Originality is Overrated, Part 3

The final part of this series has proven the most difficult for me to write. I don’t enjoy criticizing games – I’d much rather extol the virtues of a design rather than criticize games that I know many people love. But I don’t think I could do my thesis justice if I only praised derivative designs and sub-genres. I do have to actually make a case here that originality in games is overrated.

Here are a few key assumptions that I’m making as I go:

1) By originality, I mean game themes and/or mechanics that are entirely 100% new. I don’t mean twists on old proven mechanics – that’s inside of the derivative design I’ve praised.

2) Originality and innovation is of course very important to the board game industry. Where I’m saying it’s overrated is as relates to the enjoyment derived from any particular game that is original, as defined above.

3) I’m purposely looking at new games that many people of BGG have heard of and which have been very well received. Obscure games make it both less likely for people to know what I’m talking about, as well as making the argument too easy – anyone can look up a hundred obscure, ‘original’ Kickstarter games that were disasters, for instance.

So I’m instead sticking to some of the most acclaimed original designs of 2016, keeping in mind that for every original design that’s acclaimed like these are, that are probably dozens that crash and burn. 

Here’s the other crucial caveat: my point isn’t to say any of the games below are objectively ‘bad’. There’s too much taste involved to say that about almost any game. If you love one or all of the games below, more power to you. My point is that truly original games have much greater design challenges to overcome than derivative designs, and as such, can often leave people disappointed because they didn’t fulfill on their promise.

Any more qualifications will only bore people, and since I’m bound to get folks telling me how wrong I am about these games no matter what I say, I might as well jump right in.

Millennium Blades: Original themes and mechanics aren’t for everyone

In case you haven’t heard of it, Millennium Blades has a mindblowing premise: duplicate the experience of months in the life of a collectible card game player and collector in one, two hour board game.

The game has two phases, a buying, trading and collecting phase, and a tournament phase where each player takes the cards they’ve assembled and competes against the other players in an actual card game. Each phase happens three times. Players also have variable powers which enhances their abilities in one or both phases of the game. Success in the tournaments depends greatly on building card combos through your drafting and trading, and having the right kinds of cards in relationship to what your opponents are playing – in other words having the right cards for the game ‘meta’, simulating a similar necessity in CCG metas.

When a game has a theme this unique, it immediately faces a hurdle: some people are not going to be at all interested in playing a game that simulates the CCG experience, in fact, some people will be completely turned off by the theme. Others will of course love it. Incredibly original theming is double edged.

A unique theme may also create a unique play experience that is also not what many people might be looking for. In the specific example of Millennium Blades, your buying and trading is done on a very limited timer. This is necessary to prevent the game from being endless as people examine the hundreds of possible cards to get and math everything out. But what this does is, like an actual CCG, give a big edge to players who know the card pool, which takes a lot of time. Come in fresh and you’ll be slaughtered by those who know the cards inside out and can effortlessly make devastating combos.

Again, this mirrors actual CCGs and actually makes the game more thematic. But it makes it less enjoyable for the people who don’t want to learn a huge card pool. Even if no one knows all the cards, the fact that there’s a ton of information out there to learn can be frustrating to people who like full information, or at least a good amount of information, when making their gaming decisions. Even if everyone’s in the same boat, it can sometimes feel like the player who wins is the player whose deck just happens to counter what the other players chose, rather than the player who was most skillful. And some people will hate this.

To be clear, I think Millennium Blades is an extraordinary design. It’s just not for everyone, or even close to everyone. While it’s target audience will love it, there’s also a large number of people who will play it and hate it, or more likely, will have no interest in the first place. And this is entirely because of the game’s originality.

What’s wrong with this? Nothing, really. It’s simply that when you see a reviewer rave about how wonderfully original a game is, it’s important to remember that wonderful originality doesn’t necessarily mean a game most people will love to play.

Mystic Vale: An original mechanic doesn’t necessarily give a fresh play experience

For those of you who haven’t paid attention to new releases this year, Mystic Vale put a whole new twist on deckbuilders: instead of just building a unique deck of cards, you are actually making unique cards, adding up to three different powers via clear plastic sleeves to each card in your deck. Instead of buying cards, you by the powers via the sleeves, and choose which powers to put them on.

The game also has push your luck, must mechanic where you ‘spoil’ and lose your turn if the cards you play have too many spoil symbols. Until then, you can keep drawing cards. You score points to win via cards with endgame points, cards that give you points each turn, and cards that have symbols that combine to give special powers, including points. The card art in this game happens to be gorgeous.

The challenge that this particular unique game faces, and make no mistake, card crafting is a completely unique mechanic, is that even if a mechanic is completely and undeniably new, the gameplay experience it produces isn’t necessarily new.

While the busting or spoiling mechanism is a new twist in deckbuilding, the card crafting itself doesn’t feel that different strategically from traditional deckbuilding games. Once you get past the first wonderful, tactile experiences of sliding the sleeves onto the card, and your flush of pride at having constructed a really powerful card, you start to realize as time passes in the game that the crafting hasn’t given you a dramatically different decision set from the regular deckbuilder. If powers combo together, well then of course you’ll put them on one card. If they don’t, then they could go on one cards or multiple cards, it doesn’t really matter. 

While some may argue for specific examples where this isn’t true, here’s what is true: every reviewer who has reviewed the game has said the game cries out for an expansion. And when one was just released, a little over two months after the retail release of the game, some people reacted like it was about time. If the card crafting provided a lot of interesting decisions outside of those required in regular deckbuilders, I suspect the reaction would be different. As I noted previously, pure deckbuilders often feel like they need an expansion relatively quickly, since once you figure out the card pool, there’s not much else mechanically to keep the game fresh.

And that’s what this game feels like: a typical deckbuilder with a small card pool. And while that’s not terrible, it’s also not the fulfillment of the huge promise some reviewers raved about.

Vast: The Crystal Caverns – an original design can create high barriers to entry, and a poor depth to complexity ratio

Of all the games I’m discussing here, Vast: The Crystal Caverns has the grandest ambitions of all of them. It creates a dungeon crawl, with five completely different asymmetric roles and rules sets: a dragon who is trying to escape the cave complex, a knight that’s trying to kill the dragon, goblins that are trying to kill the knight, a thief who’s trying to steal treasure from everyone, and finally the cave complex itself, which is trying to hinder all the players until it can collapse the caves, killing everyone.

If you haven’t heard about this design, it’s important to emphasize that this isn’t just any game with asymmetric powers. The five roles and rules sets share literally nothing in common (other than a few rules spelling out how they interact). They might as well be the rules from five different games. Knowing how one role works will tell you literally nothing how the other roles and the game as a whole works.

Right off the bat, this creates big barriers to entry. It’s a very hard game to teach and learn, since you have to learn five sets of rules to really know what you’re doing. A more practical solution is to have each person just learn their own rules, but even when you do this, you’ll still probably have a lot of AP and downtime, since players’ decisions are dependent on what they think the other players will do, and you can’t really know that without knowing their rules. And when the different roles interact, you’ll have to hash out how this works in the different rule sets.

Besides downtime, this game faces another challenge: balance. If the game is an interaction of five different rules sets, how do you make sure the game is balanced? This is obviously far harder than in most games. 

The game largely solves this problem via the cave. The cave player has a bunch of ‘take that’ powers which do things like create barriers in the map, move people around away from where they want to be, and even take away experience and upgrades of the other characters.

There are a few problems here. This isn’t a short, light game where some vicious take that play is to be expected. The bash the leader play of the cave does balance the game, at the cost of making each player’s choices along the way less consequential. If you get ahead in the game, the cave will undoubtedly bash you down. Losing? Don’t worry, the cave will ignore you allowing you to get back into it.

The problem with this kind of balancing is that it can make the game result seem arbitrary. The winner isn’t necessarily the person who executed a clever plan throughout the game, it’s the person who wasn’t being beat down at the game’s key moment. There’s a good game design maxim that says the longer a game, the less players tolerate luck based outcomes, and that’s what the cave can feel like – something that produces arbitrary results.

And this take that play exacerbates and combines with another issue the game has: for all its rules complexity, it’s not really that deep of a game. It doesn’t feel subtle so much as opaque. Simple rules, deep decisions is another winning design mantra, and, directly because of the game’s original design, it can feel like the opposite: tough rules and shallow decisions.

Bias of Reviewers and Veteran Gamers

I want to complete this series by discussing something I touched on at the very beginning: reviewer bias. Reviewers, and veteran gamers such as the sorts of people like you and I who read long blog posts on Boardgamegeek, have an innate bias towards liking original games. 

I don’t think this is arguable. Go listen to what the most prominent reviewers say about what they care about most in a game, and for almost all of them, originality is at the very top of the list.

Now, I don’t mean anything sinister or even negative by asserting bias. Everyone has biases. It’s impossible to avoid, and all it means is that we all have different subjective experiences. My point in mentioning this particular bias is that it can lead someone without these particular biases into getting games that reviewers like without realizing that the reviewer has a very different outlook than they do.

Reviewer bias towards the original isn’t surprising, since it’s there in almost every artistic genre. We get jaded with what we experience a lot of, and keep needing variety to keep things fresh. After playing 50 worker placement games in a year, a reviewer is praying that the 51st does something really different, and is more likely to notice what’s entirely fresh than what’s a subtly effective refinement of what’s come before. The reviewer, and some of us, play a game a few times, and then are off to the new hotness before we really get to the very bottom of a game’s potential.

It’s not all that different from movie reviewers who would rather see something experimental and new rather than the thousandth derivative action film. Critics of art sometimes praise things that the average person wouldn’t, because they see how it advances the field, while average person just wants a good movie/painting/game. Most people don’t care if a game resuses mechanisms from old games or is doing something new. They just want a fun game. You and I, we can have a hard time seeing a game as it is, because we can only see it in relation to all those other games of that type we’ve already played before.

And as such, we are forgiving of original games. ‘At least they’re trying something new, rather than just being yet another derivative, soulless xyz game’, we say of a design we want to love but we know doesn’t play as well as we hoped. We have more sympathy for someone who failed to climb a mountain than someone who jogged up a hill, after all.

Which is fine. The bias of a veteran gamer isn’t any better or worse than the bias of a new gamer or anything in between. But sometimes, I think, we miss the subtleties: the little things that make a well refined game great, and which we might miss in our first, fifth, or even tenth play.

Thanks for reading and feel free to bash me in the comments!