Roll them Bones

Designing a dice game is incredibly easy, so easy in fact, that I’ll do it here, now, in the blog post header. Ready? Roll off 57 times between any number of players, each of them rolling the same die (six sided would be the best and easiest to obtain). Roll off on each draw. The player with the highest number of wins is the winner of the game. Roll off in case of tie. Done.

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Yes, I can already image your smirk as you’re smiling at my silly little game, and I know what you are thinking. But, honestly, I am too young to have had seen the prototype of Talisman over thirty years ago, and too smart to actually push for publishing a game which is won by the person able to roll the highest number of sixes. There are simply too many such games on the market already. 

Here’s the downside of working for a company that publishes board games: you can’t always write about stuff that frustrates you in gaming, simply because you’d have to point fingers at products made by your competitors. And that would make you look like a jerk. So, I decided that – if I am to proceed – I will use a very limited number of negative examples, and I will use only games I really enjoy, so that at least those who know anything about my gaming habits know that there is no ill will or bad blood here. 

Now, the essential problem of a not-so-good dice game (or of a game that relies heavily on dice), is the correlation between winning and rolling high (or, to put it in a more universal term, rolling within a specific range the game mechanisms tend to favour). If rolling a six always gives you more power, more resources, more options of using such a die, then it means that the game has a potential of being driven by luck more than by player actions. 

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Let me use an example of a game I love – and a game that for the most part does dice very well. In Alien Frontiers it mostly does not matter whether you roll high or low, because almost any set of dice can be used productively on your turn. However, if you never roll high, you’ll probably never use the action that allows you to place a colony for the price of permanently removing one of your dice (one that came up with a six), and might have a big problem getting any Alien Tech cards (and without them your ability to manipulate scores is virtually nonexistent). 

Apart from the above example, Alien Frontiers is a splendid game, definitely one that’s been in my all time top ten since the first time I played it. It’s a game that will allow a better player (or a more experienced one) to win most of the times, but if two players of equal skill face off, the game will probably be won the player who rolls more fives and/or sixes, as only one location favours low scores, while the others either favour high, or use sets with any numbers. 

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I’ve used Alien Frontiers as an example not to belittle the game (by Jupiter, it would be like belittling a good friend!), but to show that even the greatest of the dice genre are not completely free of the high roller problem. As far as I can tell, the only game that completely does away with favouring specific scores is Castles of Burgundy – and even the great Stefan Feld was not fully able to repeat this, as Bora-Bora seems to slightly favour rolling low. 

So, what should all this teach us? Well, that really good dice games should be built in a way that allows the players to use any rolls to their advantage – and that designing them so that they do exactly this is not easy, but we should still try. After all, the slight imperfection of Alien Frontiers does not prevent it from being a magnificent game, and a design many aspiring creators can draw inspiration from.

PS. Does all the above mean that we're working on a dice game? No. Nooo.

Yes.

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No second chance to make a first impression

The theme of a game is something that needs to be considered carefully, as I tried to prove the last time I tackled the topic, pointing to issues that turned out to be somewhat problematic when it came to reception of some games. Sometimes navigating through what rubs players the right or the wrong way turns out to be surprisingly difficult, as a small misstep can make some of our potential customers unwilling to buy our product, regardless of the quality of its mechanisms. So, maybe dropping the theme completely would be a better idea altogether?

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BoardGameGeek

The obvious answer is, well, no. Themes are there for two important purposes. The first one relates our game to other games already present on the market, allowing it to either stand out, or fall in line with similar products. This is a little bit like sending a message: “If you like games like Puerto Rico or Caylus, you will like this game as well” or “This might tickle your fancy if you like Talisman style fantasy adventures”.

The second purpose is of a seemingly different nature, as it is a more practical one. A theme is something that helps us learn a game. It uses shortcuts that help our brain process all the new information we are feeding it in order to finally sit down and have some fun around a gaming table.

Now, I know that at this point some of you might say that a lot of games do not have a theme and they are doing pretty well. However, even in some of those cases rudimentary theming is often also involved, especially if the game comes with six types of pieces, with each of them using different movement rules (and as a side note: while I would never try to argue that Chess is thematic, once you read The Flanders Panel, you will never look upon Chess the way you had looked at the game before).

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BoardGameGeek

However, if you try to completely remove a theme from a more complicated (rules wise) game like Agricola, you will quickly see how ungodly difficult it would be to teach it to new people. Just think about trying to make new players remember that the yellow and orange pieces are multiplied through placing them on brown squares (which you first place on green squares), while the white, black and brown pieces are gained through placing them on green squares which need to be either surrounded by your sticks or need to contain a cube of your colour before you are actually allowed to place them, and any multiplication is performed only once every four, three or two rounds.

The two above reasons make some of the most abstract European games, excellent titles like the classic Goa, Shipyard or Yspahan cling to their theme, hoping that even with a significant number of disassociated mechanisms, they will still be able to make use of the ones that make some sense, and give new players a foothold, that will allow them to actually learn the rest of the game.

In short, the theme of the game is there to translate a bunch of complicated mechanisms into a language we can easily understand and relate to something we already know. Farming, building a castle, constructing ships, sending good overseas – all this help us make enough sense of some wooden cubes and some strange symbols to actually have fun while pushing them around a board. And the memory of this process also allows us to choose efficiently while making purchases, which brings us back to relating our game to other games on the market.

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A proper theme of a game announces what we can expect inside the box. A ship, a sheep and a sad guy on the cover will tell us that we will most probably be optimizing our moves, exchanging cubes for other cubes and preparing a nice point salad. A dude with an oversized weapon, a fiery dragon or a charging army will tell us that we will most probably be rolling dice, playing “in your face” cards, putting narration over common sense and relying on both strategy and luck to win the day. Altogether, the box tells us then, if the learning process will be aided by a positive filter, or hampered by a negative one.

Finally, it all boils down to our likes and dislikes yet again. I know a very aggressive gamer, a fan of extremely confrontational games, who suffered through an explanation of Istanbul and ended up really liking the game, after he had powered through the somewhat stunted learning process to appease his wife. I also know a very multiplayer solitaire centred gamer who decided to give Combat Commander just one try and ended up having lots of fun leading her troops, but only after overcoming her aversion to aggressive gameplay and World War II history.

And as much as the above cases tell us that many gamers can actually enjoy games towards which they were initially reluctant, the publishers should probably learn a completely opposite lesson. Because in fact, most people will not play a product they are not fond of right from the start, and with the abundance of games on the market today, no game will have a first (not to mention the second) chance to make a good impression – and very rarely will there be another person around to help with making the first one really count.

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The Agent and the Narrator

According to an old joke about Talisman, the first prototype of the game was actually a single six-sided die. The players would sit down staring at it for four hours, and then roll off to see who won the game.

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Obviously, the joke is still being told by the people who do not enjoy the overall experience offered by the cult classic. They seem uninterested in the heroic stories created by hours of rolling dice, moving around the board and then either drawing a card, or... rolling more dice. And it does not necessarily mean that they hate wizards, dragons and magical swords (although some of them actually do). What it does mean is that they are unsatisfied with the level of agency offered by the game.

Last week I said that a certain level of randomness seems to be a required element of any adventure game. I think we can agree now that if everything can be weighed and measured before the game, there will be no adventure – only an exercise in optimization or, in other words, a German style game. Randomness is, obviously, not only an element of an adventure game. Even Agricola randomizes some of its elements, but only up to a certain extent. The players are first treated to a random distribution of cards, and during the game they have to take into account the fact that the appearance of some action spaces is random – although this randomness is also very limited.

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It is actually quite easy to get randomness right in a Eurogame. Just remember a simple rule: randomness first, decisions later. Shipyard introduces this element by giving players scoring tiles before the game, just like Lords ofWaterdeep which – although plagued with the quest cards random draw which felled many a strategy – supplies each player with a lord card that tells them what they will score points for.

Adventure games are, however, slightly more difficult to calibrate. In optimization games agency is king – but it is narrating a story that adventure games are all about. And here, it seems, erring on the side of caution means that it is better to make a game more random, than one that can be fully planned from the first turn and then flawlessly executed. Does that mean that all adventure games will inevitably boil down to, more or less, Talisman clones?

Certainly not, as some designers have already proven – with Mage Knight being the most recent example of an adventure game that really puts the player in the driver’s seat, while sometimes heavily taxing their little grey cells. What is important to take note of here: randomness is not gone, but it still precedes all decisions made by a player on their turn – just like in many Eurogames.

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As a fan of games with a clear narrative arc, I enjoyed my time with Mage Knight, just as much as I enjoyed a few dozen games of Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, where a random card draw created challenges for players to deal with using their custom made decks and (on a more turn-by-turn basis) their hands of cards. I was, however, surprised that many adventure game fans had a completely different view of those two games, finding them dull, too complicated or simply “not really adventure games”.

All in all, getting an adventure game design right is not only about creating a set of working mechanisms, but about (and perhaps even more so) balancing the player agency and the game’s narrative aspect. It is obvious a single design will not satisfy every gamer, which makes this balancing act, ever interesting from a design standpoint - and exciting for gamers open to experiencing new ideas within their favoured genre.

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A Road to Adventure

When asked about adventure games, it’s quite easy to give a long list of examples: from the grandfatherly figure of classic Talisman, through its almost carbon copies like Prophecy or the more recent Relic, to progressively more complicated designs like Runebound or A Touch of Evil, the now out of print World of Warcraft: The Board Game and the legendary rules behemoth known as Magic Realm. But what is it exactly that makes them adventure games?

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According to Robert Harris, the designer of the original Talisman, the game was created as a substitute for Dungeons & Dragons. What might be hard to believe to modern gamers, accustomed to slim designs which take an hour to set up, play and break down to neatly put back into the box, Harris wanted to make a game that would create an RPG-like experience in a shorter time and a more manageable form (one of the key points of this simplification being ejecting the time consuming role of the Dungeon Master).

With that in mind, it's rather obvious why the tropes and decorations for Talisman were ported directly from classic fantasy: it was, after all, a cornerstone of the game that started the whole role-playing genre, in turn spawning numerous board games and then MMOs, the majority of which still favour visiting worlds inhabited by warriors, wizards and dragons over any other. 

Consequently, it comes as no surprise that games are often categorized using their settings, with ones featuring characters, enemies and events known from fantasy literature and movies often falling into the Adventure genre (unless very blatantly being something else).There are admittedly some small deviations, but even some of those science-fiction worlds (like the universes of Star Wars or Warhammer 40.000 used as a setting for Relic) have in fact little to do with science, with their defining stories being much closer to heroic epics than the writings of sir Arthur C. Clarke.

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A fantasy theme, however, does not an adventure game make. The dwarves, axes and quests do not obscure the fact that Caverna is a Eurogame through and through. The theme of travelling around mythical ancient Greece in Venture Forth is nothing more than a theme, with the player able to best optimize their movement being the winner every time. The most important experience of playing Magic: The Gathering is not that of coming into contact with mythical heroes and creatures the decks are so ripe with – it’s about coming into contact with your opponent and crushing them. Playing any of those games is rarely an adventure - it's an optimization task or a duel.

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Now, the actual experience of having an adventure is sometimes a difficult one to create. Tabletop role-playing games do the best job here, using the best tool available: the human mind. The imagination of a Dungeon Master creates worlds, characters and surprising twists, exciting the players, and allowing the game world to react unexpetedly to their actions. But how can a board game ever substitute the unpredictability and creativity of a live dungeon master? That is and was simple since 1983 - just use a die or a stack of cards.

After looking at all the games I played, if I were to point to one feature that is prevalent to any game that “feels like an adventure”, I’d probably go with randomness. It is the randomness that allows the game to be different every time. It is the roll of a die that in the end decides of success or failure. It's the flipped card that puts a peril, a stranger or a fantastical event on the road that makes or breaks a hero. Now, am I saying that it is enough to just make your game random, to make it feel like sharing an adventure with a bunch of friends? 

No. But that is something I will have to leave for next week.

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