I’ve had some downtime between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, so I pulled out my Kindle Fire and explained to my wife that I was doing “market research” for Games Precipice. Lately, both Alex and I have become interested in electronic implementations of strategy games–both in the sense of adapting existing games from the physical realm to app form and in the sense of integrating electronic mechanics into games with physical components. Rather than focus on in-depth reviews of each game application, I’d like to step back and take a look at attributes that make a game either a good or bad candidate for electronic adaptation.

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The last method of evaluating games that we’ll discuss this month is by how complicated they are, with a particular focus on how easy or difficult they are to teach. Even if you’ve decided a given game is worth the money, and you’ve decided it fits into your collection, there are certain situations when a game is simply too complicated to be appropriate for a particular setting.

The New Player Problem

The new player problem can affect how we evaluate games both at the point of purchase (“this game looks great and is a fine value for the money, but it looks like such a pain to teach that it’s not worth it”) and at the table (“we haven’t played this game in so long, but Mike doesn’t know how to play, so it’s going to take far too long once we’ve explained everything”).

Of course, there are plenty of great resources out there dedicated to explaining how to teach games. We’ll cover those at the end, but since we’re primarily focused on game design, let’s start with what design factors can make a game easier or more difficult to teach.

What makes a game difficult to teach?

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This month we started a discussion on how we find value in games by talking about monetary value, a review of some relative valuations board games can bring in comparison to alternative sources of entertainment.

Image courtesy of BGG User Tiggers

This week we’ll look at a combination of ideas we’ll call “collection value“. How do you decide which games would benefit your collection the most?

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In recent months we’ve been looking at how using game design can influence player decisions through balance game decisions and how a game can be played more often by adjusting complexity, player count and game length.

This month we are looking at the consumer side of the tabletop industry and review how players evaluate games. This week we are asking how players frame their purchasing decisions to extract the most from the monetary value of games. We’ll be looking at how replay value can influence the perceived purchase price of a game.

This wouldn’t be a question worth asking unless we implement a constraint and one that affects us all: a budget. If given $100 to spend on games, how do you decide?

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