My usual gaming group plays Settlers of Catan with two house rules. One is pretty common and one, I think, originated with us; the other is pretty widespread. Both aim for an effect of smoothing over the early game.

Friendly Start: is pretty common. For the first two passes around the table, 7’s are rerolled.

Build Roads Last: When placing your settlements on the board, you place only the settlements, not roads. Then, in the same order the settlements were placed to begin with, the roads are placed. This helps players make their placing decisions faster (no agonizing over what directions are likely to be free) and makes it less likely that a player will be in the frustrating position of wasting an initial road. For this reason, it is very novice-friendly.

If it’s in before midnight, it’s on time…

Without a doubt, Chess and Go are two of the world’s most popular, best-respected board games. Both are rather unusual in that they feature no element of chance. Conversely, games that are entirely chance get little respect from serious gamers. (Candy Land? Snakes and Ladders?) In a casino, most board-gamers would rather play a game involving skill (Blackjack or Poker) over one with none (Craps or the slots), even against the same inexorable house odds in both games. From these extremes, you might guess that less chance implies a better game. But there are many reasons why some element of chance can improve almost any game:

• Winning the game is a payoff for many people. In a game with no chance, a less-skilled player is likely to lose a lot of the time and may get discouraged. If there is some element of chance, skilled players will still be able to enjoy the fruits of their ability (by winning disproportionately often), while other players still get to taste victory sometimes.

• An element of chance keeps the game moving. If a game is very deterministic, some players will try to think as far moves ahead as possible, looking for the perfect play. I hate this. If there are significant unknown factors in the next few turns, players have to use intuition more. This tends to be faster.

• Chance introduces anticipation, which adds excitement. Think Settlers of Catan: “Please not a seven, please not a seven…” Anticipation is also a payoff that keeps people coming back to any gambling game.

• An element of chance adds more possibilities. Scrabble could be made more “fair” if everyone were guaranteed to alternate consonant and vowel draws, but that would make all games more similar and skew the game in favor of long, sweeping words instead of close, creative plays. The art of every card game is to be able to play both good hands and bad ones.

• Playing probabilities can be a great opportunity for skill. For instance, in Bridge, the declarer often can gain an extra trick by guessing which opponent has the queen of trump. Without extra information, this is a 50/50 guess, but by carefully considering the opponents’ bidding, a skilled player can guess more accurately where the unknown card lies. Likewise, in Poker, a player may know that his chance to draw, say, the last card to a four-card flush is small; but the size of the pot and bet required might make the bet a profitable one anyway.

Note that chance does not necessarily have to equal luck. For example, in Puerto Rico, a random collection of plantation tiles is revealed for everyone. Some players may be better able to capitalize on the plantations than others; but this contrasts with, say, Backgammon, where a player who rolls high doubles over and over will just trounce an opponent who keeps rolling 1’s and 3’s.

The moral of the story is that except for a few sublime exceptions, an element of chance is an important part of making games fun. Only a handful of the most outstanding in history have thrived without it.

Today I want to share an entire game with you. I was shown this recently and it quickly caught on in my gaming group. There are no particular winners or losers; it’s more of a group puzzle than a competitive game. Regardless, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Even if it doesn’t sound great… give it a try, you won’t regret it.

We know this game only as “The Forehead Game.” If you know it by another name, let me know!

Players: 4-7. It’s possible to play with more but the game takes longer, requires more advanced players, and tends to acquire more colorful names.

Setup: Take an ordinary deck of cards. Remove the face cards, leaving the 2-10 of every suit. Deal one card to each player. Each player, without looking at their card, picks it up and holds it against his/her forehead (so you can see everyone’s card but your own).

Play: Starting with the dealer and proceeding clockwise, every player makes a guess of the rank of their card out of the number of unique ranks between all players. (Assume your own card is unique unless you have reason to believe otherwise.) For example, in a 6-player game, if the dealer sees the following cards: 2, 2, 4, 9, 10, the dealer should guess “3 of 5.” Other players should take the previous guesses into account.

If the dealer is part of a pair, it is possible for the number of unique ranks to drop as the round progress. For example, the dealer might guess 2/5 and the second player guesses 4/4. After this, everyone knows there are only 4 unique ranks; the dealer knows she is part of a pair, but not who her match is.

Players go around the table twice guessing their relative rank. Then they go around once more, this time trying to guess the exact value of the card. After making this final guess, the player can look at his or her own card.

Notes:

• The objective is for the players, as a group, to get their guesses right as much as possible. Deliberately misleading guesses are against the spirit of the game.
• When guessing your relative rank, your first priority should be to be correct the highest percentage of the time, and your second priority should to be as close as possible to the correct relative rank. (So if 1/4, 3/4, and 4/4 are all equally likely, guess ¾)
• It’s best to keep table talk to a minimum. This is surprisingly hard because even the most seemingly innocuous comments can give huge amounts of information.
• However, it’s generally considered acceptable to use other players’ reactions or uncertainty as a clue. It’s also generally considered acceptable to provide a level of certainty (dead certain, pretty sure, guessing, wildly guessing) along with your guess.
• It’s a crying shame that I picked up this game after I left college, because it would make a damn fine strip game.
• Instead, I’m going to use it as an interview exercise when I have my own software company someday.

A game with no interaction is dull. Nobody goes to a party to play Snakes and Ladders or Yahtzee. On the other hand, some people find games with lots of interaction too intense, or too draining to play for a long time. Multiplayer games often feature a cutthroat mentality that is off-putting to many people. My mom refused to play Hearts, among other games, because she hated the aggressive aspect of dumping your points on the other players. Plenty of people eschew Diplomacy because lies and betrayal are the way to get ahead.

Power Grid is a game that strikes what I think is an excellent balance between the white bread of Yahtzee and the sinus-blasting wasabi of Diplomacy. For those who haven’t played: the object of Power Grid is to build stations in, and provide power to, a certain number of cities. As you build and power more stations, you get more money, which at first glance makes it seem like your lead would build on itself—the rich getting richer. However, several mechanics stop this. First, leading players have to buy resources (the coal, oil, or uranium to run their plants) last—after other players have bought the cheap resources and driven prices up. Second, leading players have to build additional stations last, often losing access to the remaining cheap, desirable locations. Finally, leading players must commit earlier to buying additional power plants in the auction. These expenses can easily offset the advantages of having more stations—so much so that players might deliberately slow their growth to keep from suffering too badly.

It is possible, then, to act aggressively towards other players. You can try to buy up the resources they need, expand to the cities that are convenient for them, or bid up the prices of their power plants. Money is very tight, though, and any action taken out of spite will severely cut into your own advancement prospects. Victory is achieved, not by attacking your fellow players by keeping a careful eye on the game state and finding the best bargains, given their actions. That coal plant might seem like a better bargain than the uranium plant, for instance, but if two other players already have coal plants, their competition for the resource might drive the prices too high. Building is cheap in the Northeast, but if everyone else is trying to build there, the Midwest might be a better value. An oil plant isn’t as cheap to run as a solar plant, but if bidding has driven the price of the solar plant through the roof, you might be able to run the oil plant for less money and use the rest to expand.

Power Grid is, of course, not the only game that strikes this balance. Puerto Rico seems noninteractive until sudden, fierce competition strikes for scarce buildings or cargo space. It’s hard to do much damage to someone in Settlers of Catan, even with heavy use of Soldiers, and sometimes it seems like everyone is engrossed in their own tiny empire. But games are won and lost on the wise choice of trading partners and timing of trades.

Let me call these games carefully interactive, and I hope I will remember the term. The feeling of winning these games is the delicious feeling of a well-constructed, well-executed plan coming together. Losing usually doesn’t engender anger at being attacked, or frustration at being thwarted, but admiration at seeing the same thing from a fellow player (and hopefully, the chance to learn).

[Yes, I know I call people cheap whores after they beat me at Catan. That’s only because it’s true, and I stand by my points.]

Once you add more than two players to a game, you have the opportunity to add more dimensions to the interaction than simple aggression and competition. Most simply, you have organized teamwork, where players are split into partnerships or larger teams before the game begins. Bridge is probably the most famous partnership game; Star Wars Epic Duels works much better in teams than as a free-for-all. Sharing in a victory with friends is a payoff for some. Other people love organizing and directing a team, or the chance to bounce their tactical ideas off a teammate mid-game. (Not everyone loves being told what to do, of course; at some point there’ll be an article on turnoffs, which are the opposite of payoffs.)

Free-for-all games can lead to forms of interaction which are even more interesting because they can change during the game. One of these is trade. The most familiar example is probably Monopoly, where if two players can trade properties and each finish a monopoly, everyone else loses out. In Settlers of Catan, resource-trading is ubiquitous, and both parties get to build faster than they would have otherwise.

Other games, such as Risk, feature target selection. Decisions arise such as: is it a good strategy to attack a weak rival whose territory you can more easily capture? Or would it be better to attack a stronger rival who otherwise might grow even stronger? Who can be attacked with the least chance for retribution?

The problem with trade, of course, is that you end up helping one of your rivals as well as yourself. To have the best chance for good trades, you need to convince your rivals that trading with you will not give you an insurmountable lead. Likewise, in Risk, you need to convince your rivals that their best chance for winning is to attack someone other than you. If you’ve played Risk much, you’ve probably watched more than one game go to not the best tactician, but the manipulator who could make some stooge do exactly what the manipulator wanted until it was too late to stop him.

This, then, is the element of diplomacy; the social maneuvering that allows you turn trade and target selection to your advantage. The aptly-named game of Diplomacy features no element of chance and very little tactical maneuvering; the only way to get a leg up is to convince enough other people that your interests are theirs. (And then, to carefully pick the perfect moment to place a knife in the back.) Some people get a gleam in their eye like no other when their plans come to fruition; engaging in and succeeding at diplomacy is a powerful payoff for some.

Not all games have one of these extended forms of interaction. Four-player Scrabble, for instance, has no trade or diplomacy; only competition for letters and space. Lunch Money could theoretically feature temporary alliances, but in practice the game is too short not to quickly devolve into unchecked aggression on all sides. In some games, they may even be illegal. In Poker, for example, the independence of all players is paramount; any interaction which might otherwise be called “diplomacy” is actually collusion, and is a serious form of cheating.

The next article will be the last in this miniseries. It will be about games with small, controlled amounts of interaction and how this can lead to great payoffs for several kinds of players.

As a comment on my article on payoffs, Alyx posted:

“You missed one aspect of a game that can contribute to why people enjoy it, and I suspect it’s because it’s not something you personally look for in a game, but is one of the reasons I enjoy many games, including Trivial Pursuit.

The social aspect of a game…”

I didn’t forget about this, but it’s not a subject I intend to go into very much, because it’s so huge. You could easily write an entire book or blog with observations on the social extrinsic aspects of games—the kind of people who enjoy them, why those people like hanging around each other, the cultures that develop around them.

Nor is the social aspect of Trivial Pursuit lost on me. In fact, Alyx knows well that the only reliable way to get me to play that game is to get a girl I’m attracted to into the game first, and then to ask me if I want in. I’m such a sucker.

Trivial Pursuit will be covered in-depth in a later article, I promise. I’ll probably return to the social aspects of games from time to time, but it won’t be frequent, because I have so many other topics I want to cover. If someone wants to start their own blog on the subject, I have plenty of Web hosting space free. I’ll even give you five interesting topics free of charge:

· What about Eastern Europe makes Bridge so popular there? How about Korea and StarCraft?

· Why do some people handle Diplomacy gracefully, while others need to avoid it to preserve their friendships?

· What games should you plan to play if you don’t know how many people are going to come to your event?

· Why are there so few good three-player games, especially using an ordinary deck of cards?

· How do large groups deal with games that feature elimination, like Monopoly, Risk, or tournament-style Poker?