[TIGD] Kingmaking (Common Problem #2)

Off the top of my head, with out really thinking about it, if the core game mechanics/rules of a game produce a combination that forces one specific player to control the outcome of a game, I feel it is a design problem. Forcing a player, that wants to play the game, into a position to choose a winner, does not seem right to me.

Now with that stated, designing a game that handles poor game play on the part of a player I think is difficult, if not impossible to control. So I think in this case of kingsmaking it would be hard for any designer to totally remove the problem.

Take Settlers for instance(finally played it this weekend at GenCON, now I understand what you guys are talking about, love the game!), if I did not care about losing, would it be possible for me to skew the odds in favor of one specific player?

Most likely, lets say we are playing a 3 player game, I could choose to only trade with one player, thus making a move that effectively puts more resources in the hands of the one player. Having not done this, I dont know how much it would impact the game, but from what I learned this weekend, everyone wanting to win, tend to keep trades away from the person in the lead(at some point in the game).

As for Fos idea of "blurring the score", I agree that it would help reduce this problem, not sure if it resolved this problem completely.

I think solving the first part, designing a game that does not force a willing player into deciding a winner, is possible.

Trying to solve the second part, when a player no longer cares about winning and attempts to help another player, not sure what to do there...

There's a slight variation on this theme in the game Fifth Avenue. Each turn you have to take one of four possible actions, one of which is "place business". Placing the last business is one of the game end mechanisms. There are only 12 business to be placed in the entire game, so it's possible for one player to end the game very quickly and uninterstingly by choosing to place a business and placing it somewhere useless on every turn. Of course, they can also place it somewhere to help another which only amplifies the problem.

Jason

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and bring up a point.

Kingmaking might actually serve a good purpose. Let's say the player had to choose which player his move would help win. Let's say the one player, even though he thwarted the other player a few times, was civil and played good game. Now let's say the other player completely wrecked the other player and did so in an obnoxious manner. The choice for the player that's behind is obvious.

Maybe knowing this, the players of the game would be more civil the next time, making the game more enjoyable for everyone.

I'm not saying that this is always the case...but it is ONE case right :)

All, very interesting discussion; I assume that you guys have said it all, but I'll try my hand at the subject anyway!

"Kingmaker" vs. "leader bashing"

The "kingmaker" problem and the "leader bashing" problem are, for the purposes of these discussions, at least, being considered as two separate design problems. I agree that there's a certain amount of overlap between them, in the sense that someone who hits the leader very often "kingmakes" another player, but I think that's where the similarity ends.

For that reason, I think some of the proposed solutions, like "hidden scoring", are really more appropriate to treat the "leader bashing" problem, as they make leader identification difficult. But the "kingmaker" problem, to exist, doesn't presume that the player knows that he's kingmaking. It could be that the hidden scoring just makes things opaque and so a player attacks the "wrong" person, which paves the way for another player to win. This "unwitting" kingmaker may "feel" more satisfying to the players, but it's still a flaw.

It's the players' fault/It's the game's fault

This is obviously game specific. I think that as designers, we tend to assume players will make "optimal" plays, but I have to say that in my limited game experience, gaming with "average" ability gamers (in which category I include myself), one sees a lot of "bad" plays that result in unexpected endings. In one game of Clans, a player completed a village that ended the game, even though he wouldn't win by doing so; in another game of "A Game of Thrones", a player attacked someone else rather than me, allowing me on my turn to acquire my seventh stronghold and win. His explanation: "I didn't see that you had 6 strongholds already". Bummer for him, but because it affected the other players, I had been effectively "kingmade".

In that sense, I agree with Rene that "race"-oriented game endings can exacerbate the kingmaker problem because they permit one player's foolishness to end the game for everyone else.

That said, I think there's a phenomenon over and above this in which a player is forced, willingly or not, and wittingly or not, into the role of choosing who will win.

The motivation of the player as a "philosophical" solution

As a player, when I'm deciding "what move will I make", the answer is always that I'm going to do whatever gives me my best chance of winning the game. (This leads to a lot of last place finishes when I go for the longshot!) In a VP game, this means taking whatever action gives me the most VPs relative to the person I think is, at that moment, the most likely to win the game (NOT necessarily the player with the most VPs, since hidden scoring might be involved, etc).

Now, I recognize that not everyone plays this way; some people play for position, etc., and I really don't want to get into a discussion of that. Let's just say that (a) all players in the game are playing "my" way and that (b) it's possible at any time to form a fairly accurate idea of who is "winning" the game.

Under such assumptions, this makes the choice of the "kingmaker" player more well-defined -- he should take whatever move gives him the biggest gain relative to the player who he thinks will win the game. For example, if A and B are tied at 10 points and C has 6 points, and if C can choose either move X or Y; action X gives 2 VP to A and 4 VP to C; action Y gives 2 VP to B, and 2 VP to C. Using "my" system for choosing, action X would be chosen and A would win.

Now, assuming that C couldn't have won, this sounds very much like "playing for position", and in a sense it is, but the key is that C is basing his decisions on the same factors he's been using the whole game. To say that one should adopt a new basis for decision-making when one can no longer win is question-begging; why should one do so? What basis should one use? As long as one stays consistent throughout, then A could rightfully be called the "fair" winner of the game because he did a better job of preparing himself for the influence of C's turn.

This, however, won't seem terribly satisfying to most people, possibly including myself, and the chances of a scenario like this actually playing out is unlikely because there are so many other factors. For example, does C even see that he has actions X and Y available to him, or is he choosing between X and Z?

Mitigating the kingmaker problem

I think there has to be a happy medium between "cut out all interaction" and "ignore the problem, it's an inevitable reality". Interaction is fun, after all, and on the flip side, if one plays a 2 hour game only to have one's fate rest in the arbitrary decision of another player, that's not going to be very satisfying. Neither, I claim, is blinding the players to their roles as kingmakers very satisfying.

The solution, I think, lies in finding the proper scope for player interaction. Limiting the amount of impact that a player can have on another player can help, and "all or nothing" consequences of decisions should be avoided; this is particularly a problem in "power card"-heavy games. Diplomacy gives a good example for limited consequences: when a player loses a battle, his pieces are not lost, but rather, forced to retreat; his territorial position is weakened, but his army is not necessarily destroyed.

I think auction games also provide a useful model for reducing kingmaker effects, since they allow players to collectively set the price for an item, but also present a risk to each player who participates in the auction (that if you bid just to drive up the price, you may get stuck having to pay for the item!) Since all players participate, it's hard for one player to "choose" between two other players.

Another guideline might be to not have game-altering consequences of late-game decisions. A corrolary of this might be that early-game decisions should be important enough, or many, so that the game can't be reduced to one single late-game decision; the game's outcome should always be seen as the culmination of the actions of all players over the entire span of the game.

A final possibility is to make sure all players are "in it till the end". This is hard to ensure, and can also lead to the problem of the early part of the game being somewhat irrelevant. But I think it's obvious that if a player is at all times capable of winning, then the "kingmaker" scenario is negated. Many older games like "Dune" include "alliance" rules that make it possible to share victory. I don't think this is always a great solution, since it changes the scope of the game.

Dune gives a nice example of having a kingmaker effect on purpose. Each "faction" has a special condition under which they win the game. For the Bene Gesserit, that power is "Prior to the game, select another player and a game turn. If that player wins the game during that turn, you win the game instead", the idea being that you're then supposed to machinate events so as to make sure that player wins at that time. Pretty cute, and it definitely shows that the kingmaker can be harnessed in a positive way!

-Jeff

It seams that I am nearly the only one that thinks that this is not a problem. Kingmaking can be used and has been used as one of the "components" in some game ("History of the world" from Avalon Hill was mentioned but there are others).
The problem is not Kingmaking, the problem is the "run away leader/leaders" problem. If a player loosing his position early in the game, cant catches up and has no influence over the outcome, why should he/she continue to play?
In the first example in this thread, I did not see any wrong in the kingmaking situation. Two players are equal, the third player can chose how he should act and his action will have consequences. He is part of the game and he's actions should count as much as any others. Remove that possibility and he is just a "speed bump" (he has to roll/play a card/move a pawn etc. but whatever he's doing will not effect the outcome).

"Bash the leader" was another problem that was mentioned, but I do not think that that is a problem either. "Bash the leader" is a way for other players to take the leading position (or get a better position). "Bash the leader" can and has also been used as a part of games.
I tested a game (will come out some times near in the future), and it was based around a reality show. You had some personalities, and each turn you should vote a person of the show. Naturally the strongest, the leader, the personality that is the most threat to most of the others, would be voted off.

Now "Kingmaking" and "Bash the leader" are component that a designer should consider. These two effects can be used (if there are used the right way) as vital parts of the game, make all the players know that there choice will have effect on the outcome.
To avoid effects that you don’t want:
- Play test. The final game has to be tested at least 10 times (for a less complex game) before it can be consider as moved out of the prototyping phase.
- Have some of the players, to play as another style and test other theory's (example instead of always get the leading position, try to slow the other players down).
- Play test the game with several groups.
- Have one or several friend reading the rules as "the devil reads the bible".

Finally, there is one thing in a Kingmaker situation that we can't avoid, and that is cheating.

Example:
I was in a Diplomacy tournament and there was a group of players that agreed of that they should all make the final and then in the final, remove all opponents before the "real" game started. They manage to do that by playing at least 2 (sometimes more) players in each qualify game, they could control the winner and the score. I think that 5 of the players made the final and the other player was eliminated after two rounds.
I did not play Diplomacy on tournaments for over 10 years after that event.

// Johan

Gee, which of those do you think the Kingmaker would choose? It's a cute idea, but I think it adds a meta-mechanic that not all games could accomodate without dramatically altering the play style. Let's say, for example, there's a game called "Naked Aggression" where the point is to capture as many enemy cities as possible. Now, though, you have to add in the consideration that you don't want to leave Player X in the position of being unable to win but also having equal access to the cities of the two leaders, lest he be awarded the victory. I think that in most games, this is just too difficult to machinate.

That said, this "house rule" might be a decent solution for published games that have this problem, but as designers, we have the ability to try to not have this effect in the games at all. So, the question is, how do we do that?

I agree with this, that in many games, the kingmaking problem results from a runaway leader problem, and a good solution would be to find ways to keep all of the players close. Of course, then you run into the possibility of Seth's pet peeve (and a valid, one, I think), "playing for position". A player might say "I have a 25% chance of winning if I do move X, or a 65% chance of coming in 2nd place if I do move Y, I'll pick Y since it gives me a better chance at a higher position", but doing so perhaps throws the game to a different player than X would have. In other words, even when players are all kept close, different motivations among the players can lead to indirect kingmaking, and that's harder to deal with.

I couldn't disagree more; to play for three hours and have a third player choose the winner is not significantly different from playing for 3 hours and rolling a die to decide the winner. If that's what it was going to come down to, why not just roll the die from the beginning and get it over with?

That, to me, is the substance of the kingmaker problem; it renders the entire game superfluous (although it does at least select which two players have the ability to be king-made).

We're going to discuss "leader-bashing" and "runaway leader" issues in two weeks, so stay tuned! I would say you'd be accurate if you said that "leader-bashing" isn't always a bad thing, but I think it's overly simplistic to say it's never a bad thing. I won't delve too deeply now, but suffice it to say, I've played far too many German-style games where the dominant strategy was "don't be in first place at the game's half-way point". But the question this raises, then, is, "what's the point of the first half of the game?" We can debate this out in a couple of weeks!

-Jeff

Can a kingmaker effect happen in a two-player game or is it exclusive to multi-player games? And if it can out of curiosity, what would the kingmaker effect look like in a two-player game? I have an idea that it would be like an endless loop as I mused in:
http://www.bgdf.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=3171&highli...

But I am not sure if an endless loop like that would be an indication of a two-person kingmaker.
What do you all think?

BG2001