Select Page

While sitting at a table watching Nanocon attendees playtest a nearly finished board game it occurred to me that all of the players seemed to be in an unverbalized conspiracy to not win. They weren’t deliberately trying to prolong the game, but neither had any of them had figured out any of the good routes to the vicinity of victory. And none of them seemed to care that they hadn’t. They were having fun working the moving parts, doing the rituals. And fun’s the goal, right? Or were they doing it wrong? And if they were doing it wrong, was that the design’s fault, or theirs?

So this question asserted itself in my mind:

To what extent should a game’s design promote its own successful play?

To put the question another way, should the design of a game’s components, the resources provided to each player, the turn structure, the layout of the board… should these things tend to actively encourage winning play? Once you learn the gameplay, should the game’s nature encourage you to win it? Should you find yourself winning almost in spite of yourself?

On one hand, effortless victory (or, if not “effortless,” then perhaps, “low-friction”) makes you feel awesome. It is fun. A power tool or a piece of software or a car should absolutely promote its own successful use.

On the other hand, success without challenge is hollow. Its entertainment value quickly evaporates.

The best answer to the general question is probably that there’s a broad span of the continuum between “A game must make its successful play obvious” and “A game must disguise its successful play” that is—for lack of a better word—correct. It is probably also true that different parts of that span of correctness are more correct than others for games of particular types and genres.

(It feels like we’re back to the concept of flow in games that I explored a little bit in my Drop7 post. The experience must be neither too easy nor too challenging, because at either extreme, it’s too easy to be jarred out of the experience.)

The existence and role of opponents in board games adds an interesting dimension to the question, because opponents provide challenges—and self-adapting challenges, to boot—outside the “tools” of gameplay that the physical artifact and its rule systems provide.

Allowing for opponents, I want to suggest that a game’s design, broadly including both its rules and componentry, should absolutely encourage its own successful gameplay, while relying on the other players to provide nearly all of the obstacles to actually winning.

Other than its unfortunate graphic design and packaging (for which I bear the responsibity, I’m sad to say), Atlas Games’s Letter Head is a great example of a game that practically plays itself. The distribution of letter cards in its deck are such that your hand of cards essentially makes English words by itself. Letter Head will ruin you for Scrabble, no joke.

Settlers of Catan is another game that makes you feel successful simply manipulating the pieces according to the rules, riding along on the ebb and flow of die rolls from turn to turn. It’s only in your interactions with the other players that victory really becomes challenging.

The Eurogame aesthetic tends to fall down against this yardstick, because games in that style often omit head-to-head competition. When the players compete only in parallel, in their own silos, racing independently toward a goal measured abstractly in victory points, it becomes very easy—as with the Nanocon prototype*—to fall, as a player, into recursive component manipulation rather than a competition for victory with the other players. (Settlers, of course, keeps throwing you back at the other players both in the competition to make good trades and the competition to beat the other players to the better building sites.)

What do you think? What other games either promote or foil their own successful play? And what about CCGs?

And also, happy new year, everyone. Thanks for a great 2009.


*The Nanocon Prototype, coming soon from Robert Ludlum.