What board games generate emergent play?

November 25, 2021 2:35 PM

We play with some house rules in Catan. These are (I think) valid within the regular rules and these have been one of the aspects of the game that we've enjoyed the most. Are there other board games where the players will tend to produce new behaviours, conventions and technologies? Examples inside.

To give a sense of what I'm looking for, our following "house conventions" all arose spontaneously when someone did something unexpected, but seemingly within the rules. As Catan is a game about conventional economic development, I can't help but imagine them as analogies of real-world social technologies.

Invest in my port: some players choose to open up their ports to others, for a fee. "Pay me a sheep and give me three matching resources this turn, and I'll use my port to swap your matching resources and return you the hay you want next turn - unless someone rolls a seven and your cargo is lost" etc.

Detente: One person unilaterally moved the robber back to the desert once, in a group where tempers could run high. As a result, that group now always plays like that from the first seven onwards, unless someone is racing way ahead.

Protection money: "I'm going to put the robber on Alice's six hex or on Bob's eight hex. I either of you feel strongly, feel free to bribe me with resources to put it on the other person's, or on neither".

I'm aware that what I'm asking for is arguably the point of RPGs, like D&D. Also that multiplayer computer games frequently produce these kind of behaviours (I've read about EVE Online!).

However, this is for family. Therefore I'm interested in board game equivalents where this type of play is encouraged by the game's design, and can be played within the normal rules of the game.

Please don't tell me that the answer is Diplomacy!

posted by chappell, ambrose to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (19 answers total)

I feel like you’d love Agricola. Occupation and Improvement cards in Agricola seem to be basically what you describe. Part of the strategy is choosing cards that “stack” and complement each other. Not so much “emergent” as “part of gameplay” though.
posted by ghostbikes at 3:13 PM on November 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

Check out Oath that just recently came out. The point in a lot of ways is to create stories between players that replicate power structures stemming from different types of power. One player starts as the chancellor of an empire and for the most part the other players are exiles. During course of play some or all of the other players can become citizens, which can increase the chancellors power, but they have to watch out because the citizens can then usurp. Plus then the end of the games determines the next board so your next play is on the bones of the prior empire. Plus the winner of the game becomes the chancellor for the next game so you can tell some pretty crazy stories.
posted by Carillon at 3:30 PM on November 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

My partner invented selling futures in Bohnanza and it's a big part of how the game works when we play it now.
posted by sy at 3:46 PM on November 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

I’ve played a few of the “Legacy” style board games, where the rules develop over the course of twelve-ish games, and the players developed cultures and stories around the different armies/characters - we each built a minifig instead of using pawns in Pandemic Legacy, which was super fun and encouraged role playing.

I think house rules tend to develop when a group is competitive and looking for edge cases - Monopoly and Risk tend to have this happen ime.
posted by momus_window at 3:46 PM on November 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

I've played Mille Bornes with my family and friends pretty much my whole life and fairly recently learned that we've basically been playing it wrong, or rather not in the intended way. I've found that our "version" is better than the original!

In the official rules (I think), you have a partner and you share miles, can help each other out and the game ends when the deck does, and there are lots of rather difficult to remember point systems (used at least 2 of these, get 50 points, never used this card, get 100 etc).

We always just played to ausand miles, with limits on high-mile cards, the elimination of the "Roulez" requirement to recover from hazards, and crucially, the ability to pick up the last card on the discard pile instead of just drawing. This adds a small element of strategy and possibly cooperation - people help each other out, make deals and so on. This wouldn't be possible in the 2v2 official version.

Anyway, to me the base game always felt a little lacking and the house rules have developed over time to improve and streamline the experience.

Also I have Oath but have not yet played it, but I understand it's intended to create this kind of meta-play.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:01 PM on November 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Hanabi is a cooperative game where you can’t see your own pieces and need to choose each turn whether you play one or offer another player one of the limited clues. Developing conventions within the group for how to manage your pieces, what to clue and when is a great part of the game. There are lots of suggestions online, but if this is what you are craving I suggest just getting it and diving in.
posted by meinvt at 4:06 PM on November 25, 2021 [6 favorites]

The crew is a great game that is basically completely this concept. It won an award and is cheap.

+1 for Bonanza. I sell futures and "pick of the litter" and there's many flexibility in trading.

No thanks is a perfect game that has some of this and plays fast and is cheap.

The overall best trading game, if all you want is trading, is sidereal confluence. It's a little complex but it's pretty fun. Best with a very captive audience - a player or two can't be watching the football game.

Pirates cove is an oldie but a goodie as you can offer bribes and parlay with people and coordinate against the bad pirates.

Liars dice (perudo) is just dice and cups. It's excellent at all players. I recommend following normal rules, but that all 1s are wild. It's also basically all emergent behavior with if you jump up your bid or bid low to keep the action spot on a certain part of the table (with higher player counts)

Go is technically all emergent behavior. Great at two players.
posted by bbqturtle at 4:33 PM on November 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

The physical Spaceteam game and, to a lesser extent, 5-Minute Dungeon can sometimes lead to this.
posted by wintersweet at 5:42 PM on November 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've been playing Scrabble my whole life and one of the things I like about it a lot is that you can adjust the rules so that people with differing levels of skill can play together. When I was little, my mom and I would play together but I'd get nine letters and she'd get seven. Or we'd get the same number of letters but all of my words would score double. Sometimes if you play with Scrabble novices you can either gift them a list of two-letter words (enabling them to make more multiple-word plays) or let them look up words in the dictionaries (eschewing challenges which make the game more competitive but also can take the fun out of it for less experienced players). So scoring and etc stays mostly the same, there are just various adjustments that can be given to try to make a game with two different-level players more equitable.
posted by jessamyn at 6:32 PM on November 25, 2021 [4 favorites]

Seconding Scrabble house rules -- I am not sure if they are encouraged by the Rules-rules, but it seems everyone I've played with has them. We were playing tonight, and there's one player who always wins, so we added a 10 point bonus for a "really good word" as agreed by all players, UNLESS it's a bingo, and we use the Merriam Webster Online dictionary instead of the Scrabble dictionary. The Scrabble dictionary, as Stephin Merritt once pointed out, does not contain "ew", and that is totally a word.
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 9:04 PM on November 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Wow, thank you everyone - this is an embarrassment of riches!

Oath sounds exactly what I'm looking for. Hanabi too - I hadn't really thought about the potential for this in the context of cooperative games.

That said, all of these games sound hugely fun and with a ton of potential. I think we'll end up probably gifting each other most of the games mentioned here. (Although we're already frequent Scrabble players and, in that specific context, massive rule-sticklers...)

I think house rules tend to develop when a group is competitive and looking for edge cases - Monopoly and Risk tend to have this happen ime.

I'm interested in this idea, although I've played quite little of either game.

However, two of the three Catan examples that I thought of actually lessen the competitive aspects and instead strengthen cooperative aspects of a fundamentally competitive game (I've noticed that the groups I play with will try to keep unluckier players "in the game" to maintain their engagement although they're unlikely to win, keeping up levels of goodwill both on and off the board).

I can certainly imagine that regular Monopoly players might try to make the mechanics more interesting and collaborate to try and reduce the (intentionally!) arbitrary and frustrating nature of the game.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:15 AM on November 26, 2021

Response by poster: My partner invented selling futures in Bohnanza and it's a big part of how the game works when we play it now.

I've just read the rules to Bohnanza and now I'm super intrigued by how this works.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:21 AM on November 26, 2021

"I'm looking to trade this black eyed bean"

"I'll give you a chili bean"

"That's not enough"

"I'll give you a chili bean now, and the next chili bean I draw"

"....fine"
posted by bbqturtle at 5:22 AM on November 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Hanabi is an excellent recommendation. Gameplay aside, I'd definitely get the "deluxe" version of the game with small tiles instead of cards, it's really pretty.

Another great family game for this sort of thing is Monikers, which is similar to Taboo!/Celebrity and other word guessing games. You play in teams and have to get them to guess the word or name of the person on the card, drawn from a deck stacked and chosen by everyone. In the first round you can say anything you want except the specific word/name. In the second round you can only say one word. In the third round, you can't say anything at all.

The key is that the same deck is used in all three rounds, so by the end of the first one you'll know what cards are coming up. This leads to some fun emergent gameplay and language building where someone's frantic attempts to get their team to guess leads to a single word that has nothing to do with the actual thing on the card, but immediately evokes the memory of the last round, with hilarious results.

It's a great ice breaker game for people who don't know each other well because it immediately creates in-jokes for the group. Highly recommend.
posted by fight or flight at 5:23 AM on November 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

A lot of what I'm seeing here seems more like "house rules" in that they're modifications above and beyond what the game actually permits in terms of dealmaking and play, but in terms of emergent gameplay conventions, Hanabi as mentioned above is a great example, as is (historically) contract bridge.

As I understand it, the original way contract bridge was played, a bid of, say "2 clubs" was a bonafide claim that you believed you and your partner could take eight tricks with clubs as the trump suit. Somewhere along the line, some bright spark realized that you almost never really wanted to make that exact specific claim, and hardly ever wanted to play to meet that specific claim, and decided that a "2 clubs" bid could be a communication of some other piece of information to your partner, which they could use to find a bid they actually wanted to do. This development is now a pretty-much burned-in element of contract bridge, which has developed the extraludic requirement that these conventions may not be secret, i.e., if your partner knows some special thing you mean by "2 clubs", the opponents should get to know it too. So in tournament play announcing your actual bid conventions is mandatory and saying, "We bid the contracts we think we could make, and we're communicating nothing else with our contracts" would be regarded with horror and disbelief by everyone else in the tournament.

Hanabi has a similar issue (a very limited communication channel) and some groups have developed strong conventions around it, which are outgrowths of the idea that there's not just communication but metacommunication (i.e. when I tell you about 2s, I'm not just communicating to you where your 2s are --- I'm communicating to you the fact that knowing where your 2s are is the most important informaiton I can be communicating at this time). Some Hanabi groups have extremely highly developed conventions vis-a-vis communication and play (e.g. "if you can't do anything else, discard your oldest card; someone will give you a clue signalling your oldest card if there's a good reason you shouldn't). There's even completely convention-driven play like in Bridge, where cluing the player on your right's 2s may not be a communication about 2s at all, or even a communication intended for the player on your right. There was a 2015 article in Mathematics Magazine about it such strategies (here's a link to the publisher, and for those without access to that, there's a mildly sketchy duplicate hosted on github).
posted by jackbishop at 11:30 AM on November 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

bbqturtle explained it exactly right. And then at some point she (my partner) developed the refinement of distinguishing between open futures (picking from the cards dealt face up) and closed futures (also picking from the ones you draw to your hand)--giving both is more valuable. And futures becomes less valuable as the game gets closer to the end, so that adds some complexity too.
posted by sy at 12:38 PM on November 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Your Catan examples are also things that I have seen develop, and I think they are different from house rules. Like you say, they do not seem to violate any rules of the game. Instead, they are aspects of the iterated prisoner's dilemma as applied to Catan.

It's not in your immediate best interest to move the robber to the desert, or perhaps to land on someone's 3 rather than their 6. But you know that encouraging that kind of game play makes the game start faster, and also provides a way to reign in a player who is getting too far ahead, and so leads to overall more interesting later games. So it develops as a meta-strategy, to build trust with the people you are playing with, that you'll generally limit the robber's use in the early game.

That could develop in many kinds of games, when they're iterated enough times and have enough wiggle room in the rules. I think I've read that even chess masters sometimes sort of cooperate in the early game, despite being utterly ruthless and with less open-ended rules, in that they're implicitly negotiating the kind of later game that will develop, and know what lines of play lead to situations that will be agreeable to both, vs lines that lead to probable stalemates.

Sorry, no other particular recommendations in this too-long comment, but I do think repeated plays, ideally somewhat fast, and open-ended enough rules are probably the characteristics to look for.
posted by joeyh at 6:35 AM on November 27, 2021

Apropos Hanabi: I was curious why the paper I cited above was hosted on Github, and I found it linked form this very detailed blog post about completely conventionalizing Hanabi.
posted by jackbishop at 8:26 AM on December 1, 2021

I think we've generally developed house rules to make things a bit more fun or less stressful. Like in Bananagrams, if you need a break from all the letter drawing for a bit, just say so. If other players are caught up, maybe they'll read a bit or help make words, if you want help, but they'll wait to get back in until ready. In Monopoly, when one of us fails out, then usually we'll negotiate about who wants to keep playing and who wants to be done at that point (usually at least one of us is more than done). For Boggle, we've often had the rule that kids can do shorter words, three letters+ for young kids, four+ for ten and up but adults play with five letters. That way there's always some words kids always get that the adults didn't get.
posted by blueberry monster at 7:59 PM on December 1, 2021