Heyo,

Who's ready for a quick post time?

Sooooo tonight I am also tired and want to write for a shorter amount of time. I'm also going to be gone this weekend and still want to write. I hope to use this as a chance to practice writing concisely on topics.

Topic out of left field:

If you have a free for all / battle royal type game, how do you make it fun for people even if they get eliminated first?

I keep thinking about this topic because of the game Shards of Infinity. It's a fun deck-building game that I'd recommend.

The primary way to play is a free for all. Generally, it feels balanced around 1v1 play but works well for more. My MAIN complaint about the game is that it takes a while when I'm playing with more than 1 other person. The game advertises 30 minutes games, but I find they take ~1 hour per person playing minus 1 (i.e., 2 people games take 1 hour, 3 people take 2 hours, etc.).

Long games can be fun; I tend to have the patience for them. Where this hurts the Shards of Infinity experience is that it's a long game that also rewards eliminating the other players in the game.

Say, for example, I am playing with 4 other people. My friend Bob gets an excellent start and is taking the lead. Now, everyone else gangs up on him. There's no good way to prevent 4 people from ganging up, so Bob dies. Now, in the best case, there are 3 more hours that Bob has to wait.

Now you could argue that Bob misplayed and shouldn't accelerate as hard as he did. But you constantly run into situations like that. The table has to decide if it wants to kill you or not. If you get too much damage and think the table's going to gang up on you, your best bet is to kill 1 person. If you think someone is too scary or don't want to get hit yourself, make an alliance to kill someone else off.

The only meaningful counterplay is to kill someone off

There are not many ways to interact and prevent the opponent from doing what they want. I can buy the cards they want. I can hurt their champions. There's 1 card that can lower their prestige. BUT those aren't very impactful events.

The point is that the game encourages people to be killed off in long games. It isn't fun to be that person who can't play for several hours. What can be done?

If it feels bad to die, why not make it feel less bad? If you lose at Fall Guys, no worries; here's another game you can play.

This generally doesn't work well for in-person games because there's not a seemingly infinite number of people and games to play. I can imagine that for shards, you might be able to have people play another game once 2 people have been eliminated. Or have the defeated player join the player who defeats them.

If part of the reason people die early is that it's the best play, make defeating other players a bad play. Twilight Imperium 4 is an excellent example of this. It costs so many resources for so little gain to completely kill someone off that it rarely happens. (people do get effectively eliminated from being able to win. But even then, there's a low chance you'd want to do that because the player with no chance of winning could have a vendetta and make their win condition to prevent you from winning aka win-slaying).

In shards, there is a minor penalty for killing someone. Specifically, if I spend all my damage on Bob to kill him, Alice can now spend all her damage on me and vice versa. And this does come up in the end of close 1v1v1 games. The problem is that is in early or mid, the damage is less impactful than friendship, so this is not an incentive when the penalty for dying is greatest.

I'm not sure the best way to go about increasing the penalty for killing someone. Maybe immediately removing all other damage if you kill someone. Perhaps you take damage for killing someone early. Maybe there's an early damage cap or other ways to prevent someone from taking too much damage too early.

Maybe the big brain way to do this is to make the reward for killing someone REALLY BIG. You get their relic or destiny. That way, everyone wants to be the person to deliver the killing blow but doesn't want anyone else to be in that position.

If the free for all aspect leads to a bad experience, try a different format. Shards have options for 2v2 modes and bounty hunter/bodyguard modes (each player wins by killing / saving 2 other, different people). If there's no incentive to gang up on the same people, people will die later.

The problem with this is that it becomes a different game. Tho, I do want to try this sometime in the future.

Well I wrote for longer than I expected. I guess I like shards.

Bye!

Lucas

Heyo,

Who's ready for a quick post time?

Sooooo tonight I am also tired and want to write for a shorter amount of time. I'm also going to be gone this weekend and still want to write. I hope to use this as a chance to practice writing concisely on topics.

Topic out of left field:

If you have a free for all / battle royal type game, how do you make it fun for people even if they get eliminated first?

I keep thinking about this topic because of the game Shards of Infinity. It's a fun deck-building game that I'd recommend.

The primary way to play is a free for all. Generally, it feels balanced around 1v1 play but works well for more. My MAIN complaint about the game is that it takes a while when I'm playing with more than 1 other person. The game advertises 30 minutes games, but I find they take ~1 hour per person playing minus 1 (i.e., 2 people games take 1 hour, 3 people take 2 hours, etc.).

Long games can be fun; I tend to have the patience for them. Where this hurts the Shards of Infinity experience is that it's a long game that also rewards eliminating the other players in the game.

Say, for example, I am playing with 4 other people. My friend Bob gets an excellent start and is taking the lead. Now, everyone else gangs up on him. There's no good way to prevent 4 people from ganging up, so Bob dies. Now, in the best case, there are 3 more hours that Bob has to wait.

Now you could argue that Bob misplayed and shouldn't accelerate as hard as he did. But you constantly run into situations like that. The table has to decide if it wants to kill you or not. If you get too much damage and think the table's going to gang up on you, your best bet is to kill 1 person. If you think someone is too scary or don't want to get hit yourself, make an alliance to kill someone else off.

The only meaningful counterplay is to kill someone off

There are not many ways to interact and prevent the opponent from doing what they want. I can buy the cards they want. I can hurt their champions. There's 1 card that can lower their prestige. BUT those aren't very impactful events.

The point is that the game encourages people to be killed off in long games. It isn't fun to be that person who can't play for several hours. What can be done?

If it feels bad to die, why not make it feel less bad? If you lose at Fall Guys, no worries; here's another game you can play.

This generally doesn't work well for in-person games because there's not a seemingly infinite number of people and games to play. I can imagine that for shards, you might be able to have people play another game once 2 people have been eliminated. Or have the defeated player join the player who defeats them.

If part of the reason people die early is that it's the best play, make defeating other players a bad play. Twilight Imperium 4 is an excellent example of this. It costs so many resources for so little gain to completely kill someone off that it rarely happens. (people do get effectively eliminated from being able to win. But even then, there's a low chance you'd want to do that because the player with no chance of winning could have a vendetta and make their win condition to prevent you from winning aka win-slaying).

In shards, there is a minor penalty for killing someone. Specifically, if I spend all my damage on Bob to kill him, Alice can now spend all her damage on me and vice versa. And this does come up in the end of close 1v1v1 games. The problem is that is in early or mid, the damage is less impactful than friendship, so this is not an incentive when the penalty for dying is greatest.

I'm not sure the best way to go about increasing the penalty for killing someone. Maybe immediately removing all other damage if you kill someone. Perhaps you take damage for killing someone early. Maybe there's an early damage cap or other ways to prevent someone from taking too much damage too early.

Maybe the big brain way to do this is to make the reward for killing someone REALLY BIG. You get their relic or destiny. That way, everyone wants to be the person to deliver the killing blow but doesn't want anyone else to be in that position.

If the free for all aspect leads to a bad experience, try a different format. Shards have options for 2v2 modes and bounty hunter/bodyguard modes (each player wins by killing / saving 2 other, different people). If there's no incentive to gang up on the same people, people will die later.

The problem with this is that it becomes a different game. Tho, I do want to try this sometime in the future.

Well I wrote for longer than I expected. I guess I like shards.

Bye!

Lucas