I don’t play Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) any more, but I used to. There were several styles of decks you could play. One featured lots of beefy samurai and plenty of battle actions to beat the hell out of your opponent’s people and Provinces. Another style featured lots of waifish courtiers and duelists and tried hard to prevent these big, dangerous battles from ever occurring while shooting for an Honor Victory. Hey, you could get hurt in there! Yes, I played a Crane deck (the second kind) and the first kind of players always complained that our decks were “non-interactive.” By “interactive,” of course, they meant “hangs around, taking actions that are almost but not really as good as ours, and lets us win that way.”

I won’t defend my Geisha Assassins here, but I’ll say that interaction is a spectrum. On one hand, you have games like Yahtzee that I feel completely safe in labeling noninteractive. What happens on other players’ turns is unimportant to the way you spend your turn. Blackjack is the same way; a human dealer is a formality, and the other players’ hands don’t affect you at all. On the other hand, you have games like Go, Chess, and Poker, all of which would be completely meaningless without the participation of the other players. I’ll give these the label fundamentally interactive.

As it turns out, most games fall somewhere in the middle. Take Scrabble. One of the biggest payoffs is finding great words and plays. Solitaire-style Scrabble makes sense fundamentally, but nobody plays it; in Scrabble, the interaction comes in the form of competition for the limited resources of good letters, bonus tiles, and so on. Or consider the children’s game Sorry!. The way your pawns move around the board is pretty much unaffected by the other players. But sometimes, you can knock one of your opponent’s pieces all the way back to the start. This is probably the most important payoff (hence the facetious name, Sorry!). This isn’t just competition—it’s aggression.

Competition and aggression, together, describe almost all of the interaction in two-player or two-team games. Bridge partnerships compete for the limited resource, tricks; chess players attack the enemy’s pieces and king. Games like Gin Rummy and Lost Cities feature a weird sort of combination where you try to deny your opponent useful discards while looking for an opportunity to strike while your opponent is weak. Games with more than two players can feature entirely different forms of interaction, and that’s the topic for the next article.