Category: Game design theory

Theory: Add Instead of Subtracting

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Sometimes game design is about filing down rough edges, implementing things in ways that remove small but irksome play issues. I’ve run into one opportunity to do that recently: it’s often better to add than to subtract.

This might seem pretty trivial; after all, addition and subtraction are basic skills everyone learns in elementary school. However, it turns out that subtracting can lead to weird rules issues. Rather than have to deal with them, it’s often better to see if the same effect can be achieved through addition.

By way of example, consider a game where players roll dice and try to get above a certain number. (In other words, the vast majority of games with dice in them!) As the designer, you’ve decided that in certain situations the player should be less likely to succeed. Should you subtract from the player’s roll, or add to the total needed?

From a mathematical perspective, the two might be exactly the same. Subtracting, however, can create problems in extreme circumstances. What if the total of (roll – penalty) is less than zero? Does that have meaning?

Don’t laugh—it’s possible that a negative result could. In an economic game, for example, negative cost might serve as a way to reflect economies of scale. In a wargame based on ancient Greece, where morale was the most important factor for a defending army, a negative attack value might represent an attack so weak that it actually reinforces the defenders’ confidence in themselves.

If a roll of less than zero doesn’t have meaning, how exactly will it be handled? The value could just stop at zero, with a rule that it’s impossible to go lower. In that case it becomes necessary to address order-of-operations issues; if there are both penalties and bonuses to a roll, canny players might apply them so that some of the penalties are “wasted” by the not-below-zero rule.

At least one game I’ve played tried to avoid that problem by tracking negative values, but treating them as zero; the negatives only came into effect when a bonus tried to bring the total back up. The resulting system was mathematically workable, but somewhat hard to explain to new players. “You’re actually at -2, but we play like it’s 0, unless you try to increase it, in which case it’s -2.” Wrapping one’s brain around that while also trying to keep track of the basic game rules was not trivial.

Compare all of that to what happens if we just add to the total needed. In the abstract, that raises absolutely no rules questions. Nor can I think, offhand, of any specific game where it would.

Sometimes a game has to have subtraction. Keep in mind, though, that subtraction has a certain measure of built-in complexity. Where possible, use the mirror-image addition instead; it’s probably equally intuitive, and it will usually avoid creating FAQ entries.

Theory: The Redemption of All-Chat

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It’s an article of faith that all-chat is a cesspool. That reputation is richly deserved. However, it’s not a given that channels for communicating with players on other teams will only ever be used for flinging insults. Global chat channels can work in games designed around them.

Let’s start by laying out the problem to be solved. As a rule, all-chat—that is, a communication mechanism in online games that allows every player in a game or match to talk to each other—is silent at best and hurtful at worst. It says something that one of the first things League of Legends did to curb unpleasantness in its playing community was to set all-chat to “off” by default. Perhaps more remarkable, MMOs now allow players to opt out of their global chat channels. That’s how bad the situation is: an entire genre built on the social aspects of gaming has to let players shut down a primary means of socializing because it’s so awful.

What would it take to make all-chat good? There are two things I can think of:

  1. A good all-chat has a gameplay purpose. Everything in a game should have a gameplay purpose. Social features used to get a pass on that, on the theory that more ways for players to talk to each other automatically made for a better overall experience; time has put the lie to that belief. If all-chat is going to be rescued it will have to earn its place.
  2. All-chat needs players to be reasonable when using it. Making all-chat in its current form central to a game would make that game the least pleasant thing on the internet. For it to be beneficial the messages that go through all-chat must be free of the lowest-common-denominator vitriol so common today.

We can discuss each of those in turn.

The simple part: making all-chat important to the game

The former problem is relatively easy. Opposing parties talk with each other all the time, and there are plenty of ways to bring that into a game. Negotiation, for example, can be a centerpiece of strategic play; Diplomacy is a sufficient proof of that. For a sneakier version of communication, a wargame might include the concept of sending false messages to the enemy, or an economic game could involve market manipulation. Co-ops and team games often demand synchronized effort. Semi co-ops involve lots of talking as players try to balance their personal goals with the group’s needs. There’s no kind of game that can’t be built so as to encourage the players to talk to each other.

The hard part: kinder communication

It’s the latter issue, that of achieving good behavior, that’s the tricky one.

Solution 1: Put the players in an environment where dominating others isn’t the goal.

Keith Burgun recently presented an interesting argument that a game’s thematic elements affect how players view what they’re doing, and by extension how they interact with each other. When players are told in advance that the goal is to have fun together, he explains, they generally act in ways that are consistent with everyone having fun. He cites as an example his very different experiences in games with different art styles; players were nicer to each other in Team Fortress 2 than in Counter-Strike, even though they’re both violent games, because TF2’s cartoonish visuals emphasized that everyone was there to have a good time.

It’s when players are told that the goal is to dominate and harm others, Mr. Burgun argues, that they adopt language to suit. “[W]hile a player is operating in a world of violence, he is more likely to think violently.” (emphasis omitted) Players naturally respond to a game that tells them to hurt the enemy by trying to do so in every way they can, cruel words included.

Mr. Burgun’s theory points toward games that are built from the ground up to send specific messages: that winning doesn’t require achieving power over the other players, that the overall project is fun rather than in-game success, that other players are co-participants in the overall project and should be treated as valued teammates rather than as obstacles. Global chat could work fine in such a context. Without the nudge toward unpleasantness that comes from a violent theme, most players will default to a reasonable mode of conversation. Outliers will hopefully be few, and easily dealt with.

Solution 2: Effective deterrence.

There are games that don’t look at all like Mr. Burgun’s ideal, and yet the conversation manages to be civil. Diplomacy is again my go-to example. It’s a wargame that’s expressly about conquering Europe and eliminating players, but it’s unusual to run into someone who’s openly nasty. By and large people are cordial, even when they’re stabbing each other in the back and overrunning each other’s territories. Why does Diplomacy work?

Here’s my theory: Diplomacy, along with Twilight Imperium, the Game of Thrones board game, and others of their ilk, has the most effective deterrence around. In fact, Diplomacy has a level of deterrence that the criminal law envies! The structure of the game ensures that players who want to be mean are powerfully and reliably discouraged from doing so.

I recognize that that’s a pretty bold claim, so let me back up and discuss this more fully. Deterrence requires at least three things: (1) there is a rule you want people to follow, (2) people know about the rule, and (3) people are more afraid of the consequences of violating the rule than they are eager for the rewards to be had from doing so.

(1) is trivial. (2) is very much not trivial. New laws, highly technical laws, laws about unusual issues–all of these can have a weak deterrent effect simply because people don’t understand what’s forbidden or don’t think to ask whether there’s a law on point. Still, for our purposes we can assume that (2) is easily achieved in the context of rules about “don’t be a jerk on the internet;” everyone’s been told not to be unkind at some point.

(3) is the hard one. This is for a couple of reasons. First, humans discount the threat of punishment by the chance that it won’t happen. Put simply, people aren’t afraid of violating rules when they think they can get away with it. The greater the odds of getting away with it, the weaker the deterrence.

Second, humans aren’t very good at weighing future events against current ones; we tend to discount future harms based on how far away they are. The longer it will take for punishment to happen, the less we tend to care about it.

These foibles make it harder for the criminal law to achieve its deterrent purpose. Every time somebody goes to break a law, they implicitly weigh the consequences against the ideas that (a) they might not get caught and (b) the price of getting caught will be paid at an indeterminate point in the future, whereas the rewards will be here promptly. As the continued existence of crime demonstrates, some people do that calculus and come to a regrettable conclusion.

Diplomacy, on the other hand, creates an environment where those human failings aren’t given much room. The negative consequences of being nasty to other players happen right away and are extremely predictable. Negotiations break off; other players won’t provide the assistance necessary to progress; the game ends in swift defeat. The whole process takes a few hours at most.

As the theory of deterrence predicts, that leads to most Diplomacy players being polite. Tempers can flare and the gameplay is often vicious, but the kind of hateful, profanity-laden speech one finds in online games is absent. It’s remarkable: Diplomacy is basically built around all-chat, but it doesn’t sound like the all-chat we’ve come to know and disdain.

Compare this to games that try to achieve deterrence by having rules in the Terms of Service and banning users who break them. They suffer from the very problems of uncertain and distant punishment that the criminal law does, with the added weakness that banning isn’t nearly as severe as what the criminal law can impose. The sad reputation of all-chat is in part due to the fact that the deterrent effect in these games is very weak indeed.

From Diplomacy and similar examples I think that deterrence can be an effective mechanism for promoting good communication behavior in games. However, strong deterrence isn’t achieved simply by hiring some mods. It requires that the game be designed from the ground up to have a short feedback loop that consistently discourages unkindness.

Build from the right foundation

We’ve learned from sad experience that all-chat isn’t something that can be tossed on top of a game. The results are unsatisfactory, to say the least. However, global chat could be a valuable, positive thing. A game designed with the needs of all-chat in mind from the beginning, tuned in such a way as to bring about friendly communication, could elevate the global channel from cesspool to centerpiece.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Gating Power Behind Mechanical Skill

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A while ago designers at Riot Games suggested that they didn’t intend to make the more mechanically difficult characters stronger. They viewed mechanical difficulty as an opt-in experience for those interested in that particular kind of challenge.

On the other hand, fighting games often make the harder-to-play characters the strongest ones. The Street Fighters series’ Yun and Guilty Gear’s Zato-1 are both top-tier characters–in some versions of those games, dominant characters–who are very difficult to pick up.

I’ve been struggling with which approach is better for a while, and I haven’t come to any firm conclusions. Certainly I find Riot’s position appealing; it’s not obvious that mechanical challenge directly equates to interesting decisions. Furthermore, when the mechanically difficult characters are better they inevitably rise to the top of the tier lists; players will practice as much as they need to to access their power. However, Jay has reminded me previously that getting the mechanics down is part of the fun for some players; they are attaining a kind of mastery that’s important to the game, and perhaps they should be rewarded for it.

Are games with a mechanical component inherently so focused on the physical requirements of playing that we should reward players who are the best at them? Or are mechanics just a buffer between a “real game” that plays out in decisions and a “physical game” that we want to reflect the real game as perfectly as possible?

Theory: Playing Isn’t Working

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Being a good game designer involves having a reasonable familiarity with existing games. Every kind of artist learns by studying the works of others, after all. It’s important to recognize, however, that playing other designers’ games is not the same as doing design work. To make real progress, design time needs to be spent hammering away at one’s own games.

One of the perils of game design, I’ve found, is that research can be an awful lot of fun. Part of how I learn about fighting games is by playing them–and I really like fighting games. So too for wargames, worker-placement games, co-ops, semi co-ops, deckbuilders, and on and on. Learning is fun, because “have fun with this” is the default way to interact with the medium.

So far, so good. The danger is that it can feel natural to flip the equation around, turning “learning is fun” into “fun is learning.” From the latter statement, it’s easy to arrive at “having fun is also doing work.”

Unfortunately, that last position is wrong. Playing other people’s games might help one refine ideas for one’s own games, or be a source of inspiration, or demonstrate a useful technique. It will never, however, bring one’s own games into actual physical existence. It will never playtest them or write their rulebooks or do any of the other things that need doing to make one’s own games happen. Having fun isn’t doing work; it’s taking one away from the tough stuff.

This doesn’t mean that a designer should only work, leaving no time for play. Experiencing other designers’ games can be very valuable. Again, no artist would be expected to practice in a vacuum, ignoring the masterworks of his or her field.

What it does mean is that play time and work-on-own-designs time need to be kept separate. Don’t set aside two hours to work on a project, and then spend them playing Flower “to learn about non-conflictual games.” Play Flower during free time, and put those two hours into creating the next generation of non-conflictual gaming.

It’s often said that ideas aren’t worth much in game design, because lots of people have them; what’s rare and valuable is the follow-through to make an idea into a publishable game. Getting into a “playing = working” mindset is an easy way to end up on the wrong side of the ideas/follow-through divide. Play, definitely play–take it from a lawyer, making some time for not-work is a good idea–but recognize that playing doesn’t move one’s own designs forward, and keep the time for that latter goal sacrosanct.

Theory: Morten Monrad Pedersen on Emotional AIs

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A while ago I talked about stand-in AIs. I mentioned that they need to imitate human players–but I didn’t have much to say about how that could be achieved.

That question was very ably addressed in Mr. Pedersen’s BGG blog post on Monday, which gives some really fascinating suggestions about how deck-building could be used to change an AI giving random responses into an AI that looks like it hates you personally . . . or loves you!

If you haven’t seen it yet, I would urge you to give his post a look. Even if designing solo games isn’t your thing, the ideas have applications elsewhere.

Theory: Don’t Make These Arguments

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Every game that’s going to be played on a tournament basis has to figure out whether it’s going to allow things like intentional draws and people conceding for tactical purposes (e.g., to improve a friend’s standings). Magic went through this process years ago; Warmachine is still hashing it out; Netrunner is just starting to. It’s good that people are thinking about these things, since they’ll come up and it’s good to have a policy in place.

As a lawyer there are certain arguments that come up in these discussions that I find deeply frustrating. They’re based on fundamental misunderstandings of what rules are for and how they work. I don’t have a position on whether any given game should permit players to choose to draw or concede: there are reasonable arguments in both directions. I know, however, that in arguing in favor of those things no one should ever say either of the following.

Unsound argument #1: It’s hard to detect players throwing games, so we should just let them draw or concede openly.

Laws don’t exist because they’re easy to enforce; they exist because they are deemed necessary. That necessity isn’t impacted by the fact that sometimes people get away with things. We’re all mere mortals, and as a result some wrongs will go undetected and unpunished. It doesn’t follow from a difficulty in enforcement that we have to throw the doors open, and let people do whatever they want.

It’s well known that some crimes are hard to prove. Investigating sophisticated crimes—certain forms of fraud, for example—can take years, and even at the end of that process there might not be enough evidence to make a conviction certain. Nor are criminal laws the only ones where enforcement can be a struggle; monitoring compliance with environmental regulations can be a tremendous and not-always-successful undertaking.

Yet, we still have these laws, because we’ve decided as a society that they’re worth the trouble. They allow us to direct people toward good behavior, and to punish those who do harm. Furthermore, punishment isn’t always necessary for a law to work. Laws have a messaging function: they signal what we feel members of society should be doing. Legal scholars have shown that just having a law on the books has a powerful impact on behavior.

This argument, then, puts the priorities wrong way ‘round. The first question is not “will enforcement be hard.” It is “do we feel the rule is necessary.” If it is necessary, then it becomes appropriate to think out what an enforcement mechanism that’s commensurate with the scale of the problem and the resources available would look like. Asking first about the difficulties of enforcement puts the people doing bad things in the driver’s seat.

Now, my suspicion is that a rule against intentional draws and tactical concessions wouldn’t be anywhere near as difficult to enforce as laws against sophisticated fraud. Take it from someone who’s worked in public defender offices: most people aren’t as good at being underhanded as they think they are. They’ll get busted.

I’ve seen people worry that intentional drawing and tactical concessions are unprovable–that it’s impossible to know the player’s mind. Remember, however, that even in court proof beyond a reasonable doubt—the highest standard of proof in the American legal system—is not proof beyond any conceivable doubt. Sure, it’s always possible to concoct a scenario where someone wasn’t throwing a game, but rather was suffering from some incredible combination of bad luck, an uncharacteristic bout of incompetence, and perhaps a curse placed upon them by an evil wizard. It’s more likely that they were just breaking the rule, and if we can put people on death row while there’s conceivable doubt we should be able to disqualify them from a tournament.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument, though, that the rule will be very difficult to enforce, and that many of those who break it will not be caught. (Again, these are very big assumptions.) Even in this case, the rule is still doing work. It sets a standard for good play, and inculcates values in new players coming into the game. The rate of intentional draws and tactical concessions will decrease, even without consistent enforcement, simply because most players aren’t comfortable being thought of as cheaters and don’t do things they’ve been told are cheating.

That last claim might sound unprovable, but look at the first defense raised by players who intentionally draw in games where it’s a grey area when others call them on it. They rely on the text of the rules! It’s not easy for people to toss the rules aside, even when it would be advantageous to do so.

It’s important to note that this is different from the situation where everyone is ignoring a rule. We’ve all heard funny stories about laws that are hundreds of years out-of-date, but are still on the books. An entire community shrugging off a rule and not even bothering to check for violations suggests that it’s become unnecessary; that’s very different from a rule that is still held out as important.

Some rules are difficult to enforce. In practice it’s generally not that difficult, because even smart people often aren’t good at covering their tracks. Either way, though, rules can still be valuable. They shapes the environment, and in doing so promote their intended end even when they cannot guarantee 100% compliance.

Unsound argument #2: “No one can legislate morality.”

I’ve always found this position—which tends to be stated as a single sentence like the one above—a bit hard to parse. So far as I can tell, there are two ideas at play here:

1. Rules of behavior are different from moral rules. Standards of sportsmanship are moral rules, and therefore are not a suitable subject for rules of behavior.
2. People are going to do what they think is right. Trying to stop them is futile.

Both of those arguments are completely unsupportable.

First, rules of behavior and moral rules constantly intersect. Every law that has ever existed has been a rule of behavior, and they all have some kind of moral judgment behind them. We have environmental regulations because we’ve decided that preventing certain kinds of pollution is more important than economic efficiency. We don’t have other environmental regulations because in those areas legislatures concluded that the social gains of efficiency should win out. Laws against assault and murder exist in the first instance, not because of some economic argument about lost productivity, but because human society determined that those things were wrong and bad. There is no law which does not have some kind of moral judgment behind it.

Given that, there’s no reason why a rule against “unsporting” acts is per se invalid. It may be undesirable; a game might benefit from intentional draws and tactical concessions, and that’s fine. This is simply to point out that it’s necessary to have the conversation.

The second version of the argument requires very little discussion. Laws and rules prevent people from doing things they would feel justified in doing every single day. Sometimes people damn the torpedoes, of course, but that only returns us to the previous unsound argument about uncertain enforcement.

Decide on a proper basis

I don’t mind allowing intentional draws and tactical concessions. However, I would never use either of the above arguments to explain why. If you find yourself taking that position in a debate, I would urge you not to use them, either, and if someone uses them against you, don’t be swayed.

Something Completely Different: Star Trek Games Done Right

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Grousing about the old Star Trek CCGs got me thinking about Trek games. Years ago I saw a forum post on Boardgamegeek that superbly captured the issue most of them suffer from. I can’t find the post now, but paraphrased it went something like:

“Star Trek is focused on moral issues. No Trek game ever has been.”

To my mind that’s exactly the problem. All of the Star Trek games I’ve played—and I’ve played quite a lot of them—focus either on completing scientific tasks or on combat. Both of those things feature in Trek, of course, but (at least in the good episodes) they’re window-dressing for some other, more universal dilemma.

There’s been one brief exception, and it’s all the more powerful because it demonstrates how remarkable a Trek game that feels like Trek could be. Back in the SNES days there was a game called Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Starship Bridge Simulator. (That’s a mouthful! Let’s call it ST:SA.) ST:SA was, for the most part, about combat. It played like Wing Commander, X-Wing, or the Freespace games: a flight sim set amongst the stars, where the goal is to shoot down opposing vessels.

However, there was one mission that was absolutely brilliant. I can no longer recall the details, but the player had to deal with a Gorn vessel. The Gorn are not the friendliest of species, and after going through a conversation tree I was dropped into the usual fight. Destroying the Gorn vessel earned me a passing grade on the mission (this was the Starfleet Academy game, the missions were graded)—but not full points.

That was striking. Overwhelmingly the game rewarded fighting prowess. Most gameplay time was spent in battles. What had gone wrong?

I had. I had settled into a routine of “Star Trek-themed space sim,” but the designers still had in mind what Star Trek was all about. With this mission they set out to see whether you were playing according to Trek’s ideals.

After several replays, I realized that it was possible to avoid the fight entirely—but to do so, the player had to communicate with the Gorn in a way that a Gorn would respect. Offering help and being polite made them feel talked down to. Be bombastic, on the other hand, and the Gorn knew they were being taken seriously. If the player took the time to read up on the Gorn and then leveraged that knowledge to find a productive way to communicate, they would go peacefully on their way and the player got a 100% for the mission.

That single mission was the most Star Trek thing in any Star Trek game I’ve ever played. It was about diplomacy. It was about empathy. It was about building a bridge between the player and someone who seemed to be nothing like the player.

Unfortunately, it’s a moment that’s never really been repeated. Even ST:SA went back to dogfighting.

I want to play a Star Trek game that maintains the spirit and sensibility of that mission throughout. A game where creating earns better rewards than breaking, where both competition and cooperation are valued.

That game doesn’t yet exist. I guess I’d better get to work.

Theory: Environment-Influencing Games

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When we previously talked about games with an environmental element, the discussion focused on how the great outdoors could affect play. The game would change based on the weather or the season, with the components taking account of the ambient temperature. However, feedback doesn’t need to be one-way, with the state of the world driving the game. It’s possible for the influence to run in both directions, with the world altering the game—and the game encouraging players to influence the world.

Imagine as an example a civilization-building game. New technologies in this hypothetical game would be based on the actual progress of human knowledge. Traveling to other worlds might be a victory condition, just like it is in the Civilization series—but the technology to accomplish that wouldn’t be available just by spending a certain number of turns researching jet propulsion. It would need to be achieved by actual scientists.

The incentives that would create are, I think, really neat. It’s a game where success involves both good play and finding ways to contribute to NASA’s Journey to Mars program. Winning the game requires getting involved in an amazing real-world feat.

Now, I’m not a rocket scientist and I’m not sure how much of a contribution I could really make to space exploration. However, a game like this needn’t be quite so lofty. In the spirit of thinking globally and acting locally, it could be designed to look for things the player could more readily impact.

Envision something like Batman: Arkham City, except based on the player’s home town. (Or perhaps some other town—a pre-set map of New York City or Paris, or some such.) The overall conditions in the video game version of the city are based on conditions in that city. If the real-world city doesn’t have enough homeless shelters, the video game city doesn’t have enough either, and player won’t be able to cure poverty; a poor EMT dispatching system will limit the help the player can receive in-game. Building a virtual utopia demands building the necessary infrastructure in one’s own community.

Maybe that’s still too big, too hard to see the impact. What about a space-trading game where the amount of space debris is based on the condition of a local park? Less litter in the park means fewer pieces of debris. Getting good at dodging through space is valuable, but to really make money and move up the leaderboards you have to keep your park clean so that you can have lots of ships flying safely on autopilot. Or spread to a new system by taking on a new park. The rarest minerals and most exotic trade goods are in the hardest-to-reach places, so you’ll want to choose one with a lot of litter to be cleaned . . . .

Going down this path involves lots of design problems. From a technical point of view, how would that last game know how much litter is in a park? Coming at it from a design perspective, what fun in-game activity is the player engaged in, so that the whole exercise isn’t just a transparent effort to get people to clean up a public space? (Not that transparent efforts to get people to clean public spaces are bad, but we’re trying to make a game here.)

Nevertheless, I’m really excited to explore this avenue of design. Games are so often viewed as a centripetal force, pulling players into fictional spaces and drawing them away from the greater realm of human accomplishment. I have to think that there’s potential in games that could serve in the opposite role, flinging players out into the world with the goal of making it better.

Theory: Essential Wargames for Designers

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Following up on last Wednesday’s post, here are five wargames that have something interesting to teach designers. Playing any one of these represents time and money well-spent.

Wargames As Exemplars of Board Game Design: Twilight Struggle

Defying the notion that board games and wargames are separate entities, Twilight Struggle is, as of this writing, both the #1 rated board game and the #1 rated wargame on Boardgamegeek. It features a superb marriage of mechanics and theme; complex but intuitive rules that fade into the background during play; rich strategy that continues to be interesting over many plays; and quality components (especially in later printings, when the game’s success allowed for a nicer board). In other words, Twilight Struggle has the things one wants any good board game to have.

Perhaps the great lesson of Twilight Struggle is that the fundamental rules of board game design are more powerful even than we thought. One might reasonably question whether principles often stated in terms of deck-builders and worker-placement games are applicable outside the subgenres that are currently prominent in the market. Twilight Struggle demonstrates that some rules of design really are applicable to the full range of board games, and that adhering to them (or at least, breaking them only consciously and for a specific purpose) consistently leads to good results.

Incomplete Control: Memoir ‘44

Most board games assume away problems of communication and coordination. Cave-people in Stone Age always go where players tell them to go and do what they tell them to do. Pandemic’s medic never has to worry about whether his support staff will fly to the wrong city, or quit their jobs rather than entering a country where a dread disease has taken hold.

What if a designer seeks to capture realistic human behavior, where misunderstandings, mistakes, and outright refusals are part of the experience? It’s time for that designer to look toward wargames. They have been finding ways to introduce uncertainty and the fog of war into the open-information environment of a board game for years.

Memoir ’44 presents one such solution: rather than moving any piece she wishes the player uses randomly-drawn cards to activate units. If no card in hand can move a unit, that unit is conceptually out of control: maybe its radio has been destroyed and messages aren’t getting through, or the soldiers are panicking and won’t come out of their foxholes. It’s an easy-to-learn, elegant system that shows how modeling the human element adds to a design.

Solo Gaming: D-Day at Omaha Beach

Requests for a “solitaire mode” and questions about whether a game works with only a single player are seen in many board games’ forums. That’s not surprising; we’ve all had games we loved that our playgroups weren’t keen on, or been hankering for a round of something long after all opposition has gone to bed. Sometimes it’s nice just to be able to give in to analysis paralysis, really thinking through the complexities of a difficult decision without feeling guilty about making others wait. Being able to play without other people is a valuable feature.

Wargames have long been a hotbed of solo gaming innovation. The tradition can easily be traced back to 1973 with The Fall of Rome; miniatures games were doing it even earlier, and doubtless these are only the tip of an iceberg hidden by the mists of time. For designers who want to tap into this deep vein of knowledge, D-Day at Omaha Beach is considered a shining star, a brilliant game constructed from the ground up as a solo experience.

Learning by Doing: Squad Leader

Squad Leader has a tutorial so good that it’s a worthy game unto itself. Anyone who’s designing a game complex enough to warrant an introductory mode or scenario should play it, just to see what a really good one can do. You can find more discussion about why SL’s tutorial is amazing here.

Asymmetric Multiplayer: Fire in the Lake

Historically many wars have involved nations (players) with widely disparate economic and military capabilities (starting positions), available technologies (powers), and objectives (victory conditions). Wargames have had to model those asymmetric situations, and in the process wargame designers have put a lot of thought into how to do it well. The results go far beyond a certain species being better at propulsion technology, or a character having a really good fireball.

Fire in the Lake is a stand-in here for the entirety of GMT’s COIN series of games—Fire in the Lake, A Distant Plain, Cuba Libre, and Andean Abyss. Each of them is a game about four different factions. The factions all have their own abilities and goals—but every faction is on a team with another, whose interests only partially align. Far from treating asymmetric powers as simply a way to introduce some diversity and keep the game fresh, the COIN series thus uses asymmetries to create vital gameplay dynamics: the tension between the international coalition and Afghanistan’s government in A Distant Plain, or the I-need-you-but-you’re-bad-for-me relationship between the dictatorship and the crime lords in Cuba Libre. Playing these games is an eye-opening experience that shows what asymmetry can really do.

Getting the Goods

I’ve tried, in composing this list, to stick to reasonably available games. Wargames often have short print runs, and their prices can ascend toward the level of collector’s items very quickly. Even when in print they can cost close to $100; low volume means each unit has to carry a high margin, after all.

Nevertheless, I would urge designers to seek these games out. They all offer valuable lessons. What’s more, they’re all good games that deserve a spot on your shelf. You might find them engaging, or frustrating, or informative, or difficult, or any of many other things. You won’t find them to be wastes of your time or money.

Something Completely Different: Weather-Influenced Board Games

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Organic food advocates point out that being able to eat any fruit or vegetable at any time of year is a new phenomenon. For most of history, foods rotated in and out of season, available only when they were ripe. What if games tried a similar dynamic?

Sports, of course, already do this. Baseball is great during the spring, summer, and fall, but is nigh-unplayable in winter. (American) Football is tremendous fun in wet, mucky weather, but all that equipment gets uncomfortable when it’s hot. Hockey, when played outdoors, demands temperatures below freezing.

Yet, there’s no reason why the change of seasons can only influence physical games. A board game, for example, could use temperature-sensitive ink for its board; imagine a survival game whose board only appears when it’s very cold. Having to bundle up to play the game might really help set the mood!

Or perhaps the pieces themselves are temperature-sensitive, so that the game is different depending on when it’s played. A wargame about ancient Greece, for example, might model the changing roles of the era’s soldier-farmers using that technique; when it’s warm the pieces are ready for combat, but as the temperature cools they lose interest in combat and have to return to the home front. There’s a market for grand-scale games like World in Flames; how much more epic would a game about the Peloponnesian War be, if it actually played out over the course of a year?

These games might not even be playable in some places, owing to the local climate, whereas they would often be playable in others. Is that frustrating, or is it awesome? I can see a lot of valid concerns, but I can also imagine great stories coming out of people going to the Grand Canyon or the Great Pyramids in order to get the right environment to play a game.

Certainly, these would be niche products. It’s hard to imagine a game store shutting off the heat so that the players can get down to the sub-zero temperatures that activate Ice Floe Survival’s board, or parents letting their kids mess with the thermostat in order to speed up their game of Real-Time Ancient Greek Conflict. Still, I feel like there are interesting results to be found pushing out the boundaries of “what can influence a game” in this way. Is anybody already doing something like this?