Kris Hall: Jonathan Degann, Game Concepts, and the Tools of Victory

I had a bout of flu this week, and didn’t get to play any games.  But Jonathan Degann posted a new essay on his Journal of Boardgame Design, and so I had plenty to think about.

Mr. Degann is one of the more analytical commentators on our hobby, and I learn a lot from each of his essays.  A lot of the better observations I make about game design were inspired by (or directly stolen from) Mr. Degann’s articles. 

This month’s essay is about game concepts.  Mr. Degann defines a game concept as a “coherent system of mechanisms with a theme of its own.” Mr. Degann points out that when the mechanisms of a game are organized in an intelligent way around a game concept, the game seems to make more sense, and is easier to learn.

I’m not going to summarize the whole essay because why should you read my Cliff Notes version when the original essay is available?  Instead, I want to draw attention to the one area where I disagree with Mr. Degann.  And that is his analysis of Age of Empires III.

Mr. Degann says that playing Age of Empires III makes one feel “as though he is playing four games at once.” He lists the major mechanisms of the game, and concludes: “These games-in-a-game all intersect and collide but without truly building upon each other.  The theme of colonization just barely stitches this patchwork together.”

I disagree with this analysis not just because I enjoy Age of Empires III, but because the clutter of mechanisms in AoE forces gamers into what I call the Tools of Victory Dilemma.  In this dilemma, a player must choose between going directly for the victory conditions of the game or investing in one or more tools that could payoff in a big way later on.  A player who ignores the tools of the game may eventually find himself facing opponents who have greater strength, cash, abilities, or other favorable game options.  The player who concentrates too much on building up a stockpile of tools risks not having enough time left to exploit his new assets. 

I’m the second kind of player.  I have written before about how I love the special ability tiles in Age of Empires III and in Martin Wallace’s Struggle of Empires.  But I don’t believe that I have ever won either of these games.  When playing Struggle of Empires, I frequently end up with the most powerful army on the board, but without enough game turns left to do much conquering. 

This dilemma becomes most painful in games like AoE and SoE which have a limited number of turns.  The later in the game that a player invests in a tool, the less time he has to exploit the potential of that resource.

Age of Empires complicates this dilemma by making the final special ability tiles ones that can actually change victory conditions for the player who buys them.  If you buy the right tile, cash changes from being a tool to a method of generating victory points.  This makes judging the value of the tools in the game much more complicated.  A player may know that there is a tile that will make merchant ships generate victory points, but he can’t be sure that this tile will turn up, and he often can’t be sure that he will have the opportunity to grab it even if it does.

Of course, a game doesn’t have to have the word Empire in the title to force players into the Tools of Victory Dilemma.  In Brass, another Martin Wallace game, players can buy a variety of industry tiles which yield both cash and victory points.  But some tiles are good at creating income, but create few victory points.  Other industries produce more victory points, but yield little income.  Because income in this game is just a tool, not a victory condition, players are emphasizing either tools or victory points with every tile they place.

In Caylus or Puerto Rico (two games that Mr. Degann analyzes in his essay) the players don’t really have this dilemma because there is little opportunity for pursuing victory points directly, and the players are forced to choose which tools to invest in rather than whether they should ignore the tools completely.  Both of these games make it difficult or impossible for a player to make much progress without creating or acquiring a few special ability buildings.  In contrast, a player in AoE could send every colonist he has to the New World in search of victory points, and only place them in the tool-generating parts of the board when the Colonist Dock is full.

I believe Mr. Degann is absolutely correct in his feeling that a good game concept can unite game mechanisms into a meaningful whole that can be more than the sum of their parts.  But the clutter of mechanisms in games like Age of Empires III are not just complexity for complexity’s sake.  They offer players meaningful options that give players improved abilities in exchange for one of the most important resources of all—time. 

© 2008 Kris Hall

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Comments:

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Interesting analysis of Mr. Degann’s latest essay (now, Eric, if we could only coax him into writing regularly for BGN:) I think one of San Juan’s strengths over Puerto Rico is that there are more opportunities to score victory points without investing heavily on the “tools to victory.” I prefer to get a good production chain going, probably for the same reason you are enamored with special ability cards or large armies, but one can always gain enough new cards through the Ratsherr (not sure what it is in the English version) and Gold Mine rolls (and invest in just one or two “tools") and focus more on victory point buildings (monuments, chapel). Posted by Jeff Allers on Mar 7, 2008 at 08:14 AM | #

Yeah, I think Jonathan is being a little bit harsh with AoE.  I feel it’s a little gamey (that is, it plays like the sum of its mechanics, rather than as a thematic whole--not necessarily a pejorative), but the different areas have the worker placement system in common and are therefore quite interrelated.  And there is enough building upon the others to make it feel coherant.  A bit disjointed, perhaps, but still nicely done. As for Puerto Rico, I’m not sure I see the difference between the big purple buildings and the special ability tiles in AoE.  Both convert things you’ve been collecting during the game to VPs.  In fact, I’d argue they’re not much different from the monuments in San Juan.  Granted, the latter give VPs in a vacuum, but there are enough big purples in PR that I usually choose the one I like based on what I’ve been collecting the most of during that game, rather than setting up a strategy and then pointing toward a particular $10 building.  Maybe that’s a deficiency in my game, but given that a good chunk of PR is tactical and opportunistic, I think this flexibility has served me well.  Once you realize which big purple you’ll be buying, you can do a little optimization, but to me, they’re all VP machines and I’ll just buy the best one available.  You can also use this to match your personal preferences and tendencies.  So Jeff, if you like setting up crop production, you can focus on the building that gives VPs for the production buildings.  Of course, you better hope no one else gets to it first! Posted by Larry Levy on Mar 7, 2008 at 12:53 PM | #

I’ve been writing about this a bit myself recently, and I think that this whole tools of victory vs. actual victory thing is a useful game design device (to prevent things like runaway leaders), I think it’s fundamentally unthematic and unrewarding. There are lots of ways in which game theme can work of course, but a very fundamental one is through role-playing: the game puts the player in a role, and provides a set of rules and an environment that is evocative of that role, and a set of victory conditions that is appropriate to that role, and lets you go at it. Modern Art, Thebes, Settlers of Catan, Agricola. Even Samurai, although in an abstract kind of way. The problem with the tools/victory dichotomy is that it generally means players are being rewarded abstractly, rather than for how well they played their in-game role - look at Agricola vs. Brass. In Agricola you get points in ways very directly related to your success as a farmer. In Brass you get abstract points that don’t really represent your success as an entrepreneur, and certainly don’t represent in-game success at the thing your role would have you do - make money - and so in my opinion the theme is far less successful. Not that it can’t work; but the more disjoint your tools/victory elements are, the tougher it is for the game to work thematically, I think. If the tools you are using during the game - the props of your role, if you will - and the victory conditions you are striving for aren’t closely related, that’s tough. As for AoEIII, I also found it to be a bit of a disjointed mess, but more because I found that none of the particular elements of the game were very effective and then they didn’t cohere well either. I never even got to the point of worrying about how successfully it worked the theme, but I didn’t think the game was there. Posted by Chris Farrell on Mar 25, 2008 at 12:32 PM | #

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