As I’ve started to document my board game idea I’ve ran into one of the oldest challenges in game design, balance. Creating a single player game, balance is pretty easy, just make sure the player has all the tools necessary to win and you’re done. Multiplayer is a different beast all together and trying to balance out my game really makes my respect for companies like Blizzard grow.
In a single player game you’re dealing with one predetermined force (the AI) and one unpredictable force (the player). As a designer you should know exactly how the AI will handle specific situations and build the game mechanics from that. In multiplayer however human players are not predictable. The other issue is winning, lets face it, and we like to win at our games. It’s really easy to create a game for someone to win, but when you have multiple players someone will have to lose.
My board game for example, the challenge I’m facing is how many advantages should each player get; will they give one player too much of an advantage? Take for example, in my blog post I talked about having the monster roll a dice check every time it enters a country, if it fails then Victor is alerted to the monster’s presence. Now it would be fair to the monster that it should always have a chance to win the roll, however this would absolutely kill the game for Victor who relies heavily on this information. Another case, having the monster not move for a few turns to confuse Victor, very useful tactic for the player who is the monster, however another game ruining mechanic for Victor.
The solutions I’ve reached to these problems are, making the security checks very high in well populated countries forcing the monster to try to stay in barren areas. For problem two, each turn the monster stays in one area the security check will increase by one to signify the people are on to this strange creature. Going back to my mention of Blizzard, I still would love to know how long the designers spent fine tuning every part of Starcraft to make it balanced.
When dealing with asymmetric sides, the normal rules of balance don’t exactly apply. Sometimes you need to push each side as far away from each other to achieve it. Which could mean creating a very expensive high quality side vs a cheap side in a RTS, or defining what makes each side unique and going from there. However when dealing with asymmetric balance, don’t expect everything to line up as some elements will be an advantage for one player and a disadvantage for the other every time, there really isn’t anything you can do about this.
Josh
