Theory: Taking Mark Rosewater Out of Context

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On Monday Mark Rosewater posted his annual “State of Design” article, in which he reviews Magic: the Gathering’s successes and failures for the past year. It’s an interesting read for any Magic player, but as a designer what I think is most fascinating about it are the lessons that could apply to any game. The article has design rules that are still powerful when divorced from their context.

Take, for example, Mr. Rosewater’s conclusion that “[f]lavor is key.” He explains that Magic used the same mechanic (that is to say, a thing cards did) twice: once with a flavorless label, and the second time with a name that evoked ancient Greek mythology. The mechanic was much better received the second time around, in part because players understood what the mechanic represented in the fiction of the game world and got more excited about playing cards with the mechanic as a result. Accessing “chroma” sounded technical and boring, but showing “devotion” and being rewarded for it was fun–even though in both cases players were doing largely the same thing!

Reading Mr. Rosewater’s comments immediately put me in the mind of Over the Next Dune’s rules for keeping searchers on the map. When explained step-by-step, people often find them rather opaque. Say that searchers “bounce like a screen saver,” however, and everyone understands instantly. Picking the right context helps players understand the rules enormously–so much so that I’ve considered switching to a Tron-esque theme just to be able to make the screen savor metaphor more explicit.

Other lessons presented in the article are similar. His self-critique of Magic’s execution of an “enchantment block” is interesting for anyone considering a game with expansions. The discussion on rescuing a failed idea has something to say about every game where the designer’s options are limited. More generally, the fact that Mr. Rosewater criticizes his own work despite the fact that this year saw “the best-selling Magic set of all time” sets a good example.

Mr. Rosewater is a controversial figure; opinions differ on whether he’s saving Magic or smashing it. Whatever one’s opinion of his “New World Order,” however, there can be no denying that he’s learned game design in an environment where sales numbers provide quantitative feedback, with his job staked on his continued success. Hard-won experience like is is always worth considering, and the lessons he has to teach are general enough at the macro level to make figuring out how to apply them to other games time well-spent.

The Case Study: Permanent Page for Updated Print-n-Play

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I got a suggestion to put the rules and print-and-play components for Over the Next Dune into a single file, and to have a consistent place where the up-to-date file can be found. That’s completely sensible–I should have done both a long time ago! You can now find the current and complete Over the Next Dune file on its own page accessible via the top navigation bar.

Theory: What to Do If Your Game’s Not Random

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Riffing on the idea that the promise of a rare lucky moment is attractive, I thought it might be interesting to look at the fate of VS System–a game where people didn’t get those lucky moments. I should say up front that I only have this story second-hand, but even if it’s wrong it’s still interesting as a thought experiment. It’s a cautionary tale about a game that ended up being unfriendly to new players, and a chance to learn lessons about what to do if your game doesn’t randomly offer new players help.

VS System was a superhero card game. If you wanted to play something Magic-ish, but instead of knights fighting dragons you wanted Captain America fighting Doctor Doom, this was your game. Its crowning achievement may have been its substantial tournament popularity; lots of people got very good at VS System, played it very seriously, and won quite a bit of money in the process.

Part of what made VS System so popular among tournament players was that, even though it was a card game, luck actually had very little to do with the outcome. Better players almost always beat worse players. For heavily-invested players who had spent a lot of time practicing, that was a valuable feature. Their hard work was consistently rewarded.

New players, however, found VS System quite frustrating. Since everyone was better than them, they lost almost every time. They couldn’t hope for a rare lucky moment; no such moment was coming.

Losing is, of course, part of getting better. I have vivid memories of going to the local arcade in Japan once a week and getting trounced for a full year before I managed to win. However, at that point in my life I was dedicated to improving at fighting games. It’s not unreasonable for people to try a game that they’re only casually interested in, get clobbered, and decide that this particular mountain isn’t one they’re interested in climbing.

That was the decision people often made about VS System. Although a dedicated group of old-timers kept the game going, fewer and fewer new players appeared to reinforce their ranks. Tournament players who moved on were not replaced, and ultimately the game folded for lack of sales.

Compare VS System’s experience to Magic: the Gathering. In Magic, the better player wins . . . most of the time. The fall of the cards can give the worse player a chance, creating the openings they need to win. When it happens it makes the better player crazy–but even Mark Rosewater believes the game is better because those moments can happen, and the sales data support him. Magic lets new players get the lucky moment they need once every so often, and as a result it can appeal to a much larger player base.

So, judicious use of randomness can help new players win, and in the process can contribute to keeping a game popular. What if a game has no randomness? Chess has no dice, no cards, nothing that’s outside the players’ control (and I depart from Mr. Rosewater’s view that opening moves are random; a decision made with incomplete information is not random, it is simply risky). Yet, Chess has lasted for a very long time. Diplomacy has a less impressive pedigree, but it’s also a popular game of long standing with no random elements. How do they keep going?

I think there are two key things that non-random games can do to avoid frustrating new players:

Ranked play: Chess’ ELO system helps players find others at the same skill level. Weaker players can avoid being clobbered by playing people at the same ELO–or can opt into a challenge by finding someone at a higher level. Players control how much frustration they experience.

Make it hard to lose quickly: Even an extremely bad Diplomacy player can’t be eliminated in the first few turns. (The writing, admittedly, might be on the wall by then.) Furthermore, the early turns are often when most of the wheeling and dealing at the heart of Diplomacy occurs, so even the newest player gets to experience what the game has to offer and feel like he or she got to participate meaningfully.

I’m sure there are more approaches to this problem, but I feel that these are particularly effective. If your game doesn’t enjoy the luxury of offering rare lucky moments to give new players hope, doing one or both of these will help ensure that they still have a positive experience. That, in turn, will contribute greatly to the long-term health of your game.

Theory: Story Time

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When I was a kid, I saw these two Star Wars cards:

8-13-14 - Obi-Wan Kenobi8-13-14 - Bionic HandTake a look at the numbers in the upper-right corners. They’re used to generate random numbers in-game. Higher is usually better. Mostly they scale from 1-6.

Now, Bionic Hand is pretty useless. IF your opponent is playing the Disarmed card, and IF the situation came up in which that card can be played, and IF your opponent had the card in hand and played it, THEN you can play your Bionic Hand.

But it’s tempting to put it in your deck anyway, because Bionic Hand is a 7.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, on the other hand (no pun intended), is pretty great. Explaining all the ways that he’s great requires some knowledge of the game’s mechanics, so suffice it to say that he’s as awesome as it seems like Obi-Wan Kenobi should be. Obi-Wan is so great that it’s tempting to play multiple copies of him.

But he’s a 1.

These two cards taught me the first game design lesson I ever learned: very powerful things should have some drawback associated with them. Obi-Wan is great once he’s on the table, but he’s terrible if you flip him while generating a random number. Having that weakness prevents Obi-Wan from completely overshadowing cards like Bionic Hand.

Yet, there are more lessons to be found here. Weak things can be interesting if they’re narrowly powerful. Random values can be generated in many ways. The promise of a rare lucky moment is attractive.

I know I’ve been talking about the Star Wars CCG a lot recently. Part of that is because it’s fun to walk down memory lane, but part of it is because the game did a lot right. When looked at critically, it has a lot to teach.

The Case Study: Ongoing Playtesting

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I’m still playtesting the five-turn version of OtND with three left turns and three right turns. The more I play it the more I like it. It’s hard, and games consistently come down to the wire. Making the game harder was part of the goal, and that goal is being achieved.

Using three turns is also working out better than four. It’s sufficient to make the game unpredictable without rendering planning impossible. Moreover, the challenge shifts over the course of the game; it starts out very difficult, and then the advantage shifts toward the players as turns come out of the deck. I haven’t forgotten the question of how to give a game the feeling of a three-act story.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that the game still needs a lot of external playtesting. We’ll see how it holds up.

Something Completely Different: Barmageddon

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I’m taking a quick break today to offer my sympathies to those caught up in Barmageddon. Computer issues raised their head when I took the bar, so I understand how stressful that is. My understanding is that everyone was able to upload their exams in the end, so I hope that those affected were able to approach the second day without worry and are now resting easy. Good luck!

Theory: What Can Game Designers Consider?

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I’m on a bit of a Star Wars CCG kick right now, owing to the recent reset of the game. Not only is that stripping away a lot of accumulated cruft (thereby making the game a great deal more accessible), it’s also presenting an interesting design question: what are valid considerations for a game designer?

To see the problem, put yourself in the shoes of one of the people guiding SWCCG’s reset. Your job is to go through hundreds, perhaps even thousands of cards, and choose no more than 150 that will continue to see regular play. How do you do it?

Some approaches are intuitively obvious. You could look at each individual card, and ask “is this card good for the game, in light of the lessons learned since it was originally designed?” The message boards have many discussions in that vein. Alternatively you could take a broader view, asking “are the strategies that this card enables fun and interesting?” Players called for one card to be included in the new base set expressly because it was the centerpiece of deck that was both fun and fun to play against.

The issue gets tricky, though, when one considers factors outside the game proper. One member of the “reset strike force” argued against including cards that helped a deck which is expensive to build. He felt that the reset would fail to attract new players if they found out that the strongest tournament deck cost hundreds of dollars to piece together on the secondary market. The deck, and the cards that went into it, were essentially sacrificed to marketing considerations. Is that valid from a design perspective?

Similarly, there was a Dark Side deck that everyone agreed was fun, balanced, and generally good for the game. However, it was based on a card of an unusual type–an “Objective”–and none of the Light Side Objectives were going to make the cut. The Dark Side Objective was therefore left out, and its associated deck with it, on the thinking that the perceived unfairness of the DS getting something the LS wasn’t would bother players. Mark Rosewater would agree that people would dislike the incomplete pair, but the problem is external to the play of any specific match. Should a game designer care?

Underlying these issues is the general question of how we should define a game designer’s ambit. If a good designer cares about the game in play, and only that, then marketing-driven decisions are at best right for the wrong reasons and at worst actually harmful to the game. On the other hand, if the designer is crafting something larger–an overall experience that includes both play and the activities surrounding play–then it’s appropriate to think about how players will feel when they see an unbalanced card list.

In practice game designers clearly care about the experience. Most games are intended for a broad audience, after all, and the overall experience is part of how one attracts players. Nevertheless, I think it’s interesting to puzzle over the question in the abstract. Are game designers inherently marketers, or is that just a function pushed upon them? Is the marketing part of the game, or ultimately external to it? How far afield do we want game designers to go?

Theory: When Card Advantage Wasn’t

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Years ago the second-place collectible card game was Decipher’s Star Wars game. When Decipher lost the Star Wars license an arrangement was put into place allowing players to carry on making cards, which is fascinating from a legal perspective–I’d give a great deal to have been a fly on the wall during those negotiations. However, the game remains interesting from a design standpoint as well. It turns the conventional wisdom regarding card games on its head, and in the process demonstrates that even fundamental ideas about a type of game can be subverted successfully.

In 99% of card-based games, having more cards in hand is almost strictly better than having fewer. Cards give one options in the game, so more cards in hand means more options. Moreover, additional cards ultimately lead not just to more choices, but to better ones; a player with few cards has to improvise with what he or she has, while a player with many cards can select the perfect tool for the job.

The idea that more cards in hand is better is so thoroughly ingrained that Magic: the Gathering players developed a name for it: “card advantage.” Magic players routinely talk about getting card advantage, or ways to achieve card advantage. Card advantage is so commonly discussed that it was featured in a new-player series on the official Magic website. Whole theories of Magic exist to explain why decks that don’t achieve card advantage can possibly win. Even cards that don’t actually add to a player’s hand are understood in terms of the “virtual” card advantage they provide.

Getting more cards is so important in card games that Magic designers built a card that forces a player to voluntarily take on extreme card disadvantage as a wacky puzzle. They created One with Nothing–a card which forces a player to discard his or her own hand–just to intrigue those players who feel that “no card is too bad to find a use for.”

Star Wars turned all of this on its head. Drawing cards in Star Wars is easy, and there’s no maximum hand size. You can draw cards almost to your heart’s content. There’s just one problem: if you draw lots of cards, you’ll lose.

The designers who worked on Star Wars–I regret that I don’t know who they were–achieved this very elegantly. The cards in one’s deck are one’s “life bar;” when they run out, the game is over. Drawing cards, of course, reduces the number of cards in the deck. Hence, drawing cards is powerful, but also dangerous.

(Magic has somewhat the same setup, in that running one’s deck out puts one in danger of losing. However, because it’s unusual for the opponent to be able to attack one’s deck directly it’s much easier to manage one’s card drawing against the size of the deck. Furthermore, most decks don’t have anything like the card-drawing power of a Star Wars deck. Magic therefore lacks this tension in all but very unusual situations.)

Star Wars’ designers took this tension one step further. At the start of each turn, player takes a set number of cards from the top of his or her deck to form a separate pool. Costs of playing cards are paid from that pool. However, one can only draw cards from that pool. Players therefore have to weigh not only how much card drawing is safe, but also how far they can afford to go before they’re limiting what their plays for the turn too severely.

The result of all this is a number of interesting decisions. Is it better to play Darth Vader and lose out on drawing cards for the turn, or to rely on a lowly stormtrooper and refill one’s hand? When one is losing and needs to find a specific card to turn things around, is it better to draw lots of cards–and thereby lower one’s “life bar” a great deal–or to gamble by taking just a few? How does the opponent’s strategy influence that choice?

I imagine that most of the Star Wars CCG’s fans played because of the theme–I know that’s why I did, many years ago. However, under the theme (and the extreme complexity of the rules) there was a very strong design concept. If you get a chance, give the game a try. It’s a much different experience from other card games, and well worth your time.

The Case Study: Ongoing Playtesting

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Things have been busy, so just a quick update. I’ve played a few more five-turn games. They remain challenging. So far, though, I’m not sold on using three “lefts” and “rights.” It’s easier, but it may have turned the challenge dial down a little too far. I’m going to keep testing this, and take the show on the road to see what other people think.

As always, if you have thoughts let me know!

The Case Study: Playtesting a Five-Turn Limit

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It’s been busy, but I’ve been able to play a few games of Over the Next Dune with a five-turn limit. The results have been mixed. On the plus side, the game is definitely more difficult. Players have to move quickly and take risks. On the minus side, the game might not be reasonably winnable. Having only five turns makes the game very difficult, moreso than I expected.

To dial the challenge back a bit I’m considering reducing the number of turns in the searcher movement deck. Maintaining the ratio of turns to straights from the 10-turn 60-card deck in the five-turn 30-card deck produces 3.5 of each turn. So far I’ve been rounding that up to four, on the the theory that previous attempts to make a “hard mode” had been inadequate and so this time I should do everything possible to increase the difficulty. Since the 30-card five-turn deck has turned out to be a very hard mode I’m going to give a deck with three of each turn a try. I’ll update you on how that goes next week.