Almost every multiplayer strategy game becomes more about the players involved than the specific game rules, once at least some of the players have a bit of the strategy figured out. And pretty much any 3 or 4 player game can be thrown by a player who decides he doesn’t care to try to win himself (this is even often true in 6 player games, though it usually takes a bit of skill and cooperation from the to whom the game is being handed).
One way to make multiplayer games interesting is to have enough variance so that with 3 players left, the balance between a player who pulls some lucky breaks and the other two players working together is just barely in favor of the two players. If the game is well designed and the players act strategically, this shifting balance of alliances can last quite a while without either handing one of the players the game or getting boring, and winning is about figuring out how to hold your ally past the time its in his best interest to turn on you, or turning on him at just the right moment to maximize impact.
Is it this Ambition: http://www.pagat.com/invented/Ambition221.pdf? [PDF]
Re:Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)
by michaelochurch on Sunday July 08, 2012 @12:11PM
(#4214882)
Yeah, although those rules are a bit out of date. I've made some changes for balancing on some of the Slam/Nil corner cases.
Unfortunately, I get so little time to play games these days that perfecting it isn't something I've had time to do.
In any game of more than 2 players, there's a third element: strategy. That's a mix of both. People are pursuing their own interests and sometimes it affects other players disproportionately. Or, we might be sitting together at a 3-player game and I win, even though you're a better player, because that 3rd player is either lousy or unpredictable and does things that hand me advantages. (The most extreme example of this is the "king-maker scenario" where a player can't win but gets to choose the winner.) Puerto Rico, although very skillful and deep, is notorious for its table-position effect.
For an aside, part of what makes German-style board games is this strategic "interaction term" resulting neither from chance nor from individual skill alone. Pure skill games like Chess are a bit dry, in the sense that if the skill levels are different by much, the outcome is predictable: the more skillful player will win pretty much every time. German-style games leverage this third "strategic" factor to make games that aren't very luck-driven (you never feel "screwed by the dice") but that also don't have the same winner every time.
This is why most of the "serious" mind-sport games are two-party games. In Chess, if your opponent's strategy hurts you, then he (by definition) had a better strategy and therefore played more skillfully. In Bridge, any player's strategic affect on your outcome is likewise indicative: if your teammate hurt you through a strategic interaction, then you're not as good a team. In luckless 2-player games, the party that wins is the party that played better. In 3+ player games, this isn't always true.
Economic and business games are like that. They're massively multiplayer, which means that there are a lot of strategic-interaction teams that can't be attributed to skill or luck, and the quality of information most people have isn't very high. This is especially true in technology where, by definition, we're trying to do things that haven't been done before. That makes it fun, but also really, really noisy.