Dollar Auction

Dollar Auctions

A dollar auction is a thought experiment in economics in which someone auctions a dollar under the following terms: You can bid any amount you want, you can win a dollar for a cent, but if you make the second highest bid you still pay up.

Implications

Using the economic “perfectly rational” actors things get quite pricey.

Initially it makes sense to bid $0.01 to win $1
When someone else bids $0.02 it’s still a good proposition to bid $0.03 to win $1
This continues until someone bids $1. At this point the other bidder is looking at bidding $1.01 for $1. That’s a clear loss. But it is only a loss of $0.01, compared to a loss of $0.99 for stopping now. So a higher bid is still rational.
This continues until…actually it just continues. There’s no until. The dollar will sell for infinity dollars.

In economics this is a criticism of a particular means of conceptualising “perfectly rational” actors and the suggestion that the idea is flawed or at least needs some refinement. But we’re not economists.

Auctions in Games

Board games have been using auctions for a while. They’re a really neat mechanic since they sidestep a lot of balancing issues.

If something is auctioned the players are setting the price. You don’t need to say “Card A costs 4 and card B costs 5” and risk having valued those cards incorrectly. You just auction them off and the players will set the values. This is particularly powerful because it is sensative to the meta-context of the game – some things can be impossible to set costs for becuase their value changes dramatically depending on what else is in play, the state of the game and (sometimes) the sort of people playing.

There are two popular models for auctions in games:

Traditional auctions, in which players take it in turns to bid higher and higher until everyone but one player has backed down. They pay and get the thing, while everyone else takes their money back. Like you’d do in Monopoly or Power Grid. (I probably don’t need examples to illustrate this point but something tickled me about being able to use those two together)

Blind auctions, in which players simultaneously choose how much they’re going to bid and reveal all at once. All of the bids are lost, but only the highest bidder gets the thing. Or in some cases players are bidding for something akin to turn order and everyone is placed relative to their bid.

I can’t think of an example of a game that uses a dollar auction model in which the second place (or more) players lose their bids.

Could it work in a game?

Almost certainly someone has made it work and I’ve simply not played the game or games where it does, but let’s speculate anyway 😉

The good news is that it creates a complex situation in which there’s not an obvious dominant strategy. If all players but one refuse to take part in this sort of auction the player who does is at a significant advantage. If everyone but one takes part the one who stays out has a definite advantage. Optimal play with this sort of auction will be based on meta-knowledge of what the other players are likely to do. It’s also somewhat fertile ground for table talk and informal agreements beyond the structure of the game. Some players hate that, but a game that sets an expectation that it is to be played that way can attract players who don’t.

The bad news is mostly loaded into the difficulties of making it fun to lose these sorts of auction. Inherently the player who comes second will lose resources, potentially a lot of resources, and have nothing to show for it. It’s important this not remove them from being in a position to make meaningful decisions in the game. There’s also the danger of a run away winner where someone says “I have the most shinies, I am going to outbid anyone who tries to get this thing, so if you bid you will lose money for nothing, therefore you will not bid and I will get it for one shiny. With everything costing me one shiny it is easy for me to have the most shinies forever.” In theory a strategy like that could be broken where other players cooperate to break their strangehold on the “most shinies” position, but such cooperation is difficult where’s an intrinsic motivation to be the contributing member who contributes the least.

What would the working game look like?

I think there’d be two main ways to mitigate the problems auctions like this could cause:

The first would be to make a game in which the thing players are bidding with refreshes frequently. If you had 10 coins a turn to bid and couldn’t carry them over from turn to turn then nobody could maintain a “most shinies” position and someone who lost everything to get nothing is back in the action fairly quickly.

The second would be to make a game in which the social dynamics took centre stage and other game mechanics were supporting the making and breaking of alliances in a way that mean someone who bid second and lost *was* getting something meaningful. They were knocking down the money available to the winner which is somehow good for their alliance and good for them.

Is it a good idea?

Maybe! I don’t know. The point of the blog is to discuss design ideas, see what it inspires and get used to thinking of mechanics in different ways. In that it’s been an interesting topic to divert onto for a few minutes 🙂

Space Food Truck

Recently I’ve come across a computer game that I wanted to talk about, becuase it’s basically a deckbuilding board game with sprinkles and has some interesting ideas. It’s called Space Food Truck.

The Game

The gameplay will be very familiar to anyone who’s ever played a deckbuilder:

The game is cooperative and each turn starts with a random event (usually but not always bad, escalating in severity as the game goes on). Once that’s done you play all of the cards in your hand. These let you do things related to your job, which in aggregate will let you fly your truck around, pick up ingredients, cook them and deliver them to the target planets winning the game. Then you discard all of the cards you have left over and buy one or more cards to add to your discard pile. Finally you draw a new hand, shuffling your discard pile if your deck has expired.

So far, so standard. So why bring it up?

The devil is in the details. This game uses a host of different mechanics, some of which I’m wouldn’t usually to think of as a deckbuilding mechanics, in interesting ways. There’s nothing you won’t have seen before in this game, but there are times that the mix of mechanics generates something more than the sum of it’s parts. This is a good goal for any designer, so I’d like to explore them by way of looking at how using a mechanic in a new context can generate new gameplay in the hopes of inspiring ideas for other genres.

Power

All cards have a power value. The most important cards in your deck will scale based on how much power you choose to supply them with. For example if you play a repair card you might need to discard one power for each thing you want to repair. But of course a card that’s discarded for power can’t be played.

I’ve always been a big fan of “choose cards to discard to be allowed to play other cards” as a mechanic, meaningful choices are central to good gameplay and this is the sort of mechanic that helps to develop it. It also provides extra delineation between cards, allowing the presentation of choices between buying cards worth lots of coins, cards which have good abilities or cards which provide a lot of power.

It’s not used to its fullest possible effect here though. It could have been a means to flatten out some of the luck of the draw and make player skill more central. In a lot of games a hand of all of one type of card then a hand of all of another is often less desirable than getting a good mix. If important action cards had high power values then drawing them all together would lead to thoughts like “Huh, all three repair cards, well we’re not repairing for a few turns after this while I draw through the rest of the deck – but at least this turn I can fix everything!” Instead important actions have been assigned low, or even 0 power, which means the mechanic instead exacerbates the luck of the draw.

That seems like a missed opportunity.

Roles

The variation between playable roles is quite intensive and well implemented.

The captain is the only person who can move the ship and restock the supply. If the ship doesn’t move there’ll be no new cards to buy at the end of the turn – if you don’t buy a card you get a useless leftovers card that bloats your deck to no advantage.

The scientist is the only person who can improve people’s ability to do their core job. Everyone can buy cards each turn, but these come from a common pool of generic cards. The captain can never buy an extra “Fly the ship this turn” card, which is bad news since decks will inevitably get larger as the game goes on so the main jobs get done less and less consistently. The scientist’s research power adds new core cards to everyone’s decks, letting them do their main jobs more effectively.

The chef is the only person who can cook meals, necessary to win the game. However that’s a skill that’s only needed on a few turns, so the designers needed to give him a second strength. What they’ve settled on is an exceptional ability to destroy cards in both their own and other people’s decks. Even the most expensive “destroy card” options in the generic deck are typically less good than the chef’s starting options.

The engineer is there to make sure you don’t lose. Events will damage the ship and crew, lowering its capabilities in various ways. If it’s hull gets damaged enough it explodes and everyone loses. On the other hand different sorts of damage might cause people to draw fewer cards each turn or be unable to play some actions. The engineer decides what to fix in what order.

Given that the distinction between the roles is generated by approximately 4 cards in a 10 card initial deck (plus whatever the scientist researches over the course of the game) the roles feel very different. They all involve some sort of meaningful decision – whether it’s research priorities, which deck to burn cards from or where to fly – and they all wind up feeling very different to play.

Asymmetrical roles can add a lot to a game and give it some decent replayability. I suspect some of that is wasted here as I reckon the average person playing the game is probably on single player as all four roles – but as a primer on how to make asymmetric roles interesting and distinct it’s got some good ideas.

Restock

One of the defining features of a deckbuilder is how it limits which cards a player can buy to add to their deck. Dominon established the genre by selecting a limited number at the start of the game, but allow players access to all of them every turn. Others, like Legendary, have a limited supply drawn that’s refreshed after players take cards from it.

Space Food Truck takes an interesting step in treating “available options” as a resource. If the captain is willing to play a jump card and expend fuel and avoids crossing the path of places she’s visited before then she gets to draw a random selection of cards which she may add to those that are available to buy. There are a limited number of slots for these cards and it’s up to her which ones are discarded and which ones are available for the rest of the team to buy.

Having stocking the cards that people can buy from as an explicit game event opens up more meaningful choices. The actions that will lead to the most frequent restocks and doing several restocks to get the ideal mix of choices rather than “whatever was lying around” will often conflict with other desirable outcomes like “take the most efficient route” or “move primarily through systems where we know that we want what will happen to us on that planet to happen”.

This is a mechanic I’d like to see someone do more with. The decisions in Space Food Truck are often relatively trivial “everyone getting a leftovers is sufficiently bad that the jump to a new planet is worth it regardless of other consequences” or “we have fewer new cards from this planet than we have slots so we’re taking everything” aren’t tense, exciting, decisions. I’m sure a game built around playing with the stock situation some more could do a lot with it, but this shows how the potential is there to be realised.

Conclusion

Space Food Truck is not the best game I’ve ever played (well worth the price though) but it demonstrates the power of taking mechanics into unfamiliar territory and messing with assumptions. As much as there are ideas from this particular game I’d like to see taken forward, I think more generally it’s good to bear in mind how we don’t need to always be trying to come up with something new as much as innovative mixes for ingredients we’ve already got on the shelf.

An Unfair Game

Today we’re going to turn an assumption about what makes a good design on its head and see what shakes out. The assumption is this: An asymmetric game should be balanced such that players of equal skill have a reasonable chance to win no matter which side (or position or whatever) they start with.

Players Have Unequal Skill

This seems obvious, but it’s worth saying out loud, since it’s the reason to do the thing. In most games if one player is better they will tend to win. Sometimes this is desirable, especially in something like a competition scenario, but I’m not sure it’s always desirable.

If a parent plays with their kid should they always beat them, or else decide not to and lose by deliberate poor play?

Should the outcome of a game between an experienced player and someone they’re introducing to games for the first time be a foregone conclusion?

If people like playing together socially but are at different levels of skill is the best possible design one where one constantly beats the other?

I don’t think the answer to any of these questions is “yes”. I feel that in a lot of situations players are best served by a design if they have an exciting close game that comes down to the wire and whichever one of them most surpasses their personal best comes out on top.

I think there’s a place for an unfair game, in which positions are intentionally unbalanced. With the goal of creating a tense close game between players of different levels of experience.

What Features Does It Need?

The gameplay on the “hard” side needs to have a high skill ceiling. In principle the game is allowing one player to make up for a gulf in raw power through good play, so there needs to be a lot of delineation in how well it can be played. There’s no sense playing snakes and ladders with one player starting 10 spaces ahead, the lack of options in the game gives the player who’s behind no means to catch up.

The gameplay on the “easy” side needs to have accessible play, FOO strategies and at least a moderate skill ceiling. Let’s break those down one by one:

Accessible play is necessary because the side is intended as a means to introduce new players to games, so it shouldn’t assume too much prior experience of familiarity with different mechanics. You’d want it to be as playable as any gateway game.

FOO strategies are a part of accessible play and it’d be helpful for developing the game. Some relatively obvious strong plays offer a new player somewhere to get started and provide a baseline for what the game might expect a player in that position to do.

However it’s important that there be better approaches available. If one side is more powerful but its gameplay is just “Flip a card, do what the card says” then you’ve essentially relegated one player to running part of a solo game for the experienced player. There needs to be the genuine opportunities for subtle and clever plays from both sides for everyone to be truely involved in the game.

Themes

In discussing mechanical issues it’s easy to nudge theme over to one side and forget about it, but the funny thing is that there are loads of games that use themes more suited to this sort of situation than the games they’re actually in.

I think it’s to do with the nature of stories that people like:

A plucky group of heroes entering a dungeon filled with monsters and traps.

A single ninja infiltrating a castle packed with guards.

A small rebel group taking on the might of an Empire!

We like underdog stories. So why not make a game in which the underdogs really are underdogs? Making major mechanical decisions just to deliver on a theme can often generate a fairly flawed game, but if we’re looking at an unbalanced game anyway why not really nail a theme that’s been attempted a bunch of times but never in any fidelity?

Pulling it Together

I’ve started trying a few prototypes for this sort of game this week. My first attempt was one called HappyLand in which a director of an amusement park was trying to get his guests to have enough fun while his guests were desperately trying to leave and get on with their lives.

The visitors started with a deck allowing some short moves and obtained resources to add cards to their deck by moving through certain spaces, permitting them to work up to longer moves or to overcome obstacles that blocked movement such as walls and mascots.

The director draw two cards and played one each turn. This let her move visitors or mascots around or set them objectives (Like “ride the waterslide”) such that failing to do so added 0-value (“smile”) cards to their deck.

The visitors won by escaping the park, the director won by emptying the smile pile.

Having worked on it for a week and taking the time to write a short article about it today I’m not sure that HappyLand is the game I’m looking for, so I’m likely to dissect it for parts. Some thoughts on this prototype:

Deckbuilding is a strong mechanic for the “underdog” side. It requires a degree of planning ahead and creates a lot of tension between “needed now” and “needed ever”. It’s also somewhat subject to disruption and can help create the skill ceiling for the other side, especially if they’re adding cards do the deck that are anything other than unalloyed evil.

I’m not sure HappyLand was the right theme, but something that’s at least child friendly seems important, given age is going to be one of the main reasons for disparity of experience. It’s important the game not come across as “for kids” though, that’s going to be a fine line to walk.

The many against one aspect needs some consideration. The one vs one situation is easy enough and many vs many is going to be much harder to work with – but which way around should it be? Is a hypothetical group more likely to be a bunch of experienced players and one new player or the other way around? Is it better for several players to gang up on the strongest player or the weakest player to be thrown into a position of power over everyone else? Those seem appealing in different ways.

There’s still plenty to do with this, but it’s an idea I’d like to explore some more.

 

Social Deduction for Introverts

Introduction

I introduced One Night Ultimate Vampire to a new group this week and we got talking about it after the fact. Some folks liked it, others didn’t, there’s one criticism I wanted to highlight and talk about:

“in large numbers the shy folks really have to fight to be heard”

I thought this was really interesting because it describes something that I think applies to the genre rather than the game.

The Problem

A social deduction game has two elements – broadly “social” and “deduction”

You have to work things out. Partly from hard facts and partly from softer information about what people say and do.

Having worked things out you need to persuade people of some truth (either the actual truth or some alternative you’ve made up based on what you’ve figured out).

If the conversation is dominated by a few voices then the quieter people don’t get to play the second half of the game. Which is obviously a bad thing.

But the incentive structure for the game is that dominating the conversation is a good thing. People will try to build several narratives and the successful player will be the one who can make their narrative the strongest (if they’ve got their deductions right).

So the challenge for the designer is structuring the game in a way that rewards players for making more space for other players to speak up. Even if they wouldn’t usually, perhaps especially if they didn’t usually.

Not a Solution: Play with nicer people who make sure everyone gets a go

I bring this up briefly because someone always suggests it for problems like these 😉

This is a solution for *players* but it’s not a solution for *designers*. You can’t print on the side of the box “Only play this if you’re nice” and expect that to work.

A player should seek a group that they enjoy.

Where it doesn’t compromise other design goals, a designer should aim to make their game enjoyable by many types of different group.

Existing Solutions: Information Dispersal

The #1 way these sorts of games handle this issue is to make sure that all of the players have different useful bits of information. The theory being that if everyone knows something critical to their teams success then everyone will have something to say in the discussion and it will be in their teams interests to make sure it’s heard. Since the average player is on the biggest team the average player should have the support of most of the table.

It’s a neat theory, but there are a few ways it can fall down.

The first is if someone’s information isn’t useful to any other person. If all you have is “I am not a baddie” that’s not worth much. You can figure things based on that, but when you say it to the table it’s meaningless because everyone claims to be not a baddie.

The second is if the group prioritises the social over the deduction. Players new to the genre very often see leading the discussion and influencing who dies as the winning strategy. Information dispersal can only work if two conditions are met:

1. The players need the information to correctly know what they need to do to win
2. The players recognise that they need that information.

In new groups there can be a tendency to try to control the conversation without finding much out, which makes the conversation controller look powerful. If they lose anyway it can be easy for a player to attribute that to “bad luck” rather than “poor deduction” and not realise that giving players with extra hidden info more of a voice would’ve lead to a win and it was the conversation control that cost them the game.

The third is where info comes out relatively trivially and discussion on how to interpret it dominates the game. If you have 20 seconds of “Everyone says their thing” and then half an hour of arguing about it – the half hour argument is most of the game. The 20 seconds of being involved hasn’t really solved the problem, because the player still sat out of a lot of the game.

Existing Solutions: Regulated Speech

Some games will make explicit rulings about when and how a player is able to speak. In the online mafia game Town of Salem if there are enough votes to hang someone everyone else’s chat is literally disabled for 20 seconds and only that person gets to speak. Then everyone makes a final yes/no vote on whether to kill them.

Giving a player a moment to speak mandated by the rules ensures that they get to make a point at the most critical juncture means a person can get a word in edgeways at the most critical juncture.

Existing Solutions: Power at a Point

In Mafia de Cuba one player is the godfather. They will ultimately decide the outcome of the game, there’s no vote, just their word for who they think is a thief.

This has an interesting effect on group dynamics, in that one person is imbued with power in a way that distorts the conversation and that person is also the person with the most to gain from getting all of the information. If the godfather says “I want to hear from Eric now” then Eric is going to get to speak. Whether he wants to or not 😉

Other games harness this to a lesser extent, giving a player the right to choose what thing is being voted on or some special power they can use during or just after the discussion – but the purpose is the same: Get someone to chair the meeting.

Existing Solutions: Parallel Discussions

Two Rooms and a Boom takes a different approach. If a big discussion with a bajillion players is going to lead to some folks not getting to sidle into the game. So what if it was broken down into a whole bunch of smaller discussions? What if there was an active advantage to having quiet 1:1 discussions that other players didn’t notice or hear?

The answer is that play becomes very different, but everyone will be getting to do something most of the time. It’s not a perfect solution in that you can still wind up with sidelined players in 2RaaB due to its other mechanics, but it does very neatly deal with this particular issue.

Potential Solutions

Because “Information dispersal” is baked in, I’m not sure how many designers have been actively considering this as an issue rather than it being a thing that gets worked out naturally by tinkering with rules in playtesting.

Heck I’ve published a social deduction game and never really consciously thought about it!

So perhaps there are untapped solutions that haven’t yet been tried. The main one that occurs to me at the moment is likely due to ongoing discussion about asymmetric resources. What would a social deduction game look like if the capacity to talk was a limited resource?

Could you have a game in which people said things like “Rose just spoke for the third time which means she can’t be a villager, I am which means this is the last thing I’m going to be able to say.” I think there’s some unexplored potential there.

I’m sure there are other solutions out there waiting to be discovered. I look forward to playing them 😀

History of Games

There’s a project that may or may not happen, that I can’t talk about in detail at the moment, that has an odd requirement: We need to take the development of board games and split it into four “ages” each of which contains games that modern gamers would recognise and at least have some inkling of the rules of. Let’s give it a go!

The Oldest Game

For a long time I had it in my head that the oldest game is Go. Board game geek lists it as being invented in -2200, Wikipedia says the earliest written record of it is -400, I’m not sure what the definitively pinned down date is, but that game is old!

It’s not the oldest though, at some point in the past I was misinformed and never challenged my assumptions. I’m confidently informed that Senet is older and we’ve found some wicked neat sets in old tombs. That game is looking at -3500.

It’s probably not the oldest game was, because we found these beauties. Those are from 1500 years before our oldest copy of Senet so, the oldest game was, uh…whatever that is. Maybe. Or they really are some sort of counting stone and not a game at all. Or “ritual purposes” 😉

Chess and Cards

When Western non gamers talk about old games they’re usually thinking about chess and a variety of games played with a 54 card deck. Chess is 1450, thousands of years after the really old games and cards got started around 850 but they didn’t mutate into what we’d recognise as a pack of playing cards until they came to Europe and went through various mutations over the 14th to 19th centuries.

Classic Board Games

I tried asking a few people a generation older than me what they thought classic modern board games were – as in stuff that wasn’t ancient and part of anything they’d think of as “history” – but that has been around forever. The answers I got were Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders and Risk. Huh, there’s no BGG article for Snakes and Ladders, a few specific variations are mentioned, but the main one is missing. Does that seem like a weird gap to anyone else?

In any event as I’m sure most of your know S&L technically fits in with the ancient games, being derived from an Indian game that’s at least a thousand years older than chess. But they’re probably thinking of the Milton Bradley thing that got ported over in 1943 – which would fit with the dates of the other two (1933 and 1959 respectively). Basically they’re naming things that were already in the house when they were kids.

Games that were already in the house when I was a kid

I remember growing up with the 80s bookcase games. Technically I they might have entered the house after me (I was born 1984) but they predated my ability to form memories which amounted to the same thing. Also the sort of boxes that people manufactured back then were weak – after a couple of years of regular play they looked like some artefact from the before times and my parents liked games.

So mentally, on some level, old games to me means gems like Titan and atrocities against gaming like Outdoor Survival. Some of these games would be recognised by folks who didn’t grow up with them on account of Fantasy Flight deciding to publish a bunch of old games in shiny new formats.

Modern Games

Getting into things that people would talk about as actually modern games I can observe the development of that over my lifetime. Catan rocking up in the mid 90s and people wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be terrible forever if Euros had some randomness, or Ameritrash games had some theme. Dominion swaggering up in 2008 saying “Maybe we haven’t found *all* of the genres yet followed shortly by everyone losing their shit and making a million clone babies. Pandemic jump onto the stage around the same time and raising “Cooperative games are a thing” to volume that eclipsed some muffled cries of “But we’ve had those for years”. Followed by Risk Legacy announcing “I’m too much game to only appear in a potted history of game development the one time!”

Alongside all of this Kickstarter waggled its eyebrows suggestively and whispered “What if you could support games you wanted, even if they were too niche for a publisher to pick up? What if you got to talk with the designer before it was printed and could make sure it’d grow in the way you wanted? What if you got more components per pound because the distributor doesn’t get a cut? All of this could be yours!” and people saying “Yaaaay” but suddenly sometimes money disappears with no game showing up and also minis everywhere whether you like them or not. So some of the people were sad and swore never to do it again. But enough people loved the promise of a million minis and kept Cool Mini or Not printing as much money as they wanted.

Parallel Developments

As all of this happened alongside board gaming, war gaming and roleplaying were also growing up. Wargames asking questions like “What if we had models instead of counters?” and then “This is a lot of painting, can we use fewer models?” While roleplaying asked questions like “What if as well as killing everything we did some role playing?” and then “Do we need to kill anything at all?” (With a side order of “Yes you have to kill everything and also what if there were a million supplements to help you do more of that”)

The project I’m looking at doesn’t need to deal with either of those things in detail, but it might be worth leaning out of the window on the drive past and grabbing an idea or two from each.

Putting it All Together

History is messy and things overlap. It’s also really big, I’ve barely scratched the surface here, you could fill tomes and tomes with a full history of board games developing over the years. Though I’d like to see a board games history presented in the manner of this history of the world.

What I need is four distinct “ages” of board games that are nice and neat and that each one contains at least a few games that’d be iconic and recognised by the average gamer who doesn’t care at all deeply about the history of things.

What I’m considering at the moment is this:

Ancient Games
This covers almost all of human history, right up to -5000 to 1900. I’m aware this is misuse of the term “ancient”. While historically there are thousands of years between things like Chess and Go I think that a lot of players mentally dump them into the same category. Despite its absurdly broad time catchment I suspect this grouping will feel natural to most gamers.

Classic Games
This covers 1900-1945, pulling in the classic Milton Bradley stuff like Monpoly and (modern) Snakes and Ladders. Things that people will perceive as “too recent to be history” but also “too dated for most people to remember them being invented”. There’s a possibility of doing something a bit messy here and treating the dates like guidelines and assigning games based on the sort of school of design it feels like they’re from – by date Risk doesn’t belong in this category but people may feel it fits here more naturally.

The Divide
The Ameritrash / Eurogame thing feels less clear cut these days than it used to, but having an explicit age in which we’ve got those streams of development happening in parallel seems like an important note not to miss. Also while it’s not really how game development is today (partially thanks to the internet) the consequences of it are still echoing. So having an age that goes 1945-1995 to capture how that is before global communications really get going seems like a neat thing to do.

Modern Games
And finally 1995-present covers everything in boxes that still look nicer after a decade than the bookcase games did after a year (Though I suppose I should acknowledge that as a child I looked after games less well). This age has a dual problem of being too narrow (in that it covers the smallest number of years) and too broad (in that it covers the largest number of games people will recognise if I name them). I suppose its inevitable that whichever age that includes “present” will wind up that way.

I’m not sure that I’m completely satisfied with this way of looking at things, but as a guideline to do a first draft of something it’ll do. Like most of the things I do as a game designer having a starting point is the most important thing because the main process of the work is endless testing and improvement 😉