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I've worked in game design. I once built a card game (Ambition) with the express purpose of taking card-luck out of the game as much as possible. (To make a long story short, I was in Budapest and left all my German board games at home, so I had to make do with a deck of cards.) Bridge solves this problem by duplication. (Bridge is an immensely deep and skillful game, but there's a lot of card-luck when the players are skilled, so when it's played in tournaments where outcomes are taken seriously, they duplicate it; each team plays the same sets of hands and is scored on its relative performance.) Poker solves it by changing the definition (it is a skill game, over hundreds of hours; people have enough patience to play for long enough for it to converge). However, for an obscure recently-invented game that no one had heard of at the time, and even now might have a few hundred players worldwide, neither of these (duplication or the "it converges over time" argument) is a credible option. Taking card-luck out of a trick-taking game is very hard to do, and this led down a rabbit hole of analyzing game designs for the "luck/skill" question. The conclusion I came to is that the mere concept of such as a continuum is a massive oversimplification. What I found with Ambition is that, while the card-luck was largely taken out of this 4-player trick-taking game, there was a lot of unpredictable strategic influence that doesn't always have to do with a player's individual skill (which, in my mind, is an asset of the game.) In any game of more than 2 players, there's a third element: strategy. That's a mix of both. People are pursuing their own interests and sometimes it affects other players disproportionately. Or, we might be sitting together at a 3-player game and I win, even though you're a better player, because that 3rd player is either lousy or unpredictable and does things that hand me advantages. (The most extreme example of this is the "king-maker scenario" where a player can't win but gets to choose the winner.) Puerto Rico, although very skillful and deep, is notorious for its table-position effect. For an aside, part of what makes German-style board games is this strategic "interaction term" resulting neither from chance nor from individual skill alone. Pure skill games like Chess are a bit dry, in the sense that if the skill levels are different by much, the outcome is predictable: the more skillful player will win pretty much every time. German-style games leverage this third "strategic" factor to make games that aren't very luck-driven (you never feel "screwed by the dice") but that also don't have the same winner every time. This is why most of the "serious" mind-sport games are two-party games. In Chess, if your opponent's strategy hurts you, then he (by definition) had a better strategy and therefore played more skillfully. In Bridge, any player's strategic affect on your outcome is likewise indicative: if your teammate hurt you through a strategic interaction, then you're not as good a team. In luckless 2-player games, the party that wins is the party that played better. In 3+ player games, this isn't always true. Economic and business games are like that. They're massively multiplayer, which means that there are a lot of strategic-interaction teams that can't be attributed to skill or luck, and the quality of information most people have isn't very high. This is especially true in technology where, by definition, we're trying to do things that haven't been done before. That makes it fun, but also really, really noisy. |
One way to make multiplayer games interesting is to have enough variance so that with 3 players left, the balance between a player who pulls some lucky breaks and the other two players working together is just barely in favor of the two players. If the game is well designed and the players act strategically, this shifting balance of alliances can last quite a while without either handing one of the players the game or getting boring, and winning is about figuring out how to hold your ally past the time its in his best interest to turn on you, or turning on him at just the right moment to maximize impact.