W. Eric Martin: Playing Alone in a Crowded Room

Many arguments, whether about games, politics, religion or any other topic, result from a confusion in terminology that disguises the underlying opinions and beliefs of the arguers. “That game is so splunge that I don’t see why anyone would ever play it.” “I don’t see any splunge in that design. Are you sure you’re playing it correctly?” Despite not understanding what the other person is talking about – perhaps not even realizing that they don’t understand – the arguers restate their claims, confident that repetition and volume line the path toward verbal victory.

Which brings us to the topic of today’s column: “multi-player solitaire,” a term used both descriptively and pejoratively for all manner of games, with people arguing for and against Game Y being MPS without anyone agreeing as to what’s being argued over. The problem, of course, is that any definition of MPS has similarities to those of porn or patriotism – you know it when you see it – and a less helpful definition can hardly be imagined.

Ray Dennis, a member of my 6am Gamers group, offered this thought on the topic of MPS, merging the objective and subjective:

A lot of my favorite games can be called multi-player solitaire. They have a little interaction, but mostly you play your own game. That said, even if you are making the best choices possible for yourself based on what is available at the time and on what other people are doing, this is a form of interaction. I guess my litmus test is this: Would I be having as much fun if I were playing by myself with no one else? Most of the times the answer is no; you need someone to compete with even if the interaction is minimal.

There’s a lot to unpack in that quote, starting with the notion that games labeled as multi-player solitaire have “little interaction” among the players. How little is too little, and what do we actually mean by “interaction”?

On one level, “interaction” can be viewed as a synonym for “competition.” In a typical race game, for example, your goal isn’t to move around the track and cross the finish line; it’s to move around the track and cross the finish line first. The game isn’t a feel-good exercise in which everyone who crosses the finish line can view themselves as a winner; there’s one winner, and there’s everyone else. The competition against other players to end up on top makes your actions meaningful.

Let’s look at Peter Burley’s Take it to the Limit!, for example. In this game, each player has her own board and set of tiles, and as each tile is drawn bingo-style, she’ll place that tile on her board, trying to create consistently colored lines from one side of the gameboard to the other. The challenge of the game comes from not knowing which tiles will be used. Do you aim big and try to complete a high valued line of the maximum length, or play safe and shoot for completing several shorter lines? Are you creating a risky situation in which only one tile will complete several lines? With each tile drawn, you make choices over what to give up and what to work toward completing (as with each moment that passes in life). Once the gameboards are filled, players tally their points to see who’s won.

Take it to the Limit can be viewed as the poster child for MPS. Each player independently creates a display of tiles on her gameboard with her choices having no effect on the success or failure of other players – and yet I’ve never had a desire to play this game on my own to see the highest score that I can create. I play the game to compete against others, even though the competition is strictly one of heads-down play until the final bell.

What other forms of interaction can we identify?

• Positional interaction – I want to be in certain areas, and so do you. Think Go, which my foreign exchange student taught me (and schooled me at) in the recent past. Both players have ideas of how they want to claim area on the board, but in order to make your plans work you have to account for and react to the plays of your opponent. Ignoring those moves is impossible because (1) the opponent might claim the spot you wanted – and unless you want stasis, you have to choose a different location – and (2) you will lose badly because the opponent is focusing on the entire board while you’re looking only at your works.

• Acquisitive interaction – I want to own certain things, and so do you. Reiner Knizia’s Modern Art is an auction game devoted to the buying and selling of art. Ideally, I could buy every piece of artwork on offer for $1,000 and sell my own offerings for however much a player holds. No game is ever ideal, alas. Others want the same pieces of artwork you do because they see good things in the future of that artist, perhaps based on works they plan to sell in the future, so they offer to spend more money than you. Outrageous. They also inevitably decline to hand over their life savings for some schlocky work you’ve deemed to be the Next Big Thing, which means you need to pay attention to the market to see who’s offering which works and who’s bidding on what when.

  Dirk Henn’s Showmanager is one of my favorite games, and I push it on others every chance I get because game play is both simple and highly interactive. Each player is assembling actors for the same four plays, but you can mostly work on only one play at a time, so if your right-hand neighbor is work on Play X, you’ll be getting the dregs of the actors being offered if you do the same. Switch to Play Y and perhaps you can stymie the player to your left, who will switch to Play Z to thwart her left-hand neighbor, and so on. Thus, you have an aspect of positional interaction – I want to be in your seat, getting different choices of which actors to hire – on top of the acquisitive interaction, which is enforced by actors being removed from the game once they work in a single play. (Sounds like a labor issue for SAG!)

• Sequential interaction – I want to be in a certain order, and so do you. I mentioned race games above, and they’re a natural entry in this category, including my favorite game of all time, Wolfgang Riedesser’s Ave Caesar. Come in first, and you win the game (or score the most points if you’re doing a series of races). If I get ahead of you, I can sit in choke points or force you to travel a longer route, burning movement points and wasting time. If I’m behind you, I can play the largest movement cards, which are otherwise dead in my hand. Every player has the same deck of cards and the same potential movement, but you need to make choices of what to play when because playing the largest card each turn isn’t a winning strategy.

  While most race games care about who crosses the finish line first – that is, be first in the sequence or go home – not all of them work the same way. Terry Goodchild’s Formel Fun is a series of race games for 3-6 players with the movement being carried out through card play; at the end of each race, whoever is in last place gets booted out. Players then line up for the next race, and the process continues until only one vehicle remains. Since each player has more than one vehicle, you need to weigh the merits of spending lots of movement points to finish quickly in one race, and thereby starting near the front of the pack in the next, versus trying to keep more of your vehicles in the race period and possibly being able to make better use of your cards since you have options for where to play them. The joke about outrunning your friend and not the bear applies here.

  Martin Wallace’s ...Und Tschüss! is another odd example of this type of interaction. Players have a hand of number cards, and one fewer scoring cards than the number of players are on display. Each player reveals a number card simultaneously, with the lowest card earning that player the lowest valued scoring card (which can be negative) and an exit from that round. Each player then chooses and reveals another card, adding that value to the first card played, with the lowest total again being booted. The process continues until only two players remain, with the highest sum earning that player the most valuable scoring card and the second-highest sum getting squat. So, do you push for #1, knowing that you could leave empty-handed, or do you dodge out of the round earlier to pick up some sure points, keeping in mind that others will be making the same decision?

  

• Destructive interaction – I want to eliminate something, and so do you. Richard Borg’s Memoir 44 and BattleLore are driven by this interaction; you win only after eliminating a certain number of the opponent’s troops. Yes, you’ll also interact over position – claiming protected areas of the board, for example – and acquisitions – as in the Epic BattleLore setup in which you can claim public command cards to take actions on the board, but if you’re not doing something that will lead to a tear in the opponent’s eye while he contemplates the loss of his troops, then you’re doing something wrong.

Better to drop the ambiguity and talk about the elements of a game in more specific terms: Do you want to destroy another player’s holdings, but are instead limited to reducing her means of acquiring those holdings in the first place? Or to taking actions that increase the value of your holdings more quickly than those of the opponent? Once you boil complaints down to this level of specificity, you realize that all you’re doing is arguing about taste – and we all know how worthwhile those types of arguments can be…

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