Anyone who’s played tabletop games for any amount of time has encountered one of the most delightful feelings in the hobby: Laughing, putting your head in your hands, and saying, “this game is ridiculous”. Having a game careen into the territory of the absurd is amazing and is one of the most common features that make me want to replay (or buy) a game. So as designers, how can we make ridiculous games more often? Can we intentionally create a, to mince a swear, clown fiesta with some regularity?
To help reach this goal, I would like to introduce a term called nonsense potential.
What Is Nonsense?
In game terms, I have most frequently seen “nonsense” used in Magic, usually referring to decks or cards that win in slow, elaborate, usually ineffective ways. Thinking about the use here, and thinking about the standalone games I’ve played that have generated similar feelings, my best definition of nonsense is:
When a game enters a highly unusual, unexpected, or funny state.
So nonsense potential is the ability of a game, on average, to generate these game states.
Just by having a vague definition of what nonsense is, our goal changes from an impossible task to capture an indescribable state of mind to something that’s difficult but can be achieved.
Getting Up To No Good
There’s many ways to increase a game’s nonsense potential.
Being able to use components in unexpected ways is an important generator of nonsense. Of the numerous impress-the-judge games I’ve played, Stinkerhas the highest nonsense potential because it allows you to use its provided letter tiles however you like. You can misspell words; flip an E tile 90 degrees to become an M; even, if the group allows you, use multiple letters. Here’s a spectacular example:
Stinkeralso awards more points to people who use more tiles, meaning it encourages players to be less conservative and try to find weird ways to use them. Nonsense being at least a semi-viable strategy, or arising from people trying to play the game to win, is also important because it doesn’t draw competitive players in multiple directions.
Coming from a different angle, strategies that strongly deviate from the rest of the game can generate NP. Most of the time, in Trains, you want to link your rail system to as many high-value cities as possible, with the rest of the board mostly serving as an obstacle. However, Trains: Rising Sun features the Mining Train, which generates money for every mountain space you’re on. Suddenly, three players are playing a normal game of Trainsand the fourth has covered the mountainside with cubes.
Randomness, of course, helps create nonsense, but has to be a specific type. It’s okay if there aren’t a lot of random components in a game, but those components that do exist need to have a huge variety of outcomes. It’s the difference between random draw in Azul creating stations with different colors of tiles and the event deck in Arkham Horrorsometimes being a cult encounter and other times containing a beleaguered librarian.
Example Time, Baby
I don’t want to use a very strong scale for nonsense potential (NP) because this is related to humor in games and explaining humor kills it. But having a vague sense of which games really succeed in this way is useful when monitoring your own games, so I’m sorting games into low-NP, medium-NP, and high-NP.
Low-NP games keep strategy within a confined range, with not much room for unusual game states. Terraforming Marshas a wide variety of available strategies, but because every card and action contributes to the overall game plan of either terraforming Mars or generating VP, things can’t get particularly weird.
Medium-NP games have a core game state that actual play often resembles in some distorted way. Castles of Mad King Ludwignever strays away from “purchase the room that gives you the most value and price gouge your opponents just enough,” but situations arise fairly often where one person keeps building corridors endlessly or creates a single long chain of rooms.
High-NP games frequently end up in game states where everyone’s confused how it got there in the first place. While not the best High-NP game, Fluxxis probably the purest example, with the endgame frequently devolving into players drawing 7 cards, discarding 3, and stealing the winning Keeper from their neighbor’s hand.
Impactful Nonsense
Impactis a broad term that covers a lot of different components of a successful game, but you could say it applies to anything that makes a game memorable and exciting. Obviously, the higher a game’s nonsense potential, the more memorable the game will be.
This is most visible over multiple plays of a game. The highest-impact games are not only ones where you remember the game, but each individual play of the game stands out as unique to you. This is most common with games where the players or scenarios differ each game, but that’s not a 1:1 link; Pandemichas different player roles but doesn’t have a huge amount of nonsense potential. Additionally, having too much variety can actually be detrimental: The high-NP Tournament at Camelothas dozens of Godsend cards, but because 6 or 7 of them can be in play at a time, it makes all of them less memorable.
Having story-based elements can be very useful in this respect: Tales of the Arabian Nights’ mix-and-match Arabian Nights story elements make it a high-NP, high-impact game. When pitching this game, I regularly tell people about a single game where a player was exiled to Europe, met an angry djinn who broke his arms and legs, and crawled back to Baghdad…and won. This is partially a great story because there are lots of things that can happen in TOTAN that create these situations, but because they’re also couched in a narrative beyond “Kevin had his speed reduced to 1 but was able to gain enough Destiny Points at the end of the game.”
Conclusion
All of my favorite games have a very high nonsense potential, and I think it’s one of the best things a game can have. More than just offering an intellectual challenge (though that’s important too), games should be personalizable and generate conversation, even after the box is put away. NP is one of the best ways to achieve this. Despite it making the game sometimes look strange or even untested, the benefits of nonsense vastly outweighs the benefits.