The Problem with Wildcards

Games ask players to make choices to overcome obstacles and reach a goal. Wildcards, resources that you can use as any other, remove both choices and obstacles. The more wildcards a player has, the less they need to think because they always have what they need for any situation. This doesn’t mean wildcards have no place in games, but you must be careful how you deploy them. Two ways to prevent wildcards from trivializing choices are:

1. Frame them as rewards rather than resources
2. Bias them towards specific uses

When resources are inputs, they create goals because the player must find a use for them. But when those resources are wildcards, finding a use is trivial. Wildcards are always useful, no matter the strategy, so they are often better presented as goals to pursue rather than resources to use. In other words, an output of gameplay rather than an input.

Yellow and Yangtze does this literally. Your objective is to collect sets of cubes in four colors, but the game also has a fifth color, yellow, which may be used as a wildcard in any set. Yellow cubes are strictly better than any other cube, but competing for them is harder. There is only one yellow pagoda producing cubes, while there are two for each other color, making the competition more intense. Most other colors have strategic benefits for placing tiles, but placing yellow tiles only gains a yellow cube. By positioning wildcards as a reward to fight over rather than a resource to use, it creates obstacles instead of removing them.

Since the problem with wildcards as inputs is that they are equally useful regardless of strategy, another solution is to make them better for certain uses. This is the approach of Studies in Sorcery, a game about magic students robbing graves for ingredients to complete school projects at their dark arts academy. Though the game has no perfect wildcard resources, many resources have flexible uses; the key is they give more or fewer points depending on use. A project using a “Mismatched Bone” as a femur scores normally, but using it as a skull, ribs, or hand loses a point. Mammal remains score extra credit if used as ribs. By giving incentives and disincentives for using wildcards in certain ways, the game encourages players to optimize their use while allowing flexibility when options run out.

Flexibility is dangerous in game design. Too much causes games to lose their challenge. Wildcards create problems when used as flexible inputs, but using them as outputs or reducing their flexibility solves this.