Free Options are Degenerate

An option is the right, but not the obligation, to do something. In the real world, having options is a superpower because they remove the need to make intelligent predictions about the world. If an opportunity arises, you can exercise the relevant option; if not, you can ignore it. In games, replacing intelligence is bad because it removes the game's challenge. Therefore, any option you provide the player should be balanced. Pursuing free options is a degenerate strategy.

When I talk about balancing options, I mean the cost of acquiring or holding them, not the cost to exercise them. It may cost resources to exercise an option, but that does not offset the advantage of having it available. Imagine a card in Magic: The Gathering that starts the game in your hand as a bonus on top of your starting draw. Even if such a card is expensive to play, it is still extremely powerful because it is a free option that costs nothing to include in your deck.

(As a fun historical aside, Magic's designers actually had an idea for a version of this in the Tempest expansion and rejected it as insanely overpowered; Mark Rosewater writes about it here)

With that in mind, let's look at some ways to balance the advantages of holding options.

The most common way to balance options is through opportunity costs: holding one option prevents you from holding another. You can do this by limiting things like hand size or inventory capacity. In Pokémon, each Pokémon can learn up to four moves and must forget one before learning a new one. This means the cost of knowing a move is not knowing a different one.

Another approach is to charge players for the options they hold regardless of whether they are exercised. In Food Chain Magnate, there is no limit on how many employees you may hire, but you must pay each salaried employee $5 per round, even if they do no work. This encourages players to hire useful employees rather than expanding their workforce just in case. Despite that cost, hiring an employee you don't intend to use is sometimes a good strategy.

You can also balance a gain in long-term optionality with a loss in short-term optionality. In The Great Zimbabwe, specialist cards are powerful, giving you different ways to earn cattle and alter the board. The catch is that when you take a specialist, you must use them immediately, committing your cattle to the card. You get those cattle back next round, but in the short term you cannot use them for other urgent tasks. The payoff is that you get the specialist's effect that round and own them for the rest of the game, preventing others from using them.

In a similar vein, options can incur ongoing obligations their holder must meet. In Root, the Eyrie Dynasties increase their actions by 1 or 2 every round, adding cards to their decree. This steady increase in options comes at a cost: if they fail to exercise any of them, their dynasty collapses, they lose points, and they end their turn early. Much like in Spider-Man, great power comes with great responsibility.

A related method to ongoing obligations is ongoing liabilities. In Catan, you can hold as many resources as you want, but if you have more than seven, you risk catastrophic losses if someone rolls a seven. This creates a similar feeling of pushing your luck but focuses on exposing players to risks beyond their control rather than testing their ability to balance a puzzle of increasing complexity.

The important point is that optionality is inherently valuable, and free options lead to degenerate gameplay even when not exercised. Always be suspicious when you see unrestricted wildcards or unbounded hand sizes. We want to make sure that the options in our games have drawbacks or costs to holding them.