Designing Conflict That Preserves Forward Momentum
Players expect games to move forward. This creates a problem for conflict-heavy gameplay: if an attacker's goal is sabotage, their progress erases the defender's progress. But then, how can a game with direct conflict move forward for everybody? The solution is to design attacks that leave opportunities for the defender to recover. You can do this by:
- Providing new and different opportunities
- Increasing the rewards if they succeed anyway
Both approaches maintain the game's momentum in different ways; the first allows the defender to pivot while the second encourages them to double down.
Creating new opportunities
In Imperial Settlers, you can "raze" the buildings of other players to gain resources. When your building is razed, you flip it over to create a "foundation" and take one wood token from the supply. You can spend a foundation to build your faction-specific buildings, so being attacked gives you an excuse to rebuild. The attacker still denies you the razed building's effect, but you can reframe the loss as a gain by making something better.
What the defender gains should be different from what they lost; otherwise you risk undoing the attacker's progress. In Root, the Lizard Cult can use their defeated warriors to perform "rituals", one of which is to convert enemy warriors into their own warriors. You can attack a group of Lizard Cult warriors only to see them immediately return to the board, replacing the same units that defeated them. This can make the attacker feel that their effort was wasted.
New opportunities encourage the defender to pivot to new strategies. If you would rather they power through the attack, you need to focus on risk and reward instead.
Increasing the stakes
The Carcassonne: Inns and Cathedrals expansion introduces the titular Inn and Cathedral tiles. A road with an Inn scores two points per tile instead of one, and a city with a Cathedral scores three points per tile or pennant instead of two. However, if an enhanced feature is incomplete at the end of the game, it is worth zero points instead of its normal end-game value. While these tiles can be used to improve your own features, it is common to play them on an opponent's feature to deny them points, especially near the end of the game. But this strategy can backfire: if the target completes the feature despite the interference, they are rewarded for it. The attack escalates the stakes.
An escalation-based attack is a challenge to the defender. It works because the attacker and defender imagine different outcomes: the attacker imagines thwarting the defender's strategy, while the defender imagines turning the attack back on their opponent. One of them will eventually be proven right, but this does not happen until much later. Because of the time delay, the attacker has more emotional distance from the outcome and is less sensitive to wasted effort.
Conclusion
Attackers need to feel like they are sabotaging defenders, and defenders need to find a silver lining in disaster. Attacks should escalate or transform the defender's options to preserve a sense of forward progression for everybody. If an attack does not create a way for the defender to either pivot to a new strategy or receive more rewards for succeeding anyway, it risks stalling the game.
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