No catchy title this time, just wanted to talk about how we should design games that hold up to competitive play… AND to NON-competitive play.
I've said before that all things being equal, games are better if they hold up to competitive play. That is to say that they don't break down when a player "tries to win." For many games, that's not strictly necessary, for example, many party games are not really played "to win," but just to facilitate a fun time. That's well and good, but my point still stands: the game would only be better if it did not unravel when one or more players do play competitively.
I've stumbled across a new observation that is related to this, and may be even more important. Not only should a game strive to hold up to competitive play, but it must also hold up to NON-competitive play! By this I mean simply: if one, some, or (worst case) all of the players do not aggressively pursue the winning condition, the game must not stop working, and it must still progress toward an end.
Case Study: Apotheosis
This has come up on my current design,
Apotheosis. In every playtest of that game, at least one player (myself, if not my friend Dave) would treat the game as the race it was intended to be. We both strive to do tier-2 adventures as quickly as possible, as they're much more efficient then tier-1 adventures, and we press as hard as we can toward reaching the win condition (the end of a track). As a result, the duration of the game was always acceptable, and I thought the game was in pretty good shape.
The other day I had a test with 3 other players on Tabletop Simulator, and I decided to sit out and help facilitate instead of playing because TTS is kinda fiddly, and I thought it would go faster that way. This turned out to be fortuitous because it revealed what I'd consider a fatal flaw in the game: all three players went for even advancement to obtain the "consolation" level-ups I'd added, effectively spending too many turns building up rather than pressing to get to those tier-2 adventures and racing up a track. As a result, perhaps not unexpectedly, the game dragged on and ended up taking about 2 hours -- fully twice an acceptable duration!
Thinking about this problem is what turned me on to the axiom above: games must hold up to non-competitive play. First time players will not necessarily notice that you're intended to push up the tracks as fast as you can. In fact, the current incentives kind of suggest the opposite. And many players just play games to explore their systems, and don't try doggedly to achieve victory. Therefore, it is definitely appropriate to address this game-dragging problem in some way.
Brainstorming solutions
My first thought was to remove or reduce the "consolation" level-ups. I'd added them to ensure that simply picking one track and ignoring the other two wasn't necessarily the best path to take. To be honest, I'm not sure they were really necessary in that respect, but I did like having a reward for even advancement in a game where the goal is to advance any 1 track to the end. While that might have reduced the problem, it would not have eliminated it, as new or bad players could still dilly-dally too long and make the game drag. This might not be a practical problem, but it's certainly at least a theoretical one. The game should naturally push toward an end, no matter how players decide to play.
My next thought was to make some of the rewards on the tracks "1st come, 1st served" to encourage players to race for those. This might be good to do, but I'd also like to see players get those rewards more often, so limiting them might not be great after all.
Finally, the 3rd thing that came to mind was the biggest, and possibly best solution: add a game end condition that would trigger when players dilly-dally. Such a game timer would keep the game from dragging by definition, if players don't progress the game themselves, it will still come to an end. In general I'd say this is an obvious choice, except in Apotheosis, the win condition is reaching the end of a track. So what happens if the time runs out and nobody has achieved the win condition? How do you decide who wins? In some games it's easy to assess relative progress, and award the game to the player who's closest to winning. But here that is thematically odd because topping out a track is supposed to represent a big, momentous event.
Another option is to say that if time runs out, then nobody wins. This is an interesting thought, however it may be out of place in this type of game, and it's likely to make for a bad first play experience if players all lose in the first game.
Settling on a solution?
What I have decided to try is this: add a game timer (the king will return, and once he does, your opportunity to steal the throne will be gone!), and if you win before time runs out, great (the king returns to find you on his throne, controlling his army, or backed by a demon, or with his court turned against him)! But if nobody has won by the time the king returns, then the player with the best reputation across all of the guilds (evenly advanced up the tracks) is the winner.
Tangentially related: game end dynamic
In addition, I'm considering a variable, slightly random game length, something like this... When the adventure deck runs out, the king is ALMOST home. Put a King marker on a short (6 space) track that's revealed under where the deck was. Give the triggering player a marker as a reminder, and for the rest of the game, after that that player's turn each round, roll a die. On a 1-3, advance the king marker 1 space. On a 4-5, advance 2 spaces. On a 6, advance 3 spaces. Therefore when the deck runs out, you have 2-6 turns left to win by getting to the end of one of the three victory tracks. This way, if you don't think you can reach the end of any the tracks by the time the king returns, or if you think someone might beat you to it, you can advance your track markers more evenly in case nobody else achieves the win condition in time either. This gives you something to do if you feel you can't win, and it might also extend the tension (until the last minute at least) even if you know you can reach a track end before anybody else.
The game must communicate its dynamics to the players
This brings me to another recent observation, which we could put down as another axiom: The game must communicate its dynamics to the players. I have talked about this in the context of the "Alpha Player Problem" and what I call "Solitaire by Committee", or committee-style cooperative games, but it applies more generally as well. In SbC games, this axiom suggests that it's important to let players know that the game is not about making your own choices and having full agency with some incentive to coordinate with or help the rest of the group, rather in an SbC style game, the whole point is to have a little committee meeting to decide on a course of action, and then do that.
For the new perspective alternate end game trigger in Apotheosis, this axiom would suggest that it's important to make clear the "most evenly advanced" win condition is a secondary condition, and that the primary and most common way to win will still be by reaching the end of a track. Without clearly communicating this, I can see how it'd be very easy for a player to assume both win conditions are equally viable to go after, and I can just see reviewers now complaining that "the game is not well balanced, not all win conditions have the same win rates" (duh, they're not supposed to!)
I'm not exactly sure how to go about that communication outside of explicitly stating it in the rulebook, which is not ideal by itself, because it is too easy to overlook or forget about.
TL;DR summary
Games are better if they hold up to competitive play, but they MUST hold up to non-competitive play. Don't allow your game to drag on or fall apart if players don't pursue victory as aggressively as you expected them to.
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