How Do You Play? How Do You Win?

I find myself teaching board games to my friends quite often. This happens partly because I’m an anal retentive perfectionist and therefore want to read the rules and partly because once I find a game I like I want to show it to everyone I know. For most of the people I play with there’s really only two things you need to worry about, as told so eloquently by James Coburn in his tv ad about slot machines. How do you play? How do you win? I’ll show you how!

For the most part how you win is pretty straightforward. Most if not all of the games we play lately are “euro” style games where you accumulate points over the course of the game. Eventually the game ends and whoever has the most points is the winner. Games like this tend to have scoring summaries to hand out which tell you exactly what actions can earn you points and how many. You probably need to iterate over the summary and explain what each item means, but it’s pretty straightforward. You win by doing the stuff listed here!

How do you play flows nicely from there. There’s normally a turn order summary (often on the same card!) and then you just need to link the potential actions you can take to the scoring items. Easy peasy! First time players who learn the rules this way aren’t terribly likely to win but they should have a reasonable shot at playing the game properly, of having fun, and of learning how to win for future games. The alternative where a lot of strategy is spelled out in the rules explanation makes set-up take a ton of extra time and most people would rather just get to playing. (Try to teach Agricola to someone who wants to win on their first game and needs to learn everything before the first turn!)

Scoring by victory points in this way also lends itself nicely to figuring out how you ‘could’ play when you can’t win. You have a number you can make bigger! It’s ok if you’re not going to win, you still have a relevant in-game goal. Score more points! (How to deal with player ‘elimination’ in general is a topic of lively debate and not really the topic at hand. Suffice it say when you’re learning a game just scoring points will be hard to argue against.)

This works great for euros, but how do you deal with games with odd winning conditions. The game that brought this to light for me is Republic of Rome, a game from 1990 that simulates the Roman senate. The game has many different end conditions and different winners depending on game state when the game ends. In particular there are 3 potential outcomes:

- Rome falls to some catastrophe and everyone is loyal to Rome. Everyone loses.
- Rome falls to certain catastrophes and someone is a rebel. The rebel wins.
- Someone loyal to Rome accumulates enough influence to win.

Consider a specific player’s point of view. How do they win? Take it one step further… Once they know they can’t win (as new players rarely can in any game) how can they play without screwing the game? Taking actions to score victory points in a euro is unlikely to be massively disruptive, what about here?

In a euro you’ve got a grading system that’s easy to understand. More points is better! But in Republic of Rome the potential outcomes from a single person’s point of view are:

- Be loyal to Rome and get enough influence to win. You win!
- Be a rebel and have Rome fall in some way. You win!
- Everyone loses.
- Have Rome fail when someone else is a rebel. They win, you lose!
- Have someone else be loyal to Rome and get enough influence to win. They win, you lose!

The question then is how do you order those 5 things to determine what our player’s goals are. How do you win? Once you can’t win, what do you do? Is it better to have someone who isn’t you win or to have everyone lose? Does the answer to that question change after the ‘learning’ games are done and you’re playing ‘for reals’?

I’ve only played the game twice (and we got the rules muddled all over the place due to the reprinted version having terribly printed rules) but I still don’t know what the right thing to do is. I asked Andrew about this and his response was rather predictable. “If I can’t win, no one should win!” Which, I must admit, is the stance I took. Unsurprisingly this resulted in Rome collapsing and everyone losing in both games. I know for sure I could have stopped the second one from happening (I could have donated enough money to Rome to field a big enough army to survive for game end, but I was guaranteed to not win if I did) and I’m pretty sure the first game was lost because Matt came to the same conclusion. (In his case he blackmailed the leader, which had two possible outcomes. One - he became the leader. Two - we lose…)

My gut feeling is that I’m always going to take the 1% chance to win in a game like this and if I can’t win, well, no one should. Does that mean I can’t play games like this? Do we need to come to some sort of agreement that having everyone lose is somehow worse than having someone win? I could be convinced that having Rome survive with a winner is better than having Rome burn with a rebel who wins. Is it really that much more of a stretch to believe that it’s also better than everyone loses? Alternatively, maybe the game is better if it’s harder for Rome to burn. (We didn’t play with any optional rules, maybe those would help too.)

Maybe it all comes down to how you feel about kingmaking. If you hate the idea of kingmaking then you’d need to get into a position to brute force a victory which seems hard to do (especially in a 6 player game). On the other hand, if I have no problem picking a winner it would be fairly easy to team up with someone else to make them win.