"King Me": A Defense of King-Making in Board Game Design

[Music] so my name is cole worley and i'm the staff designer and sort of the de facto head of development at leader games which is a small game studio based in st paul minnesota we have about seven people on staff uh which is sort of like large for a small studio but nowhere near what like an actual publisher would look like we all still only work in one room and over the past couple years i have been working for them and we have together have made the game root uh which i'll be talking a little bit today uh and then in addition to that i have a small micro publisher with my brother where we do sort of weird history games so i've been thinking about and designing games uh about conflict about king making and about how uncomfortable makes us feel for a while and so i'm gonna kind of put those thoughts together uh when i originally sat out to give this talk i thought i'd start with something like a root post-mortem you know this is gec talk and people seem to like picking

apart dead bodies uh but root it still feels way too early for it um we have a big kickstarter going on right now there's lots of content coming down the pipe and i just don't think i have a vantage point which i could think systematically about like what root is and what it's done well and not done well although if you do have questions about the creation we can certainly talk about that in the q a however when i was thinking about this talk as i dug into root i was reminded of the strangeness of the design now for any of you who've who've sort of gone through all the paces with a big project you know that by the end of the project it seems like the most natural thing in the world but with a little bit of distance you can be reminded of how weird it is uh root is a strange game and it's done well you know every year will kind of produce like a breakout hit i just had never thought that anything i'd ever work on would do it it just wasn't something uh that we were designing for now i don't mean to sound ungrateful about any of this uh root was blessed with a wonderful creative team and a great artist these are some drawings from kyle fair and i just want

to show off his talent because i get to bother him and fill out the art request list and i want to show it off the game is cute it's adorable it pulls people in and it has a really nice pitch so root is an asymmetric strategy game now usually when we say an asymmetric strategy game people tend to think about it on the order of different powers in a d d party one person's the tank another person might be healing someone's a magic user or a thief root's really asymmetric so dramatically asymmetric that the different player positions are almost operating in different games so as an example the way the pitch goes if i were encountering you guys at pax east or something it's basically one player is managing a kingdom she starts the game with full control of the board a warrior in nearly every clearing uh there are buildings all the place she's freshly conquered the woodland and all she needs to do is keep the peace

and she's keeping the peace so that she can move her resources around and build her kingdom up and during that process a rebellion might break out and she might have to deal with sympathy for the insurgents in order to put down the rebellion she might find help from a wandering mercenary but if the mercenary in putting down the rebellion becomes more popular than she is then maybe she'll have to exile that that mercenary there's no script to this all of these interactions happen organically and rather than these different events sort of being dictated by the a draw of an event card uh each one of these different positions is essentially a different player one player plays you know uh essentially an adventure game working within the larger game the player who's playing the rebellion is having to be really has is essentially playing a political game underneath the economic game uh that the marquis de cat is playing now usually around this time if i'm at a convention i'll turn around the box and they'll see these really cute meeples and the thing is more or less sold on

the spot because look at that meeple but but before i ring them up on the register i i have to be as straight as possible with them root is not a game for everybody usually the test i give to prospective buyers looks something like this are you okay with the fact that one of your friends is going to put pieces on the board and then another one of your friends is going to remove those pieces and they might laugh at you when they do it and if you can pass that test you're probably a good candidate to buying it uh there's just no getting around it the game is very very mean um and it's mean in a way that is a little out of step with not only the kinds of games that sell to a broad audience in the hobby market but also a more general design ethos now it's mean i think when we talk about the meanness i should be specific what i'm talking about there are no catch-up mechanisms there's a lot of direct player interaction some of it is zero sum i'm going to take something and you can't

have it it's also got a really really high variance depending on the faction mixes the play styles you know all of the things around the actual playing of the game a round of root can look very very very different and i don't want to hide that from the players now usually these sorts of elements are kind of regarded as a little bit old-fashioned and they get polished out in the development process i've been fortunate to be on the development teams for beneath many games and i know that when a game goes from design to development the questions shift right when you're designing a game you're trying to make an impression you're trying to get your capture the imagination of your prospective publisher but when you're developing a game you're trying to make sure that you're not going to make your players mad right i mean it's a different it's a wholly different set of skills you don't want to make your players mad you want them to come back to like it you don't want like hate mail on bgg or really angry reddit threads

so when root started moving from design to development i was a little worried because of the things that i really liked about the game were the things that i knew were going to be totally destroyed in development thankfully patrick leader our owner and creative director had the temerity to also let me be on the development team and which is awful an awful decision you should never allow a designer to work on development i really love development and i love uh the process of cutting something apart that i've spent a year building um but i worked really hard to make sure that even as we made the game more elegant and as we sort of cut it up nicely that the weird parts were the parts that stayed so today i want to talk a little bit about the sharp edges of root the meanness of the game and i want to do this by not by talking about root but instead of by talking about why we think of those things as sharp edges in the first place and what we might be losing when we don't explore them uh and so in order to make sort of launch this exploration

i think we have to think about a sort of central term and that term for me uh is king making because ultimately root is a game about king making i always have like a good laugh when i see a thread and someone's like oh man root i heard that it has a king making problem and i'm like it doesn't have a king-making problem it is the king-making problem and it's a political game i mean if you're making a political game it makes sense that you're dealing with concepts like power brokers right uh but the fact that we oftentimes get friction there from uh people wanting to buy the game or from critics i think suggests that we are currently in a tabletop era that is really locked into a certain kind of design ethos so we're going to start by talking a little bit about king making and i'm going to try to trace why i think it's fallen out of fashion and then i want to marshal a sort of like simple defense for king making and then talk about some practical lessons for those would-be practitioners out there so king making the act of making someone king it's pretty simple uh the term is

actually a little bit more interesting than that uh it starts with this guy there he is richard neville earl warwick by the way you're going to get a lot of like stupid no animation powerpoints for me with old pictures because i come from an academic background and that's how we do our powerpoints so this guy richard neville the earl of warwick warwick the king maker he was called during the war of the roses that title was used almost entirely derisively because he was you know bad you know when we're back in the era of the divine right of kings if you have someone a human deciding who to become king that's an awful uh heretical idea um and so it falls out of fashion pretty quickly although and just a little note so the game on the right is avalon hill's famous game king maker uh which i always thought was named after like the king making problem but it's actually no it's it's about uh mr earl of warwick over there um now an interesting thing happens in the 18th century so a few hundred years after that uh the historian david hume right you didn't think i was going to go there but here we are in the 18th

century he starts using the word king maker in a very positive way and he he loves richard neville because for him to be master of your age was to be in a position where you got to determine the course of history and so the king makers are the real heroes not not the kings okay so here a slight bit of disclosure is needed i love games when i get to make the king even if i don't get to be the king and oftentimes i even enjoy it the experience uh when it fires against me when i was uh sort of looking for pictures deep deep deep inside of board game geek i stumbled into this one circa 2006 and the twilight imperium uh it's in the twilight imperium image gallery guys and this is a a rare shot of me playing game of twelve imperium at the moment someone has stolen the victory for me by passing an idiotic law um and and i just there there's hatred in those eyes but also that that's a game that that stuck

in my mind when i stumbled on this picture which i had completely forgotten about i remembered so many things about that game including the fact that we were playing in a weird like attiky space and we only had three hours to play so we played a game at twilight imperium in three hours if you can possibly believe it um so even talking about king making and thinking about the idea that uh you it might be desirable for you to steal a victory from your friend and to be mean to each other it it it provokes even me a fan of the genre it promotes a really physical response i like my stomach turns a little and i cringe this is this is strange because we all have opinions about games uh you know you might like party games or you might like games about panzer tanks in world war ii but you know your distaste for panzer takes doesn't lead you to have your stomach turn king making on the other hand is attacking something really basic and as someone who plays games and designs them and also like tries to really earnestly study

them that physical response is interesting because it seems different from other ways of other preferences that we express about our games so why does why do we dislike king making so much where does this dislike come from was it always with us is this sort of a new invention i sort of want to start here with this really really broad historical frame because i think uh one thing that happens when we talk about games is we think about them as very new and we like to think about oh you remember back when katan came out that was an eight that was like the ancient age of board games which is of course not true but because our the modern iteration of this of this art form is only 30 years old we like to extend our timeline and we think in gold ages and silver ages and we're really talking about just a couple decades so i think this is a very very unremarkable thesis but it's needed here we don't like king making because we like fairness fairness is really really

critically important to how we think about games what we want them to do and all the rest we generally view our games as a contest of skills and experience and we have this idea in the back of our minds that it's going to be fairly decided that's important and this leads us to sort of weird mental leaps of logic that aren't always necessary so for instance when you sit down and play katan uh you might roll very well in the first half of the game and everybody else thinks well i've i've built my cities on all of those sixes and eights and it's it'll be my day soon and even the person who's experiencing the good luck knows that maybe their luck is going to fall off now that's nonsense you know it's possible an eight is never rolled in an entire game of catan but even even if you play something as as capricious as yahtzee there's a general sense that we are all experiencing the same kind of luck and we all need to make the most out of what is doled to us now this is a totally new and crazy way

of thinking i think that we live in an age that is really preoccupied by fairness or at least the appearance of fairness uh as anyone knows like the world is not a very fair place at all um and this was a little more obvious when you go backwards consider for instance um the trojan war see i told you guys i warned you uh fairness is pretty new i mean think about the trojan war right one by a tricky person doing a tricky trick and how dirty of him to sneak a bunch of people in within a fake horse um and in fact odysseus is a hero is prized for his guile he's a trickster hero we love him for it there's nothing fair about the whole thing this can be broadly expended to a lot of the ways that people have written and thought about games since the inception of games themselves some of the first records of games of chess being played were games where cheating took place and then people were often killed afterwards which is why they bothered to ride in the first place

if you i mean you can stumble upon that if you just search like history of chess and cheating like it's it is incredible the number of people who have died because they uh they sli slid their you know they just happened to find a way to put their queen on the board in the late game uh this is there's a famous anecdote about napoleon being awful at chess but the other anecdote about napoleon and chess is that usually at the end of his game uh the player person who's playing it would notice that like both of the bishops were on the same color but by that point napoleon had like whisked away and was you know have it doing some real conquering but and it was actually there i mean i won't get into all the stuff because i could go on all day um there was a sense that like even cheating was part of the game and what you could get away with at the table i mean it was all it was all part of it i mean really bridge for those of you who've taken any look at bridge so much of that game is what is the cool informal communication system that we can arrive at without anybody realizing that we're sort of breaking the rules bridge without really breaking the rules of bridge when i was teaching at the university of texas we

often used this story called the queen of spades by a guy named alexander pushkin and it's an interesting story in the context of this talk because basically it's about a game a game of pharaoh a gambling game and the main character his name's herman he's an engineer and he hates games he hates how capricious how seemingly unfair they are and then he discovers that there might be a trick to pharaoh a secret strategy which will lead him to always win and like so many adult users of bgg he hunts the forums and he figures out exactly what the critical trick is to win at pharaoh and he figures it out and he cheats a bunch of people out of their money how unfair for the people he played against and then in typical russian narrative logic uh he loses all his money and goes insane so unfair for the people he cheated unfair for himself unfair for everybody that's games now it may seem a little trite to just be talking about literature in this way like obviously i'm drifting a little bit from the stakes of games but i want to just make sure that we all realize that this

ethos of unfairness uh this extended to many different spheres of life one quick example i'll give everyone is the trial by ordeal and by combat so this is a a sort of judicial test a bit of jurisprudence where basically if you don't know whether or not someone is telling the truth you just start lighting them on fire or you dump them in the water and if they're telling the truth god will save them and if they're not then obviously they were wrong now that seems insane to us but what the critical thing is that like fairness wasn't important it was this like capital t truth that was looming behind things and the capital t truth could be paradoxical and could be rotten and all of those things now in germany the fabled land of board games uh in ancient germany they sort of spun this into a tradition known as trial by combat um and what's interesting about even trial by combat is it you don't practice it or you're not

supposed to uh it's not about like the bigger guy is always going to win in a trial of combat it's the person who's right they get they get to win so this is always you know the thing about might versus right that sometimes gets forgotten is in so many sort of dogmatic logics might is given to the people who are right it's not like i'm strong so i'm going to pin you down to the ground and make you do whatever you'd like whatever i'd like you to do which is a very like modern way of reviewing it it's like no god has appointed certain people to be strong and then they also carry a kind of rightness with them and the more modern like spinning of dueling and honor all that it kind of flies out from this now i'm going to stop here sort of with the historical stuff to just step back and say that okay so right now and if you think about the modern design ethos how we think about games and what makes a good game and a bad game fairness is very important and here we have one man shooting another man

probably over something really stupid uh although not in this case because it's hamilton and burr um so how do we get to fairness where does it come from now i'm not going to give you guys a full chronology of fairness because we got more interesting interesting things to talk about uh but there is a very easy short history of it which is to say we can talk about victorian morality now board game this is the origin of board games in the in the modern sense uh so board games come about uh in the 19th century and the result of basically three things uh one printing got really cheap you get steam presses you get it's easy to like you know to manufacture you've got a factory system that can glue things onto pasteboards so they get very cheap more people know how to read uh which you need if for a lot of these early board games and the last thing is you have a sense of a utilitarian sense that maybe we should be teaching people things so this is a very early board game from 1843 called the mansion of happiness by a guy named george fox and like most

victorian board games it's a roland move how fun you basically make no decisions and you land on spaces and then you either get to go further if you landed on a space where you did something good or you go backwards if you did something naughty uh and the reward of the game is you get into heaven which is also nice um now what what is really wild here is like life is still in circulation guys like we have not moved past this point really at all we just have a more colorful spinner um and in the 18 in 1886 uh this is one of many uh i love this the game of the district messenger boy or merit rewarded now uh what what is interesting about this second game is that uh it's not couched in spiritual turns basically in spiritual terms basically if you do things that are good and nice then you get money in the game and you get more and more money and then eventually you're andrew carnegie um now some of you might be noticing a

weird disconnect here so here's a game that is maybe teaching you about the dangers of gambling but you're rolling a die so like i roll the die and i landed on oh dang bet all my money in cards go back and then i someone else rolls the dime they say you gave up gambling advance but we both roll to die so there's a weird mechanical and thematic friction happening here um and i think a lot of our current design ethos comes out of a desire to fix this problem so um we arrived then at the fun and fair design ethos games should delight and they should instruct so we want you know like those happy happy victorian children we want to learn in our games we want to be enriched by them and we want to be delighted by them but in order to make the games coherent you need to make it so that skill and experience are rewarded by victory

and i think basically everything about how we practice design sort of comes out of this tension right we want our games to be fair because if they're not fair then we're not teaching the lesson that we want to teach but if you have a game be charged with something like morality right if you win the game you were the most economical you were the most virtuous then what the game is also doing is sort of like in calvinist fashion separating out the damned from the saved the winners from the losers and anybody who's ever lost a friend or a family member over again monopoly realizes that there's like a real charge to this right okay so remember how at the beginning when i was talking about king making i was feeling a little queasy looking at these victorian children also makes me feel queasy because i feel like fairness itself is a little storied and when you start thinking about it when you start thinking about the cool games that we're making as part of an ideological program it makes the

games a lot less cool so i it actually gets a lot worse when i was a graduate student i stumbled into this book james magnums or j.a magans the game ethic and imperialism i apologize for that just awful type of the title i literally stumbled into this book it was in a free stack in a box and i just tripped over it as i was walking down the hallway and at the time i was working on a game about afghanistan and thinking a lot about sort of turn-of-the-century game design and so i just put the book in my bag and thought cool i'm gonna learn about h.g wells's war games and maybe something about empire and something like that and it it was you know like any book that you acquire it takes like a year to actually open it up and when i did open it up i found that it was actually about something quite different uh which is the game's ethic and i think this is a really useful and powerful idea so the basic argument that magnum makes is this uh sports games in general as a competitive and serious hobby they emerge in the 19th century public school

system in britain now the public school system isn't it means something in britain in the british context that's different from the united states context so in the u.s when we talk about public schools we just mean state-controlled schools in the british context a public school is about the management of empire and the management of the broader sort of governmental and bureaucratic apparatus of the state so addis comb and a whole lot of other schools were basically founded to staff the british imperial venture abroad because they needed clerks right in india so what magnum talks about is like games early early games were not about being fit or having fun like the delight part was just the lure it was just the loot box to get you to play again actually there was an ideological program at work and here's how he describes it basically the school administrators were convinced in the desirability of games especially team games in training the young this is a quote from him they

believed in the value of those games for the development of ethical behavior they had a view of education that was not only national but also imperial they saw it as their duty to give a lead to the imperial world so all these schools start spreading throughout india and they're having indian cricket teams and all the best teams in qriket these days are indian teams but it was part of the civilizing mission to sort of teach fairness and to teach rules and law because all of those things reflected the sort of ideological program of the british state now this can seem a little distant from us right here we are in san francisco gdc and we are so so very far from the imperial program but what you should know is that this tradition uh is still very much with us and many of you guys are somewhat indoctrinated into it including myself i'm sorry to break your bubble so rugby we know uh the game of rugby it comes in name from the rugby school it spawned a whole genre of novels called

the british boarding school genre including a novel called tom brown school days which was the blue point for harry potter of course harry potter is an english boarding school drama he's learning right now how to be a good little imperial servant even though he doesn't think of himself that way but if you get good at quidditch you'll get good at empire um now the point of all this is not to suggest that fairness is wrong and that sports don't teach you good things about being a person and existing in society it's just that i think that we have a lot to gain from giving ourselves a little bit of distance from the concept and for starting to imagine um or maybe not imagine but starting to treat the history of fairness um as storied right if you and if you if you're sh if you are shooting for fairness in a design you're working on you're making a kind of value judgment and you should just keep that in mind as you're pedaling your design so what happens then if we look for a different framework to

design from maybe not an overall rejection of fairness but just downgrading its value suddenly things like spite and being mean for no reason like what if those are able to do something um well i think when you boil everything away this shift in design priorities leads fundamentally to games where the winner is decided by a cabal rather than some sense of like individual merit in other words we're talking about king making this of course being an old cover of the excellent excellent game diplomacy um so i want to tell you now uh and just offer a short defense of king making as a concept and how we can go about that defense and then i'll talk about some design takeaways and sort of like practical practical tips for it so i want to build this defense first on narrative grounds because i think that games are

fundamentally a storytelling medium even when we're talking about games like the estates or chicago express or some nerdy train game that has a spreadsheet in it the biggest math fest game is still a storytelling game it's communicating a kind of narrative and so the critical language that we use to talk about stories is just well appointed to talk about games in this sense i think that we can talk about games in terms of cliche so we know for instance that in romantic comedies or comedies more general in the classic sense that they're going to end in a marriage that's a that's a narrative cliche likewise you know that when you're done playing like an empire builder that everything that you did is going to cash out and really like neat sets of three to one like gold to victory point because we got to tighten those scores somehow and make everybody feel like they were close to the end of the game even though it was no contest at all and

these cliches can be frustrating because i'm sure you've had the thought watching a romantic comedy that it would have been much better if she would have left him at the end of the first act and the movie would have been much more interesting if she was just gone on a road trip but the song and dance of going through the building of an engine and it's scoring is it's circumscribing the possible expression and again and i'll say this several more times this isn't to suggest that those games are wrong i love both of these games especially race and i think that they are worth designing playing and there's still a lot of room to explore there but we shouldn't allow that kind of genre to dominate our larger thinking about games king making in this sense offers an alternative type of scory storytelling it allows designers and players to tap into a really long tradition of betrayal and manipulation that's as old as narrative itself and it forms the foundation for a lot of media that we enjoy today from the bachelor to game of thrones and

there's no reason why we shouldn't play with those concepts when we talk about the engine builder the primary sort of motif is construction it's progressive um it's it's well i won't i won't go into wig history because i'll bore you guys all to death but what what king making offers us is perhaps the most powerful narrative tool that any writer has ever used which is to say it allows you to use irony it allows you to tell a story of revenge and redemption without worrying that everyone's going to feel that they were fairly treated it just opens up the kind of stories that you can tell now a quick sidebar to note that one space in games that has been really exploring this area is the single session rpg there's a lot of interesting work happening with independent rpg makers that it's well worth viewing and even if you know playing dnd makes you self-conscious or uncomfortable you should buy some of the books i'm going to mention here in a second because they

are very very interesting just from their formal perspective and here i'm thinking about avery adler's the quiet year and all of the rest of the game she's produced and a game by a company called thorny games called dialect these are games that really upset what you might think is even possible in the space of a game and even if you don't play them the rules are powerful enough okay so if we are going to build games about king making we need a different framework we can't use fairness as the bedrock to build our design practice on we have to find something else so what do we find uh well some people would jump to uh this gentleman over here uh renee kenizzia who has made a few games and he has this quote that you'll see like tacked onto profiles and i'll just i'll read it here when playing a game the goal is to win but it is the goal that is important not the winning this is a little bit like the old canard about the destination or the journey being more important than

the destination and it's fine uh it the main problem with it is it's it's relentlessly individualistic um it's about your personal experience of encountering the game which i think while that's a nice thought it doesn't get into what makes something like king making so difficult which is to say that my personal journey is going to intersect with yours and one of us is going to rob the other and continue the journey so um in in sort of searching for a new framework i found myself reaching for um bernie bernie de coven's amazing 1978 book the well-played game which i think is in just an unbelievable text and one that anybody interested in design should check out and in bernie kovan's book he has this really wonderful distinction he makes between playing to win and having to win and there there's a way that this could be described simply as like another version of what canisius is talking about but for de coven it has nothing to do with individual experience basically when you play to win you must

win okay cool everyone's always playing to win but when you have to win you must win because you are unsure of your own position in the community of players and only by winning can you kind of prove yourself in that position so basically you know if you think about all of the theory that around the magic circle and the exceptional space of the game uh what what de covan is talking about is if you don't close that circle entirely and you bring in some of the outside world into your game you're going to get people who are going to try to use the game as a way to manipulate the world outside of the game and that's where all the bad feelings come from so he has a short note on this and i'm just gonna i don't i didn't put this up but um i think for those of you who are interested in de coven's work it can all be pretty much summed up in this kind of short little snippet uh he describes games uh in this way and this is a quote we were willing to play we were each willing to play the particular game we were willing to play with each other and we arrived at the well-played game

because of the way we combined with the game now that's a little like woo-woo by today's standards and know that if you do buy a copy of the well-played game an excellent book it's entirely like that it's like a giant stream of consciousness exploration of play but i think what is so powerful about de coven's idea is to back out from the individual instance of the game and to really reassert the power of play as the thing that the game is allowing you to do the game is the medium that allows players to interact with each other and if you are having the perfect experience of play the victory is putting everybody on on the same page but it doesn't necessarily have to be the thing that is keeping them there so thinking about de coven as a foundation for king making i want to talk a little bit about some takeaways what are some things that we can do with this alternate framework a framework that doesn't overly emphasize fairness

well i think that there i have a kind of set of rules that i think about when i'm working on a design especially the design that i know is going to feature a lot of king making the first rule is that as in all things consent is absolutely critical you do not want to misdirect your players it's really important that everybody realizes what kind of game they're going to play jokovin has an interesting chapter in the well-played game where he talks about something called the dangerous game and he he notes in this chapter that dangerous games cannot involve people who haven't accepted the threat or haven't chosen to play the dangerous game now this is a really interesting kind of two-tiered view of this it's a little bit like watching a horror movie you obviously would never want to watch a horror movie with somebody who hates horror movies and so that's obviously bad but what is less obviously bad but what is still bad is watching a horror movie where half the people like watching it because they think it's funny and the other half the people like watching it because they think it's scary each of those that that

that heterogeneity and that that viewing base really can hurt an experience and so for dakova it's important if you want to play a dangerous game uh to agree to play it but then also to accept the danger so you should be honest about it now it's also important to realize that if you are designing a game about king making that the relationships between the players that's everything mechanisms do not matter so much as the relationships to the player and this is a very easy thing to forget when you're working in design what will happen sometimes is when these th when the relationships between the players are not highlighted the interactions the king making interaction the last stage of the game can feel like a cruel joke if i've been hoarding stone the entire game so i can upgrade my clay house and you take it from me in the last turn despite never touching me the entire game it's not going to feel like an ironic coup or something worth thinking about it's just going to feel like a bad joke and this i think brings

me to risk which i think is still just a brilliant and wonderful game maybe more fun to think about than to play but one of the the real tricks of risk is that there's no negative space on the board so what kind of game are you playing when you play risk well it's a game where you're going to hurt each other and there's no way to get around it i often wonder a lot of sort of space 4x games have this problem where the first third of the game is very quiet and like it's about synergies and building up and then in the second half you tear down all the work you did in the first half and it usually makes people feel rotten and i think if the board started full you would get around this problem this is one reason by the way like in root the board starts completely full and the primary aggressor in in the game um the faction called the erie dynasties they're playing a program game where they are literally having to program in attacks so that they have sort of deniability like i didn't mean to attack you it's just that's what i promised i would do for the rest of the game um so another like note about this is uh

another another interesting uh line about like that kind of thematic and mechanical cohesion is a comparison between something like inish and blood rage so these are both like if you look at just the boxes and the pieces you're like oh yeah there's some war happening in these boxes um an inish you fight all the time oh it's a fighting game it's a very fighting game but blood rage is really more of like a drafting game it's like much closer to sushi go than it is to risk and that isn't to denigrate blood rage i think eric lang's brilliant and he did a good job with it but it can create weird moments because there are times when like you thought you were playing a drafting game and then it slides into being a little bit of a war game and it feels like not at ease with itself whereas in inish you're playing a drafting game but the drafting game is entirely about action denial and about fighting so uh the third thing i think is very important is to give players uh diplomatic flexibility there aren't villains in real life we

have partners and we have adversaries and sometimes our partners become our adversaries and sometimes we need to find part and sometimes we need to find partners in those who oppose us no diplomacy system you design is going to be as clever as your players so you want to try to give them the most creative framework that they could possibly exist in i think this is one reason why turn-based uh strategy games especially on the digital side really struggle with their diplomacy systems it's just hard to create the sort of freewheeling deal making that you see in a game like diplomacy in like in a digital space the last takeaway is i think the most complicated one and it's the one that i'm the most unsure of personally and this has to do with the management of hope and a victory so victory conditions i think are the most critical element of any game design uh when i in my own practice they are the very first thing that i that i put to page

and they are the last thing that i ever want to tamper with the victory conditions put everybody together they're like the script even more than the rest of the rules the victory conditions bind the players together but you run into a problem once another player can't win and here i often think of martin wallace's 2001 game liberte one of the things that's great about wallace titles is i feel like he must design very quickly because he doesn't cover his tracks you can sort of see all of the development in the game just by looking at the final game and so liberty is a game about the french revolution it's an election game but the way the math of the elections works out certain factions certain players are always going to be like way ahead like after the first election a couple players are going to win like eight points and then every you can even see it in the screenshot actually like those two people did very well and everyone else is just dead last and this will always happen this isn't like bad play and in fact in the next election those people who are ahead they're going to get more ahead right and the way wallace dealt with this instead of fixing the kind of core math

problem that was producing this result is he created two alternate victory conditions misery conditions are what they're actually called whereby the players who are losing can kind of flip the table over and they have totally different ways of winning that are so dangerous you would never do it unless there was no chance you were going to win by points and what this does is even until the very very last moment all players remain kind of in in the game now this to me is a very good idea uh and and i like it i build alternate victory conditions in almost every game that i've worked on but i wonder too if there's another way of thinking about victory that isn't so uh straitjacketed and here i have to think about the games of phil eklund because the thing about phil eckland's games they're immensely complicated and goofy and they're extremely random and mean so this is a shot from high frontier if you can believe it this is like 1 20th of what the board looks like

and it is that complicated all the way through and in high frontier i uh once spent an hour planning a mission to one of jupiter's moons and then the mission was about halfway through and i hit a radiation belt wrong and one of my spaceship components blew up and i spent the next hour like hour of game time attempting to rescue my poor astronauts who were drifting to one lagrange point or another um and it was great and there's this amazing thing about eckland's games where the story that the game is telling is so bracing is so powerful that even when you're out of condition out of out of contention for victory you don't want to unplug you don't want to unimmerse yourself and this is what usually happens and if the victory condition is the only thing that is immersing your players then you need to create a system where the players always have a chance to win but if the other storytelling techniques are giving them something then the victory condition starts to be a little

less important um so i want to close with a short quota and then we'll have about 15 minutes for questions um which is to talk a little bit about video games since this is primarily a video game design conference so one of the funny things is that the space that i work in and design these multilateral conflict games video games are really bad at them like horrible like if you've ever played a game of starcraft in the free-for-all mode i'm just sorry because this the games aren't designed for it i mean even multiplayer competitive games if you think about like um like something like dota or any of the other mobas i mean or counter strike these are five v5s these are team sports um in terms of the actual like game theory we're talking about formerly two player games even if they have multiple humans involved or cooperative experiences something like overcooked games just really aren't digital games they have a hard time with the free-for-all game with the exception of something that's happened in the past couple years which is to say the rise of the battle royale

um i think that these are the most important games that have been developed since minecraft and probably even maybe more important because they are truly multilateral conflict games and even if you hate them if you've played them you probably have memories from the games you have played you've played games where you've randomly died and then the rest of your squad has attempted to avenge you as they hunted your killer over the battlefield and you watched them with rapt attention because even though your character was dead you were still in the game they have amazing storytelling capacity when we talk about open world games we usually are not talking about open worlds so much as a very full world where every nook and cranny of a setting has like all these little side plots and branching narratives in it the for my money the battle royale games are the only true open world games out there because it's really emergent what can happen you have no idea the kind of story that each match is going to tell outside of the fact you need to spend your first 10 minutes feverishly looting

before you get shot um and you know i've been talking mostly about storytelling and not so much like mechanisms and strategy although we can go into that in the q a if you'd like but one thing i will say is these games also produce really interesting strategic concerns if you are on you know a hill watching the last two squads or maybe the last two squads fight and exhaust themselves you might want to intervene and get that loot but if you fire your weapons you might telegraph your position to those squads or to another squad that might be watching you there are all these concerns about position and exposure and supply these are really interesting strategic concerns that are only made possible because we're dealing with a multilateral conflict so in short i think that by looking at games which are about king making and which really frankly uh address problems of multiplayer and rather address problems of the multilateral uh design yeah let me start that over so in

short what i'm trying to say is basically designs that feature high player interaction that feature multilateral conflict i think they've got big storytelling payoffs that are worth investigating and i also think that they also have big strategic payoffs and there's a whole world of different sorts of designs that we just sort of need to explore but part of that is realizing our own assumptions about the kind of games that we value and deciding whether or not we might want to challenge some of those assumptions all right thank you guys uh so there's a mic in the center of the room i'm happy to take any and all questions relating to this talk or anything else and go ahead and tell me your name and where you're from hi uh john peeble from tucson arizona uh great talk thank you um just a quick comment just played liberte two weeks ago and pulled off a

royalist win in turn three very satisfying excellent um and uh two questions for you first you mentioned about the disconnect between luring players into an experience they might not be prepared for it um can you talk about any concerns your team had about the cue art and the actual gameplay of root so that is a great great question thank you john wright um so we we work a little strangely uh compared to other game studios so in terms of other publishers so we're a little game studio we all pretty much work in one room and then our artist is remote and we take every project we work on from the cradle to the grave all together which means when patrick said hey i want to do an asymmetric strategy game and i said cool i want to make it be about counter insurgency the question of where we set it and how it appears that was a day two question for us and we spent a lot of time talking uh with our artist kyle farren about how we were gonna go about presenting it and we early on um we kind

of arrived at a strategy which was so there are sort of two problems with introductory war games uh problem one is introductory war games play nothing like actual war games uh they're like and i think blood rage is quite instructive here right like blood rage is a drafting game uh it's not a war game i think in any kind of meaningful sense and i don't think anybody uh that's a bit of a straw man i don't think anybody would necessarily defend that um so that's problem one right so we wanted to make sure that if this was an introductory game that it was actually like going to show people what the other games looked like the other problem that introductory games have is that they they try to bring people into the hobby but they do it in a way that doesn't actually that isn't actually that accessible so like blood rage has really like intense art it's just a lot of like blood and brawny guys and even like memoir which is a little more cartoony is a game for like your uncle or dad right it's like oh cool world war ii yes so we wanted we wanted a theme that

really tried to broaden things out and so kyle was we were working on this adventure game um and kyle was setting it in the sort of robin hood-esque animal world and it occurred to us that that actually might be the perfect way to theme the game because it gives you a kind of step of distance from the violence a little bit so the meanness in root isn't often nasty it's more like comical and that that distance we could use to put a lot of a lot of actual like really harsh interaction in the design so we sort of calibrated it to give people enough space to address it we also um so this came up in the keyforge talk which i thought was really interesting we really consciously avoided any direct theming when it came to the design because i don't care if your woodland alliance are marxists or if they're like militia radicals i want the players to be able to kind of like fill in the ideologies so all the different player

positions are presented uh with some ambiguity so that the players can kind of project and inhabit the world and one of the best ways we could do that was kind of putting it in the storybook setting thank you for that question and then one more for you go ahead a lot of a lot of talk has been made about uh the coin series and and that being somewhat of an influence i was just curious if they were an influence on this design uh so they were totally an influence i've been playing the coin game since andy and abyss first came out um i i try to wear all my influences on my sleeve as best i can so i i talked about the coin games and i think a lot of people were expecting it to be a little bit more closely modeled after the actual mechanics of a coin game but by the time the design comes out at the other end of my process it's hard to track where the influences were so the thing i wanted from the coin games was the tension between the different player positions i didn't really care about the actual mechanical framework that maintains those those tensions so i think that you know if you i think if you want to see the the comparison between the

influences um the it's les you find it less by reading game reviews of a coin game compared to a root game and you find it more in the way people talk about the games and like the after action reports thank you thank you all right we've got like 10 minutes so i'm gonna i'm gonna be a little bit quicker my answers yeah that's probably gonna be a quick one i'm hans from stockholm sweden all right big fan of your work thank you for the most but part on me probably um uh so i've been enjoying you know but i'm also a bit puzzled about uh people are like consuming uh games they do games and board games through twitch nowadays right like rather than playing it yourselves and enjoying it you're watching other people enjoy it how do you think like king making games or games to feature a lot of game making is that more fun to watch people play yes i mean there is there is it is on accident that fortnite and apex are like all you see on twitch there is something about the storytelling potential of these multilateral conflict games that

lends itself really well to viewing um and we've found i mean so i've done a little bit of streaming we actually just built a streaming setup in our office for games of route and we found it was really active people were really into it uh just coming by and watching and one place sort of in in in meat space that i can talk about this is that a convention we have a weird way of demoing root at least if i'm working the floor this is what i try to do so we set up the game we give you a little demo and then you play it for 15 minutes and then we kick you out and we put in the next group but we don't reset the game and so you inherit the player position of the idiot who is sitting there before you and what's interesting is people will come back to the booth and they'll be like oh how did how did my little vagabond do is he okay i'm like no he's not um everything's messed up and it but it speaks to that that uh that storytelling power and the the fun of watching and of sort of moving those stories to other forms we get a lot of like root fan fiction and fan art and i think it's in

part because like the storytelling is so open cool yeah thank you yeah thank you hey i'm mark from creative assembly in the uk um a lot of what you said about king making really rung true with my enjoyment of games but um what would you say is the main ways you've looked at to discourage king breaking can you define king brexit breaking is where you get players who take pleasure in not helping someone else to win but stopping someone yeah this is i mean this is a really essential question right because i think that a lot of this has to do with the frame of the question so the way i tend to view it is you want to create an environment where you are going to be the person who is made king and so if you're thinking about a strategy guide for instance you if you're worried about players bashing the leader there are ways of playing a little bit more defensively they're going to give you

coverage and also then culting cultivating the kinds of alliances that are going to like spring to life so one thing i didn't talk about diplomacy much in this talk but one of the really interesting things that you see sometimes happen in high-level diplomacy games is people will make agreements that are contingent upon the actions of other players so i'll say like look uh hey turkey i know you don't want to fight austria but if they fight me can you commit and so creating those kinds of like informal coalitions that will then have inertia to them in the late game can get around some of those problems you are still going to get situations where everyone is going to gang up on the leader that's for me that's just a phase of the game so like in a root the classic time this happens is there are these dominance cards you can play where you basically click on you you kick off your victory point marker you say look i'm going to win the game if i control this part of the map as soon as someone plays that everyone is going to pile on you harder than at any time other than the game it's going to be ridiculously unfair which is why

you have to plan and create a situation where you know you're going to be able to withstand it so basically i and then so the other thing the more practical answer to your question is that i think strategic inertia is really important so if players are going to lunge into you it's going to do things to their late game and if you are going so like basically if you give people too much tactical flexibility then it's always going it's never going to be able to tell a story because it's always going to feel like there is no inertia to your own choices but if you give inertia to those choices then you can get around some of that problem does that make sense yeah thanks a little bit of a scattered answer sorry go ahead hi i'm chris comisso i go to school at the rochester institute technology for game design development um i have a question about a board game i'm developing okay so similar to blood bowl and we have like a neutral piece which is just a disc and it's it's basically ultimate frisbee with death gladiators um okay and we have

uh and i really don't know if it's a super issue that's kind of what i was here to talk ask about um so we have several very legitimate kind of surrender board states where if you've lost all of say x kind of piece it's a very good idea to just surrender because the game will take another 10 minutes to end sure you're not going to win it's just not going to happen um and so in that way when the king is made the game is kind of over and my question is do you think that king making has a space in in a 1v1 strategy game um kind of way and if so um how do i how could i in in very gentle terms if you can't really go into specifics that's fine because you don't have that much time sure um keep it so that you know the king doesn't just kind of cause the game to end yeah i mean my general rule about this in my own practice is that games should be over the moment they're over which is to say as soon as the thing is decided uh the game should organically like come to a close pretty close so for instance it when in the redesign of pax premier the game i worked on

about afghanistan as soon as one player is ahead by four points it's a pretty huge lead and the game is just over so there's this sudden death condition that even on the very first scoring round which is maybe 20 or 30 minutes into the game the game can be over and so i think you know in the case of a of a two-player game you want to be as explicit and as formal with those game end rules as possible so that things don't drag out and here really good texts for you are um twilight struggle obviously but then also uh fort sumter in 13 days which are just balanced on a knife's edge and as soon as one player gets gets ahead the game shuts off so that you never have that tail in where it's just kind of a formality now in a in a game that is modeling sports that can be a little tricky right it depends on the sort of theming and what you're after but i would say in general don't be afraid of sudden death conditions just make sure absolutely sure that they are communicating to their players very clearly okay

all right cool i'll repeat that here if other people have questions or if you want to talk more about the blood ball game i'll be in the wrap-up room on the other side of the hall all right go go ahead we've got time for a couple more questions uh rick from the mit game lab uh so i love de coven and i actually wish more players would read them um i'm sorry can you can you repeat that oh yeah i like i love dakon's work and i i wish actually more players could read them like to really understand like you know how can we play well together um i'm wondering what do you think publishers could do to encourage these kinds of game mechanics or even play communities well it's i mean i i feel like i'm able to get her away with it because i have never worked on a title that's been meant for a general audience i've been lucky to have a small core audience uh that i sort of got through phil um the guy who designed high frontier and who i've been which i've been able to kind of borrow and then even with my work at leader games like we have a core audience that sort of knows the kind of work that we do um growing that audience um

takes titles like root it essentially you know an existing audience where you can get enough of that audience to be playing that game and then encouraging people who say oh well i've never played a conflict game but i guess root's doing well i want to try it out and like that that's the moment when those audiences grow so from for a publisher it's difficult because i feel like the at least from my perspective the main issue when i when i have my publisher head on is who's our audience and how can we serve them really really well uh and questions of audience audience expansion are kind of secondary to that but ultimately i think the kind of thing that you're talking about is finding ways to grow those audiences and you know my short answer to that is we just have to make the stories that the games are telling so compelling that they can't be ignored thank you um all right last question uh i'm julian from the game monster prom from barcelona and the question i had i found interesting what you said about the battle royal games keeping losing

players within the game thanks to emerging storytelling and how this is uh encouraged by in this case by being very multilateral but if you have thought into this what could you say like as they come to mind uh another potential building blocks to create emerging storytelling on a video game to keep the players even if they are losing so you are you're asking specifically how do we take some of these lessons into the video game space uh it could be also for tabletop games it's like how you encourage this emerging storytelling as a way of keeping your engagement yeah so i think that in general and i uh we're just about time but i have a short but i think good answer to this question which is to say what you're doing when you are doing game design is you're giving players a language to exist in a world and you have to pay a lot of attention to how that language is built because some languages are going to be quite restrictive and the stories that you're allowing them to tell and other languages can be quite capacious i think

a good example of this is something like fantasy flights netrunner when netrunner first came out it was easy to make fun of the fact that they were calling action's clicks and they had like invented this funny little dialect to talk about their game but what it did is it immersed players in the world so that even when you were talking about netrunner you were still playing netrunner and so i think from the from the design perspective give your players a language that is as expressive as the game itself and really well appointed to talk about the world that you want them to exist in okay thank you for that question all right and thank you guys for all the questions for coming