Asymmetrical gameplay - how does one achieve it ?

War of the Ring has extremely asymmetrical gameplay--different cards, units, actions, positions, dice, victory conditions, etc. Not being experienced with wargames, i do think this is more common in that realm...

My favorite game as a teenager, Illuminati, has asymmetrical start positions and asymmetrical winning conditions, but you play by the same rules more or less...

Castles of Burgundy has different boards, which give people very different ways to score points...

i guess, as far as that goes, lots of games have different start and end conditions--depending on your starting cards/characters/etc.

Sorry if that wasn't useful, just thinking about it since i find the idea interesting...

This has been something I've been wondering about myself. I think rather than having different goals, the key might be in the units themselves act. I've heard the old Dune game was very good about balancing very different forces, but I haven't played it myself. I don't know of too many card games which do this (other than Illuminati, perhaps), but there are a number of tabletop games which are good about balancing different forces (Warmachine, Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, or even Heroclixs, to an extent) you can look at for inspiration, though you only have to look at how frequently rules are revised for those games to see how difficult it can be to find a balance that's "just right."

I think you bring up a good example with Starcraft. I think part of the reason why Starcraft works well is that there's only three different armies you can play with, which is far easier to balance than if there were five or more different factions.

When you look in more detail at how the forces are balanced, I think there's a couple of things that stand out. If you look at the overall strategy of each type, you'll see that the Zerg can build a large force cheaply, while the Protoss have probably the most elite units of each type, but at a high cost, while the Terrans are somewhere in between. They have versatile forces which are more powerful (and expensive) than the Zerg, but which aren't quite as elite (or costly) as the equivalent Protoss units (i.e. Battlecruisers are pretty awesome, but they cannot wreck as much havoc and devastation as a Carrier).

When you break it down further, you can see that for every unit one force has, the other two have an effective counter. Look at how easily a group of Scourge can take down a Carrier, or how effective Firebats are against Zerglings, or how easily Zerglings can overwhelm Dragoons. No matter how powerful a unit is, or how fast it is to build them, there's always a counter. Once you can get each of the different factions essentially playing an elaborate game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, you know you've got a good balance of asymetrical units. I think that might be a good place to start - figure out a basic unit for one faction, then see how you can create an effective counter which acts in a radically different way. Once you have one basic unit for each type (i.e. light infantry), then look at how you might create units which are effective against (or vulnerable to) those basic units (i.e. heavy infantry, vehicles, etc).

edit: For your adventure game idea, what if the Good Guys were strong, but once killed, were permanently eliminated from the game (or at least given a long cool-down or other severe setback), while the Bad Guys could summon/create hordes of minions. The minion hordes would be weaker than the Good Guys, but could be replaced with little cost, so the Bad Guys could be more aggressive with their units while the Good Guys might be more risk averse.

If I would develop an asymmetrical gameplay, I immediately think of chess. The sicilian game is a good example of what it means: 1.e4 c5 ... and there are many choices after that. The point is, that the black is playing (in means of location) on his Queen's side, instead of countering on the King's side. I mean, the figures have an ultimately different position when they are played on the other side. They are attacked in a different way and they attack different figures. So the players are seemingly playing the same game, moving figures here and there, but all the tactics and strategy is really different. White plays to attack the opponent's King, while defending his own, while black tries to overwhelm the white on the other side of the board to achieve some avantage, capture one more pawn or so. The sicilian game is very typical and very dynamic in tactical way, and popular among the chess players.

The key to asymmetry is, that the players are playing ... not the same. They decide, which approach they wish to play and they still have the possibility of winning. But, the board games differ from chess. Definitely one should include more playstyles than just one or two to make the gameplay asymmetrical, while all possibly leading to win. There comes the difficulty of balancing all the games to make the approaches equal. Otherwise, everyone would play only the strongest one, and the game wouldnt be asymmetric, but a race to be the fastest. A countering mechanic (r-p-s) is always good.

hope i helped, kviki

Surely most 1 vs many games have opposed or completely different win conditions depending on your side? Or at least differing alternate ways to win. Is this what you were looking for?