A Flawed Argument

See if you can spot the flaw in David Brooks' argument:

JIM LEHRER: Is that a moral -- that's a moral issue?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I do think it's a moral issue. I still think the McCaskill idea is just a terrible idea.

JIM LEHRER: Why? Why?

DAVID BROOKS: Because these are banks that depend on superstars. And there's not an ocean of superstars out there. And we may not like these people, but the fact is, to get a good CEO who can lead a company effectively, there are actually, if they can do it well, if they're Jack Welch or somebody, they're actually worth the money.

Now, that doesn't mean I'd buy into the hedge fund bonus structure, which was yielding $300 million bonuses. But, nevertheless, the reality is, to keep top talent from going overseas or wherever it would go, you've got to allow pay over $400,000 a year in New York City.

Did you see it?

Yeah, the people who managed to run the world's largest economy into the ground probably aren't worth the money. To borrow a phrase from Atrios, this has been simple answers to simple questions.

Bunch of morons.

Game Design Part 4: Ownership

So when we last addressed what makes a good game we were thinking about choices. I left on the thought that choices are in fact important and they were important because they give the player ownership of the game experience. Today we're going to address why that ownership is important and how it can lead to interesting design. And how playing off of this concept can make some counter intuitive but also good design.

First of all, ownership is most important conceptually in video games, but similar concepts can be translated to board games. The basic idea is that an experience is more enjoyable the more control or the more influence you feel you had over it. This is the basic concept behind something like say, The Sims. Instead of having a story dictated to you as in a novel, a movie, or a TV show, you're creating your own story based on what you tell your Sims to do. That's a pretty simple concept and The Sims executed it pretty damn well (thus the whole best selling game of all time thing).

Somewhat more complicated is games that try to tell a story. The best of those games give the player flexibility in what they can do so that they're not forced along a certain path. The best example of this sort of game would be the Ultima series (or at least 4, 5, 6, and 7). The basic idea in these games was that you were the "Avatar of Virtue" who was called on to deal with great threats to some kingdom. Generic fantasy stuff, really. What made the game interesting was that there really wasn't a set path or really restrictions on what you could do in your attempts to beat the game.

Let's give an example. In Ultima 6, a bunch of gargoyles have taken over the kingdom's eight shrines and are for some reason trying to kill you. You have two missions: 1) free the eight shrines and 2) figure out why they're trying to kill you and make it stop. (As a sidenote: in most games the answer would be to kill all the gargoyles. This game is more about the perils of racism though, so that is not the correct solution.) How you accomplish those goals is completely up to you. There are the "right" ways to do, where you virtuous and help the citizens and solve their problems for them. Or there is an...alternate way in which case you're more of a lawless anti-hero. Or somewhere in between. The point for our purposes is that you have near total control of that experience. Which leads to excellent stories. (If you're ever super bored or are familiar with the Ultima series, read through that series... it's kind of amazing)

Another method of creating ownership is to not tell a story at all. This is the "god game" where you have complete control over something. The Sims and Sim City are the classic examples of this kind of game. In these games it's always up to the player to create their own story, and they're far better games for it. The most recent example of an amazing god game is Dwarf Fortress. It is graphically unsophisticated, but it is an amazing design. The basic idea is this: you get 7 dwarves and your goal is to build them a new society. To do so you need to mine out living areas, build doors, furniture, weapons, traps, grow food, hunt other food, make leather, smelt metal,...

The game itself is fun. Hard to learn, but fun. But the real joy is telling stories about your Dwarf Fortress. In the gaming community, the most infamous such story is Boatmurdered. It's... special. To understand, you really have to read through that series (trust me, it gets really fantastic eventually). For a more personal experience, John recently delighted in telling me about the two dragons he captured. He wanted to have the dragons fight other capture animals to the death to entertain his dwarves. So the first time he let the dragon out of its cage to fight a goblin. The goblin charged up and took one swing with its club...and collapsed the dragon's lung, killing it shortly thereafter. John was extremely annoyed by his craptastic dragon. So he caught another one. This time, he carefully made sure the dragon had time to gather itself before it got in a fight. So he let it go into the arena and it breathed out a huge fireball, roasting everything inside to death. John was very excited by all this, but...

The fireball had caught the room on fire. And the dragon was stuck in the gladiator pit. So it caught on fire. And died. If you're the kind of person who finds frustration like that on some level hilarious, Dwarf Fortress is the game for you.

Personally, I prefer my god games without the painful learning curve, so I love me some Civilization. But the idea is the same: take a civilization from a small tribe just developing the idea of a city to the modern age, preferably taking over the world in the process. There's no story beyond the one you create for yourself. And that's far more enjoyable than just sitting back and watching a movie, for example.

Now, how does one create ownership in a board game? It's basically anything that can get players to tell a story about how they played your game. Sometimes it happens by luck, like the time John was playing Risk and successfully defended Japan with two guys against twenty by a series of ridiculous rolls. That was some 15 years ago and it still comes up at Christmas occasionally.

Other games make more of a point to do it. The game I mentioned at the end of the last post, Acquire, is one of these. So Acquire is a game essentially about hotel chains and investing in them. There's a 9 by 12 grid and players draw from a stack of tiles corresponding to each square on the grid. Each player plays a tile in clockwise fashion. If they play a tile adjacent to another tile (that isn't part of a chain already) they form one of seven hotel chains. After the first such play, each player can buy up to three shares in any hotel on the board. Playing tiles next to an existing hotel makes that chain bigger and more valuable. When two chains come in contact the bigger destroys the smaller, but the owners of shares of the smaller are paid off.

The important thing to remember in this game is that even if you found a hotel, it's not always in your best interest to focus your stock buying and expansion on that hotel. And this is where 1) the game creates ownership and 2) uses that idea of ownership in a clever way. Because the designer understood the psychology that most people who found a hotel would want to focus on it, but made that rarely the best option in terms of playing the game (diversifying and clever timing are the keys), he made an absolutely fantastic game.

So when designing a game, one of the things you really want to think about is this idea of ownership. Can the player create a story for him or herself? If so, you're doing something right. Even if it's a very prosaic story like "I got all the greens and yellows with hotels on them and made that corner of the board a nightmare for everyone else to get through" you've done something right. Or: "I took over South America and then the Colombians invaded Mexico and from there the United States and took over the world!" to name two games that I don't like very much but still get this right.

The absolute easiest way to create ownership? Give the player LOTS of decisions to make. In other words, give them choices!

Next time: thinking about choice and why game design tells fatalism to shove it.

The Media In Brief

So this is a very very stupid article.

So the President ordered Guantanamo closed. In response, some dead enders in the Pentagon and our intelligence agencies decided to release a report that "details" how 60some people who were once in Guantanamo have now returned to the battlefield. This is supposed to scare the American people into demanding Guantanamo stay open so we can torture there more or something. I don't understand the reasoning, personally but I'll point out why it is retarded.

Reason the first: the report is full of shit. As detailed here by Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall. As best he can tell, the Pentagon makes up a number and counts people involved in propaganda against the US as having "returned to the battlefield."

For those that did continue to fight against the US there are two large problems.

Reason the second: Why did we release them? Because we couldn't prosecute presumably. We couldn't prosecute because either we either didn't have any evidence at all or the only evidence we did have was coerced (read: tortured) from these prisoners. So we released them because of the asinine interrogation techniques of the Bush Administration. Brilliant!

Reason the third: let's assume you're an innocent Afghan/Iraqi/visiting Arab of some other variety as claimed by the guy the New York Times decided to feature to scare the hell out of us "deputy director of Al Qaeda in Yemen," Said Ali al-Shihri. Not that I necessarily believe him, but I'm creating a hypothetical so bear with me. Let's say you are. And then you're picked up by the US Army based on a tip from a neighbor who is pissed at you for some unrelated reason and the neighbor turns you in for $10,000. You are shipped thousands of miles from home to a prison and are tortured and held without contact with anyone else for years. When you are eventually released, are you not going to be pissed at America? Pissed enough to violently resist them? Guantanamo was a terrorist factory.

Reason the fourth: What the fuck does any of this have to do with closing Guantanamo or Obama anyway? The supposedly scary released prisoners were released by Bush political appointees and if they've returned to the battlefield while Guantanamo was still open. It's a stupid argument made by the stupid members of the media.

But why are they making this argument? Well, basically what Digby said. Namely, the Republican Party is manipulating the refs in an even more shameless fashion than usual. Basically they're trying to set up a way that Americans are scared so that if we're attacked again in the continental US (fuck you, the word "homeland") it can instantly and conveniently be blamed on Barack Obama and the pansy ass Democrats for closing Guantanamo and endangering everybody.

Because stopping war crimes is for cowards.

What Today Represented

(Be warned, this is like, 2000 words.)

My dad always said that "anyone smart enough to be President doesn't want the job and anyone who wants the job is obviously not smart enough to be President." I think that changed today.

Obviously I was excited for the inauguration today. But all day I had a feeling of something, but couldn't quite put my finger on what it was. My Facebook status was (is) that I'm speechless. There was something about today that was new. It was certainly liberating to be free of the hell that was the Bush years. No longer is our government run by the people who let New Orleans drown, who bungled the intelligence leading to Iraq, bungled even worse the occupation of Iraq, forgot about Afghanistan, let bin Laden escape, think a woman's right to choose is murder, think homosexuals are committing crimes against God just by being who they are, callously ignored health care costs spiraling out of control and millions of lost jobs, awarded contracts to companies they used to own who were more interested in making a buck than having wiring good enough to not kill our soldiers while they showered, spied on their own citizens in their paranoid fear, manipulated public opinion by issuing fake terror alerts, and worst of all sank the ideal of America.

There is something about the idea of what we stand for. We're not always paragons of virtue. We've obviously done our fair share of awful things, starting with the original sin that was discussed so much today. But the idea of "all men are created equal" that is at our core. The idea that the only way to end war is to prosecute those who begin them.

In many ways, America's finest hours came in the years after the surrender of Germany and Japan. We funded the reconstruction of Europe, desegregated our armed forces, educated our veterans, greatly expanded our middle class, became the most prosperous nation on earth. But mostly, we helped establish the UN and ours was the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg. There we established the idea that wars are crimes against humanity, and those that begin them need to be held accountable. And those that participate in more obvious crimes against humanity also need to be held accountable. Genocide, the awful experiments of Mengele, forced emigration, all of these things were rightly condemned and we said never again. I think at the time, we meant it. Obviously in recent times we have failed in Rwanda and Darfur. We helped stop it in Kosovo.

But of course over the last eight years, it became so much worse than that. We became the nation that we once prosecuted the leaders of. Obviously our crimes did not descend to the horrors of the Holocaust. But they were our crimes. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are our crimes. Our war crimes. In the coming months and years, we're going to have to come to grips with that. We're going to rectify that situation. But that's not what I want to talk about (though I may write a full post on torture alone and why the Obama administration MUST prosecute Bush, Cheney, et al).

So goodbye to all that, to quote Andrew Sullivan. But what else did today represent? Well, for some (including myself) it represented the end of the political battles of the 60s. Whatever else you think about Obama (though if you're reading this, you're probably a fan), he did not campaign based on identity politics. It wasn't race or religion or sexual orientation that he focused on, but rather what was unifying. It wasn't re-fighting the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement. It wasn't interested in the LBJ-Reagan argument about "big government" and "small government" but rather in good government. So I think today we said goodbye to the politics of the baby boomer generation that have so dominated our public life for forty years.

We also said goodbye to one more barrier in the long struggle against racism. Those who say that racism is over are obviously naive at best or mendacious at worst. But the number of times I heard and read from African Americans the thought that either they wished their parents had made it to see this or that now they really could tell their children that they could be anything they wanted when they grew up means that this obviously was a great step forward for us.

We said goodbye to a lot today. What, exactly, did we say hello to? What did today really represent? Well, there's the obvious. We said hello to a young, dynamic President and his brilliant (and yeah, beautiful) wife. And their absolutely adorable children.

We said hello to a Democratic working majority. I think I know what that means, but I'm not entirely sure yet. I think it means we'll get a health care bill passed. I think it means we'll get meaningful infrastructure spending for the first time since Eisenhower. I think it means we'll get some real work towards alternative energy. I don't think it means we'll get a Congress that truly exerts its authority, which it desperately needs to do.

But mostly, I think, we said hello to the chance to transform the country. It's certainly not a sure thing. A lot depends on the performance of President Obama. A lot depends on Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi having grown a spine with the landslide.

But just the chance is a new feeling. This country hasn't seen a force for liberal transformation in the oval office in 56 years. It hasn't seen a good President of any kind in 48 years. We've barely seen any truly monumental legislation in 44 years.

Maybe it was the assassinations of the '60s. Maybe it was Watergate. Maybe it was the demonization of government by Reagan. Maybe it was the routine corruption and incompetence of the last eight years. But at some point, this country lost faith in the idea that government can do good, and people who want to serve in government can be good people.

For me personally, I had no real interest in politics for the first 16 years of my life. I never really thought about it. I had vague feelings about Clinton. I never really liked him, but it wasn't a policy thing. He just seemed transparently fake to me. I wasn't really paying attention. I watched The Daily Show, got a good amount of its jokes, watched the SNL political debates in 2000, and the election coverage that night. Vaguely paid attention to the beginnings of the Bush Administration. The government was an abstraction and like my dad, not one I thought was good for much.

Obviously this is cliche, but 9/11 was the event that triggered my interest. I felt a need to understand what had happened and why. What our response was and why. And what we could do to stop such things in the future. But I wasn't quite as smart as I thought I was and supported some things that were wrong. Like the Iraq War. I said at the time I think that "if such a thing as the right war is possible, I think this is the right war for the wrong reason (WMDs)." I bought into Tom Friedman's grand theory of Iraqi democracy dominoes. It was dumb in retrospect. I knew the domino theory of communism wasn't right, I had studied history, but the appeal of democracy and the ideal of American style freedom should be more appealing...

Alas, no, I think I was wrong. So I followed the 2004 primary closely in the hopes that someone on the Democratic side would step up and rid us of George W. Bush and his neo-con friends. I wanted someone smarter than me. Specifically, someone who had been smart enough to oppose the war. I preferred Gov. Dean and was disappointed when Sen. Kerry won the nomination. I supported him anyway but somewhat lukewarmly. I cast my vote against Bush, was mystified when he pulled off the victory and continued to think politicians sucked (though I found myself fascinated enough with politics to make it my second major).

Of course, during that campaign, I watched a state Senator from Illinois on Youtube. He was running for the US Senate and got to give a speech at the convention. Which as we all now know, was a hell of a speech. It spoke about the need for unity and the end to the false divisions of red states and blue states, Democrats and Republicans. It spoke of patriotism in ways other than blind jingoism. I was excited. I did some research and it turned out that this guy had also opposed the Iraq War from the start, and what was more, gave another great speech about that, where he predicted the problems that plague us to this day.

I kept him in mind. He was my favorite for this year two days after the 2004 election. Meanwhile I watched in horror as Iraq deteriorated, the Abu Ghraib and eventually Guantanamo scandals, I watched a great American city drown, I watched North Korea test a nuclear weapon, and our justice system be perverted by Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling. I was fed up with politics and politicians. I despaired that we would never, really could never, have a good government again.

I thought Hillary would win the Democratic nomination. I thought Huckabee or Rudy would win the Republican nomination and knew that the best case (John McCain) wasn't really a best case at all, despite my previous support of the man. Those choices didn't appeal to me. I didn't think a Clinton administration could or would fundamentally alter the way our nation's politics worked. It would be the Clinton administration part two, though perhaps a little more liberal. Obviously better than the Bush years, but not a fundamental change.

So I'm sitting at this very computer in early January of last year. Pretty sure I was playing Civilization with my dad. But I had the Iowa Secretary of State office's website up and was alt-tabbing out of the game to check it out during every one of his turns. Slowly Obama started to climb into the lead, then he pulled away...

His Iowa victory speech was what really pulled me in. I was, at that point, emotionally invested. The New Hampshire speech in defeat a few nights later was what really pulled me in. But this was so obviously a good guy whose policies were close enough to mine that it made sense to support him, but more importantly his politics tried to not demonize the opposition and appeal to the better angels of our natures. For the first time, I thought someone I could respect was running for President. I thought government could be good again.

And that is what today was really about. The sentiment I heard over and over again was the idea that we could be proud of our government. America did something to be really proud of. We didn't just overcome another brick in the wall slavery built for us. We overcame at least a little bit our cynicism, our doubt, our hopelessness that things can get better. We were, to borrow the phrase of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (previously borrowed by our President), audacious enough to hope.

Fundamentally, today represented the one truly American character trait: endless optimism that the world can and will be a better place. That's really what the American Dream is about. The world my children live in will be a better world than the one I did. Former President Bush nearly killed that dream in every possible way, President Obama represents to me the potential to restore it.

As for my Dad, to the best of my knowledge he never voted in a Presidential election. He voted for Obama.

Holy Crap!

We're inaugurating a black guy as President today!

Eeeeee

Our President-elect

Question: To what extent is the promotion of freedom or democracy something that you think should be part of the foreign policy and, if it is a part, how would you do it differently than it has been done in the past eight years?

President-elect Obama: Well, I think it needs to be at a central part of our foreign policy. It is who we are. It is one of our best exports, if it is not exported simply down the barrel of a gun.

And one of the mistakes, I think, [that] has been made over the last eight years, and, by the way, I'm not somebody who discounts the sincerity and worthiness of President Bush's concerns about democracy and human rights, and I think a lot of the ways that he spoke about it were very eloquent, but I think the mistake that was made is drawing an equivalence between democracy and elections.
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Elections aren't democracy, as we understand it. They are one facet of a liberal order, as we understand it. And so in a lot of countries, you know, the first question is, if you go back to Roosevelt's four freedoms, the first question is freedom from want and freedom from fear.

If people aren't secure, if people are starving, then elections may or may not address those issues, but they are not a perfect overlay.

And, you know, issues like arbitrary arrest or corruption may or may not be addressed by an election. So I think what we need to be thinking about is, in various countries, and I use my father's home country of Kenya as an example, what we should be spending more time thinking about is, how can we provide them tools so that somebody doesn't get stopped on the street by a police officer and shaken down, or how do we create a system in which you don't have to pay a large bribe in order to get a job or get a phone installed?

And if we ignore those things, then oftentimes an election can just backfire or at least won't deliver for the people the kinds of -- it may raise expectations but not deliver what they're looking for. And, you know, so we will be working with -- you know, one of the things that I have pledged to do in foreign policy is to ramp up our State Department and restore some balance between the civilian and the military side, to -- and right now we have already begun conducting a thorough review of our various aid programs, our democracy programs, how do these all fit together and how do we view it through a lens that it is actually delivering a better life for people on the ground and less obsessed with form, more concerned with substance.

Links!

Andrew Sullivan on what he thinks Obama represents.

Frank Rich reflects on the inaugural and race relations.

Paul Krugman writes a letter advocating policy to Obama.

Glenn Greenwald explains how torture is a felony and we need to prosecute.

Lighter note: Ezra Klein says its time to update the Presidential Records Act.

Brian Cook panics.

Gaaaaaaaaaah

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

Tom Friedman, America's most famous and influential foreign policy thinker.

Finally: Game Design, Part 3: Choices

Between coming down with pneumonia, post-election internets avoidance, actually seeing real human beings during the holidays and what not, I am a bad blogger. But today we're finally going to get back to the whole idea of game design and what makes a good game. Be warned, I am verbose today.

The Luck/Choice Dilemma

So every game has two essential elements: luck and choice. There are a few games of pure choice (Go, Chess, things of that nature) and games of pure luck (if you can consider something like the slot machine a "game," I suppose Candyland would be a good example otherwise). So your goal as a designer is to find somewhere on this axis that entertains people. Obviously games like Chess are highly popular, but more as a vocation or a specialty than a real hobby, which is where we're aiming as game designers. You want to make something that is both accessible and fun.

So we need some elements of chance (generally, a deck of cards or some dice). But if we rely too heavily on chance we get games that aren't actually very good. Sadly, these same games are frequently highly popular, but we can chock that one up to people being stupid. Examples of this type of game are Risk and Monopoly.

What Went Wrong With the Classics?

Risk and Monopoly have two fundamental problems that make me say they are fundamentally flawed designs. First: the outcome is at least 75% about die rolls especially in the early game. Usually someone can create a dominant position and then the mid and late games is that person grinding out a victory or two people waiting for one of them to outroll the other. The outcome isn't decided based on skill, or alternately phrased, because of the player's choices. Because of this, the player feels like fate is handling the outcome and thus they have no ownership over how they played. I'll discuss the idea of ownership in more detail at a later date, but fundamentally I think games are better when we become invested in the outcome. I'll give one example of that later on in this post. Second flaw: both games have elimination mechanics. Elimination mechanics are when a player is eliminated from a game before it is over. Obviously they're not making choices anymore and they're especially not having fun. Seeing as how our goal as designers is to let the players have fun, this is not ideal.

The second flaw is easy enough to work around as a designer. We just don't have any elimination mechanics and everyone plays the game until it ends.

The first flaw, however, is the fundamental design problem in any game. How do we make the choices of the player matter enough that they feel ownership over how they played the game without making the game into something like Chess where it takes an immense amount of study to play well? There obviously needs to be some luck involved.

How Has It Been Fixed?

So that's our problem. How have games handled it? A couple of ways.


First of all, there are games that handle the luck/choice axis by just being immensely silly. For example: Apples to Apples. So Apples to Apples is all about knowing your fellow players, but it's also a lot about how they're feeling at that particular moment. If you've never played, the basic concept is this. Each player has 5 cards that are some noun and the acting player draws an adjective. Each non-acting player picks one of their nouns and plays it face down. The acting player collects all of them, mixes them up, and picks which of the nouns s/he feels most suits that adjective. It quickly descends into abject silliness where people often play joke nouns and end up winning the round. For example, at Christmas I won a round where the adjective was "friendly" by playing Michael Jackson, figuring he was a little too friendly. In Apples to Apples, there is some choice, but "winning" is essentially all about luck and which cards come up when. Games that are silly are also less focused on winning, which makes things less frustrating when you don't. Other games in this category that people who know me have played would include Chez Geek (Greek/Grunt) or Munchkin.

So that's one method, that in particular is good for party/social type games. Another method involves any kind of bidding or betting mechanic. Now it's less about what the cards are, but how you spend your money. The obvious example of this kind of game is poker. The famous line is "Don't play the cards, play the cardplayer" (or variants of that) and it is mostly true. It limits, but does not eliminate the amount of luck that goes into the game and generally sorts out the best players over the long haul. This kind of thing also creates ownership except in cases of truly horrendous beats. As players can question their choices instead of merely questioning what cards came up or how the dice fell. The other version of this is games that are all about bidding. High Bid, for example is about collecting various pieces of art and trying to form a set (all the coins for example) or sets worth $5000. Again, all that happens is a random card is drawn off the pile and someone gets it, but because we've added a bidding or betting mechanic, players have significantly more control over the game.

Other games merely add a choice to the card drawing. The obvious example here is Rummy, where you either draw from the deck or any number from the discard pile. There is still a significant amount of luck, but by giving players a choice, you provide more flexibility and more consistency of the best player winning. I rarely beat my Grandma at Rummy, because she uses the discard pile choice better than I do.

Even more games give you ways to mitigate your luck. The obvious example to me because I'm a dork is Magic: the Gathering. So Magic involves collectible cards that do various things which is written on said cards. But when you're playing, you draw a card every turn and try to play it. So why is it so popular? Because while you're building your deck, you can add as many ways to make luck as uninfluential as possible in your games. You can put multiple copies of a card into your deck, for example. So that if you find yourself needing just that card to win, you have a 4/40 (you're still limited to four copies, because some early cards were too good if you put in too many) chance instead of a 1/40 chance. Alternately, you can add cards that let you draw more cards each turn. The math isn't quite as simplistic, but let's just say that the obvious fact that by drawing 3 cards you're more likely to find the one you need than if you draw two is in fact obvious, and a fact. So Magic lets you mitigate your luck through deck design. This is obviously a hugely successful way to do things, based on how that brand has performed for the last nearly two decades (eek!).

What About Board Games, You Board Game Dork?

But what about for your classic style board games. What about the Monopoly or Risk style games? How do we remove enough luck for them to be fun for game snobs like me, not make it Chess, and keep things accessible enough for players who don't consider themselves gamers but do enjoy the occasional game? Well, again, there are a variety of ways. But I'll talk about my two favorite board games and what they do right.


First, is Power Grid. Power Grid is about building a power grid (amazing, that!) to supply a bunch of cities with electricity. There are a couple important mechanics here that make the luck factor significantly smaller. First: turn order is not consistent. Whoever is currently leading gets the worst position for all future actions. This both keeps game close and makes a lot more choices for players. For example, jumping out to an early lead will make it so you're acting last in the mid game and that can absolutely destroy your strategy. So that's one interesting way to do things. Second: There are bidding mechanics, which work effectively as previously explained. Third: There are a variety of things to do every turn. In Power Grid, you have to buy new power plants, buy resources to power those plants, and lay down new power lines. The more things you have to do, the more choices you have to make, and the more you feel like you have control over how you've played your game. A lot of German games especially have this aspect to it. Sometimes it's very obvious where they give you "action points" and those let you do a variety of activities with you having to make a choice each round. Combined with the general non-presence of luck in Power Grid (you draw from a stack of power plant cards, but get to pick which of four you want to bid on with another four in a queue so you know what is coming) these choices on the parts of the designers give the players a ton of choices and the game is almost entirely in your control. Making it significantly more fun.


Then of course, there is Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is one of the very best games ever made for any medium. It is in fact, my second favorite game ever made (behind X-COM). I mentioned both of these way back when in the second post on game design, but allow me to explain. There are exactly two elements of Puerto Rico that have anything vaguely related to luck. And even then, each player always has a choice. Puerto Rico is all about giving the players as many choices as possible. Each round, each player will select a role (from eight possible: Settler, Builder, Trader, Captain, Mayor, Craftsman, or two Prospectors). Everyone gets to do that role, but the player who chooses it gets an added bonus. So when play comes to you during a round you have several things to think about and several choices (N + 3 - X) where N is the number of players and X is the number of players who have selected a role before you this round). What to think about is this: What do I need to do? What do other people need to do? If the answer to that question is the same, is the bonus from actually taking the role worth doing so? When you answer those three questions you select a role.

Now, within each role there are (guess!) more choices! The Settler, for example, you have to pick between the available field types (the idea of the game is that you're running a European island colony in the Caribbean, growing corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee). This is one area where there is some luck, in that the available fields are determined by flipping over the number of players plus one fields from a stack. It's a card drawing mechanic, basically. But because there are always one more field than players, there is nearly always a choice even for the last player. And choices are good! So with that, every player ends up making at least 1 + (# of players) choices every round. That's the main reason why I love Puerto Rico, the game is entirely about how you play and not about what cards are drawn or how dice are rolled.

Conclusions

Choices create ownership. And the key to having fun while playing a game is ownership. Next time (whenever I get around to it): we'll explain why ownership of a game experience is so important which will explain why choices are important. We'll also point out a couple games where ownership will perhaps increase your fun, but decrease your chance of winning because of nasty, crafty game designers. Damn you, Acquire and Imperial, damn you! (Though I love Acquire, actually)