Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Juggling Complexity (Not Quite Enough 3)

Transcript

Juggling Complexity (Not Quite Enough 3) · Pick Up and Deliver

0:04
Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
0:07
as I head out for a walk and delivering episodes, you will I stroll
0:10
around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners, are actually
0:23
good morning listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburb rynch Chicago. It
0:28
is mid November and the weather is relatively crisp. The temperature thing inside our
0:33
host said it was in the high thirties, but it feels warmer than that
0:36
to me, so I don't know, maybe it hasn't been updated recently.
0:40
I'm out today to take a little bit of a walk before I settle in
0:43
for a long day of meetings and emails and grading. It's going to be
0:48
a hoot, so let's just get into it. Glad to see you.
0:53
So I was thinking about this because, as I said, it's going to
0:57
be a long day of emails and meetings and stuff. And right now in
1:00
my job, I am experiencing what I would call the challenge of juggling complexity.
1:07
That I have a lot of plates spinning and I'm working to keep them
1:10
all spinning in a variety of different tasks that all need to get done,
1:15
and it's hard to find enough time in the day to get them all done
1:18
and keep them moving. So that is the current challenge I'm facing in work.
1:23
So even though I find that really fun in gaming, I don't find
1:26
it fun in work. It's real stressful. But I'm also particularly stressed out
1:32
this morning because my computer died twice this morning with the kind of error that
1:36
looks like it's the computer is dying for good error. And it's a very
1:41
inconvenient time for me to have my desktop PIEC fail on me, So that's
1:47
very stressful as well. I do have a laptop so I can attend my
1:49
meetings and do my work meetings today, but it's if it turns out my
1:55
desktop is dead or so significantly dead enough that I have to do repair work
1:59
on it, I'm gonna be real sad. And it feels like that is
2:02
the case. So we okay, So juggling. So my topic today,
2:09
now that you're done with the sad Brendan tiny violin playing, is that I
2:15
want to talk about juggling complexity. I've been thinking about this since I went
2:20
to my design partner Robs game Day and good Friend game Day or game weekend
2:28
recently, and I got to play a couple of games that really really hit
2:31
this spot for me, and so I thought it would be fun to talk
2:35
about the idea of juggling complexity. So I've often mentioned, if you've listened
2:39
to the podcast for a long time, that my favorite feeling, my favorite
2:43
experience in a game is oh, just not enough. That's what I call
2:46
it. The idea that you have a game where the different mechanisms are in
2:52
place in such a way that you get to a point where you feel this
2:54
sort of crisis of decision because you just don't have quite enough to do it,
2:59
and you're trying to figure out how to get enough to do it.
3:00
So I thought I would share a couple different versions of that feeling and get
3:07
your feedback on them. Now, it's possible that I am splitting hairs too
3:10
finally, and then what we're going to find is this is one hair that
3:14
I've tried to cut into three. But I think it's worth talking about how
3:17
these different effects in game design manifest and how they give me that feeling of
3:23
all, well, just not quite enough. Okay. So to start with,
3:25
I think the first version of that that I want to talk about is
3:29
the idea of speed versus efficiency, and I've experienced this lately and most often
3:35
recently anyway, in ark Nova. Ark Nova is of course a very well
3:40
known tableau builder engine builder that's come out recently or in the last couple of
3:47
years, and it's about building a zoo. And the big thing in it
3:52
is that you have these cards, and the cards increase in power as they
3:57
move up the action track. So if you take the one at the time
4:00
of the action track, it's worth sort of five power, and if you
4:02
take it when it's lower on the action track, it takes less, but
4:04
then when you take it it goes back to the bottom and now it's a
4:08
one. And each of the five cards that give you the five different actions
4:11
you can do during the game can be upgraded, so there's really kind of
4:14
ten actions you can do, or five and then five a supercharged version of
4:18
each of those, and with the power on them at higher levels, they
4:24
give you access to more stuff, but some of them they become more efficient
4:27
in terms of if you think of the game as having a limited number of
4:30
turns. The Animal card, for example, the one that lets you put
4:32
animals into your zoo. If it's at level five, you can put two
4:38
animals into your zoo, but in order to do that, you have to
4:40
have enough money to pay for them both, and you having to have to
4:43
have enough enclosures built that you can put literally put both animals into your zoo.
4:49
So there's a really interesting trade off there between the speed of Okay,
4:56
I have one enclosure built, I'm gonna put one animal in. It doesn't
4:58
matter that it's not that I'm not up to the top of that track.
5:01
That you getting that engine going feels fast, but then you're using your turn
5:08
to just do one thing. It's sort of incremental, and with some of
5:11
those animals, the payoff it's good, but it's not amazing. And so
5:15
it feels better to me to use the animal card when it's on that five
5:19
and be able to put two animals in. But often in order to do
5:21
that, I have to take a couple of suboptimal turns to either get enough
5:25
money or get enough space or whatever. And perhaps it would be smarter for
5:30
me to spread out those suboptimal turns into the animal thing too, and then
5:34
I would be getting more income from having more animals on the boat. Right,
5:38
So there's this efficiency balance and so I think of the idea of speed
5:43
versus efficiency, because then it's at its heart Arcanova is a game where you're
5:46
racing to get enough points to end the game, right that unlike a lot
5:50
of games where it has a set end time and the person who ends the
5:55
game gives everyone else one more turn and then you do score, or there's
5:59
a set of rounds and the game ends and you all do your score and
6:01
ark nova. The game ends when somebody gets a high enough combination of the
6:05
two different scoring tracks, and then once that happens, everybody gets one more
6:09
turn except the person who did it. So there's an interesting sort of chicken
6:14
dance at the end as you're lining up your end game scoring points and trying
6:17
to get to the point where when you take that last turn you'll get as
6:19
far ahead on the scoring track as you can, because if you're the one
6:24
who ends the game, everybody else gets one more turn, and if you're
6:27
not the one who ends the game, you need to be in a position
6:29
to get past the person who does, which is often very hard because usually
6:31
somebody ending the game knows they're doing it and they make a big play at
6:34
the end. So there's this question of speed racing to getting the end point
6:41
versus efficiency of actions, where you maybe go a little slower at the beginning,
6:44
but because you've built up this efficiency, you get there. And I
6:47
really love that tension, and that's part of what I like about ark Nova.
6:50
I'll also say I feel the speed versus efficiency thing in Praga can put
6:55
Regny, which is different because in Praga you have a set number of rounds,
7:00
right, and so speed isn't as crucial, But there are some bonuses
7:04
that you get that you get if you're the first person, or you get
7:06
first pick at them, if you're going in a certain direction and the spaces
7:11
are all getting taken up. So it's a race to colonize. That's not
7:14
a great word, but it's a race to take control of different spaces on
7:17
the board, ideally faster than your opponents did, because you don't want them
7:23
to get all the bonuses for taking control of those spaces. So progre but
7:27
Regne also has to me that feeling of maybe taking a couple actions to build
7:30
up the efficiency of your later actions, but then being slower off the blocks
7:34
in terms of taking things and getting bonuses and whatnot. That said, there's
7:39
not a ton of that. I'm first here. I get the best thing
7:43
in praga is very has a strategic element where you're building these long term goals,
7:47
but it's also got a tactical element of what's available when it's your turn.
7:51
And you know, I think those two together make it a pretty good
7:56
balance of different options. So speed versus efficiency is the first of the plates,
8:01
or the first of the versions of juggling complexity that I wanted to mention
8:07
today. The second one is one I'll call ducks in a row. Ducks
8:11
in a row refers to the idea that a game uses a series of interconnected
8:18
systems to set up different actions, and that in order to pursue those,
8:24
you have to have quote unquote all your ducks in a row. Right,
8:28
you have to have everything lined up in order to take the action. I
8:31
distinguish it. So ark Nova, I just said, has that right.
8:33
If you want to play an animal, first you have to have the money
8:35
to play the animal. Then you have to have the required symbols, and
8:37
you have to have a spot to put the animal, and so to do
8:41
the animal placement, you have to have all these other things arranged. That's
8:43
true, and most of these games do have similar things like that. The
8:46
place I would say the difference is is that I don't feel like in ark
8:50
Nova, the challenge is remembering to do all those things. It's just to
8:54
get them in place. Whereas in the version of Ducks in a Row that
8:58
I'm talking about, one of the mental challenges is setting up the chain of
9:03
chain of events that will allow you to do the thing you need to do,
9:05
because the way that the event the things intervene is so complicated, and
9:09
of course if you haven't guessed it yet, I'm talking about vital Asserta games,
9:13
particularly on Mars, but literally all of them that I've played use this
9:18
method of complexity. Sometimes on Mars is the one I feel at the most
9:22
because it feels like that's the one where the most often, it's the most
9:26
often that I go to do a thing and I remember, like, oh,
9:28
dang, I needed to do these two other things first. In order
9:33
to be able to do this thing right. You need to make sure you
9:35
have the right fuel, and you need to make sure you have the space
9:37
available and the worker is available, and that blah blah blah blah blah.
9:41
Right, there's all these interconnected systems, and in order for you to succeed,
9:46
you have to jump into that interconnected flow and keep up with it.
9:50
And I find that really exciting, and it is the feeling of oh,
9:52
just not quite enough, but instead of not quite enough time, which is
9:56
what's going on in the speed versus efficiency versions, in this one, it
10:03
feels like not quite enough planning, Like it is a game that challenges you
10:09
to decide how far out you're going to plan, because each step of a
10:15
process gains benefit from having planned for the previous step, and so at some
10:20
point you do have to intervene with the less you know, the less ideal.
10:22
But like by way of example, on Mars has these Science Advisor cards
10:28
that you can get, and to get one takes a fair amount of work.
10:31
You have to get the right resources and play in the right spot and
10:35
have the right stuff available. I don't remember exactly. But then what you
10:39
get when you get the Science Advisor is you get a little spiff on something
10:43
else you're doing. Maybe you get an extra action, maybe you get an
10:46
extra resource. Every time you do a thing, it's an increase in efficiency
10:50
and it's sort of a bonus. But then order to make most use of
10:54
that, then you have to plan more in order to execute the plan with
10:58
that efficiency at the right time. And then once you get that new bonus.
11:05
Now that new bonus provides you a benefit, but in order to make
11:09
the most use of it, you have to plan even moreheads So the challenge
11:13
in vitalisura is deciding when do you give up on the planning and just move
11:18
ahead, which is kind of speed versus efficiency a little bit. But to
11:22
me, the really crucial and delightful challenge in it is that moment is that
11:30
trick of trying to get all the ducks in a row in order to I
11:35
don't know what the follow up is on If all your ducks are in a
11:37
row, then what you can go swimming? When someone says get your ducks
11:41
in a row, I don't know. I don't know what the actual metaphor
11:46
is, right Like, I understand, I understand the meaning of get your
11:50
ducks in a row, but I don't understand the definitional purpose of that meaning.
11:56
If that makes sense, I'm not sure it does, but to me
11:58
it makes sense. So that is juggling complexity ducks in a row. The
12:05
other game that I would say, does that really well is underwater cities,
12:09
because in underwater cities, in order to build things, you almost always need
12:11
two different resources at least, like the tunnels and the cities both take multiple
12:16
resources, so you're constantly thinking about like spending those resources, producing those resources,
12:22
having them available, getting them. Also, which cards you have,
12:24
what order are you going to trigger your cards in? Are you going to
12:28
be able to make use of one of the cards? One of the spaces
12:30
that matches the color of your cards, you can use your card and the
12:31
space. There is an awful lot of planning and awful lot of sequential planning
12:37
that has to go into making things happen in underwater cities. That said,
12:41
I think underwater cities has a kind of a level of forgiveness that I don't
12:45
feel as they're in on Mars. I think in underwater cities you can find
12:48
a way around to resources you're missing without nearly as much penalty as you get
12:52
from something like on Mars. That might not be true, that might just
12:56
be my impression. Underwater cities does really fit that ducks in a row idea
13:03
as well. So the third kind of not quite enough. So the first
13:09
one was not quite enough time to act the second one like like, I'm
13:15
trying to get things done quickly, because you're trying to get things done even
13:18
quicker. So we're racing right. Not quite enough speed is maybe the word
13:22
I'm looking for there. The second one is not quite enough planning or not
13:26
quite enough organization. Well, the third one of not quite enough would be
13:28
time. I see why I went back and revised that earlier on. So
13:33
in this case, what I mean to say is time to prepare for the
13:37
known problems. And the classic for this of this for me is agricola.
13:41
And part of what makes agricola amazing is that you have to feed your workers,
13:46
feed your people, and you have to feed your people a not insignificant
13:50
amount of food. Right that, the premise is that you're a medieval subsistence
13:54
farmer in the area that would eventually be Germany, and subsistence farm earning enough
14:01
growing enough food for your family to subsist, meaning survive. And the whole
14:05
point of agricola is you slowly, over the time get more efficient and generate
14:09
more value for your farm, but you always have to keep minding the food,
14:16
and the game makes you take begging cards for every point of food you're
14:20
not able to feed your family, which is devastating. I mean, a
14:24
really good score in agricola is sixty points, and that's a really good score.
14:28
I've often won with points in the forties. If I have a game
14:31
where I get into the fifties, I considered it a very good game.
14:33
And a begging card is three points lost, meaning if you got an excellent
14:39
score of sixty, that begging card is five percent of your score. If
14:41
you're only getting forty points, it's closer to ten percent, right, So
14:46
the minus three card is really and if you haven't been paying attention enough to
14:52
take one begging card, chances are you taking two or three. But so
14:54
the way that gricola works is at the end of these seasons and at the
14:58
beginning you get four I think you get four rounds before the season hits,
15:01
and then it gets closer together as it goes along. You have to feed
15:05
your people. You have to spend two food per person, and if you
15:07
have a child a character that was just created that round, it's only one
15:11
food. So in the first round or at the end of the first four
15:16
rounds, you have to have four food saved up in harder to feed your
15:18
people. And it just gets worse as you get more people. You can
15:20
have a total of five people, meaning you have to have ten food to
15:24
spend some cases every two or three rounds, which means you have to have
15:28
a food engine going. You have to be growing crops and baking bread,
15:31
or you have to be harvesting animals or whatever. There's a variety of different
15:37
ways you can feed your people, but you have to be able to do
15:39
it. And with the complexity of Agricola and the fun of planning for turn
15:46
based efficiencies and acquiring goods and setting up things, I find it really hard
15:52
to remember to feed my people. It's very easy to get to the second
15:58
to last or even the last worker in the round before harvest, and then
16:02
you realize like, oh dang, I forgot to think about food, and
16:06
then your whole game is tanked. So that to me, that is a
16:10
fascinating and crucial part of the game, especially because if you're not doing well,
16:14
it's really easy to spend all your turns getting food and never really advancing
16:18
your farm very much, which I think is an amazing bit of development.
16:22
Now. Of course, Uviy Rosenberg, especially in this early games, was
16:26
really good at this and it was a really big part of his games.
16:29
He does it in Kaverna as well, but it's easier to dodge the trouble
16:32
in Kaverna in games like Rake Holt or I think at the Gates of Loyang,
16:37
although I have not played that. In that one, you're developing goods
16:41
and you have to kind of have the goods in a certain order, and
16:44
if you don't have them, then you can't sort of move forward to the
16:45
next one. So there's an interesting give and take on those things, and
16:51
I like that. I think it works really well. The other game where
16:52
I feel this pressure, and actually I feel it more. I think it
16:56
is more dramatic in this game than it is in Agricola is tri carryon.
17:00
In tra Carryon, you have to pay your workers and if you can't pay
17:04
them, you lose points. The punt penalty is not quite as harsh as
17:07
Agricola, but it's not nothing. And that's a key part of the game
17:11
because money is relatively scarce, especially if you screw up and you don't get
17:15
a good performance. You might get towards the end of the run and really
17:18
not have much money, and you have to waste an action going to get
17:22
money. You also have to spend your money on the goods to make the
17:25
tricks that you're going to perform in your magic show, and that's money that
17:27
you were going to use to pay your people. So it is a really
17:30
tight economy game that's really fun and really interesting, but very difficult. Again,
17:36
because you're thinking of so many other things. It's really easy to get
17:40
to that moment when you have to pay your workers and be like, oh,
17:42
I totally forgot about paying my workers. Oh dang, here is all
17:47
of the penalty that I'm getting now. Because I was focused on points,
17:51
you're focused on acquiring new materials or whatever. So the feeling of not quite
17:56
enough time to resolve the pressure not quite enough time emerges for me and things
18:03
like Agricola, Entra Carrion, and that's part of what I really like about
18:06
those games. Now at the game day, I have an opportunity to play
18:08
two games that for me both income, both embody the not quite enough feeling.
18:14
On the one hand, you have Brass, which is very much to
18:17
me a game of speed versus efficiency and ticking clock. The ticking clock there
18:22
or ducks in a row, I mean, speed versus efficiency versus ducks in
18:25
a row, because to get everything ready to sell something in Brass you have
18:30
to kind of get all of these different pieces in place and be watching the
18:33
other players so that you make sure to do it in a way that they
18:36
don't steal away your stuff. On the other hand, you also have the
18:41
ticking clock of you have the question of speed versus efficiency in terms of like
18:45
you want to try to sell two goods in one turn. That takes a
18:47
lot more coordinating, especially if you're selling goods that require beer, which is
18:51
what you're playing Brass Birmingham. The other option is to try and is to
18:57
try and set things up before the other pressure is the end of the game.
19:03
Right the game has played in two rounds, there are not that many
19:04
cards. I think you get, you know, fifteen turns or something on
19:10
maybe eight turns on each half of the game. It's very quick and it's
19:15
delightful, but really intense. So Brass and Brass Burmingham are one of those
19:19
games that make me feel that way. The other one that I played recently
19:22
was or Leons. Now Orleons doesn't have quite the same kind of pressures,
19:26
but the big thing is the pressure of deciding what to push for and when
19:32
the challenge of pulling the cocain the right getting the right tokens, pushing for
19:37
the right goals, focusing your points, it all works out really in a
19:41
really interesting way. And there are a number of different levers you have to
19:45
pull to try to get to the end state, and you always feel like
19:48
you just don't have quite enough stuff to do it. And I love that
19:52
so Orleons would be another example of this stealing. So what games do you
19:56
play that you would talk about as be about juggling complexity? Which ones that
20:00
I mentioned are your favorites? Which ones would you like to try? Which
20:04
ones do you think I should try? Head over to board game get Guild
20:07
three two sixty nine and let you let me know your thoughts on those games.
20:11
Uh, and I look forward to talking to you about it there.
20:14
Thanks for joining me in my walk today. I hope your next walk is
20:17
as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye,