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.
This is, to some extent, the danger that rides at the edge of Dominion. The player always has access to the straight-cash strategy (Just buy more coins, and eventually just buy victory cards, ignoring the action cards entirely) which is boring but, depending on the configuration of cards and the direction of play, might be a much more powerful strategy.
We haven’t personally tested this too much, primarily because the action cards are just more fun, so no one worries too much about pure optimization. But I always worry about that becoming an issue someday, and when that happens, the big question will be how effective that strategy really is. It’s definitely better than _some_ action card spreads, but is it better than most?
-Rob D.
I want to play Jason Bourne in The Nanocon Prototype.
There are certainly games that don’t do enough of making it clear what the heck you’re supposed to do. Taj Mahal and Power Grid come to mind as games in which you find yourself on turn 4 of your first game and realize you are totally and absolutely screwed. While this is a nice light-bulb moment for game 2, it completely sours the novice on the idea of playing said game 2.
What I’m proposing here is that maybe the winning strategy should not have Looney Tunes signs pointing towards it, but for gods’ sake, don’t have failure right there by the edge of the road like a pit in Robo Rally. I hate Robo Rally.
Great post!
I wonder if a game can’t do both — make victory conditions clear, without making the *route* to those conditions clear. I want to know exactly what I’m heading for, but I’m okay if the road’s foggy.
This is true in card games. Everyone knows the victory conditions, but the actual path to victory is never exactly clear.
Ideally, a game should present a clear path to victory, but that path need not be the BEST one.
Dominion, with its obvious “take these cards to get VP” strategy, is a good example. It’s a sound strategy. It might even win you the game if the other players aren’t paying attention – but it probably won’t win every game.
In CCGs, trait help this function in deck-bulding. If I have cards that give my Orcs +10 Awesome, and I have a lot of Orc cards… It’s a clear path to a good deck. Not the BEST deck, probably, but it’s a place to start.
Thinking about it, “a place to start” is the key to what I’m rambling about. A game should give you enough guidance to let you start winning without too much work, but let you discover for yourself the strategies to actually winning.
Darrell’s got the right idea: signposts to victory and how to play built into the game for newcomers, without making it a tedious exercise in following algorithms for experienced players is the happy medium for a board game.
Chuck: RoboRally is one of my favorite games, but it really divides people. My theory is that the division is based on facility for spacial awareness. Those more disposed to spacial awareness can find flow in the planning. Those less disposed not only can’t get into the groove, but they’re mercilessly punished for it each and every turn. (Which is all aside the point here, I suppose.)
Brent: I don’t know that clarity in victory conditions is sufficient. Imagine a game where to win, you must have 10 victory points (stated plain as day on the front of the box, say), but the mechanisms for gaining them are baroque and counterintuitive. I’m comfortable saying that would be a bad game. Although it would be more forgivable in a CCG than a board game. In fact, it might make for an interesting CCG.
Darrell: Here’s the follow-up question, then. Should the “place to start” more-or-less weave itself as the player takes his first turns, or should be player have to actively embrace the starting place? Returning again to the theoretical game played for 10 victory points, should it be possible for a novice to avoid gaining one on, say, his second turn?
When it comes to games, I find there is a place both for games that encourage “victory” oriented play and those that encourage pure interaction. One of the reasons I enjoy playing Turn Based Strategy games, over RTS, is how fiddly they can become. I love developing my cities in Master of Magic and Civilization. I often try to win Civ with a purely technological victory. The interaction with the game itself is a reward.
Games like The Sims demonstrate that there is a role for the purely interactive in game design — as that is the point of those games. I also believe that that can be a goal within a competitive game.
As for the Nanocon Prototype, it would make a nice continuation of Ludlum’s Chancellor stories.
Jeff: In response to your follow-up question, the “place to start” should be visible but avoidable. That is, the novice could choose to make a less obviously-beneficial play — since games are all about making choices. It gives the novice a chance to feel good about his choice: either “Hey, I’m a smart player and made the right choice!” or “I’m going to be daring and try a more advanced play!” It also gives the advanced player a chance to make actual advanced plays: if your first two turn inevitably ends with “win a point” then everyone’s first turns, regardless of skill level or ultimate strategy, might look the same – which begs the question of why we’re playing that first turn anyway.
Christian: I hear what you’re saying about the interaction with the game being its own reward, but that seems most oriented towards single-player computer games (as you mentioned). When you say that it could be a goal in a competitive game, what do you mean? Are you speaking of Euro-style games in which players interact with the game (not each other) in order to score points?
Playing a game badly should be hard to accomplish, and the longer the game, the harder it should be to play it (particularly to start it) badly.
I think back to the first time I played Advanced Civ, when I foolishly attacked another player on an early turn. Sure, I got the territory I wanted, but by losing just a single token early in the game I drastically reduced my population, effectively ensuring that I’d be a turn or two behind everyone else for the next 8 hours.
Nothing’s more demoralizing than realizing you’ve lost the game with hours yet to play.
I know there are folks out there who think that learning how to avoid bad play is part of good game skill. I just think it’s more fun to learn how to go from “making a reasonable choice” to “making a great choice”.
I’d much rather have a new player finish a game feeling like they understand how to improve their play than feeling like they did something stupid–it seems to me that they’re more likely to come back after the former experience than the latter.