Game Design
Analysis Paralysis: How Smart Game Design Can Keep Everyone Happy
When tabletop gamers talk about analysis paralysis, they seldom refer to themselves. ‘AP-ing’, as it’s sometimes called, is a well-known but poorly understood phenomenon.
The standard complaint goes a little like this: “A player in my gaming group takes so long to take their turns. Every time they go to take a move, they spend almost ten minutes thinking about all the possible combinations and then go ahead and pick the strategy that was fairly obvious from the start!”. While slightly extreme (10 minutes is a little crazy), this is largely what upsets many players. A board game which should take 60 minutes can drag into a four hour affair which is sluggish and boring for everyone involved.
First things first, let’s talk a little about the environment where AP occurs. After all, if we’re going to fix AP, we need to understand where it really hurts a game. Let’s think about two examples.
Case one: I recently completed an epic 8-week game of Diplomacy as England, via the excellent PBEM-style website Backstabbr. I would spend hours divining my orders and writing emails to my fellow competitors between adjudication periods. More often than not, I would eventually come to the conclusion that the most sensible option was the one which was painfully obvious.
Case two: yesterday, I played a game of Chess with a colleague. In between each turn I must have spent at least 5 minutes deciding what the best move might be. In the end, I eventually lost, so my time thinking clearly didn’t translate into a formidable strategy!
Were either of these examples problematic? Of course they were not. While I might have spent a lot of time considering my turns, it clearly didn’t upset the other players. So, what exactly is the AP critique moaning about?
It probably seems obvious, but people complaining about AP are frustrated with downtime. Plain and simple. One of the most enjoyable parts of a board game is taking your turn and seeing what happens. The space in-between turns is typically pretty low activity and thus rather dull. In an abstract two player strategy game, thinking about your moves isn’t a problem because play switches immediately on to the other player. Downtime is reduced because, well, there’s only two players. Likewise in Diplomacy, my excessive pondering was hardly an issue because everyone could spend as much or as little time as they needed thinking about their turns (adjudication occurs simultaneously and everyone submits their orders at the same time); my AP didn’t affect the other players. The problems start when players have to sit around waiting for another to take their turn. It’s particularly accentuated when you have a multiplayer game of three or more people.
How do we fix it? We might want to think about the exogenous (ie. the external) and endogenous (ie. the internal) factors which lead to AP. The principle exogenous cause of AP is, unsurprisingly, the player themself. No matter how much clever design work you do, if a player is going to take half an hour to pick what colour pieces they want to play with, you’re in for a pretty miserable time. This is important because it lets us think about the scope of our solutions a bit better.
We are never going to be able to make an individual play quicker, unless we use a stopwatch to time all of their moves which I personally think is rather cruel. We don’t want our fixes to be detrimental to the fun that the AP-ing player is having. If we value their enjoyment (which presumably requires them to think about their moves a little more than the rest of us) less than the other players’, we might as well not bother including them in the game! Of course, if it turns out that the AP-ing player can play faster and chooses not to, then you might be sharing your game nights with a sadist. That would be quite terrible.
On a more serious note, that leaves us with the endogenous factors which are bit more elusive. How can we mitigate downtime in a board game? The most straightforward answer would be to make the turns shorter. The player has less things to do on their turn, so the turn physically takes a shorter amount of time.
Compare Axis & Allies to Ticket To Ride. In A&A, players take a whole raft of actions on their turn before play moves on to the next player. In a full game of five players, that’s a lot of actions before play gets back to you; it’s not outlandish for downtime to be over 30 minutes! On the other hand, TTR asks its players to do one action on their turns: draw a card or play some cards. I don’t think I’ve waited more than 15 minutes for my turn in TTR and even slow players are not detrimental. You might be thinking that this is a bit of an unfair comparison, A&A is a way more complicated and has far more moving parts than TTR. That is correct, so where do we go next?
It’s clear that more complex games have longer turn structures, and this is going to be exacerbated by an AP prone player having to interact with all of the game mechanisms in their turn. However, who’s to say we need to interact with all the systems at once? Instead of compressing the game turns absolutely (thus reducing the options the player has and therefore the number of mechanics the game has), why can’t we compress the game turns relatively? I think it might be easier if I show you an industry-leading example of this principle in action.
Take Twilight Imperium. Loved and feared in equal measure, TI is a huge game. It barely fits on my shelf. It also takes around 10 hours to play and clocks in with a BoardGameGeek complexity rating (a scale of game difficulty) of 4.22/5 at the time of writing. Monopoly has a rating of 1.66, for comparison. So TI is massive and has a lot of rules, but how common are complaints about AP? Not as common as you might think. For sure, there’s going to be a downward bias here (I mean, if you struggle to grasp Settlers of Catan there’s no way you’ll be playing TI), but there’s an element of ingenious design work at play. Instead of asking players to take all of their actions all at once, TI restricts players to just one action at a time before play moves on during the main phase of the game. The impact this has on the game cannot be overstated. 10 hours can literally breeze by in this game, such is the level of player involvement at any point. You don’t have to wait ages for your turn to roll around, and the changes in the board state between turns are very incremental meaning canny players can plan their next go while they’re waiting. Couple this with opportunities for players to get involved in other people’s turns through the activation of strategy or action cards and you have an exceptionally dynamic system.
This was the philosophy I used when I designed my re-build of Supremacy. I knew that there was going to be a lot of systems the players could interact with, so I created the round structure to allow for lots of short, quick turns (and in some cases simultaneous turns) that allow players to be almost constantly involved in the action. Of course, my version of Supremacy is still fairly complicated (and trying to consider the ramifications of your individual in-game actions can lead to AP), but this is mitigated by the relatively few options available to you during a given phase. I’ll put in a disclaimer though. While this system can be beneficial to downtime, it might also make it even worse. Where you use lots of snappy turns throughout a round, you’re going to need to implement some type of ‘phase’ structure to hold the experience together. For example, Supremacy plays over four phases: the preparation phase (where turn order gets decided), the market phase (where resources are produced and then bought/sold on the game’s market), the tactical phase (where armies are built and then moved) and finally the trading phase (where players make deals between themselves and victory conditions are checked). That is a lot to remember! If you don’t have a half-decent player-aide available, players will no doubt get lost in what section of the round they’re in and the downtime from confusion will end up being immense.
It is also worth noting that games with this format are hardly ‘elegant’ in how aesthetic their structures are. By that I mean how the flow of the game is and how ‘pure’ the overall round structure is. Maybe I’m weird, but I feel like this is something important. TI and Supremacy are rugged designs, there are a lot of mechanics and systems and so, to make things comprehensible, there’s some ugly meta-structuring which is required via the phases. Compare this to something like Cole Wehrle’s Pax Pamir. This is a ferociously complex game hidden behind a beautifully simple tableau builder. Just like TTR, you (roughly) either play a card from your hand or take a card from the market. You can also take actions with the cards you previously played. Mind you, this is a very basic reduction of Pax Pamir (there is a lot more nuance to it than this). The elegant and wonderfully lean structure of Pax Pamir makes individual actions very easy to conduct but the strategy remains rather opaque leading to a design which has the revered ‘easy to learn, hard to master’ feeling.
I think that wraps up my thoughts about analysis paralysis and how designers can combat it through phase structuring in their games. There are plenty of other techniques (as discussed in this nice blog by Bastiaan), but I wanted to draw attention to how the scope and complexity of the design doesn’t necessarily need to be reduced in the name of cutting away at downtime. What games have you played that deal with AP well? How do they solve the endogenous factors which lead to downtime? More importantly, I hope they’re fun!
