***

Typically, gaming discussions about exploration focus on geographical exploration a la sandbox D&D or Traveller. On the computer side, certain CRPGs like the Elder Scrolls games and Red Dead Redemption, plus some of the better roguelikes are standard-bearers for exploration as a compelling game experience. Exploration as I speak of it involves that same impulse to find new and surprising things, but it can occur on abstract levels such as strategy, tactics and (in narrative forms) character and situation. My love of the strategic bricolage in Race for the Galaxy is based in how it creates such a vast plain of viable strategic possibilities (and strategic possibilities that are just close enough to viable to also be interesting). While I enjoy returning to old favorites like a Consumer Markets/Free Trade Association novelty-consume juggernaut, my interest would soon dry up if I only go to play a rotation of greatest hits.

In fact, writing those last couple of sentences gives me a decent metaphor for gamers versus casual game players: music lovers. A lot of people have their taste in music (and clothes and hair, but let’s stick to music) ossify around the time they graduate from high school or college. They love music, but it’s their music that they love and they have no need for music produced after the high point of Led Zeppelin’s or AC/DC’s career. I know about this because I know and love some of these people; it’s also what makes “classic” rock a viable radio format.Other music lovers thrive on finding new acts, new genres and subgenres of music which reach them in new ways. They may not be in touch with the current top 20, and they return fondly to old favourites, but new infusions maintain the vitality of their love of music.

Casual gamers — despite the fact that they’ll pick up new casual games every so often – are a lot like the people whose love for Nirvana will never die and they need no new music to supplement it. Bejewelled or Ticket to Ride will scratch a particular itch for them for the rest of their lives, and they do not need to find other games to scratch that itch for them, only games to scratch new itches. At most, new, largely identical match-three games or expansion maps are all they need to keep their gaming needs fulfilled.

I, like a lot of other gamers, enjoy casual games as a means of relaxation, but I also need games I can sink into and muck around with, surprising myself when a new tactic or combination comes to light, adding it to my library like I recently added The Black Keys and the Sheepdogs to my catalogue of great bands. I’m happy to apply my old favourites, but I still need that hit of discovery to continue playing regularly.

There’s a relationship between this impulse and the Cult of the New, but that’s another topic for another day.

The rules text is not your game, it is your game’s user interface. It is the button pad on your cell phone; the remote control to your cable or satellite box; the steering wheel, gearshift and pedals in your car. It is the way players (in the absence of a teacher) connect with your game and it needs to be designed as rigorously as the rules and procedures. Players cannot fall back on mashing your game’s buttons, poking through its menus or clicking hyperlinks at random.

Your rulebook must be more than a technical manual. It is a textbook, instruction manual, rules reference, and as the last chance to fail to convince someone to play your game it is a piece of marketing. Usability, user experience, proportion, rhythm, hierarchy and organization all affect how well your book (or PDF or ebook) conveys your game – your baby – to potential players. Fail at designing its text and your game will go unplayed. Worse, it will end up played incorrectly, condemning you to a lifetime of defending it and providing the same “obvious” tips and guidance and the indignity of a quick second edition.

Unfortunately, theory about designing RPG texts is scarce. We must rely on general design principles – Dieter Ram’s Ten Principles of Design is a good place to start – and dig through the theory of other fields of design for nuggets we can borrow. While no field of design deals with same mix of problems that the writers and editors of RPGs do, many fields touch on important ideas:

Technical Writing

While many technical manuals are a crime against the English language (and the sensibilities of their readers), good technical writing conveys procedures and behaviours clearly and in an engaging manner, an important hurdle every RPG must clear.

Web Design

Web designers deal with complicated hierarchies, focus and attention management every day. Most commercially-designed web pages are also major elements of a comprehensive marketing strategy as well.

Many web design blogs and books focus on explaining new techniques and concepts, and these articles are are quite similar to RPG texts. Sadly, presentation isn’t always given the attention it deserves (sound familiar?) The best designers – the ones who are (1) designers and (1a) coders – are masters who we all can learn from, though.

User Experience

A sub-discipline of web and interface design that focuses on how a user feels about using a website or program. User experience (UX) experts study conveying mood and atmosphere how to ensure users walk away with a positive feeling about a product or website.

Print Design

Your text will end up as a book – or PDF or ebook – so knowing how those products are designed will have a positive effect on the final product. At a bare minimum, learn standard practices for using italics, bold, all caps, small caps and underlining. Also, no whether you think it’s better or worse, use one space after the end of a sentence, not two (and learn what the rare exceptions to this guideline are).

Other fields of design have lessons to share, but these four (and general principles of design) should keep you busy and learning for a while. Their practitioners spend their lives trying to improve at them, so there’s no end of material for you to examine and consider. It’s time well spent, though. Your customers will thank you and so will your game.

Trias is a game about dinosaurs and continental drift. Played on a modular hexagonal board with three types of terrain: mountains, forest and plains (the board’s origin is probably a couple of cannibalized Settlers of Catan sets) which the players seed with herds of their respective dino species. During the game, the players breed and move their herds around the board and break the board up into sub-continents by drifting hexes outward into new positions.

It’s a straightforward area majority game in the mold of El Grande or San Marco with the continents the players create acting as scoring areas. Whenever a continent is broken in two by drift, one of the new landmasses is scored. The player that has the most herds on the new landmass receives two points and the second-place player scores one. At the end of the game (after the asteroid strikes, destroying all dinosaur life) there is a final scoring of all the continents where the winning species receives one point for each hex making up the continent and the second-place species earning half that many points.

All of this is straightforward, and no problems jumps out during a cursory inspection. You battle for position on newly-formed continents, breeding and manoeuvring your way to majorities, preferably on the largest continents, positioning yourself for the final scoring. In my experience, sadly, the reality is less interesting and much less fun. (by the way, if you want more details, you can find a PDF of the rules on the publisher’s website)

When a new continent is scored, the reward for having the majority is fixed; large continents score the same as small ones. Large continents leave more room for other players to tag along, though, and you want to squeeze them out to deny them points. The result, in my experience, is players setting up a small – roughly four hexes – continent devoid of dinos other than your own. They repeatedly split the continent, scoring two points, and then reunite it so the landmass doesn’t get too small to split. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It seems like the bonus for continent size at end of the game should work against this. If a player can work the isolation plan for about 80% of the game, though, he’ll score enough points to overcome almost any large but competitive continent. The key seems to be that the isolation player doesn’t have waste actions breeding or otherwise fighting for position (a small continent is faster to split than a larger one, as well), making him very efficient at churning the two point bonuses.

This pattern sucks all of the interaction and conflict – and all of the resulting fun – from the game. There are some simple ways to try fixing this – biodiversity and continent-size bonuses during the body of the game, for example – but I haven’t had a chance to playtest any of them. Getting past the efficiency of isolation play won’t be easy, either. Allowing competition in may have to promise a reward of 8 or more points per continent to overcome the problem. This threatens to increase scores enough to make the math unwieldy for what is supposed to be a family-friendly boardgame. To make the game work we may need to remove the basic scoring entirely, scoring new continents strictly on size (with a minimum threshold that is higher than I’d like) or on opposing players sharing the continent with you. All of these considerations show why designers and developers go wrong so often.

Trias isn’t the only game that suffers from a dominant strategy, but it’s one of the few where the problem resides almost entirely in the scoring mechanics. As such, it makes an excellent case study in the craft of reward mechanic design.

Over the last couple months I’ve developed a new view of what makes a reward mechanic good. It’s arisen from viewing, in close proximity, and thinking about this excellent Extra Credits video about achievements in video games and an old blog post by Dogs in the Vineyard & Apocalypse World designer Vincent Baker including an interesting discussion in the comments).

I believe that a good reward mechanic acts as a giant landmark or sign post, drawing players through the fun ways to play the game offers while helping them avoid viable but boring (or downright painful) options. If you, as a player, pursue well-designed rewards you will use the other mechanics in ways that are fun. Ideally, the more aggressively you pursue those rewards, the more fun you have, although roleplaying games have complicating factors which keep this a theoretical ideal. Boardgames or video games which violate this principle are missing the point and are much more likely to be outright broken. Often, designers of these games argue that the people that break them aren’t playing the game in the right spirit, but I would argue that the designer doesn’t understand what a game is.

Other factors – rewards that also serve as currency, largely – can be added to reward mechanics, complicating the picture. Good game design is more complicated than getting this aspect of the reward mechanics right, too. Nevertheless, I think any game that falls down on this front fails, or is at least horribly weakened, as a game design, and bells and whistles will not cover it up.

There are clear examples of games where the reward mechanics do not lead the players through the fun parts of the system. An important one is the original cycle of World of Darkness RPGs. In them, players mostly earned experience points for showing up and the annoyingly handwavey “roleplaying” rewards. Unfortunately, the interesting bits of the game are the powers – Disciplines in Vampire, Magick in Mage, and Cantrips in Changeling, for example – and, to a lesser extent, the combat system. The reward mechanics do little to draw players toward those mechanics, with no meaningful reward for playing with either of them, and what the games do reward are elements of player taste, not of gameplay. As a result, WoD players would often brag about not rolling a die all night, since that was what the game rewarded, leaving a bunch of interesting tactical game systems to rot on the vine. Worse, this could turn toxic if the group’s vision of what should be rewarded differed, especially if the GM used his authority to grant rewards to shoehorn his players into his preferred playstyle (and plot) and the players have no connection between the reward mechanics and the rest of the game’s rules to push back with.

Compare this to the reward mechanics in the Burning Wheel family of games. There are similar handwavey roleplaying rewards, but differ from the Storyteller reward mechanics in a couple of key ways: they are secondary reward mechanics compared to playing to (and against) your Beliefs, Instincts, Traits and Goals and BGITs are the mechanical heart of Burning Wheel, driving the fun, and playing strongly to your BGITs will also put you in the running for these secondary rewards. Of course this doesn’t tie into the conflict mechanics, which make those in WoD look like Candyland. They come in as the proving ground for the BGITs, though. The GM presses hard on the character’s spirit – as laid out by the BGITs – and, when the GM pushes hard enough to provoke the player (through his character) the player’s recourse is to engage the conflict mechanics. WoD GMs do not have anything mechanical to push against to provoke the players into conflict, so it’s all guesswork (or out of game discussion), which is fine, but nothing the game designer should take credit for).

Bad reward mechanics may not kill a game’s fun (there’s no arguing the success of the World of Darkness games), but I think it is inevitably the result of GM and player skill. Bad reward design inevitably causes problems – possibly easily overcome by skilled players, but unnecessary and annoying all the same – that take player skill and effort to overcome.

Mythender is beginning to see the light of day, and Ryan’s recently posted a beta draft of the character creation rules. I need to point out a few typos and vague wordings to him, but in the meantime I want to encourage him – and help spread the word – by posting an example character. Nothing breathtakingly original, but he’s got a bit of punch, and it’ll give you all some idea of what a Mythender is all about.

Without firther ado, here is Guðlaugur, Mythender.

(you pronounce the funny-looking “d” (called an “eth”) as a voiced “th” like in them or those)

Guðlaugur

Heart: Commander

                Heart’s Connection: Endangered

History: Mourner

Myth: Judgment

Questions

What did you lose? The women and children of my home village were slaughtered by dwarf and troll raiders.

What should you have done to prevent this loss? Not fallen for the raiders trick of sending a small skirmishing force to draw the village’s men away on a goose chase, leaving the women and children to be raped, slaughtered and eaten by the main force.

How has losing this maimed your soul? My wife was one of the victims, and instead of eating her, her broken and violated body was left in the centre of the village square to tell me how much I had lost because of my error.

Who follows you into battle? The rest of the men of my village, all of whom have sworn a blood pact to avenge the death of our wives and children.

How did you gain your companions? They have been my lifelong companions and brothers in battle, defending our village and occasionally going to war together when our liege demanded it.

Do you still try to act human around [your companions]? Why/why not? Yes. While they share my pain, none of them have been cursed like me, and if they knew of my curse they would abandon me as no better than the monsters that slew our families.

My Dream of Judgment shows me meting out punishment on the souls of those who bring chaos and destruction, pain and horror into simple lives. My anger is unabated, even though the heads of those who destroyed my people adorn my throne.

The Presence of Judgment causes those around me to air their grievances against me loudly and with impenetrable self-righteousness.

Weapons

My brothers are my weapon. [Sky-sundering (5)] I use them to end myths by unleashing their wrath against the raiders that destroyed our lives, whether the target is the raiders themselves or any other barrier that stands in our way.

Sætarspillir, my sword, is my weapon. [God-slaying (3)] I use it to end myths by spilling their blood upon the ground.

A lock of my dead wife’s hair is my weapon. [God-slaying (3)] I use it to end myths by looking upon it when I need to steel my heart and summon my courage in the face of overwhelming danger.

Gift

Swiftness

They say two blows are better than one. You can draw from your Mythic Heart to strike with prenatural speed, your foes suffering twice the onslaught and you gaining twice the power.

Forms

Paragon Form

I appear as myself, except Sætarspillir drips with inhuman fluids that have no apparent source

Supernatural Form

I appear as a grim presence, leeching all levity and warmth from his sight, wearing a cape of black bear fur whose sword perpetually drips monstrous fluids.

Godly Form

I appear as a grim presence, draped in enormous black bear furs and wearing a black-enameled full-face helm. I wield Sætarspillir, perpetually dripping with the blood and ichor of the cruel.

I choose the word principles advisedly. Principles should be followed but, unlike laws or rules, they are provided with the expectation that they will be broken *when there is sufficient justification*. I’m not sure how much the designers of the recent spate of dice games (To Court the King, Kingsburg, Pickomino, Roll Through the Ages, &c.) considered these problems, but all of them, as far as I know, break one or more of these principles, and I don’t think they have sufficient compensation for it.

1. Downtime is the Enemy

The most important thing in keeping a dice game fun is a quick pace. Rolling dice is fun, but watching other people roll dice tends to be boring, especially after you understand the game’s tactics well. If you can manage an average time of fifteen seconds per player turn, you’re in luck. If you go over 45 seconds, consider whether your game is interesting enough to watch to justify the downtime with more than two or three players. If it is interesting to watch what the other players are doing there shouldn’t be a problem. One good solution is to make other players’ actions affect your position. Better yet, give players problems that they can ponder and strategies they can plan during the downtime.

2. No More Than One Roll Per Turn

A corollary of the last principle. The new wave of dice games suffer horribly from boring downtime, and the single greatest cause of that downtime is that many of the games have players roll the dice three or more times each turn. Typically, this takes the form of Roll, Keep, Roll Remainder, Keep More, Roll and Pray. The idea, it seems, is to mitigate the effect of luck by letting players reroll dice they’re unhappy with, and this has a larger effect the worse you roll. Unfortunately, it makes turns go on too long (sometimes almost a minute) and there is nothing worse in a dice game than watching another player consider which dice to keep and which to reroll, since there is nothing going on, and nothing to consider about your own position.

The height of this is To Court the King, which allows players to reroll over and over again, provided they keep at least one die from each roll. Since players have half a dozen dice or more toward the end of the game, and there are special powers to consider as well, turns can take a minute and a half or more and no one but the active player has anything to do.

At the other end of the spectrum is the classic Liar’s Dice, where players generally roll *less* than once per turn and everyone rolls at the same time. Turns normally take less than fifteen seconds, and when a player has to consider his bid carefully, the rest of the table can feel the tension.

3. Give Players a Chance to React to the Dice

While this principle leads to the evil of multiple dice rolls in a turn, it doesn’t have to. It is also the best way available to minimize the role of luck in a dice game without stripping out (most of) the fun. If players have meaningful ways of reacting to what they roll, they can make choices that minimize the impact of their bad rolls.

One course is to allow players to manipulate the dice after they have been rolled. To Court the King, aside from letting players roll over and over again on their turn, also allows its players to apply special powers they have earned to the results of their dice rolls (although some powers focus on adding dice to their pool).

In Macao, players choose two dice out of a pool of six, and they receive resources based on their choices. While it’s possible to end up with no attractive options (especially toward the end of the game), this choice does reduce the impact of luck.

In Liar’s Dice, the players keep the results of their rolls private, and then make bids. While their rolls should have some impact on what bids they make, players still have the option of bluffing (thus the game’s name). There are still good rolls and bad rolls in Liar’s Dice, but bidding and bluffing do a lot to mitigate their effect.

4. Low Rolls Should Not Suck, High Rolls Should Not Rule

Self-explanatory, I hope.

Kingsburg falls for this disturbing trap. If you roll a bunch of ones and twos you won’t get to choose as attractive options as you will if you roll fives and sixes. I believe the theory is that the Central Limit Theorem will even things out in the end, but there are a couple problems with this. The Central Limit Theorem is not a guarantee that things will even out, or even come close enough for skill to make up the idfference. Also, Kinsburg is a sort of engine game, so good rolls early are worth more than good rolls late. Stone Age also suffers from similar problems.

Macao undercuts this problem in two ways: all of the players work with the same dice rolls, choosing two dice from the same pool of results and players get to take the rewards of low rolls sooner than the results of high rolls, playing the investment advantage against high returns from the dice.
Again, bidding and bluffing help Liar’s Dice to avoid this problem, although bidding lower numbers does give the next bidder more flexibility than bidding higher numbers does, since they can raise by increasing the face value of the bid without increasing the number of the bid.

Roll Through the Ages largely sidesteps this issue by using custom dice based on symbols instead of cardinal numbers. The contrast between Urns and Disasters and Food or Workers and the flexible Food/Workers face are still a lesser version.

I was fortunate enough to attend DexCon 13 in July, partially as a birthday present to myself. My first session was an experimental session of Marvel Superheroes run by With Great Power… designer Michael Miller. Darren Watts, president of Hero Games (publisher of the Champions RPG) and Indie Press Revolution (the latter newly minted at the time) was just closing up the IPR booth as we started up, and when someone mentioned we were playing MSH, Darren expressed nostalgia for the game. That inevitably led to us wheedling him into taking the last available seat for the game. Seriously, supers gaming with Michael and Darren was too good an opportunity to pass up.

As I mentioned, this was part of an experiment on Michael’s part. The objective was to run the same scenario with the same PCs under two different systems to see what the result would be. The characters are regulars in a convention campaign that Mike and (more often) his wife Katt run, so they began as WGP characters and then ported to MSH. As a warm-up and a “safe” rules tutorial (including for Michael, who hadn’t played Marvel Superheroes in many years), we began with a “danger room” PvP fight. We were split into teams and played a little capture the flag.

As it happened, the combat monsters ended up on the same side, while the other side had characters with compelling stories and themes, but they weren’t very big on Smashing Time™. The results were so lopsided that we aborted the experiment after the danger room fight and busted out some classic Marvel characters. I used Box from Alpha Flight to smash a mind controlled Hulk into the dirt, amazing everyone

During the brief intermission while Michael figured out what to do during the rest of the session everybody discussed what had just happened a little bit. I observed that Michael had created the characters for a “comic book” game – With Great Power… – while we were playing a “supers” game – Marvel Superheroes. That raised a couple of eyebrows, and I explained what I meant.

The subject came up a couple more times during the con and I’ve mentioned this dichotomy a couple times in discussions on Twitter. Most recently, I piqued the curiosity of Cam Banks, one of the lead designers of Margaret Weis Productions new Smallville RPG. Part of its design remit seems to be “don’t make another superhero RPG.” Long story short (yeah, I know, where was that ethos 250 words ago), I ended up promising him a blog post on the topic, and here we are.

In a “supers” game, the focus of the rules is on the capabilities of the superheroes. Generally, a list of powers and one or more of skills, stunts and disadvantages, define characters. Play primarily engages the rules during fights, and generating a narrative that resembles what you’d see in a comic book is mostly the result of player buy-in and GM skill. This means that, if the GM doesn’t fight the impulse, play can devolve into a series of fights with minimal connective story tissue (one of the reasons D&D4 gets compared to supers games is this shared tendency, plus it’s focus on tactical map-based combat, which is also a common thread in supers games). You may see secondary mechanics – Mutants & Masterminds’ Hero Points and Icons’ Aspects for example – which point at the story, but they often have uses focused on fight scenes, too.

In a “comic book” RPG, the rules tend to emphasize producing fictional tropes found in the type of superhero story the game is designed to emulate. Superpowers are typically more abstracted than they are in “supers” games, although some comic book games– Truth & Justice, for instance – still include catalogues of superpowers. Fights are often a specialized form of conflict, less tactical and have mechanics that feed the results of the combat back into other, story-oriented mechanics. Despite the label I’ve given, the source material doesn’t have to be comics. Smallville is, by all accounts, a “comic book” game that based on a television series.

Before a flame war starts up, I’m not saying one of these rule and the other sucks, I enjoy both supers games and comic book RPGs, and there are good and bad examples of both. My first true RPG love was Champions, the ur-supers game, and I spent endless hours making characters (and villains) for it. Heck, the MSH game that provoked all of this was a ton of fun, despite the hiccoughs. They scratch very different itches. It’s worth noting that true comic book games are a pretty new phenomenon, since they rely on game design technology that didn’t exist until sometime in the 90s.

Examples of supers games: Champions (and its progeny, like the old DC Heroes RPG and Mutants & Masterminds), Villains & Vigilantes, Marvel Superheroes, Icons

Examples of comic book games: With Great Power…, Truth & Justice and, from what I have read (I haven’t gotten to them yet) Capes and Smallville. Sage LaTorra’s Project Yellow Sun is definitely a quest for some sort of comic book game, as is my intermittent desire to hack Danger Patrol as a Brave & the Bold-inspired game.

I’m not sure this is a profound insight – it’s a false dichotomy, I know – but it’s easy to lump all superhero-related RPGs together and come to some false conclusions as a result. In particular, knowing if you want to play a supers game or a comic book game can help you avoid conflicts about what superhero RPG you should play.

If you know Quinn’s D&D blog At-Will (and his game design blog The Black Pond) you’ll know that he is on the cutting edge of 4e thinking and design. That alone is reason enough to support this project, since it will help Quinn get the wider audience he deserves. He’s using Kickstarter to fund this project, though, because he doesn’t want to make another slapdash third-party D&D product created on a shoestring budget. The Kickstarter funds will go to pay such talents as print designer Daniel “Happy Birthday, Robot!” Solis and freelance illustrator Jared von Hindman (who WotC has used on some projects). Oh, and he has hired your humble authour to serve as his editor, too

In Worldbreakers, Quinn explains a new type of monster, the Worldbreaker, which is a solo with the ability to warp reality or change the environment around him part way through a fight. This tool helps DMs design epic solo villains that do not devolve into a grindfest. Worldbreakers have been in development for more than six months, and are being honed to a high polish in public discussions on At-Will and in hardcore playtesting. When complete, this 32-page PDF will include complete rules for creating and playing your own Worldbreaker solos, plus a catalogue of nine worldbreakers designed by Quinn to serve as examples and to inject into your own games. Each of them comes with a useful backstory complete with plot hooks.

Check out the Kickstarter page, and if Worldbreakers are something you want to see the light of day, kick in a few bucks. Support quality third-party D&D products so people want to make more of them.

UPDATE: Worldbreakers has met its funding goal! Don’t let that stop you from providing Kickstarter funding while you can, though. You can still qualify for the Kickstarter-only packages, like custom-made worldbreakers and illustrations, and Quinn can use the extra funds to improve the final product in numerous ways, as well as letting him know now that there is a market for his work.

bri·co·lage

[bree-kuh-lahzh, brik-uh-]

–noun, plural bri·co·la·ges [bree-kuh-lah-zhiz, -lahzh], bri·co·lage.

1. a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things.
2. (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources.
3. (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork.
4. the use of multiple, diverse research methods.

—dictionary.com

In Race for the Galaxy, you must construct a strategy from the parts you have at – or rather, in your – hand. Only Explore and, as of the release of The Brink of War, Search give you no options without some connection to your existing tableau, and even that’s debatable if you have Explore powers in play. Then, once you execute a bit of your plan you find yourself with a new hand of cards and develop the next piece of your plan out of what you have available to you now. With a bit of practice, play amounts to developing a coherent position ad hoc from the tools that your previous plays and your current hand give you. It doesn’t always work out well, but it works more often than new players might expect. To the best of my knowledge, no other game has this quality to anything like the degree Race for the Galaxy does.

Why does Race for the Galaxy produce this effect? I’ve identified three key factors.

Almost every card features a power that is useful on its own, independent of any combinations you create later. Therefore, playing almost any card helps your situation, even if you do not have other parts of a combination that works with the card you just played in hand. You don’t have to spend time churning cards looking for a complete combination before you start putting cards into play, you don’t have to clog up your hand with halves of combinations and playing a card that later forms part of a combination isn’t really a speculative play. This creates important opportunities for discovery – Hmm…I never thought of that combo before, but here it is in front of me and it looks good – without imposing penalties for exploring the strategic space. In fact, this element of play rewards exploration, since it is often more efficient than digging for the perfect plan. The improviser is ready to roll before the stereotyped plan is, and can finish the game while a standard strategy is getting warmed up.

Power cads tend to be built from many powers, not a single dominant power, and many cards have multiple hooks (colour, keywords, and their own powers, for example) for powers to latch onto. This gives any given card a significant chance to combine fruitfully with any given power card, and some chance that it will have some synergy with a random card from the deck. Most of these synergies are standard interactions (production world plus Trade power or Consume power, Settle discount plus non-military world, etc.) and many of the others are minor or indirect effects (a small development scoring a point for Galactic Federation or Galactic Bankers). These small and obvious interactions have a funny way of becoming the building blocks complex networks of effects that come together when the right power card, featuring just the right set of powers, comes into your hand. For me, The Brink of War is an exciting addition to Race for the Galaxy because many of its cards add new combinations of hooks or feature powers connected on a single card in new ways. The addition of Prestige as another hook – and the kind of hook that it is – increases the potential combinations in the game an enormous amount, as well.

Finally, Race for the Galaxy lets you cycle through a huge number of cards during the course of a game, and rejects still serve a purpose (money). This means you are likely to find a series of cards that work together to form a strong combination, while your hand will not get cluttered with marginal or useless random cards. This is why Race for the Galaxy offers the combinatorial play of collectable card games without relying on prebuilt decks, which limit the potential for bricolage in Magic: the Gathering and its kin.

I’m not the first person to point to this aspect of RftG as its killer app, but I think this article helps to bring attention to how the game accomplishes it. Because I love the improvisational, yet strategic form of exploration Race provides, I hope other designers can replicate it in other, new systems, bringing fresh vistas to the gaming landscape. Hopefully it will even happen before we are buried under an avalanche of rehashes of the Race for the Galaxy mechanics.

The Nature of Narrative Arc

Over the course of many boardgames, the nature and feel of the decisions you have to make changes. This evolution is the game’s narrative arc. The classic example of this is Chess, familiar to millions from the body of chess literature. There are three major phases of the game, with a turn or two of transition between the phases:

• Opening – players focus on activating and coordinating their pieces, primarily by opening lines they can act along.
• Middlegame – the main struggle, where players maneuver to enhance their advantages (in a closed position) or engage in open warfare (in a more open one) or first one, then the other.
• Endgame – the armies have been decimated, and the game settles down into a (typically) slower and more incremental battle of maneuver until one player manages to put the other player’s back to the wall or both players realize they lack the tools to force a decision.

Because of the Chess’s victory condition, this arc can be cut off suddenly at any point if one player leaves himself exposed to a sudden checkmate or loss of a major piece. In the absence of such blunders, though, this same arc is followed, even though the different stages may take different lengths of time each time you play it.

Go follows a superficially similar arc – opening, middlegame and endgame – but the meat of those three phases is quite different:

• Opening – players sketch out a broad positional framework – typically building in the corners first, then along the sides and finally into the centre — which will be the home base future strategies are launched from
• Midgame – the players try to establish real control of the territories they maneuvered toward in the opening while simultaneously trying to constrain the other player’s gains
• Endgame – crossing the Ts and dotting the Is as players try to extract a little extra territory at the edges of their opponent’s holdings or provoke their opponent into occupying space they could otherwise score for

Like the description of chess’s arc, this is an extremely broad sketch, and sometimes games are resigned before they are played out, but it nails down the basic ideas.

One final example for now that will be familiar to most eurogamers. Puerto Rico and its offspring (like the card games San Juan and Race for the Galaxy; Saint Petersburg is pretty close too) follow a typical arc, especially when played by experienced players:

• Income – players begin the game trying to develop a reliable income of money or cards (which are used as currency in the card games)
• Engine Building – once income is reliable, money is used to build a means of steadily producing victory points.
• Conversion – once engines are built, they are used in the final stages of the game to accumulate victory points as quickly as possible before the game end conditions are met.

If you’ve played one of these games, you may realize that the phases that I describe are artificial, since there are rarely clear boundaries. One phase of play tends to move into the next over the course of two or three rounds or turns, and these transitional times mix the characteristics of their neighbouring phases. Different players can go through these transitions at different times, too, especially in longer games. I’m using them as a convenient abstraction that helps to illustrate arcs. They can also be useful when playing some games, though, as a guide to what kinds of problems you should be solving during different times in a game.

Not all games have an arc and many others have very little, and those games tend to produce a feeling of lather–rinse–repeat when you play them. This may not be a problem if the game is short enough or if other aspects of the game’s design are engaging enough, but how much you can tolerate is largely a matter of taste. A lot of gamers love Clans’ quick pace and unconventional tactical problems, for instance, but I (and many others) find it wears out its welcome about halfway through because there is little evolution in the nature of the game’s decisions.

Mind you, games that appear to be lather–rinse–repeat may have a surprisingly strong arc. When you go through most of the deck during a game of High Society, there is an opening phase where players are trying to pick up an item or two on the cheap, then, once positions have been established, there is more maneuvering for position, and toward the end of the game players are trying to manage their remaining money so they can move up the ladder without ending up the poorest (and therefore ineligible to win). It’s not the most sweeping arc in boardgaming, but it suffices to keep play fresh for 15 minutes.

Generating Arc

The best gaming experiences usually come when a game’s narrative is organically produced by the game’s processes. That is, the designer has not included any rules that are specifically intended to shift the landscape on the players, changing the nature of their decisions artificially. Puerto Rico starts players off with very little income, but offers expensive buildings that can act as force multipliers and inexpensive buildings which can improve a player’s income (including the production buildings). This makes it productive to focus on income early because that income can be invested in buildings that provide a return on investment that easily compensates for the time spent developing income. You can probably overcome an investment strategy with a little luck, the bonus ducats you get from role selection and a heap of corn plantations, but it’s tricky, to say the least.

Likewise, Chess’s arc arises from a couple of organic factors. The more obvious one is that pieces are removed from play, never to be replaced, producing an inexorable march towards the meticulous endgame I mentioned (except for the rare games where queens stay on the board throughout most of the game). The early part of the game’s narrative is generated by the initial position, though. The setup position puts the players’ pieces in about the least active configuration possible, so you have to mobilize your forces before you can conduct effective operations. Mobilizing your forces requires (aside from the knights) moving your pawns out of the way which, more or less coincidentally, also threatens to restrict your opponents’ pieces in a way she wants to avoid.

Ensuring that your game design naturally produces a strong arc can be a tricky business, though. In fact, plenty of commercial games – even long or “epic” ones – have little to no arc because it is such a hard thing to create organically. It’s easy to understand why designers take the easy way out and hardboil game-changing events into the rules. This feels hamfisted, though, unless it has a strong thematic basis.

Amun-Re’s Flood, at the midpoint of the game, can seem weird the first couple times you play, even though it presents some interesting questions in the second half of the game. It takes away all of the players’ on-board holdings, and it wipes out almost every farmer in the Nile Valley. The pyramids that were built in the first half remain, however, and that has a big effect on how the auction plays out in the second half of the game. These changes in the strategic landscape help refresh the game, but it also affects how you play the first half, since you must make your plans knowing that your pyramids will be put up for sale in the next half.

Pandemic’s Infection rate is just as artificial, but it feels less obtrusive. It happens several times during each game, so it does not come across as tacked on or forced. Each instance of it has a small impact on the feel of the game, too, so it gathers steam with time instead of causing one massive earthquake. It is one of a handful of mechanics that contribute to Pandemic’s arc – curing (and eradicating) diseases, the depletion of the cube supply and the outbreak meter also contribute – so you don’t devote as much attention to the Infection rate as you do to Amun-Re’s flood, either.

Another example of a mechanically forced game arc – this one more annoying because it is unnecessary – is the availability of buildings in Caylus. Players can only build wooden buildings at the start of the game, but, once a particular wooden building is constructed, stone buildings become an option and special buildings are available once the right stone building is bought. This brings stronger buildings into play in waves, which limits the options new players need to consider, and creates an arc for Caylus by providing more, and more powerful, options as the game progresses. The same effect could be produced less obtrusively by keeping key building materials out of the game until certain buildings come into play, instead, though. In fact, Caylus does exactly this with gold. Functionally, this would pretty much work the same way the actual design does, but the lack of direct connection between the trigger and the new wave of buildings is removed, making it less obtrusive. You get hit by a rubber mallet instead of a metal one.

Carefully structured building costs are an even better solution. They remove the obvious mechanical hand that says “hey! there are new things to consider now!” completely and it eliminates the waves of new buildings in favour of gradually adding new options as players acquire more resources, letting the game’s arc progress more organically. You can see this structure in action in Puerto Rico, although, lamentably, a couple buildings’ prices are wonky. Early in the game, players only need to concern themselves with the first column and a half of buildings, but as their income increases their options expand. Strategy-defining buildings like the Harbor and the Factory become available, and the 10-cost capstone buildings become a viable option somewhere between half and two-thirds of the way through the game, becoming the main target when building during the last few rounds. Puerto Rico also demonstrates the interesting decisions that can emerge from offering players a choice between taking a few small buildings early or saving up for a larger, more powerful building before the other players can snap it up.

There are practically an infinite number of elements of gameplay can produce an arc, and most games that have a strong arc combine more than one of these elements. I doubt anyone could produce a complete list of the elements that feed into a game’s arc, but some common examples include:

• Expanding play options; often new play options are stronger than older options (e.g. Caylus, Agricola, To Court the King,)
• Existing play options become more powerful (through synergies or timing effects) (e.g. Puerto Rico family, Goa, the opening in Chess, Magic: the Gathering)
• Diminishing play options (e.g. Chess, Go, some wargames)
• Increased purchasing power (e.g. Magic: the Gathering, Puerto Rico,
• Increasing payoffs (e.g. Princes of Florence, Modern Art, Tower of Babel)
• Increasingly difficult challenges (e.g. most co-operative games, Kingsburg)
• Bombs – events which suddenly and radically change the state of the game (e.g. Amun-Re’s Flood, Tigris & Euphrates’ external conflicts, various stock market crash mechanics)

Bits and Bobs

There is a common meme floating around, probably perpetuated by writers of various sorts, that human beings are storytelling creatures by nature, and out brains are designed to see narratives everywhere, even manufacturing them where they don’t belong. I don’t know of any research to back up this theory, but it is fairly well established that people are designed to spot patterns, to the point of perceiving them even when reality deviates a bit from what the pattern would dictate. The aesthetic pleasure of narrative arcs in board games probably plays into both of these tendencies if they exist.

In spite of the name, not all arcs are smooth. Some games build their arc through a progression in a particular element – the number of an influential token that is in play, for example, or the players’ ability to accumulate a certain resource – and then deliberately produces a sudden, sharp reversal. It may be an interesting side effect of a mechanic primarily intended to serve another purpose, it may be a deliberate effort by the designer to add texture to an otherwise limited arc, or it may be a means of presenting the players with new variations on previously experienced problems. The (in)famous Flood in Amun-Re may be the most extreme example. This prevents the two halves of the game from mirroring each other too closely, since it shakes up the relative values of the provinces, as does the pressure players feel to fulfill the bonus cards they’ve acquired. Removing the pieces that form a line of four in a row in GIPF – especially as the culmination of a string of high stakes tactical plays – is a less dramatic example of this kind of mechanic.

Every so often, you will read a comment by Chris Farrell or Brian Bankler (or me…) that says a game is longer than it wants to be. Typically, what this means is that the game does not have a strong enough arc to maintain interest throughout the game. Generally, the longer a game is the more important it is for it to have an arc and the more complex that arc needs to be to sustain interest. There’s no magic formula that describes how often the game should change its feel, since other factors – tactical intricacy, for instance – can help offset an weak arc. Ideally, longer games have a richer, more diverse middlegame than shorter games do, though. It’s no coincidence that Fantasy Flight games are famous for their length and their strong narratives. Of course, they are also famous for rules complexity (by modern standards) and heavy randomness, and this is a common price to pay for a rich narrative arc.

Conclusion

Narrative arc is not the be-all and end-all of boardgaming, but it is little understood and rarely discussed with much sophistication. Often a poor arc gets fobbed off as the game taking too long to play, or as a game that is just a Frankenstein’s monster of old mechanics that have been thrown together with nothing new to offer. Indeed, this seems to be the big difference between the great eurogames of the late 90s and early 00s versus the rather flat euros that come out now. Tigris & Euphrates, Princes of Florence, Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan and Modern Art all have very strong arcs that sustain interest throughout the game without forcing a player to master 20 pages of rules. Generic modern euro X probably has a flat arc that makes the same sort of short rules feel like an exercise in repetitive stress disorders. Indeed, all of the most successful new euros – Agricola and Le Havre, Race for the Galaxy, Dungeon Lords and even Dominion – features strong arcs, too. Somewhere along the way developers – even the greats like Brunnhoffer and Brück – lost track of how important narrative arc is to board games. The result has been a spate of “soulless” games that reinforce the worst stereotypes of the genre, while publishers like Fantasy Flight serve it up in heaping helpings, but with a side order of complexity and randomness.

Ah, the good old days…