If you ask someone is they want their game to be balanced, they’ll often say yes, with maybe a caveat that occasionally imbalance can be fun. But there’s a bit of a debate, though about what balanced means, and there’s two prevailing definitions. The common conception is that a balanced game means that all players have (or at least start with) an equal chance of winning the game. However, a version I like is that a balanced game is one where the better player wins every time. Combine these two, and you get “a balanced game is one where all players of equal skill are equally likely to win.” So lets dial in on that.

Playing with Power

Some players are just better than others. They may have played more, they may have played similar games, they might just have gotten more sleep that night. It’s functionally impossible for all players to start off on equal footing. This could be disastrous, since if you can already guess who the winner is before you start the game, it really drains a lot of the fun out of it. However, these people do want to play together. You can’t do the simple thing and say “don’t play with people out of your skill level,” because that’s what these people want to do. The person who owns the game will assuredly be best at the game, but they own it because they want to play it with other people. As a designer, it’s our job to let people play our game, whatever that takes.

The Main Offenders

There’s a few mechanics or genres that give good players an especially strong advantage.

Drafting games (including action drafting AKA worker placement) are the first that spring to mind. It’s a little tricky to realize. You’d think that reducing decisions to just a few choices at a time would help, but it also hinders. If you have to pick between five cards, it may seem like all you need to do is read those five cards, but that’s misleading. If all five cards have some trait in common, it may lead inexperienced players to assume that said trait is common, when it might just have been common on those five cards. Now, they may draft a card thinking they’ll find more of that thing later. Poor skill at drafting also has a cascading effect. If one player mistakenly picks the second best card, then the experienced player can correctly pick the best card. Even in the case where the best card for one player is not the best for the other, they still have the option to take it to stop their opponent from taking it. Worse yet, after all the cards are drafted, players actually have to use them now. This leads to the next issue.

Engine building games, or any types of games with setup and payoff, are very prone to benefitting experienced players. You get in this situation where a small mistake made early stacks on. You have to know what you’re doing from the very beginning of the game, which is a lot harder when you don’t know the game that well. You also haven’t had the opportunities to experiment and see where certain things will lead you.

Hidden role games, one of my favorite genres, also has this issue. Since the game relies on secrecy, it can be hard to honestly communicate strategy to other players. In fact, a core part of the experience is purposely misleading players to make bad choices for your benefit. Hopefully, after the reveal at the end of the game, this can be resolved in such a way as for the new player to learn form it, but not always.

Friendly Mechanics

That being said, hidden role’s close cousin, bluffing, is surprisingly bad-player friendly. In a bluffing game among multiple highly-skilled players, a lot of choices are based around what a player believes. Is it a bluff or a double bluff? Do they want me to know what they know? If you’re playing with a less-experienced player, those questions are the same, the tells are just different. You still need to guess whether your opponent has the perfect card for this situation, but now you need to also guess if they know it’s the perfect card. It can be a wonderful balancing mechanic.

Free-for all games are famous for their self-balancing nature. If you can hit anyone, then you’ll often hit the player in the lead. Usually they are in the lead because they are good at the game, so this means new players have a pretty easy way to gang up on better players. And maybe those better players will even enjoy the challenge!

And of course, randomness. Randomness is the great equalizer. In the intro I talked about how one definition of balance is that all players have an equal chance of winning, and nowhere is this more clear than in the “game” of flipping a coin. It’s completely random, and each player has a 50% chance of winning. Any randomness will have some impact, but use it sparingly. There are plenty of articles online about how to use it well, I just knew I needed to at least mention it.

I will also mention cooperative games, as they are both an excellent and a terrible way to play games with people of different skill levels, based entirely on if the game can handle it. I’ve discussed that elsewhere here multiple times.

Conclusion

This is by no means complete list, but it is something I wanted to make sure people were aware of. It’s popped up its ugly head multiple times in my won games, and I wanted to lessen the probability of it happening to any of you.