Candyland to Chess: The Role of Luck in Games

"I'd rather be lucky than good." -Lefty Gomez

I'd like to open this post with the admission that I absolutely hate luck's influence when it comes to gaming. While I'm not the first person write on the subject, I want to be clear about my bias going into things.

I played Magic: the Gathering competitively for a huge portion of my life. I loved the strategy of the game and the ability to customize what cards you play with, allowing you to have a more personal connection to the cards you were playing with. You got to play with the cards you wanted to play with, instead of other games where your pieces are set in stone.

Magic, as a card game, has a luck factor to it that is inherit to the game-- each turn, you draw a new card from a randomized deck. While strategic deckbuilding and playing can help minimize the impact of the luck and "smooth out" what you're hoping to get to play each turn, the fact that any given draw off the top of a deck can single-handedly make or break a game.

I've played in Magic tournaments lasting all day where a successful run would be abruptly cut off because I had poor draws, losing games before they even began. It was the most frustrating feeling in the world to have been playing for eight or more hours and to have all my success turned to dust because of factors completely outside of my control. It felt like no matter how much I prepared and how good I was at the game, there was always the chance that it could simply not matter. This frustration is what lead me to quit Magic, but also lead me to design my own game: Reckoning, the primary subject of what this blog will be about.

No Strategy: Candyland

Luck can have varying influence over games, depending on the way the game is set up. Some games, such as Candyland, are completely luck-based, where players pick a card or roll the dice and move their piece, without having to make any decisions that could influence the course of the game. These games hold value for children, as they teach the importance of turn-taking and simple arithmetic. Monopoly falls on this end of the spectrum, and while it allows some decision-making to influence the game in the form of deciding which properties to buy, hotels to build, and trading with other players, a large portion of determining who wins comes down to the die roll that controls player movement.

High Strategy: Chess and Go

On the other end of the spectrum, we have games like Chess and Go. These games have no dice, no card drawing, no spinners. Each game is determined by the skill of the players, and little else other than determining which player will go first. In Chess, white moves first, which leads to a 52-55% advantage for that player. In Go, black moves first, which leads to an advantage of roughly 5-7 points. Tournament-level Go has a system called Komi, which gives a handicap of points to the white player to try to even out their inherent disadvantage. Even in these two high-skill games, the nagging factor of luck pokes its head in.

Pure Strategy: Rock-Paper-Scissors

Is it possible to design a game without a factor of luck? Rock-Paper-Scissors is an interesting case, which can be 100% luck or 100% skill, depending on your perspective. RPS eliminates the first-player advantage because both players play simultaneously. While it is impossible to outplay a completely random opponent, humans by nature are predictable and the game's strategy lies in reading your opponent. In my opinion, this is the purest form of strategy-- reading the intentions of the person playing against you, and outwitting them.

The problem, of course, is that Rock-Paper-Scissors is boring. The game has no variance, and each match is played out exactly the same. But simultaneous action selection is an interesting mechanic that helps balance first-player advantage in otherwise highly skill-testing games. A number of games have been designed with simultaneous action selection, including BoardGameGeek's #1 ranked game of all time, Twilight Struggle. But even Twilight Struggle has dice rolling as a core mechanic.

Purer Strategy? The Goals of Reckoning

The primary goal of my design of the game of Reckoning is to create a game where luck is not a factor. The winning player will be the one who outperformed his opponent, and each move will be reliant on predicting your opponent's moves. Through simultaneous action selection, neither player will have a first-player advantage. To create a game with even less factor than hallowed strategy games Chess and Go is a daunting task, but my hopes is that it will carve a new strategic niche in gaming.

To avoid the pitfalls of being boring like RPS, the game introduces two common game mechanics to allow variance between games. While many games use luck to drive variance in games so that each game plays like a new experience, Reckoning will focus on hidden information to keep your opponents guessing, and the customization to choose which pieces you want to play with, allowing for different strategies.

I'll get into the details of these systems and mechanics in my next blog post. Thanks for reading!