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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   5684 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 18, 2022

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If anyone here plays board games regularly, what's your opinion on kingmaking? I'm aware there are a range of opinions on this, and this is a point of contention for many players out there.

Kingmaking, for the uninitiated, is basically a behaviour players can engage in during board games where after you fall behind the other players to the extent that you're effectively out of the game, you can throw the game in favour of the player you want to win. This is usually based on in-game grudges (someone absolutely screwed you over, so you'd rather they not win) and it regularly rears its head in social board games, one of the most common games I see it in being Settlers of Catan.

Personally, I am not against kingmaking. I think kingmaking, teaming, and all other related behaviours are inherent in social board games with more than two players and can't really be avoided (nor should it). A big part of any social game is about judging your adversaries' personalities and playing the players accordingly, and if you engage in aggressive behaviour early on and make enemies, there's clearly a risk that comes with it. You can't make it difficult for a player to win then expect them not to take their revenge. Additionally, strategically employing kingmaking and threats thereof can set a meta-rule for future games - if you screw me, I'll screw you back - which might make a player think twice about taking their chances to screw you in the future. The humans you're playing with are part of the game, and the relational dynamics are what make a lot of social games interesting in the first place.

It goes without saying that if the player still has a good chance of winning kingmaking would probably be a poor strategy, but I don't inherently have a problem with pursuing revenge in and of itself.

I'm generally of the opinion that games, and players within games, should almost always be as un-meta as possible. Each player should act according to the best strategy they can deduce that maximizes their own probability of winning. In some cases, you might choose strategies that you find more fun even if they have a lower probability of winning, but even then I consider that to be a flaw in the game: the best strategies ought to be the most fun. Or there might be actions which are technically legal in the rules but are unsportsmanlike, so it's probably fine to play nicely in that way (though again, this is a flaw in the game design).

Your relationships to other players shouldn't matter, the actual human person you're playing against should barely matter except in-so-far as it allows you insight into their tendencies and biases and intelligence that helps you predict their behavior. At least with regards to the actual decisions you make within the game, obviously you can like talk to them outside of the game while the game is happening. But you shouldn't modulate your in-game behavior based on out of game information, because the actual best strategy in the game doesn't depend on out of game stuff.

On the other hand, I also find over-optimizing out of game to be kind of unfun and cringe. The best example would be people studying chess strategies and memorizing positions and moves and stuff. Because then you're not getting better by playing the game, you're just studying for an interactive exam. The fun part of the game is deducing strategies and figuring stuff out and encountering new situations for yourself, not memorizing strategies that someone smarter than you figured out.

When you're playing the game, you should be playing the game properly. And when you're not playing the game, you should not be playing the game. Kingmaking is not playing the game properly, because it strictly reduces your position in the game, and provides no in-game benefit. The only purpose it has is meta, and thus is bad.

I do not consider repeated game strategy to be "out of game". It's a basic element of game theory - ever heard of repeated prisoner's dilemma?

I agree that kingmaking for someone just because they're your friend is not fun for anyone else at the table. Kingmaking for game theory purposes, especially if warned beforehand, is valid strategy. Introducing strategic spite into the game makes the table rethink how they build alliances and gives players more agency.

I do not consider repeated game strategy to be "out of game". It's a basic element of game theory - ever heard of repeated prisoner's dilemma?

In which case the "Game" your are trying to optimize for is the sum payoff over the entire repeated scenario. That is, you have one main game, which is composed of many subgames, and acting rationally within the larger game may involve local "irrationalities" in the subgames which are only rational within the larger structure. Importantly, this is explicitly declared in the game formalism. Individual board games do not mention each other, so unless you're at like a board game tournament or doing a best 2 out of 3 or something, each game is being considered independently. Maybe you as a human being want to maximize the number of board games you want to win or something, but actually you also want to optimize for things like money and friendships and comfort and happiness and eventually we've gone full meta. My claim isn't that it's impossible to treat board games as repeated games or that you won't improve your winrate, my claim is that it's inappropriate and unfun. It's effectively a defection in the board game playing experience, something which increases your own enjoyment (assuming you like winning) at the expense of everyone else, and if everyone does it then everyone ends up having less fun.

Kingmaking for game theory purposes, especially if warned beforehand, is valid strategy. Introducing strategic spite into the game makes the table rethink how they build alliances and gives players more agency.

Conditional on you being able to keep the spite entirely within the game, and credibly signal that to other players so they're not worried about making you upset in real life, I would again consider this to be a defection in the board game playing experience. It will make you more likely to win, and make the game less fun for everyone else because now you're restricting which actions they can do. If you unilaterally declare an ultimatum "nobody can do any harmful actions against me or I will sacrifice all chances of winning to destroy you" then you'll have a massive advantage as no player wants to incur your wrath (unless they're so far ahead they can afford it, or so far behind they are going to lose anyway and want to reverse-kingmaker you). But if everyone player does this then you have a big mutually assured destruction scenario and, unless the game was specifically designed around that scenario, is likely to be less fun than playing the way the game was intended.

Note that spite being a defection, a form of unsportsmanlike conduct, does not mean you should literally never do it. I would consider it appropriate in a meta tit-for-tat scenario, where you threaten players who behave unsportsmanly against you with unsportsmanly spite. If a player seems to be picking on you unfairly and spitefully, or doing some other action that is legal within the rules but the entire group agrees is bad behavior, then you can spite them back to punish their behavior. But in general the best outcome is one in which everyone cooperates, which means voluntarily forgoing a small set of behaviors that are technically legal but unfun, which varies from game to game but generally includes most meta concerns and kingmaking. You should generally seek to increase your chances of winning, but not goodheart it at the expense of having fun.

Maybe you as a human being want to maximize the number of board games you want to win or something, but actually you also want to optimize for things like money and friendships and comfort and happiness and eventually we've gone full meta. My claim isn't that it's impossible to treat board games as repeated games or that you won't improve your winrate, my claim is that it's inappropriate and unfun. It's effectively a defection in the board game playing experience, something which increases your own enjoyment (assuming you like winning) at the expense of everyone else, and if everyone does it then everyone ends up having less fun.

If I want to win each game (more or less - I don't tryhard all the time), by induction I want to win every game. I really do not see how that's worse than trying to win individual games. By that logic you shouldn't try to win a match and instead should just make whatever move is best in the shortest term every time.

If you unilaterally declare an ultimatum "nobody can do any harmful actions against me or I will sacrifice all chances of winning to destroy you" then you'll have a massive advantage as no player wants to incur your wrath (unless they're so far ahead they can afford it, or so far behind they are going to lose anyway and want to reverse-kingmaker you).

Maybe it's just a badly balanced game if one player can be that fearsome while facing off against the entire table. Anyway, I didn't advocate for spitefully destroying the first player who attacked you at any cost. I'm advocating for reserving the right to do so if you have no chance of winning.

But if everyone player does this then you have a big mutually assured destruction scenario and, unless the game was specifically designed around that scenario, is likely to be less fun than playing the way the game was intended.

If it's not fun in that particular game then I won't do it or encourage it.

As long as there's an element of diplomacy in the game, some players will be inevitably spurned in some way in favor of others. Attacking everyone equally just means you're spreading yourself thin, it's generally a losing strategy. The possibility of revenge for breaking promises or ganging up keeps the diplomacy somewhat balanced.

It's "out of game" in that it is strategizing one level up. It's not playing the current instance as the game, but instead the full set. If that's the level you want to analyze, fine, but I think it's fair to say it is tainting single-game strategy with meta strategy.

I also sign on to @MathWizard's game ethics here and have always had the feeling that caching chess opening strategy is distasteful - sort of against the spirit of the game - yes.. even in the face of hundreds of years of the top players doing just that.

Playing against wincon (e.g. in a single-winner game, Vichy-allying with somebody to help him win when you'd have a better chance of winning in a grand coalition to defeat said somebody) I consider to be dishonour*. Kingmaking when you actually can't win is hard to adjudicate because playing to wincon is not well-defined; that's more akin to bad game design.

*The computer game Stars! has a bad case of this in its player community; alliances tend to ossify, so that even if Player X is running away with the game, his allies will just keep helping him and go "yay team" at the end rather than switching sides. I am aware of how strong a term "dishonour" is; I use it deliberately, because of how it makes the game much less fun.

I think it's quite inevitable that when taken seriously games with more than 2 sides end up being more about politics than what the game is explicitly about (unless it is explicitly about politics). Even without throwing the game, any action or inaction can affect the balance between the top players.

The options are finding a gaming group that won't make casual games about politics, one that enjoys the politics, or playing games with 2 sides.

Pretty much the only games I can think of that people play seriously (read: professionally) with more than 2 sides are gambling games like poker and mahjong. And I'm fairly sure they are rife with collusion scandals.

There are natural and unnatural game politics. Example: SSBU (online). It's a fighting game that is most often matched as a 1v1, but occasionally puts players in 3-way 1v1v1s.

Now, the natural politics that happen in a 3-way (IMO) is that all participants begin by attacking each other equally. If player A gets too far ahead, B and C focus attacks more on them to pull A back down to their level. If player C drops too far behind, A and B avoid trying to "finish them off", since either A or B spending time attacking C leave themselves open for the other to attack them in return and take the lead. As a result, 3 evenly matched players usually end up with a close finish where anyone could win. Exciting!

... except this rarely happens. In actual play, A and B immediately begin the match by signaling that they want to form an alliance against C. A and B then easily double-team C until C is eliminated, then finish the match as a 1v1. I consider this much less exciting than the alternative, but dynamics demand that players play this way, because if they refuse to ally and the other player does ally, they become C, and lose.

I consider the first situation to be natural, because the politics are dictated by the flow of the game. The second is unnatural because players are plotting on a social level with each other before the game begins.

While I sympathize with this making the game worse, I don't see how you come to the conclusion that the platonic ideal of competitiveness is the natural one, and the one that actual humans consistently gravitate to without verbal communication is the unnatural one.

Games generally have win conditions. To me kingmaking depends on the nature of the win condition. In Catan, for example, there's nothing inherently that great about getting 10 victory points; you're just a little more advanced than your competitors. In that case I'm against kingmaking because why should another settlement throw away their own development. In some other game though, kingmaking might be fine, depending on the premise of the game.

The win condition in Catan is just about getting 10 victory points, yes, but the benefit of winning is something more inherent - it's about getting the status of "winner", which is what drives everyone in the first place. A perspective that views winning in Catan as "nothing inherently that great" kind of also allows one to argue that kingmaking in Catan really isn't a big deal in the first place. Since winning in and of itself isn't valuable, the one on the receiving end of kingmaking shouldn't care too much.

Anyway, let's consider this hypothetical scenario. I have a three-player Catan game. Sat clockwise around the board are Player A, Player B, and Player C. Player A has 9 points and possesses Longest Road, Player B has 8 points, and Player C has 5 points. C is pretty much out of the game, and A is clearly about to take the win with a massive deck of resource cards. However, A blocked a road of C's earlier in the game which meant C couldn't build a settlement in an important place, and/or they repeatedly moved the robber onto hexes of C's at an early stage, meaning they couldn't progress. Now, it's currently B's turn and C has enough brick and lumber to grant B Longest Road, granting them 10 victory points.

I can't make a coherent argument as to why C shouldn't kingmake, in this scenario, outside of "You might make A feel bad". Making people feel bad is also what you do when you block people earlier in the game (even when it's done for your own benefit), and games like Catan are all about stepping on people's toes. I see no reason why policing or punishing early aggressive behaviour with sabotage in the late-game should be prohibited.

What I'm gesturing towards is the question of whether kingmaking defies the spirit of the game. I think the "spirit of the game" is inherently much more important than we think. Most games are able to get away with relatively short rulebooks because players naturally gravitate towards actions that make sense. For example, most games have no rules regarding how long a turn can take, because turn duration can be governed by social restrictions players impose upon each other. To me, kingmaking is in the same boat. Sure, there are very rarely rules against kingmaking, nor should there be, but sometimes it's permissible and sometimes it's not, and some of that permissibility depends upon the spirit of the game.

I agree that it makes sense to punish early behavior with late-game sabotage, I just think that it really depends upon the game and how bad the early behavior really was. It's also perfectly in-line with the rules to spend your game sabotaging another player for a real-life grudge you have against them, but I think that that also should be discouraged.

Kingmaking based on in-game grudges is fine.

Kingmaking based on out-of-game status seeking is not and always what I think of.

Tricky line to cross because people who take games seriously and aren't able to compartmentalize can end up turning in-game grudges into real ones.

But yeah, if the person who is about to win actively screwed you over in-game on their route to victory then I don't see how they can complain if you, in-game, decline to assist in the final stages and end up hampering them enough that someone else snatches victory.

In my view though even if you're losing the game badly enough that you have no real chance of winning, the 'sporting' thing to do is to keep playing your best to prevent any other particular person from winning. That is you just make it harder for anyone to meet the win condition to the best of your ability. Even better if the game has conditions that allow you to 'force' a draw.

If this requires you to hold out in some position that basically just blocks the game from advancing very quickly, so be it.

Of course that can run into the different constraint, when it starts getting late and people are getting tired and cranky and just want to finish up and if you're the guy dragging things out they may just want you to pick a winner and get it over with.

This is my position too - kingmaking based on factors that are external to the game itself is definitely crossing a line, but there seems to be a substantial amount of people I see who are clearly just very opposed to any form of kingmaking. I happen to think this set of restrictions is not implementable in practice.

I definitely agree with this. I've played games with couples who refuse to attack each other, and it is pretty much the most annoying thing ever.

When I run into those positions I like to play my own metagame based on engineering the circumstances to 'force' the to attack each other.

Problem is some people are just so forgiving that one will sacrifice their position and not even be angry at the other for it.

This happens a lot, however it can become an ugly thing - I have seen partners getting into arguments over games. And vice versa, ruining the game just because a player wants something from somebody in real life. It is even more unhealthy in RPG style of boardgames like D&D or VtM as it is hard to play certain role if real-world social considerations interfere constantly. So if greedy wizard screws over stupid naive barbarian, it breaks suspension of disbelief if pissed barbarian player invents some elaborate revenge scheme. Just embrace the role with knowledge that it is a game and have fun. Plus in context of CW where one has to always be on alert in every context, it would be more healthy to immerse oneself in the game world leaving real life at the door.

There are other "games" more suited to real-life bonding, go camping or on roadtrip with your buddies to find out what they are about.

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