Post by: Grant Rodiek
The “elements of a great game” post has been written numerous times, I think even once or twice by me. However, when playing games on Friday, many of them new, I was a little bothered by how some of them seemed to completely miss the mark. Now, personal tastes are entirely subjective, what games a person wants to make are subjective, so me writing an article on this is a bit ridiculous.
But on the other hand, what good is a blog then?
Here are the elements, molecules, components,
I’m going to use examples for each, including some from my own games. I don’t want to hold my games at the same level of the referenced masterpieces, but I want to point out some cases where I practiced what I preached.
Help the Players feel Clever: It is absolutely the designer’s job to stack the deck and help the players feel clever. You should go out of your way to engineer situations in your experience with interesting mechanics, great cards, and well-tuned probability. Examples:
King of Tokyo: Outfox your attacker by leaving Tokyo when they thought you’d stay in. Now, you’re out of the hot seat and they’re caught in the middle. Also, all of the cards.
Summoner Wars: Every card has a special ability, which means almost any time one is used, the player feels quite clever. Pull off a single move with the Cloaks and tell me you don’t feel like a genius. Or, the Filth. Oh, the Filth!
Pandemic: There are some over-powered cards that let you do something incredible once. For example, remove a city card from the deck, which means it cannot be targeted by normal infections. I once advised my team to remove the Baghdad card. By doing so, we almost entirely eliminated the spread of disease in the Middle East and used that breathing room to win the game. I felt like I beat Mr. Leacock handily that day. In reality, he won.
Farmageddon: When people realize they can use Foul Manure defensively or offensively (i.e. protect my crop or slow you down from harvesting yours), they feel like they broke the game. Same thing when they use Crop Insurance on Sassy Wheat, Dust Bowl it to kill it, then make $6 from insurance instead of $4 from harvesting. No, you didn’t break the game. You’re doing exactly what I want you to do.
How to add to your games: Cards are a fantastic way to let players feel clever. They can have one-off text/rules, can be kept a secret (ex: Surprise! You never expected this!), and can be dealt out randomly and unexpectedly. Order of operations turn structures also lend themselves to this (ex: You can take 4 actions in any order). Faction powers, class powers, and asymmetric abilities let people feel unique and empowered to think on their feet.
Highly Interactive: I think most of the decisions you make should be based on your opponents and how they affect your personal strategy. You need to think about what your opponent will do, what they can do to you, and what you can do to them.
In order to feel clever, you should best an opponent, not a rule set. Man is the greatest game and good games pit you against your fellow species. Examples:
Glory to Rome: Almost every decision affects everyone. Which cards you want to take for yourself, which cards you’re going to put in the center that others can use, and which action you want to take that others may not be able to use. I’m awful at this game, mostly because I can’t compute the actions of my opponents and the ones I need. But, it’s a brilliant game that shows interactivity that isn’t conflict-driven.
The Speicherstadt: The bidding in this game is tense, competitive, and requires shrewd timing and investing. You can block opponents who are short on money, drive up prices, bluff interest…oh the tension! This is one of the most aggressive bidding games I’ve played, which may be why I love it so much.
String Railway: On your turn, you draw and place a train station, then place a string to connect it with another station in which you’re present. The thing is, where you place your strings determines the viability of placement for other players. Also, stations are nodes for everyone (typically), ways to earn more points. String Railway is a nasty game of blocking and building, but if you’re too insular, you’ll be stuck in the corner. Delightful!
Also, every war game ever, including Battle for York: I sought to make York a highly interactive game of constant conflict. Your decisions rotate between reacting to the actions of your opponents and dictating terms to them. You’re constantly fighting over limited territories and exploiting weaknesses, which to me lets it stand out.
How to add to your games: Scarcity is the most obvious and simplest way to drive conflict and interactivity. Scarce resources, scarce territories, really, anything that is limited from which all players must draw. Examine your mechanics and think of non-frustrating ways that others can affect each other. Drafting and worker placement are two great foundations to get you started.
Unexpected Moments: Players should be delightfully surprised during the course of the game. Keep in mind, this can come about as the result of an unexpected card draw OR an unexpected player decision. The latter is my favorite. If your game can make your players say “Holy crap!” you’re onto something. Some examples:
Risk Legacy: This game is full of “Holy crap!” moments. The game is a story that unfolds based on your decisions, and very few of the story moments are minor. Instead, BIG things happen to the world and it’s very exciting.
King of Tokyo: We were playing a 3 player game. Two of us outside Tokyo each had 6 life. My friend inside Tokyo rolled 3 times and came out with SIX hits, killing us both, and winning the game. Holy crap! That was quite unexpected.
Ascending Empires: This game often has that moment where a player gets the wild ambition to stop fiddling in his own backyard and stomp someone across the galaxy. With an epic flick and the idea to do it in the first place, an entirely new war can crop up where you least expected it.
Battle for York: The Seaports create unexpected moments constantly. They let players travel to any coastal city. Essentially, the seaports make it so nobody is every fully safe and an enterprising player can outflank the leader. It’s glorious.
How to add to your games: Mechanics that rely on dice rolls and card draws (getting the +3 coin Event in Tokaido, so clutch!) help. Giving players a breadth of options that allow them to carve a road less traveled. Pre-built scenarios that stack the deck also create upsets, which are delightful and exciting. Also, random events (when properly integrated).
Doesn’t Overstay its Welcome: This one is very subjective, so I won’t go too deeply into examples. But, you should strive to create a game that keeps people well engaged throughout the entire experience, doesn’t cause yawns, and doesn’t encourage the iPhone pull out.
Ways to use this with your games: Have your game end on a timer of sorts, or guaranteed end point. For example, York ends after 6 rounds and Farmageddon ends when the crop deck empties. Keep the pace fast so players don’t have extensive down time. Prevent runaway leaders so players don’t check out and grow bored. Have constant reinforcement in the way of points or new benefits and abilities so that players are excited to see what’s next. And finally, build in an arc to your experience, so the game has a beginning, middle, and end. Players should feel like they’ve made progress at the end, not that they are back at the start.
Few Obvious Choices: This is a very difficult one to create and explain, but the best games have few obvious choices. Obvious choices aren’t satisfying (they don’t let you feel clever, see above!) and greatly impede replayability. Players should feel like they solved a problem, even a small one, NOT took the next step in a treadmill disguised as a game. Some examples:
Tokaido: I use this one because it’s such a simple game. YES, sometimes your choice is obvious (especially in constrained 5 player games), but often, there are 2-3 things you want and you really aren’t sure. Do you want more money? Maybe the event card you draw will be killer? Should you take the hot spring to block another player? Gah!
Coloretto: What colors should you go deep on? How many negative points can you endure and still win? Should you attempt one more pass around the table or take a bad stack now? This game is brilliant.
X-Wing Miniatures Game: Because play is simultaneous, and because everyone has so many choices, you never quite know what will happen in this game. Then, you complicate this further with the dice roll probabilities. X-Wing has very few obvious decisions, other than who to explode.
Alien Frontiers: One of the best ways this game creates interesting choices is that the dice dictate your decision space. But, the number of dice, plus the Alien Tech cards, plus the number of placement spaces on the board mean your limited box of options is quite large and malleable. Then you add order of operations…
Battle for York: In this case, I want to call out York as one that does this badly, or at least in a less than ideal way. York doesn’t work with some personalities because it has a really broad decision space. Yes, you only have a few options (primarily move versus attack), but with 4 players, all of whom are moving, and points not being scored immediately (i.e. you need to act NOW to receive points LATER), it can be a difficult game for some to enjoy. So, few obvious choices, but not too many choices that aren’t obvious.
How to add to your games: Provide a breadth of options and alternate paths. Incorporate scarcity (see above) that forces players to react to the conditions on the board. Give players goals to guide them, but multiple ways to accomplish them. Vary a player’s options, like in Alien Frontiers or Castles of Burgundy.
Awesome Presentation: As the lines continue to blur between designer and publisher, I think this is more and more important. It’s something I’m trying to envision from the start with my games and I find myself drawn, more and more, to games with this quality.
I should also note, though, that I think awesome presentation must be balanced with reasonable price. But, that ultimately depends on your goals as a business. Examples:
Tzolk’in: I haven’t played this game, but a friend has it and I’m sure I will soon. Quite simply, the gears are awesome. They are exciting and they act like a magnet for promoting the game.
Tokaido: The game is gorgeous, colorful, and cleanly designed. It has nice little meeple tokens, thick character cards, and the panorama pictures are so cool!
String Railway: You’re building railroads using thick pieces of string. Simply awesome.
Rory’s Story Cubes: I think this is a category dominated by Gamewright, in general, but Rory’s is a poster child.
As “cool components” is a new cornerstone of my personal design philosophy, it’s integrated into Blockade and FLABS. I’m not ready to share the latter, but here’s a quick snap of Blockade. Blocks!
So, what do YOU think is required for a great game?
Choices.
That’s what I boil pretty much all games down to in one way or another. Players need to be able to make choices and those choices need to matter. This is why Candyland is so awful, and why Chess is a masterpiece. I’d even put Blokus in the “masterpiece” category.
This is also why I try to minimize luck (dice, cards, whatever) in my game design. There’s a place for randomization to be sure, but if a game is largely decided on luck, I find it deeply unsatsifying. Some players still want those big, swingy things that can “break” games, and that can be fun sometimes, but for me, while game-altering things can be fun, if the game’s *win condition* relies more on luck than choice, it goes in my “bad” column.
Something like 7 Wonders hits a bit of a sweet spot for me, since it does have randomization to make play and replay interesting, but the game is still largely based on the choices players make.
Very much. The player should feel like THEY won or lost, not “I lost because of the game.”
With York I arguably went too far removing luck, which is a great equalizer and way to introduce new people into the curve. With Blockade I’m definitely adding more luck (combat is resolved with dice, like Memoir or Summoner Wars), but I think your positioning, maneuvers, and use of action cards will determine the winner more than the dice.
We’ll see how it goes.
7 Wonders is really delightful. Full of choices, great use of variance, as you noted.
Personalization.
Not a requirement for everyone, but being able to customize my character, army or deck is a huge draw for some that want to feel proud as your creation stomps on an opponent.
This is a great one!
This was a great post, Grant. I particularly like the inclusion of The Speicherstadt as a great example of player interaction. Nothing about it feels hostile, but it’s really tense when making those worker/bidding decisions.
One other element I’d mention (you kind of touched upon this in the interaction section) is limited downtime. Keep the game moving along, and give other players a reason to pay attention when it’s not their turn. I think Libertalia does this really well since everyone takes their turns at the same time.
Yes a thousand times. Pacing is such a crucial element. Don’t let me check out.
What an excellent collection of ideas that bring the greatest games to life.
How do you feel about “Approach-ability”, or how much demand a game puts on new players? This can work against innovation as too many new ideas in a game could cause a strain in teaching and learning a game.
After all, how can we spread the word about great games if they can be difficult to bring to new tables? Can too much complexity be an omissive factor that can diminish an otherwise great game? Or will a great game shine through regardless?
Approach-ability is so massively important. I honestly put it as one of the top things and I’m willing to downgrade innovation and complexity all the time to make a game more approachable.
It’s really about give and take and what you’re looking for. If you’re targeting the masses, more approach, less innovate. If you’re targeting the uber nerds, the core gamers, well, more innovation is expected AND they are willing to work harder to play your game.
I’m always trying to hit that mass market so for me, approach-ability is so key.
Great games will shine through regardless, but they’ll be harder to teach to new people.