Defining Conflict

There is a trend in the hobby of people calling for more development of conflict-free games. This leaves me a little baffled. In some cases, I think what is happening is a mismatch of terms—my definition of conflict is not the one they are using. In other cases, I believe there is a desire for games that deliver experiences that I am not sure analog games are capable of providing. So, what is conflict? What kinds of conflict are found in board games? What would a conflict-free game look like? 

Conflict exists when something or someone stands between you and your goal. Any obstacle is a form of conflict. Conflict creates tension and urgency. Overcoming conflict creates feelings of achievement and satisfaction. If we look at the eight types of fun, conflict relates directly to challenge and indirectly to narrative and expression (and you could argue fantasy, fellowship, and discovery also benefit from the existence of conflict). Challenge is the enjoyment we get by striving with/overcoming obstacles. To be conflict-free, a game would need to lack challenge. Expression is the enjoyment we get from creating or expressing ourselves. The primary conflict found in expression is inner conflict. My inhibitions, skill level, and imagination provide limits and obstacles to my ability to express myself. My argument for fantasy, fellowship, and discovery is that conflict adds a sense of purpose (and drama) to our make believe, our social interactions, and our exploration. And then there is narrative. 

Narrative conflict (in literature) has long been divided into around a half-dozen types. Narrative conflict is stated as person or character vs. the source of conflict. The types are as follows: character vs. self, character vs. character, character vs. nature, character vs. supernatural/fate/god, character vs. technology, and character vs. society. The existence of narrative conflict provides characters with the impetus for action and gives meaning to the action. A story without a conflict is a story without a plot.* In board games, conflict-free themes can seem at odds with the win condition, can seem pasted-on, or can seem half-baked where the players don't fully know why they are taking the actions of the game. (Assuming that the game contains challenges but the theme attempts to be conflict-free.)

In video games we find another way to designate conflict: player vs. player (PvP), player vs. the environment (PvE), and various combinations of the two (PvPvE, PvEvP). These terms let players know who is the antagonist, aka who is trying to kill you—the game or other players or both. These terms are relegated to only a few specific types of video games. 

By comparing how conflict is described in literature and video games to how conflict exists in board games, we can create terms for the main modes of conflict. There are three main types of player conflict in board games:

Player vs. Self—This could be expressed by players trying to beat their high score/best time or by players accessing their creativity/self-expression. This conflict is most prominent in party games and some solo games, but exists in games where there are avenues for creative expression within the components and rules, such as engine builders. There is often tension between players' creativity and optimal scoring, which may or may not be a desirable trait in a game. 

Player vs. Game—This is the challenge the game poses to the player. Almost all games have this conflict to an extent (and to the extent that what we consider a game is something with rules that restrict our freedom of choice). But we see this conflict most prominently in solo games, cooperative games, and multi-player solitaire games. A subset of this conflict is player vs. time, where is game imposes time constraints on the players. 

Player vs. Player—This exists whenever a subset of players can defeat other players. This conflict is magnified by direct player interaction, especially negative player interaction. 

So far, we have seen that several types of fun generate or benefit from conflict and that types or styles of gameplay can provide different types of conflict. Now let's look at the intersection of theme and game structure: the win condition. Specifically in this case, what or why are we trying to win? Some games, even thematic games, don't provide a reason for why you want to win. However, most games have at least one of the following three goals.

Beat your opponent(s) in a competition—If there are victory points in a game, it is likely a competition. Races are also competitions. Earning the most money is a competition. Does the game measure your performance against other players? It's a competition. To double down on the theme, many games explicitly state that player characters are thematically challenged to a competition with their peers. Competitions can be team-based or against a game AI. 

Destroy or eliminate your opponent(s)—Most games with player elimination (or that end when one player is reduced to 0) have this type of victory condition. However, you could be destroying NPCs controlled by a game AI (and vice versa). In team-based games, one team may win when all (or a majority of) members of the opposing team are eliminated, such as in Werewolf. 

Outlast your opponent(s)—This is much more rare. Here, you are not actively fighting other players. Instead the focus is surviving what the game throws at you. The goal is to continue to be able to play after other players have failed. I can't think of a tabletop game that does this, although I'm sure there are some (maybe in the dexterity genre?). Dance marathons from the first half of the 20th century fall into this category, as does that car contest where you have to keep your hand on the car for the longest. 

Now let's return to the question of what a conflict-free game would look like. I posit that a conflict-free game would have no win condition. The prospect of winning (and especially losing) generates conflict. Likewise, challenge generates conflict; so conflict-free games cannot be challenging, to the extent that it cannot present difficult or meaningful decisions. Self-expression can generate internal conflict, so that's a no go. Narrative is largely defined by the conflict of obstacles that get between a character and their goals. Yes, I am saying that a conflict-free game can't have story-telling or much in the way of creativity. What kind of game are we left with?

RPGs provide some interesting options if all you want is a game without competition or a win condition. However, due to their narrative nature, all RPGs contain some form of conflict. For conflict-free games, I think we have to look at video games. The types of fun least associated with conflict are sensation and submission. A game that delights the senses (honestly, that's optional) and functions as a rote pastime with goals and rules but no obstacles other than the time commitment to playing is a game that is truly conflict-free. Video games that focus primarily on 'grinding' or 'farming' stand out as exemplars of submission-focused games. Other games that fit this category are Candyland and bingo, because they lack challenge, expression, and narrative, even though they have win conditions. Indeed, bingo is an example of a submission focused game that also has a high degree of fellowship. 

It is possible to want a conflict-free game, but also to think that my description of what that looks like sounds boring. I think here is where we find the mismatch of definitions. When people talk about conflict they may be referring to violence, domination, artificial scarcity promoting needless competition, an us vs. them mentality, antagonism, or just an unhealthy obsession with winning. Games can be free of all of these things but still have conflict. The conflict found in an educational game may be around the obstacles of learning the concepts rather than winning. Overcoming obstacles is often a learning process and learning usually involves overcoming obstacles. Also, as we have seen, the conflict in a game does not have to come from pitting players against each other. By understanding what conflict is, we are better able to carefully craft the sorts of conflict found in our games. 

I believe that board (and card) games are best suited to challenge-related conflict. Games create space for us to model overcoming obstacles and failing safely. Games let us practice how to respond to conflict. Conflict is just another tool we use when designing games. Instead of blaming the tool, let's learn how we can be more proficient in its use. 

*I'm coming from a western point of view. There are other ways to think about literature. However, I think that my broader point about how the types of fun intersect with conflict still stands. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Mechanics Roundup: Roll & Write

It has been over six months since I've written a post purely about mechanics. (We're not counting the recent theming actions/structures/strategies series, because in my mind those posts are about theme.) This is a mechanics roundup post, my second, that takes a deep look at the mechanisms that that can crop up in certain areas of game design. This post is all about roll & writes. 

I'm not an expert in the roll & write genre; I simply haven't played that many. But I find their ever-branching development to be fascinating. So, while this post will be far from comprehensive, I want to break down some of the mechanisms that crop up in the roll & write genre. 

Sometimes called random & write, the umbrella genre breaks into two halves: dice (true roll & writes) and cards (flip & writes or draw & writes or draw & draws). The genre is largely defined by the random or semi-random accrual of resources and logging those resources on a personal player sheet (or more rarely a communal board). I'm using the word resources in the broadest possible sense to include roads and buildings and geographical features (or merely numbers that must be logged in a certain order) as well as items we more traditionally think of as resources. In theory, any sort of randomizer could be substituted for dice or cards. Sonora is a flick & write, using dexterity as a semi-randomizer. Acquiring resources in a way that is not at all random, however, would likely fall beyond the boundaries of this genre. For instance, I have a game that involves flipping cards to obtain resources, but the cards are laid out in a grid and the players always know what is on the reverse side of each card. I joke that the game is a flip & write, but the main mechanisms are action drafting and blocking. On the other side of the coin, games that don't involve marking on a board or sheet also tend to not be included in the genre, even if they have all the other hallmarks of a roll & write. Era: Medieval Age claims to be a roll & build, because the game takes elements previously seen in roll & writes but eschews drawing in favor of placing plastic buildings on a board. 

Now that we know the minimum requirements for a game to be a random & write, let's take a closer look at common mechanisms found in the genre. There is a great variance of mechanisms within random acquisition beyond whether the game uses dice or cards. Here are some of the more prominent ones— 

Bingo: Every player must allocate 100% of the resources revealed. The only choice presented is how players choose to allocate the resources. This mechanism is used with both dice and cards, sometimes with both at once. Players are almost always allocating resources simultaneously to their personal boards. (Let's Make a Bus Route subverts this by having the revealed resource card translate into different actions for each player which are then carried out on a common board.) 

Simultaneous pooled resource selection: This is a variant of bingo. Every player must choose a subset of the resources revealed. There may be restrictions on how resources are chosen. Play is still simultaneous and resources do not diminish. This adds increased variance between player boards. Again, this mechanism uses dice, cards, or both. I haven't seen this done with a shared board, but it seems more possible than simple bingo. Isle of Cats: Explore and Draw showcases how using this mechanism with cards can add strategic tension by having two different decks that get added to the pool each round.

Drafting: Players select a subset of resources from a pool and those resources are no longer available to other players. Acquisition is therefore turn based. Allocation may also be turn based, especially if there is a shared board. First player may rotate from round to round to make drafting more fair. This mechanism could use cards or dice but is unlikely to have both. Cards are more likely to be drafted from a pool rather than pick-and-pass, largely because simple, fast acquisition is a hallmark of the genre. (Combos in R&Ws usually come from how resources are allocated, not how they are acquired.) Let's Make a Bus Route: The Dice Game sits somewhere between drafting and pooled resource selection; the first player chooses three dice and the second player chooses one. 

Yahtzee: On their turn, the active player rolls a pool of dice up to three times, selecting some dice to save after each roll. Play is turn based; resources are not shared. This mechanism offers the most choice per turn but also the most instances of randomness. As far as I know, there is not a game that attempts a Yahtzee mechanism with cards or on a shared board. If you're looking on BGG for this mechanism, it is listed as 're-rolling & locking.' 

Resource allocation mechanisms fall broadly into two categories: set collection and spatial placement— 

Set collection almost always requires a personal board to mark off resources that have been collected. Completed sets usually offer bonus points and/or single special abilities that allow players to trigger combos. Set collection mechanisms encourage players to push their luck by penalizing collecting too much of a resource. Players are more likely to mark off resources by ticking a box than draw them as icons. The trait that won me over for R&Ws is that you are not limited to the number of resource chits that can fit in a box. You can put thirty different resources on a single sheet and still have a small, affordable game. Generally, large numbers of resources are going to fall into set collection and not have a spatial element. 

Spatial placement typically uses a grid that may have preprinted features and/or coordinates that restrict placement. Spatial placement mechanisms focus on adjacency and connection. They create tension by allowing players to paint themselves into a corner. Players are more likely to draw resources than mark them off, although grids of preprinted resources combine elements of set collection and spatial placement. Spatial placement mechanisms really took off with the advent of map-building games that combine route-building or city-building with terrain-building. These games produce visual artifacts as the result of play that can be quite aesthetic, especially compared to the spreadsheet look of most R&Ws. 

Many spatial placement games have set collection aspects to them such as Harvest Dice, which has players drawing vegetables in a garden plot. In Harvest Dice, adjacency restricts where you can plant but scoring is determined by sets of vegetables and their market value. Games can also combine both set collection and spatial placement as separate ideas in the same game. In Let's Make a Bus Route, players use spatial placement to build routes on a shared board. The routes collect secondary resources (riders) that are marked off on a personal player board. Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade combines set collection and spatial placement by making the sets only reachable thru various spatial rules (mostly involving implied gravity). Layering resource allocation mechanisms can provide additional tension and depth of play at the cost of making the game more complex. 

Both simultaneous resource selection/acquisition and simultaneous allocation are hallmarks of R&Ws. This keeps the games feeling fast and breezy even when players are making tense decisions because there is virtually no downtime between turns. Personal player boards facilitate simultaneous actions but prevent most player interaction. R&Ws are efficiency puzzles; most have a set number of rounds or end when a player has filled a certain portion of their board. Player interaction may not be particularly desirable, as players are likely to be focused on their own puzzle. 

None of this is prescriptive, however. As the genre continues to iterate and expand, some games (like Era: Medieval Age) will fall outside the bounds of what is considered a R&W. Other games, like Sonora, are considered within the genre, even as they push the limits of what it means to be a random & write. Genres work best as ways of descriptively grouping things, and pushing boundaries is often how new genres are created. Since this genre has such a simple format, it provides a lot of opportunity for creative mechanisms, because almost anything goes. Is there luck? Do you draw or write? If yes, you're good to go. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Dealing with Doldrums

The last few weeks on this blog have seen a lot of high effort (for me) posts that required a decent amount of research. In addition, I was working on a deadline to submit a game to a publisher. Now that I'm past the deadline and between series, so to speak, it seems like a good time to write about something I've had lurking in my idea book for six months. In this post, I want to talk about design doldrums. 

There is a lot of information to be found online about imposter syndrome. And Dunning-Kruger. Threaded around these topics you'll discover discussions about how long it takes to become competent in a new skill or how you develop good taste before you develop good execution. And that comes close to what I think the doldrums are. 

For me, being in the doldrums is existing in a gap between your experience and your achievement combined with what I'll call a leveling up problem. When you first learn a new skill, the early concepts come faster and easier than when you hit the doldrums. In the doldrums, your early excitement is replaced by a certain amount of tedium. Skills become harder to build. The shine of novelty wears off. This is the leveling problem. You feel as though you aren't progressing as quickly as in your early days as a designer. On top of that, you may have achieved something you're proud of but can't announce due to the delay of publishing cycles. That's the achievement gap. As far as you're concerned, you have moved from hobbyist to professional, but no one will likely see the fruits of your labor for the next three years. Meanwhile, you have to keep designing and pitching like you deserve to be in this space. (See the connection with imposter syndrome?) 

So many designers exist are in the gap between knowing how to design a good game and getting recognition as being good designers. This seems to be when many designers give up and quit. Which is completely understandable, given that for some designers the doldrums last years stretching into decades. So what can be done about it? 

Step one: figure out why you design. If your why has to do with accolades, your energy could be spent elsewhere. If you want recognition, become a community organizer, which the hobby always needs more of. If your why is making something that can bring joy to others or is stretching design concepts in experimental ways, you're on the right track. Your why should drive your activity. 

Step two: push yourself like an athlete. You've got the basic skills. You have to practice, but also seek out more advanced training. That can look like playing games by respected designers who design in a style different from yours, playtesting with more experienced designers in the industry, or creating design teams with your peers to help push each other onward. It also looks like designing with a regular schedule, rather than only when inspiration hits. 

Step three: move the goal posts. Film actors have to learn to define success as getting an audition instead of getting cast in a role, because otherwise the rejection rate would be too much. Publisher interest is a more reasonable goal than a signed contract. When you research publishers, shoot for submissions that are so targeted that if even one publisher responds you have a good response rate. I like my response rate to be between 1-in-3 to 1-in-6. If you can't get a constructive response after six submissions, find someone who can give you honest feedback with an industry perspective. Maybe the game isn't viable as a product or maybe your submission package just needs work. 

Step four: celebrate your victories. Maybe you were selected for speed pitching, but no contracts resulted from the event. You still had face time with a bunch of publishers. Maybe you had one game signed but struggle to get a second. Don't move the goal posts to published games just because it happened once. Every handshake, every elevator pitch is a victory. If you can't accept this perspective, go back to step one. 

I have very mixed feelings about fora that ask you to post weekly progress. Sometimes progress is small or even intangible. Sometimes talking about it could kill the fragile momentum you've built. And looking at others' responses can make you feel like you're falling behind. You'll know if those types of posts help you or not. But keep a private list, one that tracks your victories and lays out your goals. Remember, awards don't belong on the goals list. Find joy in the process. 

The doldrums are hard. I am definitely in the experience/achievement gap, and I am definitely not taking all of my own advice. But I am working on it. Moving step by step to a place where I can design steadily for years to come. Every day can be a victory against the doldrums. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Playable Character Roles

This post spun out of ideas I had while working on my recent post about game structures. In this post I want to look at different roles players take on when playing a game. 

When developing themes alongside mechanics, an important question to ask is "Who is the player playing as?" Most, but not all, games benefit from an explicit answer to that question. 

The Hero is probably the first role most people think of. Hero characters may be solo acts (especially in competitive or solo games), team members (such as in cooperative games), or faction leaders (skirmish and civ games). This role requires that you know who you are playing and that that role is in some way unique from the other players. Characters may have different stats or powers, but different portraits can be enough of a distinction. Unique jobs can also be enough. If the job is carpenter and every player is playing the same nameless, faceless carpenter, that job will not make players feel like they are the hero of their story. However, being the only stone mason in the village is enough detail to become invested in the inner life of a character. And in fact, most games where players play only one character will provide some detail about the characters. Furthermore, a character is not always a person, sometimes your 'character' is a corporation. As long as a corporation has a unique logo and/or player power, it still qualifies as a hero role. (Although you should design with the implications of making a corporation the hero in mind.)

The Baddie could be a villain character or a traitor character. Villains are bad from the outset while traitor characters often switch sides at some point during the game. Villains, as a role distinct from heroes, are opposed to the majority of players, such as in one-vs-all games. To be a villain, the character must be competing against the other characters in a way those characters are not competing against each other. Villain roles usually give their players more information or exclusive information that is hidden from the other characters, such as in hidden movement games. Narratively, this gives the role a 'plotting' air. Often villain roles require a player to curate the experience for the other players, rather than playing as competitively as possible. Villains need the same level of detail that heroes do in order for players to invest in them as characters. A villainous character could still fill the role of hero, if they are not uniquely opposed to the other characters. I wrote an entire post about villainous characters in games, so I won't spend much time on them here. 

The Squad could be a team or a population. In this situation, the player is playing as multiple characters. In many cases, these games have an implied boss character (a Boss) or an explicit leader (a Hero). However, in games like Flame Rouge or Quest for Eldorado you can definitely make the case that while the player has god-level control and knowledge in the game, the characters in the story are presumed to have free will. This is easier to do if the characters have separate goals or trajectories that can narratively imply independent decision making. 

The Boss could be a business manager, a general, or even a deity, depending on what makes sense in the fiction. This role is what happens when you don't specify a hero character, but the minion characters clearly don't have free will.  This is common in worker placement games and asymmetrical games, among others. If a manager, general, or deity has a named role and card art, that technically makes them a hero (or villain) character and not a boss. The boss is a meta explanation for why the player has total control over a number of characters. 

Blind Forces falls somewhere between the hero and the boss. Players may be told who they are, but who they are is a force of nature, law of physics, or a philosophical idea. Players may be mechanically distinct from one another, but won't have much in the way of character background. (Personified forces with character portraits would be heroes.) Storytelling can get tricky around blind forces, as players won't have discernible in-world motivation to defeat other players. An example is Petrichor, where players play clouds who have a preference in what plants their water grows. 

Unspecified Roles are sometimes the best options. Sometimes, the implications of the role take your world building in a direction you don't want it to go. For example, if you try to figure out who you are playing as in A Fistful of Meeples, you may come to the conclusion that you are an Old West mobster extorting a town. Instead, the game wisely doesn't try to explain why you benefit from both arrests and robberies. Other times, the most logical explanation is either boring or doesn't add much to the game. I think of these as 'filing clerk' roles. An example is Space Base, where your role is specified in the rules fluff and never again—because you are a garage attendant for a space station. Obviously, the boss is a type of unspecified role, but one that most players could intuitively explain after playing your game. Lastly, one type of unspecified role is when players are playing above the narrative. Players will sometimes take on the role of 'player doing a mechanical action' that is not tied into the theme. Because the action is not tied into the theme, the role is not either. 

Roles are a huge aspect of world building. Mechanically, roles provide logic for player actions. Thematically, roles allow players to invest in their characters. Roles should be consistent with the logic of your world building. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.