Meeting Expectations

This week I got to help play test Keet, my contribution to The Red Dragon Inn. (I wrote a bit about how I came up with his design here and here.) During testing, something came up that I hadn't considered before: the importance of players' expectations. There are a couple of cards for Keet that do things that haven't been done in the game before, and while the rules can be written to make it clear what they do, for them to make it to print they will have to work in a way that players will expect without having to look up the rules.

Every player, no matter their experience, has expectations of how a game will work. As soon as you start to describe a new game to someone you can see them wrapping their head around what you're saying. Experienced gamers will often start comparing mechanics to games they've already played. I know I'm particularly bad for this habit, and I also know I'm not the only one who does it.

When given new information, most people try to liken it to what is familiar to them. So, when learning a new game, it's a lot easier and faster to describe its mechanics as being similar to other titles: “You use your resources to build things, like in Settlers of Catan,” or “If you don't complete your goal you lose points, like in Ticket to Ride,” and so on. Games can frequently be described as a mash-up of existing mechanics; the industry builds on itself as it grows. Even when a game does something new it will often be described as being similar to something else. I've seen this with Five Tribes: its core game mechanic, dubbed 'worker displacement', has been described as a combination of the 'worker placement' mechanic seen in many titles, as well as the bowl-filling of Mancala. The mechanic is new, but it can be described easily by highlighting its similarities to what has been done in the past. Personally, when learning Five Tribes I compared it to the action circle in Trajan.

The problem is that when you are working on a game to be published, you can't always describe it in terms of other games. Reviewers and play groups can, but a publisher can't. Not only does it make a game look derivative, but it narrows its audience by requiring people to have played the games used in the comparisons. So how do you make something original, and still make it easy to understand? Expectations are there, even from people who have never played another game before, so how do you make the mechanics clear to everyone?

One option to meet player expectations with new mechanics without using comparisons to other games is by having a strong theme. By applying a clear theme to your mechanic to can make something that would otherwise be odd to players can seem familiar and far more intuitive. You want a value to decrease over time? Perhaps it is a falling object, and your value is its altitude. You want to hide information until players perform a specific task? The players must do research and 'learn' what is hidden. Keeping the theme in mind can make mechanics resonate much better with players.

Games that are designed around a theme allow oddball mechanics to be included, and if the theme is strong enough those strange mechanics can be what makes the game truly shine. A game that starts with solid rules can play very nicely, but without a suitable theme, even the cleanest mechanics can seem confusing; if a player cannot make connections to anything familiar, then a common avenue of comprehension will be blocked, making it difficult to understand what is going on and to remember what to do. New games that are too abstract have trouble finding an audience, and need a way to stand out to be successful. Games with loose mechanics but a strong theme, like Munchkin, find an audience quickly and thrive. Still, even a light theme, if it is especially fitting, can be enough to garner clarity.

13/13

Getting it Wrong

This past week I played a couple of games I had never played before: Five Tribes and The Ancient World. We read the rules, and we thought we understood everything, so we got started. There was just one problem: How were we supposed to score points, exactly?

In Five Tribes one of the ways to score points is by collecting resource cards in suits. We took this to mean several cards of the same type, so getting a lot of Grains was advantageous, but diversifying would not be as good. While playing, I started to notice small diamonds on the cards, and surmised that they must indicate how frequently you would see a given type of card. Gold, then, would only have two cards, while Grains would have several more. This didn't make sense, though. If that were the case, Gold could never yield as many points as Grains. Thematically, it was backwards.

I thought about it more and re-read the rulebook. After much head-scratching and discussion, my opponent and I determined that a suit in Five Tribes must actually be a collection of DIFFERENT card types: the opposite of the way we were playing. We discovered our mistake during final scoring, so we just calculated things the way it should have been.

A few days later, a group of us learned The Ancient World. Here again we were set collecting. Upon an initial read-through we determined that the scoring was similar to how Five Tribes was supposed to work: collect as many different colours of banners as possible. The scoring track was clearly marked on each player board, with points for sets ranging from one to six banners. We started playing, and all was going well until the second half of the game. By this time we had all begun to wonder what the sixth banner colour was, since we were all diligently acquiring as many different colours as we could, and none of us had gotten more than five different ones.

We had once again made a mistake. There was no sixth colour; we were supposed to be collecting banners of the SAME colour, and scoring simply capped at six banners per set. We still had a quarter of the game left to go before the end of the game, though, so we had to come to a decision: would we finish the game with the proper scoring, or would we finish with the scoring method we thought was correct at the beginning? We had a short discussion, and the table voted to use the proper rules, effectively changing the game for the second half.

We were lucky, all things considered; getting a scoring method wrong is far easier to correct than game play related mechanics. While it may have a larger impact on who wins, it has little effect on the flow of the game itself. I've certainly goofed with mechanics as well, whether with a new game or with a game that I haven't played for a long time. Almost always, the group chooses to finish the current round before making the necessary changes. If it's still early, and corrections to the board state can easily be made, all the better; doing these corrections is usually preferable to starting all over again. But this is always more complicated than changing the scoring method. The only problems I see with changing how to score is with competitive players. For them, it is likely better to finish the game with the scoring method agreed upon at the beginning; it will seem more fair.

These misinterpretations just remind me of the importance of good examples; even the best rules can be made clearer with them. Still, both these games were a lot of fun; I look forward to playing them again. Properly this time.

13/13