Living Forest - PYL Deckbuilding done right

 A month or two ago, I  stumbled across a game on BGA that I'd never heard of before. The art looked nice, but I knew nothing about it. After seeing it a few times, I decided to give it a try.

Living Forest is a deckbuilding, press-your-luck (PYL) game that uses a blackjack type of "hit me" mechanism to produce resources, then let's you spend those resources on 2 different actions (or just 1, if you push your luck too far and go bust). Like Flip City or Mystic Vale, each round you will play cards off the top of your deck, one at a time, until you decide to stop, or until you hit too many "bad" icons. In this case, the "bad" icons are black circles indicating that a card is a "Solitary animal," I guess having 2 solitary animals together is ok, but they draw the line at 3!

Each card in Living Forest has some number of icons on it, Sun, Water, Seeds, Spirals, and Flowers. Once you stop flipping up cards, you'll total the icons you have showing, and then get to do 1 or 2 actions:

1. Buy cards with Suns
2. Extinguish fire with Water
3. Plant a tree with Seeds
4. Advance on a rondel with Spirals (gaining the effect of another action depending where you land)
5. Flowers aren't a resource, but if you get enough of them in a turn, you win the game
6. Forget the icons and take an "X" token, which you can use later to veto a card draw

You take these actions in an attempt to pursue victory, which you can achieve in 3 different ways:

1. Extinguish 12 fires
2. Plant 12 different trees
3. Draw 12 Flowers in one turn

There are some other details, such as the Victory Tokens that you start with, giving you 1 point toward each of those conditions, which you can steal from your opponents by lapping them on the rondel, or that the trees each give you some permanent icon that counts every turn, or that buying cards created fires that can later be extinguished... etc.

The Strategic Evolution

Everyone I've seen talk about this game (and this includes myself) says the same thing at first... Fire is the only way to win! You can buy a lot of cards on the turns your opponent goes first, generating fires, then extinguish them the following turn, when you go first and they can't stop you. I'll note that I had only played 2p at that point, but based on BGG threads I've seen, the dynamic isn't much different in multiplayer.

I believe it's the case that the Fire victory is the most obvious, most straightforward victory to go for, but I've noticed (as everyone seems to eventually) that as players gain experience, it becomes harder to pull off a Fire victory, and easier to win via other means. Some people have said that once players learn to play around a Fire victory (by buying fewer cards, putting out fires yourself to keep them from your opponent, etc), the Tree victory is the way to go-but I don't agree. So far I've found the Tree victory to be too slow - you're only allowed to plant 1 tree per turn, and while you do start with a victory token and a tree pre-printed on your board, you still need 10 more to trigger the win, and they have to be unique. When I've gone for this, even when I've succeeded, I've found that I also won by Fire or Flowers at the same time, so the Tree victory was irrelevant. Most of the time I think Fire or Flowers can both be faster than Trees. So why do people think Trees is best? I think it's because Flowers takes more nuance (and maybe more good cards for it in the supply). I'll note that you can get 8 flowers from planting the 4-cost and 9-cost trees on your board, and filling that center row, so you really only need to draw a few flowers. There are some good cards for quick Flower win, and if they're in the supply, it might be worth considering that approach... there's a 5-cost tier-1 card that has 2 flowers on it, and there's a mid-rang card with a white circle (which cancels out a black circle, allowing you to hit more on your turn without busting) and a flower that's also good.

Don't get me wrong, trees are important no matter what because they give you that engine building support for both other strategies, but so far I haven't found a reliable way to win with them that beats doubling up on certain trees and going for Fire or Flowers.

Press-Your-Luck done right

Something that's always a challenge in PYL games is the balance between the benefit of flipping one more card vs the detriment of going bust. Many PYL games are very swingy and light, you can't take them too seriously - by their nature they're very luck driven. Sometimes you see a game that tries to use PYL but also take itself seriously, and that's, as they say, a tough nut to crack. Living Forest pulls this off better than any game I've seen (I hear good things about Quacks of Quedlinburg, but I haven't had a chance to play it). If you get too many solitary animals and go bust, you are out an action - that's 1/2 your turn! However, you get the icons on that card, so you could afford a better single action than either of your two actions had you stopped. And sometimes there just aren't 2 good actions for you to do, so by hitting once more when you might bust, you are risking a mediocre action in exchange for a more powerful single  action. In that respect, sometimes it could even be a good choice to bust on purpose, which gives you the added benefit of getting one more solitary animal out of your deck, so your next turn can be stronger.

I really like the way Living Forest implements PYL, and despite that mechanism, I think it's a game you really can take seriously. It's no wonder Living Forest got nominated for the Kennerspiel Des Jahres!

What I'd Do Differently

Whenever I play a game, I always have something I'd do differently, like if it were my game, or if I were developing it, and this is no exception. In the case of Living Forest, after a handful of plays and some discussion, there are 2 tweaks I would love to try (too bad you can't use house rules on BGA):

1. Turn order based on Flowers
   The current turn order (P1 passing around the table) feels arbitrary, and can lead to that undesirable dynamic I mentioned earlier about the Fire victory. Also, Flowers are a win condition, but they do absolutely nothing in-game. Flowers doing nothing doesn't bother me on its own, but I'd like to see turn order each round be based of the number of Flowers drawn. That way you could get some flowers even if not going for that victory, in order to get more favorable turn order more often 
2. Discarding fires when getting X tokens
   Currently, any defense against a Fire victory amounts to "also go fire." That's kind of a bummer, and it contributes to the feeling new players get that Fire is really the only way to go. It would be cool if there were a way to defensively remove fire without extinguishing it yourself, and my proposal here is that whenever you get an X token for any reason, you may choose to discard a fire token from the center (without keeping it)

Those are 2 house rules that I have high hopes for. I have another few ideas that are probably unnecessary as well, but those are the tweaks I would actually try if I had a physical copy of the game. It's very possible that these tweaks are only needed for, or more relevant to, the 2-player game, but I actually think they might help in multiplayer as well.

"Challenge" vs "Difficulty"

I was thinking about Challenge vs Difficulty (particularly in cooperative board games) recently. At a glance, they sound like the same thing, but if you think about it, they're really not.

Definitions

I looked up "challenge," and the definition in this context is: "a difficult task, especially one that the person making the attempt finds more enjoyable because of that difficulty," while "difficult" is simply defined as "hard to do, requiring much effort." For the purposes of this post, I will sum those up as follows: 

Difficulty in a game is the extent you're unlikely to succeed.

Challenge in a game is the extent to which overcoming the difficulty is fun or rewarding.

I've found that these terms come up a lot in the context of cooperative games, where the players need some sort of AI or algorithm to play against rather than the cunning and guile of a human opponent. A good cooperative game is challenging, it sets a task for the players, and they have fun trying to overcome obstacles to accomplish that task. One of the nice things about these games is that an optimal set of plays is not clear, and the whole point is to make that optimal set of plays, or close enough, that you achieve the goal of the game in the time allotted.

However, some cooperative games aren't challenging so much as just difficult. In those games, the chances of losing even with an optimal set of plays is too high, so it doesn't feel as fun or rewarding when you win.

The Components of Difficulty

There are 2 major things that can make a game more difficult - they both reduce your likelihood of winning: Increased depth, and decreased fairness, where depth is the amount of good play required to win, and fairness is the degree to which that good play determines the outcome.

• In a fair game, the outcome is less often dominated by factors outside your control. If you play well, you'll win more often.
• In an unfair game, too often the outcome is outside the player's control. There's a significant chance you'll lose even if you were to play optimally
• A deep game has a high skill ceiling. You have to build up to the point where you can hope to play near-optimally
• A shallow game has a low skill ceiling. You can be confident your play is near-optimal without too much time, effort, or study

In order to examine this more closely, I thought I'd make a graph of Depth to Fairness. Plotting a game on that graph could allow us to visually see some of these relationships and make sense of them:

WAIT! Why am I using UNfairness on the bottom axis instead of Fairness? Difficulty comes from both depth and unfairness. A deeper game is more difficult to win because it requires better play. A more unfair game is difficult to win because despite good play, you might lose due to chance. So both of those things can increase difficulty. I use Unfairness for the axis so that moving away from the origin in either direction makes the game harder.

Now we can locate games on the graph, draw a vector to them from the origin, and the length of that vector relates to how hard the game is to win: 

Magnitude = Difficulty

"Challenge," then, is how fun or rewarding it is to overcome that difficulty. In this graph, the slope of that vector (rise over run: depth over unfairness) relates to the amount of challenge the game has to offer. The deeper the game, or the fairer the game, the more rewarding it is to overcome its difficulty, and therefore the more or better challenge it presents.

Practical Application

Let me lay some ground rules on what this graph applies to, how it can be helpful, and what it's limitations are.

For one thing, you'll notice that there are no numerical values on these axes. I am not sure how these aspects could possibly be measured! Also, those gray, labeled boxes are completely arbitrary, and can be deleted or redrawn wherever you'd like, so a single data point on this graph is meaningless. This graph only allows us to make relative comparisons between multiple games. As soon as you get 2 data points, you can begin to compare them and see, in a qualitative sense, which is more Fair, which has more Depth, which is more Difficult, and which is more Challenging.

This information might work best for 1-player games, solo modes, and co-operative games, when the "opponent" has a consistent skill level. It does not make as much sense for a multiplayer game, where the difficulty depends on your opponent's skill level as well - although you might be able to gain insight into questions like "how hard/challenging is it to play various different games vs Steve?" If the opposition is fixed as that particular opponent for each game, then I think the model will still allow comparisons, which could be fun to do amongst a group of friends who play vs each other a lot. 

Similarly, I think this could be used to compare factions or characters in an asymmetric game - not in general, but if you look at various factions/characters vs a particular faction/character, then you might be able to glean some useful balance (or strategic) information about matchups.

Something I think might be a stumbling block in reading this graph is that we're not talking about the outcome of a particular match here. We're talking about the difficulty of the game in general -- overall win rates, not whether you win or lose this instance, or this play of the game.

A Worked Example

Pandemic is a popular cooperative game for 2-4 players, and you can adjust the difficulty from "easy" to "expert" by using 4-6 Epidemic cards in the deck. The game is obviously harder with more Epidemic cards, but I've also observed that the game gets harder the more players you have due to logistical concerns. Let's take a look at some of the configurations you can play Pandemic in, and plot them on this Difficulty chart:

The way I drew that I'm saying that 2p-expert and 4p-easy are approximately the same difficulty, but in 4p it's more rewarding to overcome that difficulty

Good Difficulty vs Bad Difficulty

We have learned that Difficulty comprises two aspects: Depth and Unfairness. One of those increases Challenge, and the other does not, but both increase difficulty. I don't think I'm out on a limb saying difficulty that increases challenge is "Good Difficulty," and difficulty that does not increase challenge is "Bad Difficulty." 

There do exist cooperative games where added difficulty does not seem to increase the challenge. I remember when Ghost Stories came out, it was the talk of BGG.con that year, and all the buzz was that the game was really difficult. After finally playing Ghost Stories I remember thinking "I'm not sure a higher chance you can't win is the kind of 'difficult' you want in a game." Of course, that hasn't stopped the game from being incredibly popular over the years!

I've recently gotten to try The Princess Bride Adventure Storybook Game, and it strikes me as a game with a low skill ceiling. It's fairly easy to figure out what to do, and you can go through the motions to do it, and then you see if you were able to finish in time. You can reach the point where you can achieve optimal or close-to-optimal play with some confidence, but even with optimal play, often whether you win or lose a chapter seems to come down to chance. In this game's defense, I've only played it with 2 players, and it's possible that, like Pandemic, the game is more challenging (or at least harder) with more players.

To be fair, that's always the case with cooperative games -- given optimal play, there's still a chance you'll lose the game. Most (all?) cooperative games have that dynamic, lest they become "solved," and that's probably a good thing. But perhaps each game has an Unfairness threshold, a percentage chance that you lose anyway, even with optimal play, that is acceptable. Under that threshold, the game could be considered "Fair" (or fair enough). Above that threshold, the game could be labeled "Unfair." In a good cooperative game, the amount of Unfairness would be closer to that threshold, whereas in a bad game, the Unfairness might be much higher than the threshold. Unfortunately, I don't have a good feeling for where that threshold should be, and it is almost certainly different from game to game.

Conclusion

The best case scenario in my mind is a deep/fair game, where winning correlates to amount of good play, and the chance you lose even with good play is within acceptable limits. This offers more challenge, and it's therefore more rewarding and more fun to overcome the difficulty. A bad game in my mind is one that is shallow and unfair, where winning does not take much good play, but does require a lot of luck.

I'll try to keep this difference between "challenge" and "difficulty," and this Depth-to-Fairness ratio in mind when designing, especially when working on a cooperative game. For example, if I ever finish up Alter Ego, maybe I'll apply these lessons to ensure that to the extent the game is difficult, it provides "good difficulty," not "bad difficulty." It's important for games to be challenging, not just difficult!

Post Script on Effort

Another thing that could be considered is when a game requires more effort: doing lots of simple math, moving pieces around, grinding actions, that sort of thing. Busywork. Since these things don't require any particular skill (except maybe stamina to endure them), I'm not sure they make a game harder to win, they just make it more annoying to play. They could be said to reduce the Challenge, because they make it less fun and rewarding to overcome the difficulty of the game, but they do not themselves contribute to the difficulty. Therefore I don't think we need to consider Effort in this model.