Week 10 - Dice (Battle Battle)

While trying to balance my custom cards in Battle Battle, I took the easy path of not using any tokens. It was easier to balance a character that performed roughly the same every time. But, this also made playing them incredibly boring. Every round I just rolled the dice and hoped for the best. 

Zach Hiwiller writes that “It’s difficult for adults to feel satisfaction in games of pure chance between human players” (Ch. 11). I almost laughed when he used the example of the card game War because that was one of my favorite games as a young kid (Hiwiller, Ch. 11). As Hiwiller points out, War takes no skill or strategy at all, a perfect game for a young kid like myself at the time. However, my little brother (6 years younger) also liked to play war when he was a kid. Playing against my little brother I did not have the same experience. I was much older now and felt frustrated because of the lack of control. I couldn’t make any meaningful decisions and the “game” was essentially just a string of coin flips. 

I should have given this more consideration when making my costume Battle Battle characters. While designing my characters, I was only concerned with the win rate of the cards. If I could get them to have an even win rate, then the card would be balanced. But I neglected to incorporate any kind of meaningful choice in the character. The cards I made were essentially the same as War, a string of coin flips (or dice rolls in this case).

I think I fell into the trap that Schell describes without even realizing it. In chapter 13 of The Art of Game Design, Schell warns that new designers are often afraid of changing the dominant strategy of their game because “They feel like they have lost their handle on their own game”. This is how I felt while testing the regular Battle Battle cards. When I played with the standard Battle Battle cards, I was never sure when the right time to use a token was. I would always second guess myself and wonder what the right play was. Because of this, I think I subconsciously chose to create cards without tokens, so that I would always be playing the optimal game. I would always make the right choice because there wasn’t any other choice to make. I wouldn’t have to worry about playing tokens perfectly anymore.

In the end, I neglected to add meaningful choices to my characters and inadvertently created some very boring cards. In our next assignment, I will try to focus on creating a better play experience by incorporating more meaningful choices. However, I know that I can’t just add more choices without thought. It is possible to overwhelm the player with choices, creating an entirely different problem (Schell, Ch. 13). Instead, I will focus on adding choices that are limited in scope but impact the game in meaningful ways. For our group game, I will focus on choices that promote strategy without overwhelming the player with options.