What makes a game fun?

 What makes a game fun?

Why are there some games that I love playing and others that I'm not really up for all the time? Example: I now own Wingspan on Steam, and I've played over twenty games of it so far. Every time I'm done I'm like, Maybe one more game. I remember the very first time ever playing Dominion, where it wasn't our copy, it was the Lovelands, and we were at the Lovelands. And two turns into the game I was like, I need to buy this game.

And there are other games where I'm like, uh, okay I'll play. Such as Terra Mystica. I'll play it, sure, but I know I'm going to lose.

So, is liking a game tied to how well you do at it or if you win? I don't think so. I think I might not like Terra Mysitca as much, not because Alex always kicks my butt at it, but because I don't know how to get into it, get well at it, hmm, how do I put this? Like, I always feel like I never have enough stuff. Never enough workers or coins. So I can't do anything.

So maybe it's the freedom you have? Is the more freedom you have tied to how fun it is? In Alex's latest post he mentioned how he didn't like Charterstone as much as he thought he would, and one of the reasons was "I never felt I got a good grasp on the gameplay itself. I don't really know how to win. Which is kind of concerning in a strategy game."  

So maybe it's how well you understand the intricacies of a game? Because I'll tell you what, I don't really know how to win Terra Mystica. The last game I played I thought it was doing really well on the Element tracks, but I got first on all four of them and still lost, so that wasn't it. 

So what makes a game fun? Freedom of choice during your turn? Knowing how to do well? Something else? The mechanics? 

Because certain mechanics I just find so fun. The reason I like My Village so much is because I love the mechanic of having a large die pool and pulling out two dice from it to make a specific number. I love Dominion because it's a deck-building game and I love deck-building.

I don't think how fun a game is has to do with the theme, or even how well the theme matches up with the gameplay. It might be a deal breaker for some, but not for me. Going along with the previous paragraph, I'm more of a mechanics kind of guy.

Here's another idea: Maybe it's the idea of having progressed. One reason I love 7 Wonders is because at the end of the half-hour you feel like you've created an entire civilization. At the end of a deck-builder (or pool-builder like Quacks) you feel like you've made something. 

I think that might be a major reason why the game Cerebria wasn't liked by critics. Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower states that he felt for such a huge game with tons of components "it feels like a small payoff" and "I'm doing this and this and controlling this and playing this and... we get one point." Moral of the story: games are fun when it feels like you're accomplishing something.

Another thing about Cerebria: It's too complex, too complicated. Why is Wingspan so fun? Because you don't feel like you're overwhelmed; you can do one of four things. In 7 Wonders the biggest choice you have is between 7 cards. In Dominion there's only ten kingdom cards out per game you can buy. 

But there's this balance, right? Because earlier in this post I said that the freedom you had made it fun, and now I'm saying it's not having that many choices. So which is it? Too many and you get analysis paralysis, not enough and you get Chutes and Ladders. And, like, I love Caverna. Caverna is an amazing game. But there's so much stuff you can do and so many paths to victory. But I still love it.

Here's a BGG article on this idea if anyone wants to read it: (Is there such a thing as too many choices?) 

So why do I like Caverna, and Viticulture, and 7 Wonders, and Dominion, and Scythe, and... all the other games on the right-hand side of my blog? I like them because I have fun playing them. But why?

Why play games at all? What's the purpose of games? I think that Michael of VSauce said it best when he said, "In life, the rules are complicated, the goals are indeterminate and the methods for achieving them are often unknown or different for every single person. Plus, the rewards themselves are often slow to come or non-existent. So, in the face of all of that, it's no surprise that we invented games within the larger game of life itself that ensure fast, easy-to-achieve and understandable rewards."

So maybe a game is fun when there are clear goals, clear ways to reach those goals, clear things you can do on your turn, (but not too many things you can do on your turn,) but the goals aren't too easy, but they're not too difficult, and has awesome mechanics, and... man, I don't know.

And the reason I'm asking myself these kinds of questions is because I want to make the games I create fun. I want people to want to play my games. I want the games I make to be played and for the player to say, Man, that was really fun. I'd like to play that again. Because that, my friends, that is the dream.