1/2/15 Episode 189: Ten Things Every Board Game Needs--Rules

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So today is another one of my series! So today I’m going to revisit a series I’m calling Ten Things Every Game Needs. So I had done a—started with a speech I gave my daughter’s fifth grade class, which turned into an article,  which turned into a podcast, which has now turned into a series of podcasts!

So in my speech/article/podcast, I talk about ten things that every game needs. I’m now doing ten individual podcasts where I talk about each one of those things by itself. So the first one in the series was all about a goal or goals. So the second one is rules. So today I’m going to talk about why a game needs rules, and what rules do for a game.

Okay. So to start, last time I talked about needing a goal. So the first thing you have to say is, what are your players trying to do? How do you win the game? What’s the point of the game? The next thing you need is you start to make rules.

So let me explain what that means exactly, and why they’re so important. So what rules are, is it tells players what they can and can’t do. And the reason is, when I talk about the point of games, the idea of a game is something that creates—allows you to have a mental challenge. And part of having a challenge is, games by their nature need to have obstacles in them.

So I talked about this a bit in my article, I think on the podcast too, about how normally when you design something, what you’re trying to do is make it as obvious and as simple as possible. An example I always use is, you’re designing a lamp.

Well, what do you want a lamp to do? Well, normally you want the lamp—you want to understand very simply how to use the lamp. How do I turn it on? How do I turn it off? If I need to move it, how do I move it? Everything about it needs to be as simple as possible. That good design is elegant and obvious.

But games are a little bit different. The point of a game is to create the challenge. So part of creating the challenge is, you the person making the game have to build obstacles in. If the goal is to do Thing A, and Thing A is simple to do, then there’s no challenge there.

So one of the reasons the rules exist is that you’re trying to create obstacles. Rules help you make obstacles. So for example, let’s say the goal is “Go do A.” Well, what you want to think of when you’re writing your rules are, what are the simplest and easiest ways you would accomplish that? And then make rules that prevent you from doing that.

That the rules are designed to create the challenge. To make the obstacles. So the very first thing rules want to do is make sure that your goal is not easy. Because the point of a game, and a puzzle, is to make sure that your goal is hard to get. That the fun of a game is overcoming the obstacles to get to the goal.

Now, be aware, there’s a couple different types of obstacles. But really I’ll boil down to there’s two major types of obstacles. Obstacle one is the game, obstacle two are the other players. So when you create your rules, you are doing both.

So obstacles for the game means, to win the game players have to do Thing X. So the rules might say, “Oh, well you can’t…” Like for example, there’s a game called Taboo. So the game of Taboo is, here’s a word. You have to get your players to say a word. You can say anything you want to get your players to say this word. You can talk, and they’ve got to say the word. Oh wait, oh wait a minute, there is one small thing. There are five words you can’t say.

Now, those five words aren’t any five words. They’re the five words that are the most obvious words you’d want to use. Right? So Taboo, right off the bat, says, “Okay, we’re giving you a challenge, but then we’re going to make it hard by taking away the very things you would go to first.”

So if I’m trying to describe Elvis, and it doesn’t let me say “singer” or… I don't know, “Presley,” or “country,” or “song,” or “music,” it gets harder to go, “Oh, well how do I get there?” And that’s the key of a game is that they’re trying to create the obstacles in there.

Scattergories, for example. I’m going to give you some party games today. So Scattergories is a game where you have categories, and you have to find things in categories. But it gives you the letters you have to use. So it might say, “Okay, think of animals,” but then you get the letter N. Well, thinking of animals in a vacuum is not hard. Thinking of animals starting with N? A little trickier. Turns out there’s not a lot of animals that start with N. Nightingale, narwhal. There’s a few.

Okay. So number one is, your game is creating obstacles for the game to get in the way of the players. That’s number one. The second thing is, it is creating obstacles by usually pitting the players against each other. Now, there are cooperative games. But a traditional game, there’s one winner. I’m talking about that today. There are plenty of cooperational games.

So there are games in which the teams are all working together, like… there are definitely games in which it’s you, the players, vs. the game, and that would be more of the first category, where the game creates the obstacles.

In a lot of games, though, there is the other players. And the reason the other players are a good obstacle is a couple things. Number one, which is part of the fun of playing a game is having interesting obstacles. Well, other players create very interesting obstacles. You as a game designer, you can build things in, but you’re not going to come up with some of the things that the players will come up with.

Especially because the players usually know each other and have some dynamic, and that part of the fun of a game is social interaction. I did not list social interaction as one of the ten things every game needs, but it is one of the things that every game, through the things I’ve already listed, one of the things we’re trying to create is social interaction. I mean, games are about mental challenge, but they also are about interacting with other people. I mean, obviously not solitaire games. But most games aren’t solitaire.

So making the other players obstacles does a bunch of things. One, it creates more challenges that the game designer doesn’t have to distinctively make. Two, it also makes a lot of interesting dynamics, which is if you and I both want the same thing, oh, well now I have to sort of think about what you’re going to do.

And trying to outthink other players is very, very interesting. When a game designer makes a game, there is only so many things that they  can do to sort of provide obstacles. Having that extra layer, having other players means that you have to sort of fight the elements of the game, which the game designer did, but also the other players that can come up with stuff that the game designer won’t.

A very—so the most common way to do this is, if you have a singular winner, and there’s a singular goal, and only one person can win, then the other players become obstacles because they want to do the thing before you do the thing.

So for example, I’ll use—so Diplomacy. Or Risk, really. Where you have a map and you’re trying to get control of certain—certain areas are valuable, and if you can get control of them you up the strength of your army, if you will.

And so the game is about conflict, where you’re fighting other people to try to get control of that. So in this kind of game, what’s interesting is, I have to interact with other players to figure out how to maneuver this, and the game designer can create a board that allows interesting dynamics, but then the players get to add on top of that… for example, the way Diplomacy works is, you have to talk with other people and try to—there’s a lot of—in order for me to do what I need to do, I need other people to help me and support me. And there’s a lot of tradeoffs. And so Diplomacy’s all about, “Okay, I will help you here if you help me there.”

But there’s a lot—a thing about Diplomacy is sometimes, you have to betray somebody. Or you do something where you change alliances because  you realize the alliance you have isn’t going to get you as far as a different alliance.

And all of that, all the interaction and stuff, I mean Diplomacy built into it means to make people have to do this kind of interaction. But still, there’s also great fun in the interaction. Like, one of the things I noticed is, when you play a game, and we’ll get to strategy later on in this series. But one of the fun things is, as you play, you start to learn new and different ways to handle things.

And so the nice thing about having people as one of your obstacles is, people will learn, and that means the game will stay with the player. The game sort of increases in difficulty level as the players increase because it has other players learning along with them.

Okay. So that’s the number one thing. Rules will provide obstacles, and obstacles are crucial to any game. The other thing that’s really important, or there’s a bunch of things, is rules create structure. So one of the things that is very important is, structure is a very important part of games. That what you’re trying to do is create a system. And if the system is too chaotic, then it breaks down. If players could just do anything they want, then it starts to become problematic, because where are the lines drawn?

I have definitely played some games that played fast and loose with the rules, and the problem you run into with gamers is, they assume that if you don’t say you can’t do it, then you can do it,  and all of a sudden there’s things that get very meta in the game.

There’s things in which the game designer assumed no one could ever change that, so they don’t state it. And the… game players are… one of the things you’ll learn, I like to joke that the game players are the Borg. So the Borg on the show Star Trek, Star Trek the Next Generation, were this alien race that whenever you threw a weapon at them, they learned from it. And then the next time you tried to use that weapon, it was immune to it because they’d figured out how to counteract it.

And so I joke that the game players are kind of like the Borg. Like, whatever trick you throw at them, they’re going to learn from it. You can’t use the same thing twice. And that Magic is always bending over backwards trying to figure out new ways to sort of throw things at the players that they don’t expect. Because stuff we’ve done before, they do expect.

So one of the things that rules do that’s very, very important is you need to create a sense of structure for your audience. That you need to let them know what they can and can’t do. And sort of connected to this is boundaries. So create structure, so it allows you to know what you can do within the context, and it creates a boundary that tells you what’s out of bounds.

And that is very important, because game players—there is no out of bounds for a game player. That game players will like, I need to do this, okay. And you need to tell them what they can’t do. So one of the things that’s really important when creating rules is it’s just as important to define what they can’t do as what they can do. Because if you tell them what they can do, and assume that it will imply what they can’t do, players will take it very literally.

Rules, for example—since rules are a sort of mental challenge, a game player says, “Okay. I will follow the rules to the letter of the law. But anything the rules allow that they don’t expressly forbid are within the context.

And so as a designer—on some level, so one of the things that’s very interesting, by the way, when you make rules, is you kind of have to put on a lawyer hat. You kind of have to act like a lawyer. Because your players will try—you need to be crystal clear and letter perfect in what you are trying to say, because the players will work under your rules to try to figure out what they can and can’t do. And if you’re not explicit, they will take advantage of loopholes. They will definitively take advantage of loopholes.

And so one of the things I always say is, when you think you understand your game, you have your rules, write the rules down. And then what you need to do is show it to somebody who doesn’t know your game. And then, after they read the rules, without any guidance from you—in fact, probably you don’t even want to be in the room. One of the things we often do when we’re testing out games is we do—we put them behind a two-way mirror. It’s what’s called “focus testing.”

For example, some of the times we’ll put the game in a room, have two new players that have never played before, and nothing else. Nothing. The game. They have the rules as written in the game. No other person to help them. And see what they can do.

And people go astray really, really easily. In fact, rule-writing is insanely hard. And so what I recommend is, once you think you have your rules, get a person that doesn’t know your game. What I would recommend is, giving them the rules, and then getting some questions. But first let them look at the rules. Put your questions in like a little envelope or something. And say, okay. Read the rules. Once you think you understand the rules, answer these questions.

And then see how they answer the questions. You will be quite surprised. The other thing like we do in focus testing also is you can give them the instructions and just let them start playing. And see what they do. That also is very, very valuable. But just let them start playing. How do they think the game works when reading the rules.

Rules are insanely, insanely hard, and you need to have the rules early, and you need to work on them. Just as you need to iterate the game, you need to iterate your rules. And one of the things that’s very—so one of the things I’ll often talk to new designers is, okay.

You want to understand rules, so let’s start by not even making your own game. Let’s take an existing game. The game I always recommend is Tic-Tac-Toe. Let’s take Tic-Tac-Toe and write out the rules for Tic-Tac-Toe. Write them all. And then, what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to look back at them and see, did you really list everything?

And what I find is, as a good experiment, when I have people write the rules to Tic-Tac-Toe, usually when I look at them, they leave things out. They don’t have all of them. That they don’t assume corner cases or they don’t answer things like something as simple as who goes first. That there’s lots of questions that—and Tic-Tac-Toe is a simple game. That is not a complex game. But when you write out Tic-Tac-Toe, you will realize how many rules you have to write. That even a game as simple as Tic-Tac-Toe has a lot of rules, and that it is a lot more complex than you think.

Rule-writing is the kind of skill that will take you a lifetime to master. It’s that hard. But I do say if you’re trying to make a game, write the rules down, write it often. And so once again, make sure you declare what your boundaries are, what is off-limits for the game. And then, make sure that the rule are properly structuring your game.

One of the things I recommend when writing rules is to have a turn sequence. It’s to let players know—well, what you want to do is you want to bite-size your rules, which says, the game has an increment. It’s usually a turn, it may not be a turn. Your game has an increment. For that increment, explain exactly to the players what happens each time during the run of the increment. Usually it’s a turn.

But it’s sort of like, okay, beginning of the turn, this happens. And then this happens. And that what players really need is, they need a schedule. They need an outline. They need something that says, okay, when you’re playing, and it is very, very handy to give the player something visual that breaks down what they need to do.

Figure out the most important things you need. Not everything, but the most important things. And give them a nice strong visual so they can see, okay. On a normal turn, or whatever the increment is, I do the following things in the following order.

Okay, next. Rules also set expectations. So one of the things about rules is, when you first start teaching somebody a game, the very first thing you teach them, I talked about this last time, is the goal. What’s the point of the game? The second thing you teach them are the rules.

Notice when I first put this speech together, I put these things in order for a reason. It’s not in order of importance, but it’s in order of explaining what things are happening. And they are done in a more specific order to explain things. So when you talk to someone about a game, the very first thing is you’ll tell them the goal, what’s the point of the game. But the thing that follows that is, I’m now going to outline the rules.

So the way I like to talk about rules is, there are broad rules and narrow rules. So the way to think of it is, make a little triangle if you will. And at the broad end is “you cannot play the game.” If you don’t know this rule, you cannot play this game. This rule is essential for this game. Then on the bottom end, the narrow end is, this will only happen in certain corner cases. But in this corner case, you need to know this rule.

So in Magic, it’s very clear that a basic rule might be how to cast a spell. Well, you need to know that before you can ever possibly play. But a narrow rule might be what happens in the interaction between two specific cards. Well, it can come up, those two cards can be played, but unless those two cards come up in the same game interacting with each other, that’s not going to happen.

So one other thing you want to do with your rules is you want to write your rules from the broadest rules to the narrowest rules. And that when you explain to people, as a general rule of thumb, there’s some exceptions here, you want to start with your broadest rules first. You want to explain to them what they have to know.

And here’s another important thing, which is that you want to have in your rules a quick version of the rules. You want to have a breakdown. And what the quick version is, is only the [broad] stuff. You want to learn how to play, here’s—essentially what I normally say to players is, here’s the quick rules. Which implies to the audience, it doesn’t explain everything, but it explains enough for you to start playing. And here are the full rules that explain everything.

The reason that you don’t want people to read the full rules usually is, there’s just a lot of narrow things they don’t need to know. And having to know things that might not come up for fifty games before they can play the first game just makes it harder to learn. So quick rules are really, really important. And quick rules are just your [broadest] rules.

I do find a good practice to write your rules from the widest to the narrowest. To understand really what your audience needs to know. You also will find that a lot of those, they’re connective. In that the widest rules tend to link together, and that there’s a process where you get down to the narrow rules.

One of the things, by the way, that’s very, very important about rules, I say this about Magic all the time, which is, it is not important by the end of your first game that your players understand everything. They need to understand enough to be able to play again. I will repeat that, because that is very important. It is not crucial, when you finish your first game, that your players know everything. What they need to know at the end of the first game is enough to play the second game.

It is okay in your game if players come across something they’ve never come across before, and they have to figure out what to do. You need to provide the resources for them to figure that out, but don’t be afraid of that. If you make your players have to understand every rule before they can play, it will overwhelm them, and a lot of players will stop.

Now, there are definitely people that like to read the whole rulebook before they start. I’m not saying there aren’t players that want to do that. But a lot of players, it’s like, “Tell me what I need to know.” And that’s another very good thing about the spy method of game teaching. Need to know. Which is, only tell the players the things that at that moment they need to know.

You’re teaching a game—I mean, this is true in rules, this is true when you’re teaching a game, is assume your players are going—the reason I do the widest to the narrowest and the reason I have you go in order is, when you write rules, assume at any moment your players could stop reading the rules and start playing.

Because that is what happens. I’ve done a lot of focus testing. The average player does not get through the whole rules. They read enough rules until they think they get the gist of it, and then they start to play. So put your important rules first. Put your widest rules first, so the players see them. And then the narrow rules can come later.

Because what will happen is, they’ll read a little bit, get the gist of it, start to play, and when they get in trouble, that’s when they go back to the rules to figure out what’s going on. They do not read all the rules first. Because most people do not. So it’s very, very important to understand that.

Now remember that the rules are the introduction to the game. When people are trying to learn, it’s the starting point for learning. And that’s important to realize. That you can’t assume before your players read the rules that they’ve read anything. Don’t assume they’ve read the box, don’t assume they’ve talked to people that already played, don’t assume they’ve looked at the pieces. Assume nothing.

But—and then one of the things, by the way, that’s very important to do in your rules early on, very early on, is to find the pieces of your game. Because the players want to look at the pieces, and they might look at the pieces before the rules. I’m just saying you can’t assume they do. But what you want to do very early on is to find what’s in the box, assuming it’s a game in a box. If it’s an online game, video games are different in that they can hide pieces. That it’s hard to hide in a game that’s in a box.

In a box, I’ve got to give you all the pieces. You’re going to see the pieces. So what I want to do in a game that you’re getting, a physical game, is very early, I define the pieces, so you can go, “These are the things, move on.” Because if you don’t tell the players what they are, what’s in the box, they want to start figuring them out. If you say to them, “Here’s the things you have,” and you name them, and say, “Okay, now let’s start talking,” they’ll go, “Okay, you’ll explain to me as I get along. As I get there, you’ll explain to me.”

Video games, one of the huge legs up video games have on rules is, video games can do tutorials in a way that paper games cannot. Which is, they can hide the pieces in the box. They have a computer that can help teach people. They can have you do levels that are doing nothing but teaching you components of how to play.

So video games are very, very different. A lot of the—what I’m saying today about rules is true for video games, you need these rules. As far as how you teach them to other players and how it’s presented is very, very different. I’m talking a little more paper games.

There’s a whole talk on how video games function and how you teach people video games, which is important. Not my area of expertise. So I’m going to talk about paper games. A lot of what I’m saying applies. But the way it’s handled is a little bit different.

But anyway, my point is, it’s always important to remember that your rules start as the starting point for most players.

So it’s like—early in your rules, another thing you want to do very early, and you don’t spend a lot of time, make sure you spend just a little bit of time giving context to what you’re trying to do. I’ll later talk about why flavor is so important. But this is where flavor links with rules. If the players get the gist of what’s going on, and the game has spent a lot of time and energy making that flavor work, use the flavor to your benefit.

For example, Magic is a game of people dueling with magic. You are summoning creatures. You’re getting sorceries. You’re doing things the average player might get a general gist of, “Oh, I see.” And if you can explain to them—like flying is a good example in Magic. Where a creature that flies.

Well, once I explain to you the rules of flying, really what I’m saying is, “You know, flying. If this flies, this creature that doesn’t fly can’t block it.” And your audience will go, “Oh, right, okay, this flies.” Like all of a sudden, you’ve taken something that could be complex and simplifies it, because the flavor simplifies it. And I’ll get to flavor in a different podcast. When you’re using your rules, make sure your flavor is aiding you, that you’re using your flavor in the rules to explain them.

Okay. The other thing that the rules do is they help create a relationship between the different players. Because one of the things that happens when you start playing the game is, assuming there’s more than one player, which most games have more than one player, is like, what’s the context here? Are we all on equal footing? Are we all trying to do the same thing? Are some               of us trying to do one thing and some of us trying to do other? Are we working together? What exactly is the parameter and relationship between the players? The rules have to establish that, and usually do a good job of saying, “Here’s the role we have.”

The most common role is we are fighting over a task that one of us need to accomplish. Now, by the way, there are some games in which everybody but one person wins. There are some games obviously where one person wins. There are some games in which you’re working together where you all win or you all lose. The rules have to help define that. And it’s important for the rules to—players want to know the parameters of who they are and how they interact with other players. So it’s important that the rules establish that.

Okay. Another thing that rules do is they even the playing field/provide opportunities for handicaps. So let me explain. What you want is that when players come, you want to make sure that the players feel as if they have an equal chance to other players. That there’s a fairness that’s supposed to come with the rules. There’s certain expectations that players bring to a game. There’s certain things that come from other games.

Like one of the things I talked a lot about when I studied movies is, my teacher explained to us that over the years, movies have created shorthand. And that current movies get to use—not even get to use, have to use the shorthands that came before them. To a certain extent. That when you do something, viewers have learned to expect something. That when you cut from one place to another place, that means something. And that wasn’t always true, but a film did it, other films built upon it, and it created this language of film.

Games are similar. There’s a language of games. So one of the things that is assumed when you start a game is that every player has equal footing. Now, that doesn’t mean that has to be true, but if it’s not, your game up-front has to make sure players understand that.

Netrunner was a game created by Richard Garfield, in which each player—there’s two players, and they  played different sides. Now, the different sides means they have different roles. And that you have to define that. And there are other games in which different people are playing different roles. It’s key, though, the rules need to define that because people walking into it have expectation that everyone’s playing on equal footing.

Now, on the flip side, the other thing the rules do or rules should do is be a tool by which if things aren’t equal, that you can help handicap. So one of the things that is an important part of the game is, that you the game [designer], if you believe that all your players are of equal footing skill-wise, and don’t give your game any ability to adjust, you will make it harder for different skill levels to play each other.

Now, good game players will often handicap themselves and such. But it is nice if your game allows the chance for you to do that, and the rules need to be built in such a way usually—handicap is not something you have to talk about early, that comes much, much later in the rules. But it’s nice if you build into your game within the rules means by which if there’s a differential between the skill level of your players, that the game can handle that.

Now, there are ways the players will externally do that. Especially in a team game when you get to pick teams, they can pick teams to balance on what they think is fair. So a weaker player might be paired with a stronger player. But it is important, in your rules, that you provide that ability.

The other thing that rules do, this is my last big point of the day, is that rules allow connection between the games. So one of the things to remember is, much like when I talked about the movies, that when I go and see a movie, every other movie somebody has played has added to the vocabulary of what movies can and can’t do.

That is true of games as well. That one of the things about rules is, that you are not building upon nothing. That you are building upon a known thing. So one of the trends that’s very common right now is, taking something that’s a known thing and using that as a component of your game. My example for this one will be King of Tokyo. It’s a game designed by Richard Garfield. And one of the key dynamics in the game is a die-rolling thing that for all intents and purposes makes use of the dynamic of Yahtzee.

So Yahtzee, for those that don’t know, is a dice-rolling game, you have five dice, and the way it works is you get to roll the five dice once. You may then pick up any number of dice you want. The ones you like, you don’t—Yahtzee is six dice, not five dice. [NLH—False.] You may reroll any number of dice that you want. And then you may do that a second time. So you basically reroll the ones you choose to reroll, reroll a second time.

Richard made use of that. So he made use of the Yahtzee rolling. Now, his game does lots of other things. It’s not remotely Yahtzee. What the dice mean are completely different than what the dice mean—they’re not even traditional dice. They have pictures on the sides and they mean things in the game.

But by doing that, he allowed people to leapfrog in their understanding of the game. Magic for example does something similar, which is we have a lot of stuff built into the game, so when we’re teaching you a new expansion, we make sure that we make use of things you understand when we’re doing it.

There’s a lot of structure built into Magic to do that. How we template, for example, is a good example where how we write how rules work—if you understand how the rules work in one case, you can understand how they work in another case. Because we use similar language. “Whenever” means something. Things have a consistency. And once you learn our language, and the game has things, it allows you then to learn other things quicker. So make sure that when you’re building your rules, you understand other games and other shorthand that people have built up through the language of games that they made.

So by the way, one of the things people always ask me is, if you want to become a game designer, what do you need to do? And the first thing I always say is, how do you become a good writer? You read. How do you become a good designer? You play.

And what I’m talking about here is a big part of it. You need to understand the vocabulary of games to be a game designer. Because other people will tackle things that you are looking at, and understanding how they solve the problem is very valuable. And understanding the expectation of the audience. What they expect.

If something is a popular game, that means that the way you do of something might differ a little bit, to piggyback on—so piggybacking, by the way, I did a whole article on this, is what Richard was doing. Piggybacking is taking a known quantity that people understand and working on it. Sometimes you piggyback on flavor, sometimes you piggyback on mechanics, but it’s saying, hey, the audience comes in with expectations, and you work with those expectations.

So one of the reasons game playing is so important for game design is that you are piggybacking a lot of your things you’re doing based on the expectation of the audience knowing other games. And so that is a very important tool as a game designer that you can make use of.

Anyway… how are we doing today? Not too bad. It was starting to rain when I first left, and I always when it’s raining… or not worry, for you guys rain is good. It means a longer podcast. But anyway, today I was just trying to explain to you the value and the use of the rules. Of how you make rules, and what rules do for your game.

So next time—well, this is an ongoing series, so you will from time to time, but I’ve got more coming, so I hope you guys are enjoying the series. I didn’t know when I first started whether I could dig deep enough in each of the ten. And I did experiment with goals and it worked, and rules is working well. So I think this is going to be a fun series.

Anyway, thank you guys. I have now parked in my parking space, so we all know what that means, it means it’s the end of my drive to work. And I have to be making Magic. So I’ll talk to you guys next time.