Finding Balance

It’s important in life to find balance with all of the things that you do. You need to balance work with play, activity with rest, junk food with vegetables and exercise, etc. The same is true for games. A lot of times, if something isn’t quite working right with your game, the issue is balancing.

Generally, when we talking about balance in a game, we’re talking about power levels. In order for a game to be interesting, players have to be more or less on equal footing. Most of the time, this just means that no one player has a distinct advantage over the other players. In some games, players start out with different abilities. In other games, players might acquire abilities or gain certain advantages as the game goes on. All of these game mechanics have to be at similar power levels in order to make the game fair. If players feel like the game is biased against them, this can lead to them thinking that the game is broken, or worse, not fun.

Another problem a designer might run into where one character or class in the game is stronger than the others is that all of the players will want to play the same thing. You sometimes see this in fighting video games. It makes the game play a lot less interesting if everyone is doing the same thing all the time. This ties in to what we talked about last week with player choice. If there is really only one correct choice, then there really isn’t any choice at all.

The issue of balancing becomes even trickier when trying to design a cooperative game. Not only do the players have to be on an equal power level with each other, the group of players have to be at the same power level as the game itself, or the game board, which they will be playing against. And then, you have to figure out if the game works with different numbers of players, and if there are different characters to choose from, how the game changes depending on the number and which specific characters are being played. Again, and I know I say this a lot, but there is only one way to find this stuff out, and that is to play test. You have to see which characters or classes player gravitate towards, and which specific actions they use. Are there any unintentional combinations of abilities that break your game? Are the abilities worded in such a way that players can understand them without someone having to explain it to them? Do the abilities do what you intended them to do?

I’ve been working on a cooperative game for about five years now that’s an expansion for one of my board games. It pits a group of wizards, the players, against a group of dragons, the board. For the longest time, my favorite character was the fortune teller, because I designed a deck of cards reminiscent of tarot cards for her to use, and she was just a lot of fun. Unfortunately, this deck of cards coupled with her ability to see what the dragons were going to do next made her far too powerful, and I’ve spent much of design process trying to bring her down to an acceptable power level. But, with six different wizards, and six different dragons, and a multitude of other moving parts, balancing this game has been quite the challenge.

Players would complain that the dragons were too strong, so I had to weaken them and/or make the wizards stronger. But then, the dragons would be too weak, and the wizards would always win. While this might seem fun at first, if the players always win, there’s no actual challenge, and in my opinion, that wouldn’t be a very fun game to play. So, I had to balance it again, and the power level has been swinging back and forth between the wizards and the dragons ever since, as I hopefully approach that point of balance. In between all of this was play test after play test, and even though it’s been fun, it has certainly been difficult. I think the game is pretty close to balanced now, but every time I feel like I’m done designing, another problem inevitably arises. But, we keep designing, because we can always see that light at the end of the tunnel, even if we can’t tell how far away it is.

Anyway, that’s it for now! I hope that you are able to find the balance that you need. Good luck, and good gaming!