Where is your focus in this Game?
I am a die-hard “cult of the new” guy, one of the reasons is because I really enjoy the transition in my focus from mechanics to competition. It is during that transition phase where different paths emerge from the mists of the rules and strategy and tactics come into focus. I want to make meaningful decisions in my game that have an effect both on my position and my opponents. I enjoy exploring new games because they have the opportunity to open up different strategies and tactics using the resources the components and rules provide.
I played “At the Gates of Loyang” (AGL) the other evening for the first time. The players consisted of; one fellow who had played the game many times, one fellow who had played once before and 2 of us who had never played before. The players were all experienced gamers with a wide variety of gaming tastes amongst them. The game lasted for just over 3.5 hours with rule explanations. This is not a review of AGL, but playing it triggered a realization for me that has been brewing for a while regarding many of the newer games from the past couple of years. I am using AGL to illustrate my points, because it is so fresh in my mind and it is now the poster child for me of a game that is seriously lacking in interesting focus.
When I sit down to play a game like AGL you could probably break down my focus into four main areas, Mechanics, Systems, Competition, and Goals. Keep in mind that in a game like AGL I differentiate between a System and Strategy. The amount of focus I dedicate to each of those four areas varies wildly depending on a lot of factors. Briefly, I would define the four areas as such:
Mechanics: How the components work, or interact together. For example in AGL when you plant a field, you take one vegetable from your Cart card and put it on one of the spaces on the Field card, then fill the rest of the field spaces with the same vegetable. Another example would be when you fulfill a customer’s order; you take the vegetables from your Cart card and place them on the Customer card. The rules tell you how the components mechanically work.
Systems: How the Mechanics blend or work together. For example in AGL when you want to fulfill a Customer’s order, you first need to have previously planted a Field (from your Cart), then on a following turn you harvested one vegetable from the Field (back into your Cart), then you take the vegetables from your Cart, place them on the Customer’s order card and collect the money for the sale. To take the example one step further, you can then spend the money to buy victory points. That is an example of one path or system to getting victory points. I do not call this a strategy because really…that’s the primary method the game uses to generate victory points.
Competition: The degrees to which one player’s resources interact with another player’s resources. For example in AGL there is a phase in the game where all players start with a hand of four cards and then take turns either adding cards to a common pool, or dropping out, discarding their whole hand and taking one card from the common pool. If you only have one card left in your hand you play it into your area and also take one of the remaining cards from the common pool. Each player on their turn decides if one of the cards they hold in their hand is better than the cards offered in the common pool. There is competition for the cards because obviously you want take the better cards for yourself before your opponents do.
Goals: Both short term and long term. For example in AGL the long term goal is to amass the most Victory points to win. A Short term goal would be to plant the all specific vegetables in fields a customer requires for the next four rounds.
Generally when faced with a new game, obviously, the mechanics and basic systems are the primary focus. The faster my grasp of the mechanics come the faster my focus will shift towards the more exciting parts of the game, advanced systems and both kinds of goals. In any game I play the competition focus for me starts as a sliver at the beginning and hopefully by the end of the game the lion’s share of my focus is on the competitive aspect.
In my recent play of AGL it took me a couple of rounds to understand the mechanics and simple systems, a couple more rounds to understand the more advanced systems and both short and long term goals. Then…nothing. I lifted my head from my playing area and looked around for the competition…and everybody else at the table had their head down, focused on their playing area moving vegetables around between cards and tiles…and that’s it. When they finished their turn, the head came up and the inevitable question followed; “Is everybody done?” Wow. For the entire rest of the game I could not care less what my opponents were doing and they could not care less what I was doing because there was only one way for me to interfere with what they were doing; have a Helper card that allowed me to do something to them. If you don’t have a helper card, there is no point to bother even watching them. Put your head down, fiddle your pieces around between cards and tiles, buy some Victory points…then sit back and ask “So how many points did you get this turn?” Rinse and repeat for the rest of the game.
The single phase where there is any competition focus in AGL is during card selection. Even this competition is fairly muted because you can choose to keep one of the cards in your hand until the end and play it in your own play area and there is nothing anybody else can do to stop you. There is the competition to amass the most points in the nine rounds, which actually is the point of the game. The way you do that is to figure out the systems more efficiently than the other players.
Games that do not eventually shift to a competitive focus feel more like an activity or a puzzle to me. Some folks would call these games “Multi-player Solitaire” game, but that’s not quite accurate. I have used the term “Process Optimization” to describe some games in the past, and I think it fits perfectly. The way to win is to optimize your systems/processes and the resources that come your way better than I can optimize my systems/processes and the resources that come my way. That just does not sound fun and really sounds more like work.
I enjoy games that have a transition from learning the mechanics to the competition. Give me a focus on meaningful strategic and tactical decisions over a focus on process optimization in my games.
Where do you like your focus?
Peace,
Brent Lloyd
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