In the modern era, gamers demand their Game Is Balanced. The biggest taboo a popular game can make is when one “tool” or combination turns out to be significantly more potent than others. This has obvious ramifications in competitive multiplayer games. But even for single player games, players get pretty invested in any statistically significant discrepancy in end-results from options that are presented as equals. “Busted”1 and “garbage” are equally unfun for players, even when there isn’t a human opponent inflicting this imbalance upon them.

Operation Dicestorm is a 1 versus 1 tactical strategy board game we’ve been working on for a while. The armies of completely asymmetric factions duke it out till only one has units standing. In the spirit of Blizzard RTS games like StarCraft and WarCraft, we prioritized making each unit type feel completely unique, yet comparably powerful in the grand scheme of things. While this makes for a lot of variety in the gameplay, it is extremely challenging to manage complexity, balance and a variety of other design considerations.

One of my big projects is our one-on-one versus board game, dubbed Operation Dicestorm. While it’s my first focused attempt designing a board game, a lot of lessons I learned analyzing video game design is directly applicable. This post is about the concept of “Fun to Face Too,” an important paradigm to observe specifically when designing multiplayer games (pretty much every board game, and most modern video games), to create the very best game mechanics.