Quirkworthy

A provocative title, to be sure, though I think it’s probably true. At least in the context I mean it. 

Now Snakes & Ladders gets a lot of flak from gamers. Is it even a game? How do you define “game”, anyway? Well naturally I have thoughts on the topic, but that’s a tale for another time. Today, let me tell you why I think that Snakes & Ladders is perfect. 

The key is to understand that it’s not a great game if it’s even a game at all. Definitely not a perfect game. I’m talking about something else. I’m saying that it’s perfect at training people to be gamers. Let me explain.

Tiny humans aren’t born with an understanding of how to riffle shuffle and min-max a points salad Euro. They have to learn those things. They also have to learn far more basic skills. Skills that most gamers don’t even think about because they’re so ingrained. But things like taking your turn rather than moving what you like when you feel, or following the rules even when they’re not to your advantage, or that you can’t win ’em all are all key underpinning skills to any enjoyable gaming session. We default to taking turns in clockwise order around a table, but that’s not an immutable law of physics, it’s learned. And why clockwise instead of the other way, or in height order, or age, or whoever is last? All had to be learned somewhere.

If we know that we aren’t born with skills we need to be good gamers, then where do we acquire them? There are many “games” that could do some or all of that job, but for my money Snakes & Ladders does it best. At the role of training future gamers, I think it is unsurpassed. Snakes & Ladders is perfect.

Snakes & Ladders teaches the concepts of taking turns and that rules have to be followed like anything else. That’s easy. Ludo or Draughts is the same. But Snakes & Ladders has something that those others lack, and which is the source of most of the arguments that it isn’t a game at all, and that’s a complete lack of agency. This is ideal for its teaching of such fundamentals. Strip away the concept of agency and you’re left with the real basics: taking turns, following the (nicely simple and unambiguous) rules, and accepting a win or a loss. 

Another touch of genius that Snakes & Ladders teaches is the more subtle idea that rules may be both beneficial (ladders) and detrimental (snakes) and that you must follow them regardless. Picking and choosing the rules you prefer is not allowed. 

Tiny humans are also fond of the safety of repetition, and this may play a part in their enjoyment. Eventually though, they’ll grow tired of the lack of agency and move beyond it, to things that allow them some influence over their own destiny. Not straight to Lacerda, perhaps, but there’s plenty of options between those two poles. And they carry the fundamentals with them. This doesn’t mean that Snakes & Ladders is bad or has failed, just that its work is done. The proto-gamer is ready to move on.

I think that Snakes & Ladders deserves to be applauded for the vital role it achieves in training the gamers of the future, not vilified for being a crap game. It’s never going to stand alongside the best modern games, nor arguably alongside other venerable options such as Ludo. However, we are better off for having it as this perfect training tool for tiny humans who may one day grow up into fully-fledged gamers. 

Normally, I’d be advocating for working by iterating things gradually. Once you’ve got a rule in place, you just need to be paring away any rough edges and polishing the thing to a nice, smooth shine. It’s an editing process. A feedback and tweak process. A tried and tested process that works. 

Most of the time.

Sometimes, there’s another approach you could try that doesn’t get talked about as much, but which you already do, sort of, just earlier in development. I think a variation of it is useful later as well.  

When you’re at the start, brainstorming ideas, testing this or that for fit with the whole, then you’re open to things being chucked out and replaced. It feels natural at this early stage, before things gel. 

While you could do exactly the brainstorming thing later, and throw out one rule for something entirely different, this isn’t what I’m suggesting. Instead of the whole rule, I’m asking you to consider only discarding the way you’ve expressed it. Let me see if I can explain this clearly. 

You’ve got a game on the go, and you have a draft rulebook. So far, so good. When you test it, there’s a bit of the rules that players keep tripping over. You’re sure the rule works in practice, it’s just that it’s hard to explain clearly on paper. We’ve all been there. It’s not the rule that’s a problem, it’s conveying it clearly. Folk might get it when you’re on hand to explain, it’s just that the words on the page alone leave them unsure. 

The normal approach would be to edit and tweak until it worked, and this is certainly an option that usually fixes things. However, sometimes you’ll have more success with replacing it entirely. Just take a blank page and write the whole section again from memory. This is important. Don’t refer to the previous version when you’re writing its replacement (they get jealous). There are a couple of key advantages baked into your subconscious the second (or third) time you write a piece:

• You’ve already done this before, so you’re more practiced. Experience helps. 
• You’ve seen the objections and the difficulties with the first one, so you intuitively write to mitigate those problems. Probably the critical element here.

Now this idea isn’t a replacement for iterative improvement, it’s an addition, an option. Typically, I use this when I’ve written something, done a few rounds of iterations and editing, and it’s just not settling. So, I rewrite the piece and iterate over that new version. It’s not a guaranteed improvement, though I’d say that for me it’s getting close. And, if it really doesn’t help, you can always try again and write a third version, or simply revert to where you were. You lose very little trying this, and I’ve found it a great help to get a tricky section moving again. 

Note that this works with writing stories or non-fiction as well as rules, and it’s something visual artists do all the time. That’s what erasers are for. I expect that it works in music and coding and yodelling and everything else creative too. It’s just the practice of saying to yourself that this isn’t working, so try again. You like the story beat or the visual in your head. Just take another stab at expressing it. All anyone will care about in the end is that the final version is clear. So do what you have to do to get there. 

I was using this approach yesterday, on a bigger scale and for a different reason, and it works there too. I’d written a game some years ago, made a prototype, played it, and it was fine. Not terrible, but not great either. That’s not good enough, so it had been iterated and tweaked as you normally would. Still wasn’t happy with it. The game worked and I liked the idea, I just thought it could be better expressed. So, I left it to marinate. 

Yesterday, something made me think of it again, so I started tinkering. And instead of going back to my old version, I took the same spark I had originally, the same images in my head, and wrote a new game from scratch. This is the same principle of rewriting a rule or a paragraph in a story, just writ larger. 

Now I’ve not had time to make a prototype yet, so it’s not been on the table. I am, however, feeling pretty confident that this is a cleaner and slicker approach than before. To be honest, I can’t remember all the mechanics I used last time, and that’s unimportant. The whole point is to make the end result great, and we do whatever it takes. In this case, I took a tool I normally use for something small and I changed the scale it applied to. I wasn’t replacing a single rule that was unclear, I was trying to express the whole idea of the game in a more exciting and fun way. Time will tell if that worked. 

As some of you may be thinking, this is all related to murdering your darlings, which I’ve written about before, though it’s not quite the same. At least, not in my head. Anyway, I hope that’s put some ideas in yours, and that you find it helpful. Let me know how you get on.

I live in a continual state of trying to make more space on my game shelves. This isn’t for any real lack of shelves (though another couple of room’s full would be nice, thanks), it’s because I have a lot of games. I don’t think I’m alone in this quest, and regardless of how many games you have it’s not really about numbers, it’s about numbers compared to your room to store them. Whether you have one shelf or a whole library, it’s volume that counts. 

In this regard, the most infuriating, most egregious sin, is games that have boxes with almost nothing in them. This is disrespectful of my space. If you want me to keep the game you made, it’ll need to live on a shelf. The less space it takes up, the less likely I’ll be asking it to justify its continued presence. Presumably, more people keeping and enjoying your game is a Good Thing, right? So why not consider this question when it comes to designing your box?

You could argue that the empty box is a sign of confidence that new expansions will need the space, and I think that’s sometimes true. In fact, I opened a new game yesterday, and for some reason that’s exactly the impression I was left with for the small amount of room that remained. Can’t put my finger on why I thought that. Definitely did though. Jisogi, in case you were wondering.

The usual situation is that a game ships with the box fully closed, and when you punch all the counters and organise it properly, there’s a lot of spare space inside. The answer to this is simple: don’t close the box when you shrink it. I’ve had several games come with the box lid raised by a stack of punchboards, and once they’re sorted out the lid closes nicely on a comfortably full box. That’s efficient, thoughtful, and it shows that you care both about how slick your product feels, and my shelf space. I like people who care. 

I don’t like being sold a box full of air that takes up three times the room on my shelf that it needs to. This is a solid strike against something when I’m organising my shelves and deciding what stays and what goes. The poster child for this nonsense has to be 1066, Tears for Many Mothers. It’s even worse if you remove the card insert (which isn’t fooling anyone).

This sin of selling air masquerading as game used to be far more prevalent than it is today, mainly for the simple reason that size mattered for sales. It wasn’t my shelves that the publishers cared about, but those of my FLGS. People bought games in person, in a shop, where they could pick up the box. How your game was stacked on a shelf mattered, and boxes were designed to look good in multiple presentations. On a related note, it’s also why backs of boxes have changed over the years. Anyway, these days, you probably order from an image online, and the thumbnail’s the same size regardless of the real box. 

This bloaty approach to boxes seems to survive mostly in smaller games these days, presumably trying to avoid disappearing into the jumble of card decks at the back of a shelf. They’re priced to be impulse purchases, but only if someone sees them. And if you’re priced low and look big, then maybe folk will think you’re a bargain, though that’s a double-edged sword. 

Giant, sprawly, miniature-heavy, campaign games of the sort that Kickstarter and GF facilitated have a different challenge to earning their shelf space. They’re generally OK in their use of space inside any given box, they just bloat over half a dozen giant ones. Sure, it’s all full of stuff, but there’s a heck of a lot of it. There are several reasons why I’m more reluctant to buy new games if they’re huge and sprawly. Partly because they’re the cost of half a dozen other games (which I might enjoy more overall), partly because they’re so hard to get to the table, but also because they take up such a silly amount of space. Of course, the huge campaign monstrosities with buckets of miniatures can generate an experience that smaller games struggle to or simply can’t, so there’s that to include in the mix. But I digress…

Overall, in the internet age, I’m buying less air. That’s good. Less wasteful all round. 

As you’d expect, there are some companies who seem to care more about this than others, and I always take that as a good sign. They’re thinking, literally, beyond the box itself. Beyond their immediate packaging challenges of getting it to your table, and into its actual life beyond delivery. I’d argue that this is all part of the gesamtkunstwerk idea that I bang on about, and I applaud it. Typically, if they care about this, then they care about other details too. In other words, it’s a green flag. A good example of this is Garphill Games. While they don’t always get it right, they tend towards smaller boxes that are packed to the brim. Only one of many good things about their range. 

My takeaway from this rambling is that games are experienced in more ways than only in the mechanics, on the tabletop. They’re repositories of memories and nostalgia as well as being the results of understanding technical aspects of offset litho printing or sculpting for steel moulds. How your game design will be stored is part of the puzzle too. Just because it isn’t especially cool and exciting, doesn’t mean that it can be ignored. 

And, you never know, there may even be a few nerds like me who see your art there too. 

Roll & move is a mechanic with a bad reputation. It’s widely seen as a simplistic rule that’s found only in old or rubbish games that aren’t for serious gamers. I’m here to suggest that roll & move isn’t bad, it’s just misunderstood and misused.

The classic roll & move games have you rolling a dice and then moving exactly that distance along a one-way track. On your arrival, you must execute whatever that space dictates. There’s definitely a problem here when it comes to engaging gameplay, but I’d argue that it’s not the mechanic, it’s the way it’s been terribly applied. And, just because a mechanic is traditionally executed poorly¹ doesn’t mean it can’t be executed well.

Agency. Agency is the key.

The traditional application of roll & move takes away all the player’s agency, and this is why it sucks. Not because you roll a dice and move, but because you have no choice about any of it. To illustrate this point, and show how roll & move as a mechanic can be better used, let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine a non-sucky roll & move game. 

Start with the roll bit. Let’s keep the restriction that we must move as many spaces as we roll, no more nor less. What can we do from there? How about we roll two dice instead of one, and let the player choose which one to use? This is a very simple change, and only one of many ways we could allow the player to mitigate their dice roll. However, even this tiny change gives the player something to think about. It starts to give them a little agency back. 

Now the value of being able to choose or modify your result rests on two things. The first is that the goal of the game is something other than a pure race (otherwise more is always better and it’s not really a choice). Actually, we could even keep the race idea as long as we tweak it a bit. Let’s say that you can only cross the finish line if you’ve collected 3 each of 4 different fruit from those scattered about the board. Now there’s a reason to go to space A and not space B on top of the general movement towards the end. 

Our second reason why the choice of roll matters is that each potential landing space does something different. In our example, let’s say each space allows you to collect a different fruit. This is easily done on our imaginary board.

Speaking of the board, we can do even better. Why not allow the player more than one route? An open grid with movement in any direction is an extreme option, but even if we stick to a more traditional path format we can add branches and junctions to allow the player more options for their movement. Maybe we even let them move in either direction along each path, picking one direction each turn. Now, instead of no choice at all when they roll their dice, they’ve got the choice of which dice to use, and each one could take them to multiple end spaces, each of which do something different as well as moving them nearer or further from the finish line. With a well-designed path system this could give them half a dozen options for each roll, which is already quite a bit of agency and choice. And, all these changes have been small, practical, and easily implemented. 

Of course, there’s a bunch more you could layer on, but I’m going to stop here. My point is that roll & move isn’t a bad mechanic per se, it’s just generally used with little imagination and skill. As I think even these simple changes show, a roll & move game could easily be developed into something interesting. 

Before I leave you to ponder this further, I’d like to recognise that there are a few good games that have roll & move at their heart; they’re just rare beasts. I think that’s a shame. 

Notes

¹ When I say “poorly”, that’s with regard to the narrow definition of “doing well” as being fun for gamers. There’s other ways in which the traditional approach is actually a good thing, but I’ll come back to that another time.