Playing board games which involve fair amounts of mathematical understanding are by nature hard to balance. After all, if someone in the group is a lot better at statistics, or understanding conditional probability, it’s likely they’ll have a significant advantage.
This is a problem for both cooperative and adversarial board games. In cooperative board games, if the game is balanced around someone of moderate reasoning skills, superior reasoning skills tend to lead to consistent victory, making the game somewhat boring. If the game is balanced around someone of superior reasoning skills, it’s broadly inaccessible.
Adversarial games have the same issue, where if someone is better at math it gives them a significant advantage against their opponents.
Enter: chance. When you add more chance into a game, you reduce the amount of skill required to be viable, decrease the skill ceiling, and giving those with less skill a better chance. Generally, you want the better player to win compared to the lesser player but to what extent remains unclear.
Two other thoughts:
- High skill floor games partially solve this problem- but are hard to get into,.
- Dark-Souls flavoured games (where everything is super hard, but you’re rewarded for persistence) seem to be an interesting approach, that doesn’t leave less experienced players feeling miserable. It also doesn’t involve RNG.
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