The Strategic Question

I love games. I’ve become accustomed to explaining the statement as “all competitive multiplayer games: ball games, board games, card games, drinking games, and video games.” Games are fun, social, and have many transferable skills to a variety of other activities. Most importantly however, games provide the winner a fleeting sense of accomplishment and pecking order, something that is sorely lacking from 𝗆̶𝗒̶ a modern life.

Though I’m still a novice at most games, and not gifted at the few that I have spent time on, I play a large breadth of games, mostly at board game cafés when they were still open, as well as online with or without friends. In this piece, I will be sharing how I like to think about games, particularly board games. If this advice isn’t useful in improving general gaming ability, it will at the very least be useful in beating me at games.

I was originally going to call this piece ‘The Metagame’, but people tend to attach varied meanings to the term, so I decided on ‘Strategic Question’ to sum up my philosophy of gaming. The Strategic Question is a structure to frame thinking across a variety of games, dependent on the mechanics involved in the game. I have two of these questions to share, simultaneously broad enough to apply to a large number of games, and specific enough to be useful.

The first Strategic Question is “How can I win more quickly than my opponents?” This question applies most visibly to engine building games, and is really a reminder of their win conditions. In games like Dominion, Machi Koro, Power Grid, Puerto Rico, Splendor, and Terraforming Mars, gameplay revolves around accumulating resources that allow players to more efficiently accumulate more resources and points, eventually winning the game.

However, it is easy for a greedy player to lose themselves while building out a robust engine, and forget that the best engine doesn’t win games, points do. Not only are points required to win the game, but there is almost always another constraint: time, turns, or a threshold of points that another player can reach first. It is never about how many points a player will eventually be able to generate, but about if the player can generate more points than their opponents when that constraint is reached.

Splendor is perhaps the most simple and pure of the engine building games that I’ve played. Simply put, the goal of the game is to be the first to reach fifteen points, which can be acquired by purchasing cards that have points. This process is facilitated by purchasing much cheaper cards that don’t have points but make other cards cheaper. If the game was for a single player, and the goal was to obtain as many points as possible in the fewest number of turns, the strategy would obviously consist of obtaining enough cheaper cards that every subsequent card purchased would be free.

Unfortunately, the game is played with other players, and the point threshold is only fifteen points. Hence, the Strategic Question is not “how can I acquire the most points efficiently”, or even “how can I acquire fifteen points the fastest”, but the redundant sounding “how can I win more quickly than my opponents”. This is an important distinction because different players may have different speeds based on a variety of factors; it’s not about a personal best, it’s about ensuring the others are beat. If an opposing player employs a faster paced tactic than what I can achieve, my move is to block him, then reach the objective as quickly as I can myself. Likewise, if an opposing player is building out a powerful engine, my move is to slow them enough to reach the objective before their engine is online.

This Strategic Question is fundamental to all games with any sort of economy or investment mechanic, where the player can obtain some variety of fungible resource that doesn’t apply directly to scoring. Players of video games like DOTA , and StarCraft are familiar with this question. Players of board games like Catan and Seven Wonders have to make similar decisions. Although gameplay and win conditions may be driven primarily by other factors, the question of when resources should be committed to winning as opposed to obtaining more resources is perhaps the most important one in these games.

The second Strategic Question is more long-winded: “How can I force my opponent to make decisions based on false beliefs about my cards?” This is most applicable to games with significant incomplete information, notably Coup, but also Decrypto, Liar’s Dice, Skull, Texas Hold’em, and The Resistance. The objective of these games are manifold, but knowing which cards the opponents hold is a surefire way to win. While playing these sorts of games, an experienced player is constantly thinking about the hidden information of the opponent, and eliminating unlikely possibilities.

Liar’s Dice is perhaps the easiest game to explain and illustrate this concept. Every player has five hidden dice of values that only they know. Taking turns, players state a quantity of die values represented by all the dice, either greater in quantity, or equal in quantity but greater in value, than the previous player. This ends when a player believes that the previous player stated a quantity of value that is not represented by all the hidden dice, at which point, a count is taken and whichever one of the two players is mistaken becomes eliminated. In a Liar’s Dice endgame, the quantity of die values stated generally grows large enough that it invariably incorporates an estimate of the dice that a player cannot see, the focus of this Strategic Question.

There are three sets of dice a player should keep in mind: the dice their opponents think they have, the dice that they are trying to convince their opponents that they have, and the dice they actually have. Ideally, the first and second should overlap with one another, but not significantly with the third. A player shouldn’t passively conceal the values of their dice, but should instead actively mislead the opponent by establishing an alternate range of values their dice fall into. Deception is carried out with purpose and intent, either to goad opponents into overstating the quantity of a die value or into calling a count.

If someone pointed out that this example and the second Strategic Question as a whole is victim to the “But if I know they know that I know” conundrum, best explained in the 1987 film The Princess Bride, they would be absolutely right. After all, games with sufficient hidden information are indiscernible from roulette or rock paper scissors at a certain point. But therein lies the beauty of complex games: the more elements and decision points are introduced, the easier it is to become lost in the nuances and mechanics, and stop thinking about the Strategic Question. It’s the interaction of this calculus and other elements of gameplay that determines the winner.

In Coup, a player taking foreign aid or income in the first turn suggests the presence of an Assassin, but if the player had a Duke or Captain and didn’t use it, they would fall behind. In Texas Hold’em, a player limping into a pot to conceal a strong preflop holding risks defeat at the hands of someone who paid far too little to see more cards. This uncertainty must be balanced with just taking tax as a Duke in Coup, or three-betting and eliminating all the weaker hands in Texas Hold’em.

Though critical in bluffing games, this Strategic Question is useful in all games of imperfect information. The more complex the mechanics, the more other players will be focused on their own builds, often completely ignoring deception. In Catan, an initial settlement can be placed near a port to provoke another player to block it off, but both players need to be mindful of the roll probability while engaging in these feints. In Gin Rummy or Mahjong, a player may pick up a card that is irrelevant to their melds, but needs to know if enough people are paying attention that their ruse is worth the lost turn.

This concept extends further to virtually all games with decisions; even in games of perfect information like chess there are terms such as “gambit” and “sham sacrifice” thrown around. I do not play chess, so I cannot confirm if this is true. Other games are heavily reliant on technical skill: how hard someone can throw a ball, how fast someone can click, how much someone can drink, and how quickly someone can calculate probabilities. When all else is held equal and strategy is considered however, a little misdirection goes a long way.

After writing and reading this, I’m reminded of why I hate popular non-fiction: most of the time, it’s a repetition of common-sense with examples until the reader thinks it’s revelatory. So are my two Strategic Questions: “win first” and “trick others”. Despite the simplicity of these two frameworks, they are often obscured by the mechanics and technicalities of the game, so briefly considering them before making any decision will yield results. If they don’t, I can’t give you your time back, but I’ll refund whatever you paid to read this.