Maximizing difficulty of choice

I believe the key to all games should boil down to a simple premise:

Decisions, and consequences for them.

Games that are filled with much randomness (dice ahoy!) I find to be inherently inferior to those that do not fall back on such devices, especially when games oftentimes use too few dice:

the randomness that results from rolling a single die (even a D20) is MASSIVE and oftentimes ends up with a gaming experience that is pure happenstance and amounts to little more than a pretty way to flip coins.

If you REALLY need to use dice, going off on this tangent, use a lot. I mean: a LOT. If a game designer could convince me that he absolutely couldn't make his game without dice and then followed it up by saying that you rolled 50 dice at a time, I'd accept that.

Ending that rant ...

The most important thing I believe in games is to have every player have many decisions they have to make and then have rewards and penalties for those decisions. For this reason I keep referring to what I believe are arguably three of the best hobby games on the market (as opposed to mass market properties that are likewise quality, like Chess, Go, Stratego, Scrabble, Boggle):

Puerto Rico
Princes of Florence
Amun Re

Rio Grande knew what they were doing when they brought these three games to American audiences. Sure, there are many other great games that I could mention, but I think those three are heads and shoulders above the rest on so many levels it's not funny.

Decisions.
And consequences.

Absolutely. There are people who don't like ANY given game. For my buying dollar, those types of games are my favorite. For others ... they'll like something else. At the end of the day, though, that's what I guess me and people who think like me like: games where you have to make decisions and are either rewarded or penalized because of them.

Personally, over the years I have grown weary of the so-called "beer 'n' pretzel" game. It must be a great selling feature for some people as I hear it constantly as a marketing tool.

That's the great thing about games and the gaming industry -- everyone has their own preferences and what I like and you dislike or vice versa is all good.

But that's my proverbial two cents on the topic: if you want to know what I like, I like games like that (Puerto Rico, Amun Re, Princes of Florence) and of the 100's and 100's of games that I have played extensively from the hobby market, they are easily my favorites.

I can't see how some find them not fun, though -- myself and my friends have literally played dozens and dozens of games of each (probably more like 100+, especially when it comes to Puerto Rico) and they are a blast.

At least for us.

(I'm going to cry now that I have learned I like unfun games :lol: .)

First, if you like PR, you'll likewise like Amun Re and Princes of Persia. I've played PR with probably a dozen different people and have introduced them all to the other two and all like the other two about equally, so it's a decent sample size to say that most who like one will like the other two about equally.

(Even though to someone who knows none of the three I ALWAYS recommend PR as PR is known / played by far more people and one of the obvious benefits of games is having someone to play against.)

When you hear "beer 'n' pretzel" think "lots of luck." Few decisions, ease of game play, random mindless "fun." USUALLY applied to non-collectible card games, you could equate it to a board game like Candyland. Perfectly fine and enjoyable by some but ... not for me.

Again: some like one thing and some another.

Back to the topic of this post that we've hijacked on this tangent, when it comes to rules designs, ideally you want to appeal to as broad of a group of people as possible. This is tricky (some would say downright impossible).

But Chess is an easy to learn game BUT it is obviously one that rewards careful decision making. Same with Chess, Stratego, Scrabble, and other mass marketed games. ("A minute to learn and a lifetime to master" as othello goes.)

IF your game requires long rules, there should be a big payoff for them -- amazing game play that will obviously be for a narrower group of folks that will hopefully turn into a cult following of sorts.

Back to the Beer 'n' Pretzels thing, a part of their appeal (and designers should be mindful of this) is that some people don't want something ultra competitive. And that's fine, as people are free to like or not like what they want. But some people are less competitive and when you have games with extreme luck you'll often have results like equalized winning where four players will each win 25% of the time, and maybe the "best" player in that game will win 10 out of 38 games for a slightly better than "average" win percentage, but it will be severely less than when you get people together for a game like, well, let's go back to PR.

This is another aspect of the game that should be addressed when determining what you are marketing towards (the question many publishers will ask: who is this game intended for?).

A big question, as the people who like PR won't necessarily play Candyland, and vice versa, so it's a tricky test to realize who is who and what is what and to remember all of this when creating your game engine.

"Fluxx" is perhaps a better example of a casual game. You do have slightly more choice, but the game is still essentially random.

btw, does Settlers of Catan fail your "dice rolls = random outcome" test?

Wow ... E&T ... that would be up there in my personal Top 5 if we were doing the whole High Fidelity thing, but not in the Top 3. Great game, though, absolutely.

Fluxx is EXTREMELY random but still "fun" in that the mechanic and the card titles are just interesting, even if I can't play Fluxx more than a few times in any given year. It has weird market penetration, too, as it's been approved by Mensa and other organizations so you'll see it in homes that aren't "gamer homes."

Settlers is probably the most popular game in the world that I don't care for. It has a wealth of material and expansions and looks great and it's amazing that it gets so many people into games -- a number of the girls we hang out with don't like games in general, but LOVE Settlers -- but I prefer less randomness in a game, and Settlers has much randomness. But I have to give them credit for making arguably the best "random" game AND for making something that for whatever reason lots of females play, seeing as how gaming is traditionally more a male environment.

Bringing this all around to game design -- that's the beauty of ANY mechanic you do: there will invariably be a market for it because everyone has personal preferences and likes / dislikes. Nothing is really "right" or "wrong" but just a matter of suiting your game to whatever your market is and targeting that market with a quality game, whether it is random or not, complicated or not, etc etc -- as long as it's a QUALITY game, that's the most important thing.

And even if Settlers isn't my favorite game to play, it's a high quality game that is wonderfully produced.

another thing is Irrationality - There are games that benefit players who act irrationally on occassion while having a reputation of act rationally. A great example is nolimit hold'em and poker in general. If within a group you have a reputation of taking only the sure bets, then any bluff coming from you will be likely to cause people to fold the whole table around you. While if you have a habit of acting irrationally, and bluffing, then when you have a good hand come around, you can make huge bets and people are more likely to stay in and give you more money.

that is all for now

Bluffing in poker I wouldn't equate to being irrational, but rather being calculated in assessing what your table image is, what your bet will be, what the pot has, and then determining the likelihood of a call, and then factoring in whether it is therefore a good bet to bluff -- true, some bluffers ARE irrational but at the height of poker excellence, there is absolutely nothing irrational about what is done and everything from the way you hold your chips to the speed in which you throw your chips to the way you breathe / don't breathe, what you're looking at -- everything -- comes into play in perfect harmony.

Which is partly why poker is one of the greatest games ever created.

But, to quote Peter David, I digress.

It IS an interesting aspect of OTHER games, though, very true -- doing the seemingly irrational in order to be super-rational.

Going back to the original 'Should we have as few rules as possible? Argument -

Speaking from a player's and designer's perspective, I like games that have simple 'get stuck in straight away' rules, and then the option to add complexity later on by adding rules/cards/extra boards, or expansions.

Magic does this perfectly, by suggesting that new players start with a simple deck containg simple spells and creatures with no special abilities.

I am currently trying this for my current game design, and it seems to fit in well.

Many more existing games could do this to help people get started and learn the basics, by just adding a beginners section in the rules that says what rules to ignore and pieces/cards etc to leave out.