Design Talk: Gut Calls, an especially interesting kind of decision

Somewhere between 'I can just calculate the right answer' and 'this is too complicated, I have no idea' lies the sweet spot of Gut Calls: juicy decisions you just have to make on intuition.

[@matthewturner3151]

Time from beginning of design talk to referencing Slay The Spire as an example - 1m 25s. All is well with the world.

[@Tyletoful]

Wingspan is a great game. You are never sure about your strategy until the points are scored at the end. Balancing engine production and playing high feather birds is such a fun and interesting scenario each game.

[@MonocleTopHats]

I think i bounce off very math-y eurogames with high information because it feels like the information is so accessible that i could always calculate a better turn, so i feel more limited by people's patience with my turn length than wrestling with the games puzzle. All my favourite strategic games operate in this kind of fuzz-space, where i navigate forward mostly on instinct informed by a bumch of information i cant hope to perfectly parse

[@KyriosHeptagrammaton]

The problem with the "too much work" is some people are willing to optimize the fun out of everything. It can be a huge problem in boardgames waiting 15 minutes for your turn. Plus, some people have the capability but not the desire to optimize, but feel obligated to do so.

[@rich_in_paradise]

Sounds like what Daniel Kahneman called Type 1 thinking in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Type 2 thinking is concious decision making that often involves applying logic and/or arithmetic to make decisions as well as recalling facts. Type 1 thinking is intuitive, involves rules of thumb. I think the best game design comes from when you learn a game and have to apply Type 2 thinking but then as you play more it becomes a Type 1 decision at least most of the time. Especially if the game is designed to accommodate the speedup you get from making this transition. This clearly happens in games like Spire and Super Auto Pets, where experienced players are just flinging cards around at 90mph.

[@TomFranklinX]

Nice to see a fellow fan of Tversky and Kahneman

[@KyriosHeptagrammaton]

This is my problem with Into the Breach. Leans too close to "I can just calculate the right answer". The fact that you are thinking this gives me some confidence for TBW

[@StephenKatt]

I play a lot of Teamfight Tactics, which is an autobattler. Every single round you have to think about where you're headed and trying to buy the units and pick items that will give you the strongest board for now, but also hoping for the strongest board later in the game. And 7 other players are doing the same, and you're buying from the same pool of units, so ideally you figure out what others are likely to do and make a strategy that can counter those future leaders. Or you can try to build a board out of units that others aren't using so that you'll be uncontested for those units. So there's ton of gut checks constantly. One cool result of this shared pool game design is that it is somewhat self-balancing. If certain units are stronger than others, multiple opponents might try to get those, but that actually lowers the probability that one of them will find everything they're looking for, giving everyone else better odds of outpacing them. Also, different team comps are structured so that they can counter each other. But most of it is very 'gut checky' because you don't know what you'll find next round, and you don't exactly know what the opponent is doing. I've found that games with lots of gut checks are nice in terms of keeping you engaged. The times when they become too burdensome is when you have no way to re-evaluate your decision. Did that +3% crit chance make my build stronger or weaker? I have no idea. Even in wingspan, I find it hard to introduce to new players, because they don't know how to formulate a gut check yet, so every option seems as good as any other. So ideally, a game eases you into its gut checks. Dominion does this fairly well by giving rather limited options of what to buy for any given gold amount. After 1 or 2 games you start to get a sense of how a 'mostly money' strategy would work, or how a "+actions, +cards" engine might work.

[@jonperry]

What's better, a bird in the hand or two in the bush? What does your gut tell you?

[@AzureLazuline]

i always called this "discrete" vs "mushy" decisions, which isn't the best term but it works alright. It sounds like you like mushy decisions more where there's a ton of different factors that you can't accommodate for, like xcom. i actually prefer the opposite, where it all *is* calculable (but very hard). *Into the Breach* nails this for me. It's possible (but hard) to exhaustively check all your reasonable actions for a turn and see what the "best" move is, minimizing grid damage. That's already really difficult, and you can probably find some decent moves with it, but then you need to calculate what those end states actually *mean* - like, sure, this line ends with 0 grid damage, but now my melee mech is way off in the corner where it'll probably be useless next turn. What's the chance that it can actually contribute next turn? Is it worth taking 1 grid damage for a better position? What about the enemies that are currently spawning, what could they be, where can they attack? Could one of them be a scorpion that webs my artillery, how would i deal with that if it happened? Is it worth making a pilot sacrifice with 1 turn left for a huge boost in my position, or are there enemy spawns that'd be devastating when i only have 2 mechs? ...which is a *lot,* but i *can* calculate those. It's hard as hell to accommodate for it all, but give me 2 hours and i can do it, and find a 99.9% optimal move. The gut call, then, is how much time to spend on a turn. How dangerous *is* it? How likely am i to find a big breakthrough if i spend more time? So it still ends up being what you described! i guess the quick version is, i love when games theoretically let me calculate everything, but the required calculations are so unique and different for each situation that it's unreasonable to do it all the time - just when it really matters.

[@polyhedralgames]

Great insights! I've been mulling over how to nudge players to trust their gut more for a fun game experience. I recently played Marvel Midnight Suns and was thrown off by the huge numbers on the cards. They made it a bit of a chore to figure out if I could take down an enemy with my card combo. Very different from games like Into the Breach or Slice & Dice where they keep the numbers simple to calculate in your head. At first, I thought the big numbers in Midnight Suns were just inelegant design with the man perks being making it easier to make minor balance tweaks or having big flashy numbers on the screen (which is fun, admittedly). But the more I played, the more I realized I was relying on my gut feeling rather than just crunching numbers, and the game was pretty forgiving if I made a mistake. Ended up having a blast. I still love the clean, puzzle-like vibe of games with small numbers, but Midnight Suns showed me that injecting a bit of complexity or confusion can actually make the game more fun when it pushes you to trust your instincts. Intentionally inelegant design you could say?

[@paolomilanicomparetti3702]

see the same in Monster Train, where there are just too many things happening each turn to calculate everything that's going to happen (especially when the final wave of enemies that gets relentless so the game plays multiple turns without player interaction until one side dies). Personally I enjoy monster train but I think Slay the Spire is the better game...

[@phipleemans9121]

'Promosm' 😎

[@peezieforestem5078]

I actually don't like this idea. It seems like this type of play reinforces the bias people have, which may FEEL good, but is definitely not good. It's not really learning, it's more like tweaking your pre-existing belief. These sort of decisions feel like they are glorified slot machines that exploit my lizard brain. I like games that make me explore things I find unintuitive, games that make me question my beliefs and my gut. They are much harder to pull off, but when they are successful, it results in the experience of "blowing my mind", which is unparalleled, and it makes the satisfaction of "gut decisions" pale in comparison. The example that comes to mind is seeing the lines in "The Witness" for the first time - if you know, you know.

[@TomFranklinX]

Do you play chess? The feeling you described is similar to what a chess player experiences when they find a hidden tactic that requires unconventional moves.

[@peezieforestem5078]

@@TomFranklinX I dabbled in chess at around 1400 at some point, and the impression I got was that up until the point I dropped it, looking up strategies and solid openings always contributed vastly more than any decisions I made. I don't know if that changes on higher levels of play, but from what I understand, even world champions have dedicated teams that prepare their openings extensively, so that must be at least a nontrivial advantage. Overall, the game looked extremely well studied to me, I have never managed to find an unconventional move. I always felt that I relied on learning external theory and exploiting my opponents mistakes, not coming up with anything on my own.

[@TomFranklinX]

​@@peezieforestem5078 Chess has no more innovations on the strategic level. Openings and strategies are down to memorization and game knowledge. Low-level tactics is where chess truly shines. Yesterday I had a game that involved sacking two pieces to trap the opponent's queen. When the tactic succeeded it felt mind blowing.