"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!
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!
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