Matt Thrower: The Stupidity of Simplicity

There are some things in life that you just remember, things that will be burned indelibly into your brain long after countless hours of alcohol and board game abuse have taken their toll on all the surrounding neurons. People remember where they were and what they were doing when they learned about those rare, huge news stories that helped to shape a generation. You remember the great rites of passage of western civilization such as losing your virginity or getting married (assuming that you’ve managed to do either thing thus far in your life).

And then there are things that people remember for reasons peculiar to them, reasons both personal and related to the things that they value. Being a boardgamer, one of the things for which I seem to have perfect recall is my first game of Settlers of Catan.

I’d been a gamer for years before playing Settlers and my tastes were very much rooted in the classic conflict games of the 1980s, particularly titles from Games Workshop (some of which I later learned were Avalon Hill reprints for UK distribution) and West End Games. But in the late 1990s, precisely when the Eurogame phenomenon was taking off in the gaming world, I was on a gaming hiatus, so I came to Settlers pretty late – my first game wasn’t until 2002. My gaming friends and I had been playing Titan obsessively on a Monday night for week after week and one day I turned up with this different game and proclaimed that from what I’d read on the Internet I had discovered the holy grail of gaming. I’d already read the rules which, to me, seemed absurdly straightforward and I had no trouble at all explaining things to the group while we set up the game. We used the random map right away of course, knowing full well that “introductory” or “tutorial” setups are things only for the weak and feeble. Each player got a set of pieces and a reference card, and we got down, quivering with excitement, to play the game.

That was when the trouble started.

See, the thing about virtually all of those eighties classics that we’d cut our teeth on is that they were games in which a great deal of the strategy revolved around moving things about on a map, an in-game representation of physical objects doing things in a physical world. Settlers features a map and physical objects but nothing actually moves, at least not in a sense beyond your network of roads and settlements expanding. So while there were strategic aspects to the game which were immediately apparent, there were a lot more which were not. It is not, for example, entirely clear that success in Settlers usually depends on a victory point card or two and connection to some kind of useful port. It is not obvious to a beginner player that some resources are much more important than others at the start of the game, or that the ration of resources you need to collect to do well is not just 1:1. There are other aspects to this, too.

So although we were all seasoned game players, we sat through this first game of Settlers bumbling uselessly round the table, trying to figure out what the hell we were supposed to do in order to win the game or, indeed, to try to construct any sort of coherent strategy. We did discover the “wood for sheep” joke almost instantly, and the game continues to be known as “wood for sheep” across much of my gaming circle, which is a good thing. The winner of that first game – me, as it turned out – won more by accident than by design, and we all knew it and that is not a great start for a debutant board game – but the trading aspect and the sheep pun kept us going through another game and slowly the things we had to do crystallised out of the morass of confusion and it became, in a very short time, a challenging, popular and exciting game.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, what I discovered was the thin end of a wedge, a wedge which makes a complete nonsense of the idea that a game with short rules is easy to learn. I use the word “learn” specifically because it’s damn obvious that a similar claim can be made about simple games not always being easy to play – anyone who has encountered Chess or Go will attest to the fact that this is true. No, counter-intuitive as it may be, short rules do not make a game easy to learn or, more importantly, offer the players an easy way to learn about the strategies they need to play the game effectively. The actual text of the rules may appear brief and inviting, but the problems arise when one tries to translate those rules into actually playing a game. This may come as some news to you if you play a lot of Eurogames. After all, partial familiarity helps a lot with digesting something new. But for those of us who dabble in Eurogames rather than having them as a main focus of our hobby, this can be a real pain. I can attest to how awkward it is from my own experiences of trying to get to grips with Puerto Rico – I spent more games than I care to recall making utterly ridiculous decisions because although I understood the rules of the game I had no handle to use in order to help me translate those rules into strategy.

Some games have this problem more than others. After considering it for some time I eventually decided that the problem was connected to how well grounded the game was in everyday, real-life situations and skills. If we go back and look at my original experience with Settlers, I found a lot of the problems were connected to strategies that weren’t directly derived from spatial positioning. The idea of manoeuvre and spatial positioning is something people deal with every day, not in a military sense, obviously, but simply in their everyday lives. The idea of a piece moving around different locations on a board is a familiar and intuitive way of abstractly representing something that makes coherent sense. So in that way, games in which the strategy involves the physical relationships (fnar, fnar) between pieces on a board are easier to digest than those which don’t, no matter how simple the rules.

Another everyday skill that people are familiar with is counting and comparing the relative values of items, which is why otherwise clunky-looking games such as Ra, with its Byzantine scoring system, are immediately accessible once you’ve learned the rules.

A third skill common to both board games and everyday experience is negotiation, and so Diplomacy tends to click without too much difficulty in spite of page after page in the rulebook dealing with paradoxes. It follows that the hardest games to get to grips with are those which contain none of these elements – and these tend to be the player-mat optimisation games so beloved of BGG such as the aforementioned PR and the Next Big Thing, Agricola.

I suspect that the argument I’m making here is wide open to misinterpretation, so I think it’s worth taking a minute to point out what I’m not saying and hopefully, if you’ve been snorting with derision through the preceding paragraphs, you might reassess your views. For starters, my argument has only a little to do with theme or abstraction; I would argue that PR is more thematic than Chess, for example, yet Chess is relatively intuitive because it involves physical positioning – although clearly games which are deliberately trying to tie themselves heavily into a theme are less likely to exhibit this than those that are not. It is not a criticism of games which require time in order to weave a good strategy and play skillfully – any good game should take repeated plays to appreciate properly – rather the point is that some games are obtuse as to even the most basic tactics required and so new players may make decisions that aren’t just bad but utterly nonsensical.

Most importantly this argument has nothing to do with the quality of the games themselves – I like PR a lot – it’s more of a plea for people to understand that when you’re teaching a game, short rules do not automatically equal easy comprehension, even for an experienced gamer. Basic strategy explanation is often required as well, for those not familiar with the paradigm in which the designer works, and that obviously lengthens the time it takes to get the basic concepts required for play across. The simpler games, often, are not any easier to learn than their more complex cousins.

I’ve had a whole variety of experiences to support this view, and it cuts in both directions. The introductory wargame Target: Arnhem from MMP has two – that’s right, two – pages of rules. And yet, as the comments of a number of confused Eurogamers who’ve tried the title as an gateway into the wonderful world of Grognardism can attest, if you’re not used to basic wargame concepts such as a Combat Resolution Table or Zone of Control you can still have a sticky time trying to play the game proficiently, however easily you digested the rules. At the other end of the spectrum, take an Ameritrash game with enough complexity to make many people shy away in horror: Twilight Imperium 3. Even I avoided this title for some time because I found the look of the rulebook daunting, but once I’d taken the plunge I found, to my delight, that the mechanisms of the game were largely intuitive, to the point where I was able to accurately guess basic mechanisms of systems the rulebook had yet to introduce. When teaching it to other players I’ve discovered that people who have a strong background in science fiction concepts tend to find it equally easy, while those who are less steeped in the traditions of that genre struggle.

I was inspired to write this article because I find the assumption that few rules equates to an easy-to-learn game a rather irritating simplification. The message is simple: Unless your group has played a similar game in the past, don’t assume that short equals simple. The message has practical applications, too: If someone turns up at a gaming group and launches into an explanation of a supposedly simple game for which the other players are wholly unprepared, then the result is at best going to be an over-long game night and at worst could be a group of players who are mortally offended by what they view as a patronising rules lawyer. Perhaps most importantly of all, it could be the difference between the next “simple” game you try out on your kids or spouse being a hit you can all enjoy for years to come and a night spent in argument and bitter recrimination.

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