Tag: mechanics

Randomized Victory and Alliances of Doubt

In Oath, there is a mechanic in which at the end of rounds five through seven out of eight, the Chancellor player rolls a die to see if they win, provided they have fulfilled their victory condition. The probability of victory starts at 1/6 and doubles each round up to 2/3.

When I first encountered this rule, it felt out of place – clunky, even. After playing a game as a Citizen and another game observing the behavior of a Citizen, I think I understand why it is there; it is key to the entire dynamic between Citizen and Chancellor.

Citizens, in Oath, are players that are ostensibly allies of the Chancellor. However, unlike other games such as Dune or Eclipse with official alliances, they do not win together. Instead, the Citizens have an additional victory condition. If they have achieved their goal when the Chancellor wins, the Citizen wins instead; otherwise, they lose.

In practice, this can lead to strange conflicts between allies. If it looks like the Citizen will meet their condition, the Chancellor might attack them or even self-sabotage to prevent the game from ending. If the Citizen has not achieved their personal goal, they might attack the Chancellor to do the same, as I did in the game where I was a Citizen.

Enter the victory die. Both the Citizen and Chancellor need the Chancellor’s goal to be met for either to have a chance of winning, but if they know for sure that they will lose should it be achieved that round, they would have no choice but to self-sabotage. But because the Chancellor or Citizen is not guaranteed to win at the end of rounds five, six, or seven, there is enough doubt that they can work together even though they know who would win if the game did end early. Their alliance works because the losing member thinks the game might not end until they can achieve their goal.

The illusion of hope is crucial to designing games because knowing they will lose effectively eliminates a player. Traditionally, official alliances require shared victory because who would cooperate with somebody they know will win when the game ends? Oath demonstrates a different approach by adding enough uncertainty to enable teamwork between technical enemies. I still think the mechanic is clunky, but I also think it is needed.

I can already think of mechanics to support a similar dynamic for other designs. Instead of randomizing the end of the game, what if we randomized the winner of the alliance instead? For example, suppose you have a system where official allies put tokens into a bag according to their contributions. Then, at the end of the game, the winning alliance draws to indicate which one wins.

Or another option: allies could gain hidden victory points, and if their team wins, then the player with the most points is the sole winner. Rex: Final Days of an Empire does something a little like this with its betrayal cards, where each player has a secret condition which, if fulfilled, steals the win from their team. The problem with its system is that the default is shared victory, so stealing it feels petty and spiteful. If only one player can ever win, this goes away.

I don’t think shared victory is a bad thing, though some people do. It can introduce problems like freeloaders or power imbalances, but there are solutions to these. However, as Oath shows, there is a viable alternative for games with official alliances; you need to make the sole winner uncertain enough that allies keep hoping that it will be them.

How to make randomized victory points work

My opinion of Eclipse has deteriorated since I first learned about it in college. Back then, it had just come out, and I was excited at the prospect of a shorter Twilight Imperium with more streamlined mechanics. The part that most intrigued my inner designer was how it dealt with income – you removed cubes from a track to place them on a board, and the number uncovered was how much you got to collect. This practice is commonplace nowadays, but it was innovative at the time. I bought the game along with its expansion and played it extensively with my friends.

I revisited Eclipse a few years ago and found that it did not live up to my memories of it. In particular, I found myself much more aware of how arbitrary so much of it is. Exploring is costly, and the quality of the systems you encounter varies widely. Combat is a dice fest. But the most obvious way in which the game feels random is the reputation tile mechanics.

When you fight in Eclipse, whether you win or lose, you are rewarded with randomly drawn “reputation tiles” – which my friends and I abbreviated to “reptiles” to the frequent confusion of new players. These are worth some number of victory points between one and four, and the value of the tiles you own is secret. You can only hold a limited number of tiles and eventually discard lower-value tiles to make room for more valuable ones.

The reasons behind this system make sense. Because there are only a limited number of high-value tiles and players are trading up to them, players want to fight early. Because the value of the tiles is secret, players can’t be sure what anybody’s total score is, obfuscating the current leader. Succeeding in battle is also incentivized because you draw more tiles and choose one to keep.

Statistically, reputation tiles work. In practice, they lead to feel-bad moments where you draw a low tile by chance and feel cheated. The problem isn’t just with Eclipse, either. In general, when you distribute random amounts of victory points to players for the same actions, you make it easier for players to attribute their successes or failures to luck rather than their hard work.

The risk of unfairness may be why randomized point distribution of this sort is uncommon in board games. But such mechanics have undeniable benefits. We do not want players to know who has won the game until the end, and hidden victory points that nobody else knows about are great at confusing the issue. So how do we give players random victory points without making success feel arbitrary?

One of the principles I hold to in game design is that when bad things happen to a player, there should be a silver lining for them to see. My favorite example to point to is Imperial Settlers, where whenever another player destroys one of your buildings, you get one wood and a foundation that you can sacrifice to build something else. The foundation isn’t technically a benefit – after all, you could have used the building you had before the attack as a foundation already. But psychologically, it feels like a silver lining because it makes one of your choices – which card to give up – easy to make.

We can use this same principle to fix the reputation tile problem. What if you could spend reputation tiles and the value of the tile didn’t matter? For example, imagine a game where you transport cargo drawn at random from four different point values. However, during the game, you can burn unwanted tokens to move faster. The amount of the boost is independent of the point value of what you spent. (Note: This is basically how the Reactor Furnace in Galaxy Trucker works, though there the cargo isn’t drawn randomly)

In this scenario, drawing low-point tokens does not feel unfair. It is sometimes even a relief because it simplifies the player’s decision of what to do. Draw some worthless scrap? Burn it! Yet hidden tokens still serve to obscure a player’s point total. A player might choose not to burn cargo because it is valuable, or they might think they can win without doing so.

I think hidden randomized victory points can work without feeling arbitrary, and I think the key is giving players ways to convert the less valuable ones into something useful.

The difference between cards and dice

Dice have been a looming problem in Dungeon Rancher for a while. Every monster uses dice to track its level by the number of dice on the card. On top of that, players must roll enough dice to feel secure in feeding their monsters. Given four colors of dice, even the most conservative estimate puts the total dice required at 120. This is prohibitive on cost alone, but dice are also inconvenient for tracking states because it is easy to knock them over, losing information.

For these reasons, we’ve decided to try switching to using cards to track monster levels instead of dice. Each monster has a stack of cards, and to tend to it you must play a card equal to or greater than the top card. Instead of four bags of dice, there are now four decks of cards. This has major implications for the game.

When we used dice to represent levels, the highest die determined the difficulty of tending to the monster. It is inconvenient for players to search a pile of cards, so now only the top card matters. Since it would be too powerful to train a monster by changing just one card, we decided to remove the training mechanic altogether. Rerolls became the ability to discard a card and redraw from that deck.

Fortunately, we have space for the card piles above or below each monster because we limit rooms to two monsters. This is good because the new resource cards need to be the same size as the draftable cards since some are in the draft. The change also makes it much easier to theme the resources because we can use thematic icons rather than pictures of colored dice.

Players naturally hold all the cards they gain from different sources in their hands – both the drafted cards and the produced ones. Therefore we had to modify the rules about discarding your hand at the end of your turn. Now players must only discard down to their hand size, whether they keep drafted or non-drafted cards. Their hand size is equal to the number of rooms they control, making room building a little more interesting.

Finally, we decided that all monsters should start at level 1. To level them up faster, players may spend a new type of token to tend to them again.

Using a different type of component to represent information always has consequences. I find it is best to go with whatever changes are suggested by the new medium rather than forcing it to work the same way as the old one. The same is true when working under component restrictions. For example, if you are involved in an 18-card contest, don’t try to cram a bunch of state information into the cards. Just use them the way cards are typically used and make a good game within those bounds.

When game procedures inspire new mechanics

Game procedures are what I call the various maintenance tasks required in any board game to keep the game going, such as reshuffling decks, sorting the supply, or counting up victory points. They are the sorts of things that would be automated in the computer version of a game. An important part of board game design is streamlining procedures so they are not noticed by the players, since they do not contribute anything positive to the experience of the game.

Sometimes, in the course of improving game procedures, you find a new twist on your mechanics. This happened to me recently in Dungeon Rancher. I had been using six-sided dice to indicate monster levels, and one of my playtesters remarked that in the real world it is inconvenient to have to find a value on a die – in TTS, of course, you can just press the corresponding number.

I had not been intending to use dice in the actual game (the level die was a placeholder), but this got me thinking – how could dice be used to represent levels in a way that didn’t require the onerous procedure of locating a face? As it happens, when players are tending to monsters in Dungeon Rancher (a task that requires assigning a die that equals or exceeds the monster’s level), they tend to place the die on the monster to remind themselves that they have tended that monster. This inspired me to use the number of dice as the level, rather than the maximum die.

Each time your monster levels up you have to assign it a die matching or exceeding its highest die. The die you assign remains on the monster, increasing its level and potentially increasing the required value for the next time you need to tend to it. The required procedures are very smooth because they already match what the players needed to do; no additional steps are required.

This in turn led to some new mechanics revolving around rerolling dice – both dice used to tend monsters and dice already on the monsters from previous rounds. Thematically, this works very well – if you give the monster high-quality food, it becomes spoiled and will want high-quality food in the future, but you can attempt to tame it and reduce its pickiness. The mechanical process ends up feeling very rewarding, as players must balance caring for their monsters now with keeping their monsters as docile as possible for future rounds.

The lesson I take away from this is that sometimes the best source of mechanical inspiration can be coming up with ways to remove mundane chores from the game.