How to prevent RUNAWAY LEADERS in your board game design.

hi I'm Adam in Wales and this is my board gaming vlog and today I'm going to be talking a little bit about runaway leaders in games and specifically in game design the different approaches that designers have taken to deal with this issue and so this is a list of ten different ways that games in the past have dealt with the idea of a runaway leader or a snowball effect as it's sometimes called this tends to happen when we have a system whereby players who are are doing well at the game are not only generating points or advantageous positions on a board but they're also gaining special abilities or a competitive advantage at the same time so as they progress and they do better they just get better and better and better and it becomes harder and harder for the players who are losing the game to do to sort of make any ground in fact the game becomes harder for them to play which accelerates this lead the first option available to a designer of course is to just let this stuff happen you know maybe it doesn't matter maybe it's just a competitive advantage is the reward of doing well now I think that's acceptable in a short game and in fact in many games particularly sort of multiplayer solitaire so-called games European games often that that is the case if the games only going to take half an hour 45 minutes and the player can gradually just get on with what they're doing then perhaps it doesn't matter and certainly in an abstract game a two-player abstract game commonly yeah if you're doing well you're gaining more and more of an advantage and actually what's happening is you're accelerating towards a finish it may well be that both of us know who's going to win some way before we cross the finish line but that doesn't matter as long as the duration isn't long in a player elimination game players who are doing badly or players who are behind the rest of the pack are actively removed from the game by the game mechanisms so the player actually leaves the table wanders off and does whatever they want to do while the other players continue and finish off the game this is generally out of vogue at the moment with modern board games so it's something you see in old games like monopoly and risk and and and then there are some modern board games or games that people are still playing very much within the hobby that hark back a little bit to that era so formula D formula day in the past it's quite an old game actually and that still has that player elimination in it a more recent very very popular game would be king of Tokyo which has player elimination so a weak player is actively removed from the game therefore they don't have to sit and watch a leader just get more and more powerful having looked at those two perhaps less than favorable options for dealing with this issue and let's take a look at Dominion and how this game does it so in Dominion the leading player is held back by a sort of a drag a headwind as they push on ahead in there buying those high-value points cards what they're essentially doing is clogging up their deck because the high value points cards do nothing for them in fact the lower value the the low point cards are generally the most useful cards so as I get further and further ahead in points I'm slowing down where the other players who haven't got as many points have probably got a more efficient deck and they're they're their capability of gaining points is fast increasing so they're going to gradually catch me it's nicely balanced but you're not going to get the runaway leader because the runaway leader is constantly being sort of held back by this this sense of swimming upstream against the tide a very similar sort of concept to the previous entry is this idea of taxing the leader in some way taking something away from the player in the lead now that's something that Dominion doesn't do Dominion makes it harder for the leaders have progressed but nothing's actively taken away in the game ginge which is a two-player abstract game the player actually loses plane pieces as they win rounds of the game so in the later rounds they're playing with fewer pieces than their opponent they're handicapped for future rounds now that is it's it's brilliantly incorporated into this it works very well because it's an abstract game but there other games that do this which aren't abstracts most notably suburbia has a system that the city building game where as you increase up the sort of scoring track you are losing the potential to gain income and so as you go up that's going to track you're going to cross barriers they're going to reduce your income and they're going to reduce your your reputation and hence your population and that's going to make it more and more difficult throughout the game because those barriers come more and more frequently as you advance up that scoring track in essence this act is that same sort of headwind that idea of fighting against the drag that you see in Dominion but here stuff is being actively taken away from the player in the lead if game mechanisms are able to give us the opportunity to steal from the rich of course the the other side of that coin is the opportunity to give to the poor and there are some games which do that rather than punishing the player in the lead what they do is give a leg up to the player that's behind now this is really a true catch-up mechanism you see it throughout the game Kingsburg they're getting the game Kingsburg the player who is doing the worst is constantly being given that leg up there's even a phase in the game called aid from the king where the player who's got fewest buildings will be given an additional dice essentially one more worker than the other players to help them to get back up there another game which features this sort of game mechanism whereby the players who are behind are being given something extra is the game Isle of Skye this was the recent chemists field as Yara's winner in 2016 so in this tile laying game players in the later rounds of the game are given additional income if they're further back on the track so they and in fact the further back on the track you're at you you are the score track now the more money that you're going to be given in those later rounds and so you can really make quite a comeback in the later rounds and even if you've been behind throughout the rest of the game so this is a game that has that that mechanism really quite sort of visible up front and center there's no sort of hiding that mekin it's there and all players need to be aware of it throughout the game in some games as the player who is doing well advances through the game what they actually do is spread themselves very thin sometimes literally but spreading out their troops across the board and this makes them vulnerable more vulnerable than the players who are losing because you just don't have as many items available to you so a classic example would be something like small world where as your empire sort of expands where it actually means is you've got fewer and fewer sort of army units in each individual location in the board and those units are very vulnerable to attacks so this keeps that runaway leader in check many games work on the basis that they don't need any sort of catch-up mechanism because the player who's in the lead will be evident to all the other players and so therefore the other players assuming that it's a highly interactive game will be able to attack that player or whether that's in terms of you know direct conflict and battling or whether that's in terms of outbidding them in auctions or something like that the other players will essentially team up on the leader bash the leader and then that will bring the leader back and bring the other players into contention so many games rely on this sort of mechanism of course it can be a problem because there can be great cost to be the person doing that attack so if you have a three player game one player is getting ahead so player a is getting ahead player B decides they're going to step in an attack play array to reduce their lead the person who benefits is play a C because player C hasn't had to use any resources in making that attack hasn't had to place any effort on it so this features in many many games one example would be the game evolution which I think uses this brilliantly and although you know that when the leader becomes evident other players can focus on that leader it does take a lot of effort to do so and there's lots of other mechanisms that are carefully built in there to balance this so you may have a an advantage by for example having a large body size in this game being a big a big creature is a huge advantage in terms of you can attack lots of other players but it also makes you a target because other players are going to want to eat you but you're so big you're gonna provide them with lots and lots of food when you're attacked so it's nicely balanced and but still relies on that mechanism of Bosch their leader if you leave them alone they're gonna run away with the game another mechanism which is often used by games to ensure that everybody's in the game right up to the last minute is to ensure that the points scale throughout the game so that in the early rounds there are only low value sort of benefits available low point cards things like that later in the game the big points come out and so actually what we're doing in the early rounds is just sort of warming up a little bit later in the game that's where the big stuff starts to happen so you see this in games like primal Flaman which is a a trick-taking sort of auction style game from pegasus where we have three very specific decks of cards for the three rounds of the game and as the game progresses the points get more and more so the later rounds are really important and that you can swing that final round could take you from last position to first position as long as you do well towards the end of the game you can make up for your your problems earlier in the game another example path more well-known is the game seven Wonders again played in three ages and throughout those ages both points and abilities escalate so we have bigger battles in the final stages we have bigger points we have more valuable buildings coming out into third ages so again we have that sense of just warming up in those early stages and then BAM the real competition is in Age 3 many games obscure who the leader is throughout the game anyway so you don't know who the leader is so even if you're not in contention you don't actually know about it again it keeps everybody feeling involved until the end of the game so a simple example would be Ticket to Ride so in ticket to ride you have hidden objectives cards that you're working towards and no one knows whether you completed those cards or not until the end of the game when you reveal them and then we see who's in the lead so there is in game scoring so we get an idea of how well we're doing but at the end that can all change when those cards are revealed very similar happens in the game a much more sort of involved euro game where at the end of the game we reveal hidden secret objectives but my favorite example of this mechanism is the game harbin gute haben gute is a stock market game and in this game the player who wins is the person with the most money at the end of the game so far that seems fairly clear but there's a big twist because throughout the game you've got to gradually give a bit of money to charity and it's not immediately clear how much everybody has given to charity at the end of the game the player who's given the least to charity is going to be eliminated from the game even if they've got the most money overall so you can never be sure even if you've got loads of money maybe that means you've been the least generous you've given the least of charity and you're actually going to come in last place even though you've got the most money you're going to be eliminated from the final scoring it's brilliantly done and it turns this into a from a what is already a very very interesting game into something that's just fantastic now the final example and I think the one that people are going to be most familiar with when they think about catch-up mechanisms people think about power grid because power grid has that brilliant turn order mechanism whereby the player who's in in the the most the furthest back on the score chart I suppose the person who's doing the least well is actually gonna have the all the advantageous positions in turn order so in this game that turns into a strategy because players deliberately sold back a little bit they don't want to take the lead because taking the lead is going to disadvantage you throughout the game so they hold back they wait when it's the point where they want to go ahead it's essentially if we think about that cycling thing I talked about headwind previously the person in front is going slow they're struggling because they've got the disadvantage in terms of turn order in every face so you're better to sit in second place they're in second place you've got a lot of the advantage but you're also benefiting from from a more advantageous turn order as well and then you can make your final sprint towards the end of the game and hope for the wind so that features in power grid it features in power grid the first sparks and I mentioned previously Kingsburg Kingsburg does a bit of this as well uses turn order perhaps not in quite such a sophisticated way as power grid does it but it's a really clever way of keeping people in contention and just just providing that slight drag for the leader in the game so where does this leave us well I suppose in short games we're not going to worry about it too much it doesn't matter if someone runs away with a victory it doesn't matter if we know who's going to win some way before the end of the game it also doesn't matter if I'm eliminated from the game if it's a short game as long as I have to sit around for hours feeling rotten about my miserable attempt at playing the game then that doesn't matter but in the longer games then it becomes an issue particularly the games with less player interaction with a lot of player interaction we can rely a little bit on that bashier leader mechanism as long as it's balanced as long as we're not giving an advantage to the playing Turtles away in the corner then that can do some of the work for us but if we've got a game which doesn't have that much interaction which is one of those classic European sort of multiplayer solitaire games then we're going to have to rely on that sort of drag the beautiful sort of elegant mechanism we see in Dominion where things just get harder or we might have to go for the slightly more blatant tax for leader take stuff from them or give stuff to the person who's behind the problem with those two mechanisms being that it can feel a little bit unjust okay if I'm doing really really well why am I being punished for it or if they're doing really really badly why are they being rewarded for it now essentially this this all works out the same it's still that headwind thing and as long as players know upfront that it's going to happen they can build it into their strategy but it still feels slightly odd sometimes in those games power grid not so much because players use it as a strategy frequently it's one of the first things you learn about power grid is that it's not advantageous to be in this in the lead from the very beginning some players can make it work but the majority will hold back Levin it's one of the key strategies in the game it's not just a case of rewarding somebody who's doing badly actually sitting back is part of the gameplay hidden information is always wonderful of course so games like ticket to ride hard and good and try though excellent it makes the place feel like I stand involved but you don't really know who the leader is and this is helpful in preventing analysis paralysis as well another problem with some games where a player will sit for ages taking their turn trying to calculate who's in the lead how can I get the maximum possible number of points of course if you've got hidden information they can't make those calculations they're gonna have to rely on instinct and intuition and and that makes the game run much much quicker as long as it doesn't mean that ultimately the player wins based on luck I think that's not such a problem those escalating points systems that works very very well as long as the players know that that's going to happen from the outset nobody feels cheated by it we know that those starting rounds are just about getting things in order and then the later rounds is where it's really happening and this is actually the effect of games like Isle of Skye where later in the game the players who are behind are being given a real benefit in the real leg up what that means is that the final rounds of the game is where the game is decided those early rounds are just jostling a little bit for position and then the real thing the real sprint is at the end of the game so it just sort of it gives that escalating sort of feel and gives the game some momentum now a lot of this is a matter of taste some people don't like catch up mechanisms at all this concept of sort of rubber banding springing back into contention as I say it feels very unjust other people well I hate sitting in a game for hours knowing that I'm gonna lose I want to feel like there's a chance I can make that comeback and as long as that chance is not overpowering and it doesn't frequently result in wins being snatched away from the real worthy player then I think it's a good thing and it's certainly something that we need to consider when we're designing games anyway thank you very much for watching this vlog I'm Adam in Wales and if you'd like to watch any of my other videos watch Adams board game Wales on YouTube and please subscribe you can also follow me on twitter at good game Wales and on BoardGameGeek on Adams 78 so thank you very much for watching and all the best