I was looking at my blog “to-do list”, and I see a topic called “Mafia” written on September 1st of last year.  I can’t remember if I was considering writing about Italian mobsters or the party/card game.  The odds lie highly in favor of the latter, so I’ll go ahead and do that.

If you know me and/or read this blog, you know that I enjoy playing games.  Once you play a certain number of games, you start to get a sense of what makes a good game or not.  The ideal game has three qualities: novelty, balance, and challenge.

First, novelty.  I wanted to put “interestingness”, but it doesn’t feel like a word.  A game has to capture the interest of the players.  By and large, this is done by presenting the players with something new: humans in general are drawn to novelty.  To illustrate this, say I invent a game called “Lizardopoly”, where players roll dice to move small dinosaur figurines around a square board in order to buy other reptiles.  I imagine that it would be difficult for me to get people to play this game because they would have already exhausted their interest in such a game.

In order to increase the novelty of a game, you can create different roles in a game, thus increasing the number of times a player can play the same game without getting bored.  We’ll call this the diversity principle: as the diversity of roles increases, the novelty/interestingness of a game increases.  For example, Axis and Allies has five different starting countries, allowing players to have five different gaming experiences.  Many games use the diversity principle to increase the replayability of a game: Street Fighter has multiple fighters that players can learn to use and fight against, Bang! has multiple role/ability cards, Starcraft has different races, etc.

The problem with increasing diversity is that games can easily become unbalanced.  Let’s take Puzzle Fighter for example.  Puzzle Fighter tried to increase the diversity of the game by allowing players to choose from one of ten characters.  Without going into details, (they’re here if you want them), only two of the players are actually used in competitive play.  The rest are simply far worse than those two.  I’m not saying that the other players are unplayable, but playing as anybody else does leave you at a disadvantage.  The end result is that only the best options end up getting chosen, and the benefit of having the diversity in the first place has disappeared.

The easiest way to make things balanced is to remove diversity in the game, but this reduces the replayability.  If you have a sufficiently interesting game, that’s fine.  Take chess, or Go.  Both sides are almost perfectly balanced (each player has exactly the same moves available), and yet those games have withstood the test of time.  (Note, of course, that in those games, there still is unbalance in deciding who goes first.)

The final quality is challenge.  The ideal game is quick to learn, impossible to master.  The first part, ease of learning, is somewhat important, since no one will learn to play your game if it is too difficult.  I think Puerto Rico is a fun game, but people’s eyes start to glaze over when you teach them how to play.  Settlers of Catan is pretty difficult as well, but I think it’s getting popular enough where people are willing to put in the time.

The second part is more important.  If the game is too simple, people will stop playing it after they become as good as they can possibly be at the game.  Take Tic-Tac-Toe.  After playing the game a few times, you should always be able to get a cat’s game.  There’s other games like Nim where if the 1st player  (or 2nd, depending on the rules you’re using) should always be able to win no matter what the other player does.  You might not think it, but checkers and Connect Four also fall into this category.

(On a side note: one guy’s Master’s Thesis was to prove that the first player can always win in Connect Four.  I’m simultaneously jealous and disgusted.)

So why am I writing about all of this?  Well…I was going to analyze the game of Mafia, but I felt like I needed to establish some groundwork before I started.  But now my word count is pushing 700, and I don’t think anybody has made it this far.  So in conclusion, I am a nerd.

-Tim

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