Hurts So Good

For those of thus who love games, there’s nothing quite so delicious as a painful decision. I’d go so far as to say that difficult, excruciating decisions are at the heart of what makes a game great.

If you are playing games to master their strategies (as opposed to playing for thematic or social reasons), these decisions are memorable, challenging, fearful, and engaging. I’m here to talk about excruciating decisions in a range of games, and in the process look at what mechanisms bring out that delicious pain.

Underwater Cities and matching colors

Let’s start with Underwater Cities, a game I’ve been playing obsessively over the last month. It didn’t take me long to realize that the game gave me far more angst than your average worker placement game.

This is due to a simple twist, which is chief conceit of the game: in addition to placing a worker at a location to take your action, you also play a card on your turn, which is either green, red, or orange. These card colors also correspond to the colors on the board at each worker placement location. 

The cards give powerful bonuses, in the form of either an immediate reward, a permanent ability, a sometimes reusable power, or endgame points scoring potential. The catch is, in order to get the benefit of the card, its color must match the color of the worker placement location. You can place a worker along with a card that doesn’t match, but in that case you just get the worker placement action – you completely ignore the card effect.

When I first read about this mechanism, I was unimpressed. It seems like it just added a bunch of luck to the game – if you drew card colors which matched the actions you wanted to do, you flourished; if you didn’t, you were screwed. 

While there is a bit of truth to this, this ‘unfairness’ in fact generates the wonderfully tough decisions in the game. Do you take the action you really want to take on the board, and play a non-matching card and get no card action? Or do you play a great card with a great action, but have to go to a worker placement spot which doesn’t fulfill your immediate needs in order to match the color of the card? 

If you play too much to the strength of your cards, you’ll get a lot of powerful actions but you won’t be able to follow a specific plan, whereas if you ignore the power of your cards too much, you’ll follow your plan but you won’t have enough power to fulfill it. Playing well requires being able to dance between the short and the long term – when you need to follow the long term plan now, and when you can detour off to grab some lucrative things you weren’t planning on taking.

All of this is exacerbated by the fact that you can only have three cards in your hand at the start of the turn. While there are plenty of ways to temporarily mitigate the card draw luck by drawing lots of extra cards, you are back in the same vise soon after after you discard down to 3. In other words, you can’t get around the color restraint by just stockpiling a ton of cards.

There are two things about this system which I’ve noticed are common to tough decisions in many strategy board games:

1) Difficult decisions are often provoked by constraints. Games which allow you to do a ton of different things may generate analysis paralysis by the breadth of the options presented, but those decisions aren’t exactly painful in the same way. In Underwater Cities, the color restraint combined with the three card restraint creates a straightjacket that you are trying to wriggle around every turn of the game.

2) There is almost always serious long term implications in most tough decisions; in fact, the decision is usually about balancing immediate needs vs. long term needs. A game which is purely or mostly tactical might be ‘difficult’ in that it’s challenging to calculate, but that’s merely a matter of trying to work out the best play and succeeding or not.

What I’m calling a ‘difficult’ decision is the kind where you second guess yourself for turns afterward. In a tactical game, you make the right choice or you don’t, but it rarely has long term implications which you could have foreseen which haunt you.

Underwater Cities exacerbates this short term vs. long term tension by throwing in lots of deadlines and goals in the game which give you the opportunity to choose between the short and long term. There are production phases which happen only after rounds 4, 7, and 10 of the game (which is 10 rounds long). You want to max out your buildings on the board so you produce the maximum resources and victory points during each of these phases.

There are also three mid-game goals, where the first player to reach each one gets a modest reward of point and resources. In addition to this scoring, production phase scoring, and scoring based on how well you’ve built your cities at the end of the game, including a personal goal which involves building tunnels to land cities to trigger, there are lucrative end game scoring cards, which are not communal, but first come, first serve.

What prevents a player from grabbing the end game cards early is that they are cumbersome – there is a significant cost to acquiring them and putting them in play. If you don’t put them in play they clog your hand, essentially exacerbating your hand size constraint. 

Take these cards too early and you will slow down your engine too much. Wait too long, and others will take the card you need before you get there. These are among the most excruciating decisions in the game. Can I hold out one more turn before grabbing that end game scoring card so I can build more buildings before the production phase? Or do I need to grab it now before someone else does? When someone takes an end game card just before you were about to, and you’ve been building up to taking that card the whole game, it’s like a punch in the stomach.

Playing the right worker placement spots you need is essential to win the races to mid game goals, end game scoring cards, and superior production, but you need to match colors on cards to build your engine up as well. It makes every round full of pressure and dread.

Race for the Galaxy and multi-use cards

Outside of the pressure element, one of the joyful puzzles of Underwater Cities is getting thrown a bunch of disparate cards and trying to make a coherent engine or strategy out of them.

Race for the Galaxy is perhaps the most famous example of this being the entire game. You are dealt a handful of cards, and you have to decide what direction you are going to take the whole thing in – militarily conquering planets, production and trade for points, etc.

Like quite a few other games, Race for the Galaxy relies on multi-use cards to generate many of the tough decisions, especially early in the game. In this games and others like it, cards can be both something you build, such as a planet or technology, or it can be used as currency to build a different card.

This leads to hard decisions about what cards to keep and which cards to build with. Being good at Race requires being able to throw away a card which will be good in the future in order to buy what you need to buy now.

Note that the tension here is again created by a now vs. the future decision, as well as a resource constraint.

Twilight Struggle and hidden information

The classic two player game Twilight Struggle also creates tough decisions in how to use your multi-use cards. But the game also has another element which creates tension based around imperfect information about which cards your opponent has. 

There are certain cards which are powerful to play, but are a disaster if your opponent is holding the appropriate counter. Players must figure the odds and consider how their opponent has played in order to try to guess whether their opponent is holding a key card or not which wreck a certain plan if executed.

Blood Rage and interactive drafting games

Uncertainty about what cards an opponent holds also ratchet up the tension in card drafting games, which bake lots of pain into making decisions right from the outset. The act of choosing one of 8 or however many cards to permanently build up your tribe (in the case of Blood Rage), while letting go of the others forever is hard enough, and it’s made worse by knowing your opponents are going to take the best of the cards you pass and use them against you.

Is your opponent using the Loki strategy and you’re holding the perfect card for them? You have to decide between foiling their plans and taking the card that’s actually good for you. Hate drafting decisions are some of the toughest. Sometimes you can take what you want and pass off the decision to the next player, but if the person who needs the card is right next to you, then the decision is up to you.

Sometimes card drafting games can create a run on a specific type of card – for instance in Blood Rage, if everyone takes quests early. Then you have to decide whether you’re going to take a card you want, or take a quest before they’re all gone.

These decisions are much more painful if they have long term implications or whether your mistake will stab you in the heart. Drafting games which are quick and tactical, such as a Sushi Go, aren’t too painful, in that the implications are all for the short term, and consequently they play much faster.

Blind Bidding and Rising Sun

Blind bidding is a mechanism which is justifiably criticized by gamers for being unfair and unforgiving – you have imperfect information, and if you guess wrong, you lose what you bid and get nothing. But while this isn’t always fair or fun, it can create drama and angst if it’s done well.

One of the only blind bidding games I enjoy is Rising Sun, or more specifically, the combats in that game. Each battle is not one but four blind bid auctions as you secretly bid for various combat advantages. There’s a lot to calculate, and moreover, because the war phase of the game is essentially a closed economy, you have to calculate how much money you’ll have left to bid in other battles in the phase.

When planning your bids for a battle, you might be thinking about 16 separate blind auctions at the same time, if you know you’re in 4 battles during that phase.

It’s no wonder that an otherwise smooth game can generate tons of analysis paralysis during this phase. But while the auctions can slow down the game, and they are ‘unfair’ and punishing, this is compensated for by being incredibly tense. I’ve seen players go back and forth 3 times on their bids before a battle. It’s slow, but delicious, as the bids are finally revealed, and cheers and groans ensue. It’s a polarizing system – some love it, some hate it – but few would deny that it produces painful, tense decisions.

And like the other games mentioned above, there are long term consequences – failure to choose correctly isn’t just the matter of a few points right now – it affects your board position for the rest of the game.

One point on constraint before I wrap this up: constraint itself doesn’t produce hard decisions. If players take all the spots you want in a worker placement game, that sucks, but it doesn’t produce a hard decision – you simply go to the next best spot for you. A game that leaves you with only bad decisions isn’t excruciating in the way I’m talking about – it’s just annoying. Excruciating decisions are always double edged – they leave you with the potential for great success and great failure.

So what games, types of games, and game mechanisms create that enjoyable pain for you?