Brandon the Game Dev

Ladies and gentlemen, I am breaking from my staid tradition of covering board games alone for game breakdowns. As game developers, we owe it to ourselves not to play simply board games, but video games, social games, mobile apps, and more. For today’s game breakdown, I’m covering the online version of Town of Salem, not the card game.

A little bit of background: in the late years of my undergraduate studies in the autumn of 2013, Town of Salem got really big in my friend group. We played it a lot for a month or two. There was a time in my life where I was playing three or four hours of it a day.

It’s like the old card game Mafia, except with greater variety, online interaction, and whole, whole lot of metagaming. It wasn’t perfect. The online community was dodgy at best – a lot of young kids, a lot of trolls, and a lot of people just plain dropping out mid-game. But it was fun – plain, simple, really good fun.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to describe the rules of only a Classic mode game as they were when the game first came out. It’s changed a little since I was really into it and there’s lots of variations on the regular game.

It’s a 15 person game. It’s a game of social deduction, persuasion, and manipulation. Everybody is broadly split into three teams: Mafia, town, and neutral. For the Mafia to win, they must kill all the townsfolk. For the town to win, they must kill the Mafia and the serial killer. For neutral players to win, they have to accomplish their own objectives. Right off the bat, you notice that you can have multiple winners, one winner, or no winners.

To explain what I mean further, here’s a list of roles which people are assigned in Town of Salem:

• Sheriff (Town): Checks one person every night for suspicious activity – can be fooled by Framer.
• Doctor (Town): Visits one person every night, saving their life if someone tries to kill them.
• Investigator (Town): Checks one person every night for an ambiguous clue about their role.
• Jailor (Town): Jails one person every night, stopping them from doing anything. May choose to execute the incarcerated – but if they guess wrong, they lose that power.
• Medium (Town): Can communicate with the dead via chat.
• Lookout (Town): Watches one person every night to see who visits them.
• Veteran (Town): If this player goes “on alert”, he or she kills anyone who visits them.
• Vigilante (Town): If this player thinks they know who the Mafia is, they can choose to shoot them. If they guess wrong, they kill themselves out of guilt.
• Escort (Town): This player “distracts” one person every night, blocking their role.
• Godfather (Mafia): This person chooses one person to kill every night.
• Framer (Mafia): This person can frame someone else for a crime, fooling the Sheriff.
• Mafioso (Mafia): This person carries out the Godfather’s orders and becomes the Godfather if the Godfather dies.
• Executioner (Neutral): This person’s sole task is to get the town to hang their designated victim using whatever means necessary.
• Jester (Neutral): This person’s sole task is to get the town to hang them!
• Serial Killer (Neutral): This person kills one person every night.

Every night, when the sun goes down, everybody goes back to their houses. The Mafia conspires to kill someone, the serial killer does what their namesake suggests, and the town goes around trying to stop the damage and gather information. Every day, all players start discussing what happened, taking note of who died, and start trying to figure out everyone’s roles. The town then chooses a person they would like to hang and then they vote on whether to go through with it. The Town wants to see the Mafia and serial killer hanged and the Mafia wants to see the townsfolk hanged.

Gruesome, I know. Also a bit of a mouthful to try to explain, but trust me when I say it’s fairly straightforward. You learn what every role does in a few games. It takes about an hour to function well in Town of Salem, which is about on track with medium-weight board games.

Then it gets heavy.

From these simple rules, great complexity arises.

Consider this, my friends: under the veil of anonymity, with no way to convince people of who you are, how do you – as the Sheriff – convince the town of who’s Mafia? Further, if you do convince the town and the person you saw hanged was actually framed by the Framer, how do you avoid having the town hang you next round, thinking you’re the Mafia or Executioner? Further still, if you’re found to be right, what’s to stop the Mafia from killing you? You are, after all, dependent upon the tender mercies of the Doctor or the lucky guess of the Escort to save your life.

That’s just the Sheriff. From one role comes a dozen questions of how to proceed and how to persuade. Information is scarce, trust is low, and the risk of getting killed for sticking your neck out is high.

Suppose you’re the Jester. How do you convince the town to kill you? Should you act like a not-so-bright version of the Serial Killer or Mafia? Should you type in chat like a child? Should you act really annoying? Should you just wait for a better time? Should you pretend to mistype the whisper command so that your “private message” to someone else that “I’m glad we targeted SoAndSo last night” is seen by the whole town?

Literally every role comes with a complex set of tactics and behaviors that must be mastered. In addition, you have to be able to read the room you’re playing in. Your approach will be different in a room full of children than it will be with adults, as it will be different in a room full of newbies than it will with veteran players.

Town of Salem is a tight, thoughtful game that trusts its players to make it interesting.

As both a lightweight game and an accurate portrayal of the courtship process, Love Letter is an exemplary work. I often feel that “filler games” aren’t subjected to the same level of analysis and thought that many heavier games like Twilight Struggle or even Pandemic are. That’s a missed opportunity if I ever saw one! Love Letter is the kind of game that you can play while waiting for stragglers to show up at your game night or to give your uninitiated family a taste of board game culture. It’s the sort of game you can get your arms around in five minutes and understand the deeper elements of in twenty.

Love Letter is really simple at heart – win the game by winning the most rounds, win the rounds by having the card with the highest value in your hand at the end of the round OR by eliminating everyone else. Everybody holds one card in their hand. When it’s your turn, you draw a second card. You choose which card to keep and which card to play. Each card has a unique effect and there are eight types of cards.

Though it’s super easy to pick up, the game turns into a slightly heady mix of deduction, risk mitigation, and probabilistic thinking. All the strategy fundamentally comes down to a single principle of game design that became apparent to me after a few rounds.

The eight types of cards are elegantly balanced by short-term vs. long-term value.

The eight cards in Love Letter are as follows:

1. Guard. Name a non-Guard card and choose another player. If that player has that card, he or she is out of the round.
2. Priest. Look at another player’s hand.
3. Baron. You and another player secretly compare hands. The player with the lower value is out of the round.
4. Handmaid. Until your next turn, ignore all effects from other players’ cards.
5. Prince. Choose any player (including yourself) to discard his or her hand and draw a new card.
6. King. Trade hands with another player of your choice.
7. Countess. If you have this card and the King or Prince in your hand, you must discard this card.
8. Princess. If you discard this card, you are out of the round.

The higher your card’s value, the higher your probability of winning the round – a long-term benefit. The lower your card’s value, the higher your probability of hurting other players – a short-term benefit. It’s a very simple trade-off, but one that takes careful thought to manage. I’ll break it down further.

1. Guard. If you know what someone is holding in their hand, you can knock them right out of the round. Boom. The odds that you’ll know at least one person’s hand are pretty high. However, if you’re holding this at the end of the round, you’re almost certain to lose.
2. Priest. Information is a valuable currency in this game. This lets you peek at someone’s hand, giving you a chance to maximize the use of the Guard or Baron cards to knock someone out.
3. Baron. Play this when you’ve got a high card in your hand and you knock someone out. It’s a little risky, though.
4. Handmaid. Thwart someone’s strategy – purely defensive, but pretty useful.
5. Prince. If you know someone is holding a high card, this can be a really useful play, but you won’t get many chances to use it in practice.
6. King. The only reason to use this card at all is if you’re going to get the Countess or Princess out of the deal, which is fairly unlikely. Otherwise, you’re better off holding onto the King.
7. Countess. This card almost assures you victory if you can hold onto it, but its effect is a liability since it can force you to discard a great card for a lesser one!
8. Princess. This card wins you the game if you survive to the end of the round, but its effect is a liability. One false move and it’s over for you!

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At a price point of $10 on Amazon, this game is worth your attention! This game is excellent for teaching one of the fundamental lessons of game design balance: developing a trade-off. If you’re a designer, buy this and a few other games like it. It’s through studying simplicity that we can create elegant complexity.

Monopoly has been around since 1933 and it’s been grandfathered into every store and every closet. Most people I know have at least two copies of some kind of novelty Monopoly that they don’t remember receiving. When you tell someone that you’re into board games, they often ask, “oh, you mean like Monopoly” before you instinctively cringe. Currently rocking a sold 4.4 on BoardGameGeek, Monopoly is the kind of game that board gamers love to hate.

At first glance, I scoff at the notion of picking on such an old game. After all, “the best game is the one that gets played” – at least to some extent. Games tend to hit their stride after everyone has played a few games and begun to develop strategies. Monopoly defies this tendency.

Every board game breakdown I’ve done so far: Patchwork, Pandemic, Twilight Struggle, and Carcassonne has been a labor of love. By emphasizing the effects of well-implemented mechanics in thoughtfully crafted games, I’ve helped game designers learn how to create games by using examples of success. It’s time to look at failure for a change. What better game to use as an example than one we’ve all played?

Monopoly Has Issues with Runaway Leaders

Assets beget assets in Monopoly. People who are lucky enough to land on good property in the early stages of the game can snatch it up in a minute and lock others out of the market. It’s almost as if the game was invented to teach people about the potential evils of capitalism.

Potentially dangerous economic and political commentary aside, games with runaway leaders suck. Nothing takes people out of a game like the realization that they cannot win. Monopoly does not only reward asset holders proportinate to their holdings, but it rewards them exponentially, letting them get further and further ahead. Meanwhile, losers have four or five hundred dollars in their name and pray not to land on Boardwalk.

Monopoly Does Not Make Judicious Use of Luck

To some extent, Monopoly could make up for its exponential runaway leader issue through Chance and Community Chest cards. However, they’re about as likely to be good for a player as they are to be bad. Very few cards adjust for the current position of the player. There is no leveling impulse to the game. Chance and Community Chest cards can even cause a person to lose the game entirely.

Making a choice on which properties you can buy comes down to landing on them by means of random dice roll. Trading is a crapshoot with players who aren’t willing to come off their properties. Not only do players with early assets dominate the game, but asset acquisition feels entirely arbitrary.

Monopoly Has Pacing Issues

Despite letting leaders run away and providing inadequate catch-up mechanics, Monopoly is not a fast game. In fact, it tends to drag on for an hour or more before the obvious leader finally claims victory. You can drag a game on by being the losing player who keeps landing – by random dice roll – on properties not owned by your opponent. This is not at all hard to do, especially considering that you keep getting $200 just for rolling the dice five or six times!

Auggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Okay, I’m done flipping the table on this game. For all its problems, Monopoly has done a lot of good. Many of us got into board gaming because of it and many of us have nostalgic memories of it. Let’s just agree to never make anything like it again 😛