Monthly Archives: April 2020

Politics & Poker

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

Territory control games like Risk or Game of Thrones and take-that games like Red Dragon Inn face a common issue. At various times in the game, especially right at the start, all the players are roughly equal, barring starting powers and whatnot. But the game encourages you to be mean to people, whether it be by invading their territory or playing a card on them. So what do you do when the decision of who to target is arbitrary?

(No actual poker discussion here; this article is named after a song from 1960 Tony Award-winning musical Fiorello! I didn’t expect you to get it, but if you didn’t want dense references to things that only eight people are familiar with, you wouldn’t read this blog!!!)

With many of these types of games, what you do is pick someone at random, and frankly, this sucks. Picking someone to target for no reason can feel mean, like you singled them out because you like them less as a person. But making it clear that you’re being arbitrary, by rolling a die or whatnot, can also be just as bad – though your opponent may care less, choosing at random removes what agency you had from this decision and turns your turn into a miniature bean machine.

While this issue is common, it certainly isn’t unsolved. There’s a number of games in both genres that implemented ways to balance targeting decisions between “random” and “obvious”. Let’s check some of them out!

Always Incentivize Decisions

Some games solve this issue by making decisions of who to target have meaningful incentives from the first turn and for the rest of the game. The trick is that the “right” decision can’t be too obvious – otherwise we end up in the opposite problem where choices are so obvious it’s boring.

The take-that game Epic Spell Wars (which I’ve written about in more detail) does this by giving the players benefit for matching cards from the same “school” of magic. Each card targets in a different way – some a specific player to your left or right, some the player with the most HP, and so on. But the benefit from casting a higher quality spell generally outweighs aiming your spells at a particular player. This also adds a chaotic feeling to the game, making spell resolution wilder and less strategic (a good thing in this case).

Some war/territory control games resolve this issue by making the players’ locations asymmetric. Diplomacy puts each player in control of a major power during World War I, forcing them to negotiate and betray each other in order to gain control of a majority of Europe. Because the map of the game is literally a map of Europe, with some players starting the game farther apart from others, decisions of who to target and coöperate with are thus influenced from the start of the game by your neighbors. A player controlling Turkey is going to more likely target its neighbors, Austria-Hungary and Russia, while it’s more likely to make alliances with the player controlling France in an effort to catch Austria-Hungary in a pincer attack. (Caveat: I’m terrible at Diplomacy and haven’t played in 10 years, so forgive me if I got the strategy wrong.)

Compare this to a game like Eclipse where each player has exactly two neighbors at an equal distance to each other. This symmetry makes the decision of which sector to expand into and which to broker a truce with largely arbitrary until players start developing different ship technology, meaning the political interplay stays static and largely uninteresting for most of the game. (That said, Eclipse primarily focuses on Master of Orion-style empire management and technology, so not being great at something it’s not trying to do isn’t the end of the world.)

Don’t Let Players Choose

The territory control game that does the best job of handling arbitrary targeting decisions is Cosmic Encounter. That’s right, fool, I’m praising Cosmic in another article and you’re going to have to read it!!

Cosmic‘s solution to the issues of players not knowing who to target cuts the Gordian knot by simply not letting players choose who to target. Instead, on each player’s turn, they draw a random color from the “destiny deck” and they have to deal with them, for better or for worse.

This accomplishes several things. First, it makes the politics in the game much more fluid. If red is targeting purple, even though they worked together in the previous round to gain colonies, their previous actions mean nothing now and they have to re-establish relations from scratch. This may not appeal to people who enjoy building coalitions long-term, but it keeps player dynamics fluid for the entire game.

Second, assigning random opponents takes the blame away from the players. Choosing a target frequently carries hurt feelings with it – if you chose to attack me instead of my opponent, and both of us offer functionally identical options, you’re essentially just picking on me. It’s much healthier to have a deck of cards to blame for

Third, the destiny deck allows matchups to be uneven. Some alien powers are much, much better than others in combat, so if people had their say they would just attack aliens who weren’t useful in combat. This would make it less fun for people assigned these powers as they would only be able to use them on their turn, while other people with diplomatic or resource-generating powers could see benefits throughout the whole game. This way, combat-power players get their time in the sun without requiring their opponents to make decisions vestedly not in their self-interest.

Other games use different systems to randomize targeting; for example, Tournament at Camelot uses the trick-taking genre as a randomness mechanism. Each trick results in the player who played the lowest weapon card taking the combined weapon cards played as damage. Since you can’t control what cards are in your opponents’ hands, the best you can do is make sure that player isn’t you.

Small World: Hard to Categorize

Days of Wonder’s classic territory control game Small World addresses this issue in an interesting way that doesn’t really fall in the previous two categories.

At the start of the game, and roughly 2 to 3 more times during the game, you select a new fantasy race and send it rampaging onto the board, conquering your opponents and “nameless” NPC tiles. You can choose to launch your attack from anywhere, so who do you pick on?

Small World does the opposite of many territory control games by not encouraging players to fight each other; instead, it incentivizes fighting as little as possible and requires fighting to happen due to the size of the board. Each space you occupy with your civilization earns you 1 point at the end of the game, and spaces containing your opponents’ civilization require significantly more forces to conquer. Thus, in order to maximize your points per turn, you’re encouraged to find empty space on the board and only attack if you have to.

You will have to. The game’s called Small World for a reason; after the first turn or two you’ll have to attack someone in order to expand. Fortunately, the game offers lots of things to balance besides just playing kingmaker and attacking whoever’s in the lead. There’s a large number of different race and class powers, some of which benefit the attacker or defender; additionally, players can send their faction into “decline,” allowing them to pick a new race/class combination while earning passive income. This makes timing just as important as player selection, as you may want to wait to attack your opponent if you think they’ll go into decline on their next turn.

This article isn’t a game analysis of Small World so I’ll leave it at that for there, but the point is that it spends a lot of its complexity budget (especially considering the publisher primarily aims at a casual audience) making “who to target” an interesting question with many different answers.

Conclusion

Every genre has baked-in flaws: For example, deckbuilding games often have very little player interaction, and social deduction games reward being loud and pushy. “Who to target” is one of the biggest issues with take-that and territory control games, but some of the most stellar games in the genre are able to take on this issue and partially fix it in an interesting way.

In a sense, a good game design lesson to learn from this is to not take anything for granted. It’s great to work on a game in a genre you’re passionate about, because you’ll have a better understanding of the game’s appeals to an enfranchised audience, but by questioning the flaws that seemingly come part and parcel with the genre’s strengths, you may be able to create a game that nobody’s seen before.

Thrown To The Lions: Is Accessibility Everything?

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

This post was inspired by the game Glory to Rome, in particular its Colosseum card.

When you play the Colosseum, you can steal some of your opponents’ “patrons” and throw them to the lions for points. It’s a crushing play and one that will frequently win the game for the player who builds it. In fact, in a game defined by broken interactions between various cards, it may be a little too strong.

There is a mode of playing GTR that doesn’t include the Colosseum, and that’s generally nicer on new players, but veterans claim that playing “playing around” the Colosseum, by ending the game before someone can build it or by protecting yourself in various other subtle ways, is possible, and that the “advanced” version of GTR is better enough than the “easy” version that you might as well just start with it.

For a long time, I disagreed with strategy notions like these, thinking that all games should at least try to focus on accessibility and that complexity was a price paid for better gameplay. But it occurred to me that this is only true in a framework defined by numbers – sales number, or copies sold – and that the true estimate of a game’s quality is much more nuanced.

Spells For Beginners

Ironically, despite Magic: the Gathering being difficult to learn and the community being filled with hardcore gamers who love as much complexity as possible, the design team’s focus on accessibility straitjacketed my thinking from before I even knew I wanted to play board games.

Magic is designed at a large scale, which makes sense, because the playtesting for a trading card game is incredibly rigorous. most smaller companies (with the exception of Level 99, which has a huge network) can’t handle playtesting at a rate that would balance the game even slightly. This means that for a trading card game to remain a high-quality experience, it needs to constantly acquire enough new players to justify its operating expenses.

In order to acquire these players, Magic designers focus very heavily on the game being easy to pick up and play. A lot of the design team’s focus is on making the game relatively easy to parse; the New World Order design paradigm was one of the most important steps forward for the game. Comprehension is one of the most important metrics for evaluating a set of cards, even for products that are more aimed toward enfranchised audiences.

I think in terms of Magic design, all these things are good; however, I assumed that “accessibility is king” applied universally to all games, an assumption that might not be correct. Magic is in a situation where sales or community size really are good measures of success, because without large numbers of both the game would cease to exist. But that’s certainly not true for many publishers, let alone many games.

Going Dutch

Is “lots of people play it once” the end goal of a game design? Hell, is “it sells good” the end goal of a game design?

There’s plenty of reasons someone would pick a worse designed game to buy over a better designed one. Maybe the cover art is more appealing, or the theme is something they relate to; maybe their regular game group is 15 people large and they can only play roll-and-write games. Similarly, games might be inaccessible or turn off people glancing at it, but could be defined as “great” by many metrics. Princes of Florence is challenging for new players and has unreadable graphic design, but still comfortably resides just outside the BGG top 100.

There’s plenty of games that specifically aim for a niche audience and don’t care if there aren’t a lot of new blood. The venerable 18XX genre is one of these, as are war simulation games. (Twilight Struggle managed to find crossover success.) War game publisher Hollandspiele specifically decided not to balance strategies for first-time players, preferring instead to focus on a game with strategic depth after weeks of playing. In doing so, they found a small base of profoundly dedicated wargamers. Their article on the subject was enlightening and helped me codify this post. (The Thoughtful Gamer goes into more depth in a different post, which is also good reading.)

The goal of a game should be to be best it can be. For some games, like the aforementioned trading card games, “best” means that it has a large enough community to maintain organized play and develop strategies through the metagame. But for many others, “best” might mean that it has enough replay value to still be engaging for years and years of repeated play. If, for one of these second types of games, replay value comes at the cost of a steep barrier to entry, it’s worth it.

What We Owe to Each Other

To whom exactly do we “owe” our designs? Is it people playing the game for the first time, who might need convincing to give it a second shot? Or is it the people who are going to stick with your game through dozens of plays who want complexity, emergent strategy, and something they can really sink their teeth into?

It’s all well and good to shrug your shoulders and say “all of them,” or “strike a balance,” but in a lot of cases you have to pick one or the other. This is most common with “newbie crusher” strategies, like the Colosseum from the beginning of this article, which can be difficult for new players to overcome but can be countered or outpaced by veterans. What if a “newbie crusher” strategy is good for the game otherwise?

Also troubling is limits on component count and complexity. The more individual cards/powers are available in the game, the more replay value you’ll have, as more interesting strategies can be built. But by adding more components, you’re also setting the expectation that a decent player of your game should know what all of them do, along with their strengths and weaknesses. It’s pretty easy for someone to grasp the “good cards” in Love Letter because there’s only eight of them; for Terraforming Mars it might be a lot tougher. But on the other side of the coin, there’s a lot more combinatorics in Terraforming Mars that make the game so good for repeated plays.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to what makes your game good, but it should be defined by your game and your ideals, not necessarily by business terms. Capitalism’s constraints on “good” being a quantifiable value that can be defined by sales or community isn’t the only way to look at it, and that board games have masterpieces that can be only appreciated by a few people, just like with movies or music. Accessibility is, primarily, a means to achieving this conventional definition of success, and not a de facto measurement of quality.

Conclusion

Regrettably, there’s no such thing as a perfect game. My favorite game, Cosmic Encounter, is loathed by other players for its randomness and imbalance, while I certainly have games I like significantly less than their objective valuation (like Caverna, which I bounced off of). But the only way to truly know whether your game is inching closer to perfection is to set your own standards and not simply accept the easy answers put forward in front of you.

Because my work for Phantom Knight Games is in party games and in light thematic games, accessibility still remains a significant concern for me. But writing this article helped me realize that my definitions of quality aren’t universal and have a fairly commercial bent to them, and will help me recalibrate how I analyze games going forward. And one day, I hope to play the famously out of print Glory to Rome so I can judge the Colosseum strategy for myself.