I never liked the idea of explicitly changing the rules in order to make a game more fair for new players. If you become accustomed to changing the rules whenever you find yourself outmatched, and then find yourself in a situation where the rules can't be changed for whatever reason, then you're not going to enjoy yourself.
It's much more enjoyable for everyone, in my opinion, to play by the same rules as the group, but judge your own performance by a different set of rules that you keep in your own head. Maybe try to beat your own previous score, or set yourself a personal challenge -- something like "take one of my opponent's pieces" or "make the longest word in the game".
It's entirely possible to enjoy playing a game that you have little chance of winning, it just requires some creativity.
Many boards games attempt to make things fun even if you’re losing.
One of the best games for this is Concordia, where you don’t count up the points until the end. You always feel that you have a chance. Once you get fairly good however, you can scan the board state and do some rough guesstimating to see who is in the lead.
Other games can be quite brutal. You make one wrong move and you know you’re in for 2.5 hrs of pain and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I’m not sure what to think about this obfuscation tactic.
Lost Cities is a simple two-player card game where you have to take risks in laying out your cards with incomplete information.
In the end the points are tallied up. The calculation is somewhat complicated (or at least the number of points you will get are not immediately obvious at a glance), to the point where my partner and me both frequently thought we had clearly lost, but after tallying up the points it turns out we had won (or were at least much closer to winning than we thought).
I like the game but that somehow feels, well, at least weird. Especially since I first played this game on my phone. There is this really lovely implementation of it as an app that’s a real joy to play and feels very tactile and pleasant to use, much like the physical game. But one important difference is that the points are tallied up and shown for both you and your opponent as you play.
That to me makes the play at least feel more involved and more calculating. It feels quite different and I think I like it better but maybe that has also something to do with the game being very quick and it also tends to be well balanced. If I had to suffer through long stretches of time knowing I will lose … well that might be different.
I'm not aware of any move that makes it impossible for any one player to win Settlers of Catan, while still extending the game to 2.5 hours. There are at least four basic strategies that work to win, and it's nearly impossible to block all of them to the other players while still pursuing one yourself.
I have seen people win without ever building a third settlement.
i think the point of the parent is that the settlement phase at the start of the game can be pretty decisive. E.g. some people always choose crossroads with numbers that have low probably (like 11 or 3) or with only 2 aligned fields (instead of 3). Of course, you might still win the game but you're problaby too annoyed about your decisions in the first 5 minutes of the game than playing and having fun (and having a chance at winning).
Especially in games where you collect ressources to gain victory points, making the wrong choices at the start can be very devastating (because of the runaway effect).
If you choose a weak starting position, it's not going to take 2.5 hours for your opponents to win in Settlers of Catan. But if you do have an obviously weaker board position, no one will put the robber on your 2, 3s, 11s, or 12, except in rare situations. That's part of the built-in handicapping for those with obviously stronger board positions. Those 5/36 rolls don't actually produce 5/36 of the time, because most of the time the robber is blocking one of them.
If you choose a weak initial position, the expansion-first player gains an advantage over the city-first player, especially in a 3-player game. And they will both know that your only option is a card-first stealth victory. The latter is usually only viable in a very balanced 4-player game.
If you don't understand probability for 2d6 dice rolls, yeah, you're going to have a bad time in a lot of games, some of them lasting 2.5 hours or more. And if you haven't bothered learning that, why would you learn from the stronger opponents that you play?
I think most board games do this relatively poorly. But this is also the reason I think Betrayal at House on the Hill is the most fun board game I have played. 80% of the game is a sort of arms race, which is fun. You want to be the strongest but because of the randomness of teams at the end you don’t really want any particular individual to have bad luck; and if you’re doing poorly it doesn’t really guarantee your loss later on- it may even be made irrelevant.
The latter 20% is suddenly competitive and full of bullshit, and maybe by chance feels completely unfair but it’s short, has lots of hidden information, and everyone is usually happy to play it through even if they lose.
It’s a really good game design. Even if not especially strategic.
When I started playing squash, my only opponent was an ex-league player. The two of us kept a mental log of my highest score against him, which steadily increased as I got better, and he showed me where I was going wrong. Over the next year I didn’t beat him once, but occasionally would best my previous high score, which was always exhilarating, until about a year an a half later were we’re on equal footing, and I could start playing, mentally, for the win.
That said, not all games can support this mental model. Chess for instance I always find disheartening to play against much better players. A 600 ELO point difference in chess basically means you will never win, and it becomes futile, and crushing.
Assuming you can learn anything from the experience. What you might learn is weird idiosyncrasies and futile tactics playing from desperation. You might learn to not lose so quickly, but that's not the same as winning.
I don't keep playing lost games, I just resign. Maybe I should because I play mostly bullet, but as you say, you don't really learn anything interesting in those situations.
I do improve playing against better players than me. Like 200 or 300 this year. Maybe it's because I'm more focused when the opponent has a better rating.
Changing the rules mid game is not what’s being described here. Rather it’s redesigning games such that a equilibrium of sorts lasts for longer even in the presence of mixed ability, sustaining engagement for longer
Are you supposed to enjoy it when you can't change the rules for any reason? People find great enjoyment in cheating the rules and being masters of their own fate.
Playing one game sure, playing a hundred games.. maybe. Some games are built with a design philosophy that make it difficult to win in a very un-enjoyable way. There's a reason we moved on from restarting the whole game when you died in Prince of Persia to a more streamlined experience in modern games.
It's much more enjoyable for everyone, in my opinion, to play by the same rules as the group, but judge your own performance by a different set of rules that you keep in your own head. Maybe try to beat your own previous score, or set yourself a personal challenge -- something like "take one of my opponent's pieces" or "make the longest word in the game".
It's entirely possible to enjoy playing a game that you have little chance of winning, it just requires some creativity.