I was pondering two separate games, or ways to play games – Concentration (or Memory), and Winston Draft – and saw a common thread of interest to comment on. In Concentration, each player takes turns trying to find a match on the board of scrambled tiles. In Winston Draft, one player has the option to take a pile of cards for their deck or pass, but if they pass, another mystery card is added to that pile for the other player to look at / potentially choose. In both styles of game, the player has to measure the risk of allowing their opponent additional benefit versus the reward of doing something awesome (matching/getting better cards).
One of the dangerous areas of game design that I realized after playing Dominion is that the amount and nature of interactivity in a multiplayer game has a huge effect on the enjoyment of the players. When there is very little interaction, the game feels like a shared Solitaire experience and you don’t have any social benefit from playing together. On the flip side, when there’s a ton of interactivity – like people attacking each other all the time in Small World, for example – players can get upset and frustrated because they are unable to execute their strategy and/or have fun that way.
I really like the way this interaction conundrum is solved in the risk/reward scenario outlined above. Rather than pit players against each other, make it so that both (or all) players actions contribute toward a “pool” of resources in such a way that each player can ignore the benefit being given to the other if they desire, or they can factor it into their strategy (the less I give to others, the better off I am myself).