A Game Designer in Every Box

In the starry-eyed days of 1995 an increasingly notable company called Wizards of the Coast put out an innovative roleplaying game called Everway. It was widely lauded for its originality and the way that it moved away from the quantitative dice-based  mechanics of the rest of the medium. One of its most interesting mechanics was the way that it resolved actions using a Tarot-like “Fortune deck”. When an action was attempted, the gamemaster would determine the result by assessing how the meaning of a card and its orientation related to the situation.

Despite its critical acclaim, Everway was a commercial failure. Almost 15 years later you can still find very cheap copies of the boxed game. It was probably a surprising failure for the folks at Wizards, who had loved the game when they’d tried it in-house. But, years later, the employees have an explanation for the failure. “The problem,” they said, “is that we couldn’t include designer Jonathan Tweet in every box.” Not only had his originality and ability to think on his feet driven the fun of the in-house games, but he’d also set the tone of how the game should be played.

I think there’s an important lesson in here for board game designers too, one that struck me last week as I tried yet again to find the fun in Fifth Avenue.

About Fifth AvenueFifth Avenue

Fifth Avenue was Alea game #9. Like other Alea games of its period, it suffered from poor reception partially because it wasn’t Puerto Rico. However, Fifth Avenue got another black eye: it was easy to prematurely end the game if you bought up businesses (which determined the value of your skyscrapers) rather than working on expanding your skyscrapers themselves. When word from early gaming gatherings came back that Fifth Avenue was broken — and I think it arguably is when that situation comes up — the game increasingly had an uphill battle to find acceptance.

But for me personally, Fifth Avenue has a deeper problem. In my 3 or 4 plays I’ve never been able to find the joy that I assume the designer and developer must have found in the game. I can look at other Alea games like Adel Verpflichtet and understand what others see in them even if they’re not exactly my cup of tea. But with Fifth Avenue I just see a bunch of awkward mechanisms that don’t fit together well, some decision points which are almost totally opaque, and a game which might well end before it starts getting interesting … and I have no idea what could have made it cool.

The problem, I think, is that Alea couldn’t include designer Wilko Manz in every box. If I ever played with him, I’m certain he could show me how the game fits together and how to play it intelligently and competitively, but as with Everway, that’s just not a valid option, and so what might have been a great game molders on shelves, gathering dust.

Problems of Intuition

I think this problem is a general one that could affect any games. With a lot of games you can suss out how it should be played just by reading the rules. With others, you can’t figure things out until you see them in play, but at that time your understanding and your strategy begin to crystallize. But then there are games like Fifth Avenue which have enough opaque moving parts that you’re never quite certain how they should be used. This can spoil a game if it causes players to play the game in ways very different from what the designer expected. In The case of Fifth Avenue, I think it did.

Generally, there are several elements that can cause players to vary greatly from the expectations of the designer. As you stack them up, I think it becomes increasingly likely that your game will be one that only a designer can play right. Here are my top danger mechanics, the first three of which appear in Fifth Avenue:

1. User-Triggered Game-End. Users can trigger game-end in many games by running out decks of cards, buying up all of a resource, or some other possibility. What I’m really talking about here, however, is where the users can dramatically vary the game length by doing something within the game. Fifth Avenue fails here in a big way because it assumes that players won’t end the game too fast because it isn’t the best strategy … but when’s the last time you played a game where everyone played the best strategy? I personally found this issue a failing in Caylus too, because it ran in an OK amount of time when the road was being pushed hard and way too slow when it wasn’t.

2. Using-Triggered Scoring. I’ve seen this mechanism in several different games, including Fifth Avenue, Leo Colovini’s Go West! and Leo Colovini’s Alexandros. It’s very frequently troublesome because players get caught up in the fact that they might be benefiting their opponents as much or more than they’re benefiting themselves, and thus the scoring can grind to a halt. Last time I played Fifth Avenue there wasn’t a single player-triggered scoring, and my recollection is that there have never been many in my 3 or 4 games. The recent card game, Monuments is another game where there’s a player scoring mechanism that never seems to get used.

Should “correct” play of Fifth Avenue include lots of player scoring? Is that what my games have been missing? I dunno, as there wasn’t a game designer in my box.

3. Open Auctions. I can’t possibly name all the auction games where we got to the first auction and there was at least one player who said, “I have no idea what to bid.” In some games like Modern Art, you have a pretty good idea of valuation because there are some pretty explicit point values built into the game. On the other hand, I see a lot of variance in Medici play, even though it also has some really explicit numbers. (The problem in Medici, I think, is that there are two orthogonal valuations — quantity and goods type — and that makes the calculation too complex for a casual valuation to work.)

Certainly in Fifth Avenue it’s not obvious how much you should bid for your skyscrapers. In my last game, I know our groupthink was way off because we started off with really high bids that came down over time. This is where Fifth Avenue‘s opaqueness really became troublesome, because it made valuation quite tough (and really susceptible to groupthink, which can head off in crazy ways).

Though I’ve now completed my run-down of the issues that I think made Fifth Avenue not play well when learned out of the box, I had one last danger mechanic that I wanted to mention before I ended this discussion:

4. Player Suicide. One of the most frustrating things for a player is to be out of the game when it’s only half over. It’s certainly the complaint I hear the most as I run a continuing stream of new games at my “review night”. Granted, you don’t want a loser to easily win based on the last play in a game, but if there isn’t a high-risk, high-reward way to make a big move at the end, players will feel out of it. Going back to my original theme, it’s easiest to get into these bad positions when you don’t have a game designer advising you …

Generally, I’m not advocating avoiding these types of design altogether, as there are great gameplay possibilities where users trigger end-games and scoring and where you auction in really unfettered ways. You just need to be careful how many of them you stack up, and when you have a lot, I highly advocate also including some suggestions on how to play.

I’m still hoping to learn why Fifth Avenue was a good enough game to be published by Alea.

Maybe when I pull it out again next year …


Author’s Notes: I never learned. I gave up on Fifth Avenue following the play that led to writing this article. I decided that I was being foolish constantly subjecting myself to a game that fell somewhere between “meh” and “broken” just because it said “Alea” on the cover. I’ve since sold my copy of Fifth Avenue, making it the first Alea game I removed from my collection.

Picture is courtesy of Roberto Duca (bobborobbo at BGG). —SA, 5/31/14

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