The biggest piece of game design advice I ever learned was the one in the title: Make the best strategy the most fun strategy. It sounds so simple at the surface, but I’ve also seen people argue against it. So let me explain what I mean.

Gotcha!

I first learned this lesson while watching a video of a presentation at GDC by Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic: The Gathering. Lesson #13 (about 38 minutes in), which he only talked about for about three minutes, was a huge eye opener for me. In it, he talks about how he designed a mechanic called “Gotcha” where you were rewarded by catching your opponent saying a few specific words or doing specific actions, including laughing. This meant the best way to avoid giving your opponent a benefit was to never say anything, never do anything, and never laugh. This was a terrible thing to encourage in a card game with an emphasis on humor and playing together. He accidentally encouraged players to do the exact opposite of the game’s intended goal.

What happened here is that, when designing Gotcha, Mark wanted to incorporate something into the design that was happening naturally. He wanted the laughing and playing to be incorporated into the game, and failed to realize that the mechanic he had discouraged it instead of encouraged it. Believe it or not, this is usually the inverse of how this problem commonly appears.

Falling into the Trap

In a game with multiple paths to victory, the designer has to make each path feel different yet equally powerful. So lets say you manage to make each path a viable choice. Now what? What option will players pick? You might expect the answer to be ” the most fun one,” but you’d be surprised. Game Maker’s Toolkit has an excellent video on how players will “optimize the fun out of a game.” Smart players will pick whichever option is most likely to provide an advantage to them or a disadvantage to their opponents. This could mean anything from strategies that have the least randomization, strategies that don’t interact with opponents, or just strategies that are simple to understand. Funny thing is, randomization, player interaction, and complexity are often the most entertaining parts of the game.

Fun vs. Winning

When a player sits down to with a game, they have one goal: to have fun. Once they open the box and start playing, they have a second goal: to win. Your job as a designer is to make sure that no player ever has to make sure these goals are never at odds.

Think about healing mechanics in games. Video games and board games alike have the common issue where players don’t want to play healers simply because it’s less fun. This leaves an awkward choice where someone on the team has to play a boring role, or the team has to lose. As a designer, your option is to either make healing more fun or make it a weaker strategy.

What is Fun?

One of the root issues that leads designers down this path is misinterpreting fun. If a player is getting closer to winning the game, then aren’t they having more fun? Isn’t winning fun in and of itself? Well, it can be, but you have to think about your game as a whole. Sometimes things that would normally feel boring like gathering resources or spending a turn setting up can be exciting if your game is built around it and feels rewarding to players.

When you start designing a game, you have to know what about it will be fun. If you’re making a bluffing game, the bluffing should be fun. If you are making a war game, the war should be fun. The winning should be a byproduct of what the players did while they were having fun. If you can win a bluffing game without ever bluffing, then you either are making a bad bluffing game, or you need to make telling the truth as fun as bluffing.

We reach another snag here, though. Fun is relative. The healer example I mentioned earlier is a good example here. To a selection of players, healing IS fun. Some players avoid lying in bluffing games because they don’t like being dishonest, no matter how fun the game tries to make it. Sadly, the best you can do here is try to market your game well. If someone doesn’t want to start wars, don’t make them play your war game and tell them they’re having fun.

Conclusion

If you want your players to be happy, don’t make them choose between having fun and winning the game. Learn what makes players happy in your game, then reward players for doing it. Encourage fun!