Source: NAB on Giphy
Reiner Knizia has an awesome quote
“When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.” - Reiner Knizia
I’ve been thinking about this recently, especially inspired by a thread on BoardGameGeek about games that are enjoyable to lose, and here is my attempt to set down my thoughts on the various goals you can have during a game. After all, only one player can win…1
Breaking Which Witch news!
I may have mentioned, just once or twice, that we at Curious Lynx Games have been working on a game called Which Witch that we will be bringing to Kickstarter this year. I’m pleased to announce that the countdown is on for real - we are committed to launching the Kickstarter campaign on October 15th, a mere 11 days after you were sent this e-mail!
If you’re lucky enough to be hearing about the Kickstarter for the first time, why not head on over to the preview page and be signed up for notification of the very instant we go live?
It started in Germany, where there was a war…
It’s interesting to me that the kind of boardgames I love to play came out of Germany, in part as a response to what happened after World War II. Some people do enjoy combative warlike games, where destruction of your opposition is the point. However, the market in Germany was, as I understand it, the first to start saying “Actually, we’d rather build something.”
I’m no historian, but I can certainly agree that the feeling I got hooked on when I first encountered these great games from Germany was, that I didn’t know I was missing elsewhere, that I can usually point to some accomplishment that I’m proud of even when I lose.
Chess? I got checkmated, meaning somewhere along the line I either made a mistake, or got outplayed. One of these endings can still be satisfying.
Scrabble? Better - there’s the points score, but perhaps I managed to play out my rack, or make an obscure word, or land a tasty triple word score. I can lose overall but still be proud of a cool move or two.
Carcassonne? Even better - at the end of the game we have built a pretty map together. Maybe I can be proud of completing a monastery or having a large city even if it ultimately wasn’t enough points to win.
Entire genres are built around this satisfaction, the sense of accomplishment from getting something to work at all. I may not have the best engine on the table in an engine-building game, or the best deck in a deck-building game, but if we hit the point in the game where my engine is purring like a well-oiled machine2 then I can take solace in that and vow to improve next time.
Even if what I’ve made is a monstrosity of a Rube Goldberg machine, I can still be proud that it works at all.
Gaming Achievements - rewards from beyond the game
I have a conflicted opinion about capital-A Achievements in games. By these I mean games which have something external to the game, hidden perhaps in the rulebook or at least some supplementary sheet, and ask me to record various things about the final state of the game.
Win the game
Win the game with more than 100 points
Win the game but without doing something
Win the game by doing something a lot
I love this kind of thing in a solo game, because of the replay value. It forces me to explore different strategies for winning a game because merely winning is no longer good enough, I need to try to win a certain way. Succeed or fail trying, it’s only going to deepen my understanding of the game5.
Equally this has its place in a co-op game. Agemonia has an interesting take on achievements, having post-scenario rewards of 2 different types:
Group achievements that reward the group for things the group did
Individual achievements that reward an individual for things they themselves did
I like this in Agemonia as it forces you to take a different perspective on the scenario. Often a group achievement is to do the thing the scenario is set up for, but do it particularly quickly or skilfully or completely. Interestingly, you do not know what the achievements are for a scenario until the end. I find this interesting in such a narrative-driven game as it encourages you to think about what the story wants you to do, not offering up rewards on a silver plate and reducing the achievement to mere mechanical mastery.
However, take the same thing and drop it into a competitive game, and I’m less sure I like the outcome. Trying to win the game a certain way is a cool, exploratory thing to do, but I’m more likely to see this as a player deliberately handicapping themselves and seeing if they can win anyway. It curses the game - if I win because my opponent was going for a certain achievement and I wasn’t, my victory is tainted. It just smells of boasting “Well, I could beat you with one hand tied behind my back.”
Objectives as signposts
Terraria, the board game, has received some negative press over the length of the game, at least compared to what’s claimed on the box. However, when I gave it a test run anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find a neat objective system in there.
There are 4 chains of objectives in different categories, so at all times you will have 1 objective that has something to do with building, one with fighting, one with digging and one with exploring - the 4 main Terraria food groups. The game is won by reaching the bottom of one of the objective chains, i.e. when you complete all 10 objectives in the same stack.
What I noticed, and thought was smart, was that the top 5 or so objectives in the stack were simple with compelling rewards. In fact it was hard not to complete some of them. These simple objectives were secretly doing a ton of extra work:
They simplified the teaching of the game, as instead of explaining what you might like to spend your first turn doing, I could just point at the objective stack and say “Do one of them!”
They accelerated the early economy of the game - these early, simple objectives were easy to complete and the rewards they gave pushed you towards achieving the next objective.
They provided that much needed sense of accomplishment. In a very long game that’s very open world-y, you don’t really want the game to have a binary win-loss outcome that you have to wait until the end of the game to evaluate. Having little successes early on, successes that grow in size and stature as the game nears its completion, only serves to keep boosting the emotional momentum of the game.
In this manner, the objective board really had many mechanical responsibilities all at once, the focus shifting from tutorial through accomplishment to victory the further through the stack you played.
Overlapping Objectives
A Place For All My Books has an interesting take on objectives - you have a hand of Little Projects, and there are some publicly available Major Accomplishments. However, the real puzzle of the game lies in efficiently trying to complete as many Little Projects as you can at the same time.
Is it hard to have a room full of lonesome books? To have 4 stacks topped with blue books? To have 4 red books in the stacks in the corners? To have no blue books in the bathroom? Individually, no, none of these Little Projects are hard to complete. All at the same time, given that you can’t take the same action twice in a row? Now we’re talking!
What I think I like about this system the most is that the game becomes as difficult as the skill level of the best player at the table. Generally if people are completing one project at a time, someone completing 2 is going to succeed. But if everyone is doing 2s, maybe you should push to try and complete 3…
Objectives and scale as the game loop
Possibly my favourite video-game genre ever is the roguelite. Unfortunately, essentially every person I have ever spoken to about rogue-like games disagrees on what that actually means. I’m not really trying to define my own term3 to add to the confusion, rather, I want to focus on the part of it that I like the feeling of:
A seemingly (or perhaps literally) impossibly hard objective, which becomes easier through various mechanisms at each attempt, until you finally succeed.
That’s it. At its core, that’s the part of so-called Roguelikes that I like.
It doesn’t matter to me how the task becomes easier, although -
I like it when the task becomes easier with each attempt partly because you understand it more.
I like it when you have the choice during an attempt between doing something that might make this attempt the one that succeeds, or instead making a choice that makes future attempts more likely to succeed.
I like it when discoverable objectives appear along the way, perhaps side quests, perhaps just checkpoints along the way, completion of which can reward you substantially
It’s no coincidence that I’ve been enjoying the videogame Hades 2 a lot recently. In it, you can sometimes be faced with the choice when accepting a boon from a god, between one that will increase your damage output and one that will enable you to find certain resources more easily. Extra damage can only help you in this run. Extra resources cannot help you in this run, they’re only useful after this attempt fails, to be used back at your home base to unlock new things or upgrade old things.
I try to do the thing, I fail, I earn something along the way, which makes it easier to do the thing
It occurred to me whilst playing Favor of the Pharaoh that it is, essentially, doing exactly that thing that I just described. You start the game trying to roll a 7-of-a-kind on 3 dice. That’s not possible. With a Yahtzee-style dice-locking mechanism, each time you roll the dice you must lock one or more, until you have nothing left to roll and must take a reward based on the combination you rolled.
Some of those rewards earn you extra dice to roll, which can only help you toward that overarching 7-of-a-kind objective. Others allow you to manipulate the dice you have, making it easier to get the rewards you wish to claim as you ascend toward the top.
Each turn gets progressively more complex, as each extra die brings with it more potential outcomes and more allowed re-rolls. Along the way you will have picked up some single-use tokens that might manipulate a dice result by adding 1 pip, or allow re-rolls of individual dice. But when do you decide that this is the one - this is the turn I’m going to throw everything I have at achieving that 7-of-a-kind?
Summary
I firmly believe that people are going to enjoy a game, or at least have fonder post-game memories, if they believe that they accomplished something during the game. Those accomplishments can be explicit goals that are directly worth points or other rewards, or they can be implicit sensations of pride.
That’s my key takeaway. Games are usually fun to win, but what can you do to make a game fun to lose?
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1 He says, eyeing Cosmic Encounter nervously…
2 I may have mixed my metaphors here. I’m not much of a driver…
3 Yes, I’m aware of the Berlin interpretation, and no, I’m not convinced it helps4
4 It probably doesn’t help that I never played Rogue…
5 In the video game world, this can give a game an extra life that I might otherwise have “finished”, and I don’t see why this couldn’t be true for board games too. For Northwood!, for example has multiple difficulty levels to its campaign mode.