Introduction
Lately I’ve been playing a computer game called Tales of Maj’Eyal. I wanted to talk a little bit about how resource management in that game works and what lessons we can take away for board games. Let’s dive in.
Description of Resources in ToME
Characters in ToME all have some sort of resource that they use in order to activate their abilities. The resources vary considerably but they’re all used in the same way, you click on an ability and it uses the appropriate amount of resource. Let’s look at a few:
Stamina. Click the ability, stamina is reduced by the cost, if you don’t have enough then you can’t use the ability. It comes back over time.
Mana. Click the ability, mana is reduced by the cost, if you don’t have enough then you can’t use the ability. Depending on who you are it might not come back naturally and you need to use another ability to restore it.
Souls. Click the ability, souls are reduced by the cost, if you don’t have enough then you can’t use the ability. Comes back each time you kill someone while close enough to hoover up their soul.
Equilibrium. Click the ability, equilibrium is increased by the cost. Then there’s a %chance roll to see if the ability happens or if you’ve wasted your turn – the higher your equilibrium the higher the chance of a missed turn. It falls over time.
Paradox. Click the ability, paradox is increased by the cost. Then there’s a %chance roll to see if you get a paradox backlash instead of your ability – the higher your paradox the higher the chance of a backlash and the more extreme the backlash. Your current paradox level also acts as a multiplier for the power of your spells, so high paradox makes you more powerful. It returns to a level of your choice over time.
Insanity. Click the ability, insanity is reduced by the cost, if you don’t have enough then you can’t use the ability. The higher it is the greater the random number added or subtracted from everything you do. It falls over time and can only be restored in combat by using abilities that generate it on hitting enemies.
There are a bunch more: Hate, Vim, Positive Energy, Negative Energy and Psi – but you get the idea.
Why do we care?
The consequence of this variety of resources is that similar abilities can feel very different because of the resources they use. You can have two abilities that fundamentally do the same thing – say shoot a beam damaging everything along the beam – but the resource it uses depends on how you apply it.
If it uses mana then it makes sense to use it early and often, but you want to keep a plan in mind to escape combat and recover if you run short. If it relies on insanity then your opening gambit needs to include some insanity gain to make it useful, so you’re trying to find a way to combo with another ability that both generates insanity and pulls opponents into a line to get the most out of the follow up. If it’s using paradox then you can use it an awful lot, but there’s an associated risk – do you start at a high pardox so your opening salvo hits hard or a low one so you get more shots before you risk exploding yourself?
The fact that the ability/resource combination is meaningful allows a game to have a lot of skills. In the same amount of time you could design ten abilities, you could design five abilities and five resources – generating a total of twenty five possible abilities. Not all of those would be any good, some would surely be eliminated through playtesting, but it’s a way to put a lot of variety into a game without having a huge amount of rules to learn.
Asymmetric Resources in Board Games
There are plenty of games that’ll let you arrive at the same outcome through different
expenditures
. Race for the Galaxy has cards that’ll allow you to play a some planets by discarding cards or by having enough military. Descent will let you move a space using a point of movement or a point of fatigue. You can hold a territory in Game of Thrones using a unit or using a power token.
Doing the same thing using different resources that function in different ways is a great source of meaningful decisions – but in these games it’s not the core of the game, it’s a neat extra thing.
There are also games that let you simultaneously manage several resources in order to buy things using their combination. Something like Splendor offering the player several types of gem to make their purchases. But in these games the resources all behave in fundamentally the same way.
I can’t think of an example of a tabletop game that’s really embraced the possibilities of concurrent asymmetric resources either as a way to create distinctions between players or to produce meaningful decisions in how players progress – but I’d be really interested to see one attempted. If I don’t find one perhaps I’ll give it a whirl some day.
How about you, have you heard of one? Is there a game I should try to see how this works in practice?