How many turns?

Yep, I’m writing this after seeing the new Spider-Man film (tl;dr - go see it, it’s great, Zendaya’s MJ is fabulous and Frank especially made it feel more like a Spider-Man movie than an Avengers movie). The film is 2 hours and 25 minutes long, and in talking about it afterwards, I realised I cared quite a lot about that length. Yes, it felt like a long film but I appreciated it because the story felt like it needed that amount of room. The pacing was right, I didn’t feel like it dragged, and it allowed the story to contain a certain number of arcs and twists that made for an emotionally complete story.

So what’s that got to do with boardgames? Well, it all points to a feeling I had a couple of times recently. Once when we played YRO on Board Game Arena as part of our “Play with Curious Lynx” Friday lunchtime stream¹. Once again when I was into something like my 5th game of Decko by Haakon Hoel Gaarder with my son. And again when I took some time over lunch to play Wingspan Pocket with my wife.

How long should a boardgame be?

All 4 games that I’m talking about here have something in common. Wingspan, Wingspan Pocket, and YRO are all engine builder games². Decko has that in the Jokers, and also is a deckbuilding game. That means there’s a tension in your decisions that I love to see - short term gain versus long term investment.

Let’s take the first burn phase of Decko as an example³. I draw 3, 4, 5, 6, 8. Let’s assume for now that the suit doesn’t matter. I have at least 3 options that make sense here. The hand has nothing going for it, so I could fold it as is and take any card from the market. Or I could burn a card first, which I’m almost certainly going to do. But which card?

A short-term-centric argument says “Burn the 8. When we draw a card to replace it, if we draw a 3, 4, 5 or 6 we make a pair which is OK, if we draw 2 or 7 we make a straight and probably win the hand, the only really dead card is drawing the other 8.”

A long-term-centric argument says “Burn the 3. It’s one of the lowest cards we have, so long term we don’t want it in our deck. This turn drawing a 4, 5, 6 or 8 gives us a pair, drawing a 2, 7, or the other 3 is dead, but this turn doesn’t matter, building towards a stronger end game deck is what matters.”

And here’s the thing that’s delightful about this decision - it being the first turn of the game there are several turns to go - a maximum of 11 if no-one hits the target early. What’s the difference between going 11 turns with a 3 missing from your deck, versus an 8 missing from your deck? I don’t know! It genuinely depends on a lot of factors - what’s in the market right now? What are the wildcard rules for rounds 4 and 8?

The point though, is not what is the right move here. The point is that the question is an interesting question, and that’s what we’re seeking to design into our games. If Decko only lasted 3 turns then this simply is not interesting, you don’t have time to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term gains, because there is no long-term to think about!

Thanks to Board Game Arena, I was able to reacquaint myself with YRO last week - it’s a game I’ve previously had the privilege of playing in real life thanks to one of my friends owning a copy, and the online implementation is decent enough.

In YRO you start with some money and some cards in hand. Each round you use the money you have to play 0-2 cards from your hand, compare the power of your group to earn combat points, use recruit abilities of any just-played cards, possibly score bonuses if you have a complete 3-card row or column of matching colours, then income and VP abilities of all your cards in play, and loop round to do it again until someone breaches 40 VP or fills their 3×3 tableau with cards.

In Wingspan Pocket, you start with some food and bird cards in hand, and a nest with 3 abilities - play a bird, draw cards or lay eggs. Whichever you choose, all birds you’ve played are then activated in the order you played them, and the game ends when someone has played 6 birds.

So how many turns does each game last?

I’ve not given you enough information to answer that question. Is your starting money in YRO often going to be enough to play 2 cards? Would you want to, even if it is? How often does the game end via 40 VP being reached, versus the 3×3 grid being filled? Wingspan Pocket ends at 6 birds - is that 6 turns? How many turns are likely to go by with no bird being played? Is that because you cannot afford a bird, or because doing something else is better in the short-term?

My take on this, based on nothing but vibes after a number of plays of each game - regardless of how many actual turns it is, YRO feels short. I feel railroaded into playing a strategy that appears in my opening hand, because there doesn’t feel like enough time to dig for something else. I’ve often ended a game of YRO thinking that I’ve just set up my engine, and the game ended before I could get it running.

Wingspan Pocket does not feel too short to me, I feel like I generally have choices to make between going for a bird in my hand versus a bird on display - like I have time to draw that bird and play it and not feel like I’m setting myself back too far to do that. However, this is entirely based on playing at 2-players. I think the more players you add, whilst the game overall will take longer as that player’s turn needs to be carried out, turn wise the game probably ends up shorter as it’s more likely someone will drive to 6 birds quickly?

I’ll write a full article on The Gang at some point, but it’s worth mentioning here as another interesting use of game length. The Gang has players try to communicate how strong their poker hand is by taking chips that represent their hand ranking. If you think you’re the worst hand you take the 1-star chip, if you think you’re better you take something higher. You can’t actually say anything about the contents of your hand.

After 4 such ‘betting’ rounds with new cards being revealed between each, you actually reveal and compare hand ranks, and if you’re exactly correct you win, but if anyone is out of place you lose.

The game could end right there.

But instead, even in the most basic version of the game where nothing changes round to round, you still continue to play until you’ve either won 3 rounds or lost 3 rounds. That has a few important effects and I believe was absolutely the correct decision:

For similar reasons I enjoy that Panda Spin by Carl Chudyk will always take at least 2 rounds, probably 3 to play out to its prescribed victory condition⁵.

One of the skills you practise again and again in all sorts of boardgames is the ability to predict the future. You don’t know for sure what the other players at the table are going to do. You don’t know for sure what cards are coming out of the deck next. But you can read the signals on the board and hedge, you can get approximate odds on whether the next card is going to be important or not, for whatever is important to you right now.

Games tend to break down and become something else when the end is in sight. This is what I mean by prediction horizon. Your prediction horizon is how far you can see into the future with any certainty. Once the end of the game is within your prediction horizon, you can see exactly how much value a decision holds, and choose the best one.

Where games come to life for me is when the length of the game breaks my prediction horizon - I want to be able to make decisions whose impact is a little fuzzy. Where I have to feel my way, not just calculate. Of course, you can go too far - if I have nothing concrete on which to base a decision then I’d better hope there’s a card with a funny name I like or something otherwise peculiar looking I can try⁴!

My conclusion is that a game, much like this article, should be as long as it needs to be to express the ideas it contains and no longer. That means more than it sounds like it’s saying - it means that outwardly similar looking games can have very different optimal playing lengths depending on what they’re trying to make you feel.

A game should wrap up after enough time that I’ve actually managed to try out the strategy I’m trying, but not linger so long that I exhaust all my useful options. It’d be nice too if the game ended shortly after we know who the winner will be.

My design challenge to you for this week. Think of a game that you’ve played that felt like it needed to be longer. What got cut off? Why were you left unsatisfied? What levers could you pull in the game’s design to make the game last a little longer? Then do the same for a game that felt too long - why did it drag? Why did you feel like the game should have ended sooner? And what levers could you pull in that game’s design to speed things along a little⁶? Then come back to our Discord and tell us your thoughts!

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