Scalability theory

There's nothing more frustrating than playing a great game but having it unbalanced because you have the wrong number of people. In fact, my gaming group is frequently trying to figure out how to make our favorite games work with more or fewer people. For example, we found that 5-player Dominion doesn't work too well because the stacks are gone before some strategies are able to bear fruit (when those same strategies will serve you well in a four player game). So when we have five people, we play until four stacks (or provinces) run out, which seems to be a good compromise.

I think "Betrayal at the House on the Hill" doesn't scale so well. Certain haunts are hopelessly imbalanced with the wrong number of players. If you get the right haunt for the right number of players, it's a great experience.

If nothing else, I think scalablility is good for marketing your game. I'm always more likely to buy games that are for "2-6" players than "3-4 players," because the number of people in our gaming group fluctuates from week to week. Even if I love the 3-4 player game, I'm more likely buy a 2-6 player game that I don't enjoy as much because I'll be able to play it much more often. The 3-4 player game I love does me no good if it just sits in my closet because I can't play it with my wife or my gaming group (which sometimes has 4 people, but is usually 5 or 6)

So far as I can see, if you're trying to make a scalable game, you can either do what Bonanza does, and essentially provide a very different gaming experience for different numbers of players, or you can do what Battlestar does, and scale things to try and provide a consistent experience regardless of the number of players. I think either way could work, depending of the type of game. I think once you identify the "ideal" number of players for your current itteration of your game, it'll be pretty easy to figure out what aspects are thrown out of whack with greater or fewer players.

Battlestar is interesting because a lot of the scaling happens automatically. While there are some minor setup changes (i.e. how many of each type of loyalty card there are), for the most part, a lot of the scaling happens without players needing to think about it. If you haven't played, a lot of the game revolves around a "Crisis" phase at the end of each players turn, where the fleet stands to loose or gain resources or progress. Each player typically puts cards face down into a skill check to determine the result of the crisis (some will play positive cards, others negative). So with a small game of three people, players put more cards in because they only have to wait one or two turns to replenish their cards at the beginning of their turn, while with a large group of 6, everybody still draws the same number of cards, but since there are more people (with roughly the same ratio of humans to Cylons), each person puts in fewer cards per check, but the end result is the same. And since players have the chance to progress towards their final destination with each crisis card, the game doesn't run too much longer with more people. Players in larger games don't get the same number of turns in a game, but since they are fairly active during other players' turns, it doesn't hamper their enjoyment of the game (and since everyone is guessing about everyone else's loyalty, the payoff of extra intrigue more than makes up for it).

I'm afraid your specific example about how you're trying to make it scalable goes a little over my head a little bit, but from what I do understand, it seems like the mechanism you came up with should allow the game to have the same "feel" with different numbers of players. If you play it and it captures the same "feel" of playing with the "ideal" number of players, I'd say you've nailed it.

So yeah. Not sure you wanted a whole deconstruction of Battlestar in answer to your post, but those are my thoughts/experiences, for whatever their worth.

Here's another idea that I'm currently working on incorporating in my game, The Underminister.

The number of options doesn't change with the number of players, but obviously, the board gets more crowded with more players playing, right? However, it is possible to use a space someone is already occupying by paying them some amount. In a 2pl game, that cost is very high. In a 5pl game, it is relatively low. Therefore, the number of spaces and the number of playing pieces don't scale, but the cost of repeating an action does.

An aside...this reminds me of the one time I played Kavaii (very cool game BTW). There are a number of action options. The first player to choose each action can do it for free. The next player must pay 1 resource to use that action. The third player pays 2, etc. We played with the max number of players and the game felt almost impossible b/c often there were few moves you wanted to make that seemed affordable. Still, it was an interesting mechanic...