I recently played Scythe, which is one of 2016's most hyped Kickstarter game. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and look forward to the next opportunity to play it again. I'll save my overall thoughts on the game for another opportunity - other than saying that Scythe is really really awesome - to share some thoughts about one fault that plagues many games, including the fantastic Scythe, and that's  downtime.

What is downtime? Technically, downtime is the time between each player's two turns. Say you're playing Chess - when it's your turn to move, you're actively engaged in thinking about the game. Then you make your move, and you look at your opponent - it's your time to wait. Sure, you may be thinking of your next move and consider possible board states, but you can't really make a decision until you know for sure what your opponent chose to do, and you probably already consider some of their possible moves when you made yours. In other words, you are waiting. This is downtime.

Naturally, gamers and designers are always after games with low or no downtime. Though this is quite a consensus, once you start thinking you see that actually downtown can have different meanings and it bothers people to different degrees. Some people think players actually need some downtime, to think about their turns in strategic games or take a little rest in intense games (like real time games). We can now see clue that the issue with downtime is not merely about time but also about timing: how much of a game feels like downtime depends on whether a break in the action is welcomed or not. Downtime is therefore not just the time between a player's turns but more precisely, the time in which a player isn't actively engaged. Games with similar turn length could have different amount of downtime, depending on how much you engaged a player is during another player's turn. A player may be engaged during another player's turn because they're preparing for their own turn, enjoying the spectacle of their friend's turn, anxiously following to see its impact on their own position or taking a needed break after an intense turn.

Simultaneous play is a common method to avoid downtime but as a design strategy it's very restrictive and will only work for certain kinds of games. Another prominent way to avoid downtime is making turns short - if turns are short, each other player's turn doesn't take as long and it's back to you faster. However, if you make turns shorter and change nothing else, you haven't really changed the length of a game's downtime but spread it over more intervals. You'll still have the same amount of downtime but it'll come in smaller portions. We see here again that downtime isn't merely the intersection of game length and player count - we should be concerned not just about time, but also about the perception of downtime.

Short turns is the way Scythe tries to work around the issue of downtime (as the formal game description tells us), as the action-selection system only lets you choose one action during your turn. But making turns short is not always a solution and I think Scythe is a good example of that's point: turns can actually be too short, and if they are too short they don't feel quite satisfying. The upshot is that downtime is not just a function of how long it takes for other people to take their turns - it's also a function of how fulfilling each turn is. In Star Realms, for example, players build their engine throughout the game and then, at some time, you get an explosive turn where everything comes together and you play half your deck, blowing through anything. After such an epic turn, players will have more patience to wait for their next turn, and will be happy to take a breather. But with Scythe, even when my engine gets churning - I can still do only a little thing every turn and you never really get that epic turn (unless you attack in multiple places). That makes the difference between four and five players much greater than it would have otherwise been.

There is another factor that affects the experience of downtime and that is interaction. Since downtime is not just a matter of time but of engagement, if you're really engaged during other players' turns, it won't feel like downtime. In Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games you can actually interrupt another player during their turn to play a card or cancel their effect. In war games you will typically be sitting on the edge of your seat during other players turns, waiting to see where or whether they choose to attack you. But there's more and more games that choose to create meaningful interaction in non-confrontational ways, borrowing from the rising tide of Eurogames. Scythe is one of these games, where fighting occurs rather infrequently and interaction with other players comes partly from positioning on the board but mostly through a variety of intricate indirect ways, such as the way some actions your neighbors take may give you resources. Yet the most important way other players affect your play in Scythe is the fact the game ends when someone unlocks all their achievements. In practice, the game ends when someone decides to end it - which means you have to make sure your game plan aligns with the game's time horizon as it might end before you are ready.

The point is that even though Scythe has a healthy dose of sophisticated player interaction, it doesn't really gives you a reason (or the mental space) to care about what other players do. When other players made their move, I only looked to see if they built a building (because that would give me resources) completed an achievement,  and deployed a mech somewhere near me. These things don't happen that often, and so players may lose interest in the actions of other players, who are solving a complicated puzzle of their own. For that reason, the difference between 4 and 5 players in Scythe is greater than it would otherwise be, and it's not just a matter of the extra 30 seconds it takes for my turn to come around. This is something to consider we devising schemes of interaction.

The bottom line is - if you want to avoid downtime in your game, you have to think not just about the time but also about other dimensions of the experience of downtime - timing of breaks, fulfillment during players' turns, and engagement during other people's turns.

I haven't written in a little while, for various reasons, but I don't try to write here on a rigid schedule. That being said, I was invited to join the Epic Slant blog, that focuses on positivity in print, so that my infrequent pieces would be featured among the writing of other people. I like it because I can contribute recaps of the games I've been playing and have those be joined with recaps of the site's other writers. I've also written a piece there about The Magic of Playing Board Games, which included the following passage:

Why did I lose interest in playing patchwork on my iPad? Reflecting on this point got me thinking about the magic and beauty of playing in person. Patchwork was tremendously fun playing in person, but wholly unsatisfied on the iPad, and I had the same experience with some other games. I imagine that it could be fun playing with someone you know, a friend who lives across the ocean or on the other side of the continent. It’s also fun to practice a bit, if you’re really a competitive type and want to grind some games on the bus while on the way to game night. Overall, I felt that online patchwork lacks the magic of playing in person.

Head over to Epic Slant Press to check it out!

"You like political games, right? Surely you like this game!"
 
I get that a lot. And when it's not a game about elections or campaigns or election campaigns, it's a basically a war game. I like games about politics but that's not what I have in mind when I talk about political games: I think about games where players have power over each other in interesting ways. I have not done a good job explaining what this mean but the contrast with war games - by which I mean games that are primarily about war and not the specific sub-genre that is labeled war games - helps elucidate what is interesting about political games.
 
Take, for example, Forbidden Stars. A superb game, and one that I really enjoy. When you play Forbidden Stars, you worry about having enough money to buy your troops and whether or not you have the best technologies for the troops you want to buy. You also care about protecting your cities and your positioning around the galaxy - but you really mostly worried about your opponents and how you're going to destroy them. Sure, when you play Forbidden Stars with more than 2 players, you'll have the kind of diplomacy that comes with any multiplayer game - empty promises, deflection, piling on the leader and the like. Though it's more pronounced when you have ways to seriously harm each other, these kinds of dynamics are not unique to war games and exist even in the most non-confrontational games. Even Agricola, when played with people who know the game well enough, will have the same dynamics. If you don't hear the common deflection 'don't go after me! James is in the lead!' in these games it's not because the dynamics aren't there, but because norms of table talk preclude them.
 
I enjoy the diplomacy and table talk of a war based game, like Forbidden Stars, but I don't consider it a political game. War mechanics, that allow players to fight and directly conquer and/or destroy each other's pieces/areas/resources, are an easy way to raise the stakes and bring out emotional exchanges between people. And when done well, they provide a fertile ground for intrigue. But non-confrontational games have their own ways to create room for intrigue. The most obvious way is introducing lying, bluffing, hidden identities or the possibility of a traitor. All of these are common mechanics that make for good games, but they tend to take over and crowd out other game mechanics because it's hard to care about efficiency in managing resources when you don't really know who's trying to do what in the game.
 
Let's take this opportunity to  think about ways to make interesting, non-confrontational games that are not centered around hidden roles, social deduction or bluffing. How can we make an interesting political game that isn't a war game? To answer this question, let's look at some Euro-style games that get interaction right, and one that doesn’t. Starting with the one that doesn't.

Roll for the Galaxy is the dice version of Race for the Galaxy, and it uses dice creatively as both workers and resources. I don't dislike the game - though I was kind of disappointed with it given the rave reviews it got - and I think it has one of the most satisfying engine building experiences. The game has a lot going for it: a simple core mechanic that's fun and not too complicated to teach, great risk-reward management in the dice rolling and tableau building, quick play time with little downtime, beautiful components. Who doesn't love a set of colorful custom made dice? I like the game well but it has two issues that work against it. First, it has absolutely no theme. The game could have easily been about coal mines, or spyrium factories, or train company stock companies. Not only it doesn't feel anything like exploring space or colonizing planets - the slightly different probability map of each die, while a well-thought mechanic, does absolutely nothing to differentiate them. Producing green dice doesn't, in any way, feel like splicing genes, it's just producing a green. Colonizing a planet with red dice doesn't at all feel like using military power, it's just a red colonizer. I can go on, but I think you get the point.
 
More relevant to our topic, the game suffers from lack of meaningful interactions - in fact, it's probably the most 'multiplayer solitaire' in my collection. There are a few reasons for that, but the main one is this: there is really very little one can do to affect another player. As a consequence, there is little reason to care about what other players are doing. One of the coolest features of the game is that most of it is simultaneous. That means there is very little downtime and turns are very quick. Some turns are good, and you get to do everything you wanted and others are bad and you only do a handful of things. But they all pass quickly, as you execute what you have while everybody else execute their own actions. But it also means that you basically only check where other players are at, if at all, once a turn. And you only do so if you're the kind of advanced player who wants to try and guess what they are planning and which phase they might choose. Now, I say 'advanced' because on your first few games you are likely to focus on your own stuff and not really care about the tiles other people are playing. Even if you're a little experienced and playing competitively, you have to work pretty hard to study other players' tableau and you learn very little: even if you guess what they are after, you don't know what they roll and so you don't really have much to go with when guessing what phase they'll select. The main interaction of the game is the phase selection - a brilliant step - and basically that's the only reason to care about other players. If you're an expert in this game, surely you'll spend a lot of time of thinking about it but for casual players, it's just not worth the effort. The only other interaction is how quickly players are going for victory points and trying to end the game. The result is that in a game that is otherwise really great and well designed, I don't really care who I'm playing it with. It's a great game for introducing the concept of engine-building and luck management, and when I play - I usually talk to my friends about the game as if we just finished playing it. We're not talking to each other through the game, but over its head.
 
Now switch gears and think about two fantastic games that play around with the worker placement mechanic: Dogs of War and Lancaster. Both of them are, at heart, eurogames that are pretty averse to conflict. In both of them, the winner will be the player that deploys their workers (knights/captains) most efficiently - It's about getting most VPs for your every worker you place, balancing immediate VP gains against investment in infrastructure (your 'engine), and building a path to VP generation that works in the context of other players' strategy. So far so classic worker placement - where the vast majority of interaction happens in figuring out what ways others can block you. Agricola is the poster child of that classic worker placement genre, where players need to figure out what others are doing in order to ensure that no roadblocks will stop their path for victory. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of interaction because it's quite demanding to figure out what other players are doing when you're playing casually, and if you don't try you're just playing solitaire again. Still, there is no denying that in order to play Agricola even moderately well, you have to pay attention to other players' strategies and build an engine that works around theirs, making sure that blocking you would be costly to them.

Both Dogs of  War and Lancaster employ that same basic worker placement foundation. Both games are careful to ensure that whatever bells and whistles they add, the basic worker placement mechanic is allowed to shine - in both games you worry about others' blocking your path by taking desired spots. But each game adds a delicious layer of interaction that complicates the strategy without detracting from the basis fun factor - and that's why they are great examples of getting interaction right without adding direct confrontation. Though both game feature 'battles', neither of them allows you to actually destroy other players' workers or hurt their infrastructure. But they ramp up the tension by letting players mess with each other's actions in various direct ways.
 
 In Dogs of War, your workers (captains) double as investments chips: they have to be accompanied by 'soldiers' that tilt the scale of a 'battle' between two warring houses. Basically, these so-called battle determine the VP worth of each house shield at the end of the game. It really is more like a stock market than anything else, but the main issue is that you can't help yourself but stepping into the market because every one of your moves is making one stock (house) worth more, and another worth less. In addition, every captain on a losing side of a battle is worth 1 VP for players on the other side so the relative value of each spot is in constant flux, depending on players' actions. And players can collaborate on one battle while fighting each other on another- so there's a ton of room for players to annoy each other while not breaking relationships completely, always having options for collaboration as well.
 
But really, the best part of Dogs of War is that the most antagonist move - placing a worker on the opposing side of a battle - is also a possible gift to your opponent, because it provides an incentive for other players to jump into that battle on your opponent's side (also making the battle more juicy for that player). Likewise, if you jump on the same side as someone else - helping them win a battle - you're also possibly stealing (or splitting) the prize, and it's likely you're taking the reward they want. So you can't help someone without also hurting them and vice versa - and that opens up space for fun banter, negotiation, back and forth and possible deal-making.
 
Lancaster is more subtle in some ways - it's a lot more focused on engine building, efficient play and careful planning. At the same time it's much more brutal as it lets you bump away other players' workers (knights) by deploying bigger workers (stronger knights). Bumping someone else lets you do what you want even when someone else needs it as well and it also allows you to mess with their plans. Needless to say, it's a very satisfying action. But it's very costly and you might regret it later, when all your squires are spent and little knights are taking up other good spots uncontested. On the flip side, if you're worried about bumping you can overcommit to ensure you get the spot. Sometimes it'll be worth it but other times - if you failed to read the table - you'll be stuck just like the case where you bumped too aggressively or if you were bumped.
 
What's great about this mechanic is that gives you a lot more flexibility to plow through the constraints set by other players' actions. It's just another little efficiency game placed on top of the previous one but it lets you raise the stakes - how badly do other people want that spot? Will they be willing to commit and spiral down the sinkhole of bidding and outbidding? Here, you have to guess not just what people want but also how badly they want it. Just like in Dogs of War, this opens up the door for all sorts of fun back and forth - kicking someone out, and then getting kicked out only to come back with a bigger knight and so forth. There's also an arms race element where you really have to consider how important it is to get those bigger knight quickly, by judging how aggressive your friends are about what they want to get from the board.
 
The lesson is - you can make a great euro-game that has no direct conflict and with great interaction. War games are not necessarily political game and there's no reason economic games can't have great interactions and be political games. Indeed, despite popular beliefs - war is much less political than market. Or, at least, so it seems to me.

It's time to pick up the political analysis of that beloved card game that occupies the mind of its fans so thoroughly that they refer to it as the only game that matters. Since my last post, I heard from some Rugby fans that they found it funny that somebody else considers the game 'the only game that matters' because clearly Rugby is the only game that matters. I guess.
In any case, last time I talked about the deck-building game and now it's time to get into the actual game game. The only game that matters, folks, the Game of Thrones (The Card Game Second Edition, that is, which I will henceforth refer to simply as 'Thrones').1

The road to victory
The goal of the game is to get to 15 power before your opponent does. That's kind of a strange goal, and I'll talk about power in a moment but first it's important to note that the way you get there, the strategy you adopt can vary greatly. This is where the deck-building game I discussed previously cannot be totally left behind - for different decks dictate different ways to play the game. Good games, it is known, offer multiple paths for victory. Not so for good decks: some great decks force you into a very specific path if you want to win with them. Playing with these decks would not be fun if they were the only decks in the world. As it is, a big part of playing the game is knowing the deck you're playing and you can't win without playing to your deck's strengths.
 
For example, a while ago played against an unusual Stark banner of the Lion deck. Stark has a strong military presence and a good amount of tools that let you kill your opponent's characters and it works well with the Lannister package of Tyrion's gold and Jaime's military prowess. Though it goes against the theme (in the game jargon, it's not Nedly) it's a pretty common build that tends to hit hard and fast, wiping the board (by killing characters) and adding insult to injury by dominating economically with Lannister gold. And so, when I faced that deck and saw that my opponent started off with no military icons, I thought he was just being unlucky - that his deck was misfiring. So I went after him, putting an early pressure with military challenges to make sure I get a board advantage. Little did I know, he got exactly what he wanted. His deck was focused on having his own characters die (or be sacrificed) and gain power using Catelyn and Joffrey. Once I realized that he really likes having his characters killed, I stopped pushing for the military challenges - but he was already quite close to winning. That deck would not beat me twice in a row (for the record, it didn't beat me even once) - as soon as you know what's it's trying to do, it's much easier to thwart. 
 
The point is just that a big part of the game is figuring out what's your opponent is trying to do, what kind of deck do they have. To a certain degree, you can know much about it  by knowing the faction well but as the card pool grows, they offer more variety and more options. Reading your opponent, and avoiding telegraphing your own goals, is a big part of what you can and should do your opponent. And some of it is just the number of military icon on the board and what that tells your opponent about your plans.
 
Ok, enough with the deck building. On to the game. That one, that matters. One of the unique features of Thrones is that unlike many others 1v1 card games (and especially Magic: The Gathering), there are three different ways to hurt your opponent, and you are constantly choosing which of them you use. Typically, each of your characters can only participate in one of these so-called challenges so you have to choose wisely about which of them to use for each challenge. As we said, there are three types of challenges and we shall now explore the game through each one of them: power, military and intrigue.

The abstract nature of power
Now that we're finally done with deckbuilding (or are we? It really comes up a lot) we can turn to the game, the goal of which is to gain 15 power. What is power? And why 15? No such answers are provided. The ultimate currency of the game (which really should have been named something else, power is so confused as players constantly refer to characters' strength as 'power') is actually quite abstract - a vague commodity, the winning of which represents... well, it's not really clear. But hey, you might say, it's thematic! (aka Nedly) It really represents the source material! I don't think so. In Westeros, power resides wherever people believe it resides, it's shifts arbitrarily - not meticulously accumulated by whoever has the best draw economy. In the game of thrones you famously win by not dying, which is typically achieved by having lots of gold, soldiers, territories and all the rest of the stuff in the game. The fact that the game has this abstract vague goal means you can have a giant army, a lot of money and still lose because your opponent lost enough battles in The Boneway or some other ridiculous reason (try: blocked all attacks against The Wall and lost each one of them; schemed successfully in the Small Council Chamber (not even in the council, but in the chamber); let Benjen Stark die; placed one random person's head on a spike). From a thematic standpoint, it's bizarre.

But in truth, it's one of the things that make this game brilliant. It doesn't stem from fidelity to the source material but from loyalty to Eurogames design principles. The original designer of the game, the ingenious Eric M. Lang, is one of the pioneers of a game genre that I call 'hybrid' because it aims to mesh together the caricatures of the so-called American style game (aka 'Amerithrash') with Euro-style games. His Chaos in the Old World was one of the first of these, and most innovative, in the category (among my favorites are Kemet, City of Remnants and Wars of the Roses; Also, Lang's most recent and celebrated Blood Rage which I own but to my shame have never played). Thrones was designed long before any of those but the main idea is pretty similar: a rich thematic slugfest where you can destroy your opponent but you can't win if you don't worry about resource management and efficiency. Power in Thrones is basically what victory points are in any Euro-game: an artificial game concept that exists solely to measure your progress towards winning at the expense of (and not on the basis of) your other more material assets (money, land, army etc.).2

Yes, that's right. The main feature of the two players' race to that golden threshold of 15 is that it takes place at the expanse of gaining all the things that real Westerosi care about. Unlike, for example, A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, where your victory is measured by the number of castles and strongholds you control, which also produce soldiers and supply - in Thrones the choice to accumulate power usually comes at the expanse of trying to harm your opponent. You have to balance strengthening your board position with the mad rush to the win. And it's always a kind of a rush, because in the end - having 14 power is meaningless.  If you rushed to the win, got to 14 power but neglected to build your board - you might find yourself slowly being dragged down, downsized back to a power level that matches your presence, even losing. Much of the dynamic is familiar from a variety of well-loved Euro-games (from the simple Splendor, through the more stylized Spyrium and all the way to big classics like Agricola): at what point do you stop working on building your engine and switching to operating it so it would generate the ever-so-beautiful-in-their-meaninglessness victory points? Some of it is, as discussed, in the deck construction. Not all decks are designed to generate power in the same timing or speed. But much of it is in the dynamics of the game and reading your opponent is often trying to figure out how long they're planning for and what timing you can hit them with. It's not so different from RTS video games in this way: lots of strategies revolve around timing. Most games will see one player getting ahead and then trying to 'close' the game. The mechanics, and specifically the beautiful feature of the plot deck (which lets players choose 7 cards that are not shuffled into their deck but instead played once per round; this allows them to save certain powerful effects that they can play 'on demand' in specific rounds), allow players to prepare for this closure with a special plot (such as The Winds of Winter, Rise of the Kraken or A Tourney for the King). Failing to play these at the right time is likely a loss of the game. If you try to close when you're not situated for it, you might blow your 2-claim plot; if you don't close when you need to, you might allow your opponent to mount a comeback. Timing is key in the rush for power.
 
Now that we have a clear sense of the way the struggle for power takes place, and we have our eyes on that prize that wins the game, it's time to talk about the way to get there. The actual battle for the board.
 
The stressful paranoia of military presence (or lack thereof)
 The heart of the game is the characters on the board. As is appropriate for a game based on a popular franchise, a large part of the game revolves around control iconic characters from the story, oversee their triumph or be responsible for the terrible demise. Characters are not everything in the game: some decks rely heavily on locations, others on important kill events and combos with plots. But characters are the meat and potato of the game. They are what you spend most of your gold for. They comprise the biggest part of your board presence. They take center stage at the challenges phase, which is the longest and most central phase of the game. And they are what your opponent will be looking to destroy, especially early in the game.
 
And that's where Thrones really shines, because it uses the mechanic of unique characters. Normal characters are deployed (or marshaled) when they are needed and they are a lot like creatures in Magic or various other card games where you draw a card and can play it if you have enough resources. Unique characters are not like the other cards because they care about what's already been played. A unique character can only be played once, so if Tyrion is on the board, you can't play another copy of him. And when he dies, he's dead for good (at least for that game) and if you draw any more copies of him, they are just useless cards in your hand. In Magic, your discard pile is called 'graveyard' but in Thrones there's regular discard and then there's the dead pile, which is an actual graveyard: a heap of cards that you know can never come back into the game.
 
Well, with some exceptions. For some reason, Summer the direwolf can bring a Stark child back to life, usually Bran or Arya. You can play a plot that takes one character from your dead pile back to your regular (turns out he wasn't dead, it was just a close call), Aeron Damphair can use resuscitation to bring back to life people who drowned or were put to the sword and we all know that Targaryens, and especially dragons, are never really dead. BUT OTHER THAN THAT, for now at least, when someone is dead - they're dead for the game.

here are several ways in which this simple mechanic affects the way players interact. Most importantly, it raises the stakes considerably. When you have Tywin Lannister or Daenerys Targaryen on the board, you don't want them to die. You're going to do what you can to protect them - give them a bodyguard, surround them with companions who can take the hit and do your best to counter your opponent's attempts for assassination (aka 'targeted kill'). The moment where a key character in you deck - in your faction - dies, is a sad and difficult moment. Overcoming that catastrophe and keeping your cool is crucial for winning the game. Because it's going to happen. In Game of Thrones, all men must die and in the game characters frequently do.
 
But the possibility of death doesn't just raises the stakes before the inevitable demise of your favorite dwarf but after it as well. What's great about the mechanic of death (because there isn't much that's great about actual death) is it's not just interesting strategically, but also makes for a great story. Each game you play creates, as part of the gameplay, an accompanying story. In recounting the game you would tell you friends something like the following:
 
Tyrion was getting some work done but then a dragon burned him. I was trying to stabilize but then a Dornish Paramour was able to seduce Jaime and he got burnt as well. The paramour had total control over Cersei and the situation was looking dire for my Lannisters but then Ser Ilyn Payne showed up and started chopping up heads the of paramours and dragons alike. Without her dragons, Dany wasn't as big a threat and I was able to hold her off until Tywin showed up and closed the deal.
 
The death of a unique character is so significant, both thematically and mechanically, that it punctuates the game experience. The game moves from the tension of keeping these preciously vulnerable characters alive to the heroism of defeating your opponent despite the fact that half of your faction's main characters are dead. And so, it captures the spirit of the world and story without tying you too closely to the plot of the originals. Sure, sometimes Ned Stark gets his head put on a spike and that makes everybody exclaim in unison, 'how Nedly!' but just as often it'll be Ned that puts Tywin to the sword using the Stark ancestral sword, Ice. I noted that some strange decks benefit from the death of the characters (through Joffrey's sociopathy or Catelyn's masochism) but in most games, you constantly worry about having enough people so that one or two can die and it won't be the end of the world. The military challenge is a constant form of pressure on the board of awesome characters that drive the story and you the player to your eventual destiny: victory or defeat.

Intrigue's lack of subtlety
 The last type of challenge is intrigue, and if you win that you can discard a card at random from your opponent's hand. That challenge goes hand to hand with cards that let you draw from your deck - a pretty powerful effect, according to popular wisdom. The more you can draw, the more you can compensate for suffering losses in intrigue challenges and the more you gain what the experts call - wait for it, because this is getting technical - 'card advantage'.
 
Usually, in card games, it's pretty difficult to get card advantage. You have to have a special discard or draw spell, or force your opponent into an unfavorable trade. You have to pay the cost of the special effect, use a card for it and so forth. But in Thrones, the competition for card advantage is built into the challenge phase through the intrigue challenge. If the power challenge is all about finding out the tricky point at which you need to switch gears from killing to gaining power, and the military challenge is all about making sure you have enough people that can die - intrigue challenge is the most straightforward one, letting you choke your opponent's option by taking cards from his hands and discarding them.
 
Intrigue challenges (and associated effects of course) are the main reason you'll often hear Thrones players ask each other 'how many cards do you have in hand?' That's an important data point at any card game but in Thrones it's always a tactical point as well. The number of cards in my opponent's hand is tells me what are the odds that a randomly discarded card is that Balon he just summoned or that annoyingly ever-bouncing Hound. It's a representation of how many options he has beyond what's currently on the table, and if their board state is not that great - it might be time to go after that hand and eliminate their future.
 
Intrigue provokes the image of sneaky assassins and shadowy characters, but in Thrones it is the card game equivalent of going into someone's house and breaking their stuff. It's as subtle as a hammer to the face. It's a constant threat to you private hand of cards: use them or lose them. Though some factions are better at intrigue than others, all could just initiate an intrigue challenge and go after your hand.
 
The main implication of the intrigue challenge is that cards in hand are not, as in other card games, private property. You cannot really hold them close to your chest as your opponent can always swing at them. As far as I can tell, going after your opponent's hand is currently a viable strategy: you intrigue them until they have nothing in hand, and they are left with no choice but to play what they draw (aka 'topdecking').

The intricate combination of the game's components
 The three different types of challenges is at the heart of Thrones as a game. The dynamic of playing the game - and the mind games between opponents - often revolves around which of the challenges (as well as the so-called 'fourth challenge', dominance) is more important at any given time. The answer to this question varies with the timing in the game's arc (military more important early, power later), the faction you're running, the type of deck, the strategy you're pursuing and the board state. Evaluating these factors and building a game plan is the strategic skill required for the game. But what's really beautiful about the challenges as a game mechanic is that they really represents different ways of hurting your opponent, different things you can do to your opponent. There are a ton of other game effects that different cards can trigger but most of them are akin to one of the challenges. Fools draw cards for you (with their 'insight') or discard you cards, and so they fit with intrigue challenges. Kill affects  compound military claims and are often triggered by military challenges. Gaining power effects are often done by taking it from your opponent's house card. When you play the game, you might focus on effects rather than the actual challenges but most of them are in the 'mindset' of one of these challenges. And playing the game is balancing these three mind-sets.
 
Which is why Thrones is such a rewarding political experience, even in a two player game. Unlike most two player games, you're not just destroying your opponent by overwhelming them with force and punching them until some 'life' track hits zero. Thrones lets you toy with your opponent. It lets you start slow and then spring to victory, or lose a few battles just so you can win the war. Your opponents needs to figure that's what you're doing or they are done You can frustrate your opponent by taking away their options, wait them out with a long con or overwhelm them with force. There's an element of guessing and bluffing built into the structure of the game. The brilliance of Thrones is that these options do not depend on fancy card abilities, but they are in the structure of the game. If all cards were blanks and only had icons and strength, you could still build a deck that's all about frustrating your opponent or play around with the timing of a rush to power. And  my favorite part about it is that all of these are really tied well to the theme - go heavy on intrigue really feels like getting inside your opponent's camp and going for military feels like trying to crash them. This is the core strength of the game, and with that - I conclude my political analysis of it.
 
Thoughts/comments/questions/suggestions welcomed!
 
1. This post only discusses the 2 player head to head format known as joust. I'm not referring at all to the 3-6 players version, known as melee, not because I don't think it's important but because I sadly have only played it once.

2. As a side note, since this makes power challenges pretty useless early on and pretty boring in general, the game designers spiced them up with cards like Support of the People and Plaza of Punishment; the fact they exist create more tension in early game power challenges and reduces the predictability of the challenge phase. But the designers were careful to make these effects limited and few, so that they don't change the fundamental structure of the game and the nature of power as an abstract goal akin to victory points.

One reason I haven't been playing many board games in the past months is that my precious gaming time has recently been dedicated to one game, and one game only, that some people call, and not without merit, the only game that matters.

A Game of Thrones: The Card Game 2nd Edition (fondly referred to as 2.0 by its cult-like fanship) is a living card game. Supposedly, that's because the game itself is alive and evolving - every month (or so), a new pack of cards is released and changes the game completely. But it's also because it is one of these games that some people call a 'life-style' game - you can literally make this game into your life style, your only hobby, your main obsession. It's an interesting experience to step out of one hobby community, the board gaming world, and step into a completely different one - the Thrones community, which is a part of the LCG community if it's part of anything. A lot is very similar, much is different. I came to Thrones with the same love of games that brought me to board gaming - for me it playing Thrones is a similar experience to playing other games, except there's a somewhat structured  competitive play. But for the lifers, the people who play Thrones (and other LCGs) as their main hobby, the game is something totally different. One of the main reasons I play games is to clear my head - to engage super seriously in a taxing and challenging competition that I know, in the back of of the back of the back my mind, will not have any real impact on my life prospects. Unlike the challenges of work, school, parenting, family and life in general - the ones I encounter at the gaming table, aren't really that important, in the grand scheme of things. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite competitive and I like winning. Games are important in the moment because I made them important. And that's what's unique about games - you can spend a lot of time and energy on a serious challenge that would nonetheless won't affect you're prospects in life. 

But when lifers want to get away from real life they don't play a game, they play Thrones. And they do so extremely seriously. The competitive scene of Thrones that I've tasted since the second edition was launched is simply amazing. There are an impressive array of really smart people who are not only good at this game, they are dedicated. They work at this game after hours - building decks, testing them, playing against themselves, playing against each other, making videos, writing articles, rating cards, recording podcasts, collecting and analyzing data, posting winning deck lists, recording some more podcasts, creating websites to manage decks or analyze setups or run tournaments and whatever else you can think of. And so much of it is geared towards helping new players get into the game, sharing helpful tips with others, discussing tactics and perceptions endlessly, debating rules and lots of other things. And that what makes it a community - people working together towards maintaining an enterprise that is larger than them. I've said here before that every competitive play is a cooperative effort on the meta-game - where we agree to play together by the rules. That's true about a single evening with a Kemet skirmish that's wild and aggressive and is done after an hour. It's true on a larger scale when we're talking about maintaining a competitive environment for such a complicated game, for some many people. It's just fun and inspiring to be able to join a community and be a part of it so quickly, enjoying all the free labor of smart wonderful people. And it's fun to be part of something that's really challenging in a way that I have not yet experienced in tabletop gaming.

That being said, I don't know how much longer I can keep up with it. The game is indeed living, and though it's probably one of the best games I have ever played - my insatiable appetite for variety in gaming is starting to take over me. I might go back soon to my old habits of moving from game to game like a monkey hopping from one tree branch to another. It's also really hard to keep up with the game and keep playing well, when so many new cards come out every month and change the meta. The game doesn't only rewards commitment, it requires it (if you want to play reasonably well). And I'm not sure I can keep up with it for very much longer. So before I fall behind or move to the next thing, I decided to sit down and summarize some thoughts about the game because it really is freaking incredible.

Last disclaimer - though I have been playing the game quite a bit since 2.0 was launched, I have not played the previous version or any of the other LCGs/CCGs (apart from dabbling a bit in Magic in my youth). Since the card pool is still pretty small, some of the veterans players feel like the experience of the game is still not what it's meant to be. My perspective is therefore that of a new player who has only played this recent iteration of the game and have played lots of other games, though not much any LCGs. 
(note: this post turned out long - so I divided it into two parts; this part discusses the deck-building aspect of the game, and the next will discuss the actual game)

First: The Deck-Building Game (the actual metagame)

There are actually two games that involved in playing an LCG. One is the actual game, which involves playing cards that represents characters and location, accumulating power, engaging in intrigue to discard cards from your opponent's hand and killing your opponent's characters. But while you're playing that game, every LCG involves another, much more complicated, game: that of designing, building and testing a deck. Properly, that's a meta-game - though some players distinguish between playing the 'meta' (which means adjusting your deck to what you think you'll encounter in a particular setting, like a tournament) and building your deck, more generally, which involves the skill of evaluating particular cards, balancing the different components, testing and tweaking, figuring out answers to other existing decks and of course - figuring out a winning strategy for the deck. To add to the confusion, the common lingo among Thrones players (as the game is affectionately called) is to call local gaming groups 'meta', presumably because each of them develops a common set of beliefs and fashions that make for a unique meta-game. But the truth is that the real metas cross geographic areas - by playing online, watching youtube videos, co-hosting podcasts and so forth - the group of people that is playing the same meta is not necessarily geographic, though local groups remain important.  A few people  play in several metas or in an overall cross-metas meta.

In any case, the two kinds of deck-building games are both very important, and the designers clearly care about both experiences of deck-building, making them challenging as well as exciting. There are cards whose in-game effects are, at least in my humble opinion, not very interesting: they close, rather than open, decision-making options, and they don't really require much skill to exploit or even play against. Yet they often open very interesting deck-building decisions create cool dynamics in the deck-building meta-game. For example, the Iron Throne has a passive ability that doesn't have to be triggered and cannot be canceled, and it effectively ensures you win the dominance phase on most turns. Sometimes it will effect your decisions by allowing you to attack with more characters without losing dominance, or forcing your opponent to keep a few characters back just so he wouldn't lose it. But even in these rarer cases, the decision is usually a no-brainier. So the Iron Throne is something that you're typically happy to see on your side of the board, it has no great downside (it's not very expensive) and it's doing you a bit of good every turn. But when you build your deck you will soon discover that it's pretty hard to find the room for the Iron Throne in your deck. With so many other good locations, making the Iron Throne works meaning building around it, at least to some extent. It is easier in some decks than in others - Baratheon has a lot of cards that make it worthwhile for you to win dominance. In other houses, you have to work harder to make the Iron Throne work. But the interesting decisions that this card brings to the game are not made when it's on the table or even in your hand - it's in the deck construction. To build a good deck that uses the iron throne you have to adjust your plot deck, your play style and your path to victory. Someone picking up your deck wouldn't know how to play it well if they didn't know how it was built. The deck building is right there at the heart of playing the game - when you play with a certain deck, you might not have as many paths to victory or grand strategic decisions. Those were already made in the deck construction - all you have to do now is 'pilot' it well, weathering the unexpected weather and dodging the bullets that your opponents fires. But you can only use whatever was loaded onto your aircraft beforehand, in the deck-building.

The Iron Throne is also a good example of the importance of playing the 'meta' (that is, playing according to the environment you're in) - an Iron Throne in one deck counters completely an Iron Throne in another deck. Since they cancel each other out, the state of affairs where all decks have the Iron Throne is decidedly worse than those when none have it: it's basically a dead card taking up a slot that could have been used for a useful location. Nonetheless, if everybody you play with - all the people in your 'meta' - have the Iron Throne in their decks, you might have to include it as well or else be disadvantaged regularly. If it drops out of most decks, it becomes more of a matter of fitting it in your deck by making sure you get your mileage out of it in some way.

The deck-building game is a very complicated one and it's really in that game that the most committed players are rewarded most. It's a deep game but it's also very wide: there are a lot of cards involved, even with the relatively small card pool, and each card has a variety of parameters you have to consider. But that's not even all of it - to build a good deck you have to a good understanding of other decks out there and what they can do. You have to be able to provide your pilot with tools to counter them or at least work around their tricks. Even if you don't build around the Iron Throne, you have to be prepared for a deck that wins dominance easily and exploits it to gain power quickly or card advantage. Either you include in your deck a card that destroys or neutralizes the Iron Throne, or you build a deck that  wins so fast that  dominance becomes irrelevant, or you do something else to work around it.  And the best part in the deck-building game is that testing your deck, a crucial part of the process, means playing the actual game which is a super awesome game. Paying to test a deck and playing to win is not always the same thing, but it's only through playing a bunch of games that you can learn how to build a deck or even just adjust an existing deck list. 

As I said, the deck-building process is one of balancing a variety of different consideration. In the game itself, each card in your deck has just one use - it can be played for its effect by paying its gold or else it can be discarded from your hand by some nasty effect (so you can think of cards as fodder for such discard, protecting other more valuable cards; this is called using them as 'intrigue claim soak'). Many other modern card games, whether classics like  Glory to Rome (and all of its successors), Race for the Galaxy and Twilight Struggle or smaller games like Summoner Wars and Red7, have realized that part of the fun in card games is that you can use cards in variety of ways. They make you choose whether you want to use a card for its effect or as resource, sometimes using the card's rotation and placement for different effects. As noted, the cards in thrones can be used in-game in only one way (or as claim soak) but in the deck-building game each has a variety of different roles: they take up slots in your deck according to their cost, their effect, their kind and so forth. Each card matters for it can do, but also for its place on the cost curve, whether or not it can be used on set-up, whether it survives the first snow of winter and many other considerations. What this means is that if you remove or replace just one or two cards in your deck, it often sends a ripple effect throughout your deck and  requires you to make a variety of changes. For example, when The Road to Winterfell expansion pack came out I really wanted, like many others, to add Nymeria Sand to all my Martell decks. Adding a 5-cost character is not something you can do without interfering with your cost curve - the first question to ask is: can I afford to play another 5 gold character given my existing gold resources? Even if I add Nymeria by removing some other 5 gold character, I have to think about the different challenge icons that might be disturbed by the replacement. If I take out Arianne to add Nymeria, I make other cards (such as Areo) less useful in my deck. Or, in a different context, adding Nymeria to my Night's Watch/Martell deck makes me all of a sudden much more vulnerable to cards like Milk of the Poppy (as most of my Night's Watch characters cannot be targeted by Milk and Nymeria suffers from it more than others) - does that mean I need to add to my decks some Milk counters (in this case, attachment control cards, like Confiscation)? The chain of effects is endless. Adding Confiscation to your deck changes your gold curve as well as your ability control initiative, which might mean you can't enjoy the benefits of some other cards in your deck like Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken or Sunspear. Removing those would mean you are more vulnerable to some other game effect and so the process goes on and on.._. A good deck is a balanced construction where all the bits fits together nicely. You want to have enough gold to play what you need, but you don't want to have gold wasting while you have no cards in hand - so your income needs to be balanced by draw, or other ways to get card advantage. Some experience players talk about individual cards in terms of the absolute value (how efficient or cost-effective they are, for example) and there is certainly a great deal of value in that kind of talk. But it seems to me that the real value of each card really depends on the deck it is in, and even the best of cards (which include fan favorites like Tywin, Tyrion and Robert Baratheon but also obscure locations like Ghaston Grey) really shine if they are put in a deck that has room for them. A really good card - like Tyrion - will always be good and can fit in almost any deck. But its value varies in different deck; if you add him to your Targaryen-Lannister deck alongside Daenerys, Jaime, Drogo and Illyrio, you might have a hard time playing him as well as all your other high cost character. In contrast, in an event heavy deck that uses the gold Tyrion makes, such as Lannister-Lord of the Crossing (aka Leaping Lions) he really is among the best of the best. 

So what do we make of the deck-building game? For many people it's kind of a solo game, which doesn't really lend itself to much player interaction of the kind that warrants political analysis. But the interesting thing is, it turns out that the deck-building game is actually a cooperative game - a genre that lends itself well for solo gaming but also offers many great social opportunities. Deck-building, you will find, takes a surprisingly large part of the time you spend on this game (frustratingly, as does sleeving cards) but it's also something that many people do in the company of others. People post their decks for comments when they build them or in pride when they've won tournaments with them. Building a deck is such a huge part of the fun that there are probably just as many videos and podcasts of people building decks as there are of people playing. Following, and picking apart, the process of somebody's deck building is just as interesting and challenging as thinking of all their in-game decisions. It's really a big deal, and a huge part of the skill involved. Because it's a cooperative/solo game, what it does is partly what cooperative games do more generally: gives people roles, allow specialization and foster camaraderie. It also suffers from the problems of a cooperative game: quarterbacking, some people not really participating, the feeling that it's basically a puzzle we're all staring at together. And it doesn't enjoy the benefit of modern cooperative games' design, where the designer is paying close attention to these problems and attempts to overcome them. But the designers are clearly thinking of the deck-building and planting little wonderful puzzles in there, and it poses you the challenge of working together to solve them.

Posting your deck list, and explaining why and how you got to it, is an individual contribution to the communal enterprise of 'solving' the meta-game. It gives you an opportunity to be smart and shine but it also invites feedback, pushback and constructive criticism. And though some people are solitary geniuses, most people really need the support of a team in order to play the deck-building game well. So much so that some people claim that Thrones is actually a team game - a game where different metas work separately to try and 'solve' the metagame, meeting in tournaments with their respective refined solutions where all members of the meta are playing the same deck (with some small variations). This is, of course, a provocative view that many think undermine the competitive spirit of tournament play, where prizes are given to individuals, not teams. But it illustrates that the deck-building game is actually very similar to many other cooperative games, and it benefits (in both level of achievement as well as enjoyment) from bringing together a few minds to work at it.

And so, this is the great reveal: the deck-building game is not a solo game, but a cooperative one. For most experienced Thrones players (and I assume other LCGs as well), this is not a great reveal. But for many others, this can be an episode of 'you're doing it wrong' - if you've been building your decks on your own, in the darkness, as you sip dark wine solemnly and silence or jazz music engulfs you - you are probably having fun. But next time you go to a meetup - consider spending some time working with your friends on the deck you're building. And while you're at it, do it like you're playing Pandemic - with your hand of cards on the table. talking to them about your choices and getting their feedback. It's not just that they're doing you a favor or that you're giving up your secrets - it's the group of you putting your minds together to tackle a task that's clearly larger than most of us.  When you play a competitive game, you don't want your opponent to know what's in your deck. But when you're deck-building, keeping back information stands in the way of both success and enjoyment. 

However, there's a catch. Though the deck-building game is a cooperative game, it's not explicitly so. Which means - the game doesn't tell you to show your cards, or gives you specific roles or structures the interaction to make sure it works well and it's fun for everyone. That means that when you're playing the deck-building game, all of that is on you - you should make sure you're playing to your strengths, or that you're avoiding quarterbacking (aka 'alpha' gaming). That's not so difficult, if you think about it for two seconds - we do lots of things cooperatively in life. But that's why it seemed worthwhile to point out that way deck-building is basically a cooperative game. If you're only playing it solo - you're missing out on half of the fun.


Next time: the game itself!

Lastly, don't forget Gregory. Greg plays to win, but  doesn't mind if he loses while exploring a new strategy. Greg likes trying new things but not if they don't hold the potential to lead to victory. In fact, he would probably prefer to win with a weird, unknown or unlikely strategy. Greg likes a good story but only if it fits the mechanics really well. The one thing Gregory doesn't care about is whether or not the other players are people, robots or illusions of an evil demon. Greg is not playing the people, he is playing the game. More accurately, he is playing with the game - Greg is more interested in the designer's choices than in their consequences, more interested in the score track than his own score. Greg derives his enjoyment from exploring the game, figuring out what it tries to do. Greg wants to win but most of all - he wants to crack the game open and, ultimately, 'solve' it. Greg doesn't have one favorite game - games are his favorite thing, and the ranking is constantly changing. Few games stay in the same spot for a long time though one or two ultimate favorites may win a place of honor.

Real people are complex beings with mixed motivations, not caricatures - so nobody would know would be exactly an Allen or Sammy. But most people will have a bit of each with some dominant voices. Which voice is dominant can change: on some days they'll be after the win at all costs, on others they'll try something crazy to please their friends or tell a story. Yet, it's helpful to think about these categories when you're designing a game and even when you're hosting a game night. These archetypes pull in different directions - not just in the choice of the game but also in the way you teach and run it. If you're teaching Kemet to a bunch of Allens, you better make sure to go over the tiles and make sure they have a good idea of what's out there. If they're a bunch of Ephraims, you can let them discover it by themselves. Finding or making a game that can accommodate all of these different audiences is a skill - one you can get better at.

What kind of a gamer are you? And how do you prepare a game for different audiences?

Every now and then I intend to shine a spotlight on one particular game and offer a political analysis of that game. I will usually consider political games, but there could be some other games every now and then. In any case, for the first spotlight I decided to go for the mother of all political games - Diplomacy. A (no longer so) recent episode of This American Life (based on this fabulous piece, written about a particularly vicious tournament) has reminded me that there's no better way to start that with the game that got me started with this board game madness, though I didn't even know it at the time. I want to retell that story briefly.

I was introduced to the game Diplomacy, believe it or not, as part of a course on international relations. Needless to say, it was a terrible pedagogical tool - we learned nothing about diplomacy or international relations from it, and what happened in our game was far from teaching us history. But it was a great deal of fun and we were so excited about it that we started what is still, to this day, one of the best gaming experiences of my life. We started an ongoing diplomacy game where we make a move once a week - leaving the board set up in our dorm room, and allowing diplomatic communication to take place at any time or place and in any shape or form.

We never finished that game. A few weeks into the game, Austria had a nervous breakdown. He has been down to one unit in the middle of the board and had no chances of winning. He couldn't care less about the game anymore but kept on playing as a good sportsman. Though he was all but dead, his support was crucial and the pressure was intense. The alliance from the East pestered him during the day and the alliance from the West during the night (we shared a room). Both had part in his demise and eventually he couldn't take it anymore and decided he's not giving any more orders. We couldn't find a fair arrangement or a replacement, so the game stood still in the winter of 1911 (or whatever it was). Nobody flipped the table, instead the board just set there - froze in time. 

Diplomacy didn't just provide the best gaming experience of my life, it was responsible for the worst one. After that epic game, I fell in love with the game. I took it withe me everywhere and taught people how to play in bus stations and vacation homes. I tried playing impromptu sessions of the game with people I knew just five minutes. But Diplomacy doesn't work well with few players and in short sessions. It requires a whole day and seven committed people. And those things are hard to come by. So I reached out to the world and was delighted to learn that there's a dedicated community of Diplomacy players out there and among other things, they run tournaments. Imagine my delight! If you know the game, you will not be surprised to hear that the tournament was a total disaster. Not only because I lost miserably to, among others, a 12 year old who was playing with a partner (though it's never fun to lose). But because those people made me feel awful in a variety of ways I didn't know was possible. They made me feel stupid, which is a pretty common feeling to have when you fail in a strategy game. But they also made me feel immoral and untrustworthy, and then totally gullible and naive. I left the place stressed out and upset, and I didn't play Diplomacy (or any other board game) again for quite a while (a few years later, thankfully, Settlers of Catan carved my way back to the hobby)

What is it about diplomacy that makes it the friendship ruining game that it is? As big strategy games go, it is pretty simple to explain. It is a tight area control game where the competition over the geography is intense. Controlling the map is the objective of the game and it's also how you get more army. It's a classic rich-get-richer dynamic that characterizes old-school dudes-on-a-map games. The geography also dictates who your friends are and who you can harm (usually these are the same people). The units on the map are equal in strength, there are only two kinds of units (armies and fleets) and the orders  you can give them are pretty straightforward: move, support, hold. The battle system is what people call (in my opinion, wrongly) deterministic, which means that whoever has more units wins. In cases of a tie, there is a stalemate. Strategically, the game is all about positioning your units in the right places and striking in the right time. I have played Diplomacy as a two player game a few times. It has a chess-like feel, coupled with the guessing mind games that is all the rage in Rock, Paper, Scissors. It's pretty enjoyable, but that is not what makes Diplomacy ticks.

The following discusses some mechanics that make Diplomacy work as the political game that it is. By no means is this a comprehensive review of all the game has to offer. I look at these mechanics not from the perspective of the game design or the strategic player. I look at them from the perspective of the political GAmer.

Simultaneous action selection and Execution

By far the most important feature of the game is the way orders and placed and executed. Diplomacy pioneered in modern board games the style which centers around simultaneous action selection (SAS henceforth) and it's still, as far as I'm aware, one of the most extreme application of this mechanic. What do I mean by extreme? In Diplomacy, all the orders you give in the game are given, and executed, while other players are giving theirs. There is no decision you ever make in Diplomacy that is taken with a set board:  while your units are moving, others are as well. There is always uncertainty about the situation you're in. 

This is radical. SAS is a controversial mechanic. Some players love it and others hate it. From a design standpoint, it's very hard to design SAS mechanics. It's not a coincidence that Diplomacy requires this kind of technical guide if you want to resolve it without contradictions and crazy business. Moreover, you typically would want to limit your usage of SAS because it causes frustration for players who want to have control. Other games that include SAS mitigate its effects by limiting its scope. In A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, inspired by Diplomacy, players place their orders simultaneously but execute them in turn order. You get to see the board before you decide where your march. Wars of the Roses does the same thing. Cosmic Encounter, Dune/Rex, Kemet and Tiny Epic Kingdoms use SAS only for battle resolution. Other games, like Twilight Struggle and A Game of Thrones: LCG, use it only for a special phase each turn. The only other games I can think of that focus on SAS to that extent are drafting games such as 7 Wonders and Sushi Go, and they are significantly lighter and shorter. 

SAS is the heart of diplomacy and it's responsible for much of its dismal reputation. SAS creates
an environment of extreme uncertainty and when people have to make decisions in such conditions they become very paranoid. Not only does SAS encourage suspicion and distrust, but it also generates a great deal of anger and pain in the common case where one has been screwed over. If you didn't anticipate your foe's moves, not only are you not prepared for them but you also, at the same time, did something completely stupid. SAS is really punishing because it doesn't even allow you to pull back once the betrayal has been discovered. Your troops have received their orders, and now you just watch them march to their doom. 

With superior units, one can guarantee a conquest and there's a variety of ways to guarantee a stalemate. But the former is rare and the latter does not tend to deliver victory. What SAS brings to a game is tension, frustration and a healthy dose of distrust. Tension in the anticipation of the move, frustration because you once again was acting on false assumption and distrust of people who can't show you what they're up to until they've already done it. SAS makes it very hard to cooperate because it's really hard to show good faith. 


Any game that uses SAS is bound to have a taste of the poisonous relationships diplomacy fosters. Even Tiny Epic Kingdoms turn epicly sour when an alliance is broken or a battle goes badly for someone. The greater the importance of the actions done simultaneously, the more corrosive the effect. 

In Diplomacy, everything is done simultaneously. So the atmosphere of distrust and suspicion is constant. The hurdles on the way to cooperation is unrelenting. But that is not all, because in Diplomacy, SAS is accompanied by a few other poison inducing mechanics, that complement SAS like cookies to a cake. Poisoned cookies to a poisoned cake.


Stalemate and Support

Set in Europe right before World War I, Diplomacy makes the thematically appropriate choice of making stalemates quite common. This is a major design flaw in this wonderful game because it makes the game awful in at least two ways. First, the game can literally last forever, and many games actually do (or they approximate it for all intents and purposes). Second, it's not so rare to have a turn where literally nothing happened. It's hardly exciting to go through the trouble of a whole round and look at the board to see that nothing had changed. In a typical game, that can happen several times. And once alliances have consolidated and players skills are matched, it's not unusual to see this more often than not. 

But stalemates are awful in yet another, wonderful, way. Stalemates result when equal powers meet and their commonality is a reflection of the way the power is distributed equally between units on the board. This means that players absolutely need each other in order to make something happen. The need for support from other players is what makes SAS so exciting, frustrating and ultimately devastating. It's not only that you don't know what your enemy is doing but you don't even know who your friends are. In Cosmic Encounter, for example, all neutral players declare their support and send their troops. The main combatants then decide what card they play given their odds of winning. If everybody ally against you, there is no reason to throw away that good card you might use later. Or that might be an opportunity to use the 40 and punish all of them together. That is true even for a mean game such as A Game of Thrones: you get to see who betrayed you before you send Ned Stark to die in a hopeless battle.

Not so in Diplomacy. You deploy your troops blindly, hoping for the best but knowing that without that support from somebody else, you will be destroyed. And you can't make it alone - all powers in Diplomacy have too many neighbors, too many potential enemies. Growing strong early makes you a target, but failing to grow means you will definitely be wiped. You have no choice but to put your trust in someone. The only question is who, and that's the nerve-wrecking part. And that's where the next piece of the puzzle comes in.   

Diplomacy
I've mentioned here before that Diplomacy is actually a weird name for this game because thematically, it's not really about diplomacy. Instead, it's a game about war (and I'll leave the discussion regarding whether or not it merits the label 'war game' to another day). It's a game where you win by controlling Europe which you can do without talking to anybody but you can't do without destroying others. The game has no formal mechanisms for building (and breaking) alliances, signing and negotiating treaties, establishing (or breaking) diplomatic relationships or anything of the sort. All the things that in the real world (and in the period before WWI) are called 'diplomacy' are absent from the game mechanics.

With one exception. The innovative part is that the rules dedicate a game phase for discussion. That is all. The game says you have a limited amount of time to talk and leaves it a that. Unlike Cosmic Encounter, there are no in-game consequence of reaching or failing to reach an agreement: nothing happens if you don't reach an agreement by the allotted time. Unlike Dune/Rex, there is no way to make binding agreements. Unlike Settlers of Catan (or Sheriff of Nottingham and many other trading/negotiation games) - there is absolutely no way of making any trades. I can't give you this if you give me that. I can make an offer and you can agree, but we have no way of trading wood for sheep. It's just talking.

In game theory, cheap talk is a technical term that refers to communication between players that doesn't change the payoff structure. This is often confused because many people believe that the implication of game theory is that all talk is cheap unless there's some third party enforcing it. In particular, many people (including political scientists and such) have come to the conclusion that diplomacy in the real world, for that reason, is  cheap talk. This is, of course, false; real diplomacy is not cheap because, first and foremost, it's not cheap. By its technical definition, cheap talk is costless, or as close to it as reasonably possible. Real diplomacy is anything but cheap and there's good evidence that diplomacy is often useful in a variety of ways that changes the payoff structure. 

Real world aside, in the game Diplomacy - discussions are cheap talk. Or at least, it's a close to it as you can get. It is designed to artificially create the conditions, actually lacking in real diplomacy, ti make your talk as cheap as possible. Because you can't really seal a deal, and you can't exchange any resource and there is no way to independently verify the validity of the information you get - talk is very cheap. 

And yet, even in Diplomacy talk is not completely cheap. Human nature being what it is, players develop social systems of reputation and trust. People build on consideration from inside and outside the game to forge relationships. They use their relatively cheap talk in an environment that's hostile to cooperation and build those ever so precious relationships. This is because at the most crucial part of the process, the negotiation, the game steps back and gives the players space to create their own rules. It's a bit of chaos in a box, that game. That's why you get the widest variety of experience with a game like this and that's also why it ruins friendships: at least with friendships there are rules. Unspoken as they may be, we know that there are certain things you don't do to friends. But there are no such things in Diplomacy; the game provides no such limitations. You can say anything in order to get what you desperately need. Of course, that means lying. But it also means guilting people into making mistakes, cajoling or taunting them, putting them off their game. The game give you a bunch of space for talking but doesn't let you do anything specific with all that talk. You have to find something to do with it, and you may not like what other people find.

Ruining friendships?


There you have it. Diplomacy is a game where you desperately need the help of other players but you have a really hard trusting them. And in that desperate situation you are given no tools to help yourself but unstructured talking. Which leads us to the way Diplomacy makes us treat each other - in a variety of ways. The game puts players in a pressure cooker and it's not a surprise that many of them come out well done. But if there's a game where I've seen amazing alliances going the distance and splitting a shared victory, it's this one. And it's a game where people can, and often do, choose to support someone just because they like him. That's a game where real out-of-the-game charisma is really important.

And that's the game's biggest downside. It raises the stakes too high with its length and intensity and doesn't make any effort to make sure your experience is enjoyable. It's really up to the players. And there are so many ways in which people's expectations can fail to match. One game I played recently online broke down very quickly simply because some players wanted to role-play and negotiate extensively, while others really wanted to just exchange a few 'trash-talk' messages and make a move. Diplomacy reveals the truth that anyone with a bit of training and communication knows: it's not easy. Communication is something that needs to be worked at. Relationships are something that benefit from regular maintenance and really suffer when they are constantly strained by conflicting interests.

The way we treat each other in a game of Diplomacy does not reveal out 'true' nature, as some would say.  It's an artificial environment that is designed to make it hard to do what human beings naturally do: form relationship and trust each other. But it does reveal an aspect of our personality and tests it under unfavorable conditions. How far are you willing to go? What will you do in order to win? The game lets you do a great deal to each other, with both virtual sticks and stones but with real words - words that break hearts. 

I noticed this week that the strategy guide I wrote for A Game of Thrones: The Board Game 2nd edition was downloaded over a 1000 times, so I decided to post a 2nd edition of the guide itself - somewhat revised, streamlined and edited. Should be a smoother read and ever so slightly shorter.

Enjoy.

(note: this post came as a response to the great discussion on the forumsof Ludology's episode 105, Teach the Controversy - well worth a listen!)


In a comment on the forums of the podcast Ludology, designer Gil Hova said the following:

Gil Hova wrote:
I feel that there's a strong distinction between recreational and transformative games that will help us here. I think the two kinds of games work at cross purposes.

A transformative game is all about enlightening us on a certain topic and changing us in some way by playing it. A recreational game is all about flow and fiero. In other words, the purpose of a transformative game is to reflect the world; the purpose of a recreational game is to obliterate it.

And then also this:

I like to divide commercial recreational games into three categories: contests, puzzles, and worlds. It's very difficult to assign some significant external meaning to a contest and still have the contest be relevant. Contests can be only about themselves, so they have a very hard time reflecting the real world.

Since board games tend to be contests instead of puzzles or worlds, they have a very hard time carrying artistic meaning. Transformative designers therefore tend to work in genres with a lower barrier to entry, and in a game style that can more easily carry real-world meaning.


I’d like to respectfully disagree with Gil Hova. Though I like his typology and find it useful and illuminating, I don’t think it’s true that contests have a hard time carrying artistic meaning. I don’t find the distinction between recreational and transformative games as instructive – so many bridge the gap that I don’t know that the distinction really holds. The first that comes to mind is Twilight Struggle but the same is true about Dead of Winter, Tammany Hall and many many others. Almost any game with a theme really. Of course, much depends on how you understand “the purpose of a transformative game is to reflect the world” – and we can quibble about whether the purpose of Dead of Winter is to reflect the world or is it a by-product of what the game is doing, but in my opinion the only reason it places you in the extreme situation of a zombie apocalypse is that it’s a brilliant laboratory for revealing truths about human interactions in extreme conditions with a mixture of conflicting and joint interests. I use it in the classroom for exactly that reason. It might be true that the reason Isaac and Jon use it in Dead of Winter is because it’s fun for people and not because it ‘enlighten us on a certain topic and changes us in some way by playing it’ but enlightened we are, and also changed – whether we want it or not.

I’ve written it in greater length in response to the interview that Bruno Faidutti gave on this very find podcast – I think it’s a mistake to think that games (of the contest kind) are ‘too thin’ to carry an artistic meaning or that they are ‘just for fun’ and so we shouldn’t take it seriously even if they do. Any game with a theme has no choice but doing something to reflect the world. So unless you’re Red7 (I was expecting Mike to bring this one up in the safe, non-controversial games… though I’m sure someone will have an analysis of the power relations reflects in its abstract rainbow hierarchy), you will be saying something about the world. And I think designer should embrace it, not avoid it. And we should spend more time, as a community, thinking about the themes of our games.

I’m not going to say that every game has as deep a message as all others, and indeed it’s my point that many games have themes that weren’t really thought through (in other words, I think their artistic meaning is pretty poor), but even a tiny game like Love Letter sends a bunch of messages. Even my 7 year old niece had a bunch questions to ask about this game – why is the princess only receiving letters? Why can’t she send some of her own? Can she ask questions? Why can’t she just choose the one she wants? And so forth. This is clearly a case where the designer just took a stock cultural artifact off the shelf and applied it to the mechanics, and that’s totally fine. But in my opinion, you’re still responsible for the product that you produce even if you’ve used the tried and true cultural stories we all know and love. The point is: theme matters. Contests are not just about themselves when they have theme. And I much prefer the Batman Love Letter, not because I like Batman (I don't), but because the theme makes sense and fits the mechanics. I enjoy the game more that way. 

A caveat before I continue – when I criticize games, that does not mean that I’m in favor of banning them. This is not about censorship, and neither is the case of Five Tribes. I’m glad that Days of Wonder changed their mind in response to the pressure for two reasons. First, it wasn’t just knee-jerk reaction of some people, but raised a serious discussion on the portrayal of slaves in this game. It wasn’t just an irrational reaction, but a bunch of people who didn’t have a problem with it at first were convinced that it’s gratuitous and inappropriate. Second, it really didn’t seem that slaves were in any way a conscious part of the artistic vision of the game. Cathala says about it in his designer diary is "Because in ancient times, we still need a little slave at home." The appeal to historical authenticity was echoed in comments that Days of Wonder people said later and is particularly ridiculous, as others have also noticed, in a game that features Djinns prominently. But even if this was a historical theme, or if you think fidelity to the myth of Arabian Nights was guiding Cathala, the choice to put slaves is indefensible (and elsewhere I explained why I think there’s a difference between the depiction of slaves and that of assassins, but this is getting too long). When you’re making a game, you pick and choose. I didn’t see that Cathala included the rape and execution of multiple virgin queens as part of his game – though it’s the most prominent feature, indeed the driving force, of the Arabian Nights framework. For some reason, it didn’t seem ‘fun’ to him to include the constant cycle of rape execution in his game. But the Djinns are fun. The spices are fun. The carpets are sweet. And the slaves. Cathala is a brilliant designer that I really admire but I really think this was not a careful choice, but rather an attitude that we shouldn’t take this so seriously (as articulated by Faidutti in his interview). If this was an integral part of the artistic vision of the game, I doubt they would have changed it. And if he stuck to his plan with some serious explanation I wouldn’t fault him for it (though I would be disappointed). I haven’t played it yet, but from what I gather it seems that Tomorrow is an example of a game where the controversial elements were integral to the artistic vision. There would always be people doing all sorts of games and themes that are offensive or crazy, and that’s totally fine. But we need to have a conversation about the norms of our hobby – what is accepted as a mainstream, what we consume without thinking because it’s fine.

Which leads me to my second point is that I think we can learn a lot about our culture from what is and what isn’t controversial. The fact that colonialism and ‘discovery’ of the new world (whether historical or hypothetical) is, I think, revealing. The fact that I can easily think of ten great games that have no women in them or only a handful in very stereotypical depictions is a problem. These are example of what Hova calls ‘invisible ropes’, which are everywhere in our hobby. Things might be shifting on this, but the tides of cultural change are typically very slow.

To make my point even sharper and perhaps more controversial (so meta) – I want to discuss another game that is seemingly unassuming and inoffensive as can be. And for the most part, I think it is. But I think it does hide some interesting elements. The game is Harbour– a small box game from Tasty Minstrel and Scott Almes that attempts to distill and streamline a resource management game like Le Havre by making a worker placement game with just one worker. It’s a cute little game that I got on Kickstarter, in part because of the really amazing art that the game comes with.

The theme of the game is pasted on in the same way that the theme of Abyss is pasted on – both games are classic Euro games that basically try to mimic and idealized image of medieval Europe. In Abyss they said something like ‘what if make this under the water? That would be awesome!’ but nothing in the game really changed because of that, you just use squids and weird creatures to do exactly what you would if you were gathering peasants and artisans to attract lords and buy mansions. But the art is amazing. In any case, Harbour has the same deal: we take a Euro games mechanics of trading in a harbor and paste a fantasy theme on it to make it interesting. The fact these are Orcs and Goblins, Wizards and Dwarves means absolutely nothing – the game would just play just as plausibly with regular people carrying out their everyday business. They even have a beholder, one of D&D’s most terrifying monsters, as a librarian (which raises the question – how are you not turned into stone when you check out a book?). 

So what’s going on here? In placing D&D monsters and fantasy creatures in the mundane setting of a harbor, the designer and publisher were probably just trying to have a bit of fun by placing these creatures where we wouldn’t expect them, at the same time making their dry ‘trading in the Mediterranean’ theme spiced up with some fancy art. Why can’t an Orc be a cartographer? They ask, and of course we can see that an Orc can be cartographer because there he is, hunched over the desk. Orcs are imaginary creature and we can imagine them to be whatever we want them to be. And maybe some beholders are kind? Why must they all be evil?

But you see we have created Orcs and Goblins as imaginary monsters as a representation some things that we have found in the world. In various sources Orcs and Trolls are depicted as ‘dumb’ and ‘savage’ people – down to the accent that was considered barbaric by the people writing it. Orcs and Trolls represented actual people in the world we were afraid of – bad people, often from a different race or that speak a different language. In our imaginary worlds we give ourselves permission to paint little horns on their heads in our anger and hatred (because it helps deal with it!) but the stories we tell, our children and each other, about the Trolls that will snatch young kids from a villages and towns are not unrelated to the history of relationships between different peoples.
In transposing the Orcs and Trolls into an ordinary, mundane human world – the game unwittingly is telling us ‘there are not monsters in this world. Even those you think are pure evil are creatures with emotions, that really just wanted to develop their artistic skills but ended up as menial laborers because they had no choice’. And if that’s not controversial, than I don’t know what is.     

A recent Dice Tower episode raised some questions on Metagaming, a topic that is most relevant to political games. There were a variety of opinions offered on the matter in the episode, and it's worthwhile to go and listen to them. Yet the common distinction between 'good' metagaming (learning the common strategies of a game and adjusting to them) and 'bad' metagaming (brining personal relationships and outside information into the game) is misleading, as there is good 'bad' metgaming and bad 'good' metagaming. This issue is a bit deeper than 'is it ok to use knowledge from outside the game' - it goes to heart of gaming, and what gaming is all about. Let's dig in.

What is metgaming? Meta is the greek word for 'after' or 'beyond' - much like the latin 'post' (as in post-mortem or post-modern) which is interesting, because it's not how we usually use the term meta. Usually, we mean to refer to a the sub-category of an activity which is about its own category - metadata are data about about or own data, metaconginition is awareness of our own consciousness and generally it's so meta to be self aware and self-referential. This more common meaning is probably the result of a hilarious misunderstanding regarding Aristotle's metaphysics, a text that investigates what it means for things to exist or 'being insofar as it is being'. Sounds pretty meta, doesn't it? But Aristotle didn't call that metaphysics - long after he died, an editor of his works called this text 'metaphysics' because it came, simply, after the text called 'physics'. But people have taken metaphysics to be the field of study that goes 'beyond' physics - and the meaning we all know today was born, the meta which is either about itself or applies to itself.

Interestingly, metagaming is not gaming about games, or even crowdsourcing funds for a game. Instead, metagaming is playing the game beyond the game which I will call the supragame. It is treating the game at the table as the subgame of a bigger game, and it means that we make move in the current game that are aimed at advancing strategies of the supragame. Which is why it is deplored by many gamers - it means that the game we are playing right now is being secondary to something else that we bring from outside the game. As a gamer, when I'm playing a game, I want it to be all that I'm doing - that's why I pay the entry fee to the magic circle, so I'll be able to be immersed. If you pursue your petty personal vendettas on my table, you are breaking the circle; you are ruining, the game.

But there is some sense in which every game we play is already a subgame. Playing a game is a collaborative activity1 that involves an 'implicit contract between the players' that can vary slightly between groups but usually involves three understandings:
 

1. We are playing by these set of rules  (which is why  cheating is not only a violation of the game but also of the supragame - of the implicit agreement that we are going to play a game by these rules)
2. Each player is playing the game to win, or whatever it is that is the goal of this game (hence the common dislike of kingmaking) 
   
3. The purpose of  playing the game is to have fun (after all, as many people say, 'it's just a game'). 
   

I call a contract that is comprised a mixture of these three principles (play by the rules, play to win and play to have fun) the 'standard' contract. Though these elements are pretty common, the balancing between them can vary greatly between groups, and it's often very important to find a group of people who are like-minded in their ideas regarding the balance between the concern that people have fun and the understanding that we are playing to win. In some groups, as when the Green Bay Packers are playing Setllers of Catan, the norm is that "I don't care if you're my mom or my dad I'm going to come after you, I'm going to do whatever it takes to win, no one is my friend in this game" while in others players would sacrifice their chance to win to avoid creating a grudge or to make sure everybody is having fun. as Jonathan from the Snakescast notes, before you play a game it's awfully important to make sure that you're on the same page with others in the group. 

This idea of a contract is important (though some think it's pretentious) because much of what is so commonly lamented about metagaming is a mismatch of people's expectations regarding the goal of gaming or the implicit social contract. When Mark Zielinski criticizes 'bad metagaming' he is thinking about cases where your personal relationship with other players affects the way you play: you pick on the person you hate or go easy on your partner/best friend/person you secretly have a crash on. Of course, Zielnski is right that this kind of metagming undermines the 'we are playing to win' part of the contract, but it might be necessary to keep everybody having fun. If you are the kind of person whose spouse truly takes it personally when you steal from them in a game I will not blame you for prioritize your marriage over our game. I mean, after all, for me it's really important that everybody has fun, and if you get divorced over a game of Libertalia you played in my living room, I don't think you'll be coming very often. That being said, maybe you shouldn't play with Mark Zielinski. That's the point that Jonathan from the Snakescast makes regarding metagaming - that it's ok if people accept it as part of their  contract. A better way to put it, I think, is that it's important to adjust our expectations about the importance of different parts of the contract. If we can all have fun when all players are focused solely on trying to win, that's great. But very often there are situations where this kind of environment would not be fun for some people, and we have to make a decision what's more important, our winning or their enjoyment. The kind and lovable (Dice Tower Showdown host) Bill Corey provides another good example: when experienced players are joined with new players, Bill (bless his heart) thinks that you should take it easy on the newbie. David Bakhtiari from the Packers doesn't take it easy on newbies, he barely even teaches them all the rules of the game; and his friends seem to enjoy it nonetheless as they keep coming back for more. In contrast, Corey is concerned (and rightly so) that new players might not enjoy their time so much if they are being mercilessly crashed repeatedly on their very first game night. Though these attitudes seem very different, they are  different mixtures of the same contract elements.

In these examples  there is a disagreement, or a gap in expectations, regarding the balance of components in the standard contract. But gaming is a social activity that can play a variety of different roles in the social fabric of people's world. I have have played Settlers of Catan where the sole purpose of the game was, with full knowledge of all but one player (though I suspect she wasn't completely oblivious), to provide a favorable environment for someone to make a move on someone they have had a crash on for a long time. We were all wingmen and women that night, and it was quite an awesome experience. Beyond the standard contract, the keeping of which is a supragame, there is the supragame of life: of relationship, friendships, hatreds, rivalries and whatnot. It's true that bringing those stuff in may ruin the game, in some sense, but it's often much worse to let a game ruin your life ('m looking at you, Diplomacy). But more generally, we as gamers often like to play a game for the sake of the game but people play games for all sorts of reasons. Chess is, for many people,  a battle of wits that people use to measure their intelligence and prove themselves smarter than others. Poker is played to pin one's cunning and cool against one's friends; and basketball is often an opportunity to unload tension and aggression in a (hopefully) non-violent way. The guys and gals from Blue Peg Pink Peg obviously enjoy gaming is an integral part of their relationships - and that seems to enhance both their gaming experience as well as their marriage. If we can air some tension between rival companies/departments with a softball match, why not on the Kemet table? If we break the ice and get to know each other better with Two Truths and a Lie, why not with Sheriff of Nottingham? If we can build friendship with a colleague over squash, why not over Summoner Wars? Monopoly has succeeded for years in part because it has been  an open field on which  family dynamics play out and are resolved (or exacerbated). I suspect that even gamers, who say that they play for the sake of playing, are just as often driven by the meta-game of proving themselves superior decision-makers. It is most evident when they gamers  keep track of winners and losers in their game group. Who cares? The answer is, they do, obviously. 

And then there is what Zielinski calls 'good metagaming'. He is thinking about games where the supragame is part of the game: when customizing your deck is part of the game, and there is just as much fun and strategy in figuring out what you bring to the game as much as what you do with it. Magic: The Gathering, Android Netrunner and X-Wing are all examples of games with well-established metas (as are many video games, like Starcraft 2). As competitive games where much of the skill involved is in the building of one's  deck/army, it's really important to be versed in the common strategies and groupthink of your local area or the competition in which you are playing. Metagaming in this sense is just involving oneself in the ongoing scene of the game outside this specific game and attempting to advance one's chances of winning with the use of that knowledge. If you know that blue counter decks are big in this cycle of MtG, you better build your deck to prepare for them. 

But even this kind of metagame is not always 'good' or at least is something players may disagree on. Take Dice Masters for example. Since the game is fairly new, it doesn't yet have a well-established meta, though it certainly has the potential to develop it. With such a weak meta, it really isn't interesting to play against someone who builds his team around the three cards that appear in almost all top 8 teams of the recent US national instead of trying to build a team of cards they think would be fun or interesting. Another example is the recent digital implementation of the fabulous little bluffing game Coup (which I play on iOS but you can probably play it on other platforms). The digital version is well done in a variety of ways (though I think the game loses most of its appeal when it is not played in person) but to monetize the game, they gave you an option to purchase a 'spies' expansion that gives you information about other players' past plays. Such data creates a metagame that, in my opinion, really ruins the game: from a game about sussing out when your friends are lying it becomes  a game where the people who bought the expansion can play to the probability of your bluffing given your past play. This is a formidable metagame that requires quite a bit of skill but just isn't a fun game. There are other such competitive games where there is a solid and well-established metagame that requires a tremendous amount of skill but at also requires detailed knowledge of a gigantic pool of cards or the stats of various combo effects (as when you memorize the probability of every game state in poker or an entire chess playbook). That kind of meta is really awesome for those who make that specific game into a lifestyle, but I personally find it tedious and exhausting game, and I generally prefer to play these games without the metagame. Of course that usually means that I would lose to anybody who knows anything about the meta, but I'm usually fine with losing.

Lastly, there is another kind of metgaming that I think is worthwhileb to mention: the metagaming that naturally arises around a group of friends that play many different games with each other. This is not about our personal relationships in general or our knowledge of each other's past play of this specific game but rather this is about the dynamics that develop among a group of competitive players that play many games with each other and can't help but develop a history that  carries from game to game. The danger, of course, is to have grudges from one game carry into another game. Strictly speaking, that sounds like the 'bad' metagaming - and it's especially bad if you're doing it because you're just angry. But if you suspect I'm lying to you only because I lied to you every single time we played A Game of Thrones before, I really can't blame you. Many gamers who pretty much hate metgaming of the 'bad' kind nonetheless really enjoy this kind of metagaming in their group. Tom Vasel explicitly endorses it. I think this is quite fun part of having a regular gaming group (or a gaming partner) - you learn each other's tricks and strategies, attempting to work around them. But it's a very fine line and this also an issue over which people may disagree. For example, Tom Vasel thinks that it's legitimate to carry grudges from game to game in order to substantiate a threat (or, in pretentious talk, make it credible). So he may tell you, 'if you attack me here I will haunt you to the end of days'. If the game ends before he can get you, he'll go after you the next game. In my book, that would not be acceptable. While I agree that you may metagame to make your threats viable, I believe that these have to be within the same game. This is the basis for what I see as legitimate (and often inevitable) kingmaking: if you stole my chance to win the Iron Throne, you can very well expect that I'll prefer the Greyjoys over you in the last round of bidding, even if that would make them win. I may even sacrifice my own interests (assuming I don't really have much chance of winning) to make sure you don't win, and that would (hopefully) make you think twice before you stab me in a future game. But I will not carry this grudge to the next game we play, no matter what you do. I have more to say about this but this is getting quite long so I think I'll revisit kingmaking in some future episode.

So is metagaming a good thing or a bad thing? It depends, but not on what you may think it does. I tried to give some examples  of 'good' metagaming that is bad and 'bad' metagaming that is pretty awesome. But the more important part is trying to figure out what exactly is the supragame that we are playing when we muddy the water of the game on the table. Is it even a game we want to be playing? Is it one we were trying to get away from when we decided to play a board game? Or perhaps it's a game that's much more important than the one in the box, and though we may get carried away in the heat of the moment - we shouldn't forget it. 


1. That's true about competitive as well as cooperative games, as Linda Hughes says: "a great deal of cooperation is required to sustain a competitive exchange" (quoted in Stewart Woods' Eurogames, p. 177).