Designing Games That Balance Themselves

Balance is not as important as some people might believe. While it matters in contexts like games with a strong tournament focus, in most situations it does not matter if a game is slightly unfair. A game needs to be balanced enough that most players have a plausible path to victory. Beyond that, refining the balance is often a waste of time. If you still want your game perfectly balanced, there are ways to do it without numbers. Certain mechanics lend themselves to self-balancing games.

Politics is perhaps the best-known mechanic for self-balancing games. To the extent that multiple players can cooperate to take down a player in the lead, they can balance the game themselves. The designers of Cosmic Encounter have famously said that balance is boring, a philosophy obvious to anybody who has played the game. Though the alien powers vary wildly in strength, the game counters this through its alliance mechanics, which allow players to band together during encounters, either jointly colonizing planets or preventing the player in the lead from winning. It even allows for shared victories, ensuring that cooperation is a viable strategy through the end of the game.

You cannot rely on politics in a two-player game. An alternative approach is to give players access to intransitive strategies: strategies that form a cycle in which each one loses to a different one. Rock-paper-scissors is the classic example. The neat thing about intransitivity is that even when one move is superior in a vacuum, an opponent can just choose its counter. Imagine a variant of rock-paper-scissors in which you score 3 points for winning with paper and 1 point for winning with rock or scissors. Even though paper seems strictly better since it earns more points, it still loses to scissors. Intransitive systems tolerate imbalances better because everything has a counter.

But what if you have only one player? In single-player games like video games, balance is less about fairness and more about matching the challenge to the player's skill. Games with run-based gameplay, such as roguelites, can self-balance by starting at a high difficulty and offering rewards each run that make the character more powerful, lowering the difficulty. Even if players might otherwise feel insulted by the idea of lowering difficulty, because these handicaps are presented as progression rewards, they are excited to “unlock” them.

There will always be some number-tweaking necessary. If Rock is worth 10,000 points instead of 3, it might be beatable but still distorts the rest of the game. The important point is you don't need perfect balance if your game has self-balancing dynamics. Ideally, you balance the game 80% of the way and let self-balancing systems handle the rest.