Hidden Trackable

As often happens, I found myself involved in a minor argument online. This is one of those arguments that can’t entirely chalked up to different tastes.

“Hidden Trackable” refers to any element of the game that could be tracked by a player with a perfect memory (or pencil and paper) but is supposed to be hidden using one mechanism or another. Hidden trackable comes in many forms, and is in a game for different reasons.

Probably the oldest example of “hidden trackable” is in pure memory games, like Concentration. Clearly, the focus of the game is on using memory as a skill in the game. Mama Mia! is one of my favorites in this genre. There are also a few party games that involve memory, likes Celebrities/Time’s Up! Here, it is clear that the focus of the game is to reward memory.

Then there’s the games that have hidden trackable information, but it is neither a focus of the game nor is it anything that particularly has an impact on the game. Ticket to Ride is an example of this, though most rummy games are the same way. The game would function fine if hands were open and everyone could see what cards you have taken, but it makes the game go faster.

The final category are those games that are totally broken without hidden trackable information. This includes two of my favorite games of all time: High Society and Quo Vadis?. In High Society, everyone has an identical hand of bid cards, but once a bid is used, it becomes hidden, and whoever has bid the most at the end of the game automatically loses. If you knew who was lowest at all times, you’d often know that you had no way to win, and could be a kingmaker, or at least know optimal bids to make. Quo Vadis? has people acquiring open score markers as they go, but then hiding them when they go to the score pile. Since there’s no hidden information on the board, if you had a very good memory, you could know who was winning at all times. Again, this leads to kingmaker. It’s clear that the designer’s intent in these cases is that they want everyone to have a pretty good idea of how well everyone is doing in the game, but not be entirely sure until the end.

The most famous example of a game that COULD have hidden trackable information is the classic Acquire. There are four ways to play: stocks open money open, stocks hidden trackable money hidden trackable, stocks open money hidden trackable, and stocks hidden trackable money open. (The last is probably the rarest.) Supporters of hidden trackable say that the game becomes way too analysis-heavy and slow if open. Supporters of open information (like myself) say that the game works fine open, so you might as well put everyone on an equal playing field without rewarding memory. (And, for the record, my favorite PDA game is an implementation called Ackwire, which has everything open. It works just fine.)

As a game designer, if you have hidden trackable information in your game, it ought to either be specifically a core skill of the game or playable open. Remember that if you’re successful, thousands of people will be playing your game, and some of those people playing will have very good memories. If the game is broken when played with someone with a very good memory, the game is broken. (It also means that your game has a weird meta-rule about not being able to write things down… but I should probably save that for an article on meta-rules by itself.)

The main complaint I have heard about making hidden trackable information open is that it slows the game down. Well, that may be fine to fix as a player, but as a game designer, if your game slows down considerably when people are making decisions, that’s a problem to be addressed as well.

Remember, games have the opportunities to challenge many of our skills and capacities. Memory is a fine skill to use, but don’t rely upon people having poor memories to fix your game. And you don’t want to have a game where people argue constantly about which possible rules of your game are the best ones.