I get the desire for this at least to some extent. The people I see complaining about it shouldn’t be the ones complaining about it. I’ll explain what I mean here, they own a ton of games. They might play games often, but if they want to play a different game every day of the year, they can. Who cares about variability then. But for people with smaller collections and more limited resources to grow a collection, I get it. I would want me games to feel different each time.

So What Makes a Board Game Variable?

I think that this is what trips a lot of people up in this topic. There are a lot of people who want variability but also don’t want randomness. Random events, die rolls, things like that, those create a different game each time. Unless I’m the luckiest person in the world, I won’t have the same things happen over and over again.

There are other things as well. For example in a game like Pandemic, yes there is randomness of the cards you draw, but in the base game there are something like 6-8 different characters you can play as. So playing two players that is a ton of different combinations of powers you can play around with. Lords of Hellas is another game that allows you to pick your starting character, then you can add powers as you go that are randomly dealt out.

Other games do it with modules. The concept here is you have 4-5 different modules, or more, in the game. But you only play with two at a time. So that again creates those different combinations to explore. It helps if, for example, the modules have a lot of cards. Now you can swap out cards and still not see all the cards of a given module. That again keeps the game more variable because you don’t know which cards you will randomly see.

But Do Games Really Need This?

Yes, and no. It’s not a great answer, but I honestly do think that some games need it. For example, Pandemic, I think with four characters, that game would get stale pretty fast because you wouldn’t have combinations. Catan and Dominion without variable set-ups, those wouldn’t be too interesting.

Other times, the limited variability is just fine. I don’t know that Ticket to Ride needs more. The randomness of route cards and colors of train cars coming up works. It also helps keep the game simple. So for that reason, I don’t want a ton of variability in gateway games. If there is more, that means that I have even more to teach.

But sometimes with some of my favorite games I do wish that they had more. I want to continue playing them, but I feel like I’ve seen everything. I think it’s something that is often overstated by a lot of people. Something that doesn’t really matter for most games.

What are Some Games I Always Want to Play And Are They Variable?

Dice Throne

This one is definitely a game that I am always up for playing. I played it 4 times in the past three days in fact. I like it because it is variable with 16 different characters to take up against each other. It gets it’s variability in a number of different ways. There is dice chucking, so you won’t have the same results from that, but more so the characters each play differently.

The Gunslinger has a quick draw defense that can cut down damage by a lot. The Barbarian heals on defense and the Treant mainly prevents damage. And that’s just how three of the 16 characters play on defense. Plus what you draw cards makes a huge difference. If I get a lot of upgrades, I can hit more attacks, but might have less choice over which attacks. If I can modify my dice, then I can get better attacks on some turns but have less upgraded. The game is really good in terms of making each character feel unique and play differently.

Gloomhaven

Now, I think Gloomhaven has less variability than it might seem. There are a ton of different characters you can play, like Dice Throne, and those characters are variable. But you play with a single character potentially for quite some time. This is a good thing though. I found, as did the people I was playing with, that it took some time to learn your character. So having that time with just one character definitely makes a difference.

Now, there is variety in a lot of different areas. Different monsters and their AI’s based on the scenario. Scenario set-up, and how the modifier cards come out. But for how the characters attack and interact, there is limited variability as you play a character repeatedly. That’s not a bad thing because if it was more random or the puzzle of what you did changed up every time, it’d make it much harder to keep track of a pretty complex game.

Marvel Champions

This one is interesting when talking about variability. There is a ton of it because it is a deck building game. Sure, there are rules as to how you can build decks, more than Magic the Gathering anyways, but it is deck building. The bad guys you can mix and match with different henchmen, so there is a ton going on. However, once you have a deck set-up that you like that deck is going to play out fairly consistently, at least it will if you’re a good deck builder.

So the variability in what happens, that happens before the game, when you are constructing the decks for the most part. And yes, Wasp feels different than Hulk who feels different than Black Panther. But Black Panther is always going to feel like Black Panther when you play him. This again, like Gloomhaven, is a good thing. I don’t want Black Panther to feel like I’m playing the Hulk. I get Marvel Champions because I can be the superheroes who I have seen in the movies and read in the comics. Being a generic hero wouldn’t be nearly as fun..

What About Games That Might Not Have It?

Sword & Sorcery

I’m just going to give one example of this. And the reason I am picking Sword & Sorcery is because it has a lot of randomness, but I feel like not that much variability. When I played through the base game, I enjoyed it well enough, but the longer I played, I realized it was missing something. Whereas Gloomhaven gave you different feeling bad guys in droves, Swords & Sorcery was limited. While Gloomhaven had story that went all over the place, Sword & Sorcery was limited. All of that is fine but for one thing.

The Characters.

The issue I had with Sword & Sorcery was with how you played the characters. I don’t mind the dice chucking, that is fine. But what you did was really obvious. Once I had an ability that was better than the rest, I’d use it, let it cool down, use it again. Or when I got two actions, non-combat, to take on a turn, I moved and aimed, that was it. Most of the time other actions were pointless. So there was a certain element of the characters just playing themselves. In Gloomhaven, I had choice in what cards to play and I could create my own solution to my puzzle. In Sword & Sorcery, the solution was given to you.

So Do I Look For It?

Yes, and no. Another kind of answer to the question. A game with variability in what happens in it is a lot of fun. But do I really need it to have tons and tons of it? No, most games don’t need that. I haven’t played Ticket to Ride in a little bit, mainly because I play with family, but I don’t need to get special powers for the players and all sorts of crazy stuff to make it more variable. If I got that, it would make it harder to get to the table.

So there are some games that it matters and others it doesn’t. I think games with strong mechanics inherently in the game need less variability because they will present more options as to how to win. Plus, going back to what I said at the top, how often do you play games. I could play one game per day and not repeat for a long time, so how much variability do all these games really need?

What are your thoughts? Do you have a few games you love to play over and over again because of their variability?

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Formula D

Formula D, if my last Malts and Meeples video had audio, you’d know is a racing game that I want to see a legacy version of. It is based off of a Formula 1 style racing and has a ton of different tracks. I think I have six different tracks for it right now. I can almost do a campaign right now. Right now, I can race all the tracks and assign points for how people finish. The better you do or more consistently you do, then you’ll win it all.

How I’d Make It Work

The legacy element is generally the most challenging for a game. How do you add in new things to make the game change and grow? While it doesn’t have to be a major player in the game, I feel like there are interesting things that could be added. There are a few things that come to mind:

• Adding in weather for changing track conditions
• Fighting over sponsorships
• Crew and driver upgrades

Really only the upgrades to crew and driver would give it a legacy feel to it. I think that you’d be able to use it as a campaign style game as well. You can play the legacy version learning and unlocking the new things as you go. But once you are done, all the drivers and crew have a generic non-upgraded side that you can use for a campaign, so you can race season after season.

Homebrewers

This one might seem a little bit odd because it’s a small and light game about brewing beer. The main mechanic, however, is engine building. And I think that it could lead to some clever legacy elements as you play, more in the style of Charterstone where the story is less important than the mechanics. The unique character powers and ingredients that you use would be the focal point of the legacy element.

How I’d Make It Work

I hinted at it already, it is all about the player boards and ingredient cards. You would be brewing through several years worth of competitions and there’d be basic stuff, like much equipment for brewing you had or what your basic special power is that are there from the beginning. Then there would be a few legacy elements to drive it.

• Ingredients
• Brew Set-up
• Special Power
• Judging

So the big three are those upgrading of cards or player boards. You could unlock better scoring for further into your brews by upgrading the cleanliness of your set-up. Or you could improve how your special power works so it is even better. And upgrading ingredients would give them a more powerful affect like giving you more money, moving up on a different track better or further, something like that.

But the game would be driven by the judging. Think of it as following the current beer trends. The judges one year would want all IPA’s, that would give you the most points, and maybe savory ingredients to add to the beer. But you’d get that one judge, the one who has their finger on the future pulse, who is also interested in stouts or fruit. That way you know what might be coming up for what to keep or plan for the next year.

Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade

Of course I found a way to put a roll and write game in here. I love roll and write games, but it was harder than it might seem. A lot of roll and write games are very abstract. Super-Skill Pinball is one of the roll and writes that is least abstracted. For that reason, it is easier to see how it could become a legacy game.

How I’d Make It Work

It is going to have to be completely about scoring the most on each board. And in the base game there are four boards, so would it just be a four game legacy game? I don’t think it would be. You likely won’t get your best score the first time around. So instead, I would make it 8 to 12 total games.

• Trick Shots
• Special Powers

The idea behind trick shots is that you can unlock shots that you are better at. Shots you do one time per game and generally will get you out of a stick situation. Think of hitting the same bumper twice. Something like that would build upon how you can play and score. But a one time power isn’t going to break the game completely, it’ll just enhance a ball.

The special powers, those are going to be a bigger deal. You unlock them as you play and then upgrade them. These are the unique player powers that will give you more options in what you can do. An ability might be something like “The Tilter” where you can avoid a tilt more times. Or someone could get a small tilt and they never have to worry about a tilt of a difference of 1, which allows them to micromanage their game more.

Eventually, the best combined score on all four boards is the winner, but if you win on a board you can still feel good about being the best there.

Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl

This game pits you against other players as you fight monsters, race against the game, and try to be first to unlock the secret of Chernobyl. And I think it’d be a cool legacy game. Mainly because there can be a number of things, story objectives, that you can play around with. This is like Pandemic Legacy in that way, instead of going for points, it is the first person to kill seven monsters at first, keeping it very simple. Then the story unfolds about what has happened and changed the lands until you are diving into the depth of Chernobyl, trying not to die, and eventually save the lands. Of course, keeping the competitive nature of the game.

How I’d Make It Work,

I gave some hints up above, but I like this one as an objective story driven experience. Whereas the rest might create story and moments as you play, they aren’t going to be as story driven. This one is going to have you doing more and more as you try and survive the harsh lands game after game after game. Of course, there are other legacy elements as well.

• Character Upgrades
• Changing Objectives
• Items You Can Keep
• Emerging Story

I definitely see there being a ton of story potential. But there is more than that. I always go back to making unique characters or character powers. In this case you choose the area to upgrade in. You upgrade stats, health, and of course give yourself more unique powers. You can be a better killing machine or ignore that to get better at delving into the ruins. To add in with that, you can upgrade how much you can carry between games, so can keep more items or different items that you find along the way.

Galaxy Trucker

This one is an odd one, but one that I think would be awesome to have as a legacy game. In this game you are building ships in real time to fly through space, pick up cargo, and sell it. All the while, your ship is being bombarded by meteorites, attacked by pirates and generally falling apart. The whole feel of the game is that you slap the ship together and see what happens and then repeat the process. Which sounds odd for legacy, but I think could work.

How I’d Make It Work

Like I said, this one is an odd one. But there do seem to be a few areas that you could turn this into a legacy game, one of the biggest is adding in captains. Captains are going to be your main way to upgrade your ship. You upgrade them, get extra energy for your engines, shields or guns, or maybe you can fit more aliens or people onto your ship. That’s the first big way.

• Unique Captains
• Unlock new ship tech/tiles
• New Threats

The basics of the game would stay the same, but it would just add in complexity as you go along. That is the hallmark for most legacy games. Since you are grabbing tiles as fast as you can, this would just unlock new tiles as you go. It’d almost do unlocks more like Risk Legacy you could go a couple of games without having something unlock but when certain conditions are met, like half the ship falling off or delivering 30 credits worth of stuff, new threats and tiles would get unlocked. Also like Risk Legacy, I’d just track winners, not points, so the person who wins the most wins the game.

Which Would You Want To Play?

I need to ask myself that question as well. Which one would I like to play the most as a legacy game. I think it is going to be Formula D, that game you could pretty easily turn into a campaign game already and I’ve had that thought for a while that it could work that way. But Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl is super high as well. I think from a story perspective that would be the best one from them all. I am mainly just shocked there isn’t a legacy racing game out there.

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Pros

• Cooperative and a hard cooperative game
• Fantasy and Post Apocalyptic
• Good in Box storage solution
• Asymmetric factions
• Available to try on TTS

Cons

• Kickstarter Exclusive
• First game Created
• Information Overload

The Page

First, even though I say it’s a con that it’s the first game they’ve created, and that’s always going to be a con, this is a company that seems to know Kickstarter really well. The page is laid out like I expect a Kickstarter page to be laid out and they actually do a decent job of giving you an idea of what the game is about. There’s a ton of information on the page. That is another thing I have in the cons, the amount of information. Let me make this very clear, I like all the information on the page, but there is a ton of it. I’d prefer to see this much information and dig through all of it then less.

The Game

New section, because I feel like I cover this half in the page and half in my back or brick, and it should have it’s own section.

The game really interests me for a few reasons, hence why I dug deeper into the page. I like cooperative games and I’ve been interested in trying 4x games like Twilight Imperium and Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea. But those are big competitive games, so I’m curious about this one being cooperative. Then you put it in a magical and post-apocalyptic setting, and that makes it even more interesting. I love a good world where most everything has gone wrong. There seems to have been a lot of thought put into this game from the asymmetrical player powers, to every player needing to beat the enemies, not just collectively, so I feel like there’s a lot going on in the game, of needing enough for yourself, but needing to leave stuff for others as well. Finally, I like that this game sounds hard, I like to win cooperative games 30% of the time, that’s about right for me, unless they are story games then let me progress, and this seems like it’s a tough one ,and I like that. It also seems like you’ll be able to scale the difficulty level, which I like as well.

Back or Brick

Short and quick is a brick for me. Now, that said, it might become a back because of the TTS. If I can play on TTS (Tabletop Simulator), I will have a better idea of how the game would work for me. This is one that I’m bummed isn’t coming to retail because I feel like I need to see it in action more. I know that I would like it, but is it one that I could get to the table all that often. Definitely one that I want to try and keep my eye on though and could be sold on to pick-up.

How about for you, is this a back or brick?

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The idea of variable player power is that each player can do something different in the game. Now, that might mean that you’re the only player who can do something, or you can do something better than anyone else. And this isn’t because of the skill that the player possesses themselves, it is instead something that the game grants the player the ability to do.

A kind of silly but obvious example of this is in the game Magic Maze. In that game you are trying to, without verbal communication, move a group of heroes through a mall so that they can pick up what they need and then get out before time runs out. In this game each player has a certain power, you might be able to move the heroes down while I can move them up, someone else can move them left, right, and so on and so forth. While all the powers do basically the same thing, move the heroes, each of them moves it in a unique way. And now I wouldn’t really consider this a great example of how variable player powers can be used in a game, it is obvious, because you are doing something different than anyone else, in fact, you are only doing things different than everyone else.

In most variable player power games, your power isn’t the only thing that you can do. Most of the time there will be a set of common actions that you can take, but you’ll have some added thing that you can do in the game. Pandemic is a good example of this. In Pandemic everyone has the same abilities, you can travel, treat a disease, trade a card, or cure a disease. However, if you are the Dispatcher, you can move other character pawns, not just your own. If you are the Medic, you can treat a disease better. And the same goes for the likes of the Researcher and Scientist and all the other characters. They can all do the basic actions the game, but they can improve upon a basic action or add in a whole action or affect that is specific to them.

Why I like this mechanic so much is that it makes each role in the game feel different. And it means that each time you play the game it feels different as well. In the Pandemic example, if I play the Dispatcher, I’m doing actions that are helping us win the game but that are consistently different than those of the Medic. I care about getting people to where they need to be versus healing a disease. So next time when I’m the researcher and my actions are all about getting people the cards they need, I can coordinate and plan with the Dispatcher to get me to where I need to go so that I’m not using the cards I need to help someone else cure a disease. Sure, you can repeat or find a favorite character for playing or team that you like for winning, but some of the fun is trying out new things. And that’s even more interesting, in my opinion, in a competitive game, because generally that means you are changing how you target a win, I’ll talk about on of my favorites with that coming up here.

Gateway Game:

Homebrewers – Now, I’m sure people have a bunch of different games that I could have put here, but this newer game is one that I really like that plays fast. In this game you are brewing and improving your homebrewed beer. You do this by adding ingredients to your beer, this improves your beer so it makes it more likely you’ll play in the Summer Beer Fest and Oktober Fest. Where the player powers come in is that each character can do something unique. One of the homebrewers is better at cleaning their equipment, another is efficient so they get an extra action die in a month. All of things that are done are simple, and at the end, you end up with a lot of crazy sounding beer that might be good or might just be weird. If that theme doesnt work for you, Pandemic is also a great opion.

Medium Weight:

Xenoshyft: Onslaught – Again an area that could have a lot of different games, but I really like this one because it combines two or my favorite mechanics, player powers with deck building. You even get to blow up some bugs in this cooperative game. In Xenoshyft: Onslaught, you are fighting back wave after wave of bugs who are trying to get into your mining base on an alien planet. To do this, you create a line of defense, but what’s fun is that you can help other people with their defenses as well, so it’s very cooperative in nature. The player powers come in with what group of the security defending the base you are. If you are a medic, that means you start with a special card to start in your deck and it means that you get a few special abilities that unlock over the various waves of bugs. It can be a discount when it comes to buying weapons, armor, more troops, medical supplies, and then they start to build from there. It’s a very tough cooperative game, but I like it a lot.

Heavy Weight

Lords of Hellas – Now, this one is my most controversial pick because there are a lot of good ones out there, and some people don’t like Lords of Hellas all that well. I really like it, though, because of the variable player powers and multiple win conditions. In this game you are either trying to control two groups of land areas, a completed statue, defeated three monsters, or control areas with five temples. At the beginning of the game you pick a hero, and that hero has a unique power. This can help you decide what you want to go after in terms of winning the game. It can be as simple as just starting the game with a priestess but that means you can start going down the path of getting temples faster. But it leads you a bit in a way to win, though, when I got the extra priestess and was going for temples, I actually got closer to winning with two areas controlled. But I like the different options that it gave you and there were a ton of different heroes, so you could really tailor it to how you wanted.

Those are just some of them that I like, there are so many out there, even something like Gloomhaven falls into that category but I skipped dungeon crawler games because while it is a variable power, it feels and plays different, and I’ll talk about dungeon crawler and what that means coming up anyways. What are some of your favorite games with variable player powers? Does it sound interesting to you if you haven’t played a game like that?

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Most people who are interested in board games are going to be up for learning a new game from time to time. Though, there will be some people who aren’t interested as well, but that was a different article. So, you get the game to the table, now how do you teach people the game? I might have actually written about this before, but I think it’s worth going back over and giving some more suggestions, because this is one of the bigger barriers to entry for a lot of board games.

The rules to games are often challenging, and unless everyone loves board games, reading from the rule book won’t likely teach people. Even if the people do love board games, and someone starts to read from the rule book, I’m going to zone out, because I can just read the rule book myself if that’s how we’re going to learn. There needs to be a more engaging way to keep people involved in the rules.

Teaching Rules Steps:

1. Start out by knowing the rules yourself. That doesn’t mean that you’ve had to have played the game before, though playing a sample hand wouldn’t be bad or sample turn, just to make sure that you get it. Or you can watch videos from places like Watch It Played that go over the rules to certain games. What you’re looking to come out of is the win or loss conditions, end of game, and what people can do on their turn. You are going to want to know those things well.
2. Start with the theme of the game (if there is one). By starting with the theme, you can get people’s interest since you aren’t starting off with something dry. This is actually a time where you can read from the rule book, because some games, like T.I.M.E. Stories actually have a bit of a story at the start of the rule book. You can use whatever the game gives you to tell the story. Now, for some games there won’t be a theme you can do this with, I’m looking at abstract games or Dominion as examples, so you can skip that step.
3. Then talk about how you win or lose the game. This is going to be the most important information for people in the game. Generally it’s going to be about how you win the game, especially in a competitive game. You want to have the most victory points, you want to control so many territories, you want to empty your hand of cards first, whatever that might be. But if there’s a condition, say, if you run out of cards, that can eliminate someone from the game, tell them that too. Or for something like Pandemic, there are a lot of ways to lose the game, so talk about those while you talk about how you win. Pandemic is also a good example as to how you can combine this with step two, because you can talk in the theme about how you’re all members of the CDC who are trying to cure four diseases. In that case, you can get the information out in one fell swoop, though I would be tempted to repeat it again, just to make sure everyone knows.
4. Spend some time go over turn/round structure. This isn’t what people can do on their turn. But if you start by drawing cards, then playing two cards, then moving the villain ahead two spaces, then optionally getting an event card, explain that. This is meant to teach people who this works at a high level and what the structure is going to be through most of the game. It is also going to give you a chance to show off random decks of cards or things that the players might not immediately interact with in the game.
5. Go over what people can do on their turns. Now, this doesn’t have to be everything. Especially if there is a player aid that is good and clear. But talk about the important things that people can do on their turns. In Pandemic, explain how the moving works and how to treat diseases and how to cure diseases. Then, most of the characters have a special action that they can take. You don’t need to teach something like this which is specific to a single player, but have the players read, at this time, their special powers, if they exist, and in fact hand them out at this time, and then you can answer questions.
6. Show people the important parts of the game. But more than just showing off the important decks, let your players be involved in it. In Pandemic, as an example again, you can talk about the player deck and have someone shuffle it and hand out people’s hands of cards while you continue to teach more. It seems like it might distract from your teaching by having someone do something like that. I personally don’t think it will, in fact it might keep people more engaged. Because people are going to be paying attention so that if you ask them to help with something it won’t be obvious that they weren’t paying attention.
7. Finally, teach in the game as need be. This can be a few different things. Sometimes there are several things that only happen once or twice in the game, you can teach them in the moment when they happen. However, this only works if it isn’t something that is extremely important to the game or to the scoring. If there’s something that can give you an automatic win, teach that earlier even if it’s really rare. Or if it’s something that helps you as the person who is teaching the game and hurts someone else, teach it earlier or refrain from doing it, and give it as an example as something that you could do. Another thing that teaching in the game can be is letting players roll back a turn if need be. If someone has an extremely good move and makes a very bad move, point out the option to them, they might have forgotten or just missed it. But don’t do this all the time, because you’ll basically be taking that person’s turn and make this about teaching the game, so once you’ve taught something once during the game, you don’t teach the same thing again.

Now, there are probably more things that you can do. But being patient and teaching a game from theme first, and from a position where you know the rules is going to make it more likely that people will enjoy the game. And when people don’t enjoy the game, don’t assume that it was how you taught it, if you were trying to be considerate and engaging about it, not every game is for everyone.

Have you found any ways that make teaching a game easier? Or are there things that you’ve found help keep people engaged in learning the rules?

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For a lot of people, that’s what it is still in gaming. Even if they’ve progressed away from Monopoly and into games like Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, and Carcassonne, the difference between you and me is that I’m blue and you’re red. Otherwise everything we do is the same. And that’s a-okay in a ton of a games. There isn’t a need for your character to be slightly different than mine, but in some games, it makes the game a whole lot better.

Back in 1949, there was an attempt to make “unique” characters when Clue came out. Professor Plum, Mrs. White, Mr. Green, and the rest of the cast allowed you to pick your favorite based off of more than just color of the pawn you were using. Now, they gave you some art, but it really wasn’t a unique character at that point. You were really just picking a color still. But in some ways that was the start of having unique characters. It gave some foundation that could be built off off later.

Now, we see two prominent ways that unique characters are done in board games. There are more ways beyond that, but there are two major ways. The first is the special power route. Your character has something specific they can do that no one else can. The other way is the asymmetric route. Definitely the harder of the two to pull off, because what you do in the game is always different than what I do in the game.

The first type, is the special power or action that only you can take. A great example of this is Pandemic. In this game you have a base set of actions, treat disease, move, trade cards, etc. that everyone in the game can do. But each character has their own special action that they can take or improvement upon one of the other actions. For example, all characters can treat a disease by taking a cube off of the city they are in, but the medic can take all of the disease cubes off of the city they are in. The dispatcher, on the other hand, can move people on their turn, versus just having to move yourself. The rules still apply the same way for how they can move other people’s pawns.

You can start to see from Pandemic how having unique powers can make the game different each time in different ways. In fact, unique powers are a really good way to keep a game replay-able over a long period of time.

There are games that keep the base action for you, but allow either for changing your unique power or setting up your own unique powers. Two examples jump into my head quickly. The first being Smallworld. Since the races and powers are randomly shuffled, you might end up with flying wizards one time, and wealthy wizards another time. In this case, the game, like in Pandemic, dictates what your unique power is.

There are games, however, that allow you to determine how unique you want your character to be. This is the other example, Blood Rage (also Seafall does this), where you can spend action points that upgrade your clan. A pair of warriors can be made to be worth more in battle for you, or you can gain points when your warriors die in battle and go to Valhalla. Maybe your clan leader is now worth more points, or you can move your ship in a certain way. Maybe you have access to monsters now. Based on how you draft cards, you can shape your own player board to be unique. This type of game is interesting because at the start of the game, your clan is the same as everyone else’s clans. But as the game progresses, the clans play more and more differently depending on your cards, and which ones you choose to use. In Seafall, had the game been good, it was similar where you started out with the same base at the start of the first game, but you could buy upgrades that left from game to game, but you could also put in permanent upgrades as well, so the more you played the more unique you were.

Now, that has been the simpler type of player powers to talk about. The more difficult is the asymmetric player powers. The reason that this is tougher is because even if there is the same base to the game, everyone plays with that differently.

A great example of this is Root. In Root everyone has some pretty similar actions, but how they go about doing all of them is completely different. While you all might be moving troops and trying to control areas, the cats, to gain more troops have to build up various buildings, where as the birds are trying to create an order or cards that they play. The woodland creatures are just trying to get onto the board by using cards in yet another way, and the Vagabond is doing something else different with their actions.

This type of game is very interesting, and Cry Havoc is another example. There is one fairly big downside to a completely asymmetrical game. The time spent teaching the game the first time you play it is pretty to extremely high. In Root, for example, you have to explain a fair amount about each character, even though some of the base actions might be the same. In Vast, this problem is made even larger by the base actions being a greater variety. Cry Havoc is probably the easiest of them to teach, because the base actions for everyone are the same, just the buildings, objectives, and special powers mean that how you play the game as each faction is different.

You can see how this has all moved on from Clue where you had a name for your character, but that was about it that made you unique from just being a different colored pawn.

There are a few more ways that games try and add differences. The other most common, though what you can do might not change, is the hidden traitor role in a game like One Night Ultimate Werewolf or Resistance. These games, what everyone does is basically the same, some expansions provide more variability to the game, but in the base, you can hide your actions because you are doing the same thing as everyone else.

This has then been expanded upon with games like Dead of Winter and Shadows Over Camelot. Shadows Over Camelot gives the bad guy more that they can do, if there is even a traitor in the game. In Dead of Winter, each player has a hidden objective. So while you have the exact same set of powers, you are trying for a slightly unique state of the game when it ends, mainly what you have in your hand at the end of the game. For me, these games can be a bit more hit or miss, because depending on if there is a traitor or not, it can greatly hinge the game on various things, and it can at times force you to look like the traitor to actually win the game. If there was some balancing mechanic for it, it would make the game better, but potential hidden traitor and hidden objectives is very hard to pull off well in a game.

That’s a lot variable player powers and the range that can run. Personally, I’d be interested in seeing a reworking of Clue so that Professor Plum can do something different and better than Colonel Mustard, but that’s already been done in some of those investigation games, like Fury of Dracula.

What are some of your favorite variable player power games? Are there some where certain combinations are too broken to play with so you’ve banned them at your table?

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