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Designing the Best Board Game
An anonymous reader writes: Twilight Struggle tops BoardGameGeek's ranking of user-rated board games, handily beating classics like Puerto Rico, Settlers of the Catan, and Risk. FiveThirtyEight has an article about the game's design, and how certain design choices can affect enjoyment. Quoting: "Gupta has a few theories about why his game has done so well. For one, it's a two-player game — the Americans vs. the Soviets. Two-player games are attractive for a couple of reasons. First, by definition, half the players win. People like winning, and are likely to replay and rate highly a game they think they have a chance to win. ... The data offers some evidence for Gupta's hypothesis. Games that support three players rate highest, with an average of 6.58. But two-player games are a close second, with an average rating of 6.55. Next closest are five-player games, which average 6.39. ... The shortest games are the lowest rated, on average. But players don't favor length without bounds. Three hours seems to be right around the point of diminishing marginal returns. Another key to the game's success is its mix of luck and skill."
What design elements do you particularly enjoy or hate in board games?
The best games for me have a good deal of strategic depth, but are comfortable for casual players. As an adult it is very hard for me to find a large group of hard core gamers, so casual gamers have to do. But I want to be entertained too.
The best trade-off I have found is a game with a little randomness but not too much, and one that helps players who are losing catch up. This allows the good players to be rewarded for their good play instead of just luck, but also keeps the game competitive until the end.
The best game I have found so far for this is Power Grid. It has simple rules, a good deal of strategy, and many game mechanics that give players a chance to catch up. It is often in a player's best interest to not get too far ahead because they will be too harshly punished by the "catch up" mechanics. And that ultimately just adds more strategic depth to the game.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The rules must be extremely simple and straight forward, no ambiguities.
The game must be extremely difficult to play at the highest level of expertise.
The game must be handicapped to allow weak players to challenge strong players, when they have a handicap in their advantage.
The game must be able to raise your IQ, the better you play it.
The game must be able to transform your mind and let you see things that you never saw before.
The game must be balanced. A perfectly played game should be won by the least possible margin.
The game should have sacrifice to gain advantage.
The game should allow you to loose a battle, but still be able to win a war.
The game should punish greed.
The game should have an opening, middle game, and end game. Each phase of the game should determine the outcome of win versus loss.
There should be no opening book.
The game should be nearly impossible for a computer to play at an expert level.
The game should show the superiority of human pattern recognition, strategy, and logic over a computer's capacity to perform the same tasks.
The game should clearly show the difference between strategy and tactics, with both elements being present in any game.
The game should be all based on skill with no randomicity, such as rolling dice or spinning a wheel.
I like my board games to be based purely on chance. #LifeforLife
I actually don't mind games that have a high degree of luck involved, though I prefer somewhere around "low" luck. What I do mind is if that luck knocks a player out of a game well before all of the other participants are out, so that there is extreme downtime for one or more players. Games like Ticket to Ride, Lords of Vegas, Power Grid, etc... deal with this by having all players play until the scoring phase at the end. I played Risk Legacy once, and lost before I even took a turn (!). Sure I got back into the game with reduced resources, but I had already really lost the game. Letting people play (mostly) until the end is probably the single biggest requirement aside from actual fun/interesting mechanics.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
The problem with not eliminating players in a free-for-all type of games (like Settlers of Catan) is that often worst players become kingmakers. It's been more than on a single occasion in Catan that if A and B are way ahead but of more or less equal strength, C who has no realistic chance to win the game can essentially decide if A or B does. And that is is arguably even worse than blind luck.
Land dependency is Magic's number one flaw. It always has been. If there had been a rule like "You can play any card from your hand face down as a land that you can tap for one colorless mana" the game would be very different, but less flawed.
Mana screws, though, occur more on the game level than turn level. If you aren't in a game where you are screwed, your turns are based on strategy after randomness, i.e. draw a card then plan what you want to do based on the known board and hand state, with the pseudorandomness of your opponent's choices to keep play somewhat uncertain.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.