My name is Lane Davis, and I’m doing something fantastically stupid. I’m pouring all my resources — treasure, training, and time — into something I’ve failed at nine times. It’s a vocation that’s brutally hard, strictly unforgiving, and utterly inexplicable to most people I meet. That’s right: I’m a game designer. If you’re a lover of games and game culture, a fanatic for puzzles and design, or simply a fellow masochist, there’s something in this column for you.
Fixing Your First Impression
I’ll start with a fairly safe assumption: sometime in your life, you’ve imagined that game. You’ve imagined crafting that original idea or that perfect blend of everything that makes you love games. Just maybe, you’ve shared the idea with friends. If so, you know the terrible reality: that idea, the burning beacon of gaming greatness, can blaze hotly in your heart, but be totally missed by those around you.
Your friends may just not be ready for your innovation. More likely, however, your game doesn’t yet have the charisma, the instant appeal needed to snare eager new players.
So, how can you give your game idea that instant appeal? Let’s examine popular games to find techniques that boost your game’s attractiveness. Today, we’ll discuss two strategies, color coding and playing-by-numbers, that give a great impression the first time a player sits down with your game.
When building a game, you’ll be forever pulled in two directions. One half of your brain, the elite gamer half, will coax you into greater complexity. The other half, which I call the “I want my mom to be able to play this game” half, will urge simplicity. These forces often oppose one another, but there are ways to bake in ease-of-play without compromising strategic depth. One of these is color coding (see How I Got My Mom to Play Through Plants vs Zombies for dozens of other ways to solve this problem).
Color Coding
The card game Dominion is at the apex of “easy to learn, difficult to master.” While the high-level strategy is hopelessly complex, teaching the game is effortless: Dominion explains itself. Dominion is easy to learn because the cards tell you exactly what to do.
You play Dominion by playing cards. Dominion guides you to play cards correctly through use of color. Though it isn’t mentioned in the rulebook, the color of a card tells you when you should care about that card. Crucially, this means that if the card isn’t a relevant color to the current game phase, you can ignore that card.
If you’ve ever played a card game and experienced information overload, you’ve played a game that’s bad at teaching itself. Take these cards from Agricola:
Imagine a hand full of these cards. Not only do they feel like something off of this list, they also don’t help you decide when to play each card. That feeling you get from these cards, information overload mixed with uncertainty, is called analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis, or AP, causes bad feelings, makes games drag, and worst of all, gives a horrible first impression.
To reduce AP, cut through decision-making detritus by guiding your audience with color. This idea is not limited to card games. Gabe Newell discussed the use of color in shooter games, saying “one nice thing about lighting is that people understand what to do without consciously being aware of it.” Further, Portal uses color and lighting to show you where to look.
Playing-by-Numbers
Color coding is only one area where Dominion shines. While colors guide the decisions made each turn, numbers guide long-term strategy:
That number in the lower-left of each card is the card’s cost in coins. Since you get richer over time, you’ll be able to afford different cards as the game goes on. At the beginning of the game, you can only pay for a small fraction of the available cards. This reduces AP by reducing the size of your early options. In fact, a newbie can play at a near-competitive level simply by buying the most expensive card they can afford each turn.
Magic: The Gathering is another example of playing-by-numbers. Every spell card has its cost in the top-right and again, you become able to pay greater costs over time. According to Magic lead designer Mark Rosewater, the cost system adds “great pacing… build-up and excitement [and] evolution” to the game. Best of all, it makes different cards relevant to different phases of the game, leading to simpler, more straightforward decisions.
Maybe your game already has costs. How can you tweak these costs to best guide players through your game? A few ideas:
- Keep one corner reserved for costs. Magic and Dominion both allow instant understanding by always putting costs in the same place. Don’t make players work for information that should be readily at hand.
- Use as few different costs as possible. Magic uses two costs: colored and uncolored mana. Dominion used only one costs, coins, until the Alchemy expansion. Perhaps tellingly, this expansion is the least-popular official expansion. If you must use multiple costs, imitate Settlers of Catan, which replaces play-by-numbers with play-by-type: some resources are valuable early, while others are only good toward the game’s end.
- Use small, whole numbers. That’s it really. Use numbers that people can manipulate easily.
Meaningful Difficulty
Before we wrap up, let’s look at the broad effects of these guiding strategies. Using a play-by-numbers scheme eases players into that first game, just like color coding. Do these techniques take away from the skill needed to win your game? To that, I say that every game should be easy to play. A game’s difficulty should not come from understanding mechanics or grappling with controls. These are artificial barriers to entry, shackles on core gameplay. Free a player from these shackles, and you free them to explore and play within your world.
That’s all for now. Join me next time when I discuss randomness: how to improve (or ruin) your game with die rolls, shuffling, and RNGs.
Bonus Reading:
- Games that teach while you play: EgoRaptor’s Vid on the GENIUS Mega Man X Intro Stage.
- My intellectual heroes, and inspirations for writing this column: Mark Rosewater and David Sirlin.
- How complex is Dominion, really? See the absurdly large collection of strategy articles on dominionstrategy.com.
- Wikipedia article on Analysis Paralysis, most notable for the consequences of AP it addresses.
