My last post about family gaming is up on Polygon this weekend, which is nifty, so thanks for that Charlie Hall <3 Neat to have a bit of a signal boost on that. Paul Vauvrey asked me this morning if I could elaborate on some of the things that I think make for good co-play or generational cross-play games, which I touch on in the article a bit, but they’re not really broken out into separate ideas. I wanted to jot these down before I got too far away from that last piece.
When I say co-play I mean it the same way that folks use the term co-watching when they talk about Sesame Street. Multiple generations, very young, very old, and everything in between, able to engage in the same activity and enjoy it equally, even if they’re maybe sometimes taking more pleasure in different aspects of the show. In comics there is this growing body of “all ages lit” which I think functions similarly. Obviously not all shows work like this, and not all books work like this, but in my experience surprisingly few commercial games work like this. So I wanted to talk more about the games that do work like this because I think they’re neat.
Some of these are probably going to be pretty specific to table-top or turn-based games, but I think they extend to some other activities too.
Non-Tactics
One of the things that I often look for in games that I enjoy is having a lot of depth and engagement within a single turn. Another way to put it is I like games that have a lot of tactics. One possibly obscure example is comparing vanilla Ascension to some of the later expansions. Vanilla Ascension has extremely straightforward turns where the execution order of things just doesn’t matter. You scoop up your card and then it’s the other players turn. In later expansions you can do a little with this card, collect this then this, and that changes the outcome some, and you find all these places to build up an edge over your opponent through good tactical play. Pandemic has a LOT of this, and in fact a lot of Overland is constructed almost solely around this idea.
I think this is generally quite poor for co-play though because it’s just heck of a lot to remember and to keep track of for a casual player, and players who don’t take advantage of every edge in the turn can get quickly left behind. Even if you’re all technically playing the same game, if some players are scoring two, three, four times as many points as the other players, they’re not really playing the same game, and I think players of all ages can tell.
And so games in which your turn consists of maybe one to two major decisions, and/or the decisions and actions are very strongly thematically linked to the narrative and the presentation, these are games that are more likely to have cross-generational appeal, or to be able to support co-play.
The Challenge: design a game that has richness and depth even without access to the kind of tactical complexity that usually produces that interesting kind of gameplay.
Non-Strategy
The other thing I usually look for in a great game for adults is loads of long-term decision making on a turn-to-turn basis, which we sometimes called strategy. So for example decisions you made on turn 3 or turn 4 having a big influence on the kinds of decisions you can make on turn 10 or turn 11, if that makes sense. Not only does this create really different experiences on repeated plays, as circumstances and curiosity produce different early decisions (which produce different later crossroads), but it gives you more factors to weigh in each decision, and it gives a satisfying sense of significance to your decision making. Again, really core design principles that we focused heavily on when we were designing Overland.
But it’s important to remember that long-term strategy mechanics tend to heavily favor people that have played that game before, who have a greater breadth of knowledge of the possibility spaces, and also can be a lot to keep track of for casual players. And can unnecessarily encumber the process of teaching the new game and explaining. This stuff doesn’t come for free, there’s a lot of baggage depending on your audience.
One thing that Richard Garfield historically has both focused on and excelled at is creating games that can be played strategically, and strategic players will be more likely to win. But many of his games also support very shallow, non-strategy play, as a pretty viable approach. It is I think important to distinguish this in a human or emotional sense from so-called “degenerate strategies”. Degenerate strategies are ways of playing a game that maybe are very lame or boring for everyone involved, and have a good or even guaranteed shot at winning. E.g. always doing the same lame grind but eventually the math works in your favor.
Non-strategies I think are very different from degenerate strategies, even though mathematically they might be somewhat similar in their shallowness. Non-strategies are about doing something that is fun and immediate rather than slow and thoughtful, but still mostly staying in the running. If degenerate strategies are the bad version of a brute force solution, non-strategies are the good version of a brute force solution.
The Challenge: supporting these non-strategies alongside viable deeper strategies to build engaging cross-generational play.
Inherent Interest
Something that much more experienced designers than I have talked about, your Richard Garfields and your Soren Johnsons and the like, is the upsides to finding good matches between the theme and presentation of your game, and the rules of your game. In some games this is pretty built-in (Jenga) but in other games this is a very explicit design choice - are you building a city or building a farm? Are you running a train company or are you running a boat company? Which fantasy or theme better maps to and / or helps explain what it is the player is doing? Games that do this well often stand out for many reasons and are able to support more complexity without feeling overwhelming.
But also we take a lot of pleasure in games that have some kind of inherently fun action to do. Pinball machine buttons and levers are fun to flip even when you don’t hit a ball. Card games where everyone flips at once are somehow just sort of automatically a little bit fun just because of that. Anticipation, payoff, surprises, and the tactility itself all play a big part in this. Combined, games with a strong theme and inherently interesting or satisfying actions can be very impactful.
Mixed-audience co-play situations put even more pressure and burden on these things. Especially for players that are engaging with the game in a less tactical or less strategic way, these elements are going to play a disproportionate roll in their engagement and enjoyment. So we look at a game like Qwirkle, whose thick, heavy, and colorful tiles are simply pleasurable to move around. Look at poker chips, like really nice ones. High-end casino playing cards versus the flimsy stuff that comes in your euro-game reprint. These things are just pleasant to handle and manipulate. And we look at games with very strong theming - building bridges in River Dragons or fighting kaiju in King of Tokyo. This stuff has a huge impact for casual players even though it might be of secondary appeal to more mathy players.
The Challenge: build the game around actions that are fun to do in and of themselves, and that are a good fit for the framing and presentation.
I Think This Stuff Is Just Very Hard To Do
My gut feeling is that a lot of games that satisfy these weird requirements may be more discovered than designed, especially at first. Noticed, rather than invented. Maybe that’s how everything works even, but especially the games that fit into this weird niche. And I think this is even harder in digital games and real-time games, but I think that means it’s also the space where we have potentially the most opportunities right now.