So last week I asked for requests on games that I could trash for game design reasons, and I got a pretty decent list of the usual suspects. So here we go:
Monopoly: Ah yes, the #1 game in the world. I played a lot of this as a youth, but it would take a good deal of bribery (with real money) to play this again. (1) It takes too long. While there are a number of variants to reduce the length of time, a family game should not take this long to run. (2) When you’re behind, you usually stay there, and it can take a long time for you to grind out and be eliminated. (3) The interesting aspects of the game are buried. I really wish Monopoly was a good TRADING game, where you’re constantly negotiating for Monopolies. But the random process by which they’re acquired, coupled with a lack of incentives to give people the last pieces of their Monopoly, relegates this aspect to relatively low. (4) It requires knowledge of stochastic matricies to play optimally. (5) While individual turns are not that important, you’d like to roll a lot of doubles to get extra turns (but not enough to get thrown in jail.) This falls under a luck factor that does not do the jobs that luck should do in a game.
Risk: Risk shares a number of flaws in common with Monopoly. Mainly, (1), it takes too long and (2) once you’re behind you stay behind. If I’m going to play a long game, I don’t want to have a few poor rolls in the beginning handicap me for the next 8 hours. Several editions of the game have tried to fix this by putting on different end conditions, but these often lead to (3) end of game problems. Risk also suffers from (4) petty diplomacy. When the goal is to conquer everything, you know exactly how well that person is doing, and so everyone bashes the leader. Then someone else is the leader, and they are bashed. Continue until someone gets lucky, essentially. This problem is at its worst in a three player game.
Trivial Pursuit: While the trivia is fine, the board game aspect is (1) almost irrelevant and (2) frustrating. I suppose it’s designed to allow trailers to catch up, but it just ends up being stupid in practice. Also, I believe that trivia games should offer another element in game play if it is to be a trivia board/card game. (However, pure trivia games like Jeopardy! are fine.) This is a matter of taste, and not necessarily a flaw.
Candyland: This (1) barely qualifies as a game. There are virtually no decisions, and certainly none without real consequence. Maybe this is as much as a 3 year old can handle, but there are better alternatives that are very simple too. (2) It lacks pirates.
Mouse Trap: I never owned or played this one, so I can’t comment too much on it. From what I’ve been told, (1) you don’t actually get to build your own mousetrap, you sort of have to fill in the pieces of existing mousetraps, and they either work or don’t. A much more fun game would be a game where you construct your own rube goldberg machines, not unlike a boardgame version of The Incredible Machine. In addition, it’s inherently a (2) roll and move game, where the winner who rolls higher wins more often.
Chess & Go & Othello: While all fine, fine games, in some ways, these can often (1) resemble work. If you really want to be good, a lot of effort has to be put into it. And as pure strategy games, (2) it’s deterministic. The only random factors are your brains, and even then, there’s probably only so much that is going to vary from game to game. If you’re playing against a better player, you will be beaten. In the span of 23 years, I never once beat my dad in Chess, nor did I feel like I was ever getting better to the point of being able to beat him.
Clue: A very interesting problem that doesn’t come up in these games very often that Clue has is (1) theme issues. Wait, I’m the murderer? How did I not know this? It also has a (2) roll-and-move issue, where for whatever reason you sometimes don’t roll high enough to go to another room to investigate. There are a number of fixed versions of this (usually making it into a card game and eliminating the board entirely) and there are a number of deduction board games that are more interesting.
Scrabble: Scrabble has a lot of good stuff going for it, actually, and manages to combine a word game with a strategic placement game. It does have two issues in the multiplayer. (1) It has a long down time between turns, and (2) it can have Kingmaker issues.
Non-Hold’Em Poker: The more randomness you introduce, the less information you have about your opponent’s hand, the worse a game of poker is. Having community cards gives you information about what your opponent doesn’t have, along with providing texture to a game about bluffing. If you give everyone five hidden cards, you wash out the psychology. Same goes if you introduce wild cards, and for the multitude of wacky chaotic variations of poker that are out there.
Games on the backs of cereal boxes: 90% of the time, a roll and move game.
All of these games (and all games in general) share the flaw that they’re a genre that not everyone likes. Deduction games and trivia games seem to have the most people who don’t like the genre as a whole, but there are plenty of people who won’t play anything with bluffing, blind bidding, or somersaulting.
Normally I’d say to avoid these elements in your game designs. However, I’m sure any of us would be happy to design the next Monopoly. I’ll say this: these games are not popular because they’re good games. They’re popular because they were there first and happen to show up at times when they particularly resonated with our culture, and so entrenched themselves. You wil not design the next Monopoly. If that’s your goal, go elsewhere. If you’re trying to design a good game, however, I hope you’ll continue reading…
Yahtzee rocks! Or whatever that stupid “let’s put dice in a bucket and roll them” game.
6 of those were played a lot in my house as a kid. For mousetrap, it was fun when we hadn’t lost the little ball, and when the trap actually worked. Really, the fun was in setting the trap and watching it do it’s elaborate thing. It would be great to have a version where you do your own Rube Goldberg machine, like you mentioned.
Overall, the problems with Scrabble are far outweighed by the good. Its got all ages appeal, encourages good education, and is a pretty fun. Sure, its frustrating when some retard sets up a triple word score by placing “cat”, but Kingmaker issues don’t bother me so much. After all life has kingmaker issues! (the existence, not the game, which sucks).
ahh, life, that and monopoly were what made me hate “family game night” was there really ANY choices in life? I remember it to be as boring as candyland.
I agree with TheMainEvent that Scrabble is a good game on the whole. I never really felt that kingmaker was as big of a problem as the large downtime between turns. It’s got plenty of strategy, and generally rewards players who have a good vocabulary (which is what it is trying to do). It’s also pretty fun.
A different but similar game that is family oriented, fun, but actually does have significant flaws is Scattergories. That one would be worthy of a good trashing.
I forgot the other problem with multiplayer Scrabble, that’s related to the kingmaker issue: you lose a lot of control when playing multiplayer, so the strategy decreases quite a bit. Also, my personal experience with Scrabble is that it does not help to have a large vocabulary: the main skill involved is being able to make anagrams, which is different than knowing and being able to spell a large number of words.
I forgot about “The Game of Life”, which is probably worse than Candyland, since it has just about as many decisions to make, but it takes longer and has more rules.
Need to make a note to do a column on party games, where I can cover Scattegories and many other party games in more detail.
Fantastic list, particularly the non-hold ’em poker part. Really, I don’t know why anyone would want to play any other kind of poker anymore.
Omaha is “non-hold ’em” but is very similar and good.
Whatever else you may say about Candyland, it sure is elegant!
Hmm, I seem to recall that SOMEBODY taught me that a prerequisite to elegance is that there are emergent properties, which Candyland does not have. Maybe you meant simplicity, and are unfamiliar with the term elegance 😉
My reply is sure to cause embarrassment all around. Perhaps my views have subtly changed in the last few years, or perhaps I’ve simply never posted a truly clear explanation of how I define elegance in games. Anyway, in my current view, I would separate out the concept of “emergent properties” from the concept of “elegance”. I consider them to be two different concepts. I tend to use the word “juicy” to refer to that subset of “emergent properties” that I’m actually interested in – those that lead to agonizing decisions, etc.
The best way I can sum up my definition of elegance is “deep pattern”. To me, elegance means that the rules of a game are, in some sense, “all alike”, or all fit together like the pieces of a perfect puzzle. As you can see, this is actually a different concept than “emergent properties”. Elegant games will have emergent properties, but then again, so will ugly games.
Anyway, I was joking about Candyland, although maybe I actually would call it elegant by my restricted definition. (But maybe not – I think it has a couple of cards that can make you move backward, which maybe breaks a deep pattern.)
You once claimed that Candyland was a game (barely), because it had one decision. Reading the rules online, I can’t find even one decision in there. Where is it?
Actually, I take it back. I think a better word for what I’m talking about would be “consistency”. I’m starting to think that I should just use the term “elegance” in the more catch-all way that it’s usually used, to encompass the concepts of “simplicity”, “consistency”, “emergence”, “efficiency”, “gracefulness”, etc.
Damn, eight years of serious game design, and I’ve still barely figured anything out…
Well, apparently you just suck at game design. I was able to define elegance easily in my post with no disagreements whatsoever.
And I was told that in Candyland when you draw certain cards (the named ones) you have the choice to advance there or not. I haven’t actually looked at a copy to see if this is the case or not.
Your MOM was able to define elegance easily with no disagreements.
Damn it.
I can only find the “classic” rules of Candy Land online. In that version, when you draw a named card, you have no choice – you must move your piece forward or backward to that space. The only possible choice I can find is that, when you land by exact count on one of the “shortcut” spaces, the rules say that you *can* take the shortcut, implying that you can choose not to. What a delicious dilemma!
Supposedly in the more modern rules, if you draw a named card and that space is behind you, you don’t move your piece. The interesting question is, when the space is in front of you, do the rules say that you *can* move forward, or you *must* move forward? I hope that the rule is that you *can* move forward. That’s consistent with the shortcut rule, and it adds another decision to the game!
Why am I talking about this?