I have a specific preference for unforgiving games.  Your Age of Steam case echoes well here.  I ended my first game with exactly 7 VPs.  That abject failure drew me to the game.  I’ve now played more well over 200 games of Age of Steam.  Similarly I came dead last in my first game of Wabash Cannonball and not by a small margin.  That was 6 months ago.  I’ve now played Wabash Cannonball 40 times and it is still in regular rotation. 

Losing my first game is not a guarantee of success of course: I lost my first game of Phoenicia as well and I’m never going back there, and I won my first game of Container, have played 16 more times since then and happily expect to play many more times this year.  But, I do like games which impose a skill-based survivalist mentality on their players.

I wrote the following for Age of Steam, but it applies equally well to many of the games I like:

“Let’s get the basics down: First, this game doesn’t like you. It doesn’t like anybody else either, but it particularly doesn’t like you. If you ever have a question on the rules or how the rules apply to a particular situation then pick the answer that hurts the most. You’ll almost certainly be right.”

I think it depends on the kind of game you’re talking about, Kris.  You’d certainly want a family game or a lighter game to be forgiving.  As I mentioned in my review of Airships, a forgiving dice game sounds like a good thing, as it means that players won’t be the victim of some early bad luck.  With heavier games, unforgiving mechanics may be appropriate, but I don’t think they’re required by any means.  They might just shift the focus of the game from one skillful area to another.  For example, just because you can issue shares at any time in Railroad Tycoon doesn’t mean the game is lacking in skill.  It just means the “planning your turn ahead of time” skill isn’t required.  This might be comparable to designing a game with open holdings, to remove the memory aspect from the game.  Some players will like it one way and some the other, but both are perfectly sound design choices.

I tend to like unforgiving games, but not to the exclusion of the more forgiving ones.  So, like Billy Martin in the old Lite Beer commercials, I feel very strongly both ways.  :-)

I like both kinds of games, but lean toward the unforgiving kind. Age of Steam and Power Grid are 2 examples. Both have many options to choose from, but I have much more fun in Power Grid than I do in Age of Steam. In both games, every dollar counts, but I seem to understand the Power Grid engine a whole lot more. Just don’t get me started on Through the Ages - way more choices than I care for.

J.C. Lawrence said:
“Let’s get the basics down: First, this game doesn’t like you. It doesn’t like anybody else either, but it particularly doesn’t like you. If you ever have a question on the rules or how the rules apply to a particular situation then pick the answer that hurts the most. You’ll almost certainly be right.”

That’s awesome.

In forgiving vs. unforgiving, I guess the question is, is the game designed for repeat play?  If not, it won’t punish newbies too harshly.  On the other hand I think games that endure (like Princes of Florence or Age of Steam) reward experience more, which promotes playing repeatedly and learning how the game works.

Unforgiving games are OK, I suppose in abstract.  Games like Chess, Score Four etc.  Put a them on it, however, then the game becomes an interactive story.  It becomes also embodies a social exercise for me, entertaining to the participants.

The working in the sentence above should read *theme*, not *them*.

Anyway, before I accidentally hit the “send” button, what I meant to say was that once any conjunctive theme is put on a game, then I want it to be somewhat forgiving in nature, even a little luck based.  The game then becomes about people playing… and so you want everyone involved, feeling as though they have a chance to win.

The best “themed” games balance the ability to largely control your own destiny with allowing a level of unplanned variation that has to be adapted to.

BTW, Monopoly is a good example of this.  Overall, yes, it is not the greatest of boardgames but it still has its charm, is fun and is a good game.

Certainly vastly underrated by the community.  It has a great theme.

It seems it’s a matter of preference for each gamer.  Some enjoy a smarter game more, some enjoy a forgiving game more.

There are variables in here which also don’t allow for clumping these together automatically.  Some forgiving games feel like their smarter counterparts, where players feel like the game is a difficult one where winning is an accomplishment, although luck played such a large role that this isn’t really true. Pillars of the Earth is an example of this.  Other forgiving games feel more like an experience for each player, where winning/losing isn’t necessarily the end-all/be-all for each player, but playing the game itself, and having fun with the mechanics is enough, winning can be secondary to the experience of playing the game.  Railroad Tycoon is an example of this.

Further subdivisions can be created, up to the point of trivial groups.

For my money, I enjoy either a smart game which plays for the strategy (for example, Imperial), or a forgiving game which plays for the experience (again, RRT).  I really dislike those pretentious games such as Pillars which have enough luck to make futile the deep thoughts the game attempts to provoke of its players.