Games Cause Downtime Too

Nothing is as much of a downer as downtime. It’s worse than any play experience, since it literally means that you are aren’t playing the game – you are just waiting for other people.

Universally hated, downtime is usually talked about as a player issue. “It’s not the game; it’s the player” goes the cliché. Player specific downtime, analysis paralysis, is complained about far more than downtime as a broader issue.

While AP and player caused downtime are of course real, lets discuss the other side of the coin – the role of games themselves in causing downtime. The most discussion this usually gets is that certain games are called ‘AP inducing’ because of their puzzly nature (note that it’s still about the player and their AP).

Game Issues which Cause Downtime

1) Solvability/Calculability

This is what is often meant when game is called ‘puzzly’ or ‘AP inducing’. The optimal move is calculable with enough time spent, though it usually takes a lot of time to do it.

Five Tribes, a poster child for games dubbed ‘AP inducing’, has calculable turns – spend 20 minutes or so, and a smart player can definitively figure out which of the many moves available to them will generate the most points on a given turn. A player is given the uncomfortable choice of taking the time necessary to choose the best move, and cause others to suffer through their long turn, or move quickly, and possibly lose the game to someone who cares less about the implicit social obligation of having the game be fun for everyone.

In games that generate less downtime, the right move is just too hard to calculate, and as a result, players will more willingly make a rough estimate of the best play in much less time.

2) Radically Changing Game State

This issue applies to games where the board state changes so much between a player’s turns that it’s not practical to plan one’s turn in advance. The ability to plan is the main reason downtime isn’t a bigger issue in complex games, but games which remove this ability force a player to start from scratch at the beginning of their turn.

Coincidentally, Five Tribes also has this issue, in that it’s rarely worth calculating the best move before one’s turn, since someone else is likely to do that move before it gets to you, and each move completely what’s available next.

Most eurogames keep a relatively stable board state, allowing a fair amount of planning. An action selection mechanism such as worker placement can lead to someone ‘taking your spot’ and causing you to rethink, but only sometimes, and even then most of the board remains stable, allowing a player to quickly switch to plan B.

In American style games or conflict games tend to have this issue of a changing board state, but they are rarely calculable, they don’t necessarily cause AP if the decisions are straightforward enough.

3) Many Actions on One Turn

Games that allow or require a player to take many actions on one turn lead to long turns as players have to not only plan a host of moves, but the options available multiply exponentially. 

Take Root, a multiplayer conflict game in which players can do things like build, move, attack, trade, and often several of these things on the same turn. One faction in the game, The Eyrie, works through action programming, wherein the this player plays a card and then activates all the cards they have put down through the course of the game (until one of the other players disrupts them, and they have to start over with a new chain of cards). This can lead to a huge number of actions on one player’s turn.

Other multi-player conflict games strictly limit a player to one action. In Blood Rage, a player can move, invade, attack (pillage), or play a card, but never more than one of these things in a single turn, which severely limits a turn’s length.

While many eurogames limit a player’s turn to one action, such as worker placement games, some, such as engine building games where a player chains bonus actions together, can lead to large numbers of actions on one turn – this is a major reason that engine building games are often simpler and shorter than other eurogames, since a heavy engine builder could lead to enormously long turns.

4) Allowing or Encouraging Too High a Player Count

Much of the downtime I’ve seen in games comes when the game is simply being played at too high a player count. A huge culprit here for complex euros are those 5 player expansions.

In other games, it’s well known one just shouldn’t play it at a high player count. Five Tribes, despite the issues mentioned above, is okay on downtime if one plays it with 2 players (probably its best player count). 

Game Structures Which Limit or Prevent Downtime

1) Simultaneous Action Selection

There are many games where players secretly choose an action, usually by putting a card face down, and then simultaneously reveal their actions and execute them. In many of these games, such as Race or Roll for the Galaxy/New Frontiers and Mission: Red Planet, the actions are actually resolved one at a time, but it almost feels simultaneous, since these tend to be simple actions which go quickly.

Fastest of all are simultaneous action selection games where the actions are actually resolved simultaneously. Card drafting games like 7 Wonders or Paper Tales
do this smoothly and effortlessly.

‘Bingo’ style game are another good example of this, such as Welcome To, Karuba, and my latest fascination, Tiny Towns. I’d argue that one reason for the roll and write game revolution of recent years is that they frequently have this kind of resolution, which keep everyone involved all the time.

One downside to ‘Bingo’ games can be that they have little player interaction – an action is given which all the players have to enact, and they all do so separately and privately on their own player boards. While Tiny Towns does have players resolve their actions separately on their own boards, it’s more interactive in that the player whose turn it is gets to say what action, or more accurately, what resource, gets resolved on every player’s board. This gives an opportunity for quick, simultaneous meanness that doesn’t feel like anything else – a player can call a given action and receive groans all at once from around the table.

2) Unstoppable Planning

What this means is that a player can do a significant amount of planning towards actions that are unpreventable by other players.

Take A Feast for Odin. While most people consider the major innovation of the game to be combining worker placement with a Tetris style personal player board, I consider its best move to be much subtler, and it is this:

When a player acquires a tile to place on their personal board, they don’t have to place it right away – it can just sit off to the side of their board as long as they like, which usually means until the income phase at the end of the round, when one is rewarded for tile placement. 

This ability to wait not only expands the possibilities of what one can do on one’s board, it more importantly allows players to consider different options and turn and play with their tiles throughout all their opponent’s turns for the rest of the round. If someone’s taking a long turn, no problem – you’re too busy fiddling around with Tetris possibilities to care. And because it’s your personal player board, you know no one can stop you from executing your plan.

Unstoppable planning is pretty common in multi-player solitaire euros, and is arguably a reason for their popularity. While some may reject their lack of player interaction, there’s no denying this very lack lowers downtime since one’s plans can’t be disrupted.

3) Limited Action Options

Ethnos has a deserved reputation for being lightning fast, even at 6 players, because not only do players only get one action, they have an extremely limited choice of actions – they can draw a card, or play a set of cards from their hand. Reef works similarly – you either draw a card, or play a card, and that’s it. A gateway game like Ticket to Ride, while following a similarly simple structure, is actually more complicated, in that it adds taking a long term goal (ticket) to the draw a card or play a set of cards mix.

It’s definitely true that more complex games aren’t don’t work with an extremely limited option set like this. However, even complex games can reduce downtime by limiting how many types of actions you can take. A worker placement game does this beautifully – every action is simply placing a worker, and taking the action at that spot. Or a game like Concordia, is always, every turn, play a card and take the action on that card.

While there may be a lot of different actions in these games, they all have the same structure. Some games have a host of different actions with a lot of different structures. Terra Mystica, for instance, gives you a choice of 8 different actions, most of which work completely differently from each other. It’s easy in a game like this to stop and ponder what one can do before one even thinks about what one will do. 

Part of the issue here is actually visual. Worker placement games and Concordia both show you visually what actions you can take, either through the iconography at action spots or written on the cards in your hand. Games can limit downtime by making the available actions one can take easily viewable in one place.

4) No Round Structure

Most eurogames (and some other types of games) have a round structure, and at the end of each round workers are retrieved, cards are replaced, tracks are reset, etc. This kind of maintenance creates some downtime for everyone which also disrupts the flow of the game.

Some recent eurogames such as Scythe, Architects of the West Kingdom, and Raiders of the North Sea, have done away with rounds all together and simply have a continuous flow of turns until some end game condition is met. Cards and resources are replaced immediately, and in the case of Architects and Raiders, ingenious systems of worker retrieval are baked into the game mechanisms rather than having to have them retrieved during end of round maintenance.

There can be other issues with roundless games, such as a first player advantage which shows up Scythe and Raiders of the North Sea, but it can’t be denied that these games reduce downtime by reducing end of round maintenance.

5) Timed Games

While it’s use is relatively rare, cooperative games that use an actual time, like FUSE, X-COM, and Magic Maze, obviously eliminate downtime completely. Some games have timed elements or optional timers, like the hourglass in Codenames, or the timed trading periods in Sidereal Confluence and Trade on the Tigris. [Side note: Trading with timer = tense and fun. Trading without timer is why many of us gave up Catan].

That’s all I’ve got for today. I haven’t even touched on one of the biggest downtime issues in modern board games: the slog of first plays. But that’s a subject for another post…