Chess and the Hero-Driven Game
Lots of games, perhaps most, feature a hero. A protagonist that the player pilots through the game world, identifying with them and acting out their story. But just because a game features a central hero doesn’t mean that it’s a hero-driven game. Spell Valley is hero-driven because the dynamics of the game world are determined by a set of controllable heroes whose properties are determined by the designer.
Take fighting games as an example. Most fighting games feature a cast of characters the player can choose to play as, and basically nothing else. A purely cosmetic arena, two walls, and a suite of system mechanics that are often as much part of the characters as not. All the deep gameplay available in fighting games arises from the interactions of the characters. Learning a fighting game is about learning your character, and then slowly branching out to the others. You lose to the same character over and over again, get mad, try to figure out how they work, and make a plan for next time. This means that the strategic dynamics of the game are borne out in its characters, their strengths and weaknesses, their struggles and triumphs. It also makes hero-driven games easy to understand, but for that I have better examples.
Most board games require you to learn a process:
Roll the die to collect resources
Trade with the other players
Build roads, settlements, and cities
Learning this process is the primary constraint on the accessibility of your game. Players simply cannot play if they don’t know what to do. Settlers of Catan is highly unusual in the way it distills deep gameplay to these three steps. Most board games are harder to learn than Settlers, and anyone who introduces new board games to their friends has learned to fear “the teach”—that process where you delicately explain to your buddies that actually they’ll have lots of fun, just not yet, they’ll have fun eventually, after you stop lecturing at them.
Compare to the process of playing Chess:
Move a piece.
For brevity of process, chess blows Settlers of Catan out of the water. You may protest: but there’s so many more rules to chess! Fair enough. But those rules are far easier to learn than one would naively expect. There are 6 different pieces (counting pawns) that behave in a variety of ways, and the player needs to learn what each of them can do. You can teach a 5 year old how to play chess, and most people who don’t play chess will bashfully admit that they “know how the pieces move”. This is weird. Most people don’t remember how to play games that they don’t play. The irrelevant information gets discarded within a week.
People are bad at learning very particular sequences of actions, just try baking something new, or ask someone who works in IT. What people are good at is interacting with other people. And so chess does not demand new players execute a precise action sequence, rather it asks them to meet the game’s six characters: the King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, and Pawn. People are intimidated by chess, the game is sharp and punishing and it’s easy to get crushed by someone slightly better than you. But it is not hard to learn. It is not hard to learn the minimum amount of chess required to engage in goal directed behavior—to make and execute plans. In fact, chess is suspiciously easy to learn. The game is so accessible that it could only have been forged through thousands of years of memetic evolution. No individual human designer would be up to the task.
Of course, that doesn’t stop us from taking inspiration from chess and its brilliance. The hero-driven nature of chess not only makes the rules easy to learn, it makes the strategic implications of the game easier to understand. When people say chess is hard to learn, they aren’t referring to the rules, they’re referring to the game’s endless strategic depth, which your opponents will use to destroy you, and which you in turn will use to destroy them. But like its rules, the strategic depth of chess is also far easier to understand than it has any right to be. Take a concept that most chess players eventually come across: the bishop pair. What does this mean? It means that your Bishops are friends. They get along. Your bishops are more than the sum of their parts. Because one bishop can only travel on the white squares, and the other can only travel on the dark squares, the two pieces cover for each other’s weaknesses. Grand Masters are loath to give up their bishops—especially if they still have both on board. If you already know that bishops move diagonally, you can just add a couple entries to your mental folder:
because bishops move diagonally, they can never leave the square color they start on
because your bishops can attack different colors, they help compensate for each other’s weaknesses.
This new information has a convenient slot to occupy in your mental model, it goes with all the other information you’ve learned about Mr. Bishop. Even if you don’t remember all the details, the spirit of the idea is hard to forget: your bishops are friends.
One final advantage of hero-driven games is modularity. You don’t have to learn about all the heroes at once. If I’m teaching someone chess, I wouldn’t explain all the pieces simultaneously. I’d hand them a king, explain how he moves and why he’s important, and once they got the hang of that I’d give them a rook. Because the game decomposes into individual heroes, those heroes can be introduced gradually. This is especially important in Spell Valley whose design space supports hundreds of different characters. Rather than overwhelming the player with the sheer number of possibilities, players start with the simplest heroes, and then slowly discover more as they improve and prepare to handle the game’s more intricate designs. Unlike in chess, this modularity has no limit in Spell Valley, where the continual introduction of new characters allows the gameplay depth to grow with its player base.
Not all games lend themselves to hero-driven design, but for those gameplay systems that do, I think a hero-driven approach affords dramatic benefits to both the game’s depth and accessibility. Taking advantage of our natural tendency to anthropomorphize, and making our games deeper and easier to learn at the same time.