on design discourse

This post is inspired in large part by several conversations I have observed or taken part in lately. Namely, this thread and its related reposts on Bluesky about tiebreakers, this podcast episode about subsystems in games, and several other interesting discussions floating around Discord. All of these have touched on different aspects of game design and what makes for “good” choices for a game. I’ve been thinking about my own responses to each individual question, and I realized that my own approach to these things is usually a very dissatisfactory “it depends”. Perhaps useful for flexibility in designing games, but completely ineffectual for engaging in discussion, especially online.

Does a game need a tiebreaker? It depends on the game. Does that tiebreaker need to be thematically resonant? It depends on the game. Should all subsystems that add complexity to a game be removed? That depends on the game. Can someone effectively capture an ongoing conflict in a wargame setting? You guessed it, that depends! These questions are, understandably, simplified for easier presentation or consumption, but there is so much nuance behind each one that is feels impossible to provide a straightforward answer. At least for me. Every game emerges from its own context (or intersections of contexts), and so every game has a unique answer to questions about what it needs.

For example, tiebreakers only make sense within competitive games. Cooperative games or unranked games or TTRPGs do not engage with the concept often. And then, even within competitive games, tiebreakers must be considered within the boundaries of the design itself. Unfortunately, I don’t think all designers think this way. Many assume they must drive a game’s conclusion toward a single victor at all costs, even at the expense of a satisfying conclusion to a gaming experience. Game of Thrones is somewhat notorious for this — it has four tiebreakers to keep track of, none of which is particularly difficult to check and all of which make somewhat thematic sense. However, within the context of that IP and the particular corner of that story the game covers, might it not be even more thematically relevant and narratively richer to entertain the idea that if no one satisfies the major win condition Westeros descends into chaos without a victor? Or at the very least to frame victory through achieving the primary win condition differently from victory through an obviously less convincing tiebreaker?

I have similar thoughts about subsystems in games. The title of the podcast episode is a touch misleading, as they do not actually believe all subsystems must die. But Jack and Jason do run through a number of specific examples of subsystems that could be changed or removed from games to improve the overall experience of playing those games. I don’t disagree with any of their specific examples (especially not the dice rolling to move in Clue, ugh it’s the worst), but I do think there are situations in which you might want to retain a subsystem in your game that serves a narrative purpose at the expense of increasing mechanical simplicity or reducing randomness. Much has been said about how awful the dice rolling in CATAN can feel. I believe it is an important aspect of that game’s design, reinforcing two thematic elements: the unpredictable nature of resource collection in the middle ages, and the importance of trade to survival and community success in the same period. Most people want to play CATAN as a pure resource collection and management game, but it is by design a negotiation and trading game and all of its mechanisms point in that direction. Some subsystems can be extraneous, poorly implemented, or unnecessary. But many that feel that way can also be justified within the context of a game’s narrative or thematic setting.

This brings me to my main two points about all of this. First, that the conversations around game mechanisms and design principles often focus on the mechanical aspects of gaming experiences rather than their narrative elements. Ideally, and in the best games, these two things are interwoven seamlessly. Many games do not achieve this, and sometimes that is because they ignore what might be considered “core” design principles like balance, making a game simpler, or removing friction. However, many of the games I love best intentionally violate these rules in service of delivering a more thematically resonant experience. Pax Pamir, for example, has a complex deck setup, unreadable card effects in personal player areas, a doubling of point values in the third round, and a tiebreaker telling people to have a kebab cookoff, all in a game I have seen last as little as 15 minutes and as long as two hours. It does these things in service of delivering a strong historical thesis about the collapse of the Durrani Empire in 19th century Afghanistan. Many of its little rules would have been shaved off by designers more concerned with following a set of standard principles about friction and balance, and that would have been to the game’s great detriment.

Second, most games are not properly framed for the market. What I mean by this is that the framing provided about a game, by its designer, by its publisher, by marketing teams and content creators, shapes how people think of a game from the moment they encounter it. A game like Amabel Holland’s City of Six Moons (and more recently Swords Against) has, by the logic of the standard gaming market, no business being as successful as it is. But Amabel is exceptional at framing her games so that people know exactly what they are getting (even when, as in the case of both Six Moons and Swords Against, they don’t at all know what they are getting in the box). Framing matters at both a macro and a micro level. On one hand, most people know to expect different things from a party game, a wargame, a complex strategy game, or a self-produced indie game. But even within the large categories of our industry, we must shape how people understand what we’re delivering. How we talk about our games from the very beginning shapes expectations and decisions around what will be in their boxes and systems.

Hawk & Dove operates within the historical and wargame market, but we do not make traditional hex and counter games, nor do we typically cover more popular subjects such as WWII, the American Civil War, or the Napoleonic era. This difference in our game’s scope and subject matter will necessarily inform our decisions around our games’ designs. Things like tiebreakers will not always matter or even make sense in our games’ narratives. Our games may contain subsystems that others would have cut for the sake of streamlined gameplay. Our games will most definitely touch on delicate topics in the service of bringing strong historical perspectives and arguments to the table. So, when we say that our games may be challenging, we mean that on various levels. They may force players to engage with subject matter they find difficult, they may be mechanically challenging (though ideally also rewarding), and they may also challenge our players’ sensibilities of how games should work.

So, if you ask me whether or not you will like one of our games, or find it worth playing, my answer will probably be, “it depends, but I hope so.”

Cheers,

~Brooks