I wrote in a Postcard From Berlin about how the former East Germans were so overwhelmed after reunification by the choices in grocery and department stores.
And the huge selection of Eurogames in all of those stores—although a dream come true to most of us who read BGN—can sometimes be a hindrance to both east and west Germans unfamiliar with these games.  I’ve often seen customers in stores examine some of the selections from Queen and Days of Wonder, only to settle finally on a version of Monopoly.  Sometimes I even speak up, but most people here are not open to sudden advice from strangers.

From a design perspective, limited choices are a key ingredient to making the rules digestible and keeping the game moving at a comfortable pace.  Too many choices means greater susceptibility to analysis paralysis.

As for being poor judges of what we like, I just read the following quote from the beginning of the excellent book, “Blue Like Jazz” by Donald Miller:

“I never liked Jazz music because Jazz music doesn’t resolve.  But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked Jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch someone love something before you can love it yourself.  It is as if they are showing you the way.”

Brilliant… thanks for sharing. I’m going to bookmark this article and require myself to read it before making any large game purchases in the future.

When I worked in my family’s furniture store, we discovered that when we had too many chairs to choose from, many people would be unable to make a selection. They’d end up leaving the store without buying. When we trimmed the selection, we sold more. Plus it was easier to maintain stock. We just had to go heavy in a few items.

My daughter has Down Syndrome. She’s wiser than most of us, though. She sticks with what she likes, and to hell with everything else. She’s perfectly willing to sample other experiences, but she knows what gives her pleasure and constantly and quickly comes back to those things. Perhaps that’s why she’s happier than most people.

Good article, Eric.

Jeff Allers wrote: “From a design perspective, limited choices are a key ingredient to making the rules digestible and keeping the game moving at a comfortable pace.  Too many choices means greater susceptibility to analysis paralysis.”

I knew that I was forgetting something when I reread this column last night! I’ve read a number of interviews with designers who talk about limiting the choices available to players. They explain how a first-time designer often wants to give players as many options as they can imagine, but letting players do anything sometimes prevents them from figuring out what they want to do.

Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic the Gathering, has written repeatedly about why restrictions are great for design. If you approach him and say, “Design a card,” then he has a million directions available and is pulled every which way at once; say instead “Design a blue creature with a power of 5” and he’ll know how to get started.

Anyway some games have several possible choices, or actions per turn. And you would really do all of them! But you cannot because of the rules.
So the choice is hard and it is a fun part of the game.
Notre Dame is often like this: you have to choose the card to keep, while you might want all of them. Then you have have again 3 cards, but you can just play only 2… A hard choice again (not always, but often I mean!).
So I think that the world is fun beacuse you have your choices to make.. otherwise someone else will make the choices for you…

So I am a fan of variety and of choices even if I think the reality is often about to choose one path other than the other… And the challange is to bet in the right one…

I also cannot figure out how it is possible to eat 300 of times a slice of Pizza in a row… I only hope it was an Italian guy who cooked it ;-)

ema

But in Notre Dame you have to choose one out of the three cards you drew, not one of all nine possible actions.  That’s a different situation from many wargames were you have dozens or hundreds of pieces you could move.  The games with fewer options to choose from are easier to play when you are inexperienced and require less time to make a decision.

Great analogy about games, your wife and food!  I know exactly what you mean.  McDonald’s may be your favorite place for hamburgers, but some nights you feel like eating at Wendy’s.  (Guess who’s going to be sleeping on the couch tonight!)

I am a McDonald’s hamburger. I feel very sad. ;->

Eric, I happened to be speaking with Bruno Cathala at Essen about this very subject.  We were talking about what led up to Animalia being sold only by an insurance company, and then being sold in a limited quantity at Essen.

I remarked that I thought it would be difficult to be asked to design a game around animals, and he replied that it was actually easier for him to be confined in that way.

The analogy works, but in a way leave, me a little numb. I’ve have the same experience with a game collection growing faster than I would ever imagine, while at the same time having less time to enjoy them. At the same time I feel blessed with having the opportunity to check out a new game anytime I want. The main reason I feel that way is that in most other parts of my life, it’s exactly what I’m looking for. I don’t read series of books, rather individual books, don’t have 10 artist that I buy everything from but rather try to find new artists that give me something else, prefer watching movies to television series, truly enjoy having a wide variety of cold cuts and cheeses in my fridge and so on. When I go to the record store I never know what I’m looking for, I browse the latest releases and pick up whatever I find interesting or might have stored info of from somewhere about.

This is also my main motivation for travelling. Going to new places to experience something new; new food, drinks, culture events and atmospheres. That is then also why I loath places like McD. The fundamental problem is that in order for them to stay in business they have to make everything taste as a common deviator; everybody can eat it, but there’s no enjoyment and no surprises! In recent years there actually been an interesting discussion in Norway, where some argue that for instance the Norwegians love of frozen pizzas and McD is destroying the young’s tastes for “real” food. When your reference in pizza is some type of frozen pizza, a homemade or restaurant made pizza with fresh and top notch ingredients will taste strange…

While I was touring in Europe with a couple of my then artists, I really found it fascinating that especially one of the artists and crew always ate at the same places, drank the same beer and went to the same bars. I felt sorry for them. Not to say, I have anything bad to say about either them, food, drinks or places, but I have experienced so many good things that I think they would have enjoyed as well… Although you find something you enjoy, it shouldn’t prevent you from find more.

If this was to become the trend in board games I would be devastated. True, I don’t get to play the games I enjoy as much as I would like, but at the same time I constantly find new favourites. They might not be brilliant and stay with me for the rest of my life, but they will provide lots of fun, at least for a while.

(Don’t take me for a snob - I’m definetly not. Enjoy my junk food as well as the next guy. But, try to vary it a bit :-)

Great article Eric.  But what in the Hell’s “Qwirkle”?

- Derek

If any of you ever drop by the Board Game Designer’s Forum (http://www.bgdf.com) - and I’m sure lots of you do! - you’ll see that we have a regular monthly “showdown” contest, in which participants are presented with several restrictions within in which they must design a game, compounded by a one-week deadline (which is sometimes the bigger problem!)
And yet month after month we get many games that have interesting potential (indeed I was able to enter one of my earlier showdown games into the Mayfair Settlers Scenario contest because it happened to fit their restrictions as well!)

But I certainly agree with the thrust of the article.  Give people three choices and they will eventually manage to choose one.  Give then three hundred and they never will.

Derek, are you serious about not knowing what Qwirkle is? If so, I reviewed it in March 2007 (http://www.boardgamenews.com/index.php/boardgamenews/comments/game_review_qwirkle/), then named it my game of 2007 in April (http://www.boardgamenews.com/index.php/boardgamenews/comments/w_eric_martin_my_top_game_of_2007_is/) because I could already tell that I would love it and keep playing it for months to come. I believe that Qwirkle is available through Amazon.uk, but I don’t know whether it’s available in gamestores proper.

Excellent article again, Eric

But as much as I like playing games I love over and over, I still love learning new games too. But maybe that has to do with my ability to choose games I haven’t played but that I do like. In the last 2 weeks I have played about 10 new games I think, and I liked each one of them quite a bit, and I’ve replayed most of them in the mean time. If I hadn’t bothered to try them, I wouldn’t have replayed them either, and I wouldn’t have enjoyed doing so. So having choice is only a luxury problem. That’s why I make my game choices, when it comes to replaying, quite intuitively.

If people are staring at my wall and can’t make up their minds, I tend to jump in and choose something that I think they will enjoy. I’m mostly right.

Oh man, am I good or what :)

"Derek, are you serious about not knowing what Qwirkle is?”

Yes, Eric, I really am.  What is more I can’t recall anybody ever mentioning it in my presence.  I clearly need to do some investigating.

- Derek