Something I encountered the other week: the problem of how to address a variable number of players in a non-digital game. The vast majority of board and card games include rules that allow for a range of players. Most insist on at least two or three, and most cap the number at four, five, six, eight , or even ten. Few can support an unlimited number of players. In addition, nearly all have an optimal number, or a quantity that represents the best employment of the game’s particular mechanics and mathematical interplay.

Euchre, a classic card game popular in my native Midwest, is a superb example. It can be played with two or three players, but it is clearly designed to work best with four. The partnership play and the deck breakdown with four cards per trick are obvious assets, but there are also core rules (like “going alone”) that are only possible with four players. Clearly, the game has a poor answer to the question of variable players. It takes the strategy many non-digital games unfortunately employ: accomodating variable players without optimizing for them.

The situation that brought this to my attention was a three-player game of Blokus, the acclaimed geometric puzzle game. Blokus allows for 2-4 players, but it has a square board and location-based play mechanics. In our game, I chose the West corner and my opponents chose North and South. One of my opponents had lost to me every other time we played, and she talked up my skill to our third player, a newcomer to the game. Well, not only did I not win, I lost by a wide margin — the first one to be unable to play. However, I didn’t realize until after the game was over that I had been playing at significant disadvantage. Strategy in Blokus centers around finding space to play while restricting that space for your opponents. Yet at the game’s very beginning, from the choice of our start positions, I was limited to one quarter of the board as my influenced territory before I crossed the invisible line into space dominated by my opponents. However, with no fourth player, both my opponents were uncontested on one of their two borders, giving them essentially three-eighths of the board to call their own. Both of them had a one-eight board space advantage on me, and the added benefit of having no one to contest their moves into that extra eighth. This margin made it very difficult for me to even be competitive, and I am not surprised I lost.

What this showed me was that Blokus also fails at the question of addressing variable players. With a base-two symmetrical board, it is obviously designed to be played with an even number of players. An odd number necessarily leaves one at a permanent disadvantage. This oversight plagues many excellent board games, and few really have good solutions to the problem.

One that I know of that may be the most creative is Rio Grande’s recent masterpiece, Notre Dame. Aside from being an excellent game, it has a particularly unique answer to supporting three to five players. The board is rotationally symmetrical, based around a central tile that represents the famed cathredral. However, the game ships with three different cathedral tiles: each with either three, four, or five sides. The other board pieces are larger, “city section” tiles, and they too are oddly-shaped: Each player controls one section, and they can be rotated to fit the different central tiles and still ensure that each player’s section is equidistant from all other payers’ sections, ensuring that no matter how many are playing, all play from the same position of strength and the game retains its location-based mechanics. Brilliant! Granted, they had to mess with the conventions of board design and layout to achieve this, but it is a prime example of designing with variable players in mind. Clearly, the makers of Notre Dame were more forward-thinking than most board game designers, and we could all learn from their example when considering how to accomodate variable players in our games.