Dialing It Up

The power levels in your game are important for multiple reasons. Last time, we talked about balance. Today, we’re gonna talk about the way power levels change throughout the course of the game.

Just a quick aside for those who might not know what I’m talking about, power levels refer to how strong a player’s abilities are, or how strong certain game elements, like characters or cards, can be. Power level is not a good thing or a bad thing, it’s simply something that needs to be taken into consideration when designing a game.

Another term you may have come across that’s related to power levels is power creep. This is the tendency for game elements to get stronger and stronger over time. You generally hear this term in reference to trading card games. As new cards are designed and released each year, the general trend is for the cards to become stronger. This can also sometimes happen in video game series. While power creep is a necessary part of a healthy game, kind of like how a little bit of inflation is expected in a healthy economy, power creep left unchecked can ruin everything.

The way power scales is also important aspect in board games and cards games. Depending on the game, power levels can rise throughout the game, fall throughout the game, or remain flat throughout the game. In some instances, it can continuously go up and down as circumstances change for the players. In my experience, the most dynamic games are the ones where power levels rise until the final dramatic conclusion.

In a lot of games, players start with relatively few resources, and with limited abilities and options. As the game progresses, they accumulate more resources, and their abilities and options increase as a result. There are two benefits to having a game structure like this: players have time to learn about different parts of the game as they play, rather than having to try to learn everything at once, and having powers levels rise like this creates excitement within the game.

Imagine the opposite scenario, where players start with a lot, and finish the game with a little. They have to learn everything up front, and as they lose resources and abilities, their options decrease until the game basically fizzles out. In my opinion, this is the opposite of what you want your game to do. True, there may be game designs out there that operate on this very principle, but if you design a game like this, make sure it is intentional, and not just an oversight on your part.

Having a game fizzle out like this is sometimes a problem in games where the winner is the last person standing. As players attack each other, whittling down each other’s resources, more and more players leave the game until there is only one person left. Depending on how the game is designed, this could end up with the last few players left with very few resources, staring at each other across the board until one of them can eventually gain the upper hand and end the game. This would be a very anticlimactic end to an afternoon of gaming.

The power level in a game should steadily increase until the players reach the dramatic end. The action and the choices and the tension should keep building until a player finally triumphs, and if this is done well, then hopefully even those who did not win the game will have felt the excitement of it all and will have had a good time. I’m going to use my cooperative dragon game as an example again. The above dragon is the two-headed dragon from the game, and it was this dragon’s job to eliminate the players’ towers and workshops, which is their main way of accessing resources. The dragons would win once all of the players’ towers were destroyed. The problem with this is that once the players’ towers and workshops were gone, collecting enough resources to do anything was close to impossible, and the game would grind to a halt as the dragons mowed the players down with impunity.

After a lot of play testing, I came to realize that I needed to make the players’ workshops much more difficult for the dragons to get rid of. This still left open the dragons’ avenue of winning the game, which is to destroy all of the players’ towers, while still leaving the players access to resources through their workshops. In this way, players are still able to increase in power throughout the game, which not only keeps the game fun, but also keeps the two sides balanced, which as we talked about last time, is an important part of game design.

That’s all for now; may the power be with you! Good luck and good gaming!