My grandpa lived with my family while I was in middle school. He loved World War 2 movies, fishing, and asking me why I didn’t have a girlfriend yet. I had mixed feelings about spending time with him (mostly because of the girlfriend questions), so my mom used to tell me to ask him to play chess because she didn’t want him to get lonely. I hated playing chess with him.
Allegedly, my grandpa had been a tournament winning chess player as a young man. The family legend says that he was sponsored to immigrate by the Hoovers (yes, the President Hoover) in the wake of World War 2 and he used to trounce the former President’s son in chess games. Feels like a bit of a tall tale, but regardless of the facts, my grandpa could at least trounce me in chess. He taught me how to checkmate using just a rook and a king and showed me a hook, but he didn’t teach me much else. I played game after game knowing I didn’t have a chance, knowing the choices I made didn’t really matter, because he understood the game on a fundamental level that I couldn’t match. I hated every game.
It was my dad who taught me how to play chess, many years earlier. We played using a plastic revolutionary war themed set, where liberty bells instead of rooks and George Washington in place of kings (ironic in retrospect). He let me play with unlimited takebacks. I never really had to learn strategy because he let me change the game as much as I wanted. Unsurprisingly, I won more often than not. I was playing the game wrong and I won for all the wrong reasons.
I played the game “right” with my grandpa and “wrong” with my dad, but I had a great time playing with my dad.
This raises a really difficult question… if the fun factor of a specific instance of a game depends so heavily on the participants themselves and not just on the ruleset, how do we know we have made something fun? How do we know we are building something that will be fun for more people than not?
I’d been wrestling with this question for a while when Jason asked the group in a meeting “do we feel like we’re making something that will be fun?”
We all froze, unsure of who should speak first. It’s a heavy question, one that calls into question the months of work, the starts and restarts, the many debates on mechanics and feel. Not only that, it gets into the challenging question of how do we know something will be fun?
For me, there are two parts to the answer. First, the mechanics have to get out of the way. Well-designed rulesets with streamlined mechanics fade into the background so players can have a game experience. Say what you will about Monopoly (looks sideways at Mark), the mechanics aren’t distracting. You roll the dice, move, trigger an effect, and probably pay some money to someone. The simplicity lets you focus on your interactions with other players and put yourself in the shoes of a real estate tycoon, enjoying the tactile sense of pushing your boot or laundry iron around the board and passing paper bills back and forth.
The second piece of the puzzle is to understand how different kinds of players interact with games. If you run tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, this is something you think about constantly as you try to plan sessions to entertain your players. There are countless articles about it going all the way back to the eighties. Bartle’s taxonomy is a popular breakdown that describes players as either being Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, or Killers. Knowing what kind of players you have at the table helps you decide what kind of challenges to throw at them. If you have an Explorer heavy table, a rich world chockfull of lore is a great way to go, but if your group is mostly Killers you’d better spend most of your prep creating unique and interesting combats. If you’re designing a module or a campaign without the advantage of knowing your player types, a good rule of thumb is to sprinkle in a variety of obstacles designed to appeal to each of these four groups.
With Animal Kingdom (or any board game design, for that matter), we’re basically doing the equivalent of designing a module for players we haven’t met yet. Once we have our core mechanics consolidated into a clean loop that can fade into the background, we can focus on developing ways for players to interact with each other and the game that are catered to different player types.
By building a Kingdom with a variety of locations like the Fields, Savanna, and Waterfall, I think we’re well on our way to making a unique place to engage Explorers. We have some real traction on mechanics for Achievers and Killers to exploit. The biggest hole in our system right now is the sense of Socialization, the meaningful interactions between players (it’s unfortunately very easy to accidentally make a multiplayer solitaire game).
Will an approach like this guarantee that we create a fun game? Probably not. But it gives us some kind of yardstick to understand if we’re making something that has the ability to appeal to a range of players. It still won’t be fun to play Animal Kingdom if your grandpa keeps asking you why you don’t have a date to semiformal, but as long as there’s enough there for you to enjoy while your dad fudges the rules or grandma hoards voters until 3 am, I think we’ll be in a good spot.
— Peter