Choice vs No Choice

Let’s first get it out of the way, having choice in game in good. And most games do offer you some level of choice. When we think of games without choice, kids games come to my mind. In Candyland, you flip a card and move. The only choice you get in Candyland is whether or not to play the game. Once the cards are shuffled, the winner of the game is determined.

But it does happen in other games as well. Generally not a ton in the hobby gaming space, but think of any game where you randomly flip a card and something bad happens. I don’t remember the name of the game, but there is a great example of this in a Dice Tower playthrough. One of the members of the Dice Tower flips a card and it causes him to lose his current turn, or next turn. Either way, it was a random card flip with no shot to avoid it that really ruined the game.

So even some small level of choice making is better than none. Let’s look at the Candyland and unknown game example. Candyland, you could give yourself a choice, draw two cards and pick which one to play. It’s not much of a choice but there is a choice. For the lose a turn in that other game, I believe there were character stats. Give a character a roll in a given stat, or card play between two different stats to try and avoid it. Even if it’s semi-lucky to avoid it, like a die roll, make some way.

Good Choice vs Obvious Choice

Now, those choices I give above for Candyland and the other game are choices, but are they good choices. And what do I mean as a difference between a good and an obvious choice. A good choice is one that you need to think about. An obvious choice is, well, obvious. But not just obvious, it is a choice that stands out as notably better than other choices.

Even if it takes a bit to get to that decision, if there is one decision that is much better than the others, that is an obvious choice. A good choice means that you have an option that is best for your plans for winning the game. And that there are a number of options that might be very similar and I pick which one best suits my goal for a game.

A good choice can also make it feel like you’re giving up something as well, as often times you are. You want both things, but there is only a way to do one. It makes for a more interesting game, but also makes it so that players want to come back. If I didn’t see this the first time around, I want to see it the next time. Story driven games, that offer real choice, are good for that.

Making Sub-Optimal Choices in Board Games

But, let’s wrap up here by talking about something that I appreciate in a game. And this comes up less in euro games, and more in story driven and adventure focused games. When I play Roll Player Adventures, for example, I pick what my character would do. Not what I think, out of game is the best option. Is our group reckless, then we pick the reckless option more often than not. Or in Gloomhaven, I might not think a choice is the best one, but if I’m playing an Inox and it is going to help another Inox, I might lean that way.

The best example of this, though, is a role playing game. So a Dungeons and Dragons, where it isn’t a board game. But you play as an elf with very poor wisdom. At the table, you know that it is a bad idea to negotiate for medicine with this dirty guy in the back alley. But will the elf know that? I think because of playing RPG’s, I can role play into a board game more.

Now, there is such a thing as going too far down this path. For example, if I’ve been playing Pandemic Legacy and I generally try to play riskier. If it’s down to the end of the game, or I know if I get another scar the character is gone and it might push us to lose the game, I am going to pull back. I play sub-optimally when I know it won’t hurt everyone at the table, but will create a more memorable experience.

Final Thoughts on Choice in Board Games

Choice is important in a board game. Without choice based off of something, it feels more like an activity. Candyland is an activity even though it has a winner, because the winner is determined by the deck. The Mind gets called an activity by some people. And I would put it more in that category as well because you are making a decision, when to put down a card, based off of nothing all that much. It is just how long you think it should take to play your number.

A good board game is going to give good and meaningful choices. But I do think that a good board game also doesn’t make all the choices that. If every turn is an important decision the game is going to take way longer. You want to have some wins to keep the game moving, but when it comes down to the major moments, you want to have it mean a lot. Mainly to avoid ending up with decision fatigue.

Or limit it to a few options. I like Calico, for that reason. Every decision matters but your decision space is smaller. I play one of two tiles onto my quilt. Then I pick one of three tiles to add to my hand. So, every pick really matters because it is a tight board game for scoring. But every pick is so limited that it’s less overwhelming. To me that is a great balance, where my options are limited but they matter.

What game has the best decision making space for you?

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Play The Games They Want

This one I think is pretty obvious. Play what the kid wants to play. You might not love playing Candyland, but when they are really young, that might be what they want to play. And you can bring in new games to hope to get them playing something preferable, but play the games that the kid asks to play.

BoardGameCo is very good about talking about this. When he gets rid of games, and kids games, he always asks his kids if they still want to play it. If they say yes, even if they aren’t, it stays. But the games that he plays with his kids are the ones that they want to play and they have their own game shelf.

But it can be a trip up for some gamers. If you want your kid to love bigger and heavier games, but they still want to play a simpler. So a parent might push a harder game than they should onto the kid. And that’s an issue because now the kid feels like they don’t get to do what they wanted. They wanted to be part of what you are doing, but what you picked makes it unfun.

Don’t Introduce Too Much Too Fast

Now, that doesn’t mean don’t introduce new games. Both the letting the kid pick what they want to play and not introducing stuff too fast. A kid might really enjoy a deck building game like Dominion or Ascension, but that doesn’t mean that you take them to a really complex deck building game or introduce another 10 deck building games. That is overwhelming and learning something new all the time might be fun for some of us, but not for everyone.

Just needing to learn too much all the time can turn a young gamer off. And this one is true for most gamers. I know some people I play with who are always ready to learn something new. And there are other people I game with, they want to play the same few games most of the time. They will learn a new game, but mainly want familiar.

Don’t Go All Out All The Time

This one is going to be the most controversial, but I don’t think should be. The reason it might be controversial is that kids do need to learn how to lose graciously. But that doesn’t mean every time. And that doesn’t mean that you go out of your way to just destroy the kid. Close games tend to be more enjoyable.

There is a difference, I feel, between playing poorly all the time or obviously throwing games. Chaz Marler now with Watch It Played and previously doing his own thing on Pair of Dice Paradise, talked about it with his daughter. He and she would play Ascension and she really enjoyed it. He didn’t go all out. Instead he experimented with other strategies in the game. That made the game more fun for her and kept the games closer, while still keeping the game interesting for him.

Final Thoughts on Kids in Board Gaming

I do think that board gaming is a great hobby for a lot of kids. Mainly that as a hobby that encourages people to think. It encourages thinking outside of the box and figuring out strategies and basically stretching your brain in a way that is good for learning.

But it isn’t going to be for every kid. If they show interest, bring them into the hobby. My toddler wants to play my games. He has a few of his own games and he likes to mess around with them sometimes. We make a different game out of it because he isn’t able to grasp all the rules. But it is something he is interested in. We’ll see if he stays interested, but if he does, we’ll keep on playing the games that he finds fun, even if it is just that little fishing game where the fish move in circles.

What have you found useful with a kid that is interested in gaming? Anything that has worked or hasn’t worked?

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Deck Building

Most people are familiar with games that use decks of cards, from the kids game Candyland to something like Uno or Skip-bo to party games like Cards Against Humanity. All of these games use a communal deck of cards that players draw from to get their hand or to take an action and then they play those cards. It’s a very straight forward concept and you have a deck of cards that is consistent that you’ll be drawing the cards from and you’ll get whatever you get from that pool of cards.

A deck building game builds upon this idea of the deck of cards, but instead of having 108 cards in the Uno deck that everyone shares, instead you have your own deck of 10 or 12 or some number of cards. And when you start the game everyone’s decks are the same. But as the game goes on, you purchase more cards from a pool of cards that are face up to add to your deck. So when you have to reshuffle, now your deck is different than another persons deck.

A simple example of this is Ascension. In Ascension, you start with a deck of 10 cards, eight that give you points to purchase more cards, and two that let you fight monsters. The cards that you buy, some of them allow you to draw more cards when you play them, or get more points for purchasing more cards, or they’ll help you fight monsters. So by the time you shuffle again, you will have two or more different cards than the person you’re playing against, so the hand you’ll draw will be different from a hand of cards that they can draw. The further you get into the game and the more cards that you add to your deck, the more different your deck of cards will be from another players and the more different your strategy will be from another player. The deck building aspect of the game allows players to create a deck that matches how they want to play the game.

All deck building games give you a way to acquire more cards. In Ascension you purchase them, so a card that costs more will mean that you need more points to purchase it, so you might not be able to right away. This tends to be a core mechanic as well of a lot of deck building games is that they build up to you doing bigger and bigger things, but we’ll talk about what that mechanic is known as in a future article.

There are two main types of deck building games. The static market game or the changing market game. Ascension is an example of a changing market game. You have six cards to make your purchase from or to fight if they are monsters. When you purchase a card or defeat a monster, a new card is flipped down into the market form a draw pile and you don’t know what that card is going to be. So a card you want one turn might not be there the following turn, or might not be there at all again in a game. In a static market game you have a certain number of piles of cards, all the cards in those piles are identical so when you buy the top one, you know what the one underneath it is going to be. This allows you, from the start of the game, to determine a long term strategy throughout the game and to really dictate what your deck is going to be capable of doing. Dominion is an example of a static market deck building game. Now, it comes down to preference as to which one you like better. With the static deck it is going to more heavily favor the more experienced player or the player with better long term planning skills, because at the start of the game you can sit down, look at the static market and make your plan. If a changing market, you might come in with a plan but then need to adjust it on the fly, but it’ll keep the game more balanced between more and less experienced players. Neither is really a bad thing, it just comes down to personal preference.

Let’s talk about some deck building games that you might want to checkout if this sounds interesting.

Gateway/Intro To Deck Building Game

Ascension – For me, Ascension is the ideal deck building game, the changing market place means that a more experienced player doesn’t have a massive advantage and while there are some better strategies, it all depends on how the market comes out. It also works well because you are just doing two things with your cards, mainly, you are either buying with the purchasing power on the cards or you are fighting a monster with a fighting power on a the cards. A few cards do a few more things, like draw more cards from your deck but they are generally simple. The theme isn’t really there, but in most pure deck building games, which Ascension is, the theme will be missing or barely there anyways.

Medium Weight Deck Building Game

Clank! – Now, regular Clank! isn’t my favorite way to play Clank!. I like Clank! In! Space! better, but there’s just a little bit more going on than a medium weight deck building game. Clank! again has a variable market and monsters to fight, but you’ve added in some additional elements. It does more of one thing you see in Ascension, which is creating combos based off of who you’ve gotten, and it adds in more than just purchase and fight. You now have the ability to move and you are pushing your luck. Also, good cards might have negative consequences as well. It adds a bit more complexity and a bit more strategy to the game, even with a changing market place.

Heavy/Complex Deck Building Game

Aeon’s End: War Eternal – I had a few options to pick here, but I went with Aeon’s End: War Eternal. A lot of deck building games add to their complexity not so much the deck building aspect, but from additional pieces to the game play. Aeon’s End: War Eternal (or any of the Aeon’s End Games) are good examples of this. The deck building uses a static market, but you are presented with more choices. You have to cast spells at monsters, but to do that you have to purchase more spells, but with your money you also need to open breaches to cast those spells. Plus, all of the Aeon’s End games add in something else interesting, not only is there a lot of strategy to what you get from the market, you also don’t shuffle your deck, you just discard cards, so if you can plan it out correctly you can stack the deck in a particular order to get a lot of well balanced hands or maybe a hand with a lot of purchasing power in order to get a very strong spell. There’s just more to think about, though this game is cooperative so a more experienced player can help and teach a new player to the game.

Now, there are a lot of deck building games out there to choose from and some that fall into the category that I’d qualify as more deck construction games that work off of some of the same principles as a deck building game. Have you tried a deck building game before? Do they sound fun to you?

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Games can be split into four different categories in my opinion. There are light weight, family weight, medium weight, and heavy weight games. And for me, that goes from the least complex to the most complex games. I am sure that other people might have an extra category at the end of super heavy weight games for the 18XX games and Train Games (not Ticket to Ride), where you playing in a very heavy economic game and you might actually need a calculator to figure out what is going on, on your turn, not just to add up scores at the end of a game.

Let’s first talk about why games are split into these categories. There are a ton of ways to sort or categorize games such as by some mechanic in the game or the theme of the game, but where those tell you some about the game, the weight of a game is really to help you determine the complexity of the game. The heavier a game is, the more complex that it’s going to be, and the more time commitment is going to be needed for learning the game and possibly for playing the game. However, not all games that have a lot of rules have a high weight to the game. Gloomhaven, for example, on Board Game Geek, is rated at a 3.79 out of 5 for weight, which puts it at a medium heavy, and it has a pretty hefty rule book.

What is a Light Weight game?

A light weight game is going to be those filler sorts of games. Something Tsuro, is a light weight game because the rules are simple to teach and the game is easy to play. Party games also fall into this category as you can generally pull them out and get them taught and to the table in five minutes. People aren’t likely to have many questions either about them when you are playing them. And if there is a question that comes up, the rules are likely so simple that you don’t need to look up anything and can just answer it. Kids games would also fall into this category, though, not all of them. But simple games like Chutes (Snakes) and Ladders or Candyland, that people normally think of, are so simple that you really just do what the game tells you, versus make any decision in the game. That’s another area where the complexity of the game is pretty low, even in Tsuro, you have three tiles and while you have some choice at the start of the game, the choice doesn’t matter much then. And in the later part of the game, the choice matters, but you have an obvious choice so you don’t have to think about it much.

What is a Family Weight Game?

So just by thinking what is a bit more complex than the light weight games, you can start to figure out what family weight games are. The best way to describe it is that these are the games that you play with your parents if they aren’t board gamers growing up. Or growing up only played a few like Skip-Bo, Uno, Rummikub, and Yahtzee. The latter two would actually probably fall into the family weight category. But more modern games that are family weight would be things like Carcassone, Ticket to Ride, and Catan. These games have more complex rules than light games, but generally there aren’t edge cases where you have to remember that something only happens in a specific situation. These games also start to offer meaningful decisions. Yes, they are generally not that complex, but Carcassone gives you choices when you place figures like knights, farmers, thieves, and monks (if I have the terms correct). In Catan you determine where you start and where you build towards, and in Ticket to Ride, do you take those train cars you want or do you play a route before someone else can get it? But the decisions are still pretty simple and you can probably do either option and end up being fine in the game. These games also can still end up with a run away winner. Other games would something like Sushi Go! Party, Pandemic, Dominion or Welcome To…

What are Medium Weight Games?

Again, we’re taking it up in complexity of game play and learning. These games still aren’t too difficult to learn, but there are going to be more moving parts. Xenoshyft: Onslaught would be a good example of this. Where Dominion is just a deck builder that is pretty easy to each, Xenoshyft actually has you doing something more in the game, and you are faced with more decisions than just buying a card worth points, a card worth money, or a card that draws you more cards. Another game that would fit into this category is Seven Wonders. Much like Xenoshyft builds upon the fundamentals and adds in more to deck building, Seven Wonders is a more complex card drafting game as compared to Sushi Go! Party. You also start to get edge cases in the games where certain cards together interact in a way that you can’t just naturally figure out. But there aren’t so many of these that once you’ve played the game a few times that you won’t know what is going. I actually think that Gloomhaven falls into the heavier side of Medium Weight games. There are certainly a good number of rules, but once you know them, you can play without looking things up, and it doesn’t take too long to know the rules once you start playing. I’d also put a game like Pandemic Legacy in a medium weight game. The rules don’t vary greatly from base Pandemic, but since the rules are changing, you need to remember everything that is going on.

Finally, What are Heavy Weight Games?

Again, not too difficult to figure out, but these are the games that you have a lot of text on a lot of cards, there is a lot of complexity in these games. I would put games like Cry Havoc and Root into this category where you have asymmetrical powers. Because of this, each person has edge cases that are different than other people at the table. And you need to teach each character separately. These games also have a lot of what I’d call book keeping. That doesn’t always mean taking notes, but it means that there are a lot of phases and some of the phases are resetting things to a starting turn point. Two good examples of this are a couple of cooperative games from Portal Games, First Martian and Robinson Crusoe. In these games, there are certain game events that happen at the end of every turn or end of every round that you need to do. Star Wars: Rebellion is also a heavy game with asymmetrical goals going on, though the actions of the players are pretty similar. But there are a lot of decisions that you have to make in the game, and if you mess up a single decision that can cost you the game. Even a game that is generally panned like SeaFall can fall into this category because the rules are complex (some do to poor writing), but the game offers a ton of tactical decisions that you have to think about.

Finally, let’s talk about what this means for your gaming collection. Do you need a game(s) of each type? I don’t think that you do, if you know your gaming group will never want to play a light filler game, why do you have one of those in your collection or go out of your way to buy one? The same goes for very heavy games, if I know that I don’t want to play a highly tactical war game, I don’t need one in my collection just so I have one just in case. That said, I would try and keep a good variety in your collection that makes sense for the gaming group that you have. For example, according to Board Game Geek, out of the 253 games that I’ve rated on the site (or own), 3 of them are over 4 for weight, so pretty heavy. 23 of them are at 1.25 or lower (1 is the lowest possible number) and all of those are extremely light. That means that I have a lot in the middle, though I tend to skew lighter as those games are easier to get to the table with my gaming group.

So, what does your collection look like? What’s the average weight of the games that you like, do you skew more towards heavy games or do you find your collection to have a lot of filler and party games you can pull out any time?

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