Tag emotion

Randomness & Mitigation

Subsurface Games 3 Comments

You might not think that from my Euro leanings, but I love randomness in games. Or, well, I love well-used randomness. I love dice drafting, I love card draw, I love modular setup, I love randomly seeded markets. Randomness can add a dynamic element to games which would otherwise get repetitive. It makes it so, even in a game I’ve played dozens of times, I still get surprised.

However, some games go too far with the randomness. Like an oversalted dish, the randomness takes over and breaks the nuances and subtleties of gameplay. Mostly, it robs players of their agency: where in a dice drafting game the dice give you a new puzzle to adapt to and enrich the decision making, in a “roll-to-succeed” game, it often supersedes your decision making entirely. In some games, magically trading in your ability to choose your actions to gain the ability to choose die results would increase your odds of winning. That’s pretty low agency, if you ask me.

Why follow that paragraph with a picture of Risk? Oh, no reason.

“Yeah Amy, isn’t that just input vs output randomness? It’s 2023, this is nothing new!”

Except no, it’s not just input vs output. King of Tokyo has an incredibly random output randomness: you don’t choose what you do, you roll and do what the dice command! That’s all of this roll-and-move stuff people complain about! However, you also get the ability to reroll any amount of dice twice. It is still random, but because you choose which dice to reroll, you still feel like you have agency. You decide whether or not to you reroll attacks because you don’t want to end in Tokyo; you choose whether or not to reroll Hearts because you feel threatened; you choose whether or not to try to get that third 3 for a risky but rewarding strategy. While the final result is still random, you have taken decisions throughout.

“Oh, so it’s about mitigating randomness?”

Yes, but not only that. Mitigating randomness is an important dial to consider when you include randomness in a game, but too much mitigation takes away the whole emotional impact, the whole tension of the randomness: if you have infinite rerolls, there’s no point in rolling the dice, you should just choose your results.

I think it is less about mitigating than about how you present the random result, and how you allow the luck to be mitigated.

Recently I had a discussion with a designer friend about a Push-Your-Luck mechanism in a card game she was working on. Players had 3 cards in hand, and every hand, following the players’ actions, 3 cards were added to the middle of the table. Amongst other things, each card is worth between 0 and 2 stars, and rather than straight up points, she was working on a push-your-luck mechanism for those stars.

The original mechanism was that if there were an even number of stars in the middle, each star in hand gave you a point; if there was an odd amount, stars in hand were negative points. It’s a 50-50 odd (with a bit of player control over which card went to the middle), and each player can decide how many stars to hold on to, whether they go big and risky, or small and safe. 

During the test, I didn’t like that mechanism. It’s technically a push-your-luck system with agency: I can decide whether to take a big swing by keeping high cards, or keep it safe, and I could even have a bit of impact on the final result. When mixed with the rest of the game system, it made for some really tough decisions. Yet, if I kept a big hand and busted, it was frustrating; if I scored it, it felt unearned. Truly, it was the worst of both worlds.

Then, they tried a Blackjack-like system: as long as you don’t have more stars than the center row, they’re worth points. However, if you do have more, you lose that many points. Suddenly, every 2 in the middle is permission to keep a 2. If you start with three high cards, you can try to replace one of them and add it to the center. If you start with only low cards, you can use them to make your opponents bust. Whatever happened was a strong moment: busting on a big hand was dramatic instead of just being hit in the face; busting with a small hand at least felt good because others lost more; and winning the points by staying close to the margin felt amazing. All in all, the reveal of the last card became a nailbiter.

Those emotional responses are why we mitigate randomness in game. Not because mitigating randomness makes the best people more likely to win, but because having a say over the random result gives you agency, it makes you feel involved, and when you’re involved… well that’s when a simple die roll can get you to jump out of your seat.

Unsung Mechanism 1: Las Vegas

Subsurface Games 1 Comment

So I haven’t been very consistent with my blog posts recently. It’s equal part confinement, personal issues, and prepping for a Kickstarter, which leave me without the mental bandwidth for the huge, 1500-word long behemoths I usually go for. I therefore decided to try to go for more frequent, but shorter posts: whether I manage to fit this in the 600 word I aim for is another thing altogether.

This series is about the small parts that hold games together. We often focus on the innovative mechanisms, or the larger, puzzlier parts of a game, but when designing, the parts I most often lift from other games are the smaller elements, the glue that makes every other mechanism stick together. So that’s what I think I want to talk about in this series.

Today, I want to open this up by talking about Las Vegas, a dice game designed by Rudiger Dorn and published in 2012. It’s an area majority game, where each turn, you roll your dice, and choose a number you rolled, placing all dice of that number on the associated tile. Once every player has placed all 8 of their dice, whoever has the most dice on each tile gets points. That’s 90% of the game.

The dice are in.
Pic by BGG user msaari

I love Las Vegas, and it’s pretty easy to see that it’s an inspiration for With A Smile & A Gun, which is also a dice-driven majority game. The best thing about Las Vegas is that it has a crystal clear board state: how much each space is worth, how many dice every player has in each space, and therefore what the odds are that you’ll get a prize, are always very easy to see, which allows you to play it even with the most casual players. I got 3 games in with my grandparents at Christmas, and my grandma gets confused when we play Telestrations. She wouldn’t let me leave the table without a rematch of this one.

The colorful dice
Pic by BGG user jsper

Another impact of very clear board states is that when something happens, for example a certain roll, players can very quickly go from seeing it to realizing what it means, which leads to instant emotional reaction. You don’t stand up in a game of Dominion when somebody buys a card, because you don’t know exactly how good that play will be for them. In a game of Terra Mystica, a player can take a superb move, but because it will take you a bit of time to figure it out, the response is logical, not emotional.

In Las Vegas, it’s automatic: people stand up, throw their hands in the air, laugh, yell, call each other names. That’s the game’s strength, and why I love it so much. And it comes down to two rules, and how they interact.

Rule 1: You must choose a number you rolled, and place all dice of that number. Those dice are gone. If your first roll of the round is 8 of the same number, you place all of them and you’re out for the round. It is really rare, but it happens, and every time it’s a strong moment.

Rule 2: If multiple players have the same number of dice, their dice are not considered. In other words, if A and B have 3 dice, and C has 1, C has the majority. It also creates for huge moments, because you can win a lot with very few dice. It also feeds into the gambling theme very well: no matter how well you’re doing, you can lose it all… or you can win a bunch on a whim of the dice.

However, the way they interact is sublime: as your dice pool gets smaller, the odds that all your dice will have the same number, and therefore you’ll have to place there, gets higher. If you only have a single die, you will roll and place it on the associated tile.

Almost every round, at least one player causes a tie with their last roll, and it’s ALWAYS dramatic. It is huge swings of points, but most importantly, it is immediately apparent to all, meaning it elicits an emotional reaction, not a logical one, and everyone shares that moment together, because they figure it out at the same time.

The dice aren't going my way.
Pic by BGG user Stickdood

What other games cause similar shared emotional responses? How do they achieve it?