"Perfect is the enemy of good."

- Attributed to Voltaire

Another design post. Been a while since the last one.

I've hit an interesting point in the design of Nebula: I've stopped focusing on improving the game's major mechanics (which I feel are in a good place) and I've been more working on the game's 'balance'. In this situation, balance to me means that all game starting configurations have a roughly equal chance of winning, that all the powers and ship layouts and tracks and everything are close to equivalent in point-earning potential. Sure, I can't make it exactly equal, but it doesn't need to be; as long as any imbalances are unnoticeably small I'm in good shape.

However, I keep finding large flaws in that balance. This ship layout is too strong, so I apply a nerf, and now it's too weak. This power is too strong, so change it out for something else. This ability is uninteresting, maybe I can swap it for something more fun.

This has been my thought process for the past month or so. Stuck in this loop of endless tweaking, trying to find the perfect blend of evenly-distributed potential and enjoyment. And each time I make a tweak, it takes days of playthroughs to fully grasp the impact of the change.

Seems like lately, I've been seeing signs that everyone else thinks the game is done. "When can I buy this?" or "When's your Kickstarter date?". Even at one of our recent weekly playtests, a fellow designer flat out told me "You need to publish this now."

Welp. Once again life is trying to tell me something by beating me over the head with it until it soaks through my thick skull. My pursuit of the perfect balance is apparently getting in the way of completing this project.

With that in mind, I finally pulled the trigger on Nebula. I've started consulting with a graphic designer (same one as Manaforge!) in order to figure out how to organize the mess of information in the game into an understandable whole. As part of that, we will eventually decide on the size of each of the game's sheets, which in turn will specify the dimensions of the box. We will also determine what room there is for any artistic embellishments, which will tell me if I need to hire an illustrator to do art for the game (most likely yes). And with the game component specifications, I can do to manufacturing companies and start requesting quotes, which will also give me a price and timeline for running a crowdfunding campaign.

Ugh, so many moving parts. I'm wondering if part of the reason I'm hesitating is because I've been through this once before and I know how much of a pain some of the process can be.

But no matter. If I don't break this loop the game will never be done. And that is really the key; the goal should be progress, not perfection.

Of course, I'm not going to stop balancing. Manaforge had a couple of its cards get a complete overhaul right before the game went off to be printed, and I suspect Nebula will similarly have some breaking changes go into effect at the last minute. I've got a game design convention coming up in a month and I'm sure I will get some useful feedback there, maybe something to push me over this last bump. But I can't let any of that stop me from making sure the process is moving forward.

This year. I know I've said it for the past couple of years, but this time it has to be this year. Look for a Kickstarter campaign this year. Even if I have to launch it on New Year's Eve (oh please no don't let it come to that), it must be this year.

Success, I'm coming for you.

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - wholeheartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

- Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

​Welp...  it finally happened. This post makes me a little sad, but I know that sometimes these things are necessary to facilitate the progress of a design.

For a while now, I'm been struggling to incorporate some sort of player interaction into my game. I know that Nebula is pretty low on the player interaction scale; it wasn't really meant to have much. Players put so much effort into solving the puzzle on their own boards that there isn't really much mental space left for interference by other players. However, I wanted there to at least be something.

For a while, I was trying to incorporate interaction in using the game's Goal tiles. I wanted players to pay attention to what the other players are doing, and have to make the decision as to which victory point routes they can obtain versus which they have to let other players have. I got a lot of complaints that paying attention to other player's boards is too much to do when you're already concentrating on your own. So, that idea went away.

The other mechanic that has been in the game for a while is a player-interactive version of distributing resources. This resource 'draft' took many forms over the various versions, but ultimately it boiled down to working with other players to determine who gets which colored cubes. This took many forms over various iterations. For a while, I had a modified draft system, where players would pull cubes and then take cubes from each of their neighbors. I tried a cube 'market', where players could spend Energy to buy groups of cubes, with the price depending on where in the order they were. I even tried the most basic form of draft, a simple pick-and-pass.

But, through all of these, I was constantly getting complaints about the cube draft phase. The most common one was that the cube draft, as a mechanic, was not worth the physical and mental effort required to execute it. Being able to choose which three cubes you get at the start of the turn was not a meaningful decision when you're getting another ten to fifteen cubes over the course of the turn. Also, distributing cubes in this way felt like an obtrusive break in the game's flow; everyone had to stop what they were doing to deal with this part of the game.

So, after many bits of feedback telling me that this wasn't working, it eventually sunk in that it wasn't worth trying to force it. With that hanging over me, I ended up removing the entire game phase. This makes me sad, as it's basically the last bit of player interaction in the game. (Sure, there's passing the bag of cubes around the table, and looking at what cubes other players have to try to guess what's left in the bag, but that's pretty minor.)

I've heard the 'don't be afraid to kill your darlings' advice many times. The original quote pertained to writing, but the idea applies equally well to game design. However, I never thought that it would apply to me like this. Sure, I've removed mechanics from the games I've worked on plenty of times. But this one was so ingrained into the game that it didn't even occur to me until this point that it was something I could possibly remove. It took many playtesters doing the verbal equivalent of beating me over the head with it until it finally sunk in.

With that change implemented, I tried playing the game solo a couple of times, just to see how to see how the new flow works. The game felt a little faster, but I got the odd feeling that something was missing without that phase. I assume that, because the cube draft was part of the game for so long, that I was just not used to the new game flow yet. So, I left it to the playtesters to decide if the change was positive.

Wow! Dramatic difference.

So far, I've run four playtests with the phase removed. A couple of players (especially ones that had played before) commented that the game basically felt like multiplayer solitaire with the draft gone. However, that didn't stop them from enjoying the game. A lot, actually. Players new to the game also enjoyed the game quite a bit, and didn't seem to mind the lack of player interaction.

Two very interesting things happened from this change:

• The time it takes to play Nebula dropped noticeably. Whereas before it would take 45 minutes to an hour to play, now it's more like 30 to 45 minutes. Very strange, though...  the draft might typically take a minute, and it occurred seven times during the game, so I have no idea why removing it would reduce the game time by 15 minutes.
• The general feel of the feedback I received from players changed quite a bit. Before this change, players would complain about the game's mechanisms; of course this includes the cube draft, but also stuff like wanting different rewards from the board, the balance of some of the tracks, and how powerful Energy should be. Now, the feedback I'm getting is more about minor concerns: the arrangement of information on the board, the game's iconography, some of the board colors, and of course, suggestions about how to add player interaction. My only guess as to why the tone of the feedback changed is that players are enjoying the game more, and so are more prone to overlooking the game's mechanical glitches? Don't know.

But, regardless of anything else, there's no question that removing the draft was a positive change. Even if it is a mechanic that has been in the game a long time and that hurt to remove. Anything to make the game better.

Now let's just hope I don't have to cut out anything else important. :)

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."

- Attributed to Vice-President Dan Quayle

Another design post. I haven't done one of these in a while. The concept for this one occurred to me recently when two very different ideas that were both floating around in my head kind of congealed together.

My original idea was going to be a rant, posted somewhere else. My rant is concerning a particular game I play through Discord. (I don't feel the need to name it, but anyone familiar with it will recognize the description.) It is a text-based game where you play as a fantasy character, defeating monsters and collecting loot, so you can craft better weapons and defeat stronger monsters and get better loot, and so on. The game itself is fun for as simple as it is. It's closer to an 'idle' game than an old-style text-based adventure, but that's fine. The challenges in this game are few; there is an occasional 'dungeon' which serves as a gate, meaning that you have to get through the boss monster within to access the next area of stronger monsters. The first few dungeons are relatively straightforward (press button, deal damage), with later dungeons incorporating more puzzle-y elements. But it's still fun, as you get to make progress by improving your character as you go.

My gripe with the game is the randomness in the loot. At certain dungeons, there is a gear requirement. As in, you must have a specific item equipped. The only way to get this item is to craft it, and the only way to craft it involves gathering a large amount of monster parts. (Unicorn horns and dragon scales and that sort of stuff.) The problem is, these monster parts only drop from the corresponding monsters, and the drop rate is very low. Like, we're talking low single digits here. This leads to frustration as there can very easily be a lack of progress as the random number generator decides it doesn't want to play nice. Kill monster, no drop; kill monster, no drop; kill monster, no drop. Yes, you get xp and other stuff when you kill monsters, but none of that brings you any closer to the goal. There's always the same chance for that monster drop, and nothing you can do improves that. At least for me, this can quickly become not-fun.

With that train of thought bounding around in my head, I happened to read a random post someone made on Facebook, talking about how a particular game designer is always interested in the 'feel' of a game. He would ask stuff like "How do you want your players to feel while they are playing your game?". I've noticed this mentioned quite a lot over the years, and it's a good thing to focus on. (I do think about it for my games sometimes but it's not usually as front-and-center as it probably should be while I'm designing.)

Put those two together, and it made me think about the feel of this Discord game. Frustration can't be the intended result of this game, right? So, then, what should it be? My thought process let me to the question: How do I, personally, want to feel when I'm playing this game. Or any game? Why do I play games at all?

My answer, just talking about myself, is 'success'. I want to feel like I succeeded at something. I want a sense of accomplishment. Completing a victory point goal. Getting to play a difficult but powerful card. Executing a complex strategy. Obtaining a rare resource. Solving a difficult puzzle. I want something I can look back on as the highlight of the game. "That game was fun because I got to do That Really Cool Thing for the first time."

(Note, that 'defeating other players' and 'winning the game' are not on that list. Achieving victory over others is not a requirement for me to have fun. I supposed this places me squarely in the 'euro' gamer category; I don't need to feel superior over the other players, only over the game itself.)

Okay, so what is the opposite of success? Failure. I'm having less fun if I fail to accomplish the thing. Tied into that, though, is the reason for failing. Why did I not succeed? How I feel is based on that.

• Did I fail because my strategy is flawed? I didn't get the Golden Chalice of Infinite Rubies because I forgot to buy a magic key to open the chest? Meh, okay, totally my fault; I just need to learn from my mistake and do better next time.
• Did I fail because some other player executed a better plan and got there first? Ouch, okay that stings a little, but that's just an incentive for me to improve my strategy.
• Did I fail because another player with a Really Big Hammer hit me on the head and knock me out of the race for a couple of turns? Okay, that sucks; that was an attack targeted directly at me. I'm more likely to want to get back at that player for a while, which pulls me away from the accomplishing fun stuff part of the game. Also means I have to devote attention to not getting clobbered again, which is another distraction from having fun.
• Did I fail because I rolled a 1 on some die somewhere? Or I drew a card that says that I failed? This is the worst possible feeling, for me. In the other circumstances, there is always something I can do differently to increase my chances of succeeding. In this scenario, I have zero agency. I can only keep trying (if the game even allows that) until I succeed. And in that interim, someone else could come along with a better die roll and steal the goal. This scenario, failing due to random chance, causes frustration for me. And even if I do eventually succeed, how many turns did I spend sitting there and making failed rolls before I finally succeeded? Other people might feel a high from that moment, finally rolling that 6 and getting the reward; me, it's almost a sense of relief, like 'whew the bad part of the game is over'. Why does the game need a bad part in the first place?

Note that one way to help mitigate this scenario is to make a reward for failure. What if, the first time I roll, I need a 6. If I fail, then the second time, I need a 5 or 6. Third time, 4 or better. And so on. It still hurts, but at least there's a sense of progress towards a goal. Eventually, I will succeed. Or maybe each time I fail, I still gain a ruby, which I can turn in for bonuses elsewhere. There is also the possibility that I could take extra precautions. Like, if I take an extra couple of turns to go the long way and grab the Platinum Key of Unlocking Everything, then I don't have to make the final roll; just walk up and take the prize. Give me the choice to do the expensive but reliable route, or try my luck at the fast way. (I don't trust my luck, so I will almost always take the reliable route, but just having the choice is nice.)

One good example of mitigating the sting of failure was the time I got to try Rising Sun. In that game, while combat is a large part of it, there is also the element of betting on the outcome of the battle. And there are times when you might want to bet on a particular side losing. Like, if I know I'm going to lose a fight, at least I will be sure to get an extra bonus out of it. This can even be a strategy, playing to lose a combat so you can get a bonus that will let you win elsewhere. 

But games that are pure chance? Press button, fail; press button; fail. This is not fun for me. Yes, games should have some randomness; it provides variability and replayability to the game. But I don't enjoy when the main game experience is based entirely on luck. If I play a game like this too many times and get hit with bad luck too often, I'm very likely to reject ever playing that game again. Even if I don't always succeed outright, there should always be some sense of moving forward. Otherwise, I'm just wasting my time, both figuratively (in the sense of the game's turns), and literally.


​
Heh, okay. I guess this turned into more of a rant than I wanted. But the point is there; if you're making a game, ask yourself: what do I want my players to get out of this game? Then keep the answer to that in mind when you're putting together your game's systems; there might be something in there that goes against the experience you're trying to craft.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

"Out of sight, out of mind."

- John Heywood

So, an interesting coincidence happened recently.

I'm still attempting to make an expansion for Manaforge. While I think I'm on the right track with my ideas, it often feels like there's some element of attractiveness missing. As in, I come up with something that I think would be interesting to the players, but when I run a playtest, my changes are often times ignored. I've even tried making the new game elements more powerful than the standard ones, and they still sometimes go overlooked.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to an episode of the Ludology podcast. (If you haven't heard it, and are into game design, you really should give it a try. Lots of good stuff in there.) Along with the show's regular hosts Gil Hova and Emma Larkins, they had Scott Rogers on to talk about his theory of "The 6 Zones of Play". The short version is that the play area in any board game can be divided up into roughly six regions with respect to a particular player. (The regions I have in my illustration above are not the same as the zones Scott Rogers was describing. Instead, shown above is my reinterpretation of the idea.) While the theory is a work in progress, and there isn't total agreement on how many zones there should be or what goes in each one, the underlying concept is solid: the placement of game elements with respect to the player can make a difference in terms of the mental processing the players devote to them. Game pieces that are farther away from the player, harder to see and harder to reach, tend to get less consideration, even though the options they present may be superior to the options closer by. Also, there is a certain amount of mental 'context switching' going on, in which the player first processes information close by (objects in the hands and in their personal tableau), and then switches to the objects farther away (main board and sideboards) to complete their move.

Circling back to my expansion ideas, I'm currently working with four new elements. I have a deck of 'customer' cards, which represent additional scoring opportunities for the players; a deck of 'dark item' cards, which are dealt out in parallel to the standard item deck cards and expand the item build options from 6 to 8 each turn; a black 'dark power' die that gives players a shot of bonus resources in exchange for gaining darkness points; and a 'darkness' meter and associated 'curse' cards, which start to dish out obstacles to players that draw too heavily from the dark abilities.

For my first iterations with these new mechanics, I had all of the new components sitting to various sides of the main gameboard. The new items above the board, the customers below, and the curse cards and black die to one side. Typically, the game board is facing the players (at least for a small number of players), so the customer cards are close by and the dark items are far away, with the black die to the side. I noticed that players tended to be interested in the customer cards but didn't pay much attention to the dark item cards or the black die. I can't tell if my new elements are any good if the players don't pay any attention to them. (Or, maybe, they just suck that badly that nobody wants to touch them? I hoped that wasn't it.)

While I was wrestling with this problem, I happened to listen to the Ludology podcast, and the concept just clicked. Perhaps players weren't paying attention to my new game elements because they were just too hard to see? In essence, all of my new stuff could be considered to be part of the game's 'sideboard', which typically gets less consideration than anything in the main play area. Sideboard elements are often farther away than the main board, and so can suffer from decreased visibility as well as the need to 'context switch' to specifically devote mental processing time to these outside options.

With that in mind, I did a little bit of rearranging. I moved the new dark item cards onto the main gameboard; it was very cramped and hard to get everything set up right, but it did get the new cards next to the old. I also changed the black die into a small deck of square cards; while I couldn't place the die any closer, I did exchange it for something it larger and easier to see, incorporating larger iconography. The customers were fine close to the players, and the darkness meter is fine being a sideboard element; it does not need constant consideration. (It's sneaky like that. :)

Playtesting with the new elements arranged that way went significantly better. I had one player comment that the new items were easier to compare to the old ones, being placed next to them. The dark power deck (instead of a die) received more attention as well, though it was hard to tell how much of a difference it made. (One player was trying to play 'clean', not using any of the new dark powers, but ended up giving in and dabbling a bit anyway. Muhaha!)

I need significantly more playtesting to be able to come to a conclusion, but so far it does seem like the placement (and size) of some items affects how they are perceived, and therefore how they factor into the players' decisions. I'll have to keep this in mind as I keep iterating on these new mechanics. This might also affect the physical game elements themselves, as I might need to use cards instead of a die, and may end up with an entirely new gameboard. (If I do make a sideboard for the new items, it will have to attach and blend in so that it seems like part of the main board. Yay expensive component considerations. :)


Thanks for reading, everyone! I hope to theorize more on this topic as I learn more, but I thought it was such an interesting timing coincidence that I felt I had to post something about it sooner rather than later.

"This is heavy."

- Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), Back to the Future

So, this post will be a little different. I've had an idea brewing in my head for a while now that I just need to let out. However, this isn't an idea for a game, but rather a way of thinking about games. Still, like my design ideas, this is something that I've wanted to vent, for fear that it might burrow out of my head and run away somehow. Maybe this will be helpful to someone, maybe not. But if it gets at least one other person thinking, then maybe it's worth it.

Most experienced gamers will be familiar with the concept of a board game's 'weight'. At a lot of my gaming meetups, people will talk about how a game is 'light' or how they don't want to play anything too 'heavy'. But what does that mean, exactly? For such a definitive term, it seems like it's not well defined. I don't know if there has been any effort to try to classify games into one category or another. I know that the Board Game Geek website has a way for players to suggest a weight for games, with the game's official weight being some sort of average of all the submissions. But that's imprecise and subject to players' tastes. Is this type of measurement completely subjective?

First, we need to decide on what the idea of a game's 'weight' is really referring to. I've heard it mentioned recently (on one of the podcasts I listen to) that one possible definition of game weight is the amount of mental energy expended while playing a game. In a way, that makes perfect sense to me, so I've kind of adopted that concept. 'Light' games can be compared to appetizers, quick bites of gaming that don't require much thought and can be played multiple times or used as a warmup in preparation for something more involved. On the opposite end of the spectrum, 'heavy' games are huge undertakings involving intense concentration and calculation, at the end making you feel as if you just completed a semester's worth of college exams. While there are a few games at the extremes of each of these categories, the vast majority of games fall somewhere between the two, inferring a single axis for game weights. Therefore, where a game falls on this axis represents how much thought is put into playing that game.

Again, this can be a subjective scale, as some players are naturally more proficient than others at performing the thought processes associated with heavier games. The aptitude for this also increases with experience and practice; someone that has been gaming for a while is generally better at handling heavier games than newer players. This can even vary with a person's energy levels; someone who is tired may have more trouble with a heavy game than someone who is well rested.

Mulling this concept over, I've been trying to find patterns in games' weights. What exactly makes one game heavier than another? When does mental work go from easy to hard? This is colored by my own experiences, of course. I've been gaming since, well, forever, and I'm used to these patterns of thought and the need to adapt to new rulesets and challenges. (Being a computer programmer helps too. While I don't think about game goals in terms of work, the ability to break a complex task down into many simpler tasks still comes into play with a convoluted game.) Still, I'm thinking there must be something in common with similar weights of games.

One metric that seems to be a good general indicator of a game's weight is it's general type. Offhand I don't know the formal name for this, but most games are classified by their intended audience. 'Party' games are typically light, needing to appeal to a large crowd, not all of which might be gamers. 'Family' games also tend towards the lighter end of the scale, needing to be understandable by younger players. 'American' games tend towards the middle of the scale, with emphasis on their story and theme, and with randomness and interactivity taking the place of complex mechanics. 'Euro' games typically range from medium weight to heavy, with games often feeling more like puzzles or challenges to be thought through. 'Wargames' are often heavy monsters, requiring large amounts of strategy, tactics, memory, and bookkeeping in order to simulate combat on a massive scale.

Another metric that loosely corresponds to game weight is how much time the game requires to play. Shorter games tend to be lighter, longer games tend to be heavier. This is not an absolute correlation, though; light games can certainly be long, and heavy games short. However, a longer game means more opportunities to think about what is happening in the game, so in general longer games require more expenditure of brainpower.

Board Game Geek allows users to rate a game's complexity on a scale from 1 to 5, where larger numbers mean heavier games. However, this scale isn't rigidly defined. There is no absolute connection between a game's BGG weight number and how much it will make my brain work when I play it. So, this number doesn't mean much to me. Instead, I learn about how involved a game is when I learn about the game. A game with a short playtime and not many pieces is probably a light game. A game requiring multiple hours with hundreds of components and a novel for a rulebook will probably be a heavier game.

Hmmm. Is component count an indicator of game weight? It might be a factor. If nothing else, lots of pieces means more stuff to keep track of while you're playing. That has to require mental energy on some level. So, in a sense, a game's physical weight (literally, how heavy the box is) might loosely correspond to it's game weight. The size of a game's rulebook is probably also a way to try to guess weight. A game with a single-page rule sheet is probably going to be a lighter game than a game with a fifty page small-print rules tome. 

In my head, I think of games as 'light', 'medium', or 'heavy'. Some games might try to straddle the boundary between two categories, and others may take several plays before their full weight becomes apparent. But I generally try to group them into one of those three bins. However, within each group, some games will of course be heavier than others. This leads to the need to come up with sub-groups. Since I have a lot of roots in playing role-playing games, the Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart idea suggests itself here. Rather than two opposed axes, though, instead I have three groups with three sub-groups each. So, I have nine weight bins total, leading to a weight scale of 1 through 9. Each large group needs a way to differentiate the games in it, and the smaller groups are just a way to further separate games relative to each other.

Please keep in mind that I tend to play euro games more than anything else, so my opinions on where certain games fall will be colored by that perspective. Naturally, I am also limited by the number of games I've played; I don't claim to be an expert on every game out there. Additionally, I haven't played many games in some of these categories, so I will be doing some guessing as needed to fill in category examples. I will try to indicate when I do that.

Okay, so let's try this. For large categories, here's what I propose:

'Light': In general, light games focus on one thing. One goal, one path to victory, one concept to concentrate on. Sure, there can be secondary considerations and mechanics, but they all relate back to the one core goal of the game. If the game has victory points, then points can generally only be scored one way. If the game is a race to a goal, then there is generally one way to advance towards that goal. All mental effort is expended on either moving towards the goal, improving the effectiveness of your moves towards the goal, or hampering your opponents' movements towards the goal.

'Medium': Medium games introduce multiple ways of reaching a goal. If a game counts victory points, then there are multiple ways to score points. If the game is won by the first player to reach a goal, then maybe there are multiple goals, and the winner is the first player to reach any of them. These games sometimes require the player to formulate a strategy that focuses on one path to victory, with less or no attention given to the other possible paths. These strategies often need to be adapted to the game's starting conditions and the strategies that the other players are using.

'Heavy': I've had one designer friend say that a good indicator of a heavy game is the inability to explore the entire decision space of the game with just one playthrough. These games have so many considerations, so many branching possibilities, that playing the game just one time is insufficient to completely understand how all of the game's mechanics interact. These games have multiple paths to victory, and each path may have a different set of considerations that don't apply to the others.

Within each category, games can be further sorted by the amount of rules or information one needs to learn to play the game effectively, as well as the number of calculations the players need to make on their turn. A game with one hundred unique cards, each with a different ability on them, is going to take more brainpower to understand than a game with only five unique cards with twenty copies of each. A game where the ramifications of actions are easily understood and only cause small changes to the game state will feel lighter than one where actions are wide ranging and cause many consequences for other players and later turns.

So from those criteria, I have these game weights in mind:

Game Weight 1 "light-light":
These games can barely be called games. Decisions are few to none, and they often are played with minimal components and/or take only a few minutes. Longer games in this category may require only mechanical manipulation and not any sort of thought.
Examples: Coin toss, highest dice roll, Rock-Paper-Scissors, War (card game), Candy Land, Blackjack (one hand, no betting)

Game Weight 2 "medium-light":
These games are often quick and have simple and easy to understand rules. Some decisions are required, but they all relate directly to the goal of the game.
Examples: Yahtzee, Uno, Piece o' Cake, Apples to Apples, Exploding Kittens, Roll For It!

Game Weight 3 "heavy-light":
These games have one goal but multiple ways of getting there. Decisions can sometimes involve choosing between progressing towards the goal or making future turns more efficient. These games may have a significant learning curve with respect to understanding what options or effects are present at various points in the game.
Examples: Fantasy Realms, BANG!, Medici: The Card Game, Sushi Go, Herbaceous, Lost Cities

Game Weight 4 "light-medium":
These games have multiple ways to progress, either with multiple separate ways to score points or multiple goals where only one is required to win. Some ways to succeed in the game may be required while others are optional but beneficial. Thinking ahead to opponent's turns may be necessary to win.
Examples: Carcassonne, Splendor, Lanterns: The Harvest Festival, Azul, Downforce, Century: Spice Road

Game Weight 5 "medium-medium":
Multiple ways to make progress, often with more interdependence or more steps required to progress down each path. These games sometimes have a learning curve caused by a large number of potential effects.
Examples: 7 Wonders, Istanbul, Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Sagrada, Manaforge

Game Weight 6 "heavy-medium":
Multiple ways to progress, with many variables to keep track of. Often times there are many steps or chains of actions needed to work towards victory.
Examples: Hansa Teutonica, Lords of Waterdeep, Kraftwagen, Viticulture

Game Weight 7 "light-heavy":
These games have multiple potential strategies, not all of which are apparent on first playthrough. Many of the games' paths to victory are mutually exclusive (or practically so), requiring multiple plays to try them all.
Examples: Automobile, Coimbra, Rajas of the Ganges, Root(?)

Game Weight 8 "medium-heavy":
These games have multiple possible strategies with multiple variables to track. These are longer-duration games with many decisions to be made each turn. 
Examples: Terraforming Mars, Lisboa, Food Chain Magnate, Arkwright(?)

Game Weight 9 "heavy-heavy":
The most intensive of games. These can often eat up a whole day. Many combinations of player identities and/or board arrangements, plus complex bookkeeping or component manipulation, and sometimes lengthy negotiations or discussions, can mean that no two games are ever remotely the same.
Examples: Twilight Imperium, Arkham Horror


Of course, the weights assigned to the games listed here are guesses. Is 7 Wonders a 4 weight? Viticulture a 7? Arkwright a 9? While I'd like to think I have a pretty good line for when a game crosses from light to medium, the transition from medium to heavy seems more blurry. And trying to determine which sub-category each game falls into is still subjective. I think I need a better metric, or at least a better-defined one.


Okay, that was long. Took a while to write, too. And I'm sure this isn't the end of it. I will continue to refine this idea; hopefully with enough input on the subject a pattern will start to emerge. In the meantime, I'm open to any viewpoints on the subject if anyone wants to contribute. I'm sure I'm not the first person to try to put an objective criteria on this thing, so pointing me at work that other people have done on the subject might be good.

Thanks for reading everyone!

So, I've been thinking about roll and write games quite a bit lately. It definitely seems like this is one of the current fads in games; compact games that you play on a pad of specially-made score sheets, using dice and a pencil. Of course, Yahtzee (and it's predecessor, Yacht) has been around for a long time, pretty much being the first roll and write game. But the genre has been booming lately.

I know a couple of my designer friends have been trying to make roll and write games. They're not bad; in particular, one friend is making a casino-themed roll and write game with cards and dice that is shaping up really well. I also tried making my own, though my first playtest of that was a pretty big failure. Still, there might be something to my game, if I can just figure out where I went wrong.

I'm thinking I might not truly know what makes a roll and write game fun. Or, alternately, maybe this type of game does not appeal to me, and I'm going down the road of trying to create a game that I ultimately won't enjoy playing. To that end, I've been trying to get my hands on various roll and write games out there. (Playing board games and calling it research! :) Gotta love this hobby.) Sure, I've played Yahtzee lots of times, so I know how that flows. Ganz Schön Clever is a step up from that, with multiple colored scoring areas and different rules and point values for each one. Noch Mal! adds a two-dimensional aspect to the game, as you can only score places on the grid that you're adjacent to. The Castles of Burgundy dice game is another step in that direction, with a hex grid and adjacency restrictions, as well as one-use special abilities that can be obtained by marking hexes of certain colors. And the newest one onto my scene is Welcome To..., which is a card-flipping game where you are filling in house numbers on streets, with special powers associated with each of the available number cards.

I've noticed a trend in these games, one which I think might apply to the genre as a whole. Each of these games on some level creates tension by reducing the player's options over the course of the game. When these games first start, you have a blank slate to work with and the ability to place marks anywhere, subject to some sort of placement rules. But as the game progresses, your options on your turn become progressively more limited. Sure, games like Noch Mal! and Castles of Burgundy dice game have a map that you spread out on, so your options expand initially, but as the map fills up you are again left with diminishing possibilities. This forces you to plan ahead, both mapping out your strategy and trying to leave leeway for bad dice rolls or card flips. Some games have ways to mitigate bad luck, but those are finite and often run out just before those last few turns of the game when you really need them.

Other more traditional board games generate their tension in other ways. I'm know there are typical strategy games out there that try to amp up the game tension by having options run out. However, those often have other mechanics that you have to navigate, and the disappearing possibilities are often because other players have chosen those options, making them inaccessible for the remainder of the game. Roll and writes seem to be heavily reliant on this idea of you limiting yourself later in the game, forcing you to really think ahead.

So, what if there was a roll and write game that created interesting decisions without using this shrinking decision space method? A way to continually open up possibilities over the course of the game, rather than reducing them? Better ways to interact with other players and be affected by their choices? (The norm for roll and writes seems to be that all players can pick from the same pool of possibilities, though the 'active' player gets something extra. Great for asynchronous play, bad for interactive moments.) Ways to mark other players' boards? Ways to erase marks? Ways to temporarily have resources without marking a board? (Mind the component count, though; one plus of roll and write games are how light and compact they are.) I know I've only played a small sliver of the roll and write games out there, but I know the entire design space hasn't been traversed yet. There's plenty of room for adventurous designers to do some trailblazing here.

Maybe I'll end up making something unique, eventually. Here's hoping.