Meaningful Choice, Decision, Agency?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of choice, decisions and agency within board games. What options do we have in board game design and what has not yet been fully explored.

One way to represent games is a probability space, a series of nodes to be navigated by one or more players. The decisions players make, as well as random events, determine the route that is taken through that space. Each route that can be taken gives the players a different experience.

Whatever the reason the player has for playing the game, to win, to learn, to teach, their task is to understand the game’s possibility space, remove sub-optimal paths and identify optimal ones to select for their aim. Given perfect knowledge the path is deterministic; is there still a choice?

However, what if we consider decisions that do not change the route taken by the players through the probability space. What are these choices and can they have meaning for a player? Take for example, choosing the colour pieces or character that you play with, is this more than a simple aesthetic choice? Instances of these types of decision are more prevalent in digital games and tabletop role-play games but have not seen much use in board games.

The designers’ role in creating a game is to create compelling choices for the player. This is could be seen as obscuring the optimal path for success from the player through complexity, randomness, time limitations, and hidden information. But have we left a potential avenue of decision making un-explored in board games. Are there decisions that can have an effect no on the table but in the mind, changing how the players relate to the experience of play?

Is either of these decision types meaningful, or in the end is the only choice we really make, whether to play the game or not?