I was thinking over in my head why some games are played multiple times. I thought it might be worthwhile to try and go over them here; at least the reasons I’ve come up with. For clarification, when I say “games player in rounds,” I mean games where you essentially play the entire game, then play it one or more extra times, with the only stat holding over being who won or maybe a point total. I’m not talking about games where rounds are just what they call the sum of phases in a turn.

Rounds to Extend Game Length

If a game is short enough, sometimes the designer just wants the players to play more. A lot of party games fall into this camp, depending on what you count as a round. Some games don’t even have a set number of rounds to play, they just tell you to keep playing until you feel like stopping. If you have a short game that you think people will like playing but want to play more, just throw in extra rounds and you’re good. A lot of older card games can sometimes be thrown in here, since playing just one hand of cards doesn’t feel very fulfilling, but scoring points each round and playing a few helps make it feel like you’re actually playing something.

Rounds to Balance

If you’ve read enough of my articles, you know that everything a designer does can ultimately be attributed to balance. Playing multiple rounds helps eliminate almost every form of imbalance, since anything that happened in the first game that gave a player an advantage is unlikely to happen in the second. It’s often a little difficult to differentiate between this and the last reason, since short games are often unbalanced, since there’s not a lot of room for strategy in such a short time period. Is Love Letter played in rounds because each round is only 5 minutes, or because you can often win or lose entirely by things outside your control? That’s a matter of opinion, I feel.

Other than evening out random chance, playing in rounds also allows another form of balance, and one much less civilized. When a player wins a round, whether out of luck or skill, other players will be able to purposely target them if the game gives them the chance to. Free-for-all multiplayer games usually allow for this already, but having a clear way to determine who is worthy of targeting is a nice way to make sure players aren’t just bullying players they don’t like. You can even explicitly do this within the rules, such as by having the winner of the previous round go last.

Rounds for Equal Opportunities

Arguably the times when rounds are most necessary is with asynchronous games. Sometimes it’s extremely necessary, such as with Sherriff of Nottingham, where only one player gets to be sherriff at a time but each player needs to able to be it at least once. Other times it’s just a good idea to do it, like drafting games where every player gets to be the first player to pick. Often this is explicitly written in the rules, but you can also have it as a choice, like by having a player somehow “purchase” a right that they did not have the option to grab in an earlier round. On the flip side, sometimes a single player likes being in the same position each round, and they might just houserule it to keep their position, such as one person being the judge permanently in a Cards Against Huumanity game. Just as often people will take turns with something that they were not supposed to, such as switching out Dungeon Masters in D&D after every few sessions.

Conclusion

I wish I could provide more advice here, but I really just wanted to take a look at it for myself. If your game is short, maybe let players to best two out of three. If you game has some balance issues, you can try and even it out with rounds, but only if you think players would like it. And lastly, make sure everyone gets a chance to do the thing that only one player can do at a time.