An interesting article, one that you should read, came out this morning on Gone Gaming. It talks about the difference between a winner-take-all game (which most Euro-style games are) and games that include a margin of victory—either with score thresholds for an exceptional win (like Cribbage or Backgammon), or with a payout proportional to the magnitude of the victory, like in limit Poker.

Thinking about this got me wondering about why what you call a victory makes a difference at all—especially when no money is involved! The answer, I think, is that with or without money, every game is played for some kind of stakes, implicit or explicit.

Implicit stakes might include “honor,” “bragging rights,” or the acknowledgement from opponents that one is a skilled player. They can be different from player to player within the same game. Some players just want to come out on top—others want to win big, or to reach a specific score, or crush a specific other player whether or not they win themselves. You don’t even necessarily need to win the game to win an implicit stake; to use a metaphor from sports betting, you just need to “beat the spread.” For instance, if I sit down to a new board game and manage to do pretty well against experienced players—well enough that they regarded me as a serious contender in the game—I consider that a success, a validation of my general understanding of games, even though I lost. Likewise, if I sit down in a chess game against a serious club player (400 points better or whatever) and put up a good fight, I’ll probably feel good about the game even if I lose.

Explicit stakes most often involve money, but might also be explicit honorific awards—the championship title in a tournament, say. Explicit stakes have some very different properties from implicit stakes. First, an explicit stake is much more likely to be worth a similar amount to different players. I might really want to win the Settlers of Catan game while you don’t care, but assuming we are from reasonably similar walks of life, $20 means the same thing to both of us. I think that this is why Poker plays so poorly when there is no money on the table: without the explicit cash to normalize the stakes, players often feel like they have nothing to lose, and important aspects of the game like bluffing and risk management become meaningless. Second, explicit stakes make the game much more like to end up as a zero-sum game. Two players can both feel good about a well-played Chess or Go game, but only one person can win a title or trophy, and for every dollar I lose at Poker, someone else wins one.

The extra complicating factor in all of this, of course, is that hope that you get enough enjoyment from the play of the game or the social atmosphere that even if you lose whatever stakes you were playing for, you feel the time was well spent.

The topic for today and Thursday is a discussion of the many ways games can end, and some of their ramifications. I intend to talk more about multiplayer games than two-player games, because I think the “end conditions” for two-player games. It’s hard to distinguish a Race from Elimination, for example. But if there are interesting points to be made, it may turn this series even longer.

Each one of these might be thought of as a mini-Pattern relating to a specific part of the game. And they’re important for the same reason that the end of a book or movie is important: you want the tension building to a climax, you don’t want to wait around for a foregone conclusion or think “whoa! it’s over?”

Elimination: I’ve already talked about this pattern, which is generally out of favor in Euro-style games but definitely still alive and well. Most of these games feature either a momentum-building effect (hotels in Monopoly, continent and card bonuses in Risk) or else attrition (Perudo and many others); without one of these factors, the game might drag on without end.

Dominance: This pattern looks similar to Elimination, but victory is achieved when one player controls a certain fraction of the available resources, instead of having to eliminate all opponents. At the point Diplomacy calls the game by Dominance, the dominant player could probably brute-force a victory even against all remaining players. By contrast, in A Game of Thrones, the winning player has to be doing well, but the Dominance victory threshold is well short of the level where the winner could fight off a concerted attack by all opponents.

Race: The winner is the first person to achieve a certain condition. This might be a fixed number of victory points (Catan, Blue Moon City) or to reach a certain goal or destination (Elfenland or even Sorry!). In a common extension of this pattern, the turn is finished up to make sure that all players have the same opportunities. For example, Power Grid is won when a player reaches 21 cities, but if more than one player reaches this number in the same turn, it’s won by the player who has the most. (This is very possible.) Ties are broken, in this case, by the amount of game currency remaining.

Fixed Turns: The game lasts for a predetermined number of turns. The turns may be tracked explicitly, as in El Grande or Risk: Godstorm, or it may be implicit, such as in Carcassone (ends when all the tiles are gone). One advantage of this pattern is that it gives the designer very tight control over the flow and pacing of the game. (And the players won’t be surprised by the length of the game.) The corresponding disadvantage is that the end of the game can be anticlimactic, since its approach is seen all game.

X Through the Deck: This variant of Fixed Turns applies only to card games. You play until the deck is exhausted, then reshuffle it and begin again; the game ends when this has happened some number of times. The world’s best bean-oriented game, Bohnanza, uses this mechanic, and I have used for a couple of my own games as well.

Teaser: The titles for next time include Total Points, Secondary Condition, Variable Fixed Turns, Exhausted Moves, Hybrid, and Unlimited.

Discussion point: Am I on track to miss something? Let me know so I can look good by including it next time. Also, are there any neat intricacies about two-player games that I’ve missed?

It’s like bonus day! Four mini-essays, in response to the excellent comments to Tuesday’s article here.
To Fuleng, who indicated displeasure with secret scoring in Knizia games: Secret scoring does seem to be out of line, in particular, with Knizia’s intent for Tigris and Euphrates, which, (I hope!), was to be a deep and intensely strategic game. Perhaps my opinion of the mechanic has been colored by too much Puerto Rico. (Is there such a thing?) Taj Mahal certainly copes well without it. And your point about the penalty for interruptions is well-taken, because it’s everyone who suffers. El Grande is particularly nasty in this regard, because while the number of soldiers you put into the Castillo is public, they’re kept hidden once there.

To John, who commented that Settlers seems to have a “secret scoring” feel to it: You’re right in that a lot of players don’t tend to watch what others have in their hands even though it matters a lot towards opponents’ threat to win. Part of the reason might be that in the beginning of the game, it’s not as big of a deal unless you are directly competing for expansion space with a particular opponent. It might be a neat advanced strategy to count how many resources, if they were the ideal ones, a given opponent would need to reach 10 VP, and use that as an internal victory meter.Of course, you would then need to adjust for things like a excess of unneeded resources, other players’ willingness to trade, the presence of ports, and so on.

To Nevin, who expressed discontent with scoring rules that “string along” players who have little chance of actually winning: This business of how much an early lead should help later play is certainly a difficult one from a design perspective. Ideally, there would be tradeoffs available; for instance, in the early Puerto Rico game, you can try to rack up a VP lead shipping cheap goods like indigo and corn, or you can try to develop and trade more expensive goods in the hopes of being able to buy large, useful buildings later. If these tradeoffs don’t exist at all then you’re completely right: you might as well just play two separate games, one for the beginning and one for the end, and declare a winner of each separately. Can you list a couple of games you’re particularly dissatisfied with? I find that in Catan, even if I get a really lousy start due to poor luck or poor strategy, I can have a satisfying game by making a personal goal to reach a “respectable” number of points, say 8, by the time the winner finishes.

To J. Vogel, who asked if there were games where players don’t know where they stand: I saved this one for last because it’s something I’ve thought about before when trying to design games. It’s certainly tricky, because the paradox is that the players need to be able to work meaningfully towards a goal, and yet not know how close they are. One way this can work is when the goal is “beat the other player or players”, but you don’t know what they have. In Poker it’s a matter of how much you’re willing to bet that your cards are better. In games like Gin and 31 you need to find the right moment at which you believe your hand is better than the other person’s; both games, since they have a large penalty for being wrong, also have the element of “how sure am I?” The intuitive way to get a game element like this is to have some component of the score be secretly chosen; perhaps score chips are secretly chosen or you choose a goal randomly and get bonus points for meeting it. The goal could even be revealed to the other players. However, this seems like it would add a dissatisfying element of chance to the game.
This is actually going to tie in with an upcoming article, when I talk about how games are ended. To spoil it a bit now: Evo handles this creatively, because the goal is “have the most points at the end of the game”, but you don’t know when the end of the game is going to be. The game proceeds for 6-8 turns, depending on the number of players; after that, after each turn, the game has an increasingly likely chance to end right then. It works particuarly well in Evo because that game provides many chances to make short-term gains at the cost of long-term growth.

Secret scoring is a mechanic that seems very strange to me. And yet many popular games use it; many by Reiner Knizia, such as the recent Blue Moon city and classic Samurai, but also hits like Puerto Rico. The reason it’s strange is this: all points are awarded publicly, but you keep the number you actually have secret from the other players. (A screen is involved, or chits that can be worth varying numbers of points and are kept face-down.) So there’s no reason why you couldn’t keep track of how many points each player has. But it’s not made easy, and in the cases I’ve seen, players don’t tend to.

The reason for using secret scoring, I suspect, is to discourage laborious, extensive analysis as the game nears its end. Nefarious reader Fuleng brought this up as a possible weakness in Power Grid, which lacks secret scoring; unless the game is a runaway victory, players are well served by calculating the exact sums of money each opponent will need to obtain needed reactors, get fuel for them, and connect the last few cities. It makes it a less novice-friendly game that it would otherwise be. If not for the secret scoring, Puerto Rico might similarly drag down near the end, with players keeping a tally of other players’ totals and pushing the game to an end, or trying to delay it, based on whether the last few points could be scraped together.

Secret scoring also sends the implicit message to the players that the game is not meant to be played with intensive calculations near the end. Heck, you’ll win more games per hour if you cross your fingers and play with your best guess instead of keeping track of secret scores in your head and taking 20 minutes to work out the best course of action; not to mention that your fellow players are much less likely to get bored and go watch television. If these games were played for serious prize money or something, would I expect the best players to keep score in their heads and perform thorough analysis? Yeah, I would; I would also expect “tournament rules” without secret scoring to develop, to take the burden off since the analysis is going to happen anyway. But for the majority of board game play, where having a game take 45 minutes rather than 75 is a huge advantage, I think secret scoring successfully keeps bright players from overthinking the games.

I am back from GenCon and I return with renewed excitement about both the design and play of board games. Also, I return with the knowledge of how to pronounce famed German designer Reiner Knizia’s last name. It’s “kuh-NIT-zee-uh.”

Two things about GenCon are really stunning. One is the program of events. I’m guessing that on the average about 100 events run every hour from Thursday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. You get a book with a tiny blurb for each of these events, listing the name, location, cost, a couple of codes for suitability (experience required, PG-13 or R rating, etc.) and maybe a one-sentence teaser about the game itself, all in glorious tightly kerned 7-point font. Unless you know going in what you want to play, I have no idea how you’d make a decision. There’s just too many options to browse through. Through my two days, the only organized events I hit were a Euchre event, a demo session for an upcoming Playroom game, and a seminar on game design.

The other is the Exhibitors’ Hall, colloquially known as the Dealer’s Room. It’s the size of several gymnasiums and entirely packed with retailers selling games and gamer-interest stuff (T-shirts, swords, jewelry…) and gaming companies showing off their latest products. In terms of crowd and noise, think of a really busy cafeteria—then multiply the size by 200.

Did I mention I’m an introvert?

I walked through, trying not to run into people. My budget for Stuff was flexible, maybe $100 or so, and I was definitely interested acquiring some interesting gear. But as I walked through, I saw so many things, so many games, that I had no idea what I wanted. Taking 30 minutes to research a game, to test it and find out whether I really liked it, would mean that I could only ever see like 5% of that huge exhibit hall. And the sensory overload was pretty overwhelming.

So when I stumbled out to meet friends, 90 minutes later, one of them asked me whether I saw anything good. “Heck yeah,” I replied, “but… I have no idea what it was or where to find it.”

This is sometimes termed “decision paralysis” and it applies at a much smaller scale too: within a single game. It is particularly harsh for new players, because what you get with experience is the ability to quickly weed out the 95% of choices that are very poor. For instance, in the middle of a game of chess, it’s not unreasonable that a player could have 80 moves available. Novices get lost and confused and, after what seems like too much thought, often end up playing moves that don’t help the situation or are just plain wrong. By contrast, an experienced player can quickly find the four or five moves that are likely to do any good and consider the implications of each of them, drawing upon memory of similar positions or plotting several moves ahead. Go has a similarly large decision tree.

With examples like these, I clearly don’t mean to say that decision paralysis makes games unplayable, just that it steepens the learning curve. Pointing players to the good moves makes the first few games more enjoyable for the learning players (who feel less scared and frustrated) and any experienced players (who have the game move faster.)

For example, consider the opening moves of the game Power Grid. On the first turn, all players are required to buy one power plant. Most of the power plants are shuffled into a deck, but the first 8 in every game are fixed, and only 4 are available at any one time. All are cheap plants that will leave the players plenty of cash for fuel and expansion, and so there is no need for fretting over which one you end up with or fighting hard in an auction. By the time serious decisions are needed, the players have had a couple turns to see how the game is working out.

Even cosmetic factors can help. For instance, consider the little pips on Settlers of Catan resource chits—the ones that remind you that a 6 is rolled 5 times in 36, while an 11 is rolled only 2 times in 36. Is that difficult math? Does it need to be there? No and no, but it helps new players overcome the decision paralysis by driving home the fact that only the intersections at good numbers really need to be considered.