Balancing Act

On tabletop game design forums, there are two questions that seemingly arise more than others.

The first is “Which of these card layouts do you like better?”. I may do a future newsletter on graphic design - but not this month.

The other is “How do I balance my game?”

This is a seemingly simple question, but it is much more complex than most people realize. So let’s dive in and peel back the onion, in part 1 of a series on this important topic.

Types of Balance

The term “balance” is not well-defined on its own. There are many different flavors of balance, and while they overlap, each has specific nuances.

In their excellent book Game Balance, Ian Schreiber and Brenda Romero identify several types of balance:

Balance Between Game Objects: Are the objects in the game (cards, etc) of relatively equal value given their cost? This is going to be the focus of the next newsletter, so I won’t get into details here of how to figure that out. But this is often what people think of when they say “balance”.

Balanced Difficulty: Does the difficulty the player faces ramp up appropriately for their increase in power? This is more of a concern in video games, but even in tabletop this can be an issue. For example, in Dungeon Fighter, the boss creatures are much, much more difficult than what the players face earlier and come as quite a shock. (It’s a great game in spite of this - just be warned).

Balanced Progression: I refer to this more as ‘pacing’. Does the game advance in a smooth way? It doesn’t need to be linear - where every stage takes exactly the same amount. In fact, controlling this is an important and challenging design decision. In an engine building game you want players to have the chance to play with their ‘toys’ - I’ve played too many games that end just as things are getting interesting. Yet if turns get more complex later in the game you don’t want it to drag out either.

Wingspan handles this in an interesting way by dealing with the increasing complexity by reducing the number of actions, balancing things out, at least from a time perspective. Through the Ages quickens the pace by giving players more actions and larger hand sizes, which accelerates how fast cards are drawn (the Age timer).

Balanced Initial Conditions: Do all players have an equal chance to win at the start of the game, given equal skill? This is particularly complex in multiplayer games with direct interaction where the designer may rely on players to ‘rein in’ players that start in a stronger position or pursue certain strategies.

Balance Between Multiple Strategies: Do different strategies offered to players give an equal chance at victory? If you offer an alternate path to a player, it should be viable.

Balance Considerations

The people asking the question “how do I balance my game” are, for the most part, looking for some formula that they can apply to their game objects to make sure everything comes out OK.

That formula doesn’t exist. There are techniques that will help guide you (which we will discuss next issue), but you will still have to playtest to see how things actually work, and more importantly, how they feel.

However, like all math analysis in games (like figuring out probabilities for combat systems), while the analysis won’t allow you to skip playtesting and tweaking, it will reduce the amount required. It will get you to your destination faster.

Using math to balance games is a fairly detailed topic, so I am dedicating the next newsletter to a deep dive of that in particular.

Over-Balanced

Another caveat is that perfect balance is not just impossible - it is not even desirable If every card is equally valuable, if every move you make gives equal rewards, it doesn’t matter what you do.

Rock, Paper, Scissors is perfectly balanced. And literally the best move is to just randomly pick one of the three best actions. Perfect balance is bad. While this may seem like a theoretical issue, it is not. Some “point salad” games (where you get points for doing just about anything) can start to feel like it doesn’t matter what you do - you still get about the same number of points. For there to be skill and strategy involved there needs to be imbalance. There need to be better and worse options.

Balance as Fairness

This is a catch-all term for what I refer to as perceived balance. Do the players think that the game feels balanced? This can be as important as whether or not the game is actually balanced. Perhaps even more so, particularly in this age when you can’t count on your game getting played multiple times before players make a judgement. Often (too often) that judgement comes after just a single play. So it is imperative that the first impression your game leaves is one of being fair.

Related to this is what skill level to balance for. In a game with asymmetrical factions or starting positions, there may be one that is more challenging to play - but in the right hands can be very powerful. Conversely there may be a faction that may be much simpler to play.

I had this problem with The Expanse. When it was released, some people started saying that the UN faction was overpowered, and the OPA were too weak.

But I had done a lot of testing at different player counts, and the numbers showed that, within reasonable statistical variation, each faction won the expected percentage of games.

What I eventually figured out was that the UN was simply the easiest to play. Many of their technologies were passive - they were continuously active, and the players didn’t need to choose when or how to use them. The OPA, on the other hand, had no passive abilities. Everything was a judgement call.

Almost all the testing I had done was with experienced players. The blind playtests I ran were focused on rules clarifications, ease of entry, stuff like that. I wasn’t looking at balance at that point - my earlier testing showed that was OK.

In the first game or so, the players controlling factions with the Active powers just didn’t have the experience yet to realize when and how to trigger them. But the UN player didn’t have to worry about that. They could just sit back and focus on the core mechanisms, and let their powers just run on autopilot.

So is The Expanse balanced? In one real sense yes it is - and I have the data to prove it. But on the other hand, no. Not at least for new players.

This goes back to the concept of “Perceived” versus “Actual” balance. The perceived balance in The Expanse is out of whack.

Some games handle this by marking some factions as “Beginner” where others are “Advanced” or “Expert”. This at least gives the players some understanding of what they might be in for. I didn’t have that luxury in The Expanse, as there are four factions for four players. However, if I had realized the issue prior to publication I could have put in some player notes saying that the UN was the easiest to play, and the other players needed to watch out for their passive abilities.

But I did not.

My thinking on balancing for expertise has evolved over the years. At first I would balance for the long term. What is the ultimately balance when all players are good?

But now, I think it is actually more important to balance for the first one or two plays. It is a very small subset of your player base that will play the game many, many times. And then you can tweak things with ‘optional rules’ to try to bring things into balance for experienced players. You may end up with a dominant strategy lurking out there (like the Halifax Hammer in A Few Acres of Snow), but ultimately I think your game will be better for it.

For what it’s worth, in the expansion for The Expanse I included replacement techs that toned down the UN somewhat, and upped the OPA. In my mind the original was still balanced, but I think it was worth it to streamline play for the less experienced (although, realistically an expansion is NOT the best place to do this since it most likely will be purchased by your experienced players).

Next issue I will dive into some of the gory math details behind balancing game objects. Yay, math!