Growth

The feeling of gradual empowerment is very feelgood. Ever played Diablo? This is often called "progress", but that's easy to misunderstand. I call it specifically Growth. How do you mechanically create growth in a game?

Cyclical play

In a cyclical game, resources are gained, and then they are spent. It may be interesting, and you may be closer to winning, but no growth has occurred. You are still as strong as you were before.

Radlands has no growth. It gets lots of fun from other sources, but those sources have to carry a lot more weight. I probably wouldn't design a game that way now.

I like Agricola, so I made my own farming game. You ran a farm, and periodically, "guests" would come along. You could feed them, and provide housing, clothes, or a fire, to keep them warm. This was how you got points. This was open-ended, so you could satisfy the guests on any scale you liked. Players would often kill off all their animals, or create a great bonfire, rather than build things like buildings or fences. This degree of freedom was great, but after cashing in half their farm, a player was left rather deflated and aimless. They were basically back at the start of the game. What would they do now? Allowing players to make the game highly cyclical was a huge mistake. They shouldn't have been able to neglect and undo their accumulation to that degree. I didn't understand this mistake at the time, and it killed the game.

Cyclical play is a huge trap that adversarial games fall into, as attacking the enemy is typically cyclical, not accumulative.

Give income, not rewards

Players should not gain rewards. They should gain permanent benefits.

These benefits will help them for the rest of the game. (The permanent benefit might be an ongoing stream of rewards. That's fine.)

It's quite normal to have cyclical resources or money. However, they should be spent on something that provides permanent benefit.

In Splendor, players take three gem tokens per turn, or they spend gem tokens, to buy cards. These cards provide points, but they also provide a discount on all future purchases. The gems are a cyclical resource — they constantly leave the player, while the bought cards are growth.

In 7 Wonders, each card taken is either a resource or prerequisite, that stays for the rest of the game, and pays for future things.

A kind of psychological satisfaction is triggered specifically by gaining permanent income (or discounts). This is a broader satisfaction, but income specifically triggers it very well. Some games grant more complex "abilities" and options. These are often not as clearly useful, or have costs or other restrictions. It's easy to believe you're allowing growth, but the players will (correctly) not feel it.

In my farm game, planting apple trees felt good. You plant them once, and they give you food for the rest of the game. Pine trees were planted once, and then you'd later cut them down for wood. That felt bad, as nothing long-term was gained. I changed the pine trees, so that you now cut them back to a stump, that never stops growing back. Even then, you had to actually cut the tree down, and cutting it down a second time was often something you didn't do. The raw income of the apple tree felt much better.

Growth also ramps up the game, which has two benefits: it enables the players to experience new content, and it also progresses the game to its end.

As I'm growing tired of crap euro games, I'm increasingly looking at the game being played, or at the back of the box. If each player doesn't have their own board or tableau, the game is probably cyclical and terrible, and I don't want to play it.

Growth is fun. Victory is not. Victory should just be the natural result of growth.

Component accumulation

Having scores that grow during the game is a kind of accumulation. A useful mental exercise is the following:

Take a look at your game (or any game).

Ignore the rules and scores for a second. Where are the physical components going?

If you have a hand of cards, where are they going? What about resources, and other objects? Are they being discarded, or are they amassing in front of you?

If your components aren't amassing, they probably should be.