Tag Archives: psychology

Losing Is Fun

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

It’s fairly easy to enjoy a game, even a bad one, if you’re winning really hard. Even in situations where your lead was determined by luck and it’s so unstoppable that you can do literally anything and coast to victory, there is something satisfying about smugly wishing the other players a good game at the end.

Conversely, many games, even good ones, can be unfun if you’re losing. This is especially true for Euro-style games that bill themselves as luck-free strategy contests – this copy implies that this kind of game is a contest that can accurately measure each player’s relative intelligence, so if you’re losing very badly in a Euro-style game, even an otherwise acclaimed one, you feel like the game is telling you that you’re stupid.

When designing a game where strategy is an important component, as much as we have to make a winning strategy also the most fun thing players can pursue, we also have to ensure that players have a good time even while they’re losing. This article explores a few methods that can help this pursuit.

Allow Players to Reach Smaller Goals

The vast majority of games have a final goal that, when reached, wins the game for the player or players who reach it. However, many games also have lesser goals whose achievement helps pave the road for the final goal. This can range from the minor, like assembling a set of all three science symbols in 7 Wonders, to the major, like conquering a continent in Risk.

The trick is that these sub-goals are often as satisfying to complete as the major goal of the game. If a player loses, but they have these goals to point to as a quantifiable achievement, they feel like they were able to accomplish enough that playing the game had worth. So by including sub-goals or concrete steps toward victory, you can help players feel that they were able to prove themselves to a lesser extent.

The best part of using sub-goals to help losing players enjoy themselves is that it isn’t hard to knit them into your game in the first place. Sub-goals crop up naturally in most strategy game designs because it provides an exponentially ramping complexity and power that tends to be satisfying. So adding goals that give all players a sense of accomplishment is more about intention that actively going out of your way to include something in your game that doesn’t work there.

Muddle Scores

One of the big changes Small World implemented compared to its predecessor, Vinci, was replacing Vinci‘s double-sided victory point coins with single-sided ones that could be hidden from the other players once acquired. Part of the reason for doing this is that both games are territory control games, and keeping scores hidden stopped the table from picking on whoever was in the lead. But it also exemplified a method to keep losing players engaged: Muddling the scores enough that you don’t know exactly who’s winning.

Most of your players aren’t stupid, and have some general sense of how well they’re doing based on the game state. However, many players falling behind will willfully deceive themselves if the scores are muddled – if they don’t know for sure that they’re hopeless to win, then they’re willing to believe that their actions still have some use.

You don’t necessarily need to keep scores “hidden” in the traditional sense either: Another valid concept is to have one major strategy score points incrementally while another scores in the late- or endgame. Returning to 7 Wonders, players going for science and civic strategies will gradually accumulate a lot of point-scoring cards in front of them over the course of the game, but they’re not necessarily guaranteed victory despite this appearance of a massive lead – players who stockpile a lot of resources and gain military cards will suddenly catch up late in the game as cards that grant huge amounts of points to that strategy start to appear.

For games that end when a player reaches a certain amount of points, rather than after a certain number of rounds, including methods for a player to suddenly rocket ahead will help muddy how distant someone’s lead actually is. The soldier cards and longest road bonus in Catan allow a player to suddenly earn 3 or 4 points of the 10 they need to win in a single turn, meaning that another player with 6 points might think they’re competitive until the very last moment.

Wrap the Game Up Quickly After A Winner Becomes Clear

Some games create the unfortunate game state where the winner is obvious, but the players still have to play out a significant part of the game before they can wrap it up. This is particularly true in racing games – my only game of Camel Up ended with one camel rocketing far into the distance ahead of the others – but can be true in many other types of games, as well. Of course, making it so any player can win the game no matter how late it gets then eliminates the point of good strategy anywhere but before the very end of the game.

A better option is to wrap up the game right as the gap between players could become untenable. In a time-based game, that means cutting the game by maybe a round or two so people with a lead can’t reinforce that lead. (This is particularly true for engine-building games where your lead will build on itself most of the time.) In a score-based game, ensure that the winning score isn’t so high that a humongous lead isn’t even mathematically possible and then reinforce it by either not allowing a player to accelerate or letting them accelerate so quickly that you have only one or two “dead rounds” where the outcome is known.

If handled well, quickly wrapping up a game can make even the unthinkable plausible. One of the first things you learn as a game designer is that player elimination is about the worst thing you can include in a game, but the widely lauded Love Letter uses player elimination well by virtue of having extremely short rounds. Even though you have literally no chance of winning once you’re eliminated, it’ll only be a few turns before you can go back into the game.

Conclusion

As much as more serious game designers hate to admit, whether we won or lost a game still influences how we feel about it regardless of its objective design qualities. This is even more true for players, who don’t have (nor are they expected to have) the level of detachment that benefits designers. You can’t make a competitive game with no losers, but endeavoring to make the sting of losing as gentle as possible makes your game much more likely to have repeat players.

A Tale of Two Monopolies

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

Monopoly is one of the fundamental pillars of American board gaming. It’s what every non-hobbyist thinks about when they’re asked to name a board game, and its enduring popularity (along with the difficulty of copyrighting a board game) has inspired a slew of imitators. But why is this?

Furthermore, while there are many games that rival Monopoly in popularity, such as Scrabble or Clue, none of them have as esoteric a rule set. Monopoly has many rules that the average player gets wrong: Most casual players don’t auction off properties they don’t buy, collect a bunch of money when landing on Free Parking, and may buy hotels and houses without a monopoly. Why, if the game is so complex that people routinely get the rules wrong, does it remain so popular among groups that otherwise don’t play many board games?

In this article, I will argue that there are actually two kinds of Monopoly: the Monopoly as described in the physical rulebook and a kind of folk-Monopoly devised by families after a century of repeated play. By looking at the differences between these, we can not only answer these questions but find insight into how people interact with tabletop games as a whole.

It Was The Simplest of Games, It Was The Most Complex of Games

Here are the rules to “Monopoly-R” (R for Rulebook). It’s in here to illustrate the difference between the two games, because you probably know how to play Monopoly.

In Monopoly-R, players travel around the board, purchasing properties. When a player lands on an unclaimed property, they can purchase it or auction it off to the other players. Players can trade properties. When a player has a “Monopoly” of properties of the same color, they can build houses and hotels to increase their value. When a player lands on another player’s property, they pay that player in rent; the game ends when all players but one are bankrupt.

In contrast, here are the rules to “Monopoly-F” (F for paying respects Folk).

In Monopoly-F, players travel around the board, purchasing properties and building houses and hotels on them. Players can trade properties. When a player lands on another player’s property, they pay that player in rent. The game ends when everyone’s bored and wants to do something else.

Critics complain that the house rules in Monopoly-F make the game last forever, which is true if you’re playing to an actual conclusion. But I would wager that most games of Monopoly-F don’t “end” in a conventional sense, as it’s more of a social activity/parlor game than a traditional orthogame. Tag lasts forever too, but nobody complains about that.

It Is A Far, Far Better Game To Design…

So how is this important to us as designers? To find that out, let’s look at where the two Monopolies diverge.

All of the rules omitted from Monopoly-R happen to be rules that can’t be easily confirmed from looking at the board and cards. Only the rulebook says you have to auction properties off if you don’t buy them, for example, and since the game functions just fine without that rule, most people end up ignoring it for the much simpler system of “leave the property alone until someone else lands on it.”

As it turns out, this is a common thing that happens even in games targeted towards more enfranchised audiences. The issue is usually a rule that has no prompting from any of the components and no logical progression from any other rules. My game Happy Daggers requires players to move a marker up on the Dramatic Tension track at the end of every turn; a lot of time was spent crafting ways to remind players to do so instead of just moving on to the next turn and ignoring the track.

The common Free Parking house rule, where money lost is put in a central pool and whoever lands on Free Parking gets to keep it, is an interesting reverse of this: It explains a component that has no indication toward what it actually does. It’s unintuitive to assume that a space with a unique symbol and text is just “nothing”, so players came up with the best possible explanation for it.

The point of this is that Monopoly-F is an excellent road map towards designing games aimed toward a casual audience. By seeing which kind of rules are most frequently forgotten or misinterpreted, you can apply this to your own design and either get rid of fiddly rules that people won’t remember anyway or repackage them in a way that’s easier to remember.

I’m Going To Be Honest, I Haven’t Read A Tale Of Two Cities So I Ran Out Of Header Titles

Interestingly, there’s a different rule that, like the auction rule, has no indication it exists on any of the components, but remains mostly intact in Monopoly-F: Getting to take an extra turn if you roll doubles on the dice. This is because, compared to the bad judgments and hurt feelings of an auction among casual players, getting to roll dice and take more turns feels great.

The viscerality of a board game is important, especially for games aimed at more casual audiences. Peggy Hill was pretty close when she said that the best board game would be 100% spinning (visceral, tactile) and choosing (strategic). Monopoly-F, by excising the more complex and “talky” rules from Monopoly-R, focuses the game more around the fun, visceral parts of Monopoly: Rolling dice, moving your little pewter dog around the board, and grinning smugly as you present your card and get out of jail free.

(This isn’t to say that casual audiences are stupid, just that a fair amount of enfranchised players are willing to put up with worse components or tactility if the game’s fun. This is why Princes of Florence exists.)

Why Monopoly-F is more likely to have trading than auctioning is an interesting question; it could be that actions that give the players more autonomy are more fun than actions that take up a lot of mental processing power for not much gain. Definitely something to think about.

In any case, Monopoly-F‘s retention of the extra turns mechanic is an insight into what rules people love to interact with.

Conclusion: I Need To Read More Classic Literature

Feeling clever or intelligent is a fundamental building block of our self-worth. (I’m willing to believe it’s more of an American cultural thing, but I don’t know for sure.) This leads to a strong impulse to, when faced with something like Monopoly being wildly popular among casual board gamers, shrug and say “I guess everyone is stupid except for me.” This is insulting to other people and terrible for creative development.

When you see a phenomenon you don’t understand, don’t just throw up your hands and quit. Ask yourself, “Why is this?” and “What can I learn from this?” You’ll surprise yourself with how much you learn and how much you can apply to what you’re working on.