Rules and Game “Essence”

Why I think LIFE is a terrible board game for terrible, unimaginative people who have never played a good game.

Does anyone enjoy playing life?

Not the metaphysical experience, but instead the hasbro-produced board game of oddly terrifying cartoon art with rictus grins. My experience thus far has been: take the options with the highest meme value because they ultimately matter quite little, break the tiny child signifiers because there’s nothing better to do, and generally die of boredom while waiting for your next turn spinning the wheel because, if nothing else, the clicking of the spinner is somewhat satisfying.

Here’s the thing about life: it’s got a lot of parts.

If you’ve ever seen the box, it’s unecessarily massive. It’s got a spinner (that works exactly the same as a d10), a 3d board (that doesn’t matter, because there’s only one path anyway and the height is purely aesthetic), tiny cars and tiny children (which don’t affect gameplay, only the final score). There’s cards and houses but the basic gameplay remains: spin the wheel, advance your token and follow instructions that adjust your final score.

Here’s the other thing about life: it’s mind-numbingly uninteresting.

The choices are either irrelevant or insultingly simple (would you like to increase your score by 10 or by 7?), there’s no competition or skill involved in playing, and there’s a fixed number of events- even if you found finding events interesting, the replay value would be low. All there is to do is spin a wheel and resolve a foregone conclusion.

I think this exemplifies a problem I find with a lot of board games: it has numerous accoutrements, yet the basic gameplay remains uninteresting. “Lipstick on a pig” comes to mind- you can’t make an uninteresting mechanic interesting by adding more, and if you happen to find something that adds value to your game- refocus the game around that! In an ideal game, every rule advances the fun: anything that doesn’t add value should be culled.

In contrast, let me talk about a game I have a love-hate relationship with.

Aside from the part where danmaku is clearly a game for Absolute Weaboo Trash, it’s a complicated variant of a popular game called bang! This particular game takes about 15 minutes, an explained walkthrough and about 2 rounds of gameplay before it starts to make sense: the rules are Hefty.

This game is also fun.

The basic mechanic is this: you get to attack your opponents.

That’s inherently fun.

The added mechanic is: everyone has a goal, but these goals are hidden. It’s advantageous to try to advance your goals while hiding their nature from other players.

At this point, we’ve added a layer of skill and strategy onto an inherently fun mechanic.

Then, we add rules around the attacking: certain cards allow attacks, certain cards block them, and every player has unique skills that can help attack or defend.

These rules are what’s hard to explain to new players- danmaku sets a new standard for “excessively complicated methods of attack.” There’s a myriad of items and attacks, each with special effects, and to play optimally a player needs to understand the extent of their own ability as well as those of every other player. Given the number of abilities available and the modifications possible upon those, this gets difficult to comprehend.

However, the core of danmaku, that essence of attack and strategy- thats fun. Could the game be fun without the crazy number of rules? Honestly, bang! kind of achieves that- it’s a similar game that takes decades less time to explain. But is danmaku still fun?

I say yes.

If the essence of your game has no stakes, adding more mechanics won’t up them. I think that a board game with interesting mechanics will ultimately stay uninteresting if the “essence” isn’t fun- I think that if you summarize your game in a sentence and it doesn’t sound fun, it probably isn’t.

(Side note- I also hate board games where you roll a dice and advance a token, so there is a very high chance I’m being unnecessarily biased. I’m more of a tabletop/card game girl.)

I want designers to be unafraid to scrap the essence of their game. I think there’s a lot of really fun mechanics that are stuck in terribly unfun games because a designer got attached and didn’t have the courage to completely overhaul it. I want people to think of their game as component pieces that can be swapped in and out- liking a cool rule isn’t a reason to keep a game, it’s a reason to slap the rule on a new game and work it out.