Tag majorities

Under the Hood of Majorities p3: Cognitive Load

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“Gain X points if you have the most Y” is a phrase that sounds familiar to every board gamer. Majorities are a great way to add indirect interaction and tension to a game, and is often used as either a central mechanism, or a secondary way to score points where it serves to obfuscate an item’s scoring value. I have used many majority aspects in my games, and have learned a few lessons along the way. This series of posts is meant to highlight those axes on which you can play with your system and offer different experiences for the player. Today I’m talking about choices which affect the cognitive load of the mechanism:

Can it be secured? In Acquire, there are 25 shares of each color: at most, I need 13 to secure a majority. Sometimes it’s not a maximum amount to be spread out, but a maximum value a player can have: the Cult tracks in Terra Mystica, and the UN track in Energy Empire, both have a final spot only one player can reach.

Securing it allows you to focus on something else, but it’s also resources and/or actions you could have used to do other stuff: mitigating that risk becomes part of the strategy. It also allows you to file it away in your brain and keep on focusing on something else. It allows you to better evaluate an action’s value: if I need to invest 3 actions in this to gain 10 points, it’s worthwhile, but it isn’t if it takes me 8. And two players who keep one-upping each other is funny to watch for a bit, but it’s slowly taking them out of the running.

If it can’t be secured, that means the tension will never relent. If it’s a secondary scoring aspect, or if you want a more tense, more chaotic, more tactical game, it’s probably not worth adding that math element and making players count those items, because if they can, they will. If their focus is better served elsewhere, don’t give them that information.

How many actions are we supposed to invest in this? It’s a related question. In With a Smile and a Gun, both players compete over Business tokens, which score points for whoever has the most of each type, and Reputation tokens, which are just worth straight points. I tried multiple things for Business tokens, specifically in how many of each type I put out there. In a version, I had 8, 10, and 12 tokens of a type. This diluted their value so much that no one ever cared about them, no matter how many points the majorities were worth. Even when they were brokenly overpowered, players still preferred the sure thing. “Who cares about this one, I can get the next one instead” is a line I heard times and times again. It also often led to majorities being clinched very early in the process, making them worthless for the second half of the game. In the end, I brought them down to 4, 5, and 6, and

I think it’s partly risk aversion, partly optimism, but also related to the fact that, without the majority, those tokens were worthless. In Clans of Caledonia, your main way of scoring points is completing Contracts. In addition to their standard bonuses, the player who completes the most gains an extra 8 points. In games like this, it doesn’t matter if the majority will be won with 4, 8, or 14: you’ve already gotten stuff from your investment, that majority is just icing on the cake.

These are the aspects that go through my mind when I add a majority aspect to my games. Like most great mechanisms, majorities can be customized to do exactly what you want them to do. Are there other twists on the mechanism I have forgotten?

Under the Hood of Majorities p2 – Who?

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“Gain X points if you have the most Y” is a phrase that sounds familiar to every board gamer. Majorities are a great way to add indirect interaction and tension to a game, and is often used as either a central mechanism, or a secondary way to score points where it serves to obfuscate an item’s scoring value. I have used many majority aspects in my games, and have learned a few lessons along the way. This series of posts is meant to highlight those axes on which you can play with your system and offer different experiences for the player.

Who gains a bonus? Sometimes, you want to give only first place a bonus: sometimes, everyone who participated should gain one, albeit smaller for those further down the competition. I’m sure you’re smart enough to understand the implications of these things. There is a common question about how that interacts with player count, specifically with 2 players, where often a tiny investment is good enough for a large 2nd place bonus. I’m personally a big fan of the Gaia Project way of adding a pre-set value which competes with the players on those majorities and never changes throughout the game. No upkeep, and it adds much of the strategy of a three-player race.

One thing I think is underused in that aspect is negative majorities, where you just don’t want to have the least. They can be problematic, because of loss aversion, and subject to last minute swings, but in the right game can be very fun. Great examples of this are the Fire and Leather tiles in Mammut, Pharaohs in Ra, and how the winner is determined in Lords of Xidit.

This leads to a second, related question:

How are ties handled? A problem with majorities are ties. Often, games default to either “split the points” or “everyone gets the points”, which is fine when majorities are just points, or a secondary feature. However, that can’t always work. It’s also a wasted opportunity to incentivize your players in a direction or another:

  • With a Smile and a Gun: if there is a tie for first place, the majority is not scored. This is interesting because of the Cop cubes, which players send to each other to mess up their plans: blocking a district from scoring is that mechanism’s main use.
  • Power Struggle, as mentioned above, gives the tie breaker to whoever played there first, pushing you to play early.
  • On the opposite side of the spectrum, Lancaster gives the tie breaker to whoever invested there last. This makes it easier to come from behind. It works because of the bonuses for playing on Wars early: otherwise, no one would start going there;
  • Campy Creatures uses the Clash-o-meter: whoever is on top wins ties, but then goes to the bottom when used
  • Cybertopia gives the advantage to whoever triggers the scoring: this incentivizes making the Corps score. It also can lead to players feeling like no lead is ever safe -which can be a bug or a feature;
  • Dice Town has the Sheriff: whoever holds it breaks ties. This pushes bribery and negotiation, and works wonders… but only with the right group.

Can you think of a game with majorities which offers other interesting ways to scale to the number of players, or to determine tie-breakers?

Under the Hood of Majorities pt 1 – When?

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“Gain X points if you have the most Y” is a phrase that sounds familiar to every board gamer. Majorities are a great way to add indirect interaction and tension to a game, and is often used as either a central mechanism, or a secondary way to score points where it serves to obfuscate an item’s scoring value. I have used many majority aspects in my games, and have learned a few lessons along the way. This series of posts is meant to highlight those axes on which you can play with your system and offer different experiences for the player.

When is it evaluated? The entire concept of majorities is that you want the best return on the smallest investment possible. Therefore, the more information you have, the better it is: playing last on a majority is a great advantage. Which begs two questions: (1) why would I invest on it early?, and (2) how aware of the timing of scoring am I?

Unless the majority is secondary (like the Contracts in Clans of Caledonia I mentioned earlier), players will tend to delay their first play on a majority as much as they can, unless (1) you give a bonus to whoever goes there first; or (2) you limit how much a player can invest in a single action. An early adopter bonus can be a straight up bribe (like in Lancaster), or a better investment rate for the majority (like in Terra Mystica, where the first Priest sent to a Cult pushes you up three spaces instead of 2, or even in Power Struggle, where ties are broken by whoever went first).

The timing of the scoring also adds an important question: since I want to place my pawns right before the evaluation, predictability is a strong factor. Some games tell you exactly when that happens, either at the end of the game, or after a pre-set number of turns; others have it happen at random times. However, many games deal with the predictability in interesting ways:

  • Cybertopia has the players place Viruses on the Corps, which are 5×5 grids, and must place them adjacent to their last placed one. Evaluations are triggered after 2 rows/columns have been completed;
  • Ethnos triggers the evaluation after the 3rd Dragon card has been played. You have a first “hey start planning for the scoring”, then a second “are you really still pushing your luck?”, and finally a “too late!”;
  • Power Struggle has one player who determines how many turns happen between two evaluations, but only they know: can you guess from their actions?;
  • Acquire has majorities matter when two companies are connected on the game board, which means holding a potential connector tile gives you absolute control over when it does… unless somebody else holds one;
  • Smash Up has scoring happen when the total strength around a base reaches a certain threshold: given that a card’s strength varies between 2 and 6 (mostly), you have an idea of how close you are, but an imperfect one;
  • The Expanse has scoring triggered by using an action to select a scoring card, when they come up. Whoever uses an action to do so chooses a zone which scores more.

Of course, I have not played every game in the world: are there other timing variants you can think of? Any other twists which offer different experiences?