What Makes a Great Mobile EuroGame?

This Sunday my game company, Skotos Tech, released its third mobile game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad: Reiner Knizia's Kingdoms. It follows on the heels of our previous releases, Reiner Knizia's High Society and Reiner Knizia's Money. All told, I've spent some goodly portion of my last year's work on these three games (and the MobileEuroGame toolkit I've been creating, which is making it easier and easier to create new games as I go along). Along the way I've learned some useful lessons about choosing which games to adapt to mobile devices, and I've decided to talk about that this week.

For me, it's a contrast between Reiner Knizia's Kingdoms and Reiner Knizia's Money--both of which I play obsessively myself--and Reiner Knizia's High Society--which I think has as good of Artificial Intelligence and User Interface as any of our games and which I think plays well, but which doesn't quite generate the same spark for continuous play for myself.

Five Points for Great Mobile Games

Why? Here are my best guesses at five elements that make for great mobile gaming:

1. Variability. I think the #1 criteria for choosing a great eurogame for iPhone conversion is its variability. You want someone to be able to play it again and again and again without getting bored. I believe this is where Money and Kingdoms have both been able to shine, because they highlight how a master designer like Knizia can take a very simple set of rules (just two screens worth of instruction for each game) and make it feel very different every time.

In Money, I think that's because your starting hand is entirely variable, and it largely drives your gameplay, while in Kingdoms every board feels very different depending on how the first several tiles define the playing field. I also think it shows why High Society doesn't play as compulsively: though there's some variation based on which order the tiles come up in, it's a more minor effect, because your resources are identical every game.

2. Simplicity. One of the reasons that I'm very happy that our first few mobile games were by Reiner Knizia  is that they tend to have a very elegant simplicity to them. By the time I was done testing Money—by which time I'm sure I'd played it 100 times or more—I was playing in a Zen-like trance state, where my selection and exchange of cards was almost automatic.

Though there's certainly a place for more complex games, I don't think they'll generate as much immediate replay, because you often have other distractions when you decide to spend some time with a mobile euro. Having to actually think about your bid is the other thing that I believe holds High Society back from being a mega-iphone-hit, while Kingdoms straddles the line; in particular, the thought required to place a castle can either be too much or just right, depending on how well you can intuitively analyze additive scores. (A future revision of Kingdoms will, I hope, knock the ball out of the park by making it even easier to see scores for potential placements, through both simple touching and movement of the new tile.)

3. Fiddliness. When I'm reviewing a board game for tabletop play, I often will note fiddliness as a bad point. For example, I really love the gameplay of Moon & Weissblum's Oasis. It's a unique board game where you select bids of action-like cards made by other players--which is some ways isn't that different from Money, now that I think of it. However, whenever I sit down and play it at the table, there tends to be an awkwardness to it, as you constantly hand cards and markers back and forth across the table.

Conversely, I find fiddliness in a mobile games to be a big plus. There, one of the biggest problems can be a feeling of isolation from the game, since there's that screen of glass between you and the gameplay. Thus, the more you can help players immerse themselves in the game, the more you're working against one of the biggest limitations of mobile games. In Money you regularly swap cards for other cards, which I think gives you great immersion in the game, while in Kingdoms you regularly grab tiles and place them on a board. And that again leaves High Society as the odd game out, because the "fiddly" elements (spending money and taking your purchase) are all so regular that they're entirely automated. Thus, all you get to do is bid your money and watch what the other players are doing, and I think that results in a little less immersion.

4. Mathematics. I also tend to greet tabletop games which require lots of math with less enthusiasm. Whether you love designs like Power Grid or not, I think that math can drag a game down, because it often requires repetitive simplistic calculations. They're not fun, they're just work needed to make the game go. Now, I don't think that math actually makes a mobile game better. However, I do think that by relieving a game of its math burden (presuming that the computer does all of the calculation for you) you can turn a good game into a great one. It's like polishing off the tarnish and revealing the clean silver beneath.

Our most recent game, Kingdoms, shows this off best. Not only does it do all of the calculations for you when rows and columns of tiles are completed, but it'll also show you some immediate effects of tile placements when you move a tile around before placement, and that's something that I only hope to improve in the future (as I've noted already). I think that we also got similar advantages--but of a smaller scope--for both Money and High Society. Money instantly tells you your score at any time, while High Society calculates up your (simpler) score on the fly and will also show money counts for allof the players at the easiest difficulty level. As someone who did those calculations by hand while the games were in development, I can assure you that the end result is better.

I suppose it's not surprising that every game by mathematician Reiner Knizia has had math thus far, and it's another reason I'm very happy we opted to adapt his games first.

5. Compactness. Finally, a very important element for mobile games is compactness. There are folks who have been adapting games like Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, but those really don't play to mobile's strengths and you have to make things really small and/or having zooming in and out. That doesn't mean they're not good mobile games, but the do definitely start with a deficit. Of our three games, Kingdoms was the least suited on the compactness criteria--and indeed some (though not all) people have troubles making the tiles out at tiny iPhone sizes.

I think this can again go to immersion: I feel much more immersed in Money and High Society, because the components are larger and more in my face, while Kingdoms can be a bit more distancing on the iPhone (though on the iPad we could do things plenty large).

Around the Corner

I don't want to give you the wrong impression here. I choose High Society to adapt to the iPhone because I thought it featured very simple gameplay while still remaining one of Knizia's best-respected early games. At BGG it's the highest rated of the three games we've adapted to date, and I think that's well-deserved. I also stand by our adaptation of the game and think that people that enjoy the existing card game will be very happy to get to play it on the iPhone.

My only contention here is that that not all of its characteristics match the characteristics that make for an ideal iPhone game (especially to people who might not know about These Games of Ours and are more likely to rate it on sheer replayability). Would I have still adapted High Society even after thinking these facts through? Quite possibly, because I wanted to work with a range of games and I wanted to work with one of Knizia's best-respected releases. And we may continue to release games that don't meet all these criteria, as even Kingdoms stretched the issue of "compactness". Still, they're worth consideration.

With that said, I have many links to point you to this week:

First, I've written an iPhone-related column for each of RPGnet's three iPhone euroreleases. If you haven't read the other two, they are: "Making Computers Think Like Auction Players" (my High Society article) and "Turning Reiner Knizia's Money into an iPhone Game" (my Money Article).

Second, my newest reviews have been of Mayfair's Nuns on the Run and Gryphon's Charon Inc. I invite you to read them both on RPGnet.

Next week I'll be returning to my recent series on co-op games with a conversation with one of the founders of the genre.

---

Author's Note: I've since released one more mobile Eurogame, Michael Schacht's Gold! I was thinking specifically about Gold! when I wrote this article because I knew it was fiddly. You do lots of passing of cards back and forth with lot in the middle of the table. And, I've really liked how it came out on the iPhone, probably as a result. —2/8/11