Why Games Should Never End

We’ve finally figured it out with years of study.

The hardest part of designing a game is not coming up with the idea, or original mechanics, or balance, or any of that stuff.

It’s figuring out how the darn game ends satisfactorily.

This problem, by the way, is not left solely to boardgames. Movies, comics, books: with many of them, the ending is a problem. But at least in those it’s a one way street. In games, you have to worry about what a group of people will do at the end.

Why is it such a problem in games? A little thing called “Kingmaker.”

Kingmaker is a pretty unsatisfactory way to end a game. There are several different Kingmaker variations, but the basic idea is that one player, who cannot win, is forced to decide between two other people to win the game. In purest Kingmaker, there’s no reason to choose one person over the other.

However, the fact that there’s an arbitrary winner isn’t the most heinous of results from the kingmaker problem. Often times, when it’s recognized that one or more people are about to win, the other players conspire to keep those people from winning. The game grinds to a halt, serious analysis paralysis sets in, and the game ceases to be fun. In some cases, depending on the game, it could drag out the result for hours!

Kingmaker is to be avoided at all costs. The simplest way to not have a kingmaker problem in your game, of course, is to make it a 2 player game. But games are fun with multiple people, so that’s not the ideal solution. Another solution is to not allow people to really mess with each other’s scores. That can be tough to do, and decreases the interactivity factor.

What you really want to do, then, is to make the game end a surprise so that you don’t know who to bash on a particular round, and you’re just trying to constantly improve your position (as is the general motivation for games.)

It can’t be a totally random end condition though… you want to play the game for a while before it ends!

The ideal end condition would ramp up, both increasing the tension and giving you an idea of how much longer the game will last. Ideally this is planned out in such a way that it can never happen right away… you’ll want the game to last the ideal game length before it is brought to a close. However, there must be always be a chance that the game won’t end right then.

Shuffling an “endgame” card into the bottom part of a deck is common, but if that card happens to be the last card in the deck… you’re back to kingmaker because you know when the game will end. Hitting a certain score is the same way: while you get a ramping-up, you know who is likely to cross the threshold, and you get kingmaking lockup.

In the future, I’ll touch on a variety of other end conditions. There’s no magic formula for game ending, and it remains one of the most challenging parts of game design. I can’t give an exact definition of a good end condition, but I sure know one when I see it…

Since I will be on vacation all next week, I doubt I will be doing a Critical Threat next Friday, but it’s always possible. Use the holidays wisely: go play some games! (And tell me if you find some good end conditions!)