Something I’ve noticed as I’ve been playtesting other peoples’ games recently is that the feedback I most commonly give is that games don’t seem to ramp up. I like it when games get more and more exciting, or more and more interesting.

What Do I Mean By Ramp Up?

When I say a game needs to ramp up, I mean that there needs to be more game at the end than the beginning. If it’s a gambling game, the gambling needs to get bigger and riskier as the game goes on. If it’s an engine builder, the engine needs to be bigger and do more at the end than at the beginning. If it’s a race, the last stretch needs to be faster and more frantic than the start. You’ll notice a lot of this comes rather naturally for these games, when I describe them like this, but it’s not always automatic. But before I discuss how, let me discuss why.

An Easy Start

It’s important for to start simple in a game. New players will appreciate having time to get used to everything going on. Even experienced players will enjoy having the early game to try and experiment with things, possibly by setting up things that will pay off later. A good way to accommodate this is by having only one or two decisions occur in a single turn. This not only means that players can take it slow and look at every option easily, but it also means that experienced players can blitz through it in no time. Having an early game that doesn’t feel too important helps players relax and get into the game.

Narrative Element

Games are a form of entertainment, and can therefore take some lessons from other forms of media. You’ll see a lot of people talk about 3 act structures and the importance of pacing. People enjoy having things get more intense as things go on. It leads to excitement, anticipation, and a strong ending. If players are playing in order to get some sort of visceral feeling out of the experience, it’s important that they get more out of it as the game goes on. Otherwise you get bored players who won’t talk about your game again the next time someone asks what to play. Funnily enough, even though people consider American-style games to be more movie-like and visceral, I’ve actually found that Euro games are more likely to have clear forms of advancement in the game.

Progression

I can’t express enough how important it is to have a sense of progression in a game. Players should feel like what’s going on now is somehow more advanced or more important than what happened ten minutes ago. If a player doesn’t feel like they or the game is progressing, they are likely to get frustrated or bored. Frustrated players feel like they are wasting their time, and that anything they do now would have been just as useful as it was at the start of the game. Bored players will just start to tune out the repetitive nature of the game. Even if they are getting new options or new abilities, if they seem to be of the same utility as the things they are already doing, they won’t care. Why do something new and interesting if the thing you’re doing right now is working fine and doesn’t carry any risk?

But How?

So hopefully I’ve convinced you why to have your games ramp up. But How? Well, chances are the opportunities are there, they just aren’t coming to the surface.

A lot of games have a market of some sort. A way to buy upgrades, or workers, or tools, or just resources. Sometimes, these naturally ramp up. As the game progresses, players can stockpile more resources, and then eventually get something very powerful. This lets the early game have weak things that scale up to strong things in the late game. But, if your early game items show up late and the late game items show up early, it could be a disaster. Players might end up buying cheap, almost useless cards late in the game just because they have nothing better to do. Or, players might be stuck with expensive things in play, and if a player happens to get one somehow, then they end up with an item so powerful it renders the rest of their choices moot. So try and keep in mind some way to mitigate what shows up when. Also, if you have every item at the same cost (such as a single action), then try and make sure that the ones you buy later in the game are either somehow improved by actions in the middle of the game (like some way of stacking up) or that the cost for it gets easier to pay (like by increasing your number of actions in a turn).

Games that could be considered “races,” as in, games where all players are racing to do something before all other players in order to win, have a form of natural ramping as well. If a player needs to get 50 gems to win, then the early game isn’t as tense when you’re deciding between 3 gems or 2 gems and a gold coin. However the close the game gets to the end, all of the sudden every choice is tense and scary, and anyone could win at any moment! In order to facilitate this, though, you want to make sure ways to reach the finish vary both in quality and variety. If you can only score a point once at the end of your turn, then if you’re two points away the fastest it could happen is in two turns. In order for excitement, there has to be risk and chance. If the outcome is too limited, then no one is worried, and if no one is worried, then no one is interested.

Those are just two examples, but there’s a lot of ways to tackle this.

Conclusion

If you see players getting bored in your game, you need to get them excited, and preferably get them excited earlier. Things players do later have to be bigger and better than things they do earlier. Find some way for players to either build off of what they were doing earlier in the game, or find ways for the things they are doing now to feel more important and impactful than when they did the same thing last turn.