Welcome back to my series of articles for new game
designers. In my last post, I talked about how rules are bad. You should strive
to have as few rules as possible. In my work with new game designers, I’ve
noticed several common pitfalls. Today I will address another important
element.
Observation #2—Time is Precious
I recently played a published game where players needed
to first build up their characters and then start to attack powerful monsters
for rewards (good luck guessing what game that was!). The monster-attacking
part of the game was fun, but it took many turns to gain enough strength to
pull it off. We felt as if we were wasting our time at the beginning of the
game.
In game design as in life, time is precious. No one
enjoys sitting in traffic or waiting for a child to find her shoe. This is also
true of board games. Players don’t generally want to be sitting around waiting
for the fun part of the game to happen. New designers often lose sight of this.
First, they tend to overestimate how fun their game is—or at least certain
parts of it. Second, they tend to underestimate how long it will take to finish
the game. Then, I end up looking at a two-player card game with a playing time
of two hours. While it may be possible to design a successful two-player card
game that lasts this long, it’s not going to happen too often.
Generally, your game should be as short as possible. Time
is expensive, and game designers should use a little of it as they can. Does
this mean you can’t design that new three-hour dungeon crawl game? Not at all.
However, every bit of extra time must be painstakingly justified. My go-to advice
when looking at any new design is usually something about the need to
streamline. The operations in the game take too long to perform, serve no clear
purpose, or can be done in a more efficient and elegant manner. So how does one
go about cutting a game down to size? Here are three good places to start.
First, does your game have player elimination? Most of us
grew up playing classic games like Risk and Monopoly, so we understand the disappointment
of getting eliminated from a game before it is over. While player elimination
can sometimes be appropriate, especially in shorter games, modern games often
end the game at or before the moment any player would be eliminated. Many of
these games depend on victory points to determine the winner.
However, there is a fate worse than outright elimination:
essential elimination. A player might be so far behind, she might have no
realistic (or even mathematical) chance to catch up. And yet the game continues.
Instead of being able to watch TV or make a sandwich, the
essentially-eliminated player must sit at the board and struggle through to the
bitter end. The most common way to address this is to somehow obscure the score—usually
with some hidden points or endgame points based on the shifting board
position/game state. Even if your players are essentially eliminated, try to
keep them from knowing it!
Second, consider downtime. Downtime is any time where
players are not interacting with the game. The classic example of this is
waiting for your next turn. In a short game, this might only amount to a few
seconds. But in longer games, this could be several minutes—or even longer!
Downtime might be a factor from turn to turn, but some games have extra
downtime at various points along the way. For example, the game might enter a
state of downtime when two opponents have to resolve a battle that doesn’t
involve you. Sometimes players may even want some downtime in very complicated
games or real-time games. But, in most situations, you should try to reduce it
as much as possible.
There are several ways downtime can be minimized or
mitigated. Note how downtime is addressed in a game like Settlers of Catan. Players
have important considerations even when it is an opponent’s turn, in this case
watching to see if resources will be collected based on the opponent’s dice
roll. Card drafting games and games with simultaneous action selection also
eliminate nearly all downtime. If this does not apply to your game, there are
still a few things you can do. Even if there is nothing for me to do when it’s
not my turn, I might still want to strategize about my next turn. This will make the downtime more bearable. Do all you can
to help players do this. Have players draw new cards at the end of their turn
instead of at the beginning so they can think about how to use them during
downtime. Imagine how much worse Scrabble would be if you drew your tiles at
the beginning of your turn instead of at the end! Many wargames address
downtime during battles by making them interesting to watch. Even if I’m not in
the battle, I might still be interested in the outcome, especially if exciting
dice rolls are involved.
Finally, your game might include too much busywork. Busywork
is just like downtime (you are not really playing the game) but with actions.
Just like those worksheets you got when you had a substitute teacher in school,
busywork in a game can ruin your whole day. Busywork can include setting up the
game, replenishing resources at the start of a round, checking for endgame
conditions, and even tallying the score. But there are less-obvious (and more
troublesome) forms. Any action in the game where you don’t have a choice—or don’t
have a meaningful choice—is actually busywork. So if I can choose option A
(worth 5vp) or option B (worth 10vp), I will obviously choose B even time. This
is a form of busywork. I am going through the motions of a game but not really “playing”
it. This is a huge problem for beginning game designers.
The solution is mostly a matter of presenting your players
with meaningful choices—something at the very heart of game design. For more
obvious forms of busywork, try assigning the work to players who are already
experiencing downtime (perhaps because it’s not their turn). In the example I
talked about at the beginning of this article, the leveling up of my character
was actually busywork. Only when my character began to fight did the “game”
actually start.
This leads me to a last bit of advice. If you notice that
players always have to do X, Y, and Z at the start of every game before really
getting into the experience, consider removing X, Y, and Z. Instead, give the
players all the resources they would normally acquire during the boring part
and skip it altogether. Begin the game later. This also works at the end of the
game. You might notice the game slowing to a crawl at the end. The winner is
all-but-certain, yet the game lumbers on. Instead, cut off this tedious ending
portion of the game, and end the game sooner. In the best games, players often
feel like they needed just one more turn to complete their plans. Don’t let
your players do everything they want, or your game will lack tension.
Nobody wants to make a boring game. We want to make games
that have tension. The way to achieve this is to respect players’ time and use
as little time as possible while still maintaining your core experience. So
always be looking for ways to cut down the playing time of your game—your players
will appreciate it! Next time, I will talk about math in games.
