Okay, I've wanted to post this for a while. If we look at Chess, Backgammon, Go, even Draughts (Checkers for the US-English speakers), then we can see that they have extremely simple rules that nonetheless give games with a lot of depth and strategy to them - probably the reason that they've stood the test of time so well. Yet in modern electronic games, it's increasingly common to see games with a lot of complexity and not much depth; surely not a good thing. RPGs are especially guilty of this, and it removes replay value of the games. So how do we, as designers, create games with the longevity yet ease of understanding of Chess or Go? Perhaps it's something to do with having many tactical choices, perhaps to do with trickery of the opponent.

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Original post by Delphinus Okay, I've wanted to post this for a while. If we look at Chess, Backgammon, Go, even Draughts (Checkers for the US-English speakers), then we can see that they have extremely simple rules that nonetheless give games with a lot of depth and strategy to them - probably the reason that they've stood the test of time so well. Yet in modern electronic games, it's increasingly common to see games with a lot of complexity and not much depth; surely not a good thing. RPGs are especially guilty of this, and it removes replay value of the games. So how do we, as designers, create games with the longevity yet ease of understanding of Chess or Go? Perhaps it's something to do with having many tactical choices, perhaps to do with trickery of the opponent.

I have been thinking about this too.

I can see some problems with having a design as simple as Chess :

1) It is too easy for another company to steal or replicate the idea.

2) It might not be very profitable. Players can make their own boards and pieces and play for free. Some of the most profitable games are high on complexity and low on depth : e.g. World of Warcraft.


But then again, Monopoly (the board game) has been around forever, is low on depth and complexity and sells like hot cakes even though the design is easily replicated.

Re:

This topic is related to the fundamental design of strategy in that strategy is
probably the simplest and most powerful seed of emergent interaction. There are
other ways to get an emergent interaction but suppose you start by talking about
design of strategy, you can start looking at a minimal design that implements
a strategic interaction. The following minimal design is not the only way to
implement strategy. It is minimal in the sense that if you take away a component
from its definition, it would fall apart. But it doesn't mean that it is the
only way.

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Two players take turn to issue visible actions that are correlated to future actions in order to reach their conflicting goals.

The games you mentioned in the original post are all characterized by this
minimal description. For example, in Go:

Action: placement of a stone. (This is the only action in Go.)

Correlation: Capture opponent stones by suffocating them (It takes more than one stone to suffocate a group of stones.)

Conflict: The two players are trying to suffocate the other.

Consideration: The players take turn and thus have time to think before issuing an action.

Visibility: The players can see the entire board.


In a design, when you complete these five points you get yourself a strategy
game.


Design example:

Suppose I start with a random action, I could fill up the five points and get
a game design.

Action: Drawing a line on a paper.

Visibility: Satisfied by letting both players see the paper.

Consideration: Satisfied by letting both players take turn.

Conflict: Let player 1 have the goal to draw a line connecting the east to
west edges of the paper. Let player 2 have the goal to draw a line connecting
the north and south edges of the paper. The player that completes the line
first wins.

Correlation: Let the paper be a grid of 13x13. Each player can fill in at most
a segment of 4 cells. Player1 can only fill in a horizontal segment, and
Player2 can only fill in a vertical segment.


This completes the backbone of a strategy game.

I've been wondering what would happen if you took Chess and modified the rules such that you changed either the movement of the pieces or their abilities.

Wai's analysis is good, but I also like Greg Costikyan's.

But I think there's a deeper issue at work. I see three problems:

• Granularity - In many games there are often many more actions to take than in an abstract board game. Whenever you have more of something, it's difficult to make any one thing stand out. (Take having 3 stats in an RPG versus 33). By limiting the actions pieces/units can take, every piece/unit becomes far more significant.
  
  
• Strategic Dependency - Related to the above, units/pieces (especially in an RPG) rarely depend on one another critically. Because games throw tons of units or abilities at us without understanding that sometimes less is more, and because (often in the name of balance) they are often not made exceptionally powerful in only one or two ways, there's less depth to the overall situation. The RTS rush is a perfect example of this.
  
  
• Realism vs. Abstraction - When a knight jumps a pawn to take a bishop, what has really happened? Did a horse jump over some old religious official who was out on the battlefield (doing what I may ask)? Hardly. But it's the drive toward realism which brings about a wealth of distinctions which have no difference.
  

The last point is I think the biggest problem. We as gamers have become almost like little children who measure the value of a gift by how much it weighs. If RPG A has 3 character classes, which each only have 3 abilities; and RPG B has 33 character classes with 100 abilities each, Joe Average gamer is going to wet himself over RPG B, all other things (like graphics) being equal.

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Original post by Wai Design example: Suppose I start with a random action, I could fill up the five points and get a game design. Action: Drawing a line on a paper. Visibility: Satisfied by letting both players see the paper. Consideration: Satisfied by letting both players take turn. Conflict: Let player 1 have the goal to draw a line connecting the east to west edges of the paper. Let player 2 have the goal to draw a line connecting the north and south edges of the paper. The player that completes the line first wins. Correlation: Let the paper be a grid of 13x13. Each player can fill in at most a segment of 4 cells. Player1 can only fill in a horizontal segment, and Player2 can only fill in a vertical segment.

I think this is good but either under Conflict or Correlation you must have a stronger stipulation for how the moves / actions affect each other. As it stand now I can't tell whether or not line segments block one another, whether they must be linked or whether or not their are other moves that negate or enhance a player's move. By your description I could just draw a line and (by virtue of being first) win the game, which isn't a strategy at all.

Introducing something like line blocking might help, but again if strategies deadlock they're not really game worthy strategies (the first player can just draw a straight line even with blocking and the second player will have no means of heading them off, assuming lines are connected).

If lines can be randomly placed I could see more variety, but still don't see the benefit of not being player 1.

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Original post by Wavinator I've been wondering what would happen if you took Chess and modified the rules such that you changed either the movement of the pieces or their abilities.

See Ultima Chess (http://www.pathguy.com/chess/Ultima.htm), in which the pieces mostly move the same way (almost all move as standard queens) but all capture differently.

Also see Penultima (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penultima), which adds a fairly simple mechanic but completely changes the nature of the game.

Re: Wavinator

Suppose you call the game described TheCrossing.

I meant that a player could block a line using a segment. Since the maximum length of a segment is 4, it is asymetric. Suppose you start by drawing a segment in the center, and your opponent blocks it, your opponent can only block one end of a segment and the block would be weaker on one side on the side that it is blocked.

I don't have a problem with strategy game where the competitive players would end up in a deadlock like in tic-tac-toe. It is not intuitive for me to tell whether the player that starts first have an advantage. The following two games started with red with 1. The numders goes to 9 then to alphabet letters.

[ Game run examples (image) ]

In the above, it is obvious when a player makes a bad move? You could try it yourself if you want. Does the game make you think? What is the ultimate strategy? Does it exist? Does your brain gets warmer when you think about it? If so then it is good.

Therefore I don't think that it matters whether the game itself will have a deadlock, because from the player's it could be fun to discover the deadlock. For instance, it is obvious to you that when both players are playing using the best strategy, a deadlock will always result? If so, what is the strategy?

It is not obvious to me. I think that it would be part of the fun for the player to hypothesize whether there is such a strategy. I did not completely design TheCrossing because I used intuition to define the rules. But I agree with you that intuitively I tried to avoid deadlocks. (That was why I chose a boardsize that was large. I knew that the game would not work if the boardsize was too small.) But in terms of design, avoiding deadlocks was more like a refining step because the backbone would most likely be complex enough that it is not obvious whether deadlock exists.

A better description of this design:

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Action: Placement of a horizontal or vertical line segments of length at most 4 cells Visibility: Both players can see the existing segments Consideration: Players take turn to place segments Conflict: Each cell can only be colored once. A new segment must be placed on continuous empty cells. The first player that cross their assigned direction wins. Correlation: A crossing can only be completed by a set of segments. This allows the a player to guess what the opponent's attempt and purpose of a placement. Because the cost of placing each segment is high, it is unlikely that the action of an opponent is random.

Imagine that you play TheCrossing on a 59x59 board. Do you see how the game would start to feel like Go? Where while there are many local battles, there is also a big picture, and a player could lose track of the big picture. The fact that the board is big allows player more freedom to place more random segments, just like Go. You could add random unusable cells to the board so that the players must analyze and know that some locations on the map are less desirable. But that addition is not necessary to make the game itself a strategy game.

[Edited by - Wai on March 8, 2009 6:25:07 PM]

Probably because it is easier to add than take away. Anyone can add extra lays of complication, it takes a genius to take them away. It was separates designers from people who have cool ideas. Another, less important, factor is that gamers expect the games to conform to ceartain things. With big RTSs and 4Xs, if the game doesn't need a bible to play, it is assumed to be "dumbed down".

There is a difference between Complex and Complicated.

A Complicated game has many components that have few interactions. A Complex game is one where the components (which don't have to be numerous) have many interactions.

The difference is in the interactions of the components.

Take for example GO.

You have the Board, Player 1's pieces and Player 2's pieces. And that is is for the components. That is not many pieces. But the way they interact is quite extensive as a piece that is laid down interacts with many of the pieces that have already been laid down.

This is what creates the depth of game like Go and Chess.

Complexity theory, a branch of mathematics, gives us a good framework for this kind of design.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory

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But then again, Monopoly (the board game) has been around forever, is low on depth and complexity and sells like hot cakes even though the design is easily replicated.

Ever heard of copyright? You can't simply sell replicas of Monopoly... (unlike chess, which is public domain)

About depth, any game where you play against something or someone requires strategy. If finding the best move is computationally expensive or undecidable, then there is depth. That's it.