Designing Conflict for the Whole Table

Aggression is a bad strategy in a multiplayer game. When you spend resources attacking another player to hurt their position, the rest of the table benefits as much as you do, but with none of the costs. Attack mechanics have an inherent free rider problem. The usual solution is to reward the attacker by providing them with resources. There is another option, though: what if you force everybody to pick a side?

I like playing Scrabble a lot, but its mechanism for challenging words is a classic example of the free-rider problem in attack mechanics. If you believe another player has spelled a word that does not exist, you can challenge them, and whoever is wrong loses a turn. There is no reward for being right, so no matter what happens, the rest of the table profits from your challenge at no risk.

A house rule that fixes this problem requires every player to take a stance on whether the word is real when someone makes a challenge. Then, all wrong players lose a turn together, and there are no free riders. The challenge mechanic in Scrabble is framed as a way to ensure players use real words rather than an attack, so this approach may feel a bit weird, but it solves the problem.

There are many games where choosing a side is optional. In Cosmic Encounter, in every encounter, both the attacker and defender may invite other players to join their side as allies, risking their ships and sharing in the rewards. However, allies stand to risk less or gain more than the main players: offensive allies gain a colony even if they only send one ship, and defensive allies get to draw cards, which the defender does not.

Another approach is to share control of the assets under attack, so that conflict automatically gives everyone a stake. In Yellow and Yangtze, each state can have up to one leader of each of the five colors, but they do not need to belong to the same player. When a player unites two states by placing a tile that connects them, if both states have multiple leaders of the same color, they must fight a war that eliminates all duplicate leaders in the losing state. This forces players who own the threatened leaders to decide which side of the conflict they will support, a non-trivial choice as they may control leaders on both sides.

Involving everybody in conflict does more than prevent free riders; it keeps everybody engaged when it is not their turn. When designing conflicts, find ways to involve more players. Attacking other players is fun, but it is more fun when everyone is involved. If you want to introduce conflict into your game, ask yourself: how can I give everybody a stake in this attack?