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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?
Any game where I can say "I've got wood for sheep" is tops in my book.
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
Monopoly is actually probably the single worst board game I can think of. There's a dominant strategy, which means that the game (assuming everyone plays to the dominant strategy) just comes down to luck. It takes hours. After the first 2-3 rounds of the board there's effectively no strategy at all in the game.
Seriously, literally the worst board game I can think of.
I feel I have to object to the comment that Monopoly is a terrible game. I know somebody who wrote their economics undergraduate thesis on the discount model for evaluating property values in Monopoly.
But what I really object to is the claim that the game takes hours. Yes, for unskilled players it takes hours. However, top skilled players usually take about 15 minutes to 30 minutes to play a game (and many time even less than that). You buy stuff, you trade, and mortgage everything to build as much as you can, and then somebody is bankrupt in just a few round trips of a game after the house building phase starts. Skilled players roll, move, buy, pay rents, in less than five seconds usually -- so the game is very fast, until you get to the point where you have to think. You can play the game with a 10 minute clock for each player for the whole game without compromising much in the way of skill. Also, you usually agree to a draw if monopolies cannot be formed in a reasonable number of turns.
From what I have seen, the critical phase of the game occurs at the time trading occurs to form monopolies -- and this requires a great deal of skill, some of it involves being artfully persuasive. It is one of the reasons why monopoly is a cool game. Strategy and tactics sometimes are less important than being a great salesperson.
However, never bring such skilled people into a regular monopoly game. Their style of play can leave all the other players bankrupt in less than an hour and leave them wondering what just happened to their casual fun game.
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.