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Ark Nova Design Teardown #3: Turn Order and Tempo
108 Plays17 days ago
On today's episode of the Ark Nova Design Teardown, Isaac goes through the turn structure of Ark Nova, discussing what works, what doesn't, and how exactly to define what the game is.
Runedk93's "I analysed 10,000 games of Ark Nova": https://www.reddit.com/r/ArkNova/comments/1e3t63c/i_analysed_10000_games_of_ark_nova/
Dori Adar's "ABS - The Formula for Building Games": https://medium.com/ironsource-levelup/abs-the-formula-for-building-games-about-building-9f4fb8ce6396
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, email us at feedback@wegotplayed.games.
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Transcript
Essence of Turns in Game Design
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, this is Isaac Shalev, and welcome back to the Ark Nova Design Teardown. Defining what a game is is tough, but you could do a lot worse than saying that a game is an activity in which you turns.
00:00:13
Speaker
We learn about taking turns at a very young age, often by playing games like Candyland or HiHoChario or War. But even though turns are such an essential part of games, is taking turns actually good game design?
00:00:28
Speaker
I mean, we do like to dunk on the lose a turn mechanism because it frustrates the intent of the player. You sit down to play a game and this you know the game says, no no way, you can't play right now.
00:00:42
Speaker
Wait your turn. Turn-based games are the same, if a bit less extreme. First, you wait for everyone else to play, and then you get to play. If you compare this to most sports, where players are always playing, you can see why some people think that board games must be boring.
00:00:59
Speaker
But of course, all of this is a bit of a
Importance of Turns in Structuring Games
00:01:02
Speaker
straw man. Turns are essential to most games. They provide the beat, the rhythm, the structure, the tempo that channels the music of the game.
00:01:12
Speaker
Taking turns is the kind of artificial restraint that philosophers of games like Bernard Suits or Noyen identify as very soul of gaming.
00:01:24
Speaker
Taking turns is smashing the analog smoothness of free play into digital bits and assembling those bits into patterns we call games. By taking turns, we can set things aside like athleticism, the rapidity of somebody's mental processing, or even variances in players' assertiveness and shyness, and we can just remove all those from the gaming table.
00:01:49
Speaker
Everyone gets a chance to play, not just the swift, the strong, and the loud. And when you give everyone that chance, you may find that the mice are men.
First Player Advantage in Traditional vs Euro Games
00:02:02
Speaker
I grew up playing traditional games, including chess, backgammon, and lots and lots of card games. In nearly all of these games, we kids fought over who got to go first, and for good reason.
00:02:14
Speaker
Going first was usually better. You know, I can't even think of a traditional game that tried to balance the first player advantage by any means other than, you know, taking turns to see who got to go first.
00:02:29
Speaker
It wasn't until I encountered Euro games that I encountered that idea of balancing first player advantage. One particularly common approach that you'll find in efficiency games, race games, is to guarantee that every player has an equal number of turns.
00:02:48
Speaker
Some games do this with a strictly unvarying turn order. And in those games, it's kind of funny because you'll get that first player marker often an oversized kind of gigantic thing.
00:02:59
Speaker
And the only purpose of that first player marker is to ensure that when the end game is triggered, players remember who went first and so who should still get one more turn. Now, If this was another podcast with a different purpose, I might want to spend a lot of time ah on the aesthetic of egalitarianism and balance in games and to talk about just how new it is, how much of a rupture it is with the history of games and how games throughout history just weren't all that concerned with fairness.
Ark Nova: Analyzing First Player Advantage
00:03:28
Speaker
If anything, the opposite was true. Games were not fair. And that was just part of the experience, if not always part of the fun. Now, I don't think I can support the claim that Ark Nova aims to be unfair, but there is some evidence to look at. A couple of years ago, Redditor, RoondK93, posted an analysis of 10,000 games of Ark Nova over at the r slash Ark Nova subreddit.
00:03:54
Speaker
And it showed that for players with ELOs of 350 above, so you know, pretty good players. um For those players playing in two-player mirrored map games, so these are head-to-head games with both players on the same map and both players having a pretty reasonable skill level, for those games, the first player won almost 55% of the time.
00:04:23
Speaker
That's actually a really big advantage. The data set for games of this type, now that we've sort of segmented it down to 350 plus ELO, two-player games, mirrored map games, there were only about 128 games in the sample.
00:04:41
Speaker
So that 55% to 45% win rate does need to be taken with a little bit of a grain of salt. Nevertheless, over 128 games, that's still something that ought to give us pause.
00:04:55
Speaker
What's also especially interesting is that if you look at the sub 350 ELOs, where there's 736 games in the data set, the first player won just a hair less than 50% of the time. So that's pretty interesting too, right? That that first player advantage depends, it seems, on players knowing how to take advantage of it. And this is, I guess, pretty similar to to games like chess where at amateur play, that first player white advantage is less clear and obvious than in more advanced play.
00:05:31
Speaker
There are a lot of interesting stats that runesk93 posted, and Jesse is going to put a link in the show notes so you can check out that post. The overwhelming majority of Ark Nova games on Board Game Arena, and maybe even in real life, who i don't know, but most of them are played at two-player. And for the most part, I'll be talking about two-player games. So when you're reflecting back or when you have thoughts, just keep in mind, i'm mostly talking about two-player games. And every now and again, I may mention something for a higher player count game.
00:06:04
Speaker
But largely, this is kind of looking at Ark Nova as what Richard Garfield would would describe an ortho game, right? so These are games where we can rank players after the fact. There's two players, there's a winner and a loser. That's really what we're focusing on here.
Ark Nova: Turn Order and Action Strategy
00:06:20
Speaker
So one of the other challenges of figuring out whether Ark Nova has a strong first player advantage or not is that it's actually difficult to figure out because its turn order is more fluid than in many Euros.
00:06:35
Speaker
Over the course of a round, players alternate turns, but there's quite a large handful of powerful cards and de effects that grant players the ability to take an extra turn.
00:06:48
Speaker
Now, the end of a turn is, the end of a round rather, is triggered by the break mechanism, and that's this shared track, and it's advanced whenever players take the cards action, or if they choose to use the sponsor action for its break function, or when an um animal with the jumping ability is played.
00:07:06
Speaker
The player who triggers the break by moving the marker to the end of the track will receive an X token, and their opponent becomes the first player for the next round. And I'm going to talk a lot more in another show about break triggering and round structure. We'll get into that in a future episode. So let's not get too deep now. But the reason I bring it up is that the break itself provides some opportunity for actions.
00:07:35
Speaker
and the turn order doesn't actually change until the conclusion of the break. So there are abilities that fire off during the break that sure feel like taking a regular turn. For example, the ability to build a two-size enclosure.
00:07:49
Speaker
or the ability to snap a card directly from a player's from the display into a player's hand, or even the ability to like play a sponsor card for money during the break, which is a really powerful ability on one of the Marine World's upgraded sponsor action cards.
00:08:05
Speaker
All of these are an important source of additional actions. If we were to really precisely track how many actions each player took, rather than how many turns they played,
00:08:17
Speaker
we would see that there can actually be a really big gap between how many actions each player gets to play alongside maybe a one-turn gap in how many turns each player receives.
00:08:31
Speaker
This realization actually, i think, forces us to reconsider how we classify Arc Nova. It's not really an efficiency rate race in which players have the same number of actions to maximize their scores, and it's not a traditional race either where the first player to cross the finish line wins.
00:08:50
Speaker
Instead, a Nova is a game about maximizing how many actions you can take over a roughly equal number of turns. You'll still need to use those actions wisely, but explicitly thinking about a number of actions, I think is a better framing for understanding what it means to play Arc Nova efficiently. It means getting the most out of each action, but it also means winning additional bonus actions.
00:09:17
Speaker
This, by the way, is explicitly sort of baked into Ark Nova in that not only are there animals who provide extra turn effects, of the Determination ability, as it's known, but because there are other versions of extra action, like the x2 token. You might play an animal who, as one of their abilities, will allow you to place a x2 token onto one of your other actions.
00:09:45
Speaker
or even a map bonus that will allow you to do the same thing if you pick it up. And what these animals and abilities do for you is they really stress how you can use that doubled action. You really gotta think through and plan out to use the most effectively because it is so powerful, but you do need to sort of think ahead. The marketing token, which allows you to play money in order to play a sponsor card out of your hand,
00:10:13
Speaker
It has a similar kind of flavor that you can trigger it whenever you want. So it's this bonus action in your back pocket, but knowing when it's useful, knowing when the right moment is, is tricky. And the marketing token is interesting also because there's a lesser version of it, which is the marketing action when you get that map bonus space. So it's printed on the map. and The reason I say it's a sort of a junior version is because You do have to take it right then. You can't just get a token that you can cash in later. You have to do the marketing action right then.
00:10:44
Speaker
But it's a similar idea of planning for when you're going to go get and trigger these extra actions and what you're going to do
Strategic Planning in Ark Nova
00:10:51
Speaker
for them. That's where a lot of getting good at Ark Nova lives.
00:10:56
Speaker
Now, I think that engine building games, especially the last few years, have really leaned heavily into this extra actions design pattern and to the point that maybe even it's a genre that we might call combo building.
00:11:10
Speaker
ah early games or Early turns rather in a game like Teletum or Darwin's Journey might be short, but later turns trigger these explosive combos. I remember playing Imperial Settlers for the first time and just being amazed by this dynamic. In round one, you like get an apple.
00:11:29
Speaker
but by round three you're conquering Rome. It's just this incredible kind of power curve that these games are delivering for us using that combo building design pattern.
00:11:41
Speaker
Now, Ark does share some of this DNA, but I don't know that I'd characterize it as a combo builder. It does enable combos, and some animals give you that extra action, and some actions, especially when they're upgraded, let you do more than one thing. So you might be able to take more than one association action or or play more than one sponsor.
00:12:01
Speaker
And there are cards that trigger off of what you've played. So for example, if you've got that Expert in Asia, you play another Asia tag, Expert in Asia lets you build a pavilion.
00:12:12
Speaker
So as a result, you can potentially construct a big combo in Ark Nova, but it's not typical. Most turns are more atomic, and every now and again, you'll get that punctuation of a larger combo.
00:12:28
Speaker
The nature of Arc Nova is that you're going to sequence several turns in a row to build towards some important goal, not so much that you're going to set off the best combo each turn and kind of trigger that out.
Core Gameplay Loop of Ark Nova
00:12:41
Speaker
The heart of Arc Nova really is in managing sequencing. And there is a basic framework that makes that the case. There's a core loop in which you acquire animal cards, build enclosures, and put the animals into the enclosures to score points and achieve conservation goals.
00:13:01
Speaker
There are auxiliary actions in the form of sponsor cards and association actions that support this core loop. But acquiring cards, building enclosures, and playing animals is really the heart of it.
00:13:14
Speaker
It actually maps out really neatly onto Dori Adar's Acquire Build Score framework for game design and analysis. If you've never heard of that, look it up on Medium. It's a great read. And we'll see if Jesse can grab that for the show notes as well.
00:13:29
Speaker
Now, the challenge of executing on this core loop, this framework, in the most efficient way possible, what I like to call the orthogonal constraint, the fallen log that lies across your path in the forest, the thing that keeps you from being most efficient is the action card cycle itself, which incentivizes you to take actions when they're strongest, when they're at five.
00:13:51
Speaker
But it does allow you to take actions when they're strong enough for your current purpose. Now, Another implicit constraint or what makes this kind of orthogonal constraint come to life is that you don't want or need to take each action the same number of times over the course of the game, even though that's what the cycling system is designed to enable.
00:14:13
Speaker
So you've got to figure out a way to take the actions you want to take most more times and the actions you want to take least less times, even though the game wants you to take them an equal number of times, or at least that system does.
00:14:24
Speaker
And there's also the reality that even though we talked about that acquiring cards, building enclosures, scoring animals is is is this one important loop, the reality is that the two auxiliary actions, sponsors and associations,
00:14:38
Speaker
Along with animals, they're the ones that actually score you points. Cards in build are kind of a necessary evil. You'd love to never have to take them because they don't score any points.
00:14:50
Speaker
These two systems, the basic loop of playing animals and the action cycle, mesh extremely well together over a multi-turn sequence, or at least they can.
00:15:02
Speaker
But just as often, you'll get a spanner in the works and the whole system will grind to a halt. You'll get unlucky and you won't have a playable animal and you won't draw one. And so then you're gonna have to do some out of sequence moves. um You know, you might build enclosures to try and match the conditions of the animals in your hand um or go and obtain some zoos or universities. Essentially, you're going to try and figure out how to make up for the fact that you're now a little bit behind the curve, that you can't just keep playing your most powerful actions as they come
Strategic Choices and Opportunities in Ark Nova
00:15:39
Speaker
up. So you might deviate from your planned sequence by choice.
00:15:43
Speaker
Let's say a card shows up in the display and it's just too good. Maybe it's too good for you and you've got grab it. Maybe it's too good for your opponent. And so you've got to remap your actions and you've got to figure out how to sequence things to snatch it first. But sometimes your prize is just that you've kept it from your opponent.
00:16:05
Speaker
but you don't have any use for that card. And maybe now your actions are all out of sequence because you had to kind of change tracks. Now, because Ark Nova has really rich systems, even just identifying the various possible possible solutions to these puzzles of how do I get this card? How do I get this card away from my opponent? um How do I deal with that I don't have any playable cards, whatever it might be.
00:16:36
Speaker
There's quite a lot of difficulty and it takes a lot of experience to even identify all the possible solutions and then figuring out which one is the best one. You know, you've got to figure out how each move affects your position.
00:16:51
Speaker
And your position is really about your position relative to races for several different kinds of benefits. Are you racing to back a conservation project?
00:17:02
Speaker
um Are you trying to you know back Australia at five and you're worried about your opponent who's already got four? Or are you just trying to back Lizards at two because you need a project But you just can't seem to figure out how you're going to get that second lizard into your hand from the display. So there's lots of possibilities. And the value of different projects and goals is going to change. you know The conservation point reward tracks might have something really juicy on them, like a university that you absolutely want to get to. And that might change how you prioritize going down different strategic paths.
00:17:37
Speaker
All of which is to say that even though Arcnova is about efficiency, the overall efficiency, that broader sense of efficiency, is not the only kind of efficiency that you need to be concerned about to play Arcnova well.
Game Design Lessons from Ark Nova
00:17:52
Speaker
You've got to think about those smaller goals, the milestones along the way.
00:17:57
Speaker
you know When you understand Arcnova through that lens, not just as an efficiency contest, but as several overlapping and kind of nested races, some of which are very short term, only a couple actions long, and some that span much wider arcs. That's really the key to understanding how to play Ark Nova well and how to design other games.
00:18:17
Speaker
Let's wrap up with some design lessons.
00:18:28
Speaker
So lesson one, turn-based systems help level the playing field between players of different physical abilities, and they create space for longer-term strategic thinking.
00:18:40
Speaker
Lesson two, the relationship between turns and actions per turn is important when designing efficiency-based contests. Extra actions are generally useful.
00:18:52
Speaker
They're more fuel for your engine. but they can also have outsize effect in games with races to specific objectives. That extra turn at just the right time could have a lot of leverage, a lot of impact on a game's outcome.
00:19:05
Speaker
Lesson three, a turn-based game that is nonlinear, that offers players lots of options for using their turn to score or advance their position, provides a kind of first-order efficiency puzzle.
00:19:17
Speaker
When we layer on these nested races to gain certain benefits, that's going to create an even richer and deeper puzzle. And it requires players to look beyond their own boards and their own tableaus.
00:19:31
Speaker
Lesson number four, mapping actions to a process, like our core loop of acquiring animals, building enclosures, and playing animals into them, does make it easier for players to understand how to play the game, to kind of know what they ought to do, to be an initial compass for a direction.
00:19:48
Speaker
But designers can introduce orthogonal constraints or compelling alternatives to that loop so that they invite players to go a different way.
00:19:59
Speaker
This can make a game easy to initially play, but very difficult to play really well.
Closing Remarks and Future Topics
00:20:06
Speaker
That's going to do it for today. If you like this episode, please tell a friend or a foe. We're not hung up on your personal vendettas.
00:20:14
Speaker
And tell them that they can subscribe over at wegotplayed.games. Join me again next time when we talk about, I think maybe action cards and the break, but I do have another piece that's really coming together nicely.
00:20:31
Speaker
That's just about, well, i'll I'll tease it here. It's about the number one. and the number two in Ark Nova. We'll get back to that.
00:20:41
Speaker
Thanks for listening. I'm Isaac Shalev, and you can play Ark Nova with me at Board Game Arena by inviting kind fortress to your table. Until next time, remember, this is your zoo, and those are your primates.
00:21:05
Speaker
Do you have any questions or comments about this episode? Do you know something that we didn't say or know that something we said is false? Do you have a fun fact that you desperately want to share but can't find a way to bring it up in conversation naturally?
00:21:22
Speaker
Send it to us at feedback at wegotplayed.games. That's feedback at wegotplayed.games. Thank you for listening.