Speaking generally I like games that: - are simple enough to play with a six year old (no 20 page rulebooks - chess is "simple" in this sense); - play in no more than about 90 minutes; - can be played both two-player and multi-player; - have strategic and tactial choices, preferably of several entirely different kinds** (where it's not hard to make a good choice, but the best choice is not obvious, possibly requiring some tradeoff between strategy and tactics); - either allow some way to win unexpectedly or give an opportunity to come back from a setback (multiplayer can help with that, since if you take a hit you're generally less of a target). One should never hear "oh, you're going to win", unless the delay to the actual win is on the order of a few seconds (or where such a claim is itself a tactic - see Munchkin and INWO); - have some degree of interfering with the plans of other players, without overemphasizing the screw-your-neighbor-until-they-cry aspect (you should be able to make life a little harder (plan-altering harder) for someone, not end their game - unless you're in the process of winning when you do it); - have opportunities for a degree of short-to-medium term (compared to the length of the game) co-operation between players; - a modest degree of luck, but not so much as to blow away strategy completely; - I often like a nice premise where the mechanics fit the premise (nifty game components can help that if they don't push the cost up too high), but a game completely abstract of premise can work if it's good enough (Falling would not work nearly as well as an abstract game).
** an example of a game with two levels of quite different choices is the original version of Button Men where both players chose how many sides were on their X-dice each round; later James made the tournament rule that only the player who just lost a round could change (when to my mind it was tournaments that /most/ needed to keep the both-players-choose rule). The original game was actually two games, one nested inside the other. You played a sequential-move game where your tactical choices were about what dice attacks to make nested inside another simultaneous-move game where your strategic choice was what one of your pieces were.
I can't think of many games (including some good ones) that don't break at least half of those criteria and I don't imagine all of them can be done (all that well) at once. Note that many of my preferences only work in multiplayer games.
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Date: 2006-03-22 02:59 am (UTC)Part II:
Speaking generally I like games that:
- are simple enough to play with a six year old (no 20 page rulebooks - chess is "simple" in this sense);
- play in no more than about 90 minutes;
- can be played both two-player and multi-player;
- have strategic and tactial choices, preferably of several entirely different kinds** (where it's not hard to make a good choice, but the best choice is not obvious, possibly requiring some tradeoff between strategy and tactics);
- either allow some way to win unexpectedly or give an opportunity to come back from a setback (multiplayer can help with that, since if you take a hit you're generally less of a target). One should never hear "oh, you're going to win", unless the delay to the actual win is on the order of a few seconds (or where such a claim is itself a tactic - see Munchkin and INWO);
- have some degree of interfering with the plans of other players, without overemphasizing the screw-your-neighbor-until-they-cry aspect (you should be able to make life a little harder (plan-altering harder) for someone, not end their game - unless you're in the process of winning when you do it);
- have opportunities for a degree of short-to-medium term (compared to the length of the game) co-operation between players;
- a modest degree of luck, but not so much as to blow away strategy completely;
- I often like a nice premise where the mechanics fit the premise (nifty game components can help that if they don't push the cost up too high), but a game completely abstract of premise can work if it's good enough (Falling would not work nearly as well as an abstract game).
** an example of a game with two levels of quite different choices is the original version of Button Men where both players chose how many sides were on their X-dice each round; later James made the tournament rule that only the player who just lost a round could change (when to my mind it was tournaments that /most/ needed to keep the both-players-choose rule). The original game was actually two games, one nested inside the other. You played a sequential-move game where your tactical choices were about what dice attacks to make nested inside another simultaneous-move game where your strategic choice was what one of your pieces were.
I can't think of many games (including some good ones) that don't break at least half of those criteria and I don't imagine all of them can be done (all that well) at once. Note that many of my preferences only work in multiplayer games.