Building vs. Upgrading, and a game called Scorched Earth

Lots of games are about building. Over the course of the game, you're creating a sort of engine that generates the conditions for victory. You start out with a few simple functions that you can perform, and as time goes on you add more and better functions. From a single corn field to a plantation processing coffee and sugar in Puerto Rico. From agriculture to nuclear power in Innovation. From a monster to an even scarier monster in King of Tokyo.

The Fire of Moscow (source)

What if we turned the building idea on its head? A while back my wife inspired me with an idea for a game called Scorched Earth. In this game, you would be a commander in charge of a slice of Russian territory as Napoleon's army advanced. Your goal would be to destroy as much as possible of your territory's assets, with the game ending when Napoleon's army starves or is forced to turn back from lack of food.

Thematically, Scorched Earth seemed intriguing. But building is a common game mechanic for a reason. It gives a game a sense of motion and purpose. Players feel like they're accomplishing something and creating something. When you're building, you're going somewhere. You're excited about the next piece you want to add and the steps you plan to take to get it.

The momentum and narrative arc associated with building suggest some problems with going the other way. I found this to be a problem with another game idea I had, a "deck destroying" game called The Fall of Greenland. In TFoG, players would begin with a big deck of cards representing elements of a Norse settlement, which they would gradually lose as calamities hit. Like Scorched Earth, the goal was to have the best stuff remaining when time ran out. In playtesting, though, TFoG fell flat. Strategically choosing what to eliminate from your deck wasn't as interesting as choosing what to add to your deck.

As common as building is, many games that seem to be about building are perhaps better thought of as being about upgrading. Building makes things bigger, while upgrading makes them better. The deck building genre, I would argue, is -- despite the name -- as much about upgrading as about building in the sense I'm using the term here. And that's revealed by the importance of being able to get rid of your early components. Dominion has a variety of cards that let you trash a card -- often, but not always, in exchange for a better card. Quarriors lets you cull a die whenever you score.

Why would you trash a perfectly good copper card in Dominion, or a perfectly serviceable assistant in Quarriors? Because the best strategy is not to build up a huge deck, but to make an efficient and streamlined deck. In these two games, you only have access to a random sample of your deck at any one time. So low-value components just dilute your ability to access your better ones. Simple components are useful only until they can be replaced with more powerful ones.

So let's apply that to Scorched Earth. Instead of just destroying your capacity, perhaps your real aim is to consolidate. If you can build a triple-size factory back in Smolensk, then you can afford to tear down the three smaller factories in Vilno, Minsk, and Mogilev (relevant map). The advance of Napoleon's army provides a clear incentive to streamline and trim the fat from your game engine.

I don't know that I'll ever develop Scorched Earth as a full-fledged game -- the theme is certainly outside my core competency, though I suppose it could be rethemed. But if nothing else it's a useful design exercise.

Not every game problem can be solved with game mechanics

I think board game designers would learn a lot from playing a few rounds of Fiasco.

Fiasco is a story-focused one-session roleplaying game, in which you collaboratively tell a story about a wacky heist gone bad. In various sessions I've been a tea importer who dressed up as a mall Santa to destroy my competition, a cat who tried to convince the other cats to start a nuclear war with Russia, and a severed hand trying to stop my brother's clones from winning a bowling competition.

The key thing about Fiasco is that there is no win condition. By the rules, no individual can lose, nor can the group as a whole lose. Certainly there are end conditions, which determine whether your character's life turns out good or bad at the end of the story -- but it would be dysfunctional and counterproductive to the game for someone to treat those as "win conditions," organizing their approach to playing the game around achieving a specific sort of ending for their character. The rules of the game exist to support a group of people in doing something fun together.

Too often, I think that board game designers become fixated on the mechanical aspects of games. Don't get me wrong -- having solid mechanics in a game is essential. It's important to think about what kind of strategies your mechanics make possible and reward, and to adjust them if they produce dysfunctional results. But there's a limit to how much game mechanics can do. Not every problem in a game can be solved through game mechanics. If we get fixated on the idea that any undesirable strategy must be prevented or severely disincentivized within the mechanics of the game, we can lose sight of the larger picture.

A classic example of this issue is the problem of "captaining" in cooperative games -- the phenomenon of one player taking over and directing other players' moves, creating an essentially solitaire game. There are some cooperative games that inherently rule out captaining, as a natural consequence of their core gameplay (Hanabi does this beautifully). Others tack on rules to try to exclude captaining by fiat (e.g. forbidding players to explicitly name the cards in their hand, as in Shadows Over Camelot). But I've had an enjoyable time playing actual solitaire games of Pandemic and Forbidden Island -- something that would be impossible if they were mechanically captain-proofed. And I've had fun playing them with people I trusted not to captain, in social contexts that discouraged captaining. We didn't need something in the rules to force us to play nice.

Different groups will play the same game in different ways. The designer can't, and shouldn't, exercise complete control over the gameplay experience. A big part of playing most games is the informal social negotiation that occurs around the question of which strategies are legal but jerky. For example, in a recent game of Keyflower, we agreed that while it was legal to win two turn-order tiles (thus getting two ships and leaving another player with none), that it was kind of a jerk move and would be treated as such. When one player proceeded to bid on two turn order tiles, the rest of us stepped up to stop him, even when it might not have been a strictly optimal move in terms of maximizing personal victory points. We were all invested in maintaining the spirit of the game. (I should add that the person bidding on multiple turn order tiles wasn't doing it to be a jerk -- the move was taken, in context, as a sort of teasing.)

Bringing this back to Fiasco, someone could be a jerk in Fiasco. They could refuse to go along with the story, they could nitpick the allocation of white and black dice at the ends of scenes, or they could simply "check out" during the game. I've had all these things happen, and they make the game less fun. There's nothing in the rules that prohibits this kind of behavior.

The overarching goal in playing a game -- even more than racking up victory points -- is having fun together. And no game mechanic can guarantee success at that.

Cognitive vs social approaches to analysis paralysis

Luke Laurie has a useful post listing some strategies that game designers can use to cut down on "analysis paralysis" -- the tendency of players to take inordinate amounts of time to make decisions, slowing down the game. I thin Laurie's list of 10 specific strategies can be lumped into two basic approaches: reduce cognitive barriers and reduce incentives to continue investing congitive effort. The "reduce cognitive barriers" lump includes things like separating phases for different actions and reducing visual clutter. These strategies help players' brains process relevant information faster and more easily. The "reduce incentives to continue investing cognitive effort" lump involves things like randomizing outcomes that make it impossible or worthless to game out long chains of consequences and counter-moves.

The word "cognitive" appears in both of my (inelegant) labels above because Laurie's approach is basically cognitive. That is, he treats players as basically rational agents trying to maximize their achievement of a goal (winning the game), under constraints posed by the game itself and their own mental shortcomings. This is certainly a huge part what board games are about! Strategizing to win is at the heart of what draws most players to gaming.

Nevertheless, games also have affective (feelings) and social aspects too. Consider Arkham Horror, featured in the last photo in Laurie's post. There's a lot of strategy that goes into playing Arkham Horror. But people play it just as much for the feeling -- to experience the horror and madness of a Lovecraftian world. And board games are usually a social activity, to be played with and against other players rather than just solitaire or against a computer AI. I've found that analysis paralysis can vary greatly with the social dynamic of the game. For example, one of my early plays of Alien Frontiers was with a group especially prone to analysis paralysis, so the game dragged on forever. I nearly swore off it, but in subsequent plays with a different crowd it flowed smoothly. So I think that in addition to the cognitive solutions to analysis paralysis that Laurie proposes, there are also solutions to be found in the affective and social realms too. I can't claim to have an exhaustive list, so I'll just focus on one.

Laurie's last suggestion is to create simultaneous actions. On a mechanical level, this can speed up a game by letting multiple players do their analysis at the same time rather than having to wait to do them one after the other. But I have found that it also exerts beneficial social forces. On the one hand, there is social pressure on slower players to make a decision, because the whole group is waiting to do something together. On the other hand, it reduces the scrutiny directed at one player by the others who are waiting for their own turns. Together, these two forces push players to get to the point. Seven Wonders makes a good example of this. Nobody wants to be the person holding up the round by taking too long to pick their card, but you also have some breathing room to think while other people pick their cards. I use a similar approach in Bunny Money Gunny, as players pick their card order simultaneously then reveal them simultaneously. In playtests, slower players are swept along socially to avoid analysis paralysis.

Balance, fairness, and meaningful choices

Max Seidman suggests that game designers should think about balancing a game in terms of ensuring meaningful choices rather than ensuring fairness. As he defines it, "Balancing is the act of tweaking numbers (resources, probabilities, options, etc.) to ensure that players always have at least two interesting and equally appealing choices during their turns."

As I see it, there are two ways of making a choice not meaningful. One is to have a clearly dominant option. Seidman spends a lot of time on this aspect in his post, discussing the ways that designers can prune away "false choices" where the correct strategy is obvious, and ensure that there are 2-3 equally appealing options. The other way to make a choice not meaningful is to make the options not matter. If two options are equally appealing, but things will probably turn out the same regardless of which one you pick, then the choice isn't that meaningful either. It has to be clear to the player that the choice will affect the outcome of the game, and the connection between the choice and the outcome needs to be clear. The test of choice meaningfulness, I think, is that it's possible for a player to look back at their choice and say "dammit, I should have done X instead of Y!" If the choice is meaningless in the first sense, nobody will have done Y in the first place. And if it's meaningless in the second sense, players won't think that doing X would have changed anything (because they were destined to fail/win anyway, or because it's unclear whether the X-vs-Y choice made any difference).

This second aspect of choice meaningfulness brings the issue of fairness back in. Unfairness tends to make choices lose meaning in the second way described above. Imagine a game where the first player has a substantial advantage simply by virtue of going first. If the other players recognize this, then their choices will become less meaningful. They can start to feel like it doesn't matter what they choose, as they'll probably lose anyway. Similarly, the player with the unfair advantage will stop worrying about their choices, because they know they can easily coast to victory.

This is why fairness can be so important in a purely strategy-based game -- that is, a game where the only goal is to achieve a concrete victory condition. So we see excruciating efforts at fairness in classic abstract games (e.g. Go, Scrabble) and heavy Euro games (e.g. Agricola, Village). When a game is "unfair," there is usually some other non-strategic goal that makes choices still meaningful. This might be the case in a very atmospheric, theme-heavy game. For example, a horror themed game might make certain players probably doomed, but their choices are still meaningful because they help define the nature of the horror. I might be dead either way, but it matters to the feel of the game how I choose to die. The extreme case of this is a heavily narrative-based roleplaying game like Fiasco. In Fiasco there's no effort at all to "balance" character abilities in terms of making those characters able to "win." Choices are meaningful because of how they influence character development and how they produce situations that the other characters will have to react to. A good Fiasco setup is balanced in the sense of giving characters multiple appealing paths to interestingly different story endings.

Four kinds of playtests

In the few years I've been seriously working on game design, I've gotten to playtesting stage on around a dozen games. In the course of this, I've seen games tend to fall into four categories in terms of what the playtest feels like.

1. It's just broken.
The worst scenario -- the game just doesn't work at all in its current form. This can be heartbreaking when you've got a lot of attachment to the game idea, but it simply doesn't work in practice. I had put a lot of effort into The Fall of Greenland, a "deck destroying" (like deckbuilding in reverse) game with a viking theme. It ended up simply not being fun. I did three or so playtests, trying to massage the rules, but in each case it fell into the same trap: each player's turn was a small puzzle-solving exercise (half of the time obviously impossible). There wasn't anything in the way of longer-term strategy, or even short-term tactics. And the player interaction that was supposed to enrich the game was unmotivated. Usually the only thing you can do in such a case is toss the whole thing out. I'm still attached enough to the idea of a viking-themed deck destroying game that I'm not throwing it out yet, but I know it's going to need a fundamental rethinking of all of the core mechanics to turn into anything playable.

2. Churning Your Wheels.
On the first try, the game doesn't work. So you change some significant things -- and now it fails in a new way. You change it again, and it finds yet another way to fail. This was my experience for a while with Dinosaur Hunter, a mod of Monopoly in which Atlantic City is overrun with dinosaurs. The mechanic for moving the dinosaurs went through at least four different iterations before I finally hit on something that was quick, interesting, and strategic, while also affording enough movement in the dinosaurs to make hunting them and protecting your citizens both worth it. So games in the wheel-churning situation can be improved, but it's a very frustrating experience. Wheel churning can also set in later in the playtesting, in which case it can be even more frustrating. You've got a basic idea that pretty much works, but you're not quite hitting on the changes that you need to make it all come together. When you've put in that much work, it's hard to walk away.

3. The Hole in One.
This is the kind of playtest we all hope for. You play the game for the first time and it just works. It's fun, it's balanced, it keeps everyone engaged. This is what happened with my current top project, Warm Kitties. After the first playtest, the only changes I made were to shrink the board by a couple rows, and to make a new physical mechanism for the worker placement system (which didn't change the game mechanics or strategy, just eliminated annoying upkeep tasks). But I placed this type of playtest third, rather than last, because it can be deceptive. The game works so well that you assume it's all locked down. You stop looking at ways to improve it because it seems fine as it is. With Warm Kitties, for example, it took me a long time to actually implement the shifting light and shadow that playtesters had been suggesting to me from the beginning, because the game worked just fine without it.

4. The Steady March
The most satisfying kind of playtest is the steady march. The game may start out broken, or boring. But with each iteration, you can feel the improvement. Each time you play, it gets more fun. That's the situation with the current main project of my game design partner Jasmine, called Cool Table. There were too many pieces on the board, so we eliminated some and it worked better. The card-selling mechanic encouraged hoarding, so we switched to getting money for forward movement -- solving both the existing problem and another problem of over-focusing on a few pieces. You get more excited about working on a game and playtesting it a lot when you can feel the improvements actually happening.