You can probably just skip this next explanatory section by watching the video. There’s nothing anyone can teach you about this world that Rodney can’t teach you 100x better (and with 100x more Canada).

Quadropolis is a Q2 2016 Days of Wonder release where players are city-level managers building square buildings in a square district over the course of four or five game rounds. While the theme isn’t exactly the most exciting, the game lives up to the great standard we’ve come to expect from Days of Wonder. Quadropolis features many simple-yet-deep multidimensional decisions, fast-paced gameplay, indirect interactions, and multiple routes to victory–all things we love to see in a medium-light Euro like this.

In the basic version of the game, a random(ish) assortment of tiles are laid out on a 5×5 grid. Players draft these tiles, but the draft is not without its limitations. During her turn, a player places one of her arrow-shaped indicators along the rim of the grid, pointing inwards. The indicator has a number–a single copy each of one, two, three, and four–and the player collects the building tile that many spaces deep on the grid in the direction designated by the arrow.

Once a tile is collected in this fashion, the Urbanist pawn is placed on that spot. The Urbanist prevents the next player from playing an arrow that points towards it, thus sealing off its row and column until it is moved after the next tile is drafted.

After you’ve picked your tile, however, you don’t get to put it just anywhere in your city. In fact, you have to place it in a zone in your city that matches the number of the arrow you used to collect the tile.

After the final round, each building in your city scores differently. While scoring is certainly an important part of the game, as are the other mechanisms we didn’t mention and the (recommended) “expert” variant, we’ll leave them to you to discover on your own. For now, let’s talk about lenses and density.

Lenticular Design

In one of my personal all-time favorite articles on game design, Magic: the Gathering head designer Mark Rosewater explains exactly what Lenticular Design is. I’ll paraphrase for those non-clickers out there:

Lenticular Design is an approach in gamecraft that utilizes effects that are simultaneously simple to beginners and complex to experienced players.

What does that even mean?

It means that context and depth are important. For example, consider the Urbanist mechanism. A newer player may make her pick on the Quadropolis grid, and leave the Urbanist in that spot as part of the procedure. This is extremely simple to the beginner. I’ve taught this game, and nobody has ever had any trouble understanding the Urbanist.

However, as you play and understand the game better, you realize that the Urbanist can be a valuable tool. An intermediate player may use the Urbanist to deny his opponent access to a specific building. An advanced player might plan her moves ahead and sequence her choices so that the building she actually wants more would be protected by the Urbanist, and thus available for her next pick.

In short, through Lenticular Design, the simple effects in your game can manage to retain value not just across replay, but also in players across different skill and intensity levels. As a designer, this may not be the first philosophy you want to consider when trying to piece together your breakout mechanism. Instead, perhaps use this approach when deciding the best way to trim your game down from “idea-vomit” into a sleek and streamlined final iteration.

Proper Lenticular Design is the best way to make a “gateway game with legs”…but where can it go wrong?

The Density Index.

Diagnosing Problems With The Density Index

Quadropolis is a game with a wide multiaxal decision matrix–that is, the player is required to make decisions with many options where more than one relatively-unrelated factor should be considered for optimal play. Selecting the best tile isn’t about finding the best tile and drafting it. Even as a beginner, you should also consider where you will be able to place that tile in your city with the arrow you plan to use. It is also strategically sound to sequence your arrows properly, as you only have one copy of each number, so planning ahead is vital. Advanced players will consider what’s interesting to their opponents in their decisions–not just as a way to weaponize the Urbanist, but also in ordering their choices.

This is quite a lot to process, especially when an opening decision on a blank board involves as many as eighty different options. In fact, this bandwidth clutter leads to a problem with Quadropolis’s density index–one of the six pillars of game design that we use to evaluate games at Coalition Game Studios.

Density Index describes a game’s complexity and depth as compared to the overall experience it provides.

A skewed density isn’t always the end of the world. When the human mind is faced with a plethora of options, it simply trims away a majority of them by establishing an intuitive valuing system. We narrow choices down to a small handful, and then pick based on our feelings and instincts.

However, a density skewed too far can be a significant problem. Diagnosing this problem isn’t an easy task, and it isn’t always something you can directly delve from playtester feedback. Problems with the density index manifest themselves as symptoms, and Quadropolis displays two of the most classic: predisposition to Analysis Paralysis, and decisions with unintended consequences.

Analysis Paralysis

If you’ve played games for any length of time, you’re familiar with analysis paralysis even if you haven’t heard the term. Analysis Paralysis (AP) is a symptomatic density problem where players are overloaded by meaningful options, often to the point that the time it takes to process a decision exceeds what feels proper for the game. AP is when your Uncle Fred takes fifteen minutes to move his Bishop.

AP isn’t always a problem on the game’s side. Some players are honestly just more prone to overthinking than others. However, vulnerability to AP is something that we should consider as designers, and something we can address through design (to a degree).

While designing around AP would require its own article, I can make some brief suggestions (that should be used with caution). Analysis Paralysis, appropriately, is secondary to analysis. Players analyze when they feel like they have enough information to make a correct decision. If AP is a problem in your game, try:

Distort available information through use of variance or compartmentalization Identify and incentivize specific lines of play, so that players pursuing different strategies value their shared options differently (which Quadropolis kind of does) Limit each player’s ability to affect the decisions or options of his or her opponents Stabilize the game state so that a player can start considering options before her turn

In Quadropolis, the multiaxial decision matrix and perfect information are to blame for its vulnerability to AP. Your indicator arrow’s number has two different meanings here, and it dictates both which building you are able to draft and where you can place that building in your city. These different axes create a multi-focal dilemma on their own. Players are torn between wanting to choose a building and wanting to zone their cities correctly. Without clear grounds for valuing here, Uncle Fred will have trouble deciding which arrow to lay in a reasonable amount of time.

Decisions With Unintended Consequences

This symptom is the mirror image of Analysis Paralysis–although not always entirely separate. For every player that wishes to analyze a wide decision matrix, there will be another that is overwhelmed and simply makes a choice as simply as possible. Even players that thoroughly analyze a game can be surprised by the impact of their choices in later turns.

As much as the chessmasters of the world may bemoan it, impulsive decisions can be fantastic for gameplay. When your impulses turn out to be right, it can be extremely gratifying. Some players prefer to play games in this style, even when it is not necessarily the wisest course.

However, in overly dense games, many players may forgo strategic consideration in key areas, and more frequently make their decisions based on an incomplete understanding. As the game progresses, they may find quite often that their strategies did not play out as intended, and this leaves players leaving less gratified.

The primary factor here is the game’s experience. For Chess, we accept unintended consequences as a part of the game, because we approach the table expecting something cerebral. For lighter games, players approach the table differently, and these unanticipated aftereffects may actually influence player satisfaction. Even players that typically play very strategically might find themselves blindsided by their own (or their opponents’) half-baked decisions.

This is exactly the case in Quadropolis. In search of a gateway experience where cartoon cities are built, players might not consider the full scope of the surprisingly deep game. At every game of Quadropolis I’ve personally played, there are screams of anguish as players accidentally hose their opponents out of the buildings that they want. Players seldom, if ever, enter the last draft feeling confident about their cities. Many of the interactions made possible by the game’s model end up serving only as random obstacles to others when players skip over considering the full implications of their choices.

Design Challenge: Quadropolis House Variant

Despite my complaints, Quadropolis is certainly a very good and enjoyable game that I did not hesitate to purchase myself. The question is…could it be better?

How would you address Quadropolis’s density skew?

Reply in the comments section with your house rules–tested or untested!