The Prototyping Benefits of a Zero-Sum Game

If you are designing a game where points or other resource quantities are involved, you may have realized the line you have to balance when prototyping it.  To save money, you may have printed/bought/gathered less tokens than you thought you needed and had to decide what happens when your playtesters ran out.  Was that an intentional part of the game?  How many tokens are the right amount?  Should you just print way too many and not let the players run out (which of course will be more expensive to prototype and ultimately make if you decide to sell it with too many tokens)?

One solution is to eliminate the bank entirely and divide the resources up at the start of the game.  Then players give and take resources from each other.  This is what is known as a zero-sum game because there is no total loss or gain of resources.  This has a number of benefits: it's much easier to figure out how many tokens the game will need so players generally have just enough or just shy of enough most of the game (depending on what you're going for), players end up balancing the game themselves by (usually) taking from the person winning and helping out people in last place (which is an interesting additional strategic choice for your players), and this dynamic balance should help people from getting an insurmountable lead from the other players.

Zero-Sum resources will drastically alter your game, though.  Imagine if the resources in Settler's of Catan didn't come from a bank of cards, but instead when you bought a road, you had to decide who would get your wood and clay.  That would shift the focus from trading resources directly (simple and intuitive) to bargaining for future resources (e.g. "I will give you this clay now if I get your ore when you buy a development card").  One of the biggest draws of Settler's of Catan is that it's very easy to learn and it's a big social game.  However, while resource trading is a positive thing (both parties get something they want), resource bargaining can be pretty negative (it's essentially begging and what happens if one person doesn't keep their end of the bargain?).

So as always, keep in mind what your goal is with the game and what you want your players to feel.  If your game is directly competitive (players should attack each other) and you're finding all your playtesters playing too nicely, then a zero-sum situation will help force them to attack each other since they have to take their resources/points/whatever from another player and start aggression.  If your game is meant to make or keep friendships alive, maybe this isn't the right thing for your game.

Gaming Pet Peeves: Early Shuffling

Everyone has pet peeves while gaming.  These can range from game components not being lined up right (see #4), other players not following the rules exactly, game phases being skipped, discard piles not being face up, people not paying attention, people not strategizing during other player's turns so their turns take much longer than they should, or any other number of issues.  I've noticed each of those pet peeves in enough other people to realize it's not just me, but one pet peeve of mine that I seem to always get odd looks for is that I hate people shuffling a discard pile back into the deck before the game tells us to or the draw deck is empty.

I understand that in most cases, people are trying to save time by shuffling the discard deck into the draw deck when there are only a few cards left, but I don't think people realize how that affects the probability of getting cards and how much that can affect the game.  With a full deck, each card has a completely even chance of being drawn.  When the deck is empty, each card will have been drawn once.  When you shuffle the discard pile to form a new draw deck, all cards have either been used or are in someone's hand waiting to be used.  If you shuffle that discard deck early, the cards that were in the draw deck had no chance to be used, which means they will show up less frequently.  This means that the more powerful or popular cards will show up much more frequently since they will go into this discard pile and back into the deck much more frequently.  This sounds good, but there is a reason the game came with more cards than just the popular/powerful ones.  The balance of the game is being destroyed with this early shuffle.

Let's take it to the extreme and say that every time a card gets used, instead of putting it in a discard pile, we randomly place it somewhere in the draw deck.  If we place it above any other card in that deck, we will see the used card more often than those cards below it.  If we place it at the bottom of the deck (and repeat this every time to make sure all cards can potentially appear the same number of times) then once we hit the end of the deck, we will be playing the same game we were at the beginning since all the cards will be in the same order.  The whole purpose of the discard deck is to have a separate place to store cards that have been used from those that haven't had a chance to be used yet.  So give every card an equal chance at serving its purpose.  Don't shuffle early.