Making the Most of Pauses

Pauses are moments in gameplay when the game state takes precedent over the game world or when busywork intrudes upon the rhythm of play. Pauses allow players to catch their breath and check in on the game state. Pauses provide structure in the form of guide posts throughout the game. Pauses occur at the beginning and end of rounds, at the end of turns, during scoring, etc. 

Handled poorly, pauses can become interruptions. People have the ability to sustain a state of mind even when something distracts them. Imagine, for example, waking up in the night and needing a glass of water. If you are like me, you will leave the lights off and keep your task as brief as possible so as to never become fully alert, which makes returning to sleep that much easier. However, turning the lights on and having a conversation with the cat can make returning to sleep much more difficult. 

Pauses occur during transitions. The designer's job is to smooth transitions as much as possible. Carefully designed transitions will provide the benefits of a pause without breaking the absorption of the players. Good graphic design is a requirement. Intuitive rules are important. Transitions that make sense thematically can also help. 

If more time is spent in tinkering with the game state rather than the game world, pauses will inevitably become interruptions. This applies to set-up, take down, scoring, rules referencing, some AI management, etc, but also applies to other pure game state mechanics IF the appeal of the game is interacting with the game world. Usually, the draw of a drafting game is mechanical just as much as (or more than) thematic. However, the hook of an adventure game is getting to interact with the game world. Thus the adventure game is less tolerant of purely game state mechanisms than the drafting game is. This becomes an issue because adventure games (and narrative-rich games more generally) are usually more complicated than drafting games, and complicated games tend to have more upkeep. So we find ourselves with the issue that the games that are most harmed by interruptions tend to be games more susceptible to them. War games have solved this issue by making the simulative rules and upkeep a feature not a bug, but that has limited the audience for those games considerably. 

Here are some guidelines for handling pauses: 

-Minimize busywork. Busywork is always a pause and often an interruption. 

-Plan pauses that minimize downtime. Maybe your round structure allows for partial simultaneous play and partial turn-based. Pauses and distinct phases go hand in hand and provide non-mechanical benefits to the experience of play. The rulebook could also suggest that players who finish their turns/upkeep first should begin set up for the next round. 

-Theme everything, at first. Go overboard on thematic justification then pull back based on what playtesters  find to be cheesy. You may find new ways to bring parts of the game state into your game world.

-Theme around the action of the game. If your game world is simply layered onto your game state, you may not have any problems because the game state never will interrupt the game world. If, however, your game world is present in part of the game but not the rest, you are likely to inadvertently design interruptions into your game. Theming the game more closely around the gameplay is IMO the more fun solution to this problem. 

Remember that pauses are not bad and provide necessary structure to a game. The designer's job is to intentionally design pauses that augment rather than detract from the player experience. Plan your pauses lest the become interruptions. 

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