Month: March 2023

Board Games as a Negotiation (Part 1)

2023-03-31 / / 0 Comments

I recently picked up an interesting book by Herb Cohen called “You Can Negotiate Anything”. It is an in depth look at how humans negotiate, and the underlying power struggles. I originally thought that this would provide some insight into player interactions, but I began to see that it was much more than that. Not only are there occasional negotiations between players, but the interaction between each player and the game itself could be perceived as a negotiation. This shines a new light on player behavior and portrays the board game as one of the parties involved in an ongoing negotiation.

I will go through this book with you, summarizing what I believe the author is explaining, then explore how it correlates with board games. This will be my interpretation, of course, and may or may not be what the author intended. I strongly recommend reading the book yourself because it is a worthwhile journey. I hope you can get something from this slightly askew view of a self-help book.

The beginning of the book

The author opens by defining what a negotiation is. “Your real world is a giant negotiation table” is the very first line and I can definitely see this as being true with board games. That stubborn piece of cardboard in front of you, has something you want and you may have to wheel and deal to get it. Not only do you occasionally have to deal with players, but you may have to outwit the dice and cards or try to outmaneuver other players on a player board.

The author also explains that almost everything is negotiable, even certain things that we assumed weren’t. You can’t affect the result of a die after it is thrown, but can can alter the odds by choosing to throw multiple dice or deciding when to throw the dice in order to maximize your return for the risk you’re taking. This can be viewed as a negotiation between you and the game. Cards are even more subject to manipulation, or negotiation. Once you have an idea what the other players want, know what cards have been played, and know the contents of the deck, you can make a good guess as to how the cards are going to come out. This translates into a subtle shift of power to you as the cards become more and more predictable. This, in a way, is like a negotiation between you and the game, where you are gaining the upper hand.

Cohen describes the three important elements to any negotiation:

  • Information – understanding the needs of others in order to gain leverage.
  • Time – a high time investment makes people less likely to back out of a negotiation. This relates to the “Sunk Cost Fallacy”
  • Power – The actual or perceived power held by an entity in the negotiation.

All three of these are present in most tabletop games and I will explore them each further in future posts as I read this fascinating book. I hope you can enjoy it too as you follow along.

The Queued Action Pool

2023-03-12 / / 0 Comments
Queued Action Pool from the Arachnid Game

I may have been accused of losing my marbles in the past, but I’ve found a really neat way to use them this time. The mechanism shown above is what I’m calling a “Queued Action Pool”. As far as I can tell, nobody has done this yet. There have been ordered queue’s using cards in programming games like Colt Express, and many shifting queues in tableau form. There have been action pools, like the early chit-pull systems in war games, the constantly flowing marble trough in Gizmnos or the bag of actions in War Chest. This one embodies bits of all of these mechanisms, but puts them together in a new way.

In this simple action pool, each marble represents an action. The player, on their turn, can take out a marble of their color from anywhere in the trough. The remaining marbles shift down to close any gaps because the trough is angled. As the pool is depleted, colored bars representing actions are revealed triggering certain events in the game. It is easy to add more actions to the pool and to draw multiple actions out. When the track is completely empty, it could be refilled to start another phase of the game.

This simple and elegant mechanism solved a number of problems I was having with the Arachnid game. Originally, each player had their own action board and a number of action tokens to manipulate. Since Arachnid is a Cooperative game, it was necessary to keep track of other player’s boards as well as yours because events were triggered periodically based on the state of each player’s action boards. This was very confusing and hard to track. Events were being forgotten and it was so fiddley that it interrupted the game flow causing thematic breaks. No matter what I tried, the mechanics were still clunky.

I toyed with the idea of a rondel, but that didn’t give me the flexibility I needed because I also wanted to eliminate the heavily structured turn order. I experimented with shared action pool, but I needed a way to trigger events throughout the game. Finally it hit me. Why not change the action tokens to marbles and put them in a trough like in the game Gizmos. The trough, of course, would have to hold a finite amount of actions, and would work sort of like a thermometer, revealing events as the pool is depleted. This new mechanism showed the current state of the pool clearly, gave the players a way to plan for the upcoming events in the game, and cut down the administration to almost nothing. It was easy to tune as well. Just by shifting the positions of the events, I can ramp up the tension, mess with the narrative arc, and even add push-your-luck elements to the game.

The action system in Arachnid is now working like a swiss watch and I’m currently doing little happy dance. I know I’ve said this before, but it looks like I am finally at the tweaking stage of the game design. That means that I’m about 10% of the way to completion. LOL