Little Blue Roads

A different kind of post today: a friend of mine is starting a podcast and interviewed me about game design. We talk about a lot of the things I've already covered in previous posts, but we also talk about why playing games is important, and where the future of gaming might take us. I had a great time talking to him, and I hope you enjoy listening to it!

Little Blue Roads, Episode 2: Charles Wei, Tabletop Game Designer

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!

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!