On one level or another every turn-based game has to deal with the asymmetries created by one player acting before another. This is often called First Player Advantage. We see this in TCGs where the second player is often given additional resources, or more dramatically in a game like Connect4 where (if played perfectly) the first player can force a win (hint: for a fair game, don’t let the first player place a token in the centre column on the first turn).
A key feature of Aethermon: Collect’s gameplay arc is the closing possibility space over time. This means that early in the game players have many options to choose from, but as the game continues the number of moves available diminishes. Since on each turn the first player is acting slightly before each other player, they (on average) are benefiting from a slightly more expansive set of choices.
- This advantage is subtle, and often invisible. We award the end of game tiebreaks to the player who acted last in the turn order.
If this was the only form of First Player Advantage in Collect this perhaps would be all we needed to do. However, the second form presented a different challenge.
It is very difficult to predict the exact number of turns in a game of Aethermon: Collect. As a result we’ll often see some players get additional turns relative to other players (therefore giving them more chances to accumulate points), and this advantage always favours players earlier in the turn order.
- Very roughly in a 2-player game, there is a 50% chance the first player will have an extra turn.
- In a 4-player game there is a 25% chance the first player will have a 1-turn advantage on 3 players; a 25% chance the first and second player will have a 1-turn advantage on 2 players; a 25% chance the first, second and third players will have a 1-turn advantage on 1 player; and only a 25% chance no players will have a turn advantage.
This is huge! And in our early playtests it was very uncommon to see the last player win a game in 3- or 4-player games.
Our instinct was to redress this advantage with artefacts. By creating artefacts worth a fraction of a turn, we could give more artefacts to players later in the turn order to balance this disadvantage. However this created new problems:
- It reversed the problem where, depending on where the game ended, one player might be advantaged. Consider a 4-player game where no player ended with a turn advantage: the last player got multiple artefacts, and did not face a turn disadvantage.
- Furthermore, the game didn’t feel as fair. Even if over the long run this would even out the win % between the 1st player and the 4th player, this didn’t help in a single game.
- Perhaps most significantly, this didn’t feel as fun. It felt like the players were playing a different game. The first player with a single artefact just didn’t have as many options available as the 4th player looking at four artefacts.
We quickly moved on from this idea; and after MANY iterations settled on an artefact draft where the last player to act gets first choice to offset the disadvantage of turn order. To make this work the draft had to have several unique features:
- Artefacts need to offer asymmetric value.
- If all artefacts presented the same value, then acting last wouldn’t be a significant counter-balance to First Player Advantage; as the first player would get less choice, but still a valuable artefact.
- Artefacts are separated into random pairs that are drafted together.
- This is important, because once players ascertain which artefacts are the most powerful, it would be very easy to create a quick lookup table where players would always select the most powerful artefact available, making each game look very same-ish.
- Instead, we have 12 artefacts of varying strengths, divided into pairs (of which only 2 per player are included in the draft). While it is still possible to rank the 66 possible combinations of artefacts, this becomes much more difficult once considering interactions between not only artefacts, but the other artefact combinations in the draft.
While it is possible that this system would create pairs of artefacts balanced in a way that the first player drafting and the last player drafting receive artefact pairs of similar value, it is also possible that a game will conclude with no players receiving a turn advantage.
Overall this system has created games that not only produce a similar win-rate for all players in the turn order, but also feels fair.
Stay balanced, AetherRen!