The Dreaded Grind
Most people who do any amount of videogaming will be familiar with the word "grind." Wikipedia defines it as "performing repetitive tasks for gameplay advantage." It's a contentious topic.
At its worst, the mechanism of grinding forces players to repeat something they probably would not otherwise do in order to advance. In the first Destiny game, players could get quests to build very powerful swords. But one step of the quest forced players to run circles around various planets looking for resource nodes, with the item they needed only being successfully extracted once in every 8 nodes or so, and they needed 10.
Most guides say something like "next up is to grind out resources."
At its best, though, grinding can introduce great engagement and reward systems into a game. If handled properly, the quest to get the best loot or collect all the armor pieces can be extremely satisfying. And if you are repeating gameplay that you had every intention of repeating anyway, loot grind systems can introduce a constant feed of ever-powerful rewards with random bursts of surprise.
So, before looking at whether or not a system like this would be fun in a boardgame, what makes a loot grind system good? Here's some ideas:
1) The gameplay loop has to be good enough that players would play it for its own sake.
Most grindy games ask you do something over and over in order to build towards some goal. Maybe you're earning a little bit of XP each time and you'll eventually level up. Maybe you're earning better gear each time and you'll eventually have your perfect set. Whatever it is, the thing you're doing over and over needs to be good enough that you'd do it without the goal at the end.
The goal is icing over an otherwise fun game. I still go back and play Destiny's raids today because I enjoy the content, even though I've earned every possible piece of gear I can get from them.
Another way to approach this is to reward for everything. Instead of saying "you must do activity X to earn Y" and hoping activity X is good enough that people do, you say "here are activities A, B, C, and D, any of which can drop Y" and just let people do what they like.
2) As a corollary, the grind mechanics add to the game instead of subtract.
A big complaint in modern videogaming is that so many games now are forcing players to earn their rewards through a slow grind. Players get a drip feed of loot, but have the opportunity to pay real money to speed things up. This has made it feel like designers have purposefully slowed the normal rate of progression in order to sell back to you the ability to speed it up.
So the grind mechanic has not added a fun reward system on top of an already well-tuned game, but has instead slowed the rate of advancement just enough to it's felt in the hopes that players will spend more money on loot boxes.
3) What you're grinding for is desirable, but not strictly necessary.
The best games that use grinding mechanics don't tell you what you want. They set up all these possibilities and the player makes their own goals. The possibilities are desirable enough that the players will chase them for their own sake, because its fun, because it'll make their character look cool, because it makes them more powerful in an interesting way, or they just like collecting.
The worst of it is when players have to grind. Like, they just have to. Sorry, you just beat World 4 but you can't access World 5 yet until you're level 10. Better go replay Worlds 1-4 over and over until you've earned the XP.
We've recently started playing The Division again, and there are a ton of very rare items to grind for that will make you incredibly powerful. But you can experience pretty much everything the game has to offer without those items. Getting them will mean you can take on higher levels of difficulty, but there's not much new to see. But they are interesting sets of armor that significantly alter your play style and it's FUN to be really powerful. So they're desirable, but not necessary.
4) Progress must always be made.
It sucks to spend an evening playing a game, doing the content you've done over and over, only to the end the night with nothing to show for it. The best grind systems allow you to gain some sort of minimal progress for your effort each time you play, even if you don't get the one rare drop you were looking for.
Some games you're just earning XP which will eventually lead to a level up or a loot box. Some games you can destroy the things you get to earn a currency that you can spend to buy exactly the item you want. Some games just give you so much STUFF for everything you do that it's unlikely you won't get at least SOMETHING for your time. And some games have systems in place that guarantee a particular reward for a particular effort.
The argument against this is that shouldn't you just play the game to enjoy the game? What about point number 1? Isn't this fun enough that it shouldn't matter if you get your loot or not?
Well, yes and no.
a) Part of the point of a game like this is to get the thing you're grinding for. Even if the content is great, it's still part of the point of the design to also earn whatever thing you can earn from playing it repeatedly.
b) Many times these games have gated content. You need to get powerful enough through the grinding mechanism in order to access the next piece of content. And then that content drops better stuff which allows you to grind it to get powerful enough to open up the next thing. So not making progress can limit your access to new stuff in the game.
c) See point 3. This stuff is fun to get! Anytime you MIGHT get something fun, but you DON'T get something fun kinda sucks.
Content that's fun to play on its own will only get you so far. The first few times I'll play it I won't even consider that I didn't get a drop. The next few times I play and get nothing are "well that was fun, bummer I didn't get the thing." The next few times its "I think I've only got a few more of these in me." And then finally its "what other game you folks want to play?"
This happened with Destiny 2. The content was very fun for a first playthrough. And a second. And there were a few desirable things worth chasing. And then that was it and you had it all.
This isn't BAD. But it's not a game you'd grind. Just like Myst isn't. Or Resident Evil 7. Or plenty of other games whose content is amazing and completely worth playing even without a grindy reward mechanic. But if the goal of your design is to have me play the same stuff over and over, that stuff has to be good AND I've got to be able to make some sort of progress.
5) You've got to surprise me.
This is absolutely the dopamine segment of our program, but for me to be interested in grinding a game there has got to be some luck. I feel I just felt all of you shudder.
Why luck?! Doesn't it suck to have your power determined by luck? Isn't it bad design to let some people have the best item in the game and others not have it just down to a roll of the die? Wouldn't you rather earn your rewards through skilled play or invested time as opposed to luck?
Well, yes and no. Again. We don't deal in absolutes 'round these parts.
All of that is true. I want a skilled player to earn more or better things. I want an invested player to earn more or better things. I want clear paths to my rewards (see point 4).
But luck plays two important roles in a game like this:
a) It gives hope to the less-skilled or more-busy. You'll hear boardgame designers talk about this a lot when they talk about luck in games (Richard Garfield's got a good talk out there somewhere about this).
By adding luck into the equation you allow the opportunity for people to luck into a win sometimes. Is it "deserved"? Maybe not, but I don't give much weight to that word in the context of games (I'll unpack that a bit more in a later post, I bet). If the best loot in the game was only obtainable by beating the hardest content, then I'd stop playing because I'm old and slow and am just ever going to be that player. But if I have a very rare chance to get that loot just through a bit of a luck, then you've given me some hope, and a reason to keep playing. Sure, give it as a guaranteed item to the people who "earn" it.
b) Go look up reaction videos to people getting their first Gjallarhorn.
It was a very powerful item. And there was no guaranteed way to get it. It was just a lucky drop.
The possibility that you MIGHT get one every time you downed a boss was exhilarating. It was exciting. And the surprise and glee and elation you see from people when that little symbol finally pops up on their screen is an incredibly memorable moment.
Adding luck into the game creates suspense and surprise. It creates moments of ups and downs and cause emotional investment and reactions. Later on in Destiny most exotics were earned through quests; guaranteed for you as long as you did a particular list of things. And honestly, loot drops became a lot less thrilling once there wasn't anything left you could earn that would honestly surprise you.
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So this is completely getting away from me in terms of word count, but what about boardgames? Don't you ostensibly write about boardgames?
The best example I can think of grinding in a boardgame is Shadowrun: Crossfire. When you play a game of SC, you earn a bit of XP. Hitting certain XP thresholds allows you to gain special abilities or modify your character's stats. There are a couple different scenarios to play, but some of them have very high difficulty and require a good amount of XP to be earned before there's much hope of you winning. You probably need a solid 20 wins under your belt before you can take on the dragon.
Kingdom Death: Monster is another pretty good example, but not quite. You do replay the same or similar fights over and over, upping the difficulty, in order to earn newer and better rewards/crafting materials. The one thing about KD:M that makes it feel just outside the definition of "grind" is that you are forced through a limited number of turns. You can't just do the same fight 100 times to get all the best gear; you have a schedule you have to stick to that purposefully limits your ability to grind specifically to force your hand into taking risks to power up quickly in order to meet the demands of the difficult fights forced upon you at particular stages of the campaign. It's close enough, though.
I do thinking grinding mechanics can work well in a boardgame, as long as they follow the same rules that make them good in a videogame.
Most boardgames are things people play over and over anyway. I've played dozens of games of Ice Cool, even though it's the same game every time. I played Target for Today over and over, despite the game being very procedural and repetitive, even though my pilots didn't earn loot from their splashed bogies.
And boardgames actually have an advantage over playing a grindy videogame: everything's right there in the box! In a videogame, the systems are unavailable to the player, so really the only way to get that magic ring you need is to play and pray.
But in a boardgame you just pull it out of the deck. Playing Shadowrun and want to try the dragon scenario but don't have 50 XP? Well...just say that you do. Grab 50 XP worth of upgrades and have at. Too hard? Grab 20 more XP. The designers will not come to your house and kick you, I promise.
So if you have a boardgame worth playing, the layering of a grinding mechanic on top of that game, with desirable and surprising rewards, and a system that respects the players time, could really add to player engagement, power progression that feels earned, character ownership, and unexpected events that make great stories.