A Legion of Legacies, Part Four: Legacy Emotions & Agency

Welcome to the fourth article in a series about our industry’s newest category of play: Legacy Games. Previous articles in this series discussed: Legacy Play (an overview); Legacy Venn (a definition); and Legacy Mechanics (a toolbox). This final (for now) article in the series is going to look at Legacy mechanics from a few different directions by focusing on Legacy Emotions and Legacy Agency.

(As for me: my Legacy adventures continue, and I continue to love the continuity and the idea of building something from session to session. During our last Pandemic Legacy Season 2 session, we finally managed to recon one of the areas laid out at the start of the game, and that was very fulfilling; Pandemic Legacy Season 2 continues to be a well-designed and inventive game. Then, in our last SeaFall session we did something that changed the whole game, and we had to figure out what that meant; SeaFall continues to be a messy and chaotic but fun game.) Continue reading

The Alpha Player Problem (or: How to Avoid Controlling Co-Ops Without Even Trying)

The biggest problem with cooperative game design is the issue of the controlling player — or if you prefer, the alpha player. It’s such a big problem that some players won’t play co-ops because of bad past experiences with controlling players. Meeples Together, my upcoming book on cooperative game design, offers eight game-design solutions to this problem: play patterns that designers can include in games to deflate or deemphasize alphas.

However, there’s a flip side to this. Few co-op designers with perfectly resolve the controlling-player problem, and some with accept it as the price of creating the sort of game that interests them. In fact, some of my favorite co-ops like Pandemic (2008) and The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Games (2017) have styles of play where alpha players can rise to power. And I know, because I’m one of them. When I play these games I end up fighting not just against the challenges of the game system, but also about my own urges to tell everyone else what to do.

And fighting is the perfect word, because I believe that if you’re a cooperative gamer who suffers from alphaplayeritis, it’s your duty to make the game more enjoyable for everyone else by avoiding controlling the game as much as possible.

Here’s how you do so in 10 easy steps. (And if you’re not an controlling player, this really doesn’t apply to you!) Continue reading

Making the Dick Move

Hollywood Blockbuster CoverWe were attending the last party in Hollywood Blockbuster (2006). That’s the Reiner Knizia game of auctions and moviemaking that’s also called Traumfabrik (2000) and Dream Factory (2009) because name changes sell games. I’d finished all my movies except one, and I hadn’t started that last one, so I had no use for any of the resources being offered.

Two players were going after me, and I glanced at each of their movie boards. One had a movie that was nowhere close to completion, but the other needed just a single audio effect to finish a film. I grabbed the only audio effect chit at the party, then tossed it to the side, unused.

That was the dick move. Continue reading

Psychology of Gaming: Loss Aversion

Game design can be influenced by many different fields. Among them, psychology is one of the most interesting, because it suggests ways that players might act that don’t necessarily go hand in hand with the actual mechanics presented in a game. Thus this week I’m kicking off the start of what I hope will become a series on psychology, with a look at loss aversion and gaming.


I found one of the best discussions of loss aversion at Usabilia, which describes loss aversion thus:

Loss aversion is a human characteristic that describes how people are intrinsically afraid of losses. When compared against each other people dislike losing more than they like winning. Thus losses loom larger than gains even though the value in monetary terms may be identical.

There isn’t much question on the existence of loss aversion. Instead, the modern scientific articles on the topic tend to focus more on why it occurs and what its boundaries on. I think some of those issues could be intriguing for a follow-up article, but for the moment I want to concentrate on the core of loss aversion as it applies to game design.

Continue reading