Board Game Business Podcast - Balancing Your Game

[@skyhammerstudiosllc1972]

I like the "shoot for the moon" possibility for winning a game when you are hopelessly behind. A good mechanic for most games. It also appeals to that "Timmy" player who wants to win, the hard way, ha!

[@suntzugames]

Hey guys, I appreciate your effort, but I must admit that I don't feel you get to the heart of balancing at any point. You keep breaking off into subjects like "shortening the game", "make it appealing to different players" or "simplifying the game". And while they are very important topics and relevant to address, they are not really about game balancing (in my experience anyway). I miss topics like: Balance vs depth of strategy, first player balance problem, not to mention asymmetric, thematic balance and short term vs long term strategy balancing. Have a great day and thank you for the video :) Best regards Emil

[@roop298]

+Emil Larsen Agreed. As a none game designer (whose towards the end of re-engineering a PC game into a board game) how do I feel like I've hard fought a win against getting 75% through a 1 hour game and losing (and feeling bad) or worse, romping home a victory? I appreciate EVERY game has different dynamics but after all this time there must be 'standardised processes' that can be implemented in a games design.

[@RicoCordova]

+roop298 From what I've heard/read it seems like most designers go based on a mix of gut and play testing. I have a background in mathematics and have tried to apply some basic game theory and have had no luck! I'm convinced there are some underlying rules that can be applied to "force" balance, but I'm not smart enough to figure them out. :) I definitely use statistics and probabilities to influence my initial designs and concepts and it is hugely helpful. I use "gut feelings" starting around my 100th play through. I have yet to have a gut feeling contradict my math in the games I've designed. If you do the math right the game will work out right (in my VERY limited experience).

[@suntzugames]

+roop298 Yea, there are ways to do it, all depending on what your aim is. Balanced is not an easy concept to grasp, I've even heard things like Starcraft being mentioned as "too balanced" - which is quite interesting. I know what you mean, hehe - my game designs have been inspired by PC games as well - Burning Suns was inspired by Sins of a Solar Empire, and Burning Rome is inspired by Rome Total War ;)

[@suntzugames]

+Rico Cordova Gut feeling does indeed take you far. And a healthy dose of math is good, specially when you work with recalculating costs. 1 draw in a deck-building equals X points, 1 attack and 1 health etc.. Hearthstone is a good example of easy to grasp cost calculations.

[@pedromendoza5459]

+roop298 From what I have read and personally experienced, balance is just making sure that the decision points of your game design are of "even value". Because each game is different, how you balance them changes and becomes a problem to solve in and of itself. All games can be solved, meaning that you KNOW how to win using a specific strategy, or strategies. Balance is making sure that not one strategy is dominant over the other (unless you design the game that way on purpose). Figuring out the costing of your game objects accurately in each strategy is they key to knowing how to balance strategies properly. So, IMHO, it's about deciding how many decision points you want your game to have and figuring out the costs of your game objects to know how to adjust them to make sure they help out each decision evenly. It would be good to see some concrete examples in a game design of what gets balanced, how they get balanced, and why they get balanced.

[@ryansmart9500]

My favorite part of these videos is the repeated mention of "The Boat Strategy"

[@salmanqaisar7377]

hey guys, I absolutely love these videos. I'm not a designer, just a gamer, but love to think about mechanics and all that leads up to the final game I am playing. ur videos are soooo interesting. I wish they were longer! Have u guys thought about doing a Q&A session every so often, like Tom does? also a play list of your videos on dice tower channel would be great. Many thanks into all ur efforts. Sal

[@TheForbiddenLimb]

+Salman Qaisar Good idea! Are you thinking about a live Q&A or more of a mailbag episode? Based on your suggestion, I posted on our BGG guild asking for questions or suggested future topics: boardgamegeek.com/article/22737733#22737733

[@danielskrivan6921]

7:50 Dominion I think is a good example of this. The guy wanted to make Magic: The Gathering, but without the need to buy packs upon packs of cards. So he created the deckbuilding system and had a system for getting your summons and then fighting with them (like a lot of future deckbuilders, especially co-op ones do). But what happened is he realized it was too complex, and instead took combat completely out, and made the objective points. And it stands as an incredible game.

[@ShadowEclipex]

I am currently working on this step for a tcg-esque hero battler card game and already found several elements changed to balance.

[@ghostmiro]

can anybody give me witch information you put in the spreatsheet? i tought playing time is important, way to win, ...

[@Cr42yguy]

I like how in portal 2 you have to literally shoot the moon to win :D

[@bentaye]

3:25 That sounds lot harder than it really is, like 1h work at most :)

[@Heatherhigleydrums]

What about if I designed an asymmetric game with different character powers where all could win in theory with the right ability of player, but in the game instructions you tell people the relative powerfulness of each player's character ? Could this be attractive at all in terms of being like a pseudo handicap system, giving people the choice of a challenge or an easier time? I see it could be good for families perhaps, but i also imagine how people could feel a win is not a real win and the game be resented for it! Any thoughts on that?

[@darrenjones4001]

Hmmm... depends on how many options there are. Because if there are only 2 easy, 2 med, 2 hard then all of a sudden advanced players only have 2 characters to choose from.

[@Stegglergames]

I would implement this in a cooperative game, giving new players an ‘in’ and experienced players a new challenge. A competitive game in which there is only one winner would have players point to handicaps as an excuse for losing, leaving both players unsatisfied.

[@Stegglergames]

Just like you suggested in your last sentence. My bad!

[@RicoCordova]

I'm an amateur game designer (working on my 3rd). I'm also a software engineer so I have the luxury of being able to create simulators for my games. Maybe it's the type of games I design, but I've found that the "mathematical balance" has always been the best balance for me. Sometimes that means I need to rename/rework items/mechanics so the "feel" matches the numbers. I feel sorry for people who need 100s of hours of play testers when I can simulate 10M games in 30 minutes. :)

[@alexstixx]

how do you simulate making a decision? do you just do random choices, learning with ML, maybe a min max evaluation based on future states?

[@RicoCordova]

+Alex Stixx This is definitely a case-by-case basis depending on the game. It's always easiest to choose "optimally" and that's how I simulate. Since players won't always choose optimally my simulations aren't perfect. For example, I have a game were the players need to progress 2 different resource types equally up to thresholds (say, 10) and they use actions to adjust the placement of workers so that both resource types will get to 10 at the same time (or as close as possible). It's very easy to program these types of decisions. It's much harder to program to play poorly (unless you just do it with random choices, I suppose). Simply look at all the scenarios available based on the workers in play. Loop through the actions and see which one provides for the resources reaching 10 the most efficiently. Choose that action. Repeat. :) I have an open source simulator I wrote for a app called Elemental Kingdoms if you'd like to take a look at how it's done. github.com/ricomoss/ek-calc Note: This simulator is WAY out of date and wasn't complete. Just use it as a "tutorial". :)

[@chuckm1961]

You good. Us bad.

[@glencannondr]

I havent watched the video but I already know its awesome

[@Kuptain]

Tbh, when 10 people say something is overpowered and 10 people say its underpowered, there is something wrong about the general concept of the mechanic/character.

[@chuckm1961]

Disagree completely.

[@MartijnVulto]

Some very valuable ideas in there. I especially liked the points about when _not_ to balance a game because it takes out some of the fun. Thanks!

[@rickdemott6602]

Thanks for the video. Great advice.

[@Saturn2888]

I never heard of these before, but I started watching a few and think they're really great! A lot of the topics are still valuable today except when talking about Kickstarter. Based on what I'm hearing, that market's changed pretty significantly since 2016.

[@avalonperez3806]

really great post; thanks for all your advice!

[@damien-b]

Very helpful thank you!