As I mentioned (very briefly) before, designing a card or board game where players eliminate other players to win is a bad thing. The obvious reason is that once you are eliminated from a game, you are no longer playing the game, so what are your options? Go home, sit around and watch people playing a game (even worse than going to a restaurant with friends when you've already eaten), or start up your own game of something else with other people who have been eliminated. None of those options are that great and they definitely aren't why you got together with your friends to play games. The other reason this style of game is bad is that it fosters friendship destroying behaviors since you have to be a jerk to your friends or you lose the game. Or as Demetri Martin put it: “There’s so many board games with so many different titles, but I feel like they could all have the same title: Which One Of My Friends Is A Competitive Prick?”
There are some exceptions to this rule: if the game is ludicrously short a la We Didn't Playtest This At All, if you all agree that being super competitive jerks won't destroy your friendship, or if you and your friends are all griefers and enjoy the misery of others. There are also ways to have this win style and tweak it to make it work. Maybe being eliminated doesn't take you out of the game, but changes what role you play in the game. Maybe there is a way to be brought back in to the game (especially good for the first person knocked out of the game). Maybe the eliminated player gets to determine the winner of the game somehow as in Survivor. You could also completely turn this on its head and make being eliminated the goal of a player. "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." I have a sudden urge to make a Jedi Knight board game...
No comments:
Post a Comment