, our mindset becomes hyperfocused on winning the game, so actions someone takes towards achieving this goal are more excusable. Actions that only affect other people without helping you feel much more vindictive. This is one reason why the blue shell in Mario Kart is such a perpetual annoyance: Because you can only get the shell if you’re far behind, the only thing it’s going to do is drag back whoever’s currently in first, rather than help the user in any particular way.

Yet another is a sense of a power imbalance between players – it feels much worse to have a player in the lead bully a player behind them than vice-versa. In fact, this is why it’s hard to pick a target at the beginning of a game when everyone’s at roughly equal levels. The arbitrary nature of deciding who you go after is in itself an act of passive aggression. You can only feel justified in attacking someone if they’re clearly the biggest threat, either to you or to the game as a whole.

Regression to the Mean

There are a number of ways to dilute the feel-bad of being mean in a game while still giving players the opportunity.

The first is to simply force everyone to be mean to each other; if you have to attack someone, it feels much less personal than if you had the ability to advance your plan and chose to attack someone instead. Red Dragon Inn has a lot of take-that mechanics; at its core, you have to buy drinks for other players, bringing their inebriation levels closer and closer to eliminating them. The game also has a ton of cards that deal damage and do other things that only drag someone down. The key here is that you draw back up to a maximum hand size on your turn, meaning that you’re obligated to use all of your take-that cards to squeeze as much value as you can out of your start-of-turn draw. You are compensated so well for being mean that it will offend people less when you pick on them specifically.

The second is to not create actions that are only bad for one player and not good for the person taking the action. What few take-that cards exist in Terraforming Mars always have a benefit for the person who played it, and usually that benefit is significantly more impactful than whatever bad effect it happens to have. This means that if you get your greenery wiped out by an opponent’s meteor impact, you can at least feel like they didn’t play that card specifically to pick on you (though they might have timed it that way); they mostly played it for the benefits it granted to themself.

The third is to not tie a mean action to a player’s ability to take further actions. There are a number of cards in El Grande that allow you to be mean to other players, usually by rearranging the caballeros on the board in a way that makes them lose victory points. However, there is also a card that can stop your opponents from playing caballeros that turn; this one is significantly more frustrating because it interferes with not only a player’s win condition, but how they progress to that condition. When designing a mean action, it’s better to make it more of an obstacle course that an opponent has to jump through than a ball-and-chain preventing them from moving.

Conclusion

The theory goes that people like watching scary and sad movies because they get to experience negative feelings in a safe atmosphere. Through a similar mechanism, we can use games to be mean towards our friends and acquaintances while being able to patch it up afterwards. However, the “magic circle” between a game and real life is much thinner than the difference between a movie and the people watching it, so games with take-that elements have to be designed to stop emotions from running a little too hot.

The Tragedy of the Commons, or: The Comedy of the Boardgame

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

The “Tragedy of the Commons” is a component of economic theory first put forward in the 19th century and eventually named by Garrett Hardin. Investopedia did a better job of writing about it than I can, but to summarize it here, it’s a situation where everyone making the “rational” decision to maximize benefit from a source ends up unsustainably depleting the source.

While this concept is generally used in entry-level discussions about environmental science, the Tragedy of the Commons is a surprisingly useful tool for a game designer’s toolbox, combining both strategy and comedy into a tight, easy to understand package. Let’s look at how we can turn the Tragedy of the Commons into the Comedy of the Boardgame.

There for the Taking

In board games, the Tragedy of the Commons most frequently manifests itself in the following situation: There is an action that players can take that benefits them. However, the more people who take the action, the less beneficial that action becomes.

This is a fairly standard puzzle that combines both logic and player psychology, and the backbone of games with depleting resource pools like Agricola. You could say that almost every Euro-style game has some element that penalizes people who follow the same strategy as the other players. Where the Tragedy of the Commons differs from standard tabletop game design is that, instead of having multiple strategies that encourages players to diversify, there’s one “greedy” action that benefits players more than the others, but that punishes players if too many try to go for it. To put it in Prisoner’s Dilemma terms, it’s as if both prisoners tattling sent them to prison for 50 years.

You can further divide Tragedy of the Commons mechanics into PvP (Player versus Player) and PvE (Player versus Environment). You could think of PvP mechanics as a narrow shortcut in a car race; it might be logical to go for it, but if everyone makes the “logical” decision, the benefit of time saved goes down as everyone crams around it. PvE Tragedy mechanics involve some external force bearing down on the players; if the players don’t band together and take “selfless” actions to prevent it, it’ll result in everything from penalties for the irresponsible to the game abruptly ending with everyone’s loss.

The comedy potential here is fairly obvious. Watching people get punished for their greed has been consistently funny for hundreds of years, and it’s at its peak when everyone, thinking that they’re the exception, reaches into the pickle jar at the same time and get their hands collectively stuck. 

A Comic History of Pastoral Tragedies

It’s easier to understand a design concept if there’s concrete examples instead of just abstract thought, so let’s look at some ways the Tragedy of the Commons manifests itself in existing board game.

Incan Gold is where I got the idea for this article, and its application of the Tragedy is somehow both almost abstract in its simplicity and hilarious in its execution. Players gradually uncover more and more gems as they venture through the temple (why there’s no gold in a game called Incan Gold is beyond me); these are divided evenly among the players still in the temple, with the remainder continuing to sit on the card. In games with 5 or 6 players, quite a lot of remainder can sit around before people decide to leave. When a player leaves, they pick up all the remaining gems: The catch is that if multiple people leave, the gems are divided in the same way! There’s nothing more satisfying than watching four people skedaddle out of the temple at once, leaving a huge pile of gems on the ground that you can just stroll to and put in your bag.

Making this system even more appealing are relic cards, which are worth a ton of points but can only be picked up by a player leaving the temple on their own. The “correct” decision of skedaddling ASAP to grab that statue is now tempered by the extreme fear of embarrassing yourself of leaving the temple, empty-handed and way too early, because one of the other players thought the same way you did.

As an example of a TotC mechanic that’s component-wide instead of game-wide, take the Cook card from Libertalia. The Cook gets to take two booty tiles instead of one, and is ranked a respectable 18 out of 30, with higher numbers getting first priority. Depending on the booty tile distribution for a certain day, it can be very tempting to play the Cook, get a huge haul, and rocket ahead in one turn. However, if other players play their own Cooks, you could waste yours entirely; you could also suffer if they take the more conservative option and play a high-ranking but risky pirate. There are several ways you could get punished for playing a Cook, but the reward is so enormous it can be worth it.

The most on-the-nose “PvE” Tragedy of the Commons mechanic is in CO2, where everyone loses if carbon pollution raises over 500 ppm. Like most Vital Lacerda games, the system is pretty complicated so it’s hard to summarize in one paragraph, but there’s essentially one single action that can actually lower carbon pollution (demolishing high-emissions power plants and replacing them with renewable energy plants) and many, many other ways to improve your standing in the game, including improving your “expertise” by sending scientists to conferences, proposing projects for plants, and so on. Essentially, if you spend too much time screwing around trying to get territory control bonuses instead of affecting meaningful change, you lose even if you had a substantial victory point lead.

Many PvE games give players who at least tried to fight the problem some kind of bonus. In Uwe Rosenberg’s Lowlands, you have the option to contribute to the construction of a dike; if not enough of the dike is built, a huge flood occurs. People who contribute to the dike avoid the worst effects of it if it breaks and get a monetary bonus if it doesn’t, so the question isn’t “do I take the selfless action of building this?”, but “is it worth the bonuses for building the dike to take attention away from building my collection of sheep?”

I Write Tragedies, Not Sins

There’s a couple of principles that can improve your use of a Tragedy of the Commons mechanic in your board game.

The first is that players’ intent should be largely hidden. The dynamic of not knowing whether the other players are going to go for the “greedy” choice and making your best guess is generally less frustrating than knowing that you’re going to have to play conservatively. The easiest way to handle this is with some kind of simultaneous action, like Incan Gold does, but with many other games it’s difficult to determine exactly what the other players are doing before you pick a path. Breaking up player turns into multiple actions, like in most worker placement games, is a fine option.

The other is that the exact “tipping point” for when a greedy action is a good idea or not should be ambiguous before you take the action – otherwise, the choice is too obvious. Returning to Lowlands, the exact strength the dike requires to withstand the oncoming flood is hidden until the upkeep phase, where players can’t alter their choices anymore. Thus, you have to make the decision whether to conservatively pitch in on building the dike or spend more time raising sheep and hoping the floods won’t be too bad this time.

Fuzziness in general is key here. The core appeal to both the comedy value and gameplay value of the TotC mechanic is that you don’t know if you can get away with being greedy until everything’s said and done, and it should come as a surprise to everyone what the actual results of their various risk-taking ventures were.

Conclusion

The Tragedy of the Commons is less talked-about that some other common board game mechanics; one reason, perhaps, is that the nitty-gritty of balancing all the options is much harder, and an unsuccesfully executed TotC mechanic can be a serious drain on the game. That said, a successfully executed TotC will generate memories in your players that they’ll carry around for their entire tabletop gaming career, so if you feel like there’s room in your game for something like this, I highly encourage you to at least try to go for it.

Under the Hood of Downforce

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

The phantom exterior like fish eggs interior like suicide wrist-red. I could exercise you, this could be your phys-ed. Cheat on your man homie AAGH I tried to drive through the narrow space that can only fit one car man! Can’t make it. Can’t make it. Car’s stuck! Outta my way son! CAR STUCK! CAR STUCK! …PLEASE!! I BEG YOU!!!

WE’RE IN 5TH AND 6TH! YOU’RE A G-G-GENUINE CAR RACER!!!!!

A few years ago, I received a deep discount at a game store as a door prize for attending a Magic prerelease. I looked all around the store for the game I wanted to buy, and settled on two options: Western Legends and the Restoration Games edition of Downforce (also known as Top Race and by many other names.)

I went with Downforce because it was cheaper, but this off-the-cuff decision introduced into my life a cornerstone of my gaming experience from then on. Every group I’ve introduced Downforce to, ranging from professional game designers to my parents, has loved it so much they’ve shown significant interest in playing it again. When I bring it to a game night, it almost always ends up hitting the table at some pont. (I’m starting to worry about running out of scoring sheets.)

So what made Downforce so appealing to such a wide range of people, and why does it have so much sticking power? Let’s look at some answers.

Offensive Driving

I’ve wondered for a long time what the line is between “interaction” and “being mean”. Being able to interfere with your opponents is great and adds to the social atmosphere of tabletop games; “being mean to” or “picking on” your opponents leads to hurt feelings and the game being wrapped up in an atmosphere where it feels like someone could get stabbed at any moment. My theory is that there are a few factors that make being mean more acceptable, and Downforce meets enough of them that it toes the line very effectively. (I may do a full writeup on this topic sometime in the future.)

Before we get into details, I’ll clarify the main mechanic that allows players to screw each other over in Downforce. Car movement is decided by playing a card from your hand; each card has a list of colors and a number of spaces that color of car must move. This may sound like you don’t have much control over car movement, but the twist is that cars can’t move past occupied spaces. Thus, you can do things like zoom into a narrow lane first and then park it so opponents have to move you, or throw away high-value cards for colors you don’t own when that car’s stuck in traffic.

The first reason this works is that these strategies are frequently the genuine best thing you can do. If I go out of my way to drag down another player, and that doesn’t do anything to advance my own position (in a game with more than 2 players), it feels a lot more petty and personal than if my dragging down another player benefitted me. In Downforce, you won’t stop another car from moving unless either that card also moved your own cars or you’re completely out of options, which lightens the sting a lot more.

The second reason is that, while mean, these actions don’t remove your opponents’ progress or access to abilities – it just places more obstacles in front of them. Games are about solving problems in the first place, so having more problems is much less of an issue than having less of the ability to solve them. If you could rip a card out of an opponent’s hand, it would be problematic, but you were never going to use a card that was good for them in the first place unless you were betting on them in the first place.

The third, and possibly most important, reason is that blocking your opponents’ cars is just funny. There’s a lot of comedy value in a high-stakes race for millions of dollars devolving into a traffic jam with the person in front crossing the arms and waiting passive-aggressively for someone else to push them out of the 1-width lane. The “Aloha Sands” bonus track in the excellent expansion Wild Ride has a bottleneck right at the start of the game in order to reach Clownforce at maximum speed.

Muddled Winners

Racing games as a genre frequently suffer from the issue of the winner and losers being too clear. If one player has a far enough lead, the rest of the game essentially becomes irrelevant as only the person in first place really matters. People might feel they have no chance of winning and/or be guaranteed to win as early as halfway through the game and mentally check out. Other games like Flamme Rouge make movement inconsistent and often penalize people for shooting ahead, but if someone gains a large enough lead these catch-up mechanisms don’t do enough.

Downforce neatly solves this problem by making the win condition not 100% reliant on who finishes first. There’s two other very important factors as well: Whoever bid the least during the auction segment at the beginning of the game, and whoever was able to bet on the winners.

The betting in particular is critically important because it actively penalizes someone who’s able to skyrocket into the lead early in the game. Betting on the right car early in the game pays much more, so being able to dramatically move forward from the back of the pack – or moving an opponent’s car forward from the back when you’re not going to win anyway – is a much more insidious strategy than simply “doing well”.

The auction segment, on the other hand, adds a lot of comedy value through the schadenfreude of watching your opponent lose despite placing 1st and 2nd because they spent 12 million dollars on their stupid cars. Come to think of it, hubris is a big component of what makes Downforce fun in general.

My point is that Downforce is a success among casual groups especially because no matter how far ahead someone is in the race itself, the winner can be surprising. It also means that if you aren’t the best at perfectly sequencing your cards to gain maximum value from them, you can still win if you didn’t overspend during the auction or have an eye for who you think is going to win in the end, rewarding different types of thinking. There’s also enough variance in the game that skill isn’t the sole determinant of who wins.

Goldilocks Powers

I do a lot of thinking about asymmetric player powers, because while they make a game less balanced and strategic, they also make it more impactful and fun, and it’s interesting to strike that balance when designing a game. One of the most important parts about designing these powers is deciding how hard you want them to break the rules. In some games, asymmetric powers are nothing more than slightly different starting positions, while in others, like Root, each player is essentially playing by their own set of rules.

Downforce‘s powers are somewhere in the middle. They aren’t strong enough that you would change your entire bidding or racing strategy depending on what you get, but they provide you with enough of an advantage that you’ll pay attention to which one you want and feel like your power is accomplishing something for you

More importantly, these powers are unique and have character. Activating a power feels good, but each one feels good in a different way. The power that lets you always move your own cars might not be useful, but reaching in to move your cars on your opponents’ turns is deeply satisfying and you occasionally get yourself out of a jam. On the other side of the spectrum, being able to move extra spaces every so often is a consistent and slight advantage that enfranchised board gamers love. You usually don’t go out of your way for a power, but if you end up with multiple cars (something inevitable in a game with less than 6 players), you’ll usually choose the one you like the most, meaning that players will often play Downforce using a power that they personally find satisfying.

Conclusion: The Checkered Flag

Downforce appeals to a lot of groups because it’s capable of being whatever those groups want it to be. It’s interactive but not too mean; strategic but not cruelly logical; unique but not confusing for newcomers. Added to the game’s generous player count and short (usually around 30 to 45 minute) playtime, this makes Downforce an adaptable game that hits the table constantly and is a near-essential part of any hobbyist’s collection.

Yo, I’m betting on this guy to win.

Stacking Your Decks

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

The concept of the deck of cards has benefitted tabletop gaming since before the invention of the printing press. Every game that has a deck of cards employs it differently; sometimes it’s the whole game in a tiny package and sometimes it’s only a minor part of an enormous set of components. Usually, when people create a deck of cards, they only think about how it contributes to its goals; however, there’s also an aesthetic and emotional sense to each deck of cards, in particularly how the cards differ from each other and how they’re distributed within the deck. This article aims to codify some of the most common types of deck construction and find the best place to use them.

Uniform Deck

Description: A uniform deck is made up of cards that all behave the same way. They’ll be different values or suits, and the way they combine might be interesting or unique, but there isn’t any particular card that has special exceptions to how it works.

Examples: A standard pack of playing cards, minus the joker, is the quintessential uniform deck, and has been the center of hundreds of games ranging from contract bridge to 52-card pickup. Trivia and impress-the-judge party games generally have uniform decks too, since they don’t want people to have to learn new rules on the fly.

Character: “Hobby” board games with a uniform deck usually hide the complexity of their rules in the rulebook instead of on the cards, and instead dedicate a lot of fancy art or graphic design to the empty space provided. They’re good for lighter games that don’t have that many rules to remember, and in particular genres like trick-taking that rely on the elegance of the components.

As part of a larger game, uniform decks are useful as random number generators that don’t feel as arbitrary as dice (even though they totally are). You can also mess with the distribution of high or low numbers in order to change the character and frequency of what appears, making them more useful for fine-tuning.

Uniform decks aren’t as useful in thematic/experiential games because they necessarily possess a level of abstraction, given how homogenous all of the effects are. It’s better for this kind of game to make a set of cards with as many exceptions and impactful moments as possible.

Uniform Deck With Exceptions

Description: This type of deck is similar to the uniform deck, except a few cards play by different rules. Sometimes these cards are “wild” and can take the place of any other card in the deck; sometimes they’re “whammies”  that make things harder for the person who draws them. Either way, these cards break up both the monotony of the other existing cards and the elegance of having everything work the same way with no exceptions. There can be one or two exceptions to a whole deck, or they can make up to 40 or 50% of a deck that’s otherwise uniform.

Examples: The joker in a pack of playing cards, though there aren’t a lot of modern games that really use it. Cosmic Encounter‘s Destiny deck, which chooses who you’re attacking on your turn, is mostly the other player colors, but there’s also a Wild and several cards that target players who are ahead. The bluffing game Spicy requires players to call out bluffs by either suit or number; hidden in the deck are a card that’s valid for all numbers but false for all suits, and another one that does the opposite. Condottiere is mostly soldier cards of varying numbers, but there’s also powerful cards like the Drummer, which doubles your soldiers’ value, and the Heroine, who’s incredibly strong and can’t be affected by other cards.

Character: Having exceptions in a uniform deck ruins the uniform’s deck sense of “fairness”, whether that fairness was true or not. As such, a uniform deck with exceptions is best used for a lighter game where fairness at all times is less important than making lasting memories of played, or for a game that plays so many hands that whether one is fair or not doesn’t matter that much.

The number of exceptions is also important. Having one or two cards out of a 50-card deck work differently will make them feel surprising and exceptional; having fifteen out of a 50-card deck work differently will make it likely that you’ll see them multiple times per round, so it’s better to not make them too powerful or game-warping.

Unique Cards With Duplicates

Description: In this variety of deck, each card has its own method of affecting the rules or benefitting the player in some way. However, these cards come in multiples, so there might be 3 copies of Card A, 4 of Card B, and 2 of Card C in the deck. There may also be a few “categories” of cards that work similarly to each other, but differently from

Examples: Drafting games like 7 Wonders and Elysium often use this composition so players aren’t as paralyzed by having a whole series of new options every round. Elysium, in particular, has sets of cards that work exactly the same for each of the “families” that get shuffled together into one deck – so one card might give you money for collecting Zeus cards, another for collecting Athena cards, and so on.

This sort of deck is also used when representing a “character” of sorts, where you want them to have a distinct feel from the other characters while still remaining consistent to play. Every deck in Sentinels of the Multiverse is “unique cards with duplicates” for this reason. Also, if you’re drawing rewards from a deck mid-game, it will often use this construction so you have some idea of what you’re going to receive, like in Catan.

Character: This is the type of deck I see go wrong most often, because it can promise a sense of discovery and excitement and then betray it. If you’re only seeing part of this type of deck at a time, you might expect that many more different cards exist within the deck, not realizing that the handful of cards visible to you are a fair portion of what you’ll end up seeing for the whole game.

The trick here is to recognize when the balance between uniqueness and consistency is precarious enough to justify this type of deck, and go with one of the other types of decks depending on your needs except in this more narrow circumstance.

All Unique Cards

Description: As it sounds – all of the cards in the deck are unique, with their own effects and abilities.

Examples: Games with all unique cards are often very proud of them, and the entire game revolves around finding the best way to use one of the wacky cards you were just dealt. Glory to Rome and related games like Innovation and Import/Export are perhaps the purest examples, with each card being able to break the game in its own way. For a higher-profile example, Terraforming Mars and Wingspan both have decks of totally unique cards, though Wingspan has more cards with similar effects.

Character: A deck of all unique cards has a few caveats: They’re much harder to balance and design than decks where you can use multiples, and high-level strategy may end up being reliant on players knowing which cards are good and trying to fish for them. That said, depending on the game a set of all unique cards has the potential to be much more emotionally impactful than the alternatives, and is especially useful for “thematic” games where you want something different to happen not just every game, but every round or turn.

Conclusion: The World Beyond

These broad categories merely scratch the surface of how you can use deck distribution as a form of expression. It doesn’t cover games where the players develop the deck, nor the more esoteric uses of a stack of cards.

What is interesting is that these distributions of cards often have their own character that is different from the context of the game that appears around it. I’ve certainly played games that use one style of deck that perhaps should have been another – deciding what sort of deck best fits the needs of your game could be a large, and surprisingly easy, step towards greatness.

Incentives!!! On Ice

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

Richard Garfield wrote an article in The Kobold Guide to Game Design advising game designers to play as many different games as they can – not even board games, but video games, traditional games like tag, and even sports, as well as watching things like game shows and analyzing them as well. I’ve always found this advice to be spot-on, and try to branch out my game investigations where I can day to day. Because of this habit, I discovered a very interesting lesson about incentives and design intent from an unlikely source: Figure skating.

Super Spin Fighter 4

Figure skating is both a sport and performance art, combining athleticism that earns it several Olympic events with the aesthetic senses of dance media like ballet. This earns it a dedicated crowd of people who may bounce off other sports or arts, but also makes it impossible to come up with a system of judging that everyone can agree on. It essentially boils down to a debate within the skating community – should skating be judged as a sport, or as an art?

Earlier figure skating judging tried to combine the two, with judges giving a score between 0 and 6 for each category of presentation and technical skill. However, a corruption scandal at the 2002 Winter Olympics led to the adoption of the current standard used in skating competitions around the world, the ISU judging system. The ISU is a more objective scale that assigns a set value to each element (jumps, spins, etc.), then adjusts those points based on the element’s execution. There’s still points awarded for aesthetics, but it’s much more of a subordinate to execution.

The ISU scoring system was almost certainly a net positive when it comes to maintaining a competitive skating environment free of judging bias. However, this created an unintended side effect that affected how competitive people approached figure skating as a whole. Now that the majority of points were earned by execution of difficult elements, skating routines moved from a cohesive whole to more of a vehicle designed to cram in as many difficult elements as possible.

The flagship for this change is the “quad”, or a jump that requires that the skater rotate four times in midair before touching back to the rink. Suddenly, whether your routine did well or not depended in great part on whether you could hit the maximum number of quads in your routine, and less on whether those quads made aesthetic sense. As such, figure skating post-ISU scoring is now a race to the most difficult and elaborate moves, including more and more quads of various kinds. (And thus, figure skating is now a 4x game.)

Was the “quad revolution” worth the greater measure of objectivity earned by ISU? Was it also due in part to a gradually increasing athleticism on the part of people as a whole as coaching and training methods became more refined? These are questions better answered people who are more familiar with skating. What interests me is how the quad revolution was a perfect example of the core of all game design, tabletop and otherwise – incentives.

Quadruple Lutzing Through Hoops

Playing a game is the same as giving the designer permission to determine your behavior. What we do, think, and feel while playing a game are drawn from this social contract made with the game. However, designers have to use certain techniques to draw out these behaviors in the ways they want, and the best way to do that is to use incentives – a series of carrots and sticks that force players to make interesting, exciting, and challenging decisions.

There are many ways to incentivize player behavior. If a player wants to “win” a game, then any action that draws them closer to a win state than their opponents is incentivized, whether that’s lying in Werewolf, having kids in Agricola, or picking a funny card in Apples to Apples. Incentives are almost universal, even the unwritten ones – pretty much everyone who’s played a game of Codenames has given mocking suggestions to the opposing team when they’re in the weeds, because they’re incentivized to do so by the downtime and high tension on the other side.

 What’s always interested me is that, barring extreme acts of willpower from jokers who do things like build the longest road in Catan and no towns or cities, players will chase an incentive to win subconsciously, no matter how boring or miserable it is to do so. Thus, our responsibility as designers is to make sure that we’re incentivizing the things that let the players have the most fun.

The reason games go through so much playtesting is that incentivizing the right decisions for our games is nuanced and complicated. I played a Bang!-style hidden role game at a playtesting night a few years ago that was mostly performed in dead silence as we tried to figure out which roles the other players were. The designer, clearly a bit distressed, informed us that we should be talking in order to deceive the other players or suss out who was an opponent. The problem was that, based on the current rules of the game, the best thing for us to do to win the game was to quietly work towards our win conditions and not give away any information at all – if we were supposed to talk and argue, there should have been a good reason to. It wasn’t something that could have been found out by creating the rough draft and thinking about it, as human behavior in these scenarios is consistent but unpredictable.

Figure skating judging, both before and after, are examples of contests with flawed win incentives. The old 6.0 system incentivized judges to give higher scores to their home country and lower scores to opponents, as they had the freedom to do so within the rules and doing so was the best way for their country to win. (The only reason this didn’t turn into a leveling war and a race to nul points for every country was because there was a subjective limit to how much of this the audience, IOC, etc. would accept.) Under the ISU system, judges no longer had much room to do this, but skaters now had a clear incentive to adhere to an objective set of rules and maximize points as much as possible. 

Planning Your Program

At this point, we’ve broadly covered the why and how of incentives, though of course there’s so many fine details that you could fill multiple books with them. What we haven’t yet covered is the what – what do you actually want your game to incentivize? In here, too, figure skating proves deeply illuminating.

As I mentioned previously, figure skating straddles the fence between “art” and “sport”. When coming up with a system of judging, or in other words the incentives you give to skaters and coaches, how do you want to treat the practice of skating? Because skating is in the Olympics and many of the other major competitions follow in its footsteps, the broader organizers of the skating world firmly pointed the needle towards “sport”. However, while that may have been the best decision for their circumstances, it had its consequences and was not perhaps the ideal choice for skating enthusiasts or the medium as a whole.

When creating a game, you want to think about what actions, reactions, and emotions you want the game to generate and then build a system of incentives and punishments that push players towards those goals. Sometimes it’s very easy and almost subconscious to choose your design intent, particularly when working in an established media – the intellectual coziness of trick-taking games, the adrenaline rush of social deduction games, and the joy and despair of co-op games. Other times, you’re trying to mirror the emotional experiences of an external source, whether that’s the harrowing nature of the Underground Railroad or a schlocky B-horror film.

Sometimes your game, like skating, will have multiple emotional reactions it’s trying to draw from players and you need to design incentives that strike a balance. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft are essentially two things at once – a video game designed to challenge players and encourage them to continue playing in order to maintain their position on the “content treadmill”, and a virtual community that offers numerous opportunities for socialization and customization. For games like this, what looks like contradictory incentives – extremely high-end raids that require countless hours to succeed at alongside “minigames” like gardening and fishing – are trying to accomplish both goals at the same time.

When iterating your game, whether it’s broad mechanical changes or tweaking numbers, first ask yourself, “Why did I design this game? What did I want players to get out of it?” Then iterate your game so that it grows closer to that intent and not something else. It’s easy to be led astray by preëxisting games or criticism of games that aren’t like yours and to do things like make a game with wacky asymmetrical factions homogenous and boring in the name of “greater balance”, or make a party game too complex in an attempt to stand out from genre competitors; having a conscious sense of what you want your game to be, and what it could be but you don’t want it to, will keep your design journey more focused.

Kiss and Cry

Many people design games at the brain-stem level without really thinking about why they’re doing what they’re doing. God knows I do. However, tabletop game design is a profession that forever rewards you for doing the hard work of overthinking every tiny detail, and no detail is more consequential to forget than “Why was I making this in the first place?”

These questions are so obvious that they are often easy to forget. I’m grateful that the quad revolution, and skating and general, helped me wake up and consciously think about it.

Making an Impressive Impress-the-Judge Game

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

The impress-the-judge game is one of the pillars of party gaming, a valuable social lubricant for parties of nerds and non-nerds alike since the early 2000s. However, more serious designers have largely turned up their noses toward the genre; this is in no small part due to 500-pound gorilla Cards Against Humanity forcing out competitors and earning the genre the undeserving reputation of being filled with offensive “punch-down” humor. This is a huge waste, as a well-designed impress-the-judge game can bring together new players and be a great time for longtime friends alike. I like to consider myself a scholar of the subgenre, and in this article I would like to go in depth on how to make a great impress-the-judge game.

(Before I begin the article in earnest, I’ll define the impress-the-judge genre for those not super aware of game design topics. The basic concept of the impress-the-judge game is that one player each round is the “judge”, who sets forth a prompt, and each other player has to come up with a funny answer that the judge will pick. Usually, both prompts and answers are premade cards, but several excellent games have gone with other options.)

Blind Judgment

As I mentioned in my previous article on the subject, all party games are comedy Legos, designed to help tables of people find common ground through laughter. This can range from complete strangers at a convention to families who have known each other for ages – no amount of familiarity or inherent comedy skill can’t be enhanced by a good party game. Some kinds of party games are better suited to some groups than others; games that rely on your knowledge of other people, like Wavelength and Hive Mind, are better for people who mostly know each other beforehand, while trivia games like Wits and Wagers are good icebreakers for strangers but don’t add as much to preëstablished groups.

Impress-the-judge are one of the most group-agnostic types of party games. All of the humor is contained on the cards and only requires a modicum of effort for players to rehydrate, which means that no matter how poor a group is at making jokes naturally, it should be easy for them to regularly get a laugh out of everyone most of the time. This also means that the impress-the-judge game is the most reliant party game genre on the designer’s sense of humor and ability to write funny cards.

All impress-the-judge games strike a balance between rewarding writing skills (picking the best card) and acting skills (being able to sell the judge on the game you made). Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity are 100% reliant on writing skills, with anonymous submission systems that heavily disincentivize players from promoting their own answer. This has its upsides – the surprise when the shyest member of your group has a slam-dunk answer – and downsides – the despair of having your great card tossed aside because the judge didn’t get the reference and you couldn’t explain it.

Other games rely more on acting skill, though none fully reward acting skill without writing skill, as that is short-form improv and not a board game. Snake Oil is probably the widest-spread of these, though Shut Up & Sit Down darling Funemployed ventures even further into the acting side of the genre, as you have to use every card in your hand, so the ability to select the best one for the situation is taken away from you.

Your first decision when making an impress-the-judge game is where on this spectrum you want your game to fall. Your next decision is how, and if, you want to fix a few of the genre’s glaring problems.

The Three Sinkholes of Impress-the-Judge Games

The impress-the-judge game doesn’t have “pillars” of good game design holding it up; instead, it’s an excellent and time-tested gameplay base with a few large but patchable flaws. Deciding whether to fix these sinkholes at the risk of adding poisonous complexity to your game will inform much of your design work.

Downtime

The enemy of all party games is downtime. You want your players to be engaged with, or at least entertained by, the game at all times, and unfortunately, the base impress-the-judge game has two areas that frequently produce downtime for most players.

The first is in the answer selection process. Generally, each player has as much time as they want to select or create a funny answer. This means that, with the exception of the slowest player in your group, all the other players are going to spend a lot of this phase waiting around for something different to happen. There aren’t any jokes or funny moments here, as everyone wants to keep their answers a secret so as to spoil the surprise (and win the round).

The most common solution to having too much downtime here is to incentivize players to work quickly. In Stinker, there is no preset judge, with the judge instead being the player who fails to assemble an answer before everyone else. This makes players work much more quickly, and also increases the general quality of each answer because the player having the most trouble with a good answer becomes the judge by default. I took a different tack when designing Stand Back, Citizen!. Each answer in SBC! is comprised of two different types of cards, with all of the cards of one of these types dealt face-up into the table; when the round starts, you have to pick a good card from the center and create an answer before an opponent can snatch it from you. Under this system, there will still be one player left trying to figure out what card to play, but their squirming as they’re faced with a single subpar option makes the time a source of comedy instead of frustration.

The second likely area for downtime is during judging. This is much more of an issue for games with an anonymous judging system, as arguing in favor of your answer, or against an opponent’s answer, or even for an opponent’s answer if you know you don’t have a chance but really liked Uncle Jeff’s pitch, is great fun and takes a lot of the dreariness out of the process. The game that came the closest to solving this is the Quiplash series, which inverts the process by having only two answers for each prompt and making all of the other players judges. This was helped in part by its status as a digital game, but I could see this method working for tabletop games as well.

Judge Bias

Because impress-the-judge games rely on the subjective judgments of the other players, there is naturally an issue of a judge picking a particular answer either because it appeals to them specifically or because they’re biased towards one of the players at the table (for example, because they are dating). The early anonymous judging games were anonymous because of this second issue; I would argue that this is somewhat overblown and more of a problem with the gaming group than with the design of the game itself. It is true, however, that losing because someone else played a card that matched the judge’s hobbies or interests is one of the worst feelings in impress-the-judge games.

There haven’t been a whole lot of advances in this area, in part because judge bias is one of the flaws that players are most likely to accept as built in to the genre as a whole; if you wanted your contribution to not be measured subjectively, you could play one of thousands of strategy games, or even a more objective party game like Codenames. Stinker, perhaps unintentionally, went some way towards solving this by randomizing the judge after people lock in their answers; this might be a place where further advancement could be found.

The Novelty Wearing Off

Party games are second only to legacy games in their reliance on novelty. After all, comedy is based out of the unexpected, so if you’ve seen one funny answer already it’s not going to be nearly as impactful the next time. When you have a set of cards with all the jokes pre-written on them, the novelty will wear out sooner rather than later.

The easiest way to solve this is to vary up the “answer” components so players can write either anything (as in Quiplash or Say Anything, where players can even draw) or almost anything (as in Stinker, which uses letter tiles). However, this stumbles into a secondary trap, which Roger van Oech described in his book A Whack on the Side of the Head. Without some way of forcing them to create new answers, players are most likely to stick to the first things they can think of, which inevitably become relatively conservative answers that everyone’s heard before. So if you’re making an impress-the-judge game with totally open answers, you have to focus on creating lots and lots of excellent prompts.

If you’re using cards, consider using a combination of cards to massively increase the permutations that players can achieve. All of the answer cards in Snake Oil are a single word, and players combine two of them to create a product to pitch to the judge; because they’re built to change depending on the other word you pair them with, this creates a much larger variety of responses than could be generated through single cards. I used a similar method when creating Stand Back, Citizen!, though that uses an asymmetrical combination of fill-in-the-blank “power” templates and silly nouns – there’s half as many permutations, but they’re more directed and more likely to be a bullseye than cards that can be put in either order.

Order in the Court

Besides the actual prompts and answers, you should also think about the less glamorous nuts and bolts of your game; in particular, thinking about the scoring system and end condition.

You might think that because impress-the-judge games are party games for casual audiences, that whatever scoring system you create doesn’t matter because people aren’t going to pay attention to them. While it is true that party games are more about the journey than the destination, your scoring system is your best way to incentivize your players into being funny and shouldn’t be discarded offhand. Stinker is one of the best examples here: If your answer gets chosen, you get one point for every letter tile you used in it, so you’re encouraged to make longer and more elaborate answers (balanced with not becoming the judge because you spent too long moving tiles around).

A scoring system more complex than “judge picks the winner” can also introduce new skills to the game. In Say Anything, you get points if the judge picks your answer as usual, but you can also earn points by guessing which answer the judge is going to pick. This turns Say Anything into a hybrid of the impress-the-judge game and the venerable “know your friends” subgenre and helps it stand out.

The end of the game is also very important, because it’s critical that a party game not overstay its welcome. Apples to Apples had a huge issue with this, because the game ended when one player won a certain number of times – not only is this obviously problematic with a large player count, it meant that the game could drag on forever as everyone collected N-1 green apple cards, or end swiftly as some cut-up got all of them in a row. Cards Against Humanity has no end condition at all, which will frequently mean it goes on too long, but I suppose was insightful into how party games usually just sort of end anticlimactically in most of the situations in which they’re played.

I generally like going until everyone’s been the judge once. It means that the game is often too short at 4 or 5 players, but it’s better to undershoot the ideal playtime than overshoot, as it’s psychologically easier to just start a second round than cancel a too-long game in progress. It also gives everyone a chance to judge and many chances to create answers. If your game has more mechanical trappings and is expected to go a little longer, like Say Anything, going around the table twice can also make sense. Go with what works for your game and your players.

Conclusion

The actual biggest flaw with impress-the-judge games is that they’re tough to publish after both the wild success of Cards Against Humanity and the deluge of terrible imitators in the early 2010s. However, only sticking to games that are easy to publish means you’re constantly playing catchup with whatever trend is rocking BGG (or, more realistically, rocked BGG two years ago). At worst, designing a good impress-the-judge game means you’ll make your friend group very happy; at best, you can make thousands of people all over the world very happy. As long as your game deserves to exist and advances the medium, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with trying to compete in a saturated category.

Balance, On Average

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

When you think about game balance, you probably think about making all possible player options be as equitable as possible; about maintaining a fragile balance between each player’s starting position so everyone has an equal chance of winning every game. But what if I were to tell you that there was a different way to balance your games? What if that way combined a sense of fair play with all the excitement, desffpair, and storytelling opportunities that came with unequal positions? Well, good news! I’m not speaking hypothetically. Welcome to an article about making your game balanced…on average.

Dr. Ro-Galt-Nik’s Mean Bean Machine

When I was a kid, my parents would regularly take me to see the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. During one of my visits, I stumbled across a giant version of this thing, which was one of the coolest things I had ever seen:

This Galton Board, also known as a “bean machine”, is a neat visual representation of the natural law of regression toward the mean. Even if you have a function with a wide range of outcomes, if you run that function often enough, it will eventually deliver the distribution of results you expect, with a hill centered on the mathematical mean outcome. To use plainer language, everything will even out as expected, provided you try enough times.

What this means for us as game designers is that there is another option besides trying to make each player’s starting position equal every time: We can also have a wide variety of unequal starting positions and redistribute these starting positions so many times it regresses toward the mean.

I’m Pretty Sure The Genius Did This Once

That last section was pretty abstract, so to make it more practical, I’ll use an example. Let’s look at a game that’s very much in need of redesigning: I’ll call it “Small War”.

Small War is played between two players using part of a standard pack of playing cards: The 2 through 10 of hearts and the 2 through 10 of clubs. These cards are shuffled together and then dealt evenly to both players. Then, each player selects a card and puts it face-down. Once they’ve both chosen a card, they turn them face-up; the player who played the higher card “captures” the other card and forms a pair. Whoever has the most pairs at the end of the game wins.

So obviously, Small War has some problems. The most obvious one is that, because the cards are randomly distributed across both players, it can create a heavily imbalanced scenario where one player might have both 2s, 3s, and 4s and the other has both 8s, 9s, and 10s. How can we fix this so every game of Small War is equitable to both players?

A conventionally balanced version of Small War would simply distribute one copy of each card, 2-10, to each player every game. This turns the game from one based on luck to a tense mindgame where each player tries to figure out when their opponent is going to try to pass their small cards through or try to win the round with a big card. This is cool and everything, but the meta would crystallize quickly after a few rounds and the game would become stale for all but the most hardcore players.

However, there is another way: Keep the gameplay exactly the same but make the game best out of 9 rounds (1 round being what we’d call a “game” in the original). Individual rounds might be extremely unfair, but there’s so many rounds that there’s a good chance of both players’ luck of the draw cancelling out each others’ over time.  Plus, this wider range of opening hand adds more variety, prevents the game from boiling down to set opening and closing strategies, and creates amazing stories where you get dealt an awful hand but manage to overcome your opponent afterwards.

This second case is what Balance On Average (BOA) design is all about.

Defining The BOA

BOA games have a few key features.

  • A BOA game is made up of a number of individual rounds, ending after a set number or when a player reaches a particular score.
  • Each round begins with players being given a random assortment of components to make do with. The distribution of components is random and each player’s respective strength can be unequal, sometimes brutally so.
  • The results of each individual round don’t have anything to do with the rounds after it, except in a “metagame” sense where you might adjust your play based on your score or the amount of time left in the game.

You might be wondering, why even make a game like this? Well, compared to a conventionally balanced game, BOA games have a number of benefits.

  • Compared to a regular game, where being put in a bad position early in the game will make you lag behind for 90 minutes, a BOA game can get away with being pointlessly cruel to players because the round will be over in 5 minutes anyway. In fact, cruelty often engenders a desire to play again later and to laugh about it after the fact.
  • There’s a wider variety of game states in a BOA game. In a conventionally balanced game, the designer (and developer sometimes) works hard to ensure that every player starts the round at around a 5/10 and maintains that for most of the game. BOA games can deal out gamestates ranging from a 0 to a 12, greatly increasing the number of possibilities.
  • BOA games can be deeply emotionally impactful. Getting a strong hand and doing well is more likely to stick in your memory if you’ve dealt with medium-to-weak hands for the last 5 rounds; getting a come-from-behind victory is more meaningful if you were actually behind the other players in a way beyond “number of games played”.

The BOA In Action

The majority of BOA games are traditional games hailing from long before the advent of the modern “designer game”. The one Americans are probably the most familiar with is poker. You might have a terrible hand in one round and a godly hand in the next, but besides the metagame of playing more or less aggressively depending on how many chips you have compared to your opponents, the outcome of one round doesn’t affect the performance of your hand in the next.

Other card or card-equivalent games that make use of BOA include bridge, rummy, and mahjong. Much of the strategy of any of these games involves not only capitalizing on good rounds, but knowing when your starting hand is good compared to the other player or team’s and throwing away your hand as safely as possible if you you can’t catch up. For games with an easier learning curve, Uno is the textbook definition of BOA (as the distribution of wilds and special cards like draw 2s unevenly weighs starting hands), though presumably many groups only play one game at a time.

The majority of designer games that use BOA balancing are trick-taking games, likely because trick-taking card games have more fidelity to the classics of the genre than most other kinds of game. Some, like The Bottle Imp, adhere strictly to keeping rounds separate and tallying up scores on a piece of paper; others allow you to mitigate a bad hand (Nyet!) or give players a way to catch up after a nasty round (Tournament at Camelot). You could also charitably describe impress-the-judge games like Stand Back, Citizen! as BOA, since the suitability of your hand to the prompt will change each round.

Some games that look like BOA games but aren’t include “dude smasher” games like Magic, Hearthstone, and Netrunner (as you usually play three rounds max against a single opponent); drafting games like Bunny Kingdom or 7 Wonders (as your actions in earlier rounds dictate what you do in later ones); and fast social deduction games like One Night Ultimate Werewolf (as you’re not playing multiple rounds in one game – you’re playing multiple very short games).

One of the most interesting interpretations of BOA design is Condottiere. Condottiere is a sort of hybrid between BOA and conventional design because “getting a new hand” and “starting a new round” isn’t a 1:1 ratio: Players draw new hands once all but one player are out of cards. This means that players with bad hands can force balance on average by increasing the number of hands per game, while a player with a great hand might be tempted to string their hand across multiple rounds while flirting with the disaster of throwing away most of their good cards. I still haven’t seen this mechanic anywhere else meaningful, and it remains a great source of inspiration for me.

BOA Constrictions

Despite the several advantages of BOA design, games of that nature have a tiny foothold in the tabletop game industry as a whole, for reasons both meaningful and coincidental.

Part of the reason for the modern unpopularity of BOA design might be due to the meteoric rise of video games right around when the properties of a “well-designed” board game were starting to become mainstream around designers. It stood to reason that a balanced board game should resemble a balanced video game, with players selecting an asymmetric faction, strategy, or character near the beginning of the game and having a roughly even chance of winning with it at equal player skills. 

Another, perhaps more legitimate reason is that it’s hard to build a sense of momentum in a BOA game because each round is specifically detached from the next. You can have excitement and progress within a round, but compared to an Agricola or Dominion where a player’s engine and strategy slowly builds up to a splashy finish, BOA games frequently feel more “even”, with emotional impact primarily arising from unusual situations that may not always occur every game.

BOA games also have many more restrictions than conventional games. As discussed, BOA games have to have a long series of short rounds, each of which randomly redistributes starting positions. There’s only so many ways you can achieve this, and many of the good ones have been covered by conventional games. There are additional UX concerns with this system, as you need the redistribution itself to be relatively quick and painless (like shuffling and dealing out a deck of cards, as is common) and the scorekeeping to be something more modern than someone having to grab a pencil and sheet of paper. That said, I believe that BOA games are so overlooked by modern tabletop designers that their true potential remains unexplored – maybe there’s some mechanic hiding in the BOA space waiting to revolutionize the industry.

Conclusion

All game designers can fall victim to a kind of design myopia, where we grow so used to the evaluations and demands of our particular slice of the community that we forget that there are many ways to make a fun, dynamic game, some less mainstream than others. Looking at BOA games has been extremely helpful for me in this regard, and I hope to one day find even more interesting methods of balancing a game and keeping its players happy.

Board Games and the Attention Economy

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

The “attention economy” is a sociological and economic term that has gained increasing relevance as users gain near-constant access to media channels via smartphones. Herbert A. Simon summarized the concept as “…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” To be more succint, attention is a finite resource and each call for a person’s attention drains some of it.

The attention economy is also a valuable metric to keep in mind when designing tabletop games (though I’m migrating the term a bit from its original meaning). In fact, I would argue that one of the most important indicators of a game’s complexity is its attention strain, which we can define using several objective factors.

Factor 1: How Much?

The first, and most obvious, factor in a game’s attention strain is how many components there are. However, this isn’t just total number of components – it’s the total number of components the player needs to pay attention to in order to play the game.

The distinction here is most noticeable in tableau-building games like Roll for the Galaxy. Roll has a fairly large number of distinct components: Each player has a sizable tableau with up to six or seven different powers, an action strip to which they assign dice, and a pool of dice, in addition to the victory point chips and round information markers in the center of the table. However, despite this staggering amount of components, Roll is still a medium-weight game because each player only really needs to pay attention to about 20% of them. Because you can’t interact with your opponent’s tableau, you only really need to know your own components in detail most of the time.

Components that entry-level or intermediate players don’t have to pay attention to may deserve attention from advanced players, and that’s okay – advanced players will have a better range of attention for your game anyway because they’ve internalized the basic principles. Returning to Roll, a player of average skill might not pay attention to things like their opponents’ dice colors or the distribution of tiles of a certain type, and it’s not necessary for them to do so to win against people of their skill level, but that opportunity exists ready for a highly skilled player to exploit.

Factor 2: How Often?

Even if a component deserves attention, it doesn’t necessarily deserve your foremost attention all the time. Some parts of a game are only important during certain times, and at other times they can be safely ignored at no strategic cost to the player.

In many games, you can’t take every kind of action every turn, so the features you have to pay attention to are limited by whether they actually matter to you in the immediate moment. Great Western Trail has a number of disparate features, including a “job board” where players can hire cowboys and such; a cattle market where players can buy better cows for their deck; a train track running around the board with stations that grant special abilities; and the board itself, which has a number of hazardous areas that can drain money from players. However, actions are limited to the “buildings” that your cowbeeple can reach within three steps. Unless you’re planning ahead for a future purchase, you only have to care about the parts of the game that you can actually get to in the present moment, and you don’t have to balance every component at once.

You can also call attention to different components through a scoring system. In Cartographers, your scoring conditions are 2 out of 4 conditions that rotate every round; something you might need to pay careful attention to at the start of the game will become irrelevant, replaced by a new scoring condition. Besides ensuring that players aren’t pulled in too many directions at once, a system like this also keeps each round fresh and interesting, preventing a snowball effect of one player’s early lead compounding.

One of the big issues of trying to make components that only require players’ attention some of the time is that having a component only matter once in a while, or even worse, once every few games, is going to be more taxing on your players than if you had to pay attention to that component all the time.

Factor 3: Where?

The spatial placement and grouping of components can often make it easier for players to concentrate on a number of otherwise unrelated actions. This plays off the psychological principle of chunking, where humans can more easily process large amounts of information when they’re organized into discrete groups. (Think about how phone numbers are easier to remember because the 10 numbers are broken into three segments.)

In Cosmic Encounter, gaining 5 colonies on other players’ planets will let you win the game. This can frequently be difficult to track, especially with a full player count of 5+ players and with ships of multiple colors hanging out on different planets. The Fantasy Flight edition includes a tracker that lets you keep track of everyone’s foreign colonies at once, which is a baseline move for a game like this, but in a stroke of brilliance, attached the tracker to the Warp component. The Warp, beyond storing everyone’s “dead” ships, is also the focus of numerous mandatory phases during the game: Notably, at the beginning of everyone’s turn, they retrieve a ship from the Warp, thus allowing their eye to drift over the foreign colony tracker. In this way, remembering to check the win condition is chunked into normal game actions, making Cosmic‘s total cognitive load easier. (Something very valuable when you’re playing with the more complex aliens.)

There is one point of caution here: The more you dictate where all the components are located relative to each other, the more you’re dictating where everything in the game is set up. This can be an issue for people with smaller tables if your components are a weird shape that won’t fit the available space. Try not to combine too many features into a large component and keep things “free-floating” as much as you can.

Factor 4: When?

This article was inspired by the deckbuilding games Dominion and Trains. Both games have expansions with “attack” cards that affect the other players in some way, something removed from the extreme multiplayer solitaire feel common to their genre. However, despite increased interaction generally being considered a good thing, these attack cards frequently detract from the game experience because they break the unspoken promise that you don’t have to pay attention during turns that aren’t yours.

While up until now my discussion of the board game attention economy has been spatial (referring to concrete objects and their placement), when a player has to pay attention is also important. In some games, typically party games, players have to be “on” and engaged all the time. Meanwhile, in many Euros, what the other players do on their turns doesn’t require your attention until it’s your turn again. Having to be always on, especially when you’re regularly making complex strategic decisions, can often be more draining than when you have time to take a break and think about your next move sometime in the future.

Just because it’s good to let players take a break from concentrating on the present game state sometimes doesn’t mean you need to strike interactivity from the game entirely; you just need to make sure that interactive actions that affect players outside of their turns are one-sided. Two attack cards in Dominion are the Witch, which dumps a negative VP card into your opponents’ discard piles, and the Rabble, which makes each opponent do the work of discarding certain cards from the top of their decks. The Witch is much more successful in Dominion‘s context because you can mess with other players without yanking their attention away from their personal hand of cards, as the Rabble does.

This is something that’s typically determined by your genre of game. If you’re designing a game that has even partial family members in a genre, try playing those and see when you actually have to pay attention to the game. This will inform your players’ expectations going into the game, and meeting them will help prevent needless friction.

Factor 5: Wait, This is the Conclusion

Game design is about establishing a “magic circle”: Inside the circle, you want to challenge your players and deprive them of the means to achieve their goals, while outside it, you want to support your players in their gameplay experience and prevent friction in the same way other designers do. Unless you’re designing a game specifically intended to test your players’ attention span and memory, paying attention to when your players expect to concentrate and not interfering in that space will help maintain the magic circle’s integrity.