Room for Error

Puerto Rico is a great example of a game in which you can often point to the mistake that cost you the game even though it didn't look like a mistake at the time.
It's also a game in which a grandmaster will cream a novice, although the statistical probability of the novice winning is somewhat higher than it is in Chess!

My feeling is that odd mistakes will indeed balance themselves out over the course of a game but that a good design should punish those players who make consistent mistakes, whether it's a light tactical or deep strategic game.

Of course, that's always assuming that it is possible to identify a "mistake" as such: a choice (or gamble!) that turns out horribly isn't necessarily a "mistake" but can simply be bad luck (I've lost games of PR because the draw of the plantations has been very strange, although not as many as those I've lost through mistakes.) If the game is short, it's going to be hard to recover from an early one of those; but then again if the game is long it may compound the problem.

And sometimes a game can be broken from the outset. Take Settlers of Catan. A novice can lose the game because their opening settlements are put in the wrong place. An experienced player can lose because their settlements were placed to take a gamble, but that's the experienced player's fault! But which of those can be considered a "mistake"? I don't think either of them can be, and yet they may both be punished for their choices.

I think that "mistake" is unfortunately a highly subjective and situation dependent term; there are some games where you legitimately have two choices that seem equally good, and the one you choose doesn't pan out; was it a "mistake"? It's hard to say.

I think that what you might be talking about are things that are more clearly identified as being definitely counterproductive. For example, I build a coffee roaster, but in the "Mayor" phase I forget to shuffle my colonists around and thus can't produce on it that turn.

What's cool about Puerto Rico is the level to which you get punished for a mistake is also dependent on the other players. Maybe in the above example, no one chooses the Craftsman before the next mayor comes up, and so you make out ok; or maybe someone chooses Craftsman, then Trader, and you're out $4. In both cases it was a mistake, but it was up to the other players to notice and/or take advantage of your "blunder".

My personal feeling is that you don't want the game decided in the very first turn; you don't want the results of the game tracable to one blunder by one player. Yet, when you get highly experienced and highly skilled players involved in a game, there is always a possibility that the room for error will get tighter and tighter. If it doesn't, then there's certainly the possibility that the game isn't robust enough to be played at a high level. One hears the maxim that "in general, a better player will win game X", but I'm only concerned with the present game of X; if I play better, will I win, or not?

What I think makes this difficult to analyze is that multiplayer games necessarily involve very complex interactions between the players, and add to that mix a modest amount of complexity inherent to most of the game systems, and you end up with a pretty wide variety of outcomes for any given actions. To the extent that a game rests solely on any one decision, I think it's less satisfying, yet I think it's also important that a game shouldn't make it easy for you to consistently make bad plays and still snag the win. It should be theoretically possible, but never trivially simple.

How does one achieve this in practice? I think there are several ways. One is just the cumulative VP approach; in PR, for example, it's always possible to catch up until the game formally ends, but you must out-ship the shippers and out-build the builders, and this can be tough, but not impossible. In games that rely on negotiation, you can try to parley your "little guy" status into peace, encouraging other players to attack each other rather than you. A scoring system I like to use involves player rank as a means of determining VP. So this might mean you'll need to seriously increase your rank to net "1st place points" in the next scoring round, yet the ability of other players to leave you in the dust in scoring is more limited, giving you more of a theoretical chance of pulling off a comeback (although it works both ways, because you can't count on a major scoring coup to get back into it, either).

So, I think that games I like are ones where if you make a mistake, other players must notice it and take advantage of it for it to hurt you. But one also needs to consider how one's design will hold up when played by experts who are always going to see a mistake; how much will the system allow them to exploit it? To me, personally, it's tough to design with those considerations in mind. I find that when I playtest my games, I'm just as much a novice as everyone else with respect to strategy; I can usually understand how the whole game fits together, and identify what some important decision points will be, but beyond that, I find that I don't win my own games more often than other people do. What has others' experience been? If you can't easily win your own games, is that a bad sign? (a separate discussion, perhaps...)

-Jeff