Playing Power Grid the other day I thought “I could build an extra house, but I don’t want to, because then I’ll buy resources later and that’ll cost more money than the extra house would earn”. There’s a mechanic that penalises the player who’s ahead so good play becomes – in part – about fooling the mechanic so that the game thinks someone else is in the lead.

Fooling the Game is Good Play

There are a lot of games with catch up mechanics where a bonus is offered to a player who’s losing or a penalty is applied to one who is ahead. Playing these games well often involves manipulating the metric that the game uses to determine who’s winning so that it does a poor job at detecting your progress.

This is true even of “soft” catch up mechanics that have no formal implementation. When Munchkin was popular with groups I played with people very quickly realised that the first player to level nine almost never won. There’s no formal catch up mechanic but players are obliged to draw cards of the form “Play when another player tries to do something, it goes horribly, sucks to be them.” so inevitably the first person to nearly win would face a slew of these. The single skill most consistently correlated with winning was an ability to fool other players into believing that you expended all of your ‘screw you’ cards on the last player’s near victory so that they squander theirs on the current player, you can stop them and there’s nobody left with resources to oppose your final fight.

Whether you’re fooling people or systems, convincing them you’re behind improves your chances.

The Paradox of Catch Up Mechanics

A catch up mechanic needs to determine which players are winning and losing to be effective.

Who will benefit from the catch up mechanic is a factor in determining which players are winning and losing.

I’m convinced that a truly accurate catch up mechanic would find itself in a paradox really quickly. I can see it being of the form “Jeff has the least stuff so we’ll let him buy the cheap resources but if Jeff gets the cheap resources their value exceeds that of the difference between how much stuff he and Sally have. So really Sally is losing so we’ll let her buy the cheap resources, but if Jeff doesn’t get the cheap resources…”

So What’s the Point?

Honestly, I don’t know. We’re all going to die in the end anyway.

But in terms of catch up mechanics they might not achieve “Find weakest player, help them catch up” but they’re still doing something valuable.

If a winning player determines that their best move is to use their advantageous position to break some of their things or trade away useful resources inefficiently in order to get the catch up mechanic bonus – they are still breaking some of their things or trading away useful resources inefficiently.

Consider the following:

We’re playing a game and I’m winning.

I have 8 points and the option to add or subtract 2 from my score

You have 7 points and have used up all of your options for this turn

At the end of the turn whoever has the least points gets a 3 point bonus

If I add to my score I go up to 10 and you get the bonus, also hitting 10 – we’re tied!

If I subtract from my score then I go to 6 but then claim the bonus shooting up to 9, while you’re still on 7 – I’m two points ahead!

So in the surface because I’m winning and have more effective options I can manipulate the catch up mechanic so it benefits me and not you. Leaving me 2 points ahead by abusing a mechanic that was supposed to help you.

Digging a little deeper however, consider what happens if we delete the catch up mechanic: In that instance I add 2 to my score and am leading 10-7 – I’m three points ahead!

So despite the fact that I got the bonus from the catch up mechanic and it didn’t change your score one iota, the mere fact that it existed meant that I’m leading by 2 points rather than 3. Just be encouraging me to make the otherwise suboptimal move of subtracting two from my score.

Catch Up Mechanics as Incentives

The problem that I’d identified was not in catch up mechanics themselves but in how I’ve been conceptualising them.

“A catch up mechanic is a mechanic that identifies the losing player and gives them a boost allowing them to catch up” was the wrong way to think about them.

“A catch up mechanic is an incentive for a leader to make moves that would otherwise be suboptimal to allow others to catch up” seems a better way to conceptualise it.

This way of looking at them leads to some differences in how they’re designed. It seems naïve to go “We’ll assume our players play the same way as if the mechanic didn’t exist and offer people who are behind a leg up” when players are generally pretty good at games and taking advantage of the rules in order to win.

Instead respecting the players capabilities and going “Everyone will try to use the mechanic, including the current leader, who may even have a greater ability to access it if their position has given them more options. The goal is to make sure that when the leader is encouraged to use it the price of doing so is smaller than the reward, but the net effect is that they can’t be a runaway leader because they’re still paying those prices.”

A Good Catch Up Mechanic

Viewed through this lens a good catch up mechanic has these traits:

Stratified: If there are multiple players having the mechanic be effective at each step means careful thought needs to go into when to use it and when to pull ahead. If there’s no advantage in dropping from 1^st to 2^nd place it won’t work because the boost won’t be big enough to justify dropping 1^st to 5^th

Positive: If a catch up mechanic is adding to a players progress then each round everyone will progress, even if some players are deliberately losing progress to access the mechanic they wouldn’t bother if the boost didn’t outweigh the loss. A negative catch up mechanic risks creating a game that will never end if the penalty for being ahead is high enough then someone who deliberately backs off and someone who gets hit by it are both behind their starting point and the game may never end.

Manipulable: Players should be able to manipulate the thing that the catch up mechanic is assessing in a timely fashion. If the leader can’t deliberately lose some resources to access it then either it doesn’t propel people past the leader or it was inevitable that someone will be propelled past the leader. In which case they were only ahead on some metric that failed to capture winning since their being surpassed was inevitable.

Costly to Manipulate: There’s no sense in offering a catch up mechanic to whoever has the least cash if players can buy gold, get the mechanic and sell their gold to have the same amount of cash in the very next turn. To work there needs to be some friction in how the mechanic is accessed.

Incidentally you might notice these are all attributes shared by the mechanics of Power Grid and are weak to completely absent for Mario Karts Blue Shells. So I feel like they work for at least those two examples 😉

I’m presently working on a game in which players control runners who are navigating a maze with the assistance of various teleportation devices. Each player has a hand of devices and uses 1-3 each move to help their runner get to where they want to be. I’d like the teleporters to all feel different to use and the ideal move not to be obvious so there are some meaningful choices in what’s used when and what’s held back. I figured it might be interesting to use todays post to brainstorm ideas and talk about their pros and cons.

The Lovely No Limits Teleporter
Effect: Place yourself on any space within N spaces of your current location.
Pros: Simple. Useful.
Cons: Simply better than almost anything else. Would need a small N to balance with other cards.

The Leeroy Jenkins
Effect: Move forwards N spaces ignoring all intervening stuff.
Pros: Simple.
Cons: Very similar to normal movement. Board design or other player obstructions need to be significant to justify its inclusion.

Cardinal Teleportio
Effect: Move in a particular compass direction N spaces ignoring all intervening stuff.
Pros: Simple.
Cons: Could be completely useless to someone moving towards an objective in a different direction. Potential to be a “lucky” or “unlucky” draw irrespective of players skill at setting up opportunities.

Place Thief
Effect: Choose another runner within N steps, swap position.
Pros: Could have take that style effects.
Cons: Could have take that style effects.

Murphy’s Teleporter
Effect: Your opponent chooses a space you go there.
Pros: Puts an interesting choice for one player in another players turn, potential for dramatic desperation moves.
Cons: Would need some significant other advantage for anyone to ever be willing to play it.

Slingshot
Effect: Choose another runner who is N spaces away. Place yourself on any space within N spaces of them.
Pros: Potential to act as a catch up option, potential for teamwork in setting up several runners to use each others positions.
Cons: Might be too many turns on which a useful anchor doesn’t exist and its just a dead card. Board size and population density strongly impact usefulness.

The Escher Step
Effect: Choose another space with N spaces that is the same as your current space in all respects but location (If you are in a 1 wide corridor next to an exist, it must be a 1 wide corridor next to an exit)
Pros: Leads to interesting possibilities with a high N.
Cons: Awkward to codify in rules, possible analysis paralysis.

These also work in most combinations. For instance you could have Murphy’s Slingshot which anchors to a player of your choice but your opponent chooses in which direction it fires you.

What will work in practice will depend a lot on the interaction between the teleport steps and the base moves – but having a small list to populate a simple prototype allows for some basic testing and refinement (and all game design is testing).

Even the obviously bad ideas belong in this sort of early test. Murphy’s isn’t going to make it through in its unmodified format – but throwing in the card to see what the implications are when it’s played give an indication of the best thing to combine it with or what sort of magnitude of payoff it requires to justify its inclusion.

Early testing is as much about finding exactly why and how things don’t work as finding what does work. The lessons taken from the more obvious missteps can prevent more subtle ones from creeping in later in the process.

Hope you’re all having fun, I’m off to test a bad game.

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 🙂

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.

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 😀