Currently working on dice/purchase/placement game. Game is fun and can be played in 15 minutes (5 play tests so far).
The question is this:
Is 20 minutes too short for a game?
Is 20 minutes too short for a game worth 15 dollars?
Are there any examples of great non-PNP games that play in under 20 minutes?
Thanks.
No!
Risk should be 20 mins
Connect 4 is 15
Checkers
Mancala
Nim
Most of my favorite obscure games also are 15 mins or less
You just play more rounds
Hi,
You can check out Jason Greeno's Pocket Kung-Fu games which have only a few cards and play in a short span of time:
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/pocket-kung-fu:-set-1
He sells his for $8.99 (at The Game Crafter). If you have more cards, it will naturally cost more to make and therefore makes more sense to sell for more. But $15 is probably okay...
If your game can pack a bunch of fun into five minutes, you're doing great.
Long game play does not necessarily equal more fun. Frankly, I do everything I can to shorten the play time of my own games.
Michael Iachini
Clay Crucible Games
In general, I think that 20 minutes are not too short as soon as you are led to replay the game.
If your game is short, which is not a problem in itself, but does not include such a variety to entice players into playing it again, it's a failure.
I think replay value is important for that kind of game. In short game, you want to have variety and depth to make each game unique.
Some games like "Hey that's my fish" lack of these features, so that after 3 games, you will not play for the next 3 years. But other games like "That's life" which are not much more complex will have a much higher replay value.
You could also make your game a multiple round game. Where each round gives you points on your final score. "King's Blood" to that by integrating an optional scoring system that accumulated from a round to another.
First, game length must be commensurate with what your target market gets out of playing the game. A five hour game is okay if your target market is willing to play five hour games and find sufficient interest in yours. A 15 minute game is okay if your target market likes that and gets sufficient enjoyment out of the game.
Second, in a century of many distractions and opportunities for leisure time, and a sharp decrease in attention spans, games are rapidly getting shorter. When people play games they are more likely to do other things (especially messing with their phones) than in the past, so they are less likely to notice or remember what’s going on and a long game simply exacerbates those problems.
Also, people value variety more than depth nowadays (related to the “cult of the new”). I recall years ago at a game designers’ meeting one person saying he wanted to play games all day but none that took more than an hour - perhaps a common attitude. If your game is short but has lots of variety so that a person can play it more times and experience more variety in a given length of time, you can satisfy this attitude.
So for marketing purposes a shorter game is more practical than a longer game.
Third, it’s a lot easier to get sufficient playtesting for a short game than for a long one. First, you can play it more times in a given length of time. Second, a short game inevitably has less to it than a long game so there is less interaction of its parts and less to fix. In this respect it’s like symmetric versus asymmetric games, there’s less to fix in symmetric games when you’re playtesting. Third, you can find more potential players for a short game than for a long one, perhaps fitting in between longer games at a playtest session.
Fourth, if your objective is to provide some kind of depth - variety is not depth - then a short game is more difficult to design than a long one. And that’s true regardless of the kind of depth you want to provide, whether gameplay depth, story/narrative depth, puzzle depth, or model/simulation depth. Depth of any kind involves players making decisions, and players make fewer decisions in shorter games. Any of those kinds of depth are going to be harder to provide as the game is shorter.
Most likely, inexperienced designers will err on the side of putting too much into a game and of making it too long.
But from the players’ point of view, the question always is the enjoyment the game provides worth the amount of time expended? And the best guide for that is playtesting the game with lots of different people from your target market.
So we can never say in general that a 15 minute game or even a five-minute game is “too short”, but it can be too short for certain kinds of game players and certain kinds of design objectives.
That is a great length for a game. That way you have time to play a game when you have a tight schedule. If you have a lot of time, you'll also have time to play many games. This is will help reach out to the little/non-gamer crowd who only likes games for a short period of time.
Great examples of non-PNP games that play in under 20 minutes?
Blokus is the obvious one, but also draughts and backgammon. Roll Through The Ages takes about 20 minutes, I think, and is pretty great, and most good push your luck games come in within that sort of play time. Single hands of most traditional card games I suspect do (If not within five), and if someone happens to have a deck on them I'd always be willing to play Rummy or Cribbage.
I can honestly say I've never felt like a game is too short. Too long, yes. Ended too abruptly, yes. Left me wanting more, yes... But that's a good thing since that just makes me excited for the next game of it... But none of these are functions of the game's length, but rather the game's structure - A 30 minute game of Fluxx is too long, while a 4 hour game of Dominant Species feels just about right. I've played a three hour game of Core Worlds (Learning game, I think it's meant to take about 1-2 hours) that's left me wanting more, and 30 minute games of Forbidden Island that felt satisfactory, while games ending abruptly tend to be caused by there being no real end game to speak of.
Unfortunately, all of the above is true, but you make it sound if there are no interest to design longer games. What If I want to make a game that last more than a hour, Is there a market for that anymore?
I think the thing I hate most about computer technology is that information overload has created people with little attention span. I hate when people play with their cell phone when playing a board game. Or I have even seen listning to music. Movies now unfold the story so fast that you do not remember what happened in the movie when the movie is over.
Side story that I probably already told: Apprently one of the kids (5-6 year old) in my family had problem watching starwars "episode IV" and keeping focus for more than 15 minutes. When I first saw star wars, I was 3 years old, I watched a double program (episode IV + V) and It was so awesome that I would be willing to see episode VI the same day.
So yes attention span is a real problem that board game designer will have to consider in the future. Will there be eventually a remedy for it, I hope someday they will be one.
Draughts/checkers is much longer than 20 minutes when played be experts, isn't it? I suspect Blokus takes more than 20 minutes when played "seriously".
Which makes me think, some games get longer when played by experts - that's why we have chess clocks - while other games get shorter. E.g. Britannia is 7 or so hours when played by novices, 4-5 (and sometimes less) when played by experts. What makes the difference? Perhaps if the game is puzzle-like - chess and checkers can be solved, there is always a best move - then with experts the game takes longer, while if the game cannot be solved, with experts it takes less time to play?
You provide interesting examples.
I don't see any amelioration of the attention span problem, not in my lifetime anyway. A drastic change in "civilization circumstances" will be required.
You can design games for longer attention spans and so on, but publishers hear what the majority of the market says. Even in niche markets, such as wargames, the trend is to simpler, shorter games. And in a niche market, you must have something that fits the niche, you cannot design whatever you want.
When I began to offer the third edition(s) of Britannia to publishers, one of them immediately said it'll have to be cut down drastically, much too long. I expect the new 90 minute version will garner much more interest than the 4-5 hour version, from the marketplace, even though the long version has a long and successful history.
I think in Britania, you just have to get used with the game and especially have a player push the game forward (control the game flow, says who's turn it is to play, ask if they finished their turn, etc). While chess and company, the better you are the more possibilities and things you will try to calculate than a novice player, this is why it takes more time.
One of the problem is that many people are not even aware of it.
I think the key would be to have a game where you don't see the time passing. But not only it's hard to identify which factor can give such experience, it will also not convince the publisher that your 5 hour game is played like in 1 hour.
WOW, a 90 minute britania, that would be interesting to try. A similar short game is vinci and small world which fits in this time frame, but they removed the combat rolls to do so.
When I designed fallen kingdoms, inspired on Britania, I wanted to keep the combat rolls, but it seem that in the new revision I am working on I found a way to reduce the nb of rolls which should accelerate a bit the game, but not enough to cut an hour out of it. I expect maybe a 30 minute cut since now when the end game condition arrives, player's does not finish their turn. So that accelerates a bit the game, I would be curious to see how faster the game is.
Meh. Its easy to complain about "kids these days" and remember the past with rose colored glasses, but I played a games from a klutz book that had 50 games where the trickiest was backgammon.
My parents played Go Fish and Old Maid.
Now Game of Thrones 2nd edition is a thing. 13 year olds are having panic attacks, summer is shorter, school days are longer, summer school and tutoring are foregone conclusions and in their spare time some students put hours upon hours into games like WoW. All and all I think kids these days even out to about the same
Casual games always have and always will sell, probably always better than strategy intensive games, because they reach a wider market. But lets not get too hopped up on the trend being towards simpler and shorter when the whole eurogames trend is still fairly new.
I think I am going to make a thread about designing games for short attention span people.
Even the big version of Britannia can be accelerated, I've devised a version that I play in 2 hours, but it's still got the complexity of the parent game, and likely won't be included in Epic Britannia.
Conquer Britannia, the short standalone game, has been played in 1:24. Three of the four had played before. But it doesn't have the scope or gameplay depth of the big game, of course.
Recognizing that older generations typically complain about "kids", only someone who wasn't alive 50 years ago thinks there is no difference in generations. Businesses certainly recognize that generations are different and must be approached differently. Teachers recognize differences. As a retired teacher, and historian, I recognize there are real differences in how people approach games (and life) now than 50 years ago. And if we go back much further, differences are also quite striking. Ignore at your peril.
Talk to game (and book) publishers. They know, too.
Don't you think its possible that people of retirement age have just a little bit of a skewed perspective on their own memories? I know I do. And I know when I ask my sister about our childhood I get a different answer about what the 80s was like.
Are generations identical? Of course not, is this one in particular going to hell in a handbasket with inattention? No.
But you are a historian, so clearly you know this was claimed by every generation. You know what Plato said about the decaying youth. You might even know about Saint Benedict and his begrudging reforms in the 2nd century to monastic life thanks to the kids these days. You know about the youth revolutions in the 1920s, and the 1960s... the 1510s, the 1830s...
And you know above all as a student of history and as one who imparts the knowledge and importance of history to others that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and that history smiles more on the Martin Luther Kings who have a dream for the youth, than on the McCarthys who have a fear. Because the Kings are usually right.
Is 15 minutes too short a time for a game? No. A game--play--needn't take a long time to achieve its objective: pleasure for the players. As an educator, I need a variety of mini-games which I can use to fill available time at the close of a lesson, or to introduce a concept at the beginning of a lesson. I encourage my students to continue playing with the subject material between lessons, and these mini-games are excellent for the purpose. Here's an example. It's called "Collocation".
Begin with a single word (e.g. word). Players must compose an extended chain of collocations, beginning with this word. The player who contributes the last word is the loser (because giving a word for which there is no collocation causes the game to stop).
Player 1: word
Player 2: word play
Player 1: play a game
Player 2: game face
Player 1: face the music
Player 2: sheet music
Player 1: white as a sheet
...and so on.
Play for five minutes or five hours.
Occasionally I run into people who are absolutely convinced that there are no generational differences, even though businesspeople widely recognize and account for such differences. Think about this and then ask yourself why my point of view as a Baby Boomer is very different from the point of view of a Millennial (30 and under, more or less):
When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, if you were lucky you had three black and white television networks to watch instead of two, there was no Internet and consequently no e-mail, no cell phones, slide rules not personal computers (or printers, CDs, or DVDs), no World Wide Web, no Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube. A long distance call of any length cost real money. I first saw color TV in a person's house when I was 10 (trick-or-treat: the owners let the kids come in and see their cool color TV). Books and magazines were the major sources of information, not radio, not TV, not the Internet.
Music was on 8-track tapes and vinyl LPs (33 and 45 revolutions per minute, though older 78 still existed). If you wanted to watch a movie, if on TV you stayed up after 11 (old movies only), or you went to a theater, there was no way to record a movie other than film. If you wanted a single song after its initial popularity you had to luckily find an out-of-print 45 or you bought an entire album. Or, once cassette tape became available (but by this time I was an adult), you recorded it from the radio.
There was no instant replay on sporting events because videotape had not been perfected. There was no three point shot in basketball, dunks were illegal for a few years, and high school women's basketball was played six a side with only two allowed to play both offense and defense. There not only was no Superbowl, the NFL championship was not televised until several years after I was born.
Communication satellites came into use when I was a teenager, before then our foreign news came onto TV only with voice, via telephone undersea cables. The biggest recent events in the minds of adults were World War II, the Korean War (I was born during the Korean War), and the continuing Cold War. Nuclear Annihilation was on everyone's mind, an ever-present danger. (When I was 11 I walked home from school a few miles, alone, to test the possibility for sending everyone home that way if the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into a war.) Terrorism was something that happened far, far away.
My mother had grown up during the Great Depression. She would do things like collect the little bits of bar-soap left after use and melt them together to make new multi-colored bars for us to use. Waste not, want not. How many people do anything like that today, even the officially poor people?
Makes for a quite different point of view. Yes, I know what Plato says that Socrates said about young people. This is not "oh, old people always say that", this is a result of real differences in life and culture.
You only walked home once? Not every day? in the snow, uphill both ways?
Let me ask you, when you were a 20-something in the late 60s early 70s, what did you hear from the 60 year old former teachers of the last generation?
Did you hear that kids these days don't have any respect? Did you hear they don't take responsibility and pay enough attention? Did you hear that they were spoiled rotten?
If you pressed them would they tell you about how as a child they didn't have none pf those new fangled televisions, just the radio, and you couldn't decide what station you wanted out of hundreds either, because only one or two would be coming in well.
Would they tell you about growing up in the dust bowl during the great depression, about the banks going belly up, about the unemployment? Would they tell you about the war and what real fear is like? None of this sissy cold war "I might have to fight you but I really don't want to" stuff they would say, we had Hitler! And all the respectable young men did their part, they didn't grow their hair out and sing Whitney songs about the problem like these Hermen's monkey-crickets of yours.
When those people were in their 20s, what do you suppose the older generation thought of them? What stories did they tell? About the great war perhaps? And never even having a radio but getting updates about your loved ones via newsreels at the nickelodeon?
When the post-millennials are in their late 20s... The people being born now, what do you think I'll tell them about the way things used to be?
Because I think I'll tell them about the 90s, when I saw my first car phone in a limo. I'll try to explain how the internet used to run on phones, and then I'll remember that their conception of what a phone is is more advanced than what I would have called an awesome computer back then.
I'll definitely tell them where I was when the terrorists attacked, and the war that followed, and the crash, the banks closing... I'll tell them how I had to move halfway across the country to find a good job, towing everything I owned in a car that ran on dinosaur bones.
How will my argument compare to yours? Worse? Better?
How does yours compare to the WWII heroes?
How does theirs compare to their predecessors?
Seems to me they are about equally good.
Maybe there was a major drop off in attention and responsibility somewhere along that line, but do you really want to stand by the argument that the breaking point is the difference between 8-tracks and CDs?
Look mate, we seem to be talking at cross purposes. I'm saying that generational differences derive from different experiences. This is not a matter of "respect" or of older generation complaining about younger. Of course they do, just as younger complains about older, but it's *irrelevant.* Do you think my 60 year old teachers didn't have different attitudes about a lot of things than I did/do? And with your experience much different than mine, do you think your attitudes and mine are the same? Hell, no. *And that's the point.*
And yes, experts do generalize about entire generations. When someone says Gen X people tend to identify with the Lone Hero, while Millennials are more into groups and sharing, that's a distinct difference in attitudes. When any generational expert will tell you that Millennials are much more likely to give up if something is hard (no "easy button") than were previous generations, that's a difference in attitude. The point of my list - and yes, wise guy, I did walk home from school at least once in a snowstorm - is that my experiences are very different from a millennials'.
Try reading the following for some examples of how people in the real world recognize generational differences.
http://icanstilldothat.org/upcoming-events/reverse-mentoring/managing-mi...
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display...
Unfortunately I only have a paper copy (somewhere...) of the journal article I've seen with the most extensive description and references.
I think the idea is not to argue if short attention span is good or bad. Same thing when people want no challenge. Of course our generation thinks other wise and we would like it not to happen this way. But the important thing is to know those differences and adapt our design in consequence especially if you want to sell your game.
It does not mean that all video games must offer the option to pay to cheat the game, but at least to consider that some people will want to play at dummy difficulty and have not challenge at all.
Same thing for a board game, if short attention span is a problem, use some design guide lines that will make the game more friendly to them. On BGG, some person mentioned the idea of getting feedback about you actions rapidly. That is the idea behind playing with your cell phone, you get positive feedback rapidly.
Some push it too much. My girlfriend talked to me about face book game where each game you can play about 5 minutes and then you are out of energy. So you must constantly switch from a game to another. In that case, those kind of games are strictly designed for short attention span people.
Actually Lar, I'd say those games are designed for people who have longer attention spans than that, and the timer cuts them off before they want to quit to get they to buy more game time.
And Lew, You may be right, we may be ships passing in the night on this one. I've consistently said that I am not saying there exist no differences, and you keep responding with arguments that there are differences.
Is the question "are millennials different from Gen-Xers?" and "Do they have statistically significant differences in trending attributes?"
Absolutely yes. We can agree on that
But if the question "Do kids these days have a shorter attention span than previously" the answer is no.
Are kids these days lacking in responsibility and understanding ofthe value of hard work? No and No.
Right now millennials give up more easily than Gen-Xers, yes. That's because the millennials are teenagers.
If you want to compare apples to apples and look at teenage millennial to teenage Gen-Xers, to teenage boomers for that matter I think you will find that millennial lead the pack in at least trying things that are hard, even if most of them aren't grown up enough to follow through on them yet. Post-Milenials will probably beat them.
No, they don't have the attention span boomers have now, but I've got news, neither did you when you were that age. Or in your list of anecdotes about the good ol' days did you forget that TV shows were half as long, 25% fewer of you went to college, and the entire Hardy Boys anthology could fit printed inside Harry Potter, and The Order Of the Phoenix
Again I think this balances out to about the same. I'm not saying there are no differences, and I'm not saying millennials are bigger better stronger. I'm saying we pick and choose the data that fits our presumptions, and our presumptions tend to be that younger generations are more infantile, and we have always been as mature as we are today.
Short story about television, they made a study that compared slow paced kids TV show vs fast paced kids TV show (ex: sponge bob) and they found that kids watching fast paced TV show were more likely to have short attention span problem.
Even in movies, I think the pacing of the events and the story are much faster than what they were 10-20 years ago. So I think short attention span is getting more and more common in the recent generations than the previous generations.
It's absolutely true that movies on average are more fast paced than they used to be.
They are also longer, higher budget (even adjusted for inflation) and all around better on average. Although some gems stand out from among the classics they were the best of the best of the best, and we've forgotten the lots and lots of junk that was made.
Do you think out capacity to eat more calories per day than our great great grandparents did is indicative of the fact that this generation requires more nourishment, or do you think it is more likely a result of the greater availability of inexpensive food?
I would say B due to the industrialisation of food production.
Probably the same with movies (everyone prefers sprouts that don't drag, they are just more available now)
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