Larry Levy:  The Two Faces of Gaming

Bruno Faidutti occasionally posts editorials about the world of gaming on his wonderful web site.  The most recent one really stopped me in my tracks, and challenged what I considered to be an obvious truth of game design.  But before I discuss what Bruno wrote, a little background.

The editorial, which is cleverly titled “Draw a card or draw a cardâ€?, is about the way that players can replenish their hand during a card game.  The standard method in traditional card games, which goes back hundreds of years, is to add a card to your hand, possibly play one or more of them, and then end your turn by discarding a card.  This is the method used in all of the many Rummy variants and the reason is simple:  the active player invariably has a choice of picking the top card from the stock or the top card of the discard pile (or maybe part or all of the discard pile).  If a player drew a card at the end of his turn, you’d have to allow him to grab the card beneath his own discard.  In addition, these games play very differently if a player isn’t allowed to immediately use an opponent’s discard on his turn.  So the “Draw a card, play a cardâ€? method is traditional for good reasons.  It also probably feels natural to begin your turn by drawing a card, but that might only be because that’s the way we’d always seen it done.

This method of card replenishment became so pervasive that it was always used, even in games where cards could only be drawn from the stock.  For example, Mille Bornes, or its predecessor, Touring (which dates back to the turn of the twentieth century).  I’m not sure which designer first had the brainstorm, but at some point (I think it may have been during the early nineties), some German games began changing this to “Play a card, draw a cardâ€?.  In most of these games, there was no discard pile, so the player’s only choice was to draw from the stock.  The reason behind this change was simple, brilliant, and obvious once it was noticed:  reduced down time.  If a player draws a card at the end of her turn, she can decide what she will do on her next turn while her opponents take their turns.  If she waits until the beginning of her turn to Draw a card, she must consider this new piece of information, which might cause her to begin her thought process all over again.  The amount of time gained per turn usually isn’t great, but when you multiply it by all the turns of a game, the savings are tangible.

“drawing a cardâ€? is functionally equivalent to “Drawing a cardâ€?.  For example, look at one of the more popular games where you draw a card at the end of your turn, Schotten-Totten (or Battle Line, if you insist).  In the former game, each player starts with a six card hand, plays one of them, and then draws a card.  A completely identical game could be created if you began with a five card hand, drew a card to begin your turn, and then played a card.  In each case, you have six cards to choose from each turn.  The only difference is that in Schotten-Totten, you can consider your play while your opponent takes his turn, but in my imaginary game, you might have to pause after beginning your turn with a card draw.

Because of this obvious advantage, “draw a cardâ€? games have become quite popular.  In fact, I can’t think of a “Draw a cardâ€? game released in the last five years or so, except where the players have the option of drawing from the discard pile (as in Wyatt Earp).  Knizia even chose to use “draw a cardâ€? in Lost Cities, in spite of the fact that players can choose to take the top card of one of the discard piles instead of drawing from the stock.  This has a subtle effect on play, one I’m sure the Good Doctor considered before using it.  But it also has the advantage of keeping things moving.

To me, it seemed as if the “draw a card, play a cardâ€? method had become the de facto standard.  Some forgotten designer was able to think outside the box and change the way we’d always played card games and the improvement was so obvious that virtually all other designers jumped onto the bandwagon.

Then I read Bruno’s editorial.  In it, he says that there are designers (like himself) who prefer to have players draw a card at the beginning of their turn, while there are others who tend to have it occur at the end of a turn.  He thinks the advantage of “Draw a cardâ€?, in addition to its familiarity, is that it heightens the surprise and fun aspect of a game.  He speaks of the pleasurable anticipation as players imagine what card they might pick up at the start of their next turn.  He says that selecting a card at the end of a turn “makes the game deeper and more challenging, but it also makes it feel less fun and less naturalâ€?.

Even though the kinds of games that Bruno likes and I like are just about polar opposites, I have tremendous respect for both his design abilities and his insight into the gaming industry.  So I take these comments seriously, even though they run counter to my assumptions.  The thing is, I’m a fairly logical guy.  Not exactly Son of Spock, but my reactions to most things in life are much more intellectual than emotional.  That includes gaming.  Sure, I can laugh my ass off playing a silly piece of fluff like Plem Plem, but most of the enjoyment I get from gaming comes from the left side of my brain.  There is a natural tendency for all of us to assume that the rest of the world shares our outlook on life.  And this is a case in point.  I mean, the end-of-turn drawing just makes so much sense.  Less down time.  Totally equivalent gameplay.  You don’t begin your turn with a surprise, but you can end it with one—what difference does it make?  How could anyone prefer “Draw a cardâ€? to “draw a cardâ€??

Well, obviously there are those who do.  Just like there are gamers who love bluff and double think and blind bidding and all those other things that bore me to tears.  There are (at least) two faces of gaming:  the folks who love the deep strategy and intellectual challenge and the folks who delight in the silly, the social, the surprise.  This, of course, is a vast simplification; there are those who love both sides of gaming, as well as many other aspects of games that attract us.  None of this is news to me; there’s obviously a reason there are so many bluffing and blind bidding games out there.  But there are times I don’t realize how far it goes, that there’s a segment of the gaming world who feels it’s more important to experience the delight of a favorable card draw at the beginning of your turn than to save a few seconds of down time.  Neither view is right and neither view is wrong.  In fact, gaming is immeasurably richer as a result of these different approaches.  Sometimes, though, it’s nice for the strategists like me to be reminded that there’s more than one type of gaming out there.  Thanks, Bruno.

IGA Award Winners
The winners of the International Gamers Awards were announced this week and, with one notable exception, my crystal ball proved to be unusually accurate.  For two-player games, my pick, Twilight Struggle, did indeed win, although more easily than I thought it would (it grabbed 10 out of the 14 first-place votes, a very strong showing).  It thus becomes the first game to win both the IGA’s Two-Player and the Historical Simulations awards.  This is a tremendous achievement and I extend hearty congratulations to designers Jason Matthews and Ananda Gupta, as well as publisher GMT Games.

On the multiplayer side, my selection, Caylus, emerged victorious and the games I identified as close competitors, Thurn und Taxis, Railroad Tycoon, and Indonesia, also finished well up in the voting.  So that’s pretty good prognosticating.  However, the one huge surprise, and the biggest story of this year’s election, is that the most serious threat to Caylus’ victory was none of these games, but instead was the unheralded Jenseits von Theban, the self-published archaeology themed game.  In fact, Jenseits tied Caylus in the final round and the Ystari game only won through a tie-breaker procedure.

This was, to me at least, an astonishing and completely unforeseen development.  I find it the clearest indication yet of the wide split between the IGA’s two factions:  the ones that prefer heavy games and those that go for the lighter titles.  We saw it in the multiplayer voting the previous two years, but to have two so very different games tie is remarkable.  All the more so, since I bet the first that many gamers even heard of Jenseits was when it got nominated for this award.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s brilliantly themed and deserved the nomination.  But it has a huge luck factor and was, in fact, one of the first games I dismissed in my analysis.  Obviously a lot of the voters thought differently.

But if we didn’t have surprises like this one, we wouldn’t have to actually conduct the voting, would we?  Congratulations to William Attia and Ystari for a richly deserved honor.  And maybe even bigger congrats to Peter Prinz, designer and publisher of the game with the tiny print run that came this close to winning.  Interestingly, both titles, as well as Twilight Struggle, are their designers’ first published games.  Who says there’s no new blood in the world of gaming?

Comments:

< Back Home