I thought tonight’s article was going to be very short: “Sorry, guys. I have to play some emergency Footmen Frenzy with my roommate, who’s having a tough time emotionally.” Luckily his Serious Relationship Talk turned out better than planned, so he was able to beat up some 13-year-olds without my help. It got me thinking about the use of games as an emotional coping tool, though…

For me, board games and computer games have very different roles as coping strategies. When I fire up a good, distracting computer game—Warcraft, Civilization, Oblivion, GalCiv, or any roguelike—the rest of the world kind of slides away. If there’s food or drink nearby, it’ll be gone without my ever tasting it. Whatever emotional state I was in before tends to slide away. When I stop, I’ll remember what I was feeling like, but the emotional state itself is usually gone.

This isn’t as awful as it sounds because when I get home from work, the departing emotional state is often “tired and cranky.” And the emotion isn’t disappearing into oblivion, either. Competitive games (Warcraft) get me into an excited mood that can carry over after they’re done; or maybe a slightly enraged one, if I was up against, or on a team with, idiots. And of course, anything could get my mind started on game design…

By contrast, board games are a social activity. That’s good. It fills a need. It’s also a great chance to talk to my friends, if that’s what I want. More of the social construction and problem-solving, less of what is sometimes derisively called “coping.” On the other hand, look, I’m a guy. “Coping” is good enough a lot of the time; problems go away if I don’t dwell on them. And if the problem is that I’m tired of social interaction… well, getting more of it isn’t what I need.

This is the kind of topic that’s going to be very different for different people, so today more than usual, I encourage you to leave a comment.

I’ve played two collectible card games in my day: Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) and Magic. I enjoyed them both at the time, although I don’t play either one actively any more; and predictably, I’ve toyed with the idea of developing one.

The CCG market has some issues that ordinary board games don’t. The games are much more potentially lucrative (hundreds or thousands of dollars per player, as opposed to $20 or $40). But you need a critical mass of players to get anyone interested, and the extreme expense means that people typically play only one CCG, whereas a board gamer might own dozens of board games. They’re also more difficult to share with non-players. As a result, the CCG market is a very tight one, and I have much less hope of having a CCG of my design see production some day than an ordinary board game.

Pretty much every CCG has the concept of rarity: some cards are easier to come across than others. The standard system is something like 10 common cards, 4 uncommons, and 1 rare in a pack of 15. (There are about the same number of cards of each rarity.) Back at the dawn of Magic, when it was the only CCG out there, they thought it would be OK to use rarity to balance cards: if a card were hard to get, it would be fine if it were more powerful, because a player would only have access to one or two. Right? It was a happy revelation for the industry that people were willing to spend hundreds of dollars to get those powerful cards.

Modern CCG designers have to strike a balance. On the one hand, they want to make to get people excited about opening booster packs with the possibility of good cards; and they want people to buy lots of packs, in the search for the good cards. On the other hand, they don’t want to be seen as trying to squeeze money from the players, and they don’t want their game to be thought of as one that you have to blow a lot of money for to do well. If you can build a decent deck with no rares or only a couple, that can draw players who would otherwise be anxious about a large investment.

(L5R tried a flat rarity system at one point. Nobody bought it; I got unsold boosters from a flat-rarity expansion as a random promotion years later. My theory is that there was nothing to look forward to opening the packs.)

In my ideal world, here’s how I’d like rarity to work:

• Common cards are staples and utility cards. Every deck needs some, but they have no particular synergy with anything. You’ll want to have a box of them lying around, though, because when you want to build a new deck you’ll need to include a bunch of them no matter what.
• Uncommon cards add the distinctiveness to a deck. They have flavorful mechanics that you make work together in a useful way to build a good deck. Ideally, I would like be able to look at the list of only the uncommons in a deck and get a good idea of the way that deck is supposed to work.
• Rare cards are those that work only with very specific strategies or that you only need one of in a deck. The danger (depending on your point of view) is that if the rare cards contribute to a very powerful specific strategy, they suddenly become very in-demand. My favorite rare cards are L5R’s Uniques, which you can only have one of in a deck. They get played, so you see them in many decks, but because there’s only one per deck, you don’t necessarily see them every game. Therefore, like in the old days of Magic, it’s still neat when they hit the table.

We had a 9-10 person group for Telephone Pictionary again last night. It’s still a good game. Quotes of the night:

“I will wear your silence!” (I don’t remember how this started–it had already fallen off course at this point–and it finally ended up as “You can’t make hippies happy by giving them T-shirts”)

“Spin the wheel, you damn Nazi!” (“Axis of Evil” became “Axis Devil”, and evidently a WWII Japanese rising sun flag was misinterpreted as a giant wheel)

Inspired by the popularity of design patterns in computer science, a couple of authors recently wrote a book entitled “AntiPatterns.” The antithesis of a design pattern, an AntiPattern is a commonly made mistake, an easy trap to fall into that might seem like a good idea at the time but turns out to have negative consequences.

It’s a good idea that didn’t turn out to have the massive impact of design patterns. But I’ve certainly seen games that make the same mistakes that have been made many times before, so here you go.

Name: Elimination, or Last One Alive Wins

Problem: You have three or more players. Every player has the opportunity to attack any other player in some way.

AntiPattern Resolution: After undergoing a certain amount of abuse, players are eliminated. The last person remaining at the end wins.

Issues: There are several. First and foremost, players who are eliminated have nothing left to do. In an online computer game, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—these players can just start the next game. Civilization 4 and Warcraft 3, for instance, have online free-for-all matches that don’t suffer from this problem. In a board game, though, the players have to look around for something else to do. Not so bad in a big party, but if you just want to gather the players to play a particular game, it makes it tough.

Second, usually, attacking taxes your resources. This creates an incentive to stall and hope someone else attacks and does your work for you—which causes the game to stall.

Examples:

• In Lunch Money, you have a hand full of attacks that you can unload on whoever you want. The game has theme but little in the way of strategy. You lose when you can no longer convince people to stop hitting you, and they decide to just finish you off. If you’re lucky, everyone else will be finished soon as well and you can get on to something else.

• In the board game Titan, you form legions of creatures that roam around an battle other players’ legions. The goal is to eliminate all other Titans, which are unique and fairly powerful creatures. The designers had some good ideas for of ways to mitigate the second problem. As you win battles, your Titan games experience, which makes it increasingly difficult to assassinate and eventually a powerful fighter in its own right. Also, winning fights earns you Angels, powerful creatures that can be summoned into other fights; bolstering your ranks with Angels helps make up for losing your other creatures in hard-fought battles. However, the first problem is pretty much insurmountable, in my opinion. The game is so massively complicated that it’s completely unsuitable for a party game; you’d have to gather a group of people specifically to play it. And if one player gets an unlucky break and gets killed off early, does that player just sit and watch TV for the next 3 hours?

• As I mentioned before, WarCraft 3 has a free-for-all mode. The first problem is mitigated because if you get eliminated, there’s no big deal; you can start another game right away. The second problem is mitigated in a fascinating way. You have “hero” units that can gain experience as you kill enemy units. With little experience, hero units are expensive and not particularly powerful; but with experience, they are overwhelmingly powerful. It’s important to fight a series of small engagements as the game goes on to build experience; but not so much that you are vulnerable to an overwhelming attack by someone else. If you do see someone in a weakened state and can finish them off, you are in a good position to take their resources for your own.

Evidently, Wordpress doesn’t believe in Daylight Savings Time, and it would be offensive to my sense of symmetry not to have a post for today in the calendar, even though the “real” Tuesday post was the previous one.

You may have noticed that I tend to capitalize the names of common, noncommercial games like Chess, Go, Bridge, Poker, and so on. This is kind of nonstandard—usually these words aren’t capitalized. I’m going to stick with my convention because I refer to so many always-capitalized games and it looks strange to talk about a list of games like “Settlers of Catan, bridge, and El Grande.”

This is the second in a series. I want to talk about this one because I was thinking about a common “AntiPattern,” Elimination, and writing this would set the groundwork for talking about it. Coming Thursday!

Name: Victory Points, or just Points

Problem: You want to encourage strong or strategic play throughout the game while minimizing a “snowball effect” in which early winners cannot be defeated. Or, you want multiple paths to victory that can quite possibly be mixed and matched. You want all players to be able to play through the end of the game.

Discussion: The idea of using points to score a game is nothing particularly novel, of course. Most card games score using points of some kind. The principal difference between VPs, as I think of them in most board games, versus points in (say) Euchre,  Rummy, or a hundred other card games, is that in most card games, points are used only to keep track of cumulative score over a series of many otherwise-identical rounds; whereas in most board games VPs are accumulated over the course of a dynamic game.

Bridge is a sort of middle area because the scoring does affect the play of the game, in terms of vulnerability and willingness to bid a part score, and its strong influence over bidding conventions. If Bridge were regularly played to a certain number of hands or a certain score (instead of duplicate scoring, which is much more common) I’d be very inclined to describe its scoring as a VP system.

Victory may be decided either by the first player to a certain VP total or the player with the highest VP total when a certain landmark is reached. For instance, Settlers of Catan is won by the first player to 10 VP, while El Grande goes to the player with the most VP at the end of round 9.

Examples:

• In Settlers of Catan, VPs are tied quite closely to your progress in settlement and city development. It’s very difficult to win without building a decent-sized urban base. On the other hand, Longest Road and Largest Army provide VPs that don’t help much toward production, but are relatively cheap to pick up. Most games go to a player that manages to build a good base for resources and uses it to snag one of these.
• In Puerto Rico, you get lots of VP for shipping goods back to the Old World, which otherwise gives you no other benefit. Buildings also grant VP, but even if you optimize to buy the cheapest possible, they probably won’t be enough to beat a dedicated goods-shipping player. A mixed strategy which attempts to buy many useful buildings while shipping as many goods as is convenient is a very playable strategy (that I happen to play myself, when possible.)
• In Carcassone, you get VP as the game goes on for finishing the roads, cities, and cloisters that your “meeples” patrol. The longer they hang out on the board, the more points they have a chance to bring you, but if you run out, you may not be able to take advantage of excellent opportunities that present themselves. VP are also available at the end of the game from farmer meeples, which can be difficult to play and are a gamelong investment, but which can give you big points if you get your fields and farmers connected to enough cities (and can get more power than your opponents!).