The Frustration Tightrope
With one game (plus two small and one large expansion) behind us, and three announced titles ahead of us, a lot of our time at Kinson Key Games is spent in game development. One thing that I feel like we are almost constantly grappling with is how much frustration we want players to have. Where is the "sweet spot," as it were, on how constricting vs. how free a game should be? Even as I write this blog post, I am listening to some post-game feedback from a playtest of Excursions, where playtesters are debating the relative merits of launching ships freely vs. a player having to choose to take a Launch action. The former option would be a lot more generous to the players, but the latter option is a lot more strategic, as it allows players to launch when other players may not be able to (rendering those other players' turns a lot less efficient, unless they had the foresight to build adjacent developments).
This could be frustrating for those other players.
But isn't frustration something we crave on some level? A cornerstone of worker placement games, for example, is the aspect of blocking spaces and forcing others (or yourself) to shift strategies. An important aspect of a deck-builder is that turn when you draw up 5 cards, only for them to be the "wrong" 5 cards and having to pivot or play a suboptimal turn. That pit-of-your-stomach feeling in a push-your-luck game, which gives way to either a great sigh of relief or (often in my case) a groan of despair, is a form of frustration that I savor. Cooperative games thrive on this frustration as the proverbial fires begin to outnumber your ability to extinguish them.
Without frustration, games largely become activities.
The pendulum can swing far too far, though. There are games that I don't enjoy because I feel like they back players into a corner and then beat them over the head with restrictions. There are some eurogames, largely of the old-school variety, where a single misstep on your first turn can doom you for the rest of the game. There are games where you start the game poor and are given precious little opportunity to get any richer. There are games where the frustration factor outweighs the fun factor. I think that Agricola (I know, I know—blasphemy...) can get close to this territory, though there are far worse offenders. Recently, I was playing Pandemic: Hot Zone – North America with my wife and daughter, and we lost the game a few times in a row. Obviously, since we played the game multiple times in a single sitting, we were thriving on the frustration—that "we almost did it" nature of the game—but this soon gave way to the other sort of frustration: the "because of the way the cards came out, I'm not sure we could've won, no matter what" sort of frustration.
As a developer, how do we ensure that there is a correct amount of frustration in a given game to not only offer what the players need but also to ensure that the frustration level is within range of what our company has previously offered? In Galactic Cruise, we decreased lot of the usual worker placement frustration, substituting blocking for bumping, but there are still frustrations regarding the economy (depending on setup, certain supplies can be harder to come by) and the timing in the game, where the open drafting of resources in the silo, Agenda Cards in the market, and ship segments cause some of the "well, dang" moments. Additionally, the race element of the game means that a player can trigger the end of the game sooner than other players realize, causing a resounding "Ah, I just needed one more turn!" around the table. (It should be noted that, according to a lot of people, none of these are frustrations, and Galactic Cruise is basically a carebear game with far too few frustrations in the game.)
For Excursions, there is a higher level of frustration potential, as there is an interactivity in the action selection mechanism that is not present in Galactic Cruise. When playing Excursions at the max player count (6 players), there is a potential for there to be a total of five actions between your turns that you do not want to take, or actions that you perhaps do want to take but doing so will upset your long-term plan (e.g., you may be saving money to build a Development, but then another player chooses the Upgrade action when it's their turn to be the active player; you now must choose whether you want to spend some money now to build that upgrade, or do you save your money for what you'd originally planned?). This can no doubt lead to some frustration, but I would argue that this is also where the fun of the game is rooted. There is a sort of delicious angst that comes in those spans of time between your active turns. Again, though, it's a tightrope. Err on the side of not enough frustration, and players will complain about a lack of tension. Err on the side of too much, and players will complain that the game is just beating them over the head with restriction and punishment.
You know what makes this job a whole lot easier? Having tons of great playtesters who are able to offer their feedback on the game! If you're interested in playtesting Excursions, Manoomin, or any of our other upcoming games, we organize all of those through our Kinson Key Games Discord, which you can join here.
