On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 33

spectrum you have silly examples such as Candy Land (which actually
is a contest—a luck contest—because there are no decisions whatsoev-
er, let alone ambiguous ones), but even lower levels of randomness can
cause problems.
One of the most popular Eurogames in America is The Settlers of
Catan (see the “Designer Board Games� section for more about Euro-
games). This is a relatively simple game in which you build a network
of houses and roads, collect resources, trade, and perform a few other
special actions in a race to get the most victory points. While the game is
far from purely random, some people find the amount of randomness it
does have to be a problem. You roll two dice on each turn, and whoever
has houses on the corresponding numbered spaces gets resources. It's
not terribly unlikely that you will go too many rounds in a row without
your numbers coming up, and this feature can dramatically affect the
course of the game: one player could have his or her numbers rolled ten
times in a row, providing a massive advantage over the other players.
These kinds of random ups and downs in games sometimes are referred
to as windfalls (random good things) and pitfalls (random bad things).
The problem with a game that has a high level of randomness is that
it can sever the tie between the player's agency —his or her decision-mak-
ing abilities and performance—and the outcome of the game. It can send
mixed signals to players who are trying to learn it (and for any unsolved
game, that's all players), for they may do fantastically one time and poor-
ly another, and the results may have much less to do with the choices
they made than with randomness. Losses can feel like they weren't real
losses, or that they don't matter, and wins can feel the same way. Games
with a high level of randomness can have a bit of a lethargic “who cares?�
feeling associated with them. BoardGameGeek user clearclaw remarked
about The Settlers of Catan , “Just roll the dice for me, I'll go do something
else and let me know how it turned out later.�
Again, I'm not against randomness—but because of these kinds of
problems you should never have more randomness than you need. Think
of randomness as a necessary evil. The key thing to understand is that if
you have strong mechanisms in a multiplayer game, you don't need very
much randomness because the other players will provide most of the
variance. And it's much more interesting and rewarding to fight another
player than it is to fight a deck of cards.
Single-Player versus Multiplayer
Although it tends to be a useful term practically, there really isn't any
such thing as a single-player game. Since all games are contests, all games
must have more than one party that is trying to win.