Random

[learnedax]

I played a game called Puerto Rico on Sunday. It's an interesting economic resource game, which because of the players' dependence on copious "colonists" I quickly dubbed The Unwilling Settlers of Catan. I was just barely edged out of victory by patrissimo, and a subsequent discussion of strategies led me to the following rule of thumb: a strategy game's value is proportional to the ratio of the necessary complexity of a successful strategy to the inherent complexity of the rules. This is why I like Go better than Chess; the former has simpler rules but more complex strategy. Chess also has a much high tendency to get locked into repetitive gambits, and I'm not sure whether I would say a trend towards dynamism is part of that strategic quality or a separate factor, although I am sure that it makes games more enduringly interesting.

This does not necessarily apply to games that are not pure strategy. I am tempted to say that we could reduce partly strategic games into several layers and apply this metric to the purely strategic one, but I'm not sure that really works. I tend to like some kinds of complexity almost for their own sake, Cosmic being the clear example. It may be that my enjoyment of it is somehow separate from strategy, or it might be again that variability that keeps a game dynamic is a driving element.

Somewhere I had a point. Er. Something prosaic like "avoid needless complexity" but, hopefully, with a better idea of how to decide.