Avoid Dead Shops by Giving Broke Players Options

Buying items from a shop or market is a great source of progress. But when players lack the means to buy anything, it feels like a waste of time, especially if visiting the shop is required.

When designing any shop, ensure the player has something to do, even if they can't afford anything. You can do this by giving fallback rewards to broke players, covering small differences, or offering other ways to obtain the items on display.

In games with an encounter structure, shops are just a special type of encounter. When a player lacks a prerequisite, giving them a fallback reward keeps the encounter feeling relevant. The best rewards are those that address the missing prerequisites.

Inscryption does this a lot. When you visit the Trader and don't have any pelts to trade, he will give you five gold teeth instead, which you spend to buy pelts from the Trapper. When you encounter the Mycologists without any duplicate cards to combine, they will give you a copy of a card you already own. Fallback rewards that satisfy an encounter's prerequisites prevent the encounter from feeling wasted while also making it more likely that the player will be able to engage with it as intended in the future.

Perhaps the only thing more frustrating than not being able to buy something because you are broke is being just short of what you need. Finding ways to bridge this gap can make markets run more smoothly. Just look at Ecosfera, a cooperative deckbuilding card game with a unique approach to markets. When buying a plant card, if you have all but one of the element cards needed to pay for it, you gain the missing element from the supply to your hand and can use it immediately. The downside is that drawing too many elements of the same type causes a "natural disaster", so each time you take the subsidy, you increase your risk.

You can also cover shortfalls probabilistically. In Smallworld, conquering a region costs two race tokens plus one per object defending it. A player might end their turn with leftover race tokens they can't use. On their final conquest, they can roll the reinforcement die to add to their tokens for a chance to take the region.

Haggling is another way to get prices down to what the player can afford. In Winter Falling, shops have a haggle button you can press to reduce all prices by 1 coin. The catch is that each time you press it, it removes one option, so if you haggle too much, then the item you wanted may no longer be available to buy.

There are other ways to interact with shops besides buying, the most notable being stealing. In the roguelike platformer Spelunky 2, you can rob a shop by picking up an item and walking out. This angers the shopkeeper, who will try to kill you. Future shopkeepers will also be hostile. Broke players can choose this riskier strategy for immense rewards at the cost of introducing many dangerous enemies.

Shops are a waste of time if players can't interact with them for lack of money. You can avoid dead gameplay by considering the following questions:

• If the player can't afford to buy anything, is there something I can give them instead?
• If the player is slightly short of what they need to buy something, is there a way for them to cover the difference?
• Is there another way the player can interact with this shop besides making purchases?

The choices players can make when broke don't need to be as good as those they can make when wealthy, but they do need some way to continue playing the game.