Measuring Drama in Goose-like Games

Abstract

For games of complete information with no chance component, like Chess, Go, Hex, and Konane, some parameters have been identified that help us understand what makes a game pleasant to play. One of these goes by the name of drama. Briefly, drama is linked to the possibility of recovering from a seemingly weaker position, if the player is strong enough. This is an important requirement to prevent initial advantages to be amplified into unavoidable and thus uninteresting victories. Drama is a feature that arguably good board games should have, since it is relevant in the perception of the play experience as pleasant. Despite its intrinsic qualitative nature, we suggest the adaptation of the concept of drama to games of pure chance and propose a set of objective criteria to measure it. Some parameters are here used to compare Goose-like games, which we compute via computer simulation for some well-know games. A statistical analysis is performed based on the play of millions of matches done by computer simulation. The article discusses correlations and patterns found among the collected data. The methodology presented herein is general and can be used to compare other types of board games.

Donald Duck Holiday Game: A numerical analysis of a Game of the Goose role-playing variant

“…Although fewer rounds are required when adding more players, more die throws are needed (from 246 up to 345). As observed by Neto and Silva (2016), the game durations roughly appear to be lognormally distributed. With fewer players, the righthand tail packs relatively more mass.…”

“…An enjoyable GG should score well on various measurable properties; serious deviations from the target values may indicate that there are structural problems with the game. We draw upon the drama criteria defined by Neto and Silva (2016), making some adjustments and additions on the way. In particular, we focus on the game duration and the balance between characters.…”

“…In line with Neto and Silva (2016), this paper provides an example of how a simple Monte Carlo simulation may be used to analyze key properties of the game. Such an approach could aid board game designers in an effort to improve the balance of their games; especially in role-playing games, it may be difficult to foresee how the differences between characters pan out.…”

“…On the other hand, if every player expects to lead at some point, this might indicate a lack of structure in the game. According to Neto and Silva (2016), an ideal value should be somewhere in the middle. For the DDHG, the average number of leaders during a game are 1.98 (2 players), 2.90 (3 players), 2.70 (4 players) and 4.40 (5 players); i.e., virtually ever player leads at a given time.…”

“…Seville (2001) and Neto and Silva (2016) describe the use of Monte Carlo simulation to perform numerical experiments on the game, including distributional properties of the game duration. Neto and Silva (2016) explicitly focus on quantifying criteria that contribute to the games dramatic properties (as a certain exposure to drama keeps the race interesting), providing metrics on what constitutes an enjoyable game. We believe that the role-playing dimension studied in this paper makes for an interesting addition to existing works.…”