Slashdot Mirror
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?
I like my board games to be based purely on chance. #LifeforLife
Any game where I can say "I've got wood for sheep" is tops in my book.
I play board games two or three times a week. I love games with elegant rules which still lead to a game that can be played over and over. I've been playing bridge for 30 years, and I still find something new every time I play. Dominion and Werewolf are really neat elegant systems, but nearly every game is a new experience.
I also need to be able to improve. I think Royal Turf is an elegant game, but I know the ideal strategy and don't enjoy playing anymore. Whereas I have a lot to learn to be a better Zendo player and a better poker player, and will never master either game.
You still can't beat Monopoly.
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
About the only thing we agree upon is that Third Reich is a great game and could take a day or longer to play. I don't consider the rules to be complicated/obtuse, and it is definitely not a simulation. It is a meat and potatoes grognard style game.
I love the modern Euro-games but many times would rather play Third Reich, Empires in Arms or Advanced Squad Leader with some old friends whenever I get a chance. The former are easier to get new people into playing and don't take a lot of time, the latter require a particular kind per pedantic personality and a commitment of time.
main(){char*c="main(){char*c=%c%s%c;printf(c,34,c
A good game should have simple rules, but hard to master.
Chess has the maximum amount of rules for a game.
Most casual game players the rules need to be simple as they can start playing quickly. Without feeling like an idiot. However even though the rules may be simple, there is a lot of different strategies to try to win.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I like abstract strategy games, but I don't like heavy memorization. Chess is popular so it's easy to find opponents, but memorizing the opening book is necessary if you want to get good. It's also very easy for weaker players to lose the game from a single blunder, which is unsatisfying for everybody. Arimaa was designed to be difficult for computers because of the very high branching factor, and that same property also makes it interesting for humans.
Arimaa can be played on a Chess board, and the rules are simple. Memorization is completely useless. You're forced to use intuition, in a way more like Go than Chess. There are no draws. Comebacks from inferior material are much more common than in Chess. It feels like Chess without the boring bits. It's still too new to tell if it's a truly great abstract strategy game, but people are already playing it at a very high level with no obvious flaw in the rules. I recommend trying it:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/
I'm an avid board games collector, but I have specific interests.
I like "mathematically interesting" board games. A lot of the big-name games just don't do it for me. I also like board games with well-designed elements and pieces, no matter how bad the actual game. Yes, I'm odd.
I quite like the Pac-Man from the MB Game Pac-Man board game. It's a piece of design that I love. And I quite like the "inifinite board" concept of a Mad-Max like car board game I have called Thunderoad (also went by other names). But I really like things like Super Cluedo and even Cluedo: The Great Museum Caper (Cluedo = Clue in the US). However the original Cluedo is just boring. It's about how well it works as a game, not some hard-and-fast rule for what works.
It's the old story - you have to have something that nobody's seen before and telling you how to do that is impossible.
Strangely, I find RPGs and other tabletop games uninteresting for the most part.
I loath chance-driven games.
There needs to be enough chance so that you have to apply new strategies and skills to overcome the luck of the draw. Chance that simply promotes or demotes you without any recourse is pointless. Chance that puts you in situation A or situation B is slightly more interesting. Chance that puts you in situation(n!) is where you have to exercise your brain to map out a new strategy, and it's where games get fun.
John
Can't say for Catan (haven't played it yet), but at least for ticket to ride there are multiple scoring oppertunities at the end of the game, which I think keeps the final winner up in the air. IMO, TTR does a great job with the luck factor. You can choose to try to be lucky in drawing cards, or go the safer route by choosing face-up cards. I made the mistake of playing Talisman again after many years. That game has not aged well. Way too random, with very little strategy allowed.
The best trade-off I have found is a game with a little randomness but not too much
I concur.
I have played some games with very little randomness, and for me at least they become "brain-burners" where I try to think three or four moves ahead. When I tried Caragena I had this problem. If there is some randomness, I can relax until it's my turn.
Also, some games that seem to contain a whole lot of randomness can become statistically predictable. If a game has you rolling a set of dice a dozen times in your turn, each roll is random but over all the rolls it averages out. In games like Can't Stop there is an undeniable element of luck, but it's less than a game that puts a great deal of importance on a single toss of the dice.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The unofficial Free Parking jackpot in Monopoly was the worst thing about any board game ever. It meant a game that already dragged on too long never ended.
The problem with cooperative games is that many of them devolve into the most dominant personality running the show, i.e. if we want to win, everyone has to do what the smartest person says they should. Games of this sort that allow recovery from the bad decisions of one team mate are often trivially easy if all the players are equals and execute flawlessly.
Party games, like Cards Against Humanity, or Telestrations (where we too don't keep score) are just for fun, but also don't remotely tickle the itch of someone looking for the intellectual challenge a strategic board game provides. Dixit perhaps gets closest for me, as I play into the strategy of predicting who might play what based on how well I know them.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
Bridge has the "one player gets knocked out very early" aspect to it, but it's fine. Dummy's job is to go mix the next round of drinks for everybody.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks