“Analysis paralysis”

I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens when a player gets stuck in “analysis paralysis” while playing a board game.

This is that moment when a player is on their turn and they get stuck looking at the options in front of them and try to work them all out so they can decide which move is the best one. This happens mostly in more complicated games where there are a lot of variables to account for and options to choose from.

Sometimes a player can stop and analyse their moves for minutes and this happens because there genuinely is that much information to check and working out the right strategy and the winning move is a good thing. After all, if all the information is there in front of you and you just need to work it out, why wouldn’t you do that? I do not consider this to be analysis paralysis and, especially in those final moments of a game where your moves can make all the difference, I have no reservations about doing this.

But sometimes this happens because the game is not clear in the connection between cause and effect, or the available choices are all too similar. This is something I consider to a bad feature of a game. If your choices don’t really matter, or you can’t even tell what they will do, where’s the skill in making that choice?

Many gamers (myself included) learn to deal with this sort of thing by necessity. Personally if I’ve got nothing else to make my choice by, I go for the fun option. I’ve learned to identify when I’m in this situation and deal with the problem of not having a clear choice.

But I don’t think this is an interesting thing to learn in a game, it’s more fun to play a game where you know you made good choices rather than a game where you won because you picked randomly and got lucky.

Game design philosophy