Do board games need victory conditions?

August 15, 2023 9:14 AM

Game designer Amabel Holland asks what kinds of human things the medium of board games can express and explore once we let go of winning or losing as sources of meaning. She looks at four games – two of her designs, and two from other designers – and how each game approaches their victory conditions, or lack thereof. (SLYT, 14:15)
posted by Etrigan (27 comments total)

She's so cool, I have loved some of her games so much. Northern Pacific I think is on of the greatest shared incentive introductions I've ever played. You can take a room full of people who don't really play board games, and I've seen them transform. The first round people are desultorily placing cubes all over the place. By the second round the elbows get sharper, you can see folks start to get it, suddenly the train is skipping a juicy city. The third round people will start telling others, oh hey you need to move here because it benefits us both, if you don't X will skip us or whatever. It's a beautiful design and a magical transformation.

I will say, having played a lot, though by no means all, of her games, it definitely tracks that she's asking about victory conditions. Forex is one of the weirdest, but coolest games that I've played.
posted by Carillon at 9:40 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Seems like a good place to link ProZD's classic Ameritrash vs. Euro games skit.
posted by praemunire at 9:44 AM on August 15, 2023 [15 favorites]

Thank-you for that, praemunire! I laughed a lot. And I play Wingspan and also Warhammer...
posted by one more day at 10:07 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I really want to get a hold of For-ex.

Don't think I have played any of her games though. Her association with Winsome Games makes a bunch of her things a hard pass. Refuse to support that guy.
posted by Windopaene at 10:09 AM on August 15, 2023

We have a special set of rules for playing Settlers of Catan. After a certain point when it becomes clear who is doing well at the game and who is struggling, we all stop playing to win ourselves and play to ensure my daughter wins. That's just the rules. There's no reason. She's not a little kid who needs help or will feel bad if she doesn't win.

Winning is how you define it. When she wins the game, as she inevitable does, we have all won.

I play a sandbox game on line and frequently encounter competitive players in the chat who are completely unable to understand how if most of us played the way they do we would consider ourselves to be losing. They think they are the only ones winning because they define winning as the first one to be a player killer, or having the best weapon, or by being the richest, or by belonging to the strongest faction, or by having the highest stat in some area.

The only way to lose a game is if you don't enjoy it. And it's a real win when you howl with laughter at your character's magnificently horrible death.
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:14 AM on August 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

For-ex is online at BGA if you are open to playing virtually.
posted by Carillon at 10:19 AM on August 15, 2023

When we were dating, my wife and I would play Words With Friends. I usually won. One day she said she wasn't playing to win, but playing to tie. I thought about that and changed my strategy to try and make our scores the closest as possible. It was far more challenging than just "winning" and actually made the game more enjoyable for both of us.
posted by mrphancy at 10:35 AM on August 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

Hollandspiele FTW! Or "for the enjoyment and thought-provocation" or something. I always enjoy her games, and the question of victory conditions is highly relevant, because, ah, I mostly lose. That doesn't mean it's not enjoyable or interesting, and I've tried to take the same spirit to other games I'm not "good" at, or where absolute victory is a true condition (Eldritch Horror, I am looking at you).

Windowpaene, maybe drop some knowledge if you're going to drop that kind of shade. It sucks to hear a general "well I won't work with a person of that caliber" when, in fact, the problem is not widely known. I went looking--briefly, as long as I cared to spend on it--and I found no meaningful brief summary of what the problem is with Winsome Games. Something happened a few years ago with ownership and litigation over a game??
posted by cupcakeninja at 11:18 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

John Bohrer has the reputation of being a bit of a grump ass at times, but from what I've heard that's the extent of it? I'm not sure if there's more there of course, but from what I've heard he's just a bit of a dick in personal interaction.
posted by Carillon at 11:21 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

My wife was confused by my attacking double and triple score spaces in Scrabble when we first played. She explained that her family always played cooperatively. I --jokingly I assure you-- called her a goddamn communist.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 12:16 PM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

I greatly enjoyed this post, thanks!

Also, this seems relevant.
posted by tempestuoso at 12:24 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

My wife was confused by my attacking double and triple score spaces in Scrabble when we first played. She explained that her family always played cooperatively. I --jokingly I assure you-- called her a goddamn communist.

My college orchestra bassoon section had a travel Scrabble set that we played on the bus, during downtimes in rehearsal, etc. Our goal most of the time we played was to make the coolest board: generally shooting for solid blocks of 2x3 or larger.
posted by bassooner at 12:58 PM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I lecture about the nature of games a lot, and at some point we usually get onto what is a game, and how far you can reduce a game to the bare essentials without it ceasing to be a game. Yellow Car is as simple as I've found, and most people I ask agree that it's a game--mostly because it feels like a game rather than an activity or a puzzle, it tickles the 'game' parts of the brain. For those who don't know it, the rule of Yellow Car is:

1. If you see a yellow car, say "Yellow car"
2. (optional: and punch the person next to you on the arm)

There is no win because the game, like The Game (the rules of which I once explained to the listeners of BBC Radio 4, in what may be the high point of my career), never really ends. The Game has a lose-state, and Yellow Car does too (sore arm), and there are a bunch of card games that don't have winners, only losers (Cockroach Poker) which is interesting, but my personal fascination is games where there is a winner but it's less important than an enjoyable experience. The ultimate example is Mornington Crescent (originally 'Finchley Central'), where any player can win by saying 'Mornington Crescent' (or 'Finchley Central'), a feat so trivially easy that it's much more fun to continue playing. There are many games that we play ostensibly for the promise of the win, but actually to take part in a pleasurable shared experience with the other players.

Also Amabel Holland is a five-star genius.
posted by Hogshead at 1:04 PM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Also too, there are games that, while having winners and losers, fall into the category of 'experience generators'. Cosmic is often referred to as such, but Betrayal at House on the Hill, Fluxx, or Munchkin are also games that fall into that category for me. It's not that you can't play to win, but that the game really doesn't give you the levers to 'outplay' anyone, and it's more something to experience as a group.
posted by Carillon at 1:18 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I once tried out a new game, and we played for a couple of hours before eventually realizing it had no win condition. You could retire with your Victory Points, but there wasn’t any reason to, so the player with the most stamina would win. We decided the game ended at 9pm.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:57 PM on August 15, 2023

IMO, most games should have quicker win/quit conditions. At some point that is not that far in to the future, most people get bored of playing and want to move on to something else. Winning as quickly as possible is one way to end and move on, maybe smart game designers could consider more conditions that just winning.


Especially when playing with children, but it's not that different when playing with casual adults. Blame short attention spans or whatever.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:04 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Genji and Proust, I own an edition of Puerto Rico that does not clearly state the game's win-conditions in the rules. The problem is that without them it's not clear what you're endeavouring to do in the game, what resources you're trying to build. (We found an exhaustively complete Powerpoint deck online, compiled by someone else who had run into the same problem, and learned the game from that.)
posted by Hogshead at 2:19 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

We play Carcassone mostly to make the coolest possible final landscape.
posted by signal at 2:30 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

A friend of mine enjoys Firefly with little or no reference to the victory conditions (which can vary with each session): he finds the game produces an interesting enough narrative that being the first one to pull of these Niska jobs or make these deliveries to Beaumonde or whatever are secondary to inhabiting the ‘verse for a few hours.

I can’t say I totally disagree. I’ve played quite a few games of it and seen some great moments. I can hardly recall who won any particular game.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:21 PM on August 15, 2023

Board games are fun for their own sake, and don't explicitly need a victory condition. But where our culture is right now, people need an easily comprehensible excuse to play, and for better or worse trying to win both gives them that and an element that drives the game forward.

TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons once seemed like a ludicrous thing to ask people to spend their time on. "Simulating a pretend person in an imaginary world presented by another, without a victory condition? Kind of like we're little kids? Aren't we too old for that? Why don't we watch Professional Sports on TV instead?" It took a lot of acclimatization to convince people that D&D and other RPGs were a worthy use of their time, and even then it had to have a boost from tabletop wargaming.

I think, like signal suggests with playing Carcassonne to make cool landscapes, that a board game with an objective to make something that's interesting outside the game, maybe a story or a work of art, could be entertaining without the players trying to "win." TTRPGs kind of have that aspect, if you consider building your character, and the stories of their adventures, as an objective to itself.
posted by JHarris at 5:33 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've had some lovely evenings playing Wavelength with friends. There's a way to keep score, but we wind up just playing and playing and playing.
posted by MengerSponge at 7:47 PM on August 15, 2023

JHarris, if I had a dollar for every time someone has showed me their enormous $100 before expansions board game about being a fantasy/scifi/horror character in a scenario and I looked at them with a confused face and suggested an RPG instead... well, I'd probably have enough to buy one of those bloated board games by now.

I find it surprising that it has taken the board game world so dang long to start exploring the medium more, but I guess it wasn't until the Internet helped people find each other that we started seeing things like jeepforms, parlour larps, story games, and game poems in the RPG/LARP world. There are still certain RPG websites where games that have different goals and social contracts are met with extreme hostility. I imagine board game design and enthusiast spaces may be even more hostile to the idea of games that aren't intended or designed to be won.

That said, I do think there have been some board games over the last 20 years that seem to be more interested in exploring an idea through a defined system than they are about being games. I have seen others that are essentially just light RPGs or ways to explore a narrative and party games, while they usually have a way to select a winner, are really just a way to get conversations going and people laughing.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 7:50 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Our boardgame group has gravitated towards co-op games since it is more fun to play together than against each other. Victory is for everyone!

My favorite co-op game of the past few years is The Crew and its sequel Mission Deep Sea. They are collaborative trick taking games in which all the players are working together to accomplish the same missions and extremely limited communication allowed between the players. Hands are fairly short and it is super fast to set up ("deal out all the cards and some number of missions"), so if someone makes a mistake that causes the crew to fail a mission it is no big deal to shuffle the deck and re-deal. We jokingly call the game "What were you thinking?!?" since that is always the question afterwards.

In addition to The Crew, we're also fans of Pandemic: Rising Tide in which the players are working together to pump out the polders, repair the dijks and build the strategic water control structures that keep the Netherlands safe. This variant (by Pandemic designer Matt Leacock and Dutch game designer Jeroen Doumen) is a much more soothing than the original, which is all too real these days....

We also played through Sleeping Gods, a legacy co-op exploration game that reminds me of the Roguelike Sunless Sea video game. It has the nice feature that you can swap out players between sessions, unlike some other legacy games, so that if some people can't attend an evening you can keep making progress. It is, however, a total table hog, which we made even worse by printing an A0 sized map of the entire world so that we could log our journey like pirates on the chart table.

Oh, and we also liked Paleo, although we haven't played it as much. The players are cooperating to try to keep their cavepeople alive through the night while hunting mammoths and making art. A reprint added some diversity to the people cards, which was a welcome update.

And, looking over at the game collection, we also liked Magic Maze, a quirky co-op division of responsibility game in which each player can move the pawns in one direction so navigating them through the "shopping mall" without talking requires them to be aware of what the other players are thinking about. There is a fun large red "HEY!" token that you can place in front of a player if they haven't moved a pawn in the direction you want, but since you can't tell them which pawn you need moved you just have to stare intently at the player until they figure it out. The "Maximum Security" expansion should be included in the base and makes it much more fun.
posted by autopilot at 2:33 AM on August 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

And after looking at the board game shelf, there's one more! Mysterium is sort of like Dixit crossed with Clue: one player is a recently murdered ghost who is trying to reveal who, where and how they were killed to the other players. They can only communicate via dream cards with fantastical pictures that somehow relate to those bits of information. We mix the Dixit cards into the dream deck for extra weirdness.

Also, having watched the video, I see that Amabel is discussing a different sort of "victory" that doesn't exactly match to the co-op games that we're playing. Her examples are more ambiguous as to what winning means or more open ended. Heads-Up, Charades or Pictionary style party games without scoring are perhaps more fun since they allow the players to be silly without having to consider "are we winning?", although they don't raise any deeper questions, compared to the That Others May Live game (that she illustrated), which asks the player to keep trying to do better.

(although the rule book for TOML does have "Enemy Victory Conditions", "Player Victory Conditions" and "Draw Conditions", so maybe she was describing alternate rules and I missed that part?)
posted by autopilot at 6:59 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also too, there are games that, while having winners and losers, fall into the category of 'experience generators'. Cosmic is often referred to as such

My all-time favorite "victory" in Cosmic Encounter is when all four other players teamed up to split a four-way victory against me because it was the only way I could be stopped from winning the next turn. My noble sacrifice unified the galaxy! I become the greatest hero by playing the villain the universe needed (in this case, a colossal appendage stealing planets out of their orbits).
posted by FatherDagon at 10:56 AM on August 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

And then there is the ever popular variation of Scrabble where the winner is the one who puts the most obscene/disgusting words on the board. Let me tell you the triumphant flush you get when you play phlegm or add a U-S at the end of the word meat is something that will stay with you and let you fall asleep that night smiling.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:53 AM on August 18, 2023

My thing about boardgames is that I'm only moderately interested in the games themselves, I mostly play for the chitchat and back and forth with the other players. Which is why I find BGA so unsatisfying, it's just not the same with a random matchup of players. I wish I could get a regular online boardgames night going.
posted by tavella at 9:57 AM on August 18, 2023 [1 favorite]