A discussion of Spielfrieks about whether Ra contains more interesting decisions that Ra made me write the following article. However, I think it is more appropriate on this forum, as it delves so deep into gamedesign and gametheory and I don't know if such a "deep" article would be fully appreciated on that discussiongroup.
Anyway, here it is:
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Alan Kwan's original post on this subject contained a lot of bold statements, such as that Settlers is more *fun*, but that Ra requires more *skill* and that there is a roughly same amount of luck in both games.
I am not going to make such statements, because they are very subjective. However, it is interesting to compare Ra and Settlers, because, although they both contain a significant amount of luck, there is a fundamental difference in the place where the luck manifests itself.
In Settlers the resources you acquire are determined by a random event: the dice rolls and by your opponents (if they are willing to trade, although you do need some resources to start with). You do have some say over which resources you might get by placing villages on "good" hexes during the setup phase, which is an important phase and requires a lot of skill to do right, but after that it is mostly up to the dice.
In Settlers you try to convert your resources (which you get through a random process) as efficiently as possible into more resources, until you have enough resources to end the game and win it. Turning resources into more resources is typical of a game with a runaway leader problem, by the way, although Settlers does contain some methods to drag down the leader somewhat such as the trading mechanism and the robber.
Ending the game by reaching or fulfilling a certain condition is what I call a binary wincondition. You have either won the game or you haven't. Another example of a game with a binary wincondition is Attika, where the first player to either connect shrines or place all his buildings wins. This is fundamentally different from a game with a victory point system, in which the player who ends the game not necessarily always wins it (ie. "Through the Desert", "Lost Cities" and... "Ra").
In Ra the resources that are at you disposal are not random, everyone gets a stack of suns that are of equal worth at the beginning of the game(well, more or less, there is a small difference in the numbers). You try to use your minimal amount of resources as efficiently as possible to turn them into as much Victory Points as possible within the give timeframe (3 rounds, each of which end when a certain number of Ra tiles has been drawn). Of course, in typical Knizia fashion, resources are also worth victory points at the end of the game, which makes sure that players are not "wasting" their resources on VP's when the end of the game nears.
In Ra the time you have to turn resources into VP's is a random thing, because you never know when that last Ra tile will come up. Also, the victory points come up in a random manner and how much resources you have to spend to get a certain amount of VP's depends, up to a certain extent, also on your opponents and what resources (suns) they have left, because of the auction mechanism.
In Ra you already see two dimensions that Settlers combines in one thing: a timeframe and a victory point system. I know that Settlers also has VP's, but in Settlers the VP's are used to determine whether a player has already won or not. So, basically the dimensions of time and VP's are intertwined in Settlers, whereas they are separate things in Ra. This typically means that Ra requires a different mindset than Settlers and that the goals and priorities in each game are of a different nature.
For example, in Settlers your goal might be to upgrade that village as soon as possible and with the minimal amount of resources into a city. Once you have accomplished that, you can use the extra resources gained from that city to build roads and a village to create a port. Of course, when the opportunity presents itself (maybe because of trades or unexpected die rolls or because certain spots get blocked or because you have 8 cards in hand and just want to get rid of some of them) it might be wiser to build a second city instead of that harbor or to buy developmentcards.
Basically, what you are constantly doing in Settlers is converting resources as efficiently as possible into other resources. This is certainly not an easy process, because the resourcesystem is complex (is an extra city better than a port, for example) and you constantly have to re-evaluate your goals based on what resources you get, what the boardposition looks like, etc. Only at the very end you are actually interested in accumulating things that do not produce extra things, but just give you enough VP's to win the game. And sometimes it is necessary to "steal" VP's from other to prevent them from winning.
In Ra you are constantly evaluating how much resources a certain set of tiles, that translate more or less directly in a number of victory points, is worth for you and your opponents and you have to base your decision (placing a bid or not and if yes then how much?) on that. If you could somehow find out the "magic formula" for this (which undoubtly is a very complex one) you would have a good chance of winning, were it not for the random order in which the tiles are drawn and the random endings of the rounds (although you could factor this into the equation too of course).
As you see, it is impossible to say which game has more interesting decisions and more luck as the luck and the decisions in both games appear at totally different levels in their resourcesystems.
I am not advocating one game over the other, because tastes just happen to differ. I am just trying to explain the fundamental differences in their resourcesystems, so that people hopefully can better understand *why* a certain mechanic in a certain game works a certain way.
- Rene Wiersma
Cat... ate.... long... post.... :cry:
Oh well, at least now I know what I'll have for dinner tomorrow :twisted:
Let's try again, it is not as if I have something better to do...
In this post I'll expand my theory and show some resource schema's of different games.
Before I do that, I want to explain some different terms I'm using.
When I'm talking about resources I mean all the things that are at a player's disposal when he needs to make a decision and of which he has a limited amount. Resources can be tangible things such as cards, chips, playmoney, but it can also be more abstract things such as actions, action points, board position, even seating position and whatnot.
With time I mean the number of turns (or rather: decision moments) a player gets before the game ends. Time, in a sense, is also resource, because it is something that players have a limited amount of. However, I feel compelled to distinguish time from other resources for a number of reasons:
- Time is a universal resource that is an important feature of many games
- Time is a tool for a designer to control the length of a game
- Time introduces a story arc to a game, in the sense that at a different stages in the game players will have different goals and objectives
- Time introduces a sense of urgency, the idea of "getting things done in time" and appropriate rewards and penalties
A victory point is that which you count up at the end of the game and the player who has the most of wins the game. Victory points don't always need to be VP chips, they can be money or a position on a score track, etc. When I talk about victory points I don't mean the number of points of a single player, but rather the whole delta of all victory points of all players combined. For example, when I gain a point it is the same as everybody else losing a point.
A victory condition is the condition which a player must fulfill in order to win the game and thereby also ending it. Some games also use VP's for this (when someone reaches x vp's he wins the game), but in the context of this theory they fulfill a different purpose than "true" victory points.
In the schema's you will see some "blobs" which depict the influence that random factors (var) and opponent's (human) have on a player's resources or on the time of a game. The bigger the blob the more influence. The size of a blob is mostly a subjective thing of course, but it is useful to illustrate a point.
All right, here is my first resource schema.
You see that there is a large random factor (the dice rolls for resource cards mostly) influencing the resources a player has at his disposal. There's also a large human element influencing the resources of a player. This interaction be through the use of the robber, trading cards and blocking spaces on the map.
The looping arrow on resources means that players can turn their resources into more resources. Resources in this game are of course the resource cards, but also development cards, villages, cities, board position, etc.
The looping arrow on resources indicates that this game might have a runaway leader problem, because resources are used to gain more resources to gain more resources, etc. The game tries to migitate this by letting other players have a large influence on other player's resources. Or, to put it more bluntly, players are able to bash the leader. The fact that a player has to discard cards when he has more than seven in hand when a 7 is rolled also puts a cap on the runaway leader problem.
A player can also use his resources to try and advance towards his victory condition. In Settlers, most things that advance a player towards a winning condition are also resources themselves (villages, cities), so the decision whether to go for the victory condition or more resources is often easy, although deciding what is the most efficient way of accomplishing that is not simple. Only at the end, when a player can win the game it makes sense to obtain things that are not resources but only advance towards the victory condition. Of course, sometimes it is also necessary to obstruct another player, to keep him from winning, when you cannot win yourself.
A game that has resource schema very similar to that of Settlers is Monopoly. In Monopoly a player also tries to convert his resources into more resources, until someone wins the game by reaching the victory condition (which is the bankruptcy of everyone else). I think that in Monopoly the random factor on a player's resource is a lot bigger and the human factor smaller.
A game that is often considered the polar opposite of Monopoly (and perhaps Settlers too) is Chess, but its resource schema is remarkably similar:
You see that in Chess players also try to use their resources (pieces, boardposition, number of possible moves) to gain more resources (less pieces for opponent or trade a lesser piece for an opponents better piece, better boardposition, more moves). Chess also has a runway leader, small mistakes often lead to a loss, which is the reason why players often concede long before the game is technically over. If no player is able to run away with the game it ends in a draw.
There is no randomness in Chess (except for who plays white and black, which I omitted for clarity), but the influence a player has on the resources of the opponent is huge.
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So far, I have shown some examples of games that have binary winning conditions. In my next post (I better post this before my cat eats it again) I'll show some more schema's of games that have time as a prevalent resource and I'll explain how that affects play.
- Rene Wiersma