
Designing Twilight Struggle, the top-ranked board game - ryan_j_naughton
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/designing-the-best-board-game-on-the-planet/
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msluyter
I like Twilight Struggle a great deal, but I find its top BGG ranking somewhat
odd.

I'd wager there's a sort of selection effect: the sort of person willing to
sit down for a 2 player game in the first place is probably the sort of hard-
core gamer who enjoys highly complex brainburners, and thus is more likely to
rate it highly.

Compare that to the sort of moderate/casual boardgamer who prefers something
along the lines of 7 Wonders. The former will play 7 Wonders and (may) give it
a mediocre rating, while the latter aren't even going to try TS. Just a
theory.

And for the record, the last time I played, TS took 5 hours, but neither of us
were fluent and were thus often consulting the rules and/or stuck in analysis
paralysis.

~~~
quink
[http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/nicodv/bgg/blob/master/BG...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/nicodv/bgg/blob/master/BGG%20Top%201000%20Reanalyzed.ipynb)

Spoiler: Twilight Struggle still #1.

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zeroonetwothree
I tried playing this game but I really didn't like it. I found it way too long
and complicated. We never actually finished a game. I much prefer <1 hour
games.

So sad, since there are so few great two player games. I was really hoping
this would be one of them.

~~~
lukifer
For a great two-player game, obligatory plug for Netrunner: information
asymmetry and mind-games in a Gibsonesque cyberpunk setting.

~~~
steveklabnik
Huuuuuuge plus one here. Netrunner is such a good game. They could really work
on their templating, though, but that's Fantasy Flight...

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ansible
For those of you who haven't seen the Tabletop series [1] yet, it's a fun way
to get a feel for the many shorter board games out there. Previous seasons had
shows on Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, and King of Tokyo mentioned in the
article.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7atuZxmT954wz47aofSl...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7atuZxmT954wz47aofSlvu0zbD4YuPOF)

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jaryd
As a major Twilight Struggle fan I urge any newbies to check out:
[http://twilightstrategy.com/](http://twilightstrategy.com/)!

(I am not affiliated with twilightstrategy.com in any way)

~~~
lowboy
Twilight Strategy is fantastic. I made something to better navigate the card
strategy pages (hyperlinks between cards):

[http://twistrug.jjt.io/#/cards](http://twistrug.jjt.io/#/cards)

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finnh
I am dismayed that Connect Four has a below-average rating. Still a great game
in my book ... I burned many hours in Thailand playing this on the beach, Beer
Chang in hand.

~~~
evanb
I wouldn't be surprised if it were ultimately related to the fact that it's a
solved game. Programs exist which provably never lose. So the strategy is
known, there are (in principle, anyway) no "hard choices" that many of the
higher-ranked games have.

~~~
1123581321
Yes, it's become a poster child for "bad game" and so it's rated worse than it
deserves and lower than games that are (i my opinion) worse because so many
people have heard that it's solved.

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CurtHagenlocher
It's a computer game and not a board game, but I'm surprised that "Balance of
Power" wasn't mentioned as a predecessor.

~~~
clavalle
It started as a board game. The digital port is very recent.

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LanceH
There was a Balance of Power - geopolitical game in the 80's. It was all about
influencing various countries, nudging them left or right. Then there would be
an impasse and the missiles would start flying. It didn't seem like much of a
game to me.

~~~
firebones
Chris Crawford created the game. On the Mac, it was really a great game for
the time (1985), and I'm not sure I ever managed to win. (Blowing up the world
or losing to the Soviet Union tended to be much more likely outcomes given my
incompetence at playing brinksmanship.)

I liked it because it was probably the first turn-based game I played that
really made great use of Mac graphics featuring great interactive maps and
mock newspaper headlines summarizing the reaction to actions, along with a
frustratingly tough AI opponent.

Crawford was of an era where the interesting games were much more about
teaching and conveying the designer's worldview, and less about creating
Skinner boxes for maximizing IAP or expansion pack sales, or franchises.

The reason the missiles would always fly had a lot to do with the fact that as
a player, you had to really view it not as a confrontational game, but as a
cooperative game (with the AI) where mutually assured survival meant
concessions were more important than aggression. This is pretty much
antithetical to the conditioning in every other game of playing to win.

Some good history on the game here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_\(video_game\))

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michaelochurch
_Two-player games are attractive for a couple of reasons. First, by
definition, half the players win. People like winning, and are likely to
replay and rate highly a game they think they have a chance to win. Also, with
just one opponent, there is little downtime. You don’t have to wait while the
turn gets passed around the table to three, four or five other players. That’s
boring._

I can give some insight into why 2-player games are popular. (ETA: when I
wrote this, I missed that 3-player games do slightly better.)

I'm a guy who engineered (optimized?) the fuck out of a 4-player card game (to
minimize card-luck in a trick-taking game) called _Ambition_ :
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhHZh5IEKBDf56ExgErv4o/edit)

I succeeded in the design challenge, and I think it's a damn good game, but
the game hasn't caught on and player-number (or, for math people, player
_arity_ ) is almost certainly the biggest culprit. It takes _exactly_ 4\.
(There's a 3-player variant, but it's not as fun and I'd rather just play a
game designed for 3, like _Skat_.) The reason I bring this up is that I have
insight into what 2-player games do so well. It's cultural. A 2-player game
(or a 2-party game, like Bridge which has 2 teams of two players) is a
showdown and it's _decisive_. It develops a "mind sport" culture. There's less
of a feeling of decisivity in a 3- or 4-player game because you can't always
separate "A outplayed B and C" from "B played best but C's mistakes
unintentionally advantaged A over B and A won".

Game outcomes generally have four components: Chance, skill, strategic
interaction, and flux. Flux is minute-by-minute engagement in the game (which
can be modeled as a fluctuation in skill). Skill and flux are what we care
about. The "strategic interaction" term might seem odd, because "strategy" and
"skill" are often used interchangeably, but it actually refers to the scenario
in 3+ party games where A, seeking his own strategic goals, unintentionally
advantages B over C. This is sometimes called "strategic luck". (Or, it can
devolve into a king-maker scenario. Or it can become an influence of table
position, as in _Puerto Rico_ , that some dislike. Or it can be made a part of
the game, as in _Diplomacy_ , where people pre-arrange interaction effects--
but might defect.) It's inevitable if you have more than 2 parties. And it
makes it easy for people to feel "screwed", just as chance does, so while you
can have that element and still have a good game (just as I'd argue that
random chance doesn't make a game "bad", even if the Euro aesthetic eschews
it) you're not likely to develop the "mind sport" culture of _Go_ , _Chess_ ,
or _Bridge_ if that's the case.

I don't know for sure if this explains 2-player games getting higher ratings,
but 2-player games and variable-player games (like Texas Hold 'em, which
accommodates varying player number better than, say, a highly-engineered
trick-taking game) do the best job of catching on and developing a reputation.
A 2-player game is a showdown and a variarity game accommodates a group of
unplanned size; exactly 3, 4, or 5 limits the audience and "catch on" speed.

~~~
ghaff
A 2-person game also is also just a good match with the fact that there are
probably a lot more situations where 2 people want to play a game with each
other than there are situations where a group is available to play. (Depends
on the environment of course--school or a social gathering vs. a couple or a
couple of friends--but I suspect 2-player opportunities are a lot more common
in general.) That doesn't directly explain the high ratings for 2 person games
given that 3 is even higher but I suspect it's one reason that higher player
counts tend to have lower ratings.

~~~
acveilleux
This holds double for deep or complicated games. Trying to find 3 ASL players
will be hard outside of a convention.

