The Two Crucial Components of Any Game

Recently, I returned to one of my older games: one of the first that was generated on my website. Both to improve it and to create a few “spin-offs” based on the same idea.

Because I remembered, when I made it, that it felt “almost there, but not really”. The game was simple and “worked”, but it also didn’t. At the time, I had no clue how to fix this or where to even look.

Having gained a lot more experience developing games, I came back and immediately saw the major pain points and possible solutions.

That realization turned into a longer thought process … which turned into this article!

The two components

I realized each game needs two crucial components. Without them, I don’t believe any game will actually feel fun and interesting. (They might be playable or balanced, but that’s not the most important factor. Fun is the most important factor.)

Each game needs a way to GET INFORMATION and then a way to ACT ON THAT INFORMATION.

It sounds quite obvious, but is very hard to apply in practice. Or, rather, it’s easy to forget this and get bogged down in other ideas / rules / mechanics that forget to include these components.

Information

Without information, you have no idea what’s happening. You can’t react, can’t strategize, can’t plan (ahead), nothing! Others might be winning, they might be losing, they might have a great hand of cards or a bad one—you literally don’t know.

And when I say “without information”, really imagine a game that doesn’t give you any of this.

For example, a game where players are dealt cards, which they place facedown before them, and after 5 rounds everyone scores their thing. At no point do you know what others have in their hand or what they have done. You have no information. That’s not a fun game.

Hopefully, you have never seen or played such a game. I tend to forget how many systems (popular) games have to automatically hand out information all the time. Even the simplest card games force you to play cards faceup. Or they add rules about which cards you may play (implicitly telling your opponents which cards you do or don’t have).

Act on information

Without a way to act, the information is useless. You might know exactly what your opponents are doing, and the exact way to stop it, but you just can’t do that! This is not only unfun, it’s incredibly frustrating. Games should provide direct ways to use the information to your advantage, to control it.

Notice the distinction between “a way to act” and “a way to act on the information”. Even the simplest game has rules about what you do on your turn, so surely you can act in some way. But it’s meaningless if those actions don’t align with the information you get or need.

For example, imagine a game where you’re allowed to see one card in the opponent’s hand every round. But there is no action to influence their hand or what they play. Then … what’s the point of getting that information? This is unintuitive and makes you feel like the game just plays itself.

Okay, this is all a bit abstract. Let’s dive into concrete examples.

Example: Swerving Shots

The game Swerving Shots is one of my oldest game ideas, even from before I had my Pandaqi website.

It was in the same boat as Kingseat (which is handled in-depth below), and now I believe it was “mediocre” for the same reasons: missing those two crucial components.

In that game, each turn, you …

  • Place a hexagonal tile onto the field. (The tiles show paths, so this is how you “connect” longer and longer paths over time.) OR rotate an existing tile.
  • Then place your bullet at one edge of the map.

After every round—each player has taken a single turn—you shoot those bullets. Follow the paths on the map! Wherever they end up ( = shoot out of the map), they hit that player.

It felt, again, like simple and intuitive rules that would make a fun game. But let’s check our crucial components.

Info + Act

Information: tiles are picked from a market. So you know the options, but have no clue which one the opponent will pick or where they’ll place their bullet. There are countless options for that combination of actions. So, when you place your bullet, you’re really just making an educated guess about what the players after you are going to do.

Act on it: let’s say you have the last turn, so all players have already placed their bullet before you. You have information. Can you act on it?

  • Yes, if you’re lucky. If the perfect tile happens to be in the market, or there’s one tile you can rotate and it solves everything.
  • Once the bullets are shot, they must follow the rules of the game, so their path and the outcome is (mostly) set in stone.

Again, we find a game where you’re just guessing at what others will do (out of 100+ options), and then the game mostly plays itself.

This feels like a nearly invisible wall. You feel like your game should work, and it is playable, but the real fun factor stays out. And now I believe that happens when one of those components is missing.

How do we solve that?

Knowing this, how might we go about improving the game idea?

Reduce the number of options on your turn. Having 10 options each turn is more than enough for variety and choice. So don’t allow picking any market tile and placing it anywhere OR rotating any tile. Put restrictions on it. For example:

  • Each turn, you place a tile AND rotate.
  • The tiles have some unique element, like a color or shape. You can only place them adjacent to one with a matching element.
  • And you can only rotate a tile with a matching element.

If there are only a few tiles in the market, play becomes predictable enough that players can plan ahead and try to play into other player’s turns.

Reduce the number of options for bullet placement. Now that we have our “identifier” for tiles (such as a shape), we can also limit where to place bullets!

  • The bullet also has a shape.
  • You can only make it start from a matching side.

Again, this means you have a handful of options for where your bullet starts. Less overwhelming for you—other players can guess what you will pick and plan ahead for that.

Delay making decisions until you have information. Instead of doing your turn at once (change map, place bullet), split it.

  • First everyone changes the map.
  • Then, in reverse order, everyone places their bullet.

Similarly, we can allow decisions after shooting the bullets. Maybe you made a mistake calculating the trajectory. As the bullets fly, you realize things are going wrong—you get more information and you want to act on it.

So create tiles with splits, or special actions, or other mechanics that allow one or two choices/tweaks as the bullets fly around.

These are simple changes that I came up with in 30 seconds, while writing this. But if I had done this, the game would’ve been soooo much better. Just by picking the two components and really drilling into them, finding ways to constantly give information updates and allow acting on them.

Example: Kingseat

Kingseat is the game I returned to after a year or so. The basic rules are as follows.

  • Each player starts with a hand of “votes” (for specific made-up political parties)
  • Each round, you simultaneously cast a vote.
  • The longest sequence of matching votes (checked clockwise from the King) wins the round. Those votes are scored for the end.
  • All remaining players either execute their card’s action or swap places.

That’s it. That’s the whole game. Simple, right? Sounds good, I thought.

And yes, it does work.

  • You can act, controlling what you vote and how you respond to not winning the vote.
  • Rounds are fast, all players are always active.
  • The objective is simple (score the most votes for your secret faction)
  • And by swapping places, you can control where your vote sits in the order, hopefully creating the longest sequence at the right time.

But it just wasn’t great. And now I know it’s because the two crucial components were mostly missing.

Information

Information: the only information you get is the Vote from each player, every round. You don’t know the rest of their hand. You can’t predict their votes in advance.

But okay, we can fix this with some tweaks. That’s what I did when I returned and updated (almost completely redid) the games.

  • Actions that allow seeing other player’s cards.
  • Actions that limit what you may play (or MUST play) next round.
  • Or, as I did with Kingseat, exchange cards during setup (give 2 to the right, 2 to the left) so everyone knows at least something about each other’s hand.
  • When you swap places, you also swap 1 card.
  • One of the players (picked in whatever way) must vote first and faceup, so you know one vote (and its position) already.

Act on information

Act on information: this is the more egregious offence. But it’s hard to spot or correct while developing, which is why I’m writing this article.

Let’s say you just studied another player’s hand. You know they have 3 Red votes, 2 Green, and 2 Blue. So … what?

You can’t control what they vote. You have no clue which of the options they’ll pick.

If you studied the other player’s hand, it means you’ve taken your action (instead of swapping places). So even if you did know exactly what they were going to vote, you couldn’t position yourself to benefit/block it.

I can add all the mechanics or actions to share information in the world—but if you can’t instantly act on it, what’s the point? The game just isn’t fun.

You’re sitting there thinking “well I know this will not go well for me, but there’s no way to change it now, so I’ll just vote some random thing! Let’s hope this game is over quickly and we can do actual fun stuff!”

Similarly, I tried making voting “open” half the time. So you vote in turn, playing faceup, giving you loads of information. This was still unfun, however, because you couldn’t act on it.

Say you’re one of last few players in a 5-player game. There is already a sequence of 2 matching votes before you, so no matter what you play, you won’t win anyway. (Even if you create your own pair of 2 matching votes, the other one comes first and actually wins.)

All these tiny things add up to make a game just … not really fun in the long run. Only giving information but no way to act on it, is like dangling candy in front of your players and then putting them in a cage.

How do we solve that?

I didn’t know. That’s partially why I dropped the ideas a year ago. How do we solve this?

Now you see why I gave the other example first. Much of the same solutions apply here, and I’ve come to realize they apply almost everywhere.

Give players a few options, but not too many. Actually reducing their options (for Voting or execute/swap) means any information other players get is more reliable and can predict the future better. So …

  • Add a rule that limits what you can/can’t Vote every round. This is a consistent rule that one can also predict in advance/control for the future.
  • Add limitations on when you may execute or swap places. For example, only allow 1 swap per round.

Less randomness after making your decision. My testing showed that the winners often won with a sequence of only 1 or 2 cards. This means, in a 5-player game, you have 3 players who can do the action they played OR swap places.

That’s a lot of … chaos and randomness for which you can’t account. Now, when you Vote, you have no idea how the round will play out. Will your action even make sense once you’ve seen what the others have done!? Nobody knows!

Randomness before acting is fine. Randomness after acting induces that frustrating feeling of being in a cage again!

How might we solve that?

  • Rig the game to have bigger winning votes (3+ cards). So that, on average, way fewer players get to do something unpredictable each round. => An easy way to do this is to rewrite the core rule to say “most votes wins” instead of “longest unbroken sequence”.
  • Split the different phases per round.
    • First you Vote simultaneously.
    • After the reveal, winning votes are scored. (Or maybe even make this a choice, so you can still decide if you want to score your vote after seeing the results.)
    • Then only handle the players who want to swap places.
    • Then only handle the remaining players, who must execute their action. (They now know the final layout for the next round; likely, this is only a single player remaining, so chaos is reduced.)
  • Split the different phases per game.
    • Instead of picking your Loyalty at the start ( = if that faction has the most votes at the end, you win), pick it at some other moment. Or just say: “Your final card is your final bet.” This allows you to constantly act on what happens in the game by changing whom you’re going for.
    • Instead of counting votes all the way at the end, count them regularly and have that result influence the game.

I’m not saying I did (or should do) all of these things. But they’re clear, simple ideas that directly tackle the core issue here. It’s what a game usually needs to be fun, instead of endless extra actions/cards/tokens/whatever.

Information shouldn’t be given out all at once at the start. My original solution for Kingseat—trading some cards with neighbor players at the start—isn’t the best because it only happens during setup.

Instead, I now feel good games should continually update your information. It’s easier to remember, the info is always more up-to-date, and it gives a better sense of momentum and constant progress.

  • Include Actions that allow you to see other player’s hands. (Though I’ve also learned that swapping cards is stronger than looking, because you actually change your hand + don’t need to remember what you saw, because you actually have the card now.)
  • Instead of starting with all your Votes, collect them as you go.
  • Or start with some facing outwards (they’re public info and only 1 of them flips back to secret each round, allowing you to vote with it).

All of these ideas would already improve the game. Now it was up to me to pick the right ones (that had the biggest impact), while keeping rules simple and the different Throneless Games (the overarching project of which Kingseat is just one game) unique.

I spread out most of these across the different versions. The simplest version does the bare minimum (to, well, keep it simple), the most complicated version chucks in a lot of these balancing factors (through the use of randomized Thronecards each round).

If I were making just a single game, I’d make many of the tweaks expansions or variants. Ways to change the game to suit your group / your players as well as possible. Because even the best efforts from me will not make a game the most fun or intuitive for all possible human beings.

Conclusion

Once you look for it, you’ll probably find this in all good games. In their core rules, in the subtle details, they make sure you are always able to get information and then act on it.

The actions are rigged so that players must always give away more information for the greatest rewards.

The gameplay is split into phases so you can still act or course-correct on whatever the previous phase did.

The options available to any other player are manageable (<5 or <10), so any information about them will actually help you think ahead and predict the optimal path to victory for you. Too many options make it completely impossible to act on anything; too few obviously mean you can’t act at all.

The information-gathering actions (or phase, or mechanic, or whatever) is always before the acting phase. Similarly, randomness happens while you get information, not after you’ve acted.

The specific actions you can do directly feed into the information you’re getting about the game state. Don’t do: “each round, reveal your highest card—then you do something unrelated, like roll the dice.” Do: “Each round, roll the dice. Then the player with the highest card is allowed to pick one dice to reroll.”

Information > Act on information. That’s the feedback loop that seems to power most fun games. Make this cycle clear and direct, as tight and fast as possible, and it will repeat the fun experience until the end of the game.

Without that, you can have a game that’s playable, or feels balanced on paper, but just doesn’t turn out fun in the end.

At least, those are my thoughts at the moment.