Playing to Win vs. Playing "Competitively"

I've played a couple of games recently where something very... mathematical... occurred to me. And I wanted to talk a little about it, because this kind of idea is important for playing competitively.

I don't play many games "competitively." I play to win, sure, but I also play to enjoy the process of playing. I think most people fall into that range; they aren't there solely for the purpose of making sure that they win, but they do want to win. And that is important! If winning has nothing to do with you playing a game, you aren't playing the game that everyone else is.

Playing to win isn't the same as "competitive" in my mind. When I write those scare quotes around the word, the implication is that you are competing not only with the people around your table, but also with everyone who ever has played the game, you are trying to achieve high scores and prove your skill, you are trying to participate in the unspoken world-wide tournament that is "people who have played, are playing, and will play." Or, even more literally, you are playing in a tournament and the only important goal is to win, however that needs to happen.

Now, of course, there is not a concrete distinction between "playing to win" and "playing competitively." It's more of a spectrum. Sometimes people are casual when they play, sometimes they are hardcore, often changing stances and positions on the spectrum in the middle of a single game. And although they aren't the same, they have a lot of overlap. And I've been thinking lately that if you "play to win," you should consider some of the "play competitively" thought processes so that you and your opponents/compatriots can sharpen your skills and always give the best challenge to one another.

On to specifics!

In Alien Frontiers, the goal of the game involves landing colonies on different regions of a planet and establishing control of those regions by having a plurality of colonies. This is how you score points, and all of the actions in the game funnel you towards this. Playing recently I noticed something. Even if you do no other action in the game, you can slowly push a colony through the hub over the course of three rounds, landing it in the third, and score one point (possibly more, if you get a majority on the region of the planet). Again, this is if you do nothing else. Without buying additional ships/dice, without maximizing the utility of your rolls, without trying to figure out how to get specific resources, you can without fail land one colony each turn.

And that means that if you are going to win, you need to make sure that you land your colonies more often.

Now this might not strike you as a revelation. Of course you should be landing colonies as often as you can! That's the whole point! But the revelation to me isn't that. It's that there is a built in timer in the game. It's that you can track your progress against an imaginary base-line player, see how your strategy progresses, and compare the progress that you make against it. You can, with very little effort, see how "competitive" you are playing, and over the course of many games, check if you are able to improve that value.

The game has a built in timer!

It changed the way I thought about Alien Frontiers. It's not just about taking a good series of actions, setting yourself up for a "two colony" turn. It's about beating the timer, and once you think of it as a timer, the options in the game become very clear.

Then the revelation began to grow. If each player begins with 8 colonies, then the game will take no longer than 24 turns. You have only 24 turns, probably fewer, to make your best effort.

But what about other games?

Ticket To Ride has a world-wide tournament scene, with pretty significant participation and prizes, including a major scandal recently when one of the champions was caught cheating. How did they catch him? Because if you do a little math, you realize that the game should take a certain number of turns; much like Alien Frontiers, each player begins with a certain number of train cars, and when they run out, the game ends. Each car requires a single card to play, and you can take 2 cards per turn. Suddenly, the game takes on a structured, race-like format! And, luckily for the people who were victims of the cheating, if someone finishes too early, or has too many cards in their hand, it is simple to see.

Video gamers, especially online games with a strong PvP component, have taken advantage of this kind of thing for years. It requires quite a bit more math, and a lot of precision timing, but if you have ever looked for a macro to maximize your damage and healing while supporting your other powers in an arena fight, while acquiring the exact gear to get your output numbers right, you know what I mean. Someone took the time to figure out the exact time line of encounters, the multi-layered possibilities of a fight, and realized that it boils down to a relatively simple measure of effectiveness.

But, to my point: Games, as fun and thematic as they can be, are often mathematical systems with a wide spread of decision-trees and outcomes. I don't like to think of them that way. But thinking that way, even a little bit, can improve your ability to play, which improves the experience for you and the people you are competing against or working with. There is a way to go overboard - we don't all have to be Esports geniuses - but there is a way to take advantage of simpler concepts to make the game in your home more competitive and more fun.