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)
1 comment:
This was very interesting. But I still like both Risk and Monopoly.
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