This is not an undiscussed topic. However, I know it comes up from time to time…
Given that this is well trodden ground, I’d like to put a little structure on it. I’ll chime in with additional prompts throughout the week, in order to hit a few angles that may let this become a new rather than rehash conversation.
First off:
Why is luck (or random outcomes, or even just tasks so difficult that the outcome is unpredictable) such a critical part of human play? We see it across hobbies, across cultures, and across time. What is it about luck that we need?
Without luck (I’m including hidden information, simultaneous action selection, and the like, but I would hesitate to include “tasks so difficult that the outcome is unpredictable”, unless you mean physical interactions such as sports and dexterity games), play can begin to feel like work: to have a chance of winning, you need to play better than your opponent, and the only way that can happen is by sustained effort, and maybe not even then. For many people, that’s not what they are looking for in play. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, luck can buoy you up to win, and provide an excuse when you lose, and everyone gets a chance.
I think that’s the main thing. Introducing more variety is another angle, but not as significant: Go features more variety than you need, for example.
Luck and it‘s opposite—interesting that I had to look up the translation for „Pech“ (aka pitch) and English really doesn’t have a good antonym for luck, so—bad luck are equalizers. They are supposed to hit everyone equally (chance is the stochastic version) and enable people with different skill levels to play together.
Luck helps hiding outcomes so we might attempt something we deem impossible („Don‘t tell me the odds!“) … And since we need to take risks all the time in life, play helps us prepare for that to include chance in games so we can practice.
One thing it does is it engineers a moment where multiple things might happen - good or bad and just pausing for that moment is possibly thrilling and addictive.
Additionally it can be indistinguishable from a genuinely thought out play from an opponent. You can get the same feeling and results from an opponent taking a piece as just randomly removing it.
Without luck you just have chess - the better player wins every time. To take luck out of a game you need all the components of chess, such as total visibility of information and absolutely equal turns.
Luck introduces exciting unknowns, very much like gambling. This forum knows what happens when there’s too much luck in a game - there’s no player involvement, only seeing who the dice choose as the winner this time.
So unless you’ve got some clever gaming mechanism to add to one of those extremes (asymmetry in powers or goals when there’s no luck, or the act of playing is fun enough when there’s total luck), the best route is to have SOME amount of luck involved.
Then you’re into the actions players can take to steer the results a little or a lot.
The other part of luck’s unpredictability is that it allows for new stories. Same deck of adventure cards in a different order = a different adventure.
Yeah, this is basically my feeling. Luck in moderation also expands the range of skills one has to use: in the most obvious example, if I’m playing a Terraforming Marsalike (Ark Nova, Earth), I can’t just make a plan at the start of the game, I’m going to have to make the most of the cards I get.
But luck also works backwards: if you beat me at chess, you played better and that’s it. If you beat me at Realm of Sand, well, maybe you were luckier than I was; you have less reason to crow, and I can grumble harmlessly about my bad luck, rather than it being a straight “I’m better than you” relation.
Btw I would like to note that I personally very much prefer some luck in my games for the reasons @Benkyo lists. I always feel compelled to think things through as far as I can. Luck stops me from doing that and makes things feel like play. Hedging… is more fun than calculating.
I definitely agree with the point about luck being an equaliser. There’s a guy at my work who’s really into Hive, and brings a set to every work gaming social, but I’m never going to agree to play it with him because I already know the outcome and that’s boring. If I wanted to get really into Hive though I’d be playing him all the time to improve my game!
The thing about chess and similar games is that nobody is the better player all the time.
The random substrate of pure unrandom games is the condition of the contestants, the physical and psychological capabilities.
(And all right, yes. Chess has been learned by computers well enough that for them it’s not any such thing. But watching humans play can be worthwhile.)
(And why are you arguing this point, Michael? You don’t understand chess yourself and you dislike and disdain physical contests being rubbish at them yourself. Pure philosophical perversity, must be.)
Inclusion: When luck or random outcomes are involved, anyone can play. Anyone can win. Luck, like games, helps bring us together. And sure, few things are pure luck and the better player will win most of the time, but luck adds that crucial not always. If games and play are meant to bring us together, luck/uncertainty is an enabler.
Fun: That moment. That moment when the dart hits the bulls eye, the cap falls in the pint glass, the ball hits the back of the net - oh so good. I couldn’t stand playing a slot machine but I’ve spoken to those who do. Why? It’s that moment. Because when you win…
Let’s talk about the no dice movement. The luck is bad camp. We saw the fall of Settlers (of Catan). We saw the kingship of Puerto Rico and Agricola and their acolytes like Power Grid.
Why did a portion of the community turn on luck? Is it in all of us or is it just a vocal camp? What were they/we after instead, and what does it offer?
I don’t mind luck in games, even as equalisers. I’m more interested on how you can use luck to make the game interesting. Kingdom Builder is a great example of how to use luck. It uses probabilities for players to make good decisions.
I would still prefer player interaction over luck however. Chicago Express or Stephenson’s Rocket have zero-randomness/luck in the game, but good luck (heh!) calculating the game
I’ll admit, I used to look pejoratively at this group. I would complain about how the board game community overlapped more with the cross-country team, the tennis team, the chess team than things like water polo and soccer. People who were less comfortable with chaos, coordination, reactions to uncertainty. People who couldn’t handle their cheese being moved. And I thought they were wrong and their games were wrong.
Except Agricola. Obviously.
I’ve grown. Mellowed, broadened. I’ve learned to find pleasure in these types of games as well. I’ll have to mull on they why and what exactly (and it may spill into question 3…)
I do still react with a bit of an internal shadow to anti-dice sentiments, though. Even when it’s Uwe himself in the Feast for Odin manual apologizing for the dice and explaining why it’s ok this once. For everything I’ve shed, part of me still feels it is for people who can’t handle losing and don’t do well with disruption (which means low luck paired with low interaction, I guess).
Why do some games feel as though they have luck when they mostly don’t? VOLT, for example, there’s luck in the goal placements and the upgrades you draw, but that’s a relatively small part of the game and the majority of it is straight player vs player.
I struggle to sympathise with the no-dice crowd, partly because I love dice, but also because some of them are actually saying "the randomness might stop me winning " and anyone who needs to win that badly / be seen as the most skilled is not focusing enough on boardgames being fun.
Skinner boxes. aka Operant Conditioning as noted above. The basis for all classic casino games like slots, craps, roulette, keno, and so on.
Variety. Take Bridge. It would be really boring if every hand was the same. So, you have random setup each hand and try to do your best.
In Tournament Bridge play, everyone has the same set of hands so that no one can claim that they got worse hands and you can do a fair(er) comparison of play.
Random setup in otherwise randomless games (Through the Desert comes to mind) keeps each game fresh and helps prevent opening moves from being scripted. Fischer random chess was designed for this.
In the better (IMO) eurogames with dice, the dice randomize the options and it’s not just about “higher die rolls win.” Some values may be better or worse for you at the moment, but that’s inherent in the variety. Many Feld games do this; see also Yspahan.
Knizia. I won’t try to find the quote, but I heard it said that he said that a good game (with randomness) allows the winner to feel that they won on superior skill and the loser to feel they lost due to bad luck.
Fairness. Perhaps less so with board games, but definitely with rpgs, randomness makes outcomes seem fairer than if determed by fiat. Dice are seen as impartial (even if it can feel like your dice are out the kill your PC). RPGs also have a bit of Operant Conditioning going on as well.
I have skimmed over some of the comments above, so pardon me if I repeat concepts.
To me, needing a degree of luck comes from our human condition.
There are degrees of luck. On a game with dice, be it a board game or a role playing game, that roll randomizes the play, and then you try and play with what you have been dealt with. You can still feel very skilled if you had a bad hand at cards and get away with a win. In a coop game with dice rolls (dungeon crawler type) nothing beats the excitement or deception when a key moment is decided by a roll of the dice (or card) and it goes well ( or bad). It gives you the feeling of uncertainty that you would expect in a real adventure.
In game with little luck, like chess or go, you can feel lucky at times, if you realise that you made a mistake and the opponent did not realise they could have had you.
I can compare it a bit with fencing. I can sort of know my opponent, and I can sort of know if they are more or less experienced/skilled than me. So I can try my luck throwing a feint, to see what happens. If the deception lands, I can feel lucky. If it doesn’t I feel that I wasn’t skilled enough to pull it off. In the end, it is all a feeling. More than likely, it depends more on the skill/experience of each contestant than anything else, but the feeling is there. If I pull it off against my instructor, it can be very rewarding.
I have been always including the word feel, or feeling. Luck in itself does not exist, only probability does, so we feel lucky or unlucky in our own heads. But we need that feeling in a game to give it some sort of “realism”. To make it more like we perceive challenges in life.
Yeah, I’m a little snooty at this camp sometimes. I’m not proud of it but I have thought ‘stop being so insecure and controlling’. However the bit that I think annoys me about this is it ignores that games with high variance and luck can also be skilful games. Risk management and sequencing are just some of the skills involved in more strategic and/or tactical dice games. @Benkyo should be played at Twilight Struggle by anyone who thinks else wise.
The bit that I struggle to tease out towards argument/proof is Mike Fitzgerald’s assertion that players underestimate how much luck is involved by playing any game with more than 1 other person. I think it necessarily makes games stop being zero sum. As a result is there not always best moves? Possibly too many motivations to take in to account? My feel is it’s correct but I’m not committed to those arguments.
My cube rails and 18xx games are mostly in the ‘no luck’ crowds games. I’m not convinced luck has nothing to do with the wins and losses. Many a game I’ve seen @lalunaverde win due to his higher skill level but outside of that I’m not sure it’s always the best player of that instance of that game winning. The complexity and intertwined positions mean the chaos of close calls play out in ways that I’m not convinced luck isn’t a factor in the results.
So I suppose my answer was at the start. It’s people believing they are more in control than they are. I wonder if it’s also something a bit macho often. I also think attempts to be academic about games design influence some people. The assertion that input randomness is good but output randomness is bad is oft repeated in the literature around board games. I think it sounds better than it is and again misattributes what skill is. Here’s Richard Garfield being better on the topic than I am.
I thought about touching this topic too. I have an opposite opinion where input randomness tends to be bad because they dictate how you should play; while output randomness is fine once you learn basic probabilities. And the latter is where people struggle because I’m surprised on how bad people can be when it comes to probabilities
