Go look at your game shelf. How many games could you pull out at game night and start teaching without having to reference the rules? At least a few, right? Of the 134 titles on my shelf at the time of this writing, I could probably shred 59 rules manuals and never miss a thing. At least half of the others, I would only need the rules on hand for minor reference.

So, you’re telling me you have 100 different rules manuals practically memorized? Are you the Rain Man?

Not at all. Most games are built to be as intuitive as possible–that is, they touch an individual’s understanding at levels more or less outside of conscious reasoning. Highly intuitive games are generally easier to learn and easier to remember.

So let’s talk about how you can use players’ intuition to make your game better.

The Complexity Curve

You’ve never heard of Chess, but you just sat down for your first game. What’s your first move?

Uh, I thought you just said I hadn’t played before…?

Right on. So how do you decide what your first move should be? You can’t really make that decision without a better knowledge of how the game works.

A game’s Complexity Curve describes the amount of information and understanding that a player must possess to make strategically viable choices in gameplay.

Therefore, in Chess, you kinda need to understand the game’s objective and how the pieces can move. At that point, there is no further information you require to play the game.

That’s what you think. I just finished my first game, and my opponent had me in checkmate inside of four moves.

Yeah, that’s called the Scholar’s Mate, the main reason why sons don’t want to play more than three games of Chess with their dads. It’s actually quite simple to block, but you’ll learn that in time like the rest of us did. Complexity Curve only applies to a game’s width and not its depth. You had all of the tools and knowledge you needed to stay in the game you lost, but you failed to rally because you lacked mastery of the game’s inner workings. That’s a bit of a different topic, which you can read more about in this article on analytical and intuitive decision-making processes.

The Learning Process

Chess is actually not a terribly easy game to learn. There are seven pieces, and each has its own different rules and limits in movement. The Pawn is the most basic piece, but there’s quite a bit of required reading to understand how to move it.

A pawn can move to the square directly in front of itself, if that square is clear. A pawn on its starting rank has the option of moving two squares.

But it captures differently than it moves, too, so that’s more information you need to know. Oh, and don’t forget you promote it to a Queen if it reaches the far side of the board. And the weird en passant maneuver, which I know about but have to look up every time I think about it to remember how it works. That’s just one of the pieces.

I think you’re being a bit dramatic. Chess has a pretty slim rule book, there are plenty of heavier games out there.

Absolutely correct. Have you ever tried to teach Chess? It takes less time to understand than Settlers of Catan, but one hundred percent of the time, the new player will try to make one or more illegal moves. Why is this? The The answer lies in understanding how it is we learn and process new information.

With Chess, the procedures are unfamiliar. We simply have to commit the movement patterns to memory. There’s no way to remember that a Bishop moves any number of spaces diagonally unless you just know that a Bishop moves any number of spaces diagonally. From a game design standpoint, this means Chess has a relatively high Complexity Curve, even though it has a fairly light rules weight.

In layman’s terms, our brain is a bunch of wormy wires. When we learn something new, it’s like connecting a circuit from one place to another. This network keeps building throughout our lifetime (and falling apart, although that’s a different story). As we form little clusters and hubs of these wires, the brain can actually shortcut new information by following pathways that have already been established. That means if we have a frame of reference for new information, it’s easier for us to sort and store it than it is if we’re starting cold.

These little leaps are called “intuition,” and as game designers, they are our single most poweful tool when it comes to managing the Complexity Curve. Try putting it to work with some of these tried and true methods.

1) The “Don’t” Method (Alchemists, 2014)

Alchemists is a light/mediumweight worker placement game combined with an unapologetically heavy deduction game. Using an app to compartmentalize information, you combine pairs of reagents to make potions. Each potion displays a negative or positive polarity and a color (red, blue, or green). A negative green potion, for example, would then tell us that neither of the reagents possesses a positive green aspect to its alchemical signature. Figure out the polarity of each of a reagent’s colors, and you have some valuable information that can score you points (if you use the information correctly).

….wait, what?

Exactly. You don’t always have to manage the Complexity Curve. Sometimes, a complex game is exactly what you’re looking for.

This doesn’t mean it’s okay to puke every idea you can possibly think of into a box, throw it on Kickstarter, and brand it as a “brainburner.” Nobody wants your brainbarf.

However, if you don’t overdo it, a steep Complexity Curve can actually increase players’ investment in the game. In the Coalition Games Profiling process, we classify this as accessibility vs intensity. The more some player types commit to learning a game, the more they stand to be rewarded through its mastery–especially player types that are more intrinsically motivated.

Just be aware of the consequences here. Complexity hurts accessibility, and this means overall satisfaction with your game could suffer no matter how technically sound it is.

2) Fulfill Thematic Expectations (Hive, 2001)

In Hive, the objective is to capture your opponent’s Queen by entirely surrounding her with your pieces. You have several different types of piece in your arsenal, and each of them moves according to different rules.

Wait, that sounds pretty similar to Chess…?

That’s because it is fairly similar to Chess. I certainly wouldn’t call Hive

a Chess variant, but there are many parallels in its structure. Hive actually has a wider decision matrix than Chess, as your bug pieces start in a reserve and you have the choice to deploy a new bug or move a bug already on the table. So….why do newcomers take to Hive easier when it’s a wider game?

Let’s look at the rules excerpt that describes how to move the Grasshopper piece:

The Grasshopper does not move around the outside of the Hive like the other creatures. Instead, it jumps from its space over and number of pieces (but at least one) to the next unoccupied space along a straight row of joined pieces.

When I explain the Grasshopper’s movement to a new player, I say, “The Grasshopper jumps over stuff. Like this,” and then I show them. And then a magical thing happens–they never forget how the Grasshopper moves. Hive’s Complexity Curve is managed because the pieces usually do exactly what you’d expect them to do from a thematic viewpoint. The Grasshopper jumps, the Ant skitters along the edge, the Spider creeps, the parasitic Mosquito can move like any other piece to which it is connected. Players take easier to the game because it just makes sense.

The important thing to remember when using this method is that you have to make you’re in control. If you go overboard with thematic parallels, then you could only be making the problem worse. There’s seldom call to represent every aspect of a thematic concept through procedure–make sure you know when to draw the line.

3) Fulfill Procedural Expectations (Blood Rage, 2015)

Bloood Raaaaaaage is an area control game from Eric Lang where each player controls a clan of Vikings battling for glory on the verge of Ragnarok. Its rules manual is quite chunky, clocking in at over 7,000 words, but it’s surprisingly intuitive and easy to learn–especially for experienced tabletop gamers.

It’s intuitive in a p eculiar way though. When you get right down to it, the manual needs all 7,000 of those words, because it’s describing some fairly involved procedures. For example, how do you know who wins a fight? Well, first, each player secretly selects a card from her hand, and places that card face-down in front of herself. Once all players have completed this action, all cards placed face-down in this way are simultaneously revealed. Each player then combines the flat strength value of each unit she has present in the battle, and adds to it the numerical value of any red cards that were revealed. From there, players have an opportunity to play any red cards with a white-framed number from their hands, and add those values to their sides in the battle. All players’ total values are compared, and the player with the highest total is declared the winner of the battle.

That’s kind of a wordy explanation just to figure out who wins a fight, and that’s only a small part of the game. I thought it was supposed to be easy to learn?

How about this: combat is deterministic, modified by simultaneous card-selection, and some special cards can further modify strength after the rest of the cards are revealed. Or, better yet, “Combat resolves pretty much like it does in Cosmic Encounter.”

In its combat, drafting, and almost entirely across the board, Blood Rage manages its Complexity Curve by utilizing familiar mechanisms and procedures that gamers will recognize and understand. By putting a name to a procedure, we build a shortcut in our brains that we can reference later and easily remember.

We even do this in procedures that are already very simple. Take, for example, drawing a card. If an effect tells me to draw a card, I must take the top card from the indicated pile of cards and place it into my hand–typically keeping information about the card’s nature to myself until the card is played. I don’t need that whole explanation though, because I’ve drawn a million cards in my life, and I know the drill.

4) Simultaneous Procedure (Sheriff of Nottingham, 2014)

In Sheriff of Nottingham, players are townsfolk trying to get goods cards past the Sheriff’s inspection and score them. However, the goods are hidden, introducing a double-edged bluffing element. If the Sheriff inspects a pouch and the goods are as the townsman reported, the Sheriff pays him an appropriate amount of money (aka victory points). If the Sheriff inspects a pouch and catches the townsman in a lie, the townsman’s goods are confiscated. After everyone has been the Sheriff three times, the game is over, and you score points based on your total money remaining, the goods you’ve scored, and then varying amounts based on the leader and runner-up in each type of good.

And now you know all you need to know to play Sheriff of Nottingham.

Wait, aren’t there six different phases in the game turn? What about those? How do we get cards? How do I know when I’m the Sheriff?

In spite of the fact that the game’s rules manual explains all of this over quite a few pages of real estate, Sheriff of Nottingham is easy to learn because everyone proceeds through the turn together. If it’s your first time, just follow along. As long as someone at the table knows how to play, then everyone knows how to play.

This is also an excellent way to reduce downtime in your game, but be warned: it isn’t for every game. Many games include effects that are specific to timing. Simultaneous action often has difficulty supporting that kind of model.

5) Relegate Rules Information to Game Elements (Dixit, 2008)

Oddly enough, Dixit is my all-time favorite game. I’ve probably played it hundreds of times, and I’ve probably bought about a dozen copies of the game as gifts for friends and family. It just never gets old to me (even if it’s wildly different from the rest of the games in my top 10).

In Dixit, each player draws a hand of seven from the central deck of 84 whimsically-illustrated full-art cards. When it’s your turn as the active player, you select a card from your hand, place it face down, and say a word or phrase–anything you want–that you feel other players might guess describes your card. Then, each other player contributes a card from his or her hand to the pile. Those cards are shuffled together and laid out. Everyone simultaneously tries to guess which card is your’s using a numbered voting tile, and your goal is that some people but not everyone will guess your card. If you make it too easy and everyone guesses, you score no points and everyone else scores. If you make it too hard and nobody guesses, same thing. Get it juuuust right, and you score a chunk of points.

Okay, so how many points are we talking here?

I dunno.

I thought you said you’d played the game hundreds of times?

I have, but the scoring actually kind of requires you to remember a few things. I’m sure it would be fairly easy to memorize–in fact, I could probably think on it and get most-if-not-all of it right–but I actually don’t need to. In spite of mildly-involved scoring, Dixit remains an incredibly simple game because the scoring rules are laid out nicely and neatly on the game board itself. Now nobody needs to learn it, because it’s right there in front of you.

Relegation of rules weight to game elements doesn’t end with simple rules reminders. Take Magic: the Gathering for example. Over 15,000 cards have been printed, there’s no way of knowing what every card does. The thing is, you don’t need to. You can just read the cards as they come. Obviously this is an extreme example, but your game elements can serve as an a la carte platform for rules. It doesn’t even have to be with text–intuitive iconography can serve the same purpose.

Just make sure you know when to draw the line. Some rules just need to be in the manual, and nobody likes to dig through walls of text on their cards.

6) Minimize Width (Splendor, 2014)

In Splendor, players are jewelers trying to do the most things that involve jewels. During your turn, you can collect some sometimes-jewels, or spend jewels to buy forever-jewels (that often score points, and provide you with a jewel of that color that you can “spend” without losing it). If you’re the first with the specific set of forever-jewels listed on one of the three Noble tiles, you collect that tile for free and score the points listed on it. The game ends once someone ha s reached or exceeded 15 points.

While I skipped over a couple things, that’s pretty much the entirety of the game. With those four sentences, you wouldn’t have trouble jumping in (as long as you didn’t have to go first). Even as simple as it is, Splendor is a terrifically popular game.

The surest way to manage your Complexity Curve is just to make your game simpler. Just do it the old fashioned way. Trim, prune, and make sure that you’re presenting the most efficient version of your game that you can.

But I didn’t need to tell you that, right? You were already doing that…right?

Another angle on this is to reduce your game’s width while preserving its depth. This can be tricky, and can’t work for every game, but it’s definitely a solid model. If you can make a “minute to learn, lifetime to master” kind of game, you’re ahead of the curve–pun not necessarily intended.

Design Exercise

Pick a game off of your shelf that you could explain without using the rules manual.

How does that game manage its Complexity Curve?

Apply that method to a game that you’re designing. Are you employing that same method?

If so, is there any other way to use that method and further manage your game’s Complexity Curve?

If not, try and think of a creative way to implement that method.