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Miniature Game Design Thoughts Part 2: Critical Mass
I want to delve a little into the combination of elements that give miniatures games a finite lifespan. Yesterday, I referred to this as the point of ‘critical mass’.
I want to delve a little into the combination of elements that give miniatures games a finite lifespan. Yesterday, I referred to this as the point of ‘critical mass’.
There’s a particular feeling that takes hold of people when they find a new game they really like. It’s a mixture of excitement and a thirst for knowledge. Combine that with the varying degrees of obsessive personality you tend to find in gamers, and you’ve got a new addiction.
Video games have a built-in capacity to extend that ‘new fun’ feeling throughout the game. A well-constructed video game will periodically introduce extra abilities, enemies, weapons, story and areas to explore. That refreshes the feeling of joy and keeps things new and exciting.
Gamers subconsciously look for this in their tabletop experiences, too. This is what gave rise to the culture of board game expansions and, of course, a desire for regular impactful releases in miniature games.
This can be partially satisfied by creating games with high replayability. If there are many different ways to experience a game, you’ve already built in the capacity for captivating your audience over a longer period of time.
Your audience will then bring other people into the game through their enthusiasm, and will spend more money. Miniature games most often solve this by having a variety of different factions to play. Great miniatures games can be held back by a small number of factions.
Star Wars Armada is an excellent example of this, as a game with a top notch fleet space battles rules system but only two playable factions. When X-Wing second edition released, they recognised this issue and increased from three to seven factions.
The other common method of keeping a miniatures game feeling fresh is through regular and impactful new releases. The issue here is that if a new release is not impactful enough to make players use it in their games, it has no impact.
At the same time, if a new release is being played in every game, your community will quickly become bored and frustrated with it. In a perfect world, you want everything new and old to be played with 50% of the time. Although that’s rarely achievable.
Achieving this 50% new/old ratio is difficult. There’s a huge number of factors involved and, frankly, the stress-testing tools available to miniature game designers and developers are usually insufficient for the task. They are always doing the best they can with what they have.
The reason I say 50% is that, when applied individually to every choice a player makes when selecting miniatures to play with, this ratio gives the highest chance of players experiencing something different each time they play. Achieving its highest level of replayability.
A key factor in the selection ratio for a new release is the feeling of something being truly different. A new visual for a miniature, new rules, new tactics, a new playstyle. If a release lacks too many of these elements it will not be impactful. It will be ‘more of the same’.
This presents all sorts of problems, such as building pressure on identity (the worry that eventually every faction will play the same), and the design space of the game (how many different ways to do something). My colleague, @xoryn, refers to these as ‘fun boundaries’.
Additionally, every time the designers add something new to a game, it adds ‘bloat’. That is, the overall amount of information in the game is increased. This is the main cause of a game reaching critical mass.
Simply put: a new player looking to get into a game is more likely to pick it up if there are multiple interesting choices they get to make. But they don’t want to be overwhelmed with masses of information they must learn before they can begin to play the game in full form.
To put this into context. When X-Wing first edition first released, each faction had only a hand full of ships and 20-30 different upgrade cards. By the end of first edition, each faction was into the teens of different ship classes and way over 100 different upgrades cards.
Quite literally, what keeps a miniature game alive and growing is also the same thing that will one day end it unless the designers take the appropriate steps. I cited Age of Sigmar as perhaps the most controversial, but valid, method of attacking this issue.
The birth of Age of Sigmar case study is one that warrants further discussion, but I’ve definitely talked enough for today 
if you managed to get this far, thank you for reading.
if you managed to get this far, thank you for reading.
