Question: Examples of #boardgames that don't herd players towards optimal play?
Most games have a basic idea baked into the design, whether through victory conditions or something akin to "most points wins, here is probably the best way to get points, fight over who does it best." Once in a while, I run across a game that doesn't have that nudge (or it's so subtle that you don't notice it for a bunch of iterations). These often fall out as "sandbox" games.
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A friend & I have been playing The Colonists about once a month. We've gotten to where we can bang out an era 3/4 game in about 3hrs. I think we're maybe 10-15 games deep and have gotten past the "ok, what's my intra-turn optimization" to where we try and plan out 6-9 moves as goals.
Well, we've hit a ceiling though of ~290vp over 6ish games now (today was 280 vs 282). At this point, it's a fundamental rejiggering of how we approach the game vs just tightening up existing play.
It's a wide open sandbox though as best I can see. Ora & Labora is another that sort of feels like that, but there differentiation is determined by an opponent's building acquisition rather than conscious player planning choice as it is in The Colonists. Point stands though, I think both can fit the definition.
What examples of unguided games that don't guide players to optimal pathways?
(Note, this doesn't mean it's commercially successful, or a good design in general, just unguided)
@gpage This seems to explicitly assume constructive games, essentially engine-builders and similar, but really anything constructive/accumulative/aggregative and challenged sustained average VP production rates with an intimation of rich-get-richer.
Random thoughts around those edges: Carcassonne, Fresh Fish, Lokomotive Werks, TwixT, Sticheln, Quo Vadis?, Xe Queo! -- each for a sharply distinct and different reason.
@gpage There's also an intimation of VP accrual for the feedback. Games with a threshold or last-one or like end qualifiers have a tougher time setting that feedback.
Diplomacy is interesting here..?
@gpage Surely, any system providing progress feedback is.
Consider a resource conversion algebra system say, and you spend a tonne of time & effort making this & that out of muck & stuff...with no feedback at all other than now you have the new stuff. And you pound away at this for hours or days and weeks...and one day...you make some stuff and the system suddenly says, "You have 1 VP".
Like a blind man in a coalmine with a stick, that event is now your lodestar. Whack whack whack whack.
@gpage Heck, have the "You have 1 VP" message come after game end. Now what did you do in the last hours or whatever that equalled a VP and didn't before? Newtonian search away!
Just the same, it is now your steering lodestar. Test test test.
Mix it up. You get 2 VPs, but before you got 1, or 1 and you expected 2... Same dealio.
If I do this, the nice man pets me.... No operant conditioning here, move along.
@PhilGross I think T&E is right there on the edge cause of how scoring works. That sort of tracks with the Quo Vadis suggestion, but T&E at least you know you need to balance things.
(And yeah, I find video games to be a different ball of wax in the guided sense, for better or worse).
@PhilGross specifically this is why I wonder if T&E fits or if I'm misreading the diversified scoring incentive.
@jcl I remember reading a design note from (I think) Seth Jaffee about including "guide posts" of sorts in games, and I think that ties into your VP comment; if you gain information from VP accumulation along the way, does that count as the game guiding you toward something?
@MplsMatt interesting. I remember in the OG that firms became a game of priority deal and how it saddled you with fewer options to evade overloading attacks from people further down the chain.
How many games have you played so far in general of 2e?
Grayson Page
J C Lawrence
Seiðr
Phil Gross
MplsMatt