My two cents on degenerate play

The subject of degenerate play has reared its ugly head again. To be fair, I'm not sure if it ever actually puts its head down.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/713590/what-degenerate-play

As usual, no one really seems able to agree on exactly what degenerate play is. For me, it generally means playing against the spirit of the game or good sportsmanship. If I want to smack you, it might mean that you are engaging in degenerate play. Or, it might mean you are just playing better than me :P

If it's an intrinsic flaw in the game, that falls under a game being broken or solved. I don't think many people would call putting an X in the middle of the Tic Tac Tor board degenerate play. 

I'll be honest, many examples of degenerate play, like only buying silver in Dominion, really seems like a learning curve. As players gain more experience, they learn overcome the low plateau strategies.

In all honesty, the games with actual degenerate play that doesn't either involve people needing more experience or the game actually being genuinely broken are games like Magic the Gathering. When every card adds or changes rules and there are literally thousands of cards, there end up being combinations and loopholes beyond what the designers anticipated.

Often, I think the goal of degenerate play is to 'prove' you are smarter than everyone else at the table, including the designer who is there by proxy. Oh, and to rub everyone's face in it. 

Really, the bad sportsmanship part feels important to me. If someone's gets upset or their feelings get hurt, I think that's significant. Particularly when someone is doing it for their own entertainment. 

For me, that is the real problem with degenerate play. When someone's intentionally subverting someone else's fun. If a group of friends want to sit down and have fun with loopholes, I'm not going to find fault with that.

Although all that gets turned on its head when there's money involved.

Tournaments, when there's a purse involved, aren't about fun. Is degenerate play ruining the environment or is it educating the developers or is it just playing smart so you can win? Is there a line where it counts as cheating?

There's definitely a line but I don't know where it is. I don't fault playing smart. I don't fault playing vicious. I don't fault playing to win. But somewhere beyond all of those, there is playing to hurt. Maybe that can be degenerate play. Maybe that's just being a jerk.

Dominion - so much emergent gameplay!

Oh boy. When I started discussing emergent gameplay, I forgot about one of the poster children for it in modern board games, Dominion.

Okay. That's not actually true. Magic the Gathering (TM) THAT is really the poster child for both getting complex results from simple rules and players coming up with some crazy stuff. 

The thing is, while I admire the design of Magic and I respect Wizards of the Coast's business model for getting players' money out of their wallets, I've never been into Magic. The pay to play model has never really worked for me.

Dominion let those of who didn't want to invest in Magic a chance to try out deck building and see how card interaction works. I mean, not counting Blue Moon, Scarab Lords and Minotaur Lords, all by Reiner Knizia :D

(Jeez, I'm setting myself up for not just other games to discuss but other games by Reiner Knizia!)

But a key part of what made Dominion work was the low entry point. (Plus the ability to play with more than two, a wide variety of distinct cards, fascinating interaction of cards, etc) It is really easy to teach folks how to play Dominion.

The basic formula of A: play an action card B: buy a card and C: cleanup by putting your hand in your discard pile and drawing a new hand means you literally have an ABC  to teach people. And all twenty-five of the cards that come in the first box are pretty easy to understand.

However, after you get passed the big money strategy, where you just buy coins to buy points, you start exploring how the cards interact with each other. You discover different combinations and learn how cards have different values, depending on what other cards are available.

Dominion embraces both sides of emergent gameplay, complex situations out of simple rules and players coming up with novel, surprising, or even shocking card combinations.

And that is just with the original twenty-five kingdom cards. Every expansion has just add more combinations to explore and discover! 

I am also going to argue that Dominion offers a greater degree of emergent gameplay than deck builders likes Ascension that use a random center row. Since you know which ten cards you have to work with in any given game of Dominion, you're able to make more deliberate, specific choices.

Magic the Gathering really helped refine synergy between a wide variety of cards but Dominion helped a different audience explore it.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion