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.

If you think about any game you play regularly, you’ll think about certain things that you really like about the game. They’re the reason why you play it, the reason why you enjoy it, the reason why you come back. I’d like to call these the “payoffs” of a game.

One of the cool things about playing a wide variety of games is the wide variety of payoffs you get to enjoy. I’ll eventually talk about things like having multiple kinds of payoff in a single game, the pacing of payoffs, and which games I find don’t much like because of their lack of payoffs that I enjoy. For now, I’d like to share some examples of their tremendous diversity:

Scrabble: The satisfaction of finding a really high-scoring play, or a neat word, even if it doesn’t score you all that many points. Boggle has the same thrill when you find good words, and that game also has the satisfaction of finding a bunch of little words.

Chess: The exciting search for a good play; the thrill of seeing your plans come to fruition. The witnessing of familiar-and-yet-new patterns as they unfold on the board. A lot of players enjoy the feel of nice, heavy pieces, and the feeling in your hand of capturing an enemy piece. With intricate, complex games like chess, you get a feeling of accomplishment from finding strategies and patterns that you would have missed a few months ago. Blitz chess concentrates less on the beautiful patterns and more on the intense rush of bloody engagement.

I’ve never seen Go played blitz-style, but it otherwise has many of the same payoffs, even though the game is very different.

Poker: Probably no other game features such intense anticipation so many times during a session. This makes the thrill of victory incredible and even when you don’t win, the adrenaline is pounding and you always leave excited!

Trivial Pursuit: This isn’t one of my favorite games, and I have several complaints about it. I’ll discuss them later, but the payoff is clear: You get to feel smart when you get an answer right.

Settlers of Catan: A truly remarkable game for its fine balance, mixture of luck and skill, and variety of different payoffs. Getting the resources you want is exciting, either from well-positioned settlements or trade. You can take pride in watching your little empire grow. For some people, cooperation is a payoff in itself, and those people love to form mutually beneficial arrangements. Others enjoy aggression and the thrill of the struggle to be on top. For those people, the chance to impede your opponents is a payoff, as is the chance to form a “mutually beneficial” arrangement that just happens to benefit them the most.

Iron Dragon: This is an Empire Builder-style railroad game. Watching your rail network and pile of cash expand is great, of course, but I’ve talked to a couple of people that really enjoy the chance to play and draw with the crayons used to mark your track.