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Candyland, but a game!
(apologies in advance for the weird white background formatting - that happens when I paste stuff, and it's a huge pain in the butt to fix, so I'm not going to bother)
There seems to have been a rash of threads on social media a couple weeks ago about whether or not Candyland is even a game, let alone a shining example of design. Perhaps they were in response to noted developer John Brieger's tweetstorm about how "Candyland is a masterpiece of game design that designers should be studying and dissect as one of the best examples EVER of game design craft for specific audiences." In any case, John decries the notion, put forth by many "game snobs," that Candyland is not even a game.
Of course, whether you consider Candyland to be a game or not depends entirely on your definition of "game." As one reply from GeekNights host Rym Decoster pointed out:
It fits the definition of 'orthogame' in that it has mutually agreed rules and a method of ranking players. It also fits my favorite definition of game: "An interactive amusement". It's not an ideogame. Nor is it a "series of interesting/meaningful decisions"
As for my thoughts on whether Candyland is a game... I'd say it is and it isn't. It's not a "game" like I like to think of games, because it doesn't have any choices to make. But in a more general sense, I think it's considered a game by a lot of folks. Is that just marketing? It comes in a game box, it is sold in the games section at Target, and people have been calling it a game for decades So yeah, it's all down to definitions
I generally enjoy Keith Burgun's 4 interactive forms, but I'm not sure that's much help in categorizing Candyland:
- It's not a toy, because it does have a goal (be the first to cross the finish line)
- Is it a puzzle, because it's goal is meant to be found (you're meant to get to the finish line)?
- Is it a contest, because crossing the finish line first is a measurement?
- But it's not a game, because there's no decision making to be had
Based on that, I guess Candyland is a "contest," though the thing that's being measured is questionable -- your ability to raw the right cards? To unknowingly sit in the pre-determined winning seat? Feels a little fishy to me. But with no decisions to be made, I don't think Candyland qualifies as a game.
BUT THAT'S OK.
Being a game or not being a game is not what lends value to Candyland. Breiger outlined the value of Candyland pretty thoroughly in his thread.
Perhaps what's really in view here is the difference between game design and product design. Designer/Developer TC Petty replied to Breiger thusly:
I’d say all your points are “it was a good product.” It has no other game design craft qualities to study as evidenced by no mechanics to discuss nor how they were implemented or evolved. Product design: yes. Game design: no.
And while I am on record disagreeing with everything TC says, in this case I think I agree. John's points are all valid, but they're more about the product design of Candyland, and not the game design.
I hadn't really thought about the design of Candyland before, so I found the following assrertion in Breiger's thread interesting:
A few mechanical considerations that go into designing Candyland board length space distribution shortcut placement color distribution composition of the deck (1's vs 2's vs special)
And it prompted this follow up from me:
For a game without choices, ARE those considerations important? What does tuning them change? * Duration (important) * Movement range per turn (important to a point)Anything else?
and he said:
Since there aren't decisions, the mechanical choices sort of funnel into 3 outputs that create a lot of the experience: Duration Pacing / Movement Range Surprises and Volatility The 3rd is pretty important to the what makes Candyland exciting for kids (big swings)
and I said:
Looking at the board images above, it appears the order of the colored spaces are simply a repeating pattern: ABCDA... with occasional special spaces inserted I won't say that's NOT intentional, but am I out on a limb to think it's a default starting point?
The special spaces are more or less evenly spaced as well I'm not familiar with the card mix, but how much does it differ from an even mix of all the possible 2-color combinations?
You suggest these things were carefully chosen and intentional, but I'm not convinced there was a lot of design thought put into them That doesn't make Candyland any less special or good at what it was! But are there really under-the-hood design lessons for modern designers?
I don't think I saw a response to that, but it was interesting to think about anyway. It was also amusing to see some of the other comments being tossed around, like TC's argumentative ones, and the typical tangent from Jeff Warrender (author of You Said This Would Be Fun) in which he proposes turning Candyland into a game by adding a handful of convoluted mechanisms:
Since Candyland is the game of the moment, how about this variant: Candyland bid-to-move. Give everyone 30(?) coins. Each turn, flip a card. Everyone bid (closed fist?), high bid moves to that color. Ties friendly. Out of coins, eliminated(?).
Probably, if everyone is past a special space, when its card comes up it’s discarded. A mean variant would be, bid to avoid it, everyone but low bidder pays, low bidder moves back. Like bad cards in High Society.
A bidding game wants everyone interested in every bid. In a track game like this, "I only bid for big moves" will be common. So small moves have to have value. You also want/need asymmetry.
I think maybe instead of special spaces there are "conveyance cards" which you can win in a bid, and if you later land on a space with that conveyance you get to skip some of the track.
Easiest way to get asymmetry is from different or diverging paths. Maybe there are side quests, maybe those are what give those conveyance cards or some other treasure thing.Maybe rank order matters or there are checkpoints (e.g. it's a rally of some sort)
My idea to make Candyland into more of a game
In my mind, an attempt to "make Candyland into a game" should really maintain the general scope of the game. If changing it too much, and changing its scope and category, then why even include the original game at all? However, I think Jeff was orbiting a solid idea in there, which I would like to reach in and extract here:
What if we simply combine Candyland's board with another very simple, straightforward game: No Thanks. In No Thanks (now on BGA!), you flip a card with a number, and then take turns either paying a chip into the pool to avoid the card, or taking the card (and all the chips in the pool). Chips are good because they allow you to say "no thanks" to bad cards, and they're worth a point at game end. Cards are bad, because their value subtracts from your score. There's a twist however: if you can get a run of multiple cards in a row, then only the lowest value counts. So if I hold the 33 already, then the 32 is -32 points for everyone else, but actually +1 for me!
Imagine this mechanism, but instead of just collecting numbered cards that are bad, you advance down the Candyland board when you take a card with a color on it, and the goal is to be the last player across the finish line. This way, any given card could be better or worse for any given player, and then also there's the number of tokens you have to consider, making it a million times more thinky than Candyland as, but still a super accessible, simple game.
What theme would lend itself to wanting to be 'last past the post'? One follower suggested a political race, where "advancing down the track" is like scandals coming to light, and "reaching the finish line" is like having to drop out of the race due to an abundance of, I don't know, shame?
Let me know what you think. I actually suspect this idea could have some legs, and if I work on it any further, I may well get into some of those design questions such as distribution of colors in the deck, order of colored spaces on the board, number and spacing of shortcuts, etc. Maybe there's intentionality that could go into that after all - though I still find it hard to believe there was much intentionality behind it in Candyland!
