Exciting Moments Require Agency

One of my current projects is a game called "Letterjack" that involves playing cards to spell words. Gameplay felt flatter than I wanted, so I came up with an exciting new mechanic: if an existing letter matches one you played, you steal and score it. Match several letters, and you could score a lot of points in one turn.

This created the texture I wanted, but players did not find it satisfying. The issue was agency: you do not control the letters you start with. Your ability to match letters that others play and use that to steal points is luck of the draw.

Exciting moments work better when players feel they were responsible for them. The degree of responsibility depends on the game. In Magical Athlete, the only important choice is which racer to run. You still feel excited when your racer randomly surges ahead because you chose them. It is difficult to make players feel excited about something they did not choose.

Responsibility also requires non-obviousness to some degree. Drawing the perfect tile to close a feature in Carcassonne feels good, but it does not make you feel clever. Using a useless-looking road to invade a valuable farm feels much better. In Letterjack, my card-matching mechanic required no insights from the player. If they had a matching letter in their hand, they only needed to find a word for it.

The problem might be that the core tension of Letterjack is how to empty your hand while playing long words. The letter-matching mechanic aligned with neither of those goals. A better approach might be to somehow link the letter capture to the length of the word played instead. That way, the exciting moment depends on something the player can control.