A Bad Start

Have you ever played a game where it felt like you had no chance of winning? Have you ever played one that gave you that feeling on the first turn? I have, and it's not fun.

Games like Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan heavily punish players for bad choices or unlucky draws at the beginning of the game. In Puerto Rico, getting saddled with an unfavourable patch of farmland on the first turn will set you so far back that you may as well stop playing. In Settlers of Catan, if you place your settlements on the wrong numbers during setup you'll spend the entire game watching everyone else surge ahead while you wait.

These games are praised so highly, and yet they seem so unforgiving. Now, I will grant you that for years I enjoyed playing Settlers of Catan regularly, and I will still play it every now and again. However, the few times that I have played Puerto Rico, I had a miserable time. I have to wonder why I can find enjoyment in one of these games when they both can be such a punishing experience. It may be that my personal history with Settlers of Catan has granted my a bias: I learned how to play Settlers of Catan with my friends in high school, and I have good memories of playing it with them. Though my bias may be more shallow: I typically did well in games of Settlers of Catan, so I was infrequently the player lagging behind waiting for the dice to roll in my favour. Still, I feel that my ability to enjoy Settlers of Catan and not Puerto Rico may have more to do with the way the games play.

In an essay called “Stealing the Fun” Dave Howell suggests that “a game is not fun unless a player believes they have some reasonable chance to win until the moment the game ends” (p.84, The Kobold's Guide to Board Game Design. Open Design, 2011. ed. Mike Selinker). He notes that it is the mere belief that is important, not the probability. It can be extremely unlikely that the player in last place will win, but if that player *believes* it can reasonably happen, it is enough for them to have fun.

My experience would suggest that Howell is on to something; when I have been woefully behind in a game like Settlers of Catan, I know that the dice could eventually roll in my favour, and if it happens enough I could recover from a bad start. I've had the same experience with other dice-based games, like Blood Bowl and Warhammer. I have seen enough 1s rolled in a row (and enough 6s) to know that these statistical outliers do happen. If all I need to get back into a game is for someone to roll a 12 three turns in a row, I can hold on hope until the dice stop moving. It's very unlikely, buy it is reasonable!

Puerto Rico doesn't have that random element, though. The only randomness is drawing farm tiles to determine what resources you can collect, and it's that precise element that can make or break a game so early. Unlike Settlers of Catan, where each turn the game introduces a random element, the overall deterministic nature of Puerto Rico removes that 'reasonable chance' that Howell mentioned. It arguably makes the game more strategic, but I just find it unpleasant. Don't get me wrong, I like games with heavy strategy that require careful planning and forethought, but I like them best when you can make a mistake and still find a way to dig yourself out of the hole you have made for yourself. A single error early on should not completely ruin your chances at victory in any game.

My girlfriend dislikes strategy games, and it seems it is for this same reason; she does not feel that she ever has a chance at winning. I think she's wrong (she has the ability to win!), but it's this belief that keeps her from enjoying those games. It is important to note that actually winning doesn't factor in here; feeling that you can win is enough to enjoy the game. Actually winning is just a bonus.

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