strāt'ə-jē

Strategy (strāt'ə-jē): A plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result

In a discussion online today I encountered a speed bump in communication between myself and 2 of the people I often chat with, JC Lawrence and Ben Keightley. They said they didn't believe in "multiple paths to victory" - that it was a bewildering concept, and in the end had no actual meaning. Rather it's one of those catch-phrases that people adhere to without ever bothering to look back to reality.

In my mind that's not the case at all. To me, Multiple Paths to Victory means more than 1 distinct strategic approaches to the game. When I mentioned this, Ben said something I found interesting, and which explained to me why we weren't seeing eye-to-eye:

< cocadieta >: Puerto Rico has one dominant strategy. The dominant strategy, documented flawlessly on BGG, is to first establish income sources, then generate income, then turn that income into points.

To me, that's not a Strategy, it's simply how you go about games with economic engines. It's like saying "My strategy is to win the game!" No shit.

I guess in a general sort of definition, what Ben proposes is a Strategy, but to me that's not useful for discussion of any game in particular. At the genre level sure - "establish an income engine and then establish a VP engine" is a way to approach economic engine games. I could say that in Agricola you need to get a food engine going before you start increasing your family and building up your farm. In Puerto Rico you need to get some kind of cash crop in order to establish income before you can start shipping or building in earnest. To that extent maybe this overarching plan is the "Strategy" you can go into the game - any game - with.

On the game level though, when discussing a particular game, I find it more useful to consider more local strategy than that. Once you determine what type of game you're playing, the global - genre level - strategy becomes common sense, and now you need to consider game specific strategy. In my mind there's still room for both long term strategy as well as short term tactics at the local, game level, and that is distinct from a genre-level general over-arching strategy.

So when I say that Puerto Rico has 2 main strategic paths, Shipping and Building, I'm referring to local (game level) strategy. I agree that as a game in the Economic Engine genre there's a global (genre level) strategy of "establish income, then generate VPs," but to me that's not useful for any kind of discussion.

One thing I like in a game is multiple paths to victory. By this I mean more than 1 distinct strategic approach at the game level to establishing that engine, or to acquiring those VPs. When designing my games, and when looking at other designs, this is what I'm considering. To me it's more useful than general strategic commentary such as "score more points over the course of the game than the other guys."

Butterfly in the sky? No wait, this is Reading Railroad

Scott finally got a chance to playtest his build of Reading Railroad, and since it worked I finally got off my ass and finished my prototype as well. I played a 3 player game using the updated rules Scott sent me after his test. I knew going in that there were a few things I wanted to watch for and likely change. The test went well overall, we were able to play through the entire game, we had fun, and the system definitely seemed to work.

The things I'm looking to change are basically things intended to steer the game toward my original design goal - that you don't have to be a wordsmith to play the game. Also, I'd like to emphasize the in-game point scoring (by making longer words than necessary to connect cities) more, so that it can be a significant source of points in the game.

In game design terms, that is to say terms I personally use when thinking about game design, I'm trying to emphasize a particular SvB. In this case, I'm trying to create interesting choices stemming from the ability to score points either by building bigger words over the course of the game while laying track as cheaply as possible, and forgoing those in-game points in favor of building track to specific cities in order to get the "right" City tiles for endgame scoring. The former strategy I expect will score more points over the course of the game, but will probably end up with suboptimal City tiles or a smaller "biggest network". The latter strategy I expect will yield bigger endgame scores, at the cost of in-game scoring. Thus, we have 2 extreme strategies of which players will do some of each in order to collect enough points to win.

In addition, I'm trying to encourage an additional SvB in the endgame scoring - I plan to have multiple words that can be spelled with City tiles, some small, some large. I'm hoping that there might be a viable "short word" strategy as well as a viable "long word" strategy. The scoring for words will probably continue to be Scott's ingenious idea: [#letters]^2, which would make a longer word worth more points. However, a longer word ought to be more difficult to complete, so shorter words, though less points, could be more guaranteed.

Finally, one more idea I've recently had is to have additional scoring cards one could buy, like a Ticket in Ticket to Ride, which have 3/4/5/6/7 letter words on them which build on each other... for example:
ARE DEAR DREAM REMADE DREAMER
CAR RACE CATER CREATE TERRACE
Where you score for the longest word on the card which you can make out of your City Tiles. You would basically pay points for these cards, an investment in the possibility of more points later.

I intend to enter this game in the KublaContest (KublaCon game design contest) this year, which means I should probably get it wrapped up and in the mail fairly soon, it has to arrive by May 12th!

"Shipping vs Building" (SvB)

Games provide players an opportunity to make choices, then evaluate the results and make more choices, etc. until an end result is achieved. Many games make this process interesting by providing multiple paths to get from the beginning of the game to that end result. Multiple paths to victory as it's often called. Various strategies, or ways to approach the game in an effort to win. I refer to those paths as the game's Shipping vs Building.

This term comes from Puerto Rico, arguably the greatest multiplayer strategy game of all time. In that game the extreme strategies are Shipping - loading goods on boats for victory points, and Building - spending money on buildings which are worth points. These are not mutually exclusive strategies, but in general the more shipping you do, the less building you can afford, and likewise the more building you do, the less goods you'll be shipping. These are simply the 2 major methods to gain victory points, the winning player will do some combination of the two.

That's a pretty pure example, from a well renowned game, of multiple paths to victory, and that's what I am referring to when I ask a question like "what is this game's SvB?"

When designing games I often ask myself, what's this game's SvB?