Hoarding Is a Degenerate Strategy

If you have played a video game RPG, you may be familiar with the frustration of a full inventory. You explore and gather items, then suddenly run into a wall and must decide what to get rid of. As much as you might wish inventory limits away in the moment, there is a good reason why they exist: hoarding is a degenerate strategy and should be avoided whenever possible.

The strength of hoarding comes from the optionality it creates. If a player can accumulate as many resources as they want, they do not need to make intelligent decisions about which resources matter. They can simply wait until a challenge arises to see which resources they need. When you have options, you don't need intelligence.

As a concrete example, take Catan. The game has a soft hand limit of seven resource cards because if you have more, you must discard half when a 7 is rolled. Without that limit, players would not build roads until they had enough resources to build a settlement on the other side. Why risk someone else getting there first? Trade between players would be discouraged because exchanging with the bank would be easier given the number of cards. Much of the strategy becomes trivial without pressure to spend resources.

The biggest threat hoarding poses is that it encourages players to avoid commitment until they have enough resources to ensure success. This decreases multiplayer interaction by making strategies less predictable and delays the feedback the game provides, making it harder to learn.

Hard inventory limits solve hoarding, but they are not the only solution. Like Catan, you can impose risks on players with too many resources, creating a dilemma for those who want to push their luck. A related solution is escalating efficiency penalties based on the amount stored. In Through the Ages, each stored resource is a cube taken from a bank with escalating corruption penalties paid at the end of your turn. The more resources you store, the more you lose to corruption, encouraging you to spend them.

Another approach is to make storage manipulation part of the game. Through the Ages lets you store resources more efficiently with advanced technology, allowing each cube to represent more resources. Catan: Cities and Knights lets you build walls around your cities to increase your effective hand limit. In Imperial Settlers, each player has unlimited storage for one resource type and can unlock unlimited storage for others by building certain buildings. As long as you don't offer it for free, storage space can be a great reward to motivate strategies.

In my game Sprocketforge, resource storage is a core puzzle players must solve. Players cannot carry resources from turn to turn and must store them in empty sectors of their gears. This forces players to think about which gear spaces will line up on future turns and store resources in the right spots to synchronize receiving them back. Or they can regain stored resources at the cost of destroying the productivity of the gear they are stored on. Without these restrictions and costs, there would not be a game.

As much as hoarding can ruin games, barriers to hoarding can create them. Many games, besides Sprocketforge, are defined by obstacles that prevent players from accessing too many resources at once. If your game suffers because players hoard resources, think carefully about how to solve the problem. A hard limit works, but with creativity you may come up with something gameplay-defining.