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I’ve played more new games this past year than ever before, so with the holidays coming up and the year ending, everyone posting gift guides and such, I wanted to reflect and analyze a bit by making my own favorite game lists. For this post I will focus on my favorite abstract strategy games. I’ve been playing chess since I was around four years old, but the truth is I never even thought of it as a board game. I could sit down to play a card game, a board game, or chess. Previously having very limited board game knowledge, I had no concept of board game genres, and what defined an “abstract game” as opposed to any other kind. In retrospect that might be because a good portion of my early tabletop gaming was actually abstract games. People tend to define abstract games as being (usually) for two players, having perfect information, and not having a theme. This definition has been stretched with games like Azul, which is considered an abstract game but is lightly themed, allows up to 4 players, and also has an aspect of randomness. Even an older game like Battleship is lightly themed and doesn’t have perfect information, but can it be defined as anything other than an abstract game? (Mind you, 90% of my battleship experience was on graph paper, so I never even considered it a "board" game.) It doesn’t have characters, battles, cards to collect, things to build, and it doesn’t tell a narrative. Ultimately, the core of a good abstract game is its mechanic, and here are some great examples, in no particular order: 1. Azul – Is it a surprise to anyone who has played Azul that it is on this list? I’d heard so many rave reviews of it and finally made the purchase, and do not regret it one bit. Azul is a tile collecting/pattern-making game with a market mechanic and random drawing of tiles each round. + Easy to learn and easy to teach– great for new gamers, kids, and guests. + Easy set up and easy clean up – it takes about 2 minutes to set up/break down, which removes a barrier to entry when you don’t have the time or energy to sit down for a long game. + It plays pretty quickly once you learn it. + It works well with all player counts – some games that are 2-4 players are either boring with 2 or overwhelming with 4. Azul works well either way. + Very engaging - remains rewarding and interesting even after you’ve played many times. It has an elegant simplicity that still challenges you with various strategies and paths to victory. + It’s pretty, and the tiles are tactile in a very satisfying way. 2. Qwirkle! – This game surprised me quite a bit. I didn’t buy it myself, but ended up playing with my little brothers. Not only were we able to get going in minutes, I was astonished at how effective its simple mechanic was. Qwirkle! Is basically a bag of black tiles, each with one of 8 different shapes in one of 8 different colors. It feels like a cross between dominoes, scrabble, and a Sudoku. Image credit BGG user edroz + Easy to learn and easy to teach– the complexity level is about equivalent to dominoes/Sudoku. + No set up needed, clean up is just throwing everything back into a bag. + Plays well with several player counts and a wide age range. +/- It is a bit longer than I expected it to be - I didn’t find it too long, but impatient little ones might start getting distracted. - You have to count up your score every turn and write it down, similarly to scrabble. There’s no way around it, but I don’t love that aspect. + It has a lot of possible strategies and each game turns out different. It feels like a modern classic. 3. Photosynthesis – Beautiful and innovative, Photosynthesis is a competitive game about growing trees, requiring you to plant seeds and nourish them with the light of the sun, which changes its angle each round and eventually gets blocked as trees grow taller. Image credit BGG user DocChills + Beautiful components – nice to look at and pleasant to handle. + It’s about trees! That’s just an automatic plus in my book. + Unique mechanic that reflects the theme well. I commend the designers for their genius here, because it really is something special. - Slightly harder to teach than the other games on this list – not difficult, but I feel like I might have to reference a rulebook once or twice, which is not the case with the others. 4. Blokus – I probably find Blokus extra fun because I just love shapes, but it’s a great little strategy game that has a lot to offer. 4 players each have an assortment of tetris-looking colored pieces of various sizes (measured in squares on a grid) and layouts, and the goal is to be left with the least number of units when the board is full and no more moves can be made. Image credit BGG user Terraliptar + Easy to learn and easy to teach. Can be played with kids. + The components are satisfying to interact with. + It plays quickly. Another one that is great for a quick sit down, or something you can play with guests.  + Seems simple but there are some clever maneuvers possible.  +/- If you don’t have good spacial skills you might find it more difficult. - You can only really play it properly with 4 people, but getting exactly 4 players is often a challenge. (There is also Blokus Duo, a two player variant.) 5. The Duke – The Duke is kind of like chess on steroids with a velvet bag. It is a 2 player game and is similar to chess in that each player has a set of pieces of with different abilities, and needs to “check mate” the other player by cornering their king (in this case, Duke.) The kicker is that each tile’s ability is drawn on it as a chart, but it is capable of different moves on the opposite side of the tile. Each time you move a tile, you must also flip it, so you have to really start thinking 5 turns ahead. You also only start with 3 tiles on the board, and for the rest of the game may either use your turn to move a tile or draw a new one from your bag to place. Image by BGG user unic + Get ready for some serious brain-melting strategy. + Its blend of chance and multi-turn planning works well and keeps the game exciting without making it feel unfairly random. + An interesting twist on a classic, therefore also easy to teach, but definitely hard to master. - The game is very different if you are playing for the first time or for the 10th time, so a newbie and a seasoned player would have a fairly imbalanced game. (A big advantage is memorizing the moves that the pieces make on both sides of the tiles, and the more you play, the better you know them.) 6. Quarto! – Stumbled upon this game when a friend was giving it away, and was pleasantly surprised. It’s sort of a 4x4 tic-tac-toe board in which you don’t want to allow your opponent to get 4 in a row… only you choose which pieces they place, and each piece has 4 different characteristics: shape, height, color, and solid/hollow. To get 4 in a row, the pieces only need to share one characteristic between them. + Easy to learn and easy to teach. Easy set up and easy clean up. + Nice hearty, wooden components with a classic feel.  + You can never tell early on who is going to win. + Unique mechanic where you hand pieces to your opponent to place. - The turn order is hard to get used to and I’m embarrassed to admit how often I forget it in the middle of a game.  -/+ I like to plan ahead and it’s strange to not be able to in this type of game because of the number of unpredictable factors.  - Sometimes you end up at a point where no more moves can be made without the opponent winning (although they also have to realize this, so observation is a key factor here.) 7. Sagrada - This is a 2019 addition to this list that I absolutely had to include. Sagrada is a beautiful and puzzly dice-drafting game about making colorful stained glass windows, inspired by Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona. It feels good, looks good, and plays well. + So many colorful dice. They are a pleasure to play with. The player boards are beautiful too. + You can choose player board of varying difficulty. It's nice to have the variety of puzzly and challenging vs. more casual gameplay. + Plays well with all player counts! It's great with 2-4 or up to 6 if you get the expansion. There is also a solo mode. - The tools and objective cards feel a little repetitive after several plays, and make me wish there were a few more, although I don't necessarily have great ideas for what else could be added. (Worth noting that the box recommends ages 13 and up, but a clever 8 year old can definitely learn this.) What are your favorite abstract games? #GAME #GAMES #BOARDGAME #BOARDGAMES #TABLETOPGAMING #TABLETOPGAMES #ABSTRACT #STRATEGY #ABSTRACTSTRATEGYGAMES #GIFTGUIDE #RECOMMENDATIONS #BLOKUS #QUARTO #PHOTOSYNTHESIS #AZUL #THEDUKE #QWIRKLE #CHESS #SAGRADA

How do you challenge someone without making them want to bang their head against the wall? Balancing difficulty is a tricky thing, especially since ideal difficulty heavily varies depending on who the solver is. Audience There are puzzles out there that will challenge everyone that comes across them, but there are also puzzles that will take one player minutes to solve while another player might take hours. Player skill sets and their level and breadth of experience play a huge factor in this, so before you start trying to balance your puzzle, ask yourself who the intended audience is. Designs intended for kids, novice puzzlers, and expert puzzlers should all look at least somewhat different. Amount of information Amount of information is one of the key elements to puzzle difficulty. Think of a sudoku book, broken down into sections of easy, medium, and difficult. I can usually finish an easy puzzle in a couple of minutes, without any notes. A medium one might require taking down some notes but is still a straightforward solve. A difficult one might require a little extra mental gymnastics, making you think on the level of “IF x, THEN y, but IF z then…” as one might during a game of chess. Yet, a “hard” sudoku in it’s solved form is no different from an easy one - the difference lies in the amount of information presented to the solver at the starting point. It follows then, that less information means a higher level of difficulty, but take away too much information and the puzzle becomes unsolvable. Straightforwardness The other main factor of difficulty is straightforwardness. I find this most challenging to balance in puzzles that require making mental connections between different things. The more tenuous the connection seems, the more you run the risk of your player getting confused and frustrated. In these kinds of puzzles it’s important to leave enough breadcrumbs without completely spelling out the answer. (Often this will mean leaving larger breadcrumbs than you first anticipated.) Most importantly, you don’t want to leave your player wondering “How was I supposed to know that?” In some instances, straightforwardness is easier to manipulate, such as in this very simple logic puzzle. Here, if you took any information away, it would be impossible to solve without guessing, but what if you reworded some of the clues? For example, if you changed the first clue from “Ollie was awarded fourth,” to “Ollie was awarded after Isabel, but was not third,” it would already add one extra step to figuring out Ollie’s placement, and take the entire puzzle a tiny step up in difficulty. Similarly, adding layers to a puzzle will also increase the difficulty, as multiple steps require thinking on several different levels simultaneously. Image credit to https://www.logic-puzzles.org/ Outside knowledge Puzzles shouldn’t require outside knowledge to solve, but if having it makes it easier, that’s not necessarily a problem. For example, someone with poor spatial reasoning skills will have a harder time solving a three-dimensional puzzle than an architect might, but ultimately may figure it out with some devoted effort. If you present a non-musician with a bunch of sheet music to decipher though, you can expect a different result. To that end, make sure you include enough information so that the puzzle can be solved without special knowledge (unless of course that knowledge is what you’re testing). Too easy, too difficult Easy puzzles are not necessarily bad - there is a time and place for everything. Easier puzzles make for a great introduction to a concept that might increase in difficulty, similarly to how video games might include a tutorial, (or better yet, some sort of organic onboarding). You might breeze through the first few levels of a game, but they are there to teach you some basic concepts before presenting you with a challenge that otherwise you may not have the resources to solve. When playtesting, take note of where people get stuck. As a general rule, if every playtester gets stuck on a puzzle, it usually means that it would benefit from an extra clue to guide the player in the right direction. If everyone is able to solve it, it’s possible that it is just easy, but it also might be a puzzle of moderate difficulty that is just very logical to whoever comes across it. Depending on what level of challenge you’re looking to create, you might leave puzzles at anywhere from a 25%-100% solve rate (without needing an extra clue). The major thing to be aware of though, is the reason why the other percentage of people is not solving it - is it because they are missing something, or is it because something about your design is too confusing or obtuse? “Impossible” puzzles Some people make puzzles so difficult that while they may technically be solvable, they’re not really designed to be solved. You may have heard of things like Cicada 3301, created by who-knows-what-sinister-agency-or-organization, that only a tiny handful of people may have ever completed, but I’m talking more about things like an escape room with a 3% win rate. Real talk: your 3% win rate puzzle is probably not very fun for 90% of people. I’m not a believer in 100% win rates, but I urge creators to consider why they’re designing in the first place - to snicker as they watch people struggle, or for people to enjoy their game as much as possible? What do you think? How do you balance difficulty in your puzzles? #PUZZLE #PUZZLES #PUZZLE GAME #MYSTERY #GAME #GAMES #GAMEDESIGN #GAME DEV #GAME DEVELOPMENT #TABLETOP GAMING #TABLETOP #BOARD GAME #DIFFICULTY#LEVELS #BALANCE #PROTOTYPING

These questions, of course, have many answers, and I am not the first one to ask them. I write this both to continue discussion of the topic, as well as get my own thoughts on order. First of all, what is a puzzle? A puzzle, in essence, is a problem designed to be solved by some measure of ingenuity, providing the solver with a degree of amusement. Solving a problem is at the very core of a puzzle, and the reason why people are drawn to them, but what distinguishes a puzzle from any other problem we encounter in our everyday lives? Arguably, a puzzle is supposed to be enjoyable to solve. Puzzle quality does not depend on genre, as personal taste goes far in determining satisfaction. Some people hate logic puzzles and others jigsaw puzzles; can we objectively assess their quality when preference is so paramount? To a certain degree. (I would compare it to appreciating the craft behind a piece of music, even if it is of a genre one dislikes.) Context is one essential factor—one might like to solve a sudoku while commuting to work but dislike having to do one inside of an escape room. The issue of context however, might be more of a reflection on the design of an overall puzzle game rather than the individual puzzle. It is possible to ruin an otherwise enjoyable puzzle by inserting it into a scenario that would make it less enjoyable, but a bad puzzle will probably remain bad regardless of context. Context aside, I will try to avoid critiquing puzzle genres and instead focus on a few basic things that are less subjective: Logic, execution, and fairness. Logic A puzzle is logical when it has understandable reasoning behind the design choices made in its creation. At a very base level, 2+2=4 is more logical than 2+2=6, because it conforms to rules we are familiar with and understand. To make 2=3 make sense, you’d need to build a separate set of rules and make those rules apparent to your player. Some puzzles require us to make connections between disparate objects. For example, you find a cylinder, and somewhere there is a circle, ideally the same diameter as the cylinder, inviting you to put the cylinder down on it. But let’s say there was an outline of a square instead - would you ever think to put the cylinder down on it? To some people, a less obvious connection implies a higher level of difficulty, and it may be true that a puzzle would be more difficult for it, but if the difficulty comes from faulty logic rather than something requiring deeper analysis, the added challenge may feel arbitrary. The bottom line: How does a player feel when they haven’t solved a puzzle and then they hear the solution? Is their reaction “Ohhhhhh I should have seen that, that makes sense!” or is it further confusion? If they are left wondering how they were supposed to arrive at that solution, that’s not sign of solid logic. Execution A good puzzle requires a clear execution, meaning that difficulty is not due to ambiguity, and one should be able to extract a definite solution once the problem is solved. A couple examples: You’re told that you’re looking for something in particular, but the answer is actually something else. A riddle says the password you’re looking for is a star, but it turns out to be the name of a constellation. They’re related, yes, but conflating the two creates ambiguity that sets a bad precedent for subsequent puzzles in the game. Another common instance is a set of components that don’t quite fit or align properly, leaving you wondering if there is an error or if you’re doing something wrong. If you’re thinking, “I guess this is supposed to go here…?” then the puzzle is lacking a certain degree of precision. This is something fairly simple to correct and should not be ignored, as it will save your players a lot of frustration. There should also be little room left for user error, especially when doing something that requires outside knowledge, like an internet research or a book cipher. A book cipher can be done in several different ways (chapters, pages, paragraphs, sentences, words, letters) so there needs to be some kind of instruction, otherwise your player will be left guessing through five different methods of extracting the solution. The bottom line: When you perform the correct action or figure out an answer, you should be able to know that it’s correct. Avoid ambiguity, vague verbiage, multiple answer possibilities, and imprecision, especially with physical components. Fairness How can a puzzle be unfair? It’s kind of feels like playing a game with a cheater. Lack of fairness often goes hand in hand with lack of logic and poor execution, but unfair puzzles often leave one with a special sense of dissatisfaction. Intentional placement of red herrings: in-game items or pieces of information that seem like they are part of a puzzle but are actually just there to distract you, causing you to waste time chasing false solutions. It’s true that red herrings can sometimes occur unintentionally, but the biggest culprits are things that look very intentional and specific but in fact are just there to throw you off. If it’s an aesthetic choice, it should be clear that it’s not part of the puzzle. Lack of information and general guessing: Let’s say you need to find 4 objects and place them in a line on a pedestal, but there are no clues relating to the order of the artifacts. It turns out you’re just supposed use trial and error. Without any feedback, like you might receive in a Mastermind game, this is complete guesswork, and guessing is different from solving - guessing turns the activity into a task reliant on chance rather than a puzzle. Outside knowledge: Puzzles that expect you to know information that they’re not providing can be problematic. Tabletop games and puzzle hunts in which you need to use the internet for research usually state this explicitly, but if you are not expected to use outside resources and need to have knowledge of pop culture, history, or otherwise, this is basically just trivia; information to be found, rather than puzzles to be solved. Unreasonable expectations: Things that cause failure because you simply can’t accomplish the task given to you. A puzzle that requires reading tiny letters in dim lighting feels unfair because ultimately it’s a measure of how good your eyesight is, not how good of a puzzle-solver you are. (It’s also not very fun.) The bottom line: Eliminate red herrings. Include all relevant information, unless research is explicitly necessary. Don’t create difficulty through trial and error, guesswork, or unreasonable barriers. Final Thoughts So what if your puzzle is logical, fair, and well-executed - is it good? This is where subjectivity comes back in! On the bright side, it now has the potential to be good. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a puzzle fun, but here are some questions that I like to ask myself: Does the puzzle rely on piecing together information or a process of tasks? If the latter, how long is the process? Does it get tedious? Does the puzzle introduce any new concepts? Does it teach you anything? Does it offer a sense of discovery? And finally, does completing it give you a sense of accomplishment? It is hard to attain all or even most of these things. Like anything, it also take a lot of practice, and realistically, a puzzle will probably be liked by some people and not by others, and that’s okay! As a follow up, here’s a good watch about what makes for good video game puzzles. What do you think makes a good puzzle? #PUZZLE #PUZZLEGAME #GAMEDESIGN #GAMEDEV #GAMEDEVELOPMENT #TABLETOP #BOARDGAME #TABLETOPGAMES #DESIGN #ESCAPEROOM