Scott Tepper: How Long Has This Been Going On?

If you don’t live in Chicago, you may be unaware that the Chicago Transit Authority is renovating the tracks and train stations around the city.  The project, which will last years and cost millions of dollars, involved shutting down a set of tracks at the one of the busiest stations, and reducing the number of trains by 35% at rush hour.  The result of this madness is a 40+% increase in travel times, and train cars at rush hour that are packed more tightly than the components in a closed box of Colosseum.

While riding to work the other day, the train I was on stopped between stations due to congestion.  During our standstill, a message kept repeating over the loudspeakers to let us know that the CTA was improving its service.  Over and over it repeated, droning on about the great rail service we would be getting….one day.  As so many things do, this message got me to thinking about games.  In this case I started ruminating about the mechanisms that cause a game to end (or not end).

Many of the games I grew up with were variations of race games, so winning was just a matter of being the first to cross the finish line.  Depending on the game, this could be in a short or long time.  Chutes and ladders, Sorry!, Parcheesi(Pachisi), and Backgammon are all race games.  Not so surprisingly, all of these games have a considerable luck component; your fate is largely dependent on the cards you draw or numbers you roll on the dice.  Fewer and fewer popular games these days are simple roll and move games, in part because the discerning public has choices of more engaging games.

A common method for more modern games is a limit to the number rounds.  For a lot of card games, this round limit is built in: Each hand of bridge or hearts in a 4 player game consists of 13 tricks.  Factory Fun lasts 10 rounds.  La Citta goes for 6 “years”.  Galaxy Trucker consists of 3 flights.  I think these sorts of limits are the most useful for a game designer when they are trying to control the duration of a game.  The choice of number of rounds in the designing of a game can result in a pretty precise game game length, and thus result in a game that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.

Tile games, such as Carcassonne, Ta Yu, Blokus, have a built in timer as well.  As soon as all the tiles are used, or the board is full, the game is over.  The length of the game therefore is controlled by how many tiles, or the size of the board that the game contains.  Again, here a smart designer can generally shape the length of the game to a reasonable time limit.

Games that have variable, or multiple ending conditions tend to impress me.  I find it fascinating in these games that the designer had to obviously playtest a game extensively to find a reasonable game length.  Some examples of these games are: Quandary which ends a round when the 6th tile of any color is played, Puerto Rico which can end when either all the colonists have been taken, all the victory points have been used, or someone has filled their city with buildings, or Thurn and Taxis which ends when a player acquires a #7 carriage or has placed all their buildings.  The reward of these types of games is a level of tension that you don’t see elsewhere due to the possibility of a “sudden” ending.  As a result, the players need to constantly be pressing themselves to not only be aware of what their opponents are doing, but push themselves to not make mistakes.

Over time, having been exposed to more games, I am now able to recognize what I see as flaws in game design.  One of these failings is when a game’s gears allow it to churn in place without progressing to an ending.  The Pollgame is an example of one of these games.  In this game the players move forward on a score track by guessing how many of the players answer “yes” to a variety of personal questions, such as “Have you ever gone skydiving?”.  It’s a great game to get to know people, but the game length becomes problematic when played with the full complement of 8 players, because your chance of guessing the correct number goes down to 11%.  I’ve witnessed games of The Pollgame where round after round, no one guesses correctly, and thus no one progresses.  So what should be a light party game drags on for 90-120 minutes.

Another good game that has a tendency to bog down is Drakon.  In this game, the players add room tiles to the board or move their character through rooms in a effort to acquire a certain amount of gold coins, and then reach an exit to the dungeon.  Several of the room tiles allow you to affect an opponent, primarily by stealing their gold.  If a player doesn’t have enough gold, they can’t win the game.  So it is common in this game, to move your character to a room that allows you to steal gold from one of your opponents, and then have another opponent steal that gold from you.  Around and around a single gold coin can go until someone decides to break the chain.

Even Can’t Stop, the highly rated game by Sid Sackson, can slow down near the end of the game with 4 players, when the players need to roll the dice to advance numbers that haven’t already been claimed.  With 4 players it’s very possible, as several of the numbers have been closed out, that you’ll “blow it” on the first roll of your turn, and so all you can do is pass the dice to the next player.  When this occurs, it doesn’t really create a fun gaming experience, especially when it happens to several players in a row.  It’s like the gaming equivalent of having the tires on your car spin in place on ice.  Whee!

When this kind of stagnation arises, it prompts me to wonder to what extent the designer playtested the game, and, or if they recognized this type of glitch and simply decided not to address it with a rules fix.  In real like, when I’m stuck in a situation where I find myself waiting and not moving forward(ie. in line at opening night at a blockbuster movie), I’ll bring along a game to help while away the time.  But what escape does a gamer have when the game they’re playing stagnates...go back to real life?  What games can you name that have a tendency to stagnate, and what fix would you have made, if any, to the game rules if you were the designer?

© 2008 Scott Tepper

---

Comments:

You must register with BGN in order to comment. Registration is free!

I have seen games of Settlers bog down with several players at 9 VPs and no where to build on the board. It becomes a boring time of rolling dice, collecting resourses and trolling the card deck for a VP card so you can win. John Posted by John Daniels on Feb 18, 2008 at 04:32 PM | #

John, I’ve had a similar thing happen once in Settlers as well.  I had forgotten about that. Posted by Scott Tepper on Feb 18, 2008 at 05:38 PM | #

I see more games these days better designed to avoid this problem. Take Heck Meck/Pickomino, for instance, and how one tile is flipped over (taken out of the game) for each scratch, ensuring the that the game will end in a reasonable length. Another dice game, the brand-new “Drachen Wurf” from Schmidt, also allows players to steal from other players with their die rolls.  The number of dice required to steal an opponant’s dragon, however, is always one more than the number of dice the other player used to “secure” the dragon.  Since there are only 6 dice, eventually a dragon can no longer be stolen, and the game is guaranteed an ending in a reasonable time.  Nice design element. Posted by Jeff Allers on Feb 19, 2008 at 06:41 AM | #

< Back Home