How might I eliminate asymmetrical gameplay caused by turn order?

Question

I'm designing a turn based game in which players profit from buying, transporting, and selling resources. Each turn, the map has to produce a certain number of resources and different locations, and resource prices have to be updated. Because of this, each round, after every player has taken their turn, the game state has to be updated; resources are consumed/produced, prices in each cell of the map need to be updated, etc. Originally, I was going to have a simple turn order, where each player took their turn, then the map is updated, then the cycle repeats in the same order. However, after a little bit of testing, it became clear that this gave a significant advantage to players who have their turn right after the map is updated. They're able to collect the newly produced resources before any one else has a chance to.

The easiest way I could think of to balance out the gameplay for all players is to randomize the turn order after each round. While this would give everyone a fair chance, I'm worried that this might be too big of a shift away from strategy and towards luck.

How might I eliminate asymmetrical gameplay caused by turn order?

Answer 1

Have the players take their turns simultaneously. This also has the added benefit of speeding up the game, because players don't sit idle while waiting for the other players to make their moves. In that case you might want to separate each round into an interactive "planning" phase and an automatic "execution" phase.

During the planning phase, all players give orders, but no orders get executed yet. The other players do not see what orders the other players are giving. Players are free to take back any actions during that phase. When a player is satisfied with their plan, they click on "end turn".

When all players clicked on "end turn", the game goes into an "execution" phase. The orders of the players get executed and the results are resolved. This requires some game design considerations for handling cases where two players make moves which contradict each other, for example two players try to collect the same resource, move onto the same space (which can only hold one of them) or buy the same unique item. There are several ways to resolve such situations. Which one is most interesting depends on your overall game design.

When this just doesn't fit into your game design, do a game-state update before every individual player's turn, and not just when all players have finished. That way every player has the opportunity to snatch a resource which got spawned on the start of their turn.

Answer 2

Do what Power Grid does:

Players take turns in order of farthest behind to furthest ahead in terms of scoring (in the case of Power Grid, the player who powered the fewest cities that round). This acts as a catch-up mechanic, giving the resource-advantage to the player in last place.

It also means that the player who's in the lead doesn't want to stay in the lead because it gets more expensive. For Power Grid, the "optimal" position is generally 2nd place until the game is nearing its conclusion, but I have seen "from behind" victories as well (that is, where the person in last place manages to out-compete on that last turn, taking the win).

Heck, there isn't even anything that stops the player in front from just not powering all of the cities they can a given turn in order to drop to the back and take the resource advantage, other than the fact that by powering fewer cities, they take less income. But as income is generally a diminishing returns scalar (the first city is $20, the second is $19, etc.) there are points in the game where it is more expensive to power a city than one would make in income for having done so (e.g. that unit of coal cost cost $10 to acquire this turn, but using it to power 1 more city only gets you $8 back). So generally players power as many cities as is worthwhile and the turn order attempts to keep the game close.

Answer 3

The easiest way I could think of to balance out the gameplay for all players is to randomize the turn order after each round. While this would give everyone a fair chance, I'm worried that this might be too big of a shift away from strategy and towards luck.

Do not randomize, change the turn order in a fixed way. If I play first, next turn I play last; if I play second next turn I play first, and so on..

Answer 4

A good way to do this that I always liked is tying turn order to some resource expenditure. Thus determining turn order becomes part of the gameplay to get skilled at. This allows for some very interesting asymmetric play if done right. You can see this in games like Twilight Imperium or Five Tribes.

Twilight Imperium - Each round starts with players choosing their "roles" such as warfare or trade. Each role also has a number associated with it which determines turn order, and turn order determines the "role" choosing order. The "roles" have variable strength depending on what they do, with the weakest being lower and strongest higher. The lower the number the earlier you go. In this specific case the lowest number "Initiative" has no effect and simply gives you first turn advantage, while the highest number "Imperial" scores you 2 victory points to help win. Much of the game revolves around trying to grab "Initiative" to guarantee an "Imperial" turn following.

Five Tribes - Each round starts with players paying a certain number of coins. The most coins payed gets to start the round. Ties are resolved as a stack and the bidding is done in turn order from the previous round. That forces players to think about how much first turn advantage is really worth in game currency.

Answer 5

One thing to consider would be to do your update at the end/start of each player's turn instead of at the end of the round. That way, every player would have the opportunity to collect freshly spawned resources every turn. You would definitely want to shift the amount that spawns (or inflate costs) to compensate for the influx of new resources.

Alternatively, you could make it so that resource collection occurs at the end of the round instead of during any player's turn. During a round, players would be competing to be the ones controlling the resource production, but would only gain new resources at the end of the round when everything updates. With this approach you may still want to implement a turn order rotation, but it will be less imbalanced within each round.

Answer 6

The Thue-Morse sequence is the fairest way to share [turns] between (two) players:

AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA AB BA BA AB AB BA BA AB BA AB AB BA ...

To calculate, count the number of bits that are 1 in the binary representation of the turn number (starting at 0):

• If there are an odd number of 1's, it's B
• Otherwise it's A

The sequence is not random, but it doesn't repeat in an intuitive pattern, so you could display the order players will move on the current turn and maybe even next turn(s) so people can strategize.

The Thue-Morse sequence can also be generalized to more than 2 players.

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Otherwise handicap the player(s) who go earlier. This video explains how to do that: First Move Advantage - How to Balance Turn-Based Games

Answer 7

A non random way to do it, its making that to be the first player is a choice of the players.

I mean, you can take the stone resource, the peasant or the first player turn token, flag, or any other more roleplaying reason.

Thats the way of games as the Agricola boardgame.

The other way of taking that first turn token is like in Terra Mystica.

Every player during every round (there are 6) can do an "unlimited" number of actions. One of the actions is stop playing in the current round. The good thing of do it faster than the other player is that it will mark the turn order in the next round. First to end first to play, second to end second to play, ...

Always avoid to be too much random!

Answer 8

If both players play on the same map, that might be impossible, since the first player can change what is possible for the second, so you might try to balance it out somehow different. It depends on what is possible:

• many card games go the way of additional resources, like an additional card (MTG) or the coin in Hearthstone. This could be one option to balance it, but might be dangerous to overdo and give the second player an advantage, maybe even based on the meta.

• some boardgames go for an approach, where the first players action ready up some other actions for the next player, that might be more lucrative. In your game, the first player might sell good A to a factory, that then wants good B for the second player. If both players know of this second option, it is more of a strategic use.

• similar to that suggestion before, give the second player more information, like what spawns where next turn. This way he might secure resources for the next turn, if possible. Of course, this is only possible, if your game mechanics support something like this.

• like the others suggested, mix up the turns. But instead of making it random or change turn by turn, make it part of the game itself: maybe the one with the least amount of money or resources goes first. Or, something like "El Grande", where you bet who goes first. But don't make that betting depending on money. If you give 500 from 1000 or from 4000 credits, that's a huge difference and can snowball the game early on. You could rather gamble, how many resources some is allowed to pick, the one with fewer goes first.

Answer 9

I very much prefer the "simultaneous turn-based" approach used by e.g. Sword of the Stars, but if you want to keep a more traditional turn-based structure, one option is to update the map between each player's turn.

For example, let's say you have a lumber mill that produces 2 wood per turn, up to 10 stored. If there's five players competing for the same mill, they each get 2 wood per turn; if there's only one, he gets ten per turn (assuming five players).

There's many ways of how exactly to balance this approach, and it largely depends on what kind of game you're trying to make and what works as fun for you. Say, more players might mean more resources overall (maintaining the same yield per turn per player), or it might mean the same amount of resources (more players -> less resources per player-turn). The max storage of a resource producer might be the same you had as per-turn production previously, or it could scale with the player count. Allowing even more resource storage while keeping the per-turn yield the same will increase the tactical options. There's endless variations you can play with :)

In either case, there's still a bonus to the first player exploits the resource when its storage is full, but it also means a great trade-off between "should I wait one more turn and hope to get 10 wood, or go in right now to get at least the 8 wood?". When you keep the resource storage scaled with player count (so that two players means 4 wood but five players means 10 wood), the one who last claimed the resources will also be the first one to get maximum yield from the producer, which makes "camping" the producer especially valuable - but anyone who claims the site will disrupt this, and both players "lose" - the original "owner" no longer has maximum yield per-turn, while the new "owner" sacrificed potential yield elsewhere.

Answer 10

I'll throw in how my Colonialism board game deals with this. Player order is set randomly for turn one, and I mean completely randomly: it might be player 1, 3, 2, 4, 5, or it might be 5, 1, 3, 2, 4. At the beginning of each turn (including the first), players may bid in an auction to go first. If you decide to go first, your marker on the turn order track moves to the front, and everyone else moves backward. So if the order is 1, 3, 2, 4, 5 and player 2 pays to go first, it's now 2, 1, 3, 4, 5.

An additional detail is that in the previous example, after player 4 bid to go first, player 2 might pay more than player 4 did, and then the order becomes 2, 4, 1, 3, 5. So player 4 moved forward, but still doesn't get to go first; but he did pay less for that position. This phase of the game happens in reverse turn order, giving advantage to the players who are further forward in the order.

So players only pay to go first if it is worth paying to. Historically, nobody pays to go first on turn one, because it's not an advantage yet. Eventually, the cost of the bid becomes worth the benefit, and people start doing it. My design is letting the value of the advantage determine the cost of getting it. Since order is not necessarily clockwise or counterclockwise, someone who never pays to go first will eventually be going last every turn.

Answer 11

I can a few possibilites :

• If it is a kind of role playing game, it might be possible to implement an attribute (let's stay initiative) that determines the turn order. The person who have the most initiative starts first, then the second person etc. Dofus is a game implementing this and it works pretty good.
• If every player has to be equal, then it might be a good solution to choose randomly the first turn order and then to shift by one at each global turn end. For instance player A was the third to play at Turn 1, at Turn 2 he will be second, then first, then last etc.
• Based on what you said about your game, it could be possible to make the players that have the least resources start first the turn to let them have a chance to catch up.

Answer 12

There are 3 approaches I know of that work well:

• One turn per player.

• All players play during the same turn. Use game design to avoid contradicting moves.

• Use a realtime approach. First to click gets the resource.

Answer 13

It might help you to think about how this sort of trading works in the real world.

One approach might be that players need 'agents' on the ground in reasonable proximity to the resources they want in order to be able to exploit them.

For example on your map you could have certain key locations, cities, markets, ports etc etc where players can commit counters representing their agents in order to have access to certain activities. Having an agent in a port might allow a transportation action while cities might give access to mines and factories while markets allow access to agricultural products. This system would force players to plan ahead and commit themselves before they know exactly what resources are available. It might even be possible to establish more remote trading posts on their own initiative. This is a relatively simple way to represent investment in infrastructure ie agents cost money to maintain but give more opportunities.

You could have a mixture of central trading hubs where actions are free and more remote locations where agents are needed.

Another key aspect of real world trading is bidding, if two people want the same thing one of them needs to either get to it first or be prepared to pay more for it.

You could also combine the two, having an agent in a cell gives the player the opportunity to bid for the resources in that cell, all eligible players make an offer and the highest bid by the end of the turn wins.

In this case during one turn players just take turns to take an action they have used up their available actions and order matters much less as action aren't resolved untill the end of the turn.

Answer 14

Try putting the environment into the turn order. That is, rather than having the entire game state update as a specific "end of turn" event, simply include it into the turn flow of the game - i.e. the environment is a "player" that takes actions such as producing resources and changing prices. The important insight here is that the environment can be split into multiple entities that each take their own turns that are interleaved with the other players, each tile and merchant taking the small actions that pertain to their responsibilities.

This could work especially well for price changes, because since not all sales points change their prices at once, resources could legitimately be worth different amounts on different parts of the board. A massive gold shortage on the east side of the board, for instance, might immediately create a price hike, but gold will still sell for cheap on the west side of the board while newsboys are taking their turns to travel there.

Answer 15

Lords of Waterdeep would have a similar problem with the first player to move gaining an advantage, but they solve it by allowing the players to steal the first turn as one of their limited actions in the preceding round.

A player assigns their workers to different locations in a round, one of which takes control of the token which denotes the first turn. If a player already controls that token, they can ensure they keep it by spending a worker to do so before someone steals it.

The tradeoff is that the workers are severely limited, and spending a third/quarter of your workforce every round to keep the first turn is not a viable strategy.