Curtis Lacy's brief intro

First off welcome Curtis these boards are a great place for these kinds of discussions!

To your question; the most obvious answer is also the most boring. If all players have exactly the same abilities and options and you completely remove randomness, you could accomplish your goal. However egalitarian this may be, it will not be fun because once someone make a mistake, they will never be able to recover and all games will be won by the person who makes the least number of mistakes or the game will end in a tie among players who made no mistakes.

By adding in multiple win strategies you can reduce this effect quite a bit while increasing the enjoyment for people with different tastes in gaming, particularly if there are only enough resources for one player to win with a given strategy.

Finding the balance between completely random winners and losers (Chutes and Ladders) and structured strategy devoid of randomness (some historical simulation games) is something many of us struggle with on a regular basis. How much or how little randomness can depend on how casual you want the game to be. Zombie Dice is a great casual party game with a high degree of randomness and some degree of push your luck style strategy. Yahtzee is a similar game design in many ways, but less fun because of the lack of Zombies :)

Hope that helps, or at least gets your wheels spinning.
Levi

Levi Mote
Bonsai Entertainment
www.bonsaigames.net

Hi Curtis,

I'm happy I'm not the only one here trying to avoid too much luck (where "too much" for me means something close to "more than zero").

This could be true for chess, but actually nobody knows the outcome in case of optimal play.

Chess is symmetric, deterministic, but not boring, is it? That said, I agree with your point with a small addendum: By removing luck (and all its substitutes) you get a game which is either boring or very heavy.

I'd amend the previous post by the following: Hidden Information, Simultaneous Action Selection, and complexity. The former two can be seen as fair luck substitutes. Complexity is a problem in nowadays, when most people look for quick and easy entertainment.