A Quick Change of Plans

Last week I got sick. I lost my voice at the end of my work week, and it came back just before my next shift. It was a lovely weekend of miming and being reduced to a whisper. Unfortunately, with my new work schedule, plus getting ill, my post last week went up late. I'm still trying to get used to this new schedule, so the post is also late. This was not my plan when I started this blog.

I've certainly played many games where my initial plan was ruined. Sometimes it was just the luck of the dice, while sometimes it was my opponents shutting me down. Regardless of how it happened, the question always became whether or not I could change strategies in time to catch up. I usually couldn't.

It's not an easy thing to do, especially when my strategy early on does well. Getting an early lead is great, but often that rush style needs to be followed up with preparations for a longer game, just in case the quick win falls flat. Otherwise, a loss is all but guaranteed. Games of Magic: the Gathering are particularly indicative of this, where rush strategies are often compared to a flip of a coin: either those decks win early, or they lose horribly. There is no middle ground, and a good aggro deck doesn't usually have the tools required to survive a late game; it's all-in, and every card is there for the quick win. If their opponent survives to find their an answer, the rush deck has basically lost.

I've certainly struggled with trying to change strategies in other games, too. In games like Eclipse, Planet Steam, and a lot of resource management games, I so often focus on one strategy, and when it falters I don't usually know what to do. I've spent too many resources, committed too heavily on a particular plan, and, like the rush deck, I no longer have the ability to do anything different. Collecting a diversity of resources and leaving yourself open to that change in tactics is clearly the way to go in these longer games; I just have a bad habit of tunnelling in one plan. I will aggressively collect one resource, which will become devalued as the game goes on. My economic bubble will burst, and then what can I do?

This isn't really a problem with these games, though. It's just my approach to them that is the problem. I do have a lot of fun gobbling up sheep, or minerals, or water, or whatever resource I have (over)valued in a game, but I know from experience that unless I can trade these resources away for moderate value, it will end badly. Some games leave this option very open; Settlers of Catan has its ports, Ad Astra has cheap trading with the bank, and Lords of Waterdeep have quests for each resource. Each of these games makes it easy to adapt and change your strategies by making each resource roughly of equal value, and somewhat interchangeable, throughout the game.

Meanwhile, games like Puerto Rico and, to a lesser extent, City necessitate specific resources at specific times in the game, and if you find yourself unable to get the resources in the correct order, you will struggle. In games where resources are best collected in a certain order each time you play, I have to question granting access to these resources to players randomly throughout the game, especially if there is no way to swap what you have for what you need.

At least for the player who built the aggro Magic deck he chose what cards to include. Without any sort of agency over what resources you can collect, or at least some ability to get what you need when you need it, you can be shoehorned into a bad strategy for the whole game. Some variation is welcome in these games, making resources occasionally harder to get early on helps to prevent a game from getting stale. But this is best when balanced with some way to adapt strategies and to change plans on the fly.

13/13

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

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.

13/13

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