Category: Game design theory

The Case Study: Player Powers, Take Two

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Cooperative games often give each player a unique power: Pandemic makes one player a scientist and another a medic, while Forbidden Desert has one player be good at carrying water while another can dig quickly. Yet, it isn’t necessary for a co-op to do so; Space Alert is a great game, and all of its players are on equal footing. I’ve been interested in bringing unique player abilities into Over the Next Dune, and have even put forward some untested ideas, but before sinking a lot of time into it I want to figure out with confidence whether OtND is in the category of games that benefit from such abilities or the category that doesn’t.

When would one want to add unique player powers to a game? I’ve come up with a couple of possibilities:

1. The game benefits from a certain amount of something, but no more. Pandemic would be easy if everybody had the medic’s ability to cure lots of people in a turn. However, letting one person do that is just enough to keep the players above water when the cards flip the wrong way and disease suddenly spreads all over. A single medic serves as a safety valve without making the game trivial.

2. The unique abilities provide very different game experiences. Playing a Dwarf Trollslayer in Warhammer Quest has little in common with playing a Grey Wizard. Providing such distinctive experiences adds a lot of replayability, since getting tired of one of them doesn’t mean you’re tired of the game as a whole.

3. The unique abilities create new, interesting decisions. Playing the water carrier in Forbidden Desert is neat because in addition to the game’s usual decisions you have to decide how important it is to stay close to oases. Figuring out when it’s safe to go help the team and when you should to stay behind collecting water is tricky. The unique power is valuable in part because it brings that interesting decision to the table.

Looking at that list, I’m struck by the fact that it’s mostly about the powers rather than the game. Do the abilities provide different experiences? Do they create new decisions? It depends on what the abilities are!

We could come at the problem from the other direction. When would one not want unique player powers in a game?

1. Giving players unique capabilities would undermine the game’s mechanics. Diplomacy is a classic game of cooperation (and competition). It’s a wargame where the players’ strengths start out relatively even, so to make progress you have to cut deals. If the players had special abilities they could rely on it might make negotiation less important–and the negotiation is the reason to play.

2. The game is at a complexity limit. Space Alert is played in real-time on a 10-minute clock. Players make mistakes and overlook things, even without having to track the effects of special powers. If people were also trying to manage unique abilities the game could tip from “hilarious barely-controlled chaos” into “impossible and frustrating.”

Over the Next Dune certainly isn’t so complicated that it can’t bear the weight of unique abilities. I’m less certain whether player powers would undermine the game’s central challenge of tricking the searchers. On the one hand, the more tools the players have the less likely they are to take the risk of getting close to searchers to pull them around. On the other hand, it seems like abilities could be created that would increase rather than detract from engagement with the searcher-tricking mechanic.

The best way to resolve that uncertainty is with some testing. How about this as a starting point:

Pop a Tire: If this player token is adjacent to one or more searchers at the start of the Sneak Phase, that searcher is affected by terrain during the next Search Phase. (Any time during the next Search Phase that searcher’s movement would cause it to enter one or more squares with terrain in them, the searcher must expend two squares of movement instead of one. If it does not have enough movement remaining to expend two squares of movement, it stops moving.)

My thought is that this creates a new decision (whether and when to slow down a searcher) and a potentially different game experience (seeking out searchers instead of avoiding them), without adding complexity (players will already know the terrain rules) or undermining the central mechanic (since it increases rather than decreases the mechanic’s use during the game). I also like that, as noted in the first iteration of this ability, it doesn’t empower one player; rather, it helps a player assist the others.

That’s one power, but there can be five players in a game of Over the Next Dune. I’ll be back with more on Monday.

Theory & The Case Study: Gates in Over the Next Dune

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I’ve been considering whether to try out gated player abilities in Over the Next Dune. Gating player capabilities would be a substantial change, and unusual for a cooperative game. On the other hand, gates are a commonly-used, proven mechanic. It’s not a trivial decision.

Let’s start at (what I think is) the beginning. Why would one ever use a gate, instead of just letting players deploy their capabilities whenever they want? I can see two reasons:

1. The gate leads to interesting decisions. Mark Rosewater likes to say that “restrictions breed creativity.” Limiting the player’s access to a capability forces the player to think about when to use it, and to find alternative solutions when the capability isn’t available or shouldn’t be employed.

As a quick example, think about Barrier in League of Legends: a protective shield that isn’t available for a few minutes after being used. Since access to the Barrier is limited, players have to make tough decisions about precisely when it will do the most good. They also have to find ways to conserve the Barrier for those key moments, and to protect themselves when the Barrier is “on cooldown.” If players could just throw up the Barrier all the time, those decisions would be lost–and no other decisions would appear to replace them.

2. The gate prevents an ability from dominating gameplay. In some ways this is the inverse of the previous rule: the gate is in place because unlimited use of a player ability makes the game less interesting. RPGs often use gates in this way; powerful abilities would make the early game trivial, so players can’t access them until later.

(There’s also a third reason–to help monetize the game. However, that opens up a can of worms that I’m not looking to address right now.)

Those both seem like good reasons to include gates. Yet, they aren’t universal in cooperative games. Pandemic‘s Scientist doesn’t need to do anything to be able to cure a disease with four cards instead of five; that ability is always “on.” Shadows Over Camelot‘s Sir Bedivere can trade cards in for new ones without earning the privilege. Clearly, gates aren’t for every power or every game.

What considerations, then, militate against gating player powers? Ironically, I find it much easier to think of why a designer would want to limit powers than why the designer wouldn’t. Perhaps that says something about me. 🙂 Here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. The game is unplayable when the ability is not available. Most RPGs don’t limit your capacity to walk around. In fact, I’m not aware of any at all that do. That’s not surprising, because if the player can’t move around the world in an RPG the player can’t do anything at all. Limiting walking would tend to destroy people’s ability to play the game.

2. The game needs something, and the ability provides it best when it is constantly available. League of Legends needs a way to ensure that games move toward their conclusions. A big part of ending a game of League is damage output; players and teams need damage to destroy the opposing team’s defenses and ultimately the enemy base. Thus, the game needs to ensure that teams have reliable access to damage output. If no team can damage objectives, the game cannot progress (setting aside really grindy strategies like letting minions do all the pushing–let’s not go down this road).

League’s need for guaranteed damage is met by “auto-attacks.” Every character can punch, swing a sword, fire arrows, or has some other freely available mechanism for inflicting damage. Since they’re costless, auto-attacks guarantee that the game cannot stall completely. Regardless of the team composition or overall situation, both teams have the theoretical ability to bring down objectives and end the game.

3. You want to encourage a behavior. If players should be doing something in a game, designers can incentivize it by letting players do it no strings attached. Ikaruga, for example, is a “bullet hell” game in which the player(s) can switch colors to absorb enemy fire. The color-switching mechanic made the game an instant classic. Having no limits on switching colors was a good design move, because it encouraged players to try the mechanic out early (desirable because color-switching was the game’s innovative feature) and to do it often thereafter (important because it helped players progress and kept them hooked).

So, two reasons to use gates and three not to. What do they mean for OtND?

To date players have three capabilities in the game: moving, tricking searchers, and rescuing other players. Moving should not be gated. The game is unplayable if players can’t get around the board.

Tricking searchers also should not be gated. It is, at least arguably, the most interesting aspect of the game. Keeping it freely available encourages players to interact with this important mechanic.

Rescuing is already gated by the need for several players to work together. That proved necessary to stop rescuing from dominating gameplay. However, the current limitations appear sufficient; I don’t think more are needed.

What about additional player abilities, then? Things like Pandemic’s Scientist and Shadows’ Sir Bedivere, that are outside the core rules of the game? Do they need to be gated? Should they exist in OtND at all? Let’s take that up next time.

The Case Study & Theory: Gates

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Thinking about how to add on to Over the Next Dune raises the question of whether and how to gate player powers. Of course, that begs the question of what a “gate” is. 😉 To avoid definitional confusion, let’s hammer that out.

A gate is something that controls a player’s access to in-game capabilities. The classic example is mana, as seen in League of Legends or the Final Fantasy games. A player uses up mana each time he or she employs a special ability, and when the mana is gone the player cannot use special abilities until it recharges. Ammunition is also a gate; it limits how much the player can use a certain weapon before having to switch or seek out more ammo.

Gates do not have to be numbers. Many role-playing games, for example, control players’ power via progress through the storyline. As the player explores new areas, meets new people, and learns new things, the player gets new capabilities.

Gates can go one way or bi-directional. One-way gates result in permanent changes. For example, in Burnout Paradise access to new cars is generally gated by completing races. Once you complete the race associated with a car, you have access to that car forever. Mana and ammunition are usually bi-directional gates; you can run out and lose access to a power, but replenishing the resource takes you back through the gate and enables you to use it again.

I believe that that’s a reasonably complete discussion of what gates are. They also have some properties that aren’t definitional but that I feel are worth putting forward:

Gates can be thought of in either direction. This is kind of a weird one, and it’s usually not relevant, but it can be useful. All gates can be described as having something or not having the opposite. For example, in Battletech firing weapons builds up heat. You can think of heat as the gate (too much is bad) or coolness as the gate (not enough is bad). It doesn’t matter, from a theoretical perspective, which approach you take.

Admittedly, this can get kind of silly. You could say that “lack of mana” is the gate, and that a player can use a certain ability because his or her lack of mana has been kept below a certain threshold. It’s a lot easier, though, to say that the player has enough mana.

Basically, this is like flipping an equation to put the variable you’re solving for on the left. It doesn’t really change anything, but if you’re accustomed to a certain presentation it might help you understand what’s going on.

Out-of-game gates are ineffective. Experience has shown that players cannot be limited by resources outside the rules of the game. Money and physical difficulty are two examples of out-of-game gates which have been proven not to work.

Money. If your game is popular, you will have a subset of players who will spend whatever they need to to get a competitive advantage. Magic: the Gathering was originally designed to use card rarity as a gate, on the thinking that players would be limited by their collections. Over time it became clear that tournament players assembled complete collections regardless of the cost. Magic still uses rarity for various design purposes, but not to balance constructed-deck tournament play.

Physical difficulty. It does not matter how difficult a physical task is; if it will help players win, some of them will put in the necessary time to be able to do it reliably. Fighting games often use precise timing as a gate, demanding that players time their moves to 1/60th of a second in order to get the longest combos and the most damage. Many, many players have practiced enough to hit those 1/60th of a second windows routinely.

From here we need to think about whether OtND should use gates at all. I’ll get into that next time.

Theory: PSA for New Warmachine and Hordes Players

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So you’ve decided to try Warmachine or Hordes. Great! They’re excellent games. And you’ve looked through some of the books and you’ve decided to try a Cygnar gunline. All ranged attacks, all the time. You’ll annihilate them before they even get close! Right!?

Wrong. This is completely wrong. The gunline will not work–and there are solid game design reasons why.

Imagine a universe where a gunline can realistically plan to wipe the opponent’s army from the board before it can get into close combat. In that universe, a close combat-focused army (like, say, many of the steampunk and fantasy armies in WarmaHordes) is unusable. You’re playing Rock, and they’ve got a lot of Scissors. They lose every time–and that kind of lopsided game is boring.

What’s more, if gunlines are successful scenario-based play is pretty much out the window. Experience has demonstrated that all-ranged armies do not move forward. After all, moving forward makes them more vulnerable to being engaged in close combat! Hence, all-ranged armies tend not to push into scenario zones, or capture flags, or otherwise take advantage of all the board’s real estate. They are resistant to incentives to maneuver, and in the process an important part of the game is lost.

Privateer Press knows that Warmachine and Hordes will suffer if gunlines work. As a result, the games are balanced so that they won’t. You must have a close combat aspect to your army, because if the opponent wants to, he or she will be able to get to you.

Isn’t it a cost to have gunlines be weak in this way? Why should all-ranged armies suffer so that close combat can function? It’s because gunlines shut out so many other options and considerations. Scenario-win armies don’t work because the gunline just eradicates them. Close combat units are irrelevant because they get swept off the board without doing anything. Even setting up the board gets reduced to “where are the clear fields of fire.” Unworkable gunlines are the price we pay to keep Warmachine and Hordes interesting.

The gunline doesn’t work. It has never worked. There is no reason to think it will ever work. Please, please, don’t spend your money on one. Spend it on Warmachine and Hordes, they’re great games! But buy a unit of Sword Knights or a Centurion to go along with your Gun Mages.

Theory: *Stand-In* and Puzzle Pure Co-Ops

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I wasn’t really satisfied with the terminology I used to discuss the types of pure co-ops in the previous post. “Simulation” sounded like it related to the theme of the game. Using that word was going to lead to definitional confusion; it needed to be changed.

I’ve revised the post to use “stand-in” instead of “simulation.” The new term should be clearer that the distinction is between co-ops whose AI imitates a human player and those whose AI does not.

In addition, I’ve added some more examples and cleaned up some wording. It’s an all-around better post now.

If you checked it out before, please take another look and let me know what you think of the changes. If you haven’t yet, try it on for size.

Theory: Simulation and Puzzle Pure Co-Ops

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It’s an article of faith that a great opponent makes a game more fun. A good pure co-op game, then, needs a good AI foe to challenge the players. Designing that opponent requires, first and foremost, deciding what kind of co-op you’re creating: a stand-in or a puzzle. Mashing elements from both types together leads to trouble.

A stand-in challenges the players by imitating a living opponent. It tries to do what a human would do in a given situation. In essence, it simulates the experience of having a human sitting across the table (or on the other side of the internet connection) playing against you.

A puzzle challenges the players by presenting a problem for them to solve. It is not concerned with doing as a real person would do; its only goal is to provide an interesting dilemma, and it acts in whatever way the designer thinks will best achieve that. Puzzles may (should?) have a theme, and they may be good simulations of that theme, but they aren’t trying to simulate an opposing player.

Which category a game falls into has a huge impact on what kind of AI is appropriate. Stand-in AIs need capacities that puzzle AIs don’t. A human will respond to his or her opponent’s actions; to feel “real,” the stand-in needs to be able to do the same. It has to be able to find out what the players are doing, determine what an appropriate response might be, and implement that response.

Puzzles, by contrast, don’t have to care what the players are doing. In fact, they don’t have to do any specific thing so long as they’re interesting. The central question is what the game needs, not how a person would behave, and the AI needs only those capabilities relevant to the game’s particular answer.

Either choice can lead to a great game. Pandemic and Forbidden Desert, for example, are both great puzzles. The diseases to cure in Pandemic and the sandstorm to dig through in Forbidden Desert don’t act like human opponents–but why would they? Diseases and sandstorms aren’t sapient, and it would be weird if they could respond to the players’ actions. Instead they operate in ways that are both thematic for the natural forces they represent and interesting in play. For puzzles, that’s the gold standard.

As an example of a great stand-in I always go back to the Reaper Bot and Zeus Bot for the original Quake. (Wow. I’ve been playing FPS games for a long time.) At a time when a lot of people were on dial-up and internet play with other humans was a lag-filled affair, the Reaper and Zeus Bots were striking for their ability to navigate without bumping into walls, good aim, and consistent connection. Many real players, fighting against 300-500ms pings, couldn’t offer those things. The bots out-humaned the humans!

Designers run into trouble, however, when they mix the two categories. One sees this a lot with “cheating” computer game AIs (which are usually intended for solo play rather than co-op, but the issues involved are comparable). They look like stand-ins but are actually puzzles, and as a result they often end up being unsatisfactory.

For example, players often express frustration with the AI in the Civilization series of games. Civ’s AI promises stand-ins; the player controls one civilization and the others are guided by an AI that has each civilization pursue its own ends–just like they would if humans were guiding them. The goal is to beat the other civilizations, eliminating or outscoring each as though they were separately controlled by human players. The AI-driven civilizations sometimes cooperate and sometimes attack each other, imitating what humans do. It looks like a stand-in, it quacks like a stand-in . . .

. . . but it’s not a stand-in, and at least anecdotally it ends up irking many players as a result. Civ’s AI doesn’t get much smarter as the difficulty level goes up; it just gets more and more resources, far outstripping what the human player receives. Those resources enable the AI to challenge a skilled player, but they undermine the simulation; no human can do the things a high-difficulty AI can do. Ultimately the game becomes a puzzle in which the player must find optimal moves that will allow him or her to keep up with the AIs’ lead in technology and production. Players choose a higher difficulty level looking for a simulation testing their diplomatic ability and battlefield tactics, instead find an optimization problem testing their command of the math behind the game, and walk away aggravated.

(To be fair, some players greatly enjoy the higher difficulty levels. However, they’re usually knowledgeable about the game, know they’re in for an optimization problem, and are specifically seeking that experience.)

Civilization demonstrates–-has in fact been demonstrating for years–-that a really tasty apple is not a substitute for an orange. When designing a pure co-op, follow in the mold of Pandemic, Forbidden Island, and Quake’s excellent bots by figuring out whether you need a puzzle or a stand-in and then delivering fully on that experience. Slipping elements of one into the other is apt to confuse the game’s message and frustrate players.

Pure Co-Op Games Are . . . Well, Games (a Response to Jake Thornton)

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A few days ago Jake Thornton posted some comments on why he doesn’t like “Pure Co-op” games. Reading it, I was surprised to find myself disagreeing. Mr. Thornton is a great designer, but I think he’s off the mark in his essay. He’s conflated unaddressed design problems with flaws inherent to the genre.

Before going on, I want to emphasize that I have enormous respect for Mr. Thornton. I’ve been playing his games for years, and they’ve always been great fun. It’s sometimes happened that I’ve had to say to excellent lawyers “I think you’re wrong this time;” here as in those instances, I’m only taking issue with the argument, not with the person.

Mr. Thornton’s post is linked above, but in summary he feels that pure co-op games (which he defines as games where “all players on one side are working towards exactly the same goal and play as a group. Usually they either win or lose collectively, ie all win or all lose”) are like group projects in school: either you’re carrying the weight for others, or a (possibly) more knowledgeable person is telling you what to do. Since neither dragging freeloaders along nor being puppeted about are much fun, he finds this sort of game unsatisfactory.

These problems arise, Mr. Thornton argues, because a game requires that the players be in competition. So long as the players are competing, everyone can–ironically–get along. When the players aren’t competing, he feels, power dynamics emerge and people start to feel badly.

Pure co-op board games only work, Mr. Thornton argues, as enablers for “social get-togethers.” Instead of watching the ballgame and chatting, the group plays a cooperative board game and chats. Although he doesn’t say it explicitly, my impression is that he feels pure co-ops in this setting avoid the problems that normally frustrate him by making the outcome unimportant. Good players don’t feel the need to carry weight and no one gives the weaker players orders, simply because no one really cares about winning.

As is so often the case, the problem here stems from a definitional issue. Mr. Thornton reads the definition of game as meaning “two or more players, all of whom are competing with all the others.” That isn’t required by the definition he uses (“a competitive activity involving skill, chance or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules”), and it seems like a flawed perspective from the outset. He excludes anything involving teams, such as most professional sports, from being “games!” Sometimes having a correct definition involves slaying sacred cows–witness the fate of Pluto–but the position that football and baseball can’t even be considered games isn’t tenable.

The faulty definition leads, predictably, to a faulty result: games with teams, pure co-op games included, aren’t games. Mr. Thornton views that as reasonable because in his experience pure co-ops aren’t fun. However, there’s an alternative explanation which doesn’t require adopting an extreme definition of “game:” the pure co-op games he has played may simply have been flawed.

It’s no secret that cooperative games can have a power dynamic between the players, and that that dynamic can be unpleasant. However, game designers have been grappling with that problem for some time, and have found ways to deal with it. In fact, they’ve found so many solutions that, as you can see from the linked posts, there’s dispute about which ones are best! That some games haven’t implemented good solutions doesn’t require that they be excluded from the definition of “game.”

Mr. Thornton isn’t obliged to like pure co-ops. However, I’d like to see him recognize the game design challenges they pose, and take on those challenges in a serious way. (Currently he feels that “Pure Co-op is actually relatively easy to design once you have everything else in place,” which is only sustainable because he concludes that pure co-ops aren’t really games and don’t need to be rigorous.) He makes great games, and I’d play a pure co-op he designed to tackle these issues in a heartbeat.

Concept, the Concept behind it, and the Concept of Game Design

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Over the weekend I had the opportunity to try Concept. I’ll be frank: it didn’t grab me at first. However, as time has gone on I’ve started to appreciate it more and more. It’s really forced me to think in detail about the boundaries of what counts as a game.

Concept is a lot different from most other games; it’s sort of like Pictionary with pre-set images. There is a board with pictures, and on your turn you mark various pictures to try to get the other players to guess a word or phrase from a card. For example, at one point a teammate and I had “Mount Rushmore;” we marked a picture with a rock, a picture with an arrow that we hoped would denote “tall,” and put four markers next to a picture of people in historical garb. (We also put down lots of other markers, which proved to be incredibly confusing to the group and generally a bad idea. 😉 ) Those who had played before felt that the scoring system in the game didn’t add much to the experience, so we played without keeping track of who was winning; the only goal was to communicate as effectively as possible.

Immediately after playing I found the game was interesting, but kind of odd. Another player commented that it was more of an activity than a game, and I felt like that was about right. There was a task, and when you completed it you moved on. A fascinating exercise–expressing “heritage” with pictures was not easy–but not a game.

Yet, when I compare Concept to the rules for what-is-a-game, I find it meets all of them. Played for fun? Check. Rules? Nothing complicated, but they’re there. We played without scoring, but measuring victory isn’t a requirement for a game; think about SimCity, or some variations of Minecraft, or 99% of all role-playing games.

Moreover, of all the games I played over the weekend Concept is the one I keep thinking about. It was undeniably interesting, with tough decisions and a lot of thought involved. (Oh man, “heritage.” Don’t get me started.) Concept was also by far the newest experience. One of my tests for “should I buy this game” is “do I already own something that provides similar gameplay;” I don’t have anything on my shelf that’s like Concept.

So why was I cold on it at first? I think it was because I went in expecting . . . well, something that felt like other games. What I got was a really offbeat experience. It wasn’t until I had time to sit and think about Concept that I realized that (a) there’s a game there and (b) for all that it threw me off-balance, I greatly enjoyed it.

At this point, I think the best word for Concept is “refreshing.” Being so different from other games while still being a game and pushing the emotional and intellectual buttons games do is an accomplishment. It renews my faith in game design as a field; it doesn’t have to narrow down to a few valid designs, but can instead open up to many different experiences that all work.

When I taught school, seeing really great teachers made me want to teach like them. As an attorney, watching great lawyers work inspires me to litigate the way they do. In game design, Concept makes me want to try to build something that extends the boundaries of games the way it does. If you’re interested in the field, I would urge you to check it out; I think you’ll find it as interesting as I do.

Something Completely Different: Throwing Dice at Dad’s Plastic Army Men

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Not every game needs to be complicated. I recently saw a discussion of simple, off-the-cuff rules for miniatures, and it reminded me of a game I used to play with my father. Here’s how it worked:

1. Grab some plastic army men. Players should probably have the same number–about eight is good.
2. Go outside. Both players can build a little fortress out of whatever stuff is around, or one player can build a fortress and the other player can be the attacker (in which case the attacker gets to make some shallow ditches to serve as trenches, set up low walls, and otherwise prepare the terrain).
3. Put your army men in sensible places, pretty close to each other–there shouldn’t be more than a couple yards of “no man’s land” between the players’ armies. Feel free to have your army men take cover in your fortress or in the terrain, but you’re not allowed to completely hide army men from your opponent and you’re not allowed to wedge your army men in or otherwise make it unnaturally hard for them to fall over.
4. Take turns throwing a die–just a regular six-sided die from a board game–at the opponent’s army men. You have to throw from close to one of your soldiers, so positioning matters. If you knock down or flip over an opponent’s army man, that guy is out. If you just jostle an army man but it stays upright, the army man can keep fighting.
5. Players have to move way out of the way during the opponent’s turn, so that no one gets hit by the die. This is a very safe game so long as everyone is reasonable about it; be reasonable by moving aside so that the die can’t hit you if it bounces (or if the opponent just misses).
6. During your turn you can move one of your army men the length of a short stick–maybe six inches. You can use a stick from outside, or if you cut the army men off sprues you can use a sprue. It doesn’t matter so long as both players have the same length stick. (Be careful with the sticks, of course.)

That was it. In fact, that’s enormously more rules than my father and I actually had; we just kind of figured things out as we went. It seemed logical that army men should be able to move, so we grabbed some plastic sprues from the army man set and used them to measure how far they could go. The game wasn’t fun when army men were braced and impossible to knock down, so we said that that wasn’t legal. We never wrote the rules of this game down; the listing above is the first time they’ve been recorded in any kind of formal way (at least by me–I’m sure other people have played similar games).

And you know what else? That game was super fun! It was very thematic (which wasn’t the word I used when I was eleven, but you get the idea). Good tactics were important, but there were also elements of physical skill and luck that allowed for comebacks after a tactical mistake. (Plus, throwing things has an entertainment value all its own.) Building the fortresses was great; we played on a rocky beach that had lots of building materials.

I’d like to say I have a big point about game design to make with this post. Maybe there is something here about how understanding game design in a rule-driven way doesn’t have to lead to ossification of the art, or how the fun of building something in the context of a game can extend to building the game itself. If I’m being honest, though, my real motivation was to say this:

Play outside with your kids. They’ll treasure those memories. I know I do.

Something Completely Different: Making Competing Players Powerful – Rules

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How can a two-player competitive game reinforce both players’ feelings of might and prowess, where the game is played synchronously in the real world?

There aren’t a lot of competitive games that are designed so that all of the players feel good at the same time. Usually it’s exactly the opposite: at any given moment someone is losing, knows it, and feels lousy. Miniatures games are no exception; since everything is (usually) right there on the table, it’s easy to see when you have taken greater losses than your opponent or are further away from an objective.

Since minis games weren’t helping me find rules germane to the issue, I ranged around a bit. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Players should “fail forward.”

This one comes from role-playing games. In essence, it says that failure should not mean that the player’s turn just ends in defeat. Instead, something interesting should happen.

Knowing a little role-playing game history might help clarify how this rule works in practice. (It’s also interesting in its own right.) Dungeons & Dragons, arguably the first major role-playing game as we’ve come to think of the term, was designed by wargamers. Those designers modeled D&D’s combat on the wargames they were familiar with: dice were used to model the uncertainties of combat, with a good result meaning you succeeded in hitting the target and a poor result meaning failure. This system is used even by game designers with military experience, so I assume that it’s at least a reasonable way to model people fighting.

Over time, however, problems revealed themselves. When playing a wargame, one normally controls many pieces. A single piece’s bad roll is just one part of a larger turn, so even when the dice go against you it’s still possible to have a satisfying turn overall. By contrast, in role-playing games the player usually controls a single character who makes a single roll in a turn. If that roll comes up snake eyes, that’s it–the turn ends on a down note.

Failing forward is one solution to that issue. (It also relates to other role-playing game design issues, to say nothing of the term’s use in self-help books and other arenas; I’m focusing on this particular application of the idea.) In essence, it says that failure should make things more interesting instead of just being a stopping point. The player doesn’t get what he or she wanted, but does get something else: plot advancement.

So, for example, in D&D (or at least, some versions of D&D) a player might try to swing a sword at a monster in order to slay it. If the player fails to slay the monster, that’s it; the player’s turn is over. By contrast, in a fail-forward model the player might fail to slay the monster–and be carried back to the monster’s lair. That means a whole new set of opportunities and options: maybe the player will have another go at fighting the monster, or sneak away, or find out that the monster’s lair is full of the monster’s artwork and the monster is actually a sentient being. Instead of the player’s turn just crashing to a halt with failure, the player is left with new possibilities to consider while waiting for his or her next chance to act.

Failing forward doesn’t mean failure is impossible or that players are choosing between a menu of good options. It just takes some of the sting out. The player missed the mark this time, but something interesting still happened and so the player can focus on that instead of stewing over the failure.

2. The game should involve building something the player can take pride in.

Agricola is a controversial game, which is surprising for a farming simulation with tried-and-true mechanics. A lot of people find the theme dull, or don’t like the “Euro” design sensibility wherein much of the game boils down to constructing an economic engine. I can’t say those criticisms are unfair–I’m not, I have to admit, all that interested in agriculture myself–but Agricola is nevertheless one of my favorite games. That’s for one simple reason: each and every time I play, I get a sense of accomplishment from building my little farm even if I lose.

I see the same dynamic play out in the Civilization series of video games, Minecraft, even building toys like lego. It’s fun to make something. Creating is enjoyable even if you lose, or even if the game is such that winning and losing aren’t meaningful concepts. Seeing something neat that’s new in the world, and being able to say “I did that,” is for many people compelling regardless of the context in which it occurs.

Building doesn’t have to be linear or unopposed; Civilization, Minecraft, and many other games involve building in an environment of challenge with the possibility of setbacks. Overcoming those obstacles can be another part of the fun, and can even give character to one’s result. The key is the sense of accomplishment; players need to be able to take pride in the results of their efforts, even if those efforts don’t result in winning.

That last sentence deserves a little more emphasis. It’s critical that the players end up with something they can take pride in. Agricola’s building is fun because your farm is a nice, productive spot even if it doesn’t earn the most points. Games where the building is just another way to keep score–where one can end the game with a useless half-constructed building, or a spaceship that could never fly–don’t provide this kind of satisfaction.

So what does all this mean?

I’ll be honest: I’m not quite sure yet how rules from role-playing games and a farming simulation apply to a miniatures wargame. However, I feel like these rules are already pushing in interesting directions. This game is supposed to play out a story, and failing forward involves plot advancement; doesn’t that suggest a very different kind of minis game? One where success is measured, not in the number of opposing units destroyed, but in telling a story? Where does that story come from? How does the building factor in? What are the players building? A thing? Character competence? The story themselves? How is the building handled so that players can enjoy the result even when they lose?

At the risk of being unfair, I’m going to leave those questions hanging for a little while: on Friday I’ll have the results for the latest round of Over the Next Dune’s playtesting.