BrainGoodBlog

Here is a game design concept we’ve been talking about on the Keith Burgun Discord. I think it is useful for creating and honing the type of “strategic dance” we find in games like StarCraft. (See strategy triangle)

First, a definition:

“Axis of victory” – A spectrum along which player power or “position” is measured. Once a player achieves sufficient progress (a “critical mass”) along an axis relative to an opponent or the game state, they can convert or exploit that position into a victory. (Note that sometimes an overwhelming advantage along one axis will actually be converted into another to formalize the win. See: StarCraft, Magic the Gathering, examples later)

Why we care: Having multiple axes of victory can help create “strategy dance/pivoting” dynamics, introduce opportunities for lateral thinking, obfuscate player positions and introduce hard-to-compare trade-offs.

The Strategy Dance: Players make moves that change their commitment and power along each axis (some moves also change how much an opponent knows about each). Each player tries to find a “window” in which their power along some axis is sufficient relative to their opponent or the game state to allow for a win.

Practical Advice:
In order to allow for the dance, designers should do two things:

1. Carefully manage the relationship between “commitment” and “power”. If a move is powerful along one axis, it might be counterbalanced by the degree to which the player is locked into that choice. Both power and “commitment” (i.e how much this limits your ability to pivot to another axis later) exist on a spectrum. This might also be conceptualized as “strategic inertia”.
2. Ensure an interconnections between the pursuit of different “axes of victory”. Moves might explicitly spend power on one axis to attain it in another, or gain a smaller amount of power along two (or more) axes in order to “hedge” or defer your decision. Vitally, it is important that players are incentivized to remain somewhat “open” to pursuing more than one axis. (In Civilization, players are specifically too incentivized to “focus” on just one, which can narrow the game into an optimization puzzle along that axis)

Examples of games with multiple clear axes of victory:

• Puzzle Strike/StarCraft: Econ, Army, Tech (defense is more of a situational response to an opponents advantage in army)
• Dragon Bridge: Push, Escape, Items, White Gems
• Magic: The Gathering/Spectromancer: Card Advantage, Board Advantage, Reduce Opponent’s Life to Zero
• Pax Pamir: Faction Dominance + Loyalty to that Faction (3 different axes), No Faction Dominance + Have the Most Supporters
• Race for the Galaxy: Produce-Consume Engine, 6 Cost Developments, High “Point” Tableau
• Air, Land and Sea/Crimson Company: Each of the three lanes

Formal vs. Emergent Axes of Victory

As a game is explored/studied/designed, axes of victory that are not strictly defined by the formal goals of the game may emerge. For example, having a better economy and being able to defend it in StarCraft allows you to get a bigger army than your opponent *later* which in turn will allow you to destroy your opponents buildings (the formal win condition). These can become more and more nuanced and particular as the game is explored. For example, maybe having a “critical mass” of Corsairs and Dark Templar allows you to exploit a weakness along the “detection” axis. Or in a card game perhaps the combination of card X and Y are strong enough to effectively ensure a win. We can refer to progress towards the critical mass or towards playing card X and Y at the same time an “emergent axis of victory”.

Adding formal win conditions/goals can (but doesn’t necessarily) have the effect of increasing the number emergent “axes of victory” in a game. It may be the case that some of the formal win conditions are impractical to reach, or subsumed within the pursuit of another, easier win condition.

Conversely, a game with only one formal win condition may have multiple emergent axes of victory (i.e StarCraft, Race for the Galaxy).

Finally, in the case of a game like Race For the Galaxy, advantages along multiple axes are combined at the end into a score, allowing for “mixed” strategies. This is sometimes referred to as  a”point salad” approach. However, in some cases this can end up feeling less like a dance between multiple axes of victory and more like an optimization puzzle along a single axis. (This is similar to what happens in Civilization when you “lock in” the axis you will focus on to a certain extent early on).

I’ve been asked a few times about what I think the best way to start a new strategy game design is, and I’ve generally had a hard time answering. However, during the process of brainstorming for new prototype designs I have repeatedly returned to a concept I like to think of as Action Funnels as a useful starting point (especially if we’re shooting for Playfulness). Let’s try a simple definition:

“An action funnel is any system in a game that takes a wide menu of possible player actions and limits it to a subset of currently possible actions”.

There are a few reasons that they are useful! Firstly, a strategy game needs to be complex enough (whether intrinsically or through emergent complexity) to remain unsolved and provide interesting decisions. Therefore generally speaking, there needs to be a wide array of game states and actions possible. 

However, if all options are available at all times, a player that has not developed sophisticated heuristics is encouraged to parse through each of them in order to evaluate them relative to one another. Anyone who has stared at a 19×19 empty Go board or wondered which of their chess pieces to move at the opening of the game can attest to this.

Clearly, this kind of laborious parsing is not what we’re looking for if we’re trying to maximize Playfulness. Action funnels allow for a breadth and richness of possible game-states/strategic contexts, while keeping the responsibilities of the player relatively manageable, and hopefully freeing them up to play a bit more instinctively. In Through The Desert, you are only allowed to play next to one of your “leader” camels, which provides a much more manageable array of options for each turn.

Games use a wide variety of means to implement Action Funnels, but here are just a few examples:

1. In Great Western Trail, there are a huge number of possible actions/worker placement spaces, but players are only allowed (at the start of the game) to move forward 1,2 or 3 spaces. (“You don’t have to worry about everything, just which of these 3 would you like”). Notably, as players gain comfort with the system they can read into further implications of those three actions, but still only need to consider the 3 each turn.
2. In The Castles of Burgundy there are a great number of tiles available each round, and a great number of possible placement spaces on each player’s board. However, they can generally only gain tiles from “depots” that match the two dice they roll each turn, and place tiles on board spaces that match those dice. Furthermore, player’s have to “extend” their existing kingdom with each placement, further funneling their actions.
3. A Hand of Cards can be interpreted as an action funnel, and is used in many games! (You may have a large number of cards in your deck, but you are only allowed to play those in your hand)
4. Many rogue-like games feature an implicit action funnel with the spaces on their board. Because these tend to be single-actor games, while there are a staggering number of possible positions and actions available you are only able to take actions from where you are. Typically on a square grid this limits you to 4 options, plus whatever items and spells you might have available (although still interpreted from your current position).
5. In Wingspan there are 170+ bird cards available, but on your turn you must first choose one of only four actions. (Play a bird, gain food, lay eggs and draw cards). There are then nested* action funnels (heh) after that! When you play a bird, you choose one from your hand. When you gain food, you gain from those available in the feeder. When you lay eggs, you must choose which bird to lay them on (and some may not have room). When you draw bird cards, only those in the “offer” plus the top (unknown) card of the deck are available. In Wingspawn after you activate a row, you might also activate bird cards in that row, which could result in ANOTHER layer of actions, which are again heavily funneled (which of these two goal cards would you like?)
6. In Memoir 44, it would be easy for players to get overwhelmed if they could command any of their units. However, they must first choose from a small hand of cards which normally feature a flank (left, center or right).Then they enter the nested funnel of choosing which particular units to activate in that section of the board.

There are many, many more examples of Action Funnels in games. You can think of resources in a game that are used to pay for buildings as an Action Funnel that limits your current actions to buildings you can afford. You can even think of cooldowns (especially long ones) in a MOBA as Action Funnels that limit your current strategic possibilities. 

So help your players navigate a complicated and interesting game space without heavy proofreading, action parsing and calculation. Use Action Funnels! If you’re interested in the games I make with following these design guidelines, please sign up for the BrainGoodGames mailing list here.

*Notably, when a game features nested Action Funnels, keep in mind whether they can feel comfortable choosing the top layer BEFORE choosing everything they will do in the second layer of choices. Otherwise they will end up with a combinatoric array of options that can result in a ton of action parsing.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the properties that I appreciate the most in strategy games, and going through my collection of games I noticed a trend about my favorites. They all exhibited a high degree of an element called playfulness (term suggested by Keith Burgun, we talk a bit about it on his podcast here. Alternative names might be Smooth, Easy, Intuition-Rewarding and Streamlined)

To describe the property, let me first use a counterexample.  There is a common design aspiration to make games “simple to learn,but hard to master”. Games like Chess and Go embody this; they are both simple to learn (they have low inherent complexity/few rules) and hard to master/deep (they still exhibit a varied and interesting strategy space after a ton of intense study and play).

On the other hand, Caverna, StarCraft and Keyflower are quite complex and deep, but in my experience also don’t lend themselves to playfulness. In StarCraft, it can often feel like you are on a knife’s edge, and one wrong move can send the game spiraling out of control. In Caverna, it can often feel like there are large amounts of information you could be studying/calculating (like the building market), but don’t because it is overwhelming or tedious. (This can be a big problem if other players don’t mind the calculation).

So I’m not talking about simplicity/complexity, and I’m not talking about depth. (Although depth is  another property I aspire to in BrainGoodGames)

Instead playfulness refers to a property of games that encourages players to play with their gut/creatively, and minimizes the incentives to calculate/count/solve. Games that have this property include Race for the Galaxy, Wingspan and The Castles of Burgundy.

Race for the Galaxy is quite complex, and notoriously difficult to learn to play, but when I play I am often playing by feel rather than calculating out card probabilities or doing a lot of calculation. I think this in part can be attributed to the fact that you know some of the properties of the draw deck but not to an exhaustive degree.

The Castles of Burgundy also has quite a bit of inherent rules complexity, but gains a lot of playfulness by utilizing something I like to refer to as an “action funnel“. There are a ton of possible varied game states, actions and effects possible in the game, but on your turn you are constrained to actions that correspond to the values on the two dice you rolled. In this way you can focus your attention on a smaller part of the game system.

Wingspan also features an “action funnel” in that there are only 4 possible “main” actions available each turn (play a bird, or activate one of 3 habitats). In addition, it also features a system of “sub-goals” like “collect a bunch of birds with large wingspans” or “be the player with the most birds that have eggs on them”. It also features “sub-goals” on the bird cards themselves, such as a bird that encourages you to play birds with a certain nest type to gain more eggs.

“Sub-goals” on cards is also used by the 6-cost development cards in Race for the Galaxy, with similar effects. Players that are lost in the complexity of the game state can use the “sub-goals” as ready made heuristics to circumvent calculation and aid decision making. The labor-intensive process of picking through the huge decision tree can be circumvented with the expectation that the “sub-goals” are at least sometimes reasonable to pursue. (As the player plays more they can replace this rough heuristic with subtler/more context dependant ones)

Here are a few other game design techniques I have thought of that can contribute to playfulness (i.e encourage players to play with their gut):
–Action Funnels
–Turn timers/real time games
-Simultaneous actions/”Yomi” mechanics/Donkeyspace
-Information horizon/ambiguity engines
-Trying to not punish player’s mistakes too harshly
-Increasing the complexity threshold until players give up calculating
-Using systems amenable to pattern recognition/chunking
-Avoiding snowballing mechanics
-Allowing risky play/”going all in”/comeback potential
-Thematic nudges (suggested by Keith Burgun) like having a cute, low-stakes or unthreatening theme

I plan to elaborate on some of these in future articles, but hopefully you get a sense for the concept and why it might be useful to optimize for. I’d be very interested to hear any ideas you have about techniques for maximizing playfulness so please leave a comment, drop by the discord or tweet at me @brickroaddx. If you’re interested in games made with an eye towards playfulness, please sign up for the BrainGoodGames mailing list here.