11. Randomness

[I]f cause and effect aren’t possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.

JEFFREY KLUGER

Novice designers’ games have a common theme: a heavy focus on randomness. Randomness itself is neither good nor bad. Randomness for the game designer is like salt for a chef. Sometimes you want to prepare something a bit salty. Sometimes adding salt only hurts the dish.

Completely Random Games

The “saltiest” games are those that are determined entirely without any intervention from the player. For these games, a combination of die rolls, card draws, or other random processes determine the events and winners. LCR is a game that is completely determined by dice rolls. You cannot be “good” at LCR because no skill ...

Get Players Making Decisions, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.