Phase Transitions

I am about to get a little self-indulgent here, so feel free to skip over this newsletter!

What follows is a segment I did live for the Dice Tower at Gencon 2013.

When I did it live I got more emotional than I anticipated. If you listen to the broadcast you can hear my voice cracking throughout the second section. I guess talking about your life in front of hundreds of strangers (albeit friendly strangers), is tougher than expected.

ALSO - Before I get to the actual piece in question, I wanted to thank the many of you who have pledged to subscribe to this newsletter on Substack if I switch it to a paid version.

I am pledging that this newsletter will always be free. That is partially altruistic - I just want this information to be out there - and partially selfish - I do not want to be beholden to a specific schedule, and if I have subscribers, I will always feel the need to come out with new content.

If you want to support what I do, please consider a donation to my charity New Voices In Gaming, which provides scholarships to designers from underrepresented groups to various conferences, including Tabletop Network.

Thanks for all the support! Now on to our irregularly-scheduled newsletter.

<Every day we face lots of different boundaries – the transition between waking and sleeping, work and vacation, wanting and having. These boundaries shape and influence our lives, sometimes dramatically, but the affects are often subtle.&nbsp;Games are similar, and have different types of boundaries that impact play.

A boundary that all games have is their conclusion. Those that have a fixed number of turns, like Terra Mystica, often feel quite different on the last turn than they do the rest of the time.&nbsp;The value of points and actions becomes much simpler to calculate, and so for many games the last turn becomes an exercise in optimization, as each player tries to maximize their victory points relative to the other players.

This is usually a bad thing in a design. It slows the game down, and can make the machinery of the game more evident – as moves that otherwise are really bad suddenly become really good. So designers either have to live with the consequences or patch the rules to disallow those moves, or otherwise inhibit the players.

An example of this is in Through The Ages. One of the key mechanics of the military system allows players to sacrifice units to double their strength. In almost the entire game this leaves you more open to counter-attack by the other players, so it is used sparingly. However on the last turn, why not just sacrifice every single unit for a big war and lots of victory points? To counteract this, the designer added a rule that you are NOT allowed to sacrifice on the last round. This is just another rule that needs to be learned by the players and reduces the elegance of the system.

I call these Edge Effects. As a fledgling designer I always look out for edge cases, which can take a number of different forms. They can be the first or the last turn, or they can be people exclusively acquiring a single resource instead of spreading out. It is important to look for how edge effects can break a game.

Problems with edge effects are not limited to games. They can be seen in such diverse arenas as politics, where term limits can create a 'lame duck' president, whose ability to act is impacted, both positively and negatively, and computer programming, where edge effects account for the highest percentage of software bugs.

Like politics, edge effects can also have a beneficial impact on a game design. For example, they can naturally create a rising tension and narrative arc to a game. Some games add specific phases to the games – mini boundaries that impact the flow around them. 1830 and Power Grid are good examples. Anticipating and manipulating the phase boundaries in those games is a key part of player strategies.

Some games have more fluid fuzzy boundaries. Two examples of this are St Petersburg and Dominion Both of these games have a pivot point – an inflection point – where the players need to transition between building up their engine and collecting victory points. You have to sense when the end is approaching and make that pivot at a key time to maximize your chances of victory.

Today, August 16th, is my birthday. Today I am 49 years old. Many people mark the milestones of their lives by decades. When you hit 30, 40, or 50 you sit back and take stock of where you are. I do things a little bit differently, which I'm sure surprises no one. When I was 16 I decided that the time for reflection would be the perfect square years. 16, 25, 36, and now 49. As it feels like the passage of time gets faster as I get older, I think that spacing this further apart actually has worked pretty well. It also has tracked a lot of key moments in my life. When I did this for the first time at age 16 my parents were finalizing their divorce. At 25, I got engaged, at 36 my youngest just entered preschool, and now at 49 my son is in college and my daughter is just a year away. And my next 'reflection' year is at age 64, 15 years from now. Perhaps that will coincide with grandchildren, as my children will be 32 and 34.

And so, knowing that 49 was approaching, I've been thinking about what I want to do with these next 15 years. And I've realized that games can provide a framework, or perhaps even a philosophy, to my life. Perhaps it's time to start thinking about switching from building my engine to gaining victory points. Perhaps I need to make my own pivot.

I've spent a lot of time building my engine – to me that means learning all that I can, reading all that I can, making connections, and trying to understand the world a little bit more each day. And I think that for me, I earn victory points by passing that knowledge onto others. Building my engine is the input, and victory points are the output. And part of my output is that I believe that the universe is understandable, and that expanding that understanding is, on the whole, beneficial for humanity.

August represents another birthday month of a sort for me. On August 25, 2007, almost exactly six years ago, the first GameTek segment aired on the Dice Tower. This has been an amazing opportunity for me, and I am so grateful and honored when I get feedback from people that I was able to open their eyes to something new. And I really look forward to continuing doing both GameTek and Ludology. Being part of the Dice Tower community and gaming community at large has been such a positive force in my life.

So I guess I've already started collecting some victory points. And I certainly want to continue to build my engine and keep learning.

But I need to do even more, to find more outlets to take what I've learned and synthesized over 49 years and give it back. I've already got a lot of ideas, and I'm sure many will fail and even more may not even get tried, but hopefully some will make a small bit of difference. And by declaring my intention here, publicly, perhaps that will help keep me on track to make it happen.

So the age 49 - 64 chunk of my life begins tonight. I look forward to letting you know how it went at Gencon 2028.

This is Geoff Engelstein, with GameTek.

I'm a tad more than halfway through the 15 years in question - and I have to say, looking back on what I put forward as my goals, I am very proud of what I've done - particularly in terms of earning victory points by passing knowledge onto others. In these past years I have:

• Published four books about game design

• Publishing my first non-game-design book. More details on this soon!

• Become an adjunct professor at the NYU Game Center

• Started a charitable organization to award scholarships to up and coming game designers

• Helped launch the Tabletop Network conference and Zenobia Award

• Mentored many designers through the Tabletop Mentorship program<

which honestly when listed like that seems overwhelming.

But I am sharing this not to brag - well, not solely to brag, I guess - but hopefully to inspire. Thinking about what I wanted to do, stating it publicly, and then taking concrete steps to make it happen, has really paid off.

And it's never too late to start - I started doing GameTek when I was 45 and didn't publish my first game until I was 47.

So if you have a dream, go for it! You may not get there, but the journey has endless rewards.