Smart, Clever or Powerful?

Players may not remember the rules of your game, or the actions they took. But they will remember how your game made them feel. Finding out how the game you are designing makes your players feel is important to making your game fun and memorable.

For example, in a social deduction game like Werewolf or Blood on the Clocktower, were your players able to achieve their goals without being discovered? Or, was it too easy to discover a player’s role? Did the players feel clever, or not? If the players aren’t feeling clever, they probably aren’t having fun. Time to make some changes!

Having players that feel powerful in your game is great, but the game should still be challenging. If it isn’t, then it’s not fun. For example, in Gloomhaven, part of the fun is looking through your available cards and seeing what top/bottom card combo makes the most sense. But, once you’ve used a set of cards, they are unavailable until your character takes a rest. If you could use a powerful set of cards over and over again without restriction, the game becomes very dull.

If, during the playtesting of your game, you see a combo that is overpowered, you need to reevaluate that part of the game. Otherwise, the first player to get that combo will generally win, and it’s less fun for the other players.

In the game I’m designing, Escape from Nemo’s Island, during a recent playtest, one of the playtesters found a killer combo. He had a clue card that allowed him to hang onto the card, instead of discarding it after use. And, he was playing the Scholar character, that can spend actions to draw additional clues. So, once the location on his clue card was discovered, he could draw more clues to match with it and easily find supplies and treasure. This wasn’t my intention when I added that ability to those clue cards, and it made the player easily win the game. One player felt powerful, and everyone else felt powerless. That is going to get fixed in the next iteration!

So, what game(s) are you working on, and how do they make your players feel? Powerful, or powerless? Clever, or dull? Smart, or dumb?