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.

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It's Popular Because It's Popular

Every entertainment industry has trends; whatever is popular will inevitably trigger the creation of similar entities. The Simpsons and Batman Begins, for instance, helped to change the landscape of their respective mediums by their sheer popularity. Once upon a time the idea that a cartoon would be inappropriate for children was unheard of, as were dark, gritty superhero movies. The board game industry is no different; trends pop up just as often as anywhere else. There they usually play out either as a common theme, or as a common mechanic. Common themes usually coincide with what is popular in other media, like tropes of horror, fantasy, or superheroes. Common mechanics are usually the result of other companies emulating a popular game.

I first noticed board game trends a few years ago, around the time that Munchkin Zombies was released and The Walking Dead first aired. There had been a growing cultural obsession with Zombies, and it seem to come to a head around then. The undead were everywhere, and it didn't take long for a glut of zombie themed games to appear. The zombie craze has since petered out, and while there are the occasional new title, the market is no longer as saturated with them; it has moved on to the next trend.

Around the same time, about when zombie games were starting to trail off, deck building games were on a huge upswing. Dominion had been released a few years prior, but around that time it had hit a remarkable level of popularity. It seemed that every game company was pitching their own 'deck building game... with a twist!' Unfortunately, most of these games ended up feeling basically the same. The 'twists' never really pushed these games to be all that different. Even Quarriors, one of the more unique takes on deck building, is essentially just Dominion with dice. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy a lot of these games, but they do feel somewhat derivative. It has taken time, but deck building is finally starting to move away from being the only core mechanic, which was what made these games all feel like Dominion, to being an interesting tool that designers can now integrate into other games.

I would be remiss if I did not touch on the recent craze of adult party games. They have been around for well over a decade, but it wasn't until recently that the genre became popular. One particularly offensive game exploded in popularity and spawned several copycat games aimed at being as shocking as possible. Personally, I'm sick of this style of game and look forward to them going away. My opinions aside, the genre is a good example of how the game industry latches on to a popular idea and produces as many games as possible to capitalize on it.

Once I started to notice the trendiness of game mechanics and themes with new releases, I started to look at older titles and saw it playing out in them as well. The most obvious example I noticed was shape of the classic Monopoly board. The spaces around the perimeter of the game board has appeared in countless titles over the years, like Careers, and stylistically they are clearly inspired by Monopoly. It is interesting to note that since the release of Settlers of Catan, the Monopoly-board design has given way to more games with hexagonal spaces modular boards.

Resource management, worker placement, and even cooperative games have all had their day in the sun. Themes come in bunches, as do mechanics. The market will always seek to make the most money, and looking at what is currently popular is a fine way to do that. (I'm expecting to see some variations on Five Tribes in the near future.) This isn't to say that this is a bad thing; it's just the nature of the industry. Still, it's always nice to see when something new comes onto the scene and mixes things up. And if you don't like the games that are coming out now, there is no shortage of older titles to play.

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