Welcome to “About…”, a kind of thread I may not do more than this once, but felt a need to claim a series title for anyway. Basically, there are some gaming topics I want to talk about, and some games or gaming products that I want to review. So, when one leads into the other, why not talk about them both? Well, we’ll probably see.

This time, I really want to talk about Player Elimination, a mechanic for games that’s as old as dirt, but generally considered a dirty word nowadays. And frankly, I don’t see why – Player Elimination is, in many ways, the cleanest, most logical, and most satisfying way of determining a winner. When the last player standing is the last player standing, there can’t really be arguments that you had the win in your hand, or had the better board and were starting to overtake the early leader when the game decided time was up. No, you lost all your mans and were summarily evicted from the board.



Okay, when I say I don’t see why people don’t like Player Elimination, that’s not entirely fair. I’ve “played” Monopoly1, so I know what it means to be sitting out for potentially a lot of time while other people are still at the table. Hell, it happens in multiplayer Magic – somebody hits 0 life long before anyone has actually won the game, or even long before the next player to lose is out… and I’ll admit, it’s not a good feeling. So there’s your big Con for Player Elimination, balancing against the advantages for gameplay and decisive victory: Somebody might end up bored, potentially for a very long time.

I feel like this depends on the game, however. Naturally, any game being played with two players loses absolutely nothing for Player Elimination, because once somebody’s out, the game is over and you can move on to the next one. For games with three or more, the cost of player elimination can vary vastly. Monopoly, of course, can lose somebody very early and drag for an almost arbitrary amount of time after. Risk2, while it features a more definitive endgame, can also take at least one person out long before it reaches that point, especially in games larger than three.

And then there are two games quickly entering my favorites: Tsuro and Miskatonic School for Girls. Both games have “Be the last player standing” as their sole win condition, though both are more struggles for survival against the game itself than “Put everyone else’s numbers to 0” slugfests.

Tsuro: The Game of the Path (Or just Tsuro) is a fast, simple game for 2-8, and surprisingly it’s actually competent with both extremes of player count, though it’s a quite different game. You start at the start of a line on the board edge, but the rest of the board is built as play continues. Each turn, you put a tile down in front of your mover and follow the appropriately lengthened line to its new end, which may or may not twist, turn, or practically change directions. If your placement met up with another tile, you keep following the line until you’re in clear space or out of the game (by hitting a board edge or another player’s mover). Everybody else your tile placement extended the line for ALSO has to follow their new tangled strand of spaghetti to its conclusion.

A game of Tsuro took about 20 minutes (short), with eight players who had never played before. With a crowd that has a passing familiarity with the game and doesn’t have to look up “what’s the goal?” and “How do you move?” on everyone’s first turn, it can go :15 or even shorter. This means even if someone is somehow eliminated very shortly into the game, they have about enough time to make a sandwich or go to the bathroom before the game is over and a victor is declared. And more often, Eliminations happen in 1 or two clusters (depending on how many players start) as lines touch, and then the survivors run out of wiggle room very quickly. Because most of the “how does this work” questions in my 20 minute first experience came at the very start of the game, I’d say nobody sat out for 10 or more minutes, and “under 5” would be a good guess as to how long any one eliminated player was not in-game. This has held for multiple plays for multiple groups.

Elimination issues aside, Tsuro is a fun game. It is a FAST game but it still feels like a full game, not just a round of something larger (and I do think that having everyone taken out, rather than scoring up points, has something to do with that). It’s somehow at once very abstract – moving a rock along a white line on a brown/red field – and highly thematic in the aesthetic and mood that the pieces want to evoke, one that’s surprisingly serene for a game of survival against a mechanic that will, inevitably, lead to your loss if you keep going. There’s a tension to every play because even though putting down your tile lets you position yourself for the future (and potentially position your opponents in a bad way or outright eliminate them), every tile added to the board is another place your mover can’t stand, bringing the game closer to its conclusion.

Miskatonic School For Girls is a much longer game, hovering in the half hour and up “Long enough to notice but not going to be the only thing you play” bracket, but the experience of elimination in it is quite similar: about 5 minutes, or in Miskatonic’s case a few turns between when the first player goes out and when the last player is standing alone.

Miskatonic School is a game for 2-4, though really it’s best with 4. You start with full sanity and a deck of young ladies utterly unprepared for the fact that the likes of Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and Azathoth are only thinly veiled as the faculty. Each turn you add a student (good) to your deck, a member of the faculty (Bad) to the deck on your left, and have to fight off any faculty you drew or suffer the consequences, almost always including some loss of sanity. When your House (a lot of the visual design parodies Harry Potter as much as Lovecraft) reaches 0 sanity, that’s game over for them and for you.

Miskatonic School for Girls is a game that I first found out about as it was garnering a load of attention due to a kickstarter campaign for its creation, but I didn’t buy in then and, in fact, didn’t play it until it had been out for quite some time. By that time, it had garnered plenty of reviews, and most of them were… lukewarm, with a few being less positive than that. Having played it for myself, I understand where some of that criticism is coming from. The watercolor art is very nice, but on the other hand you’re going to see each piece a ton since the game doesn’t have a ton of unique cards and the ones in your deck are constantly being cycled back through your hand. It sells itself on a Lovecraftian theme, but ultimately goes for the funny rather than the horrible, which could easily be… not what you’re looking for at least.

There are a couple points I’ve seen the game criticized on, on which I, as a fan of the thing, disagree. Both, I feel, have to do with the Elimination aspect. The first is that there’s not really a chance to “optimize” your deck. That is, Miskatonic School for Girls is part of a larger genre, and the yardsticks of that genre (the Deckbuilding game) mostly rely on finding clever ways to make your numbers bigger, where in Miskatonic School, your deck is never going to be better for your survival than it is when you start the game: the new students you get may help, but not as much as the slow but steady addition of faculty hurts. I’m not too familiar with the Deck Building genre, but for Miskatonic at least this seems to be not a bug, but rather a feature. This isn’t a game about “winning”, it’s a game about not losing your mind at least until everyone else has done the same.

Which brings us to the second big criticism (in a way the impetus for this writing): the idea of Player Elimination itself. Because I look at how a game of Miskatonic School plays out, and I ask: “Why is this a bad thing?” Since everyone has the same influx (1 good item and 1 bad item), it’s hard to get overwhelmed any large number of turns before your neighbors. The game is primed to fall apart for everyone in the span of a few turns, turns which don’t take long individually. There is very little, in terms of time, lost when you’re out. Like Tsuro, you can hit the restroom, grab a drink, and very likely come back to find the table picking up from the end of game. If not, you’ll witness it not just some time tonight but very, VERY shortly. There isn’t that feel-bad hang time where you’re out and playing nothing for the foreseeable future. You can forsee the end of the game really easily and immediately. So what do you lose, other than the game (which all but one player was going to lose elimination or no since, you know, it's not a co-op game)? Not a whole lot, if anything really.

All in all, I think Player Elimination is a bit unfairly maligned. It has the potential create some negative experiences, but it also raises the stakes in a visceral way. Don’t get me wrong – I love my Settlers of Catan, Fairy Tale, and Gilloutine point-scoring or objective-meeting affairs, but I have a special place in my heart for any game where I can win by making the other guy lose (even indirectly as is usual for Miskatonic School and Tsuro), not because I’m a horrible and spiteful person (Though I may be), but because that is, in a way, the purest or at least most direct form of interaction: being able to target your opponent’s numbers or position with a plan in mind.


1 I put “played” in air-quotes because… well, if you’ve sat down at a monopoly board and tried to engage with it as it is intended or worse, with the common house rules, and follow its sequence of events to their conclusion, you KNOW it’s not so much a game as it is an exercise in bleeding the fun and humanity out of a room. Monopoly, in my opinion, is not a game you play so much as a torment you suffer. An not in the good way, like Nethack or Dwarf Fortress.

2 I’m one of the few people who enjoys modern board games and still likes Risk. Well, not so much “likes” as “considers to still be a game”, but for Risk nowadays, that’s high praise. I don’t think it’s great, but at least if played by RAW (with the cards) it has a proper game flow, as the surges of troops get bigger and bigger, forcing conflict to escalate until you can turn in your cards and swarm the world with the armies you receive. It can drag, absolutely, but it doesn’t have to, so I at least give it a nod as something that is played and will often generate positive net fun.

The problem with player elimination is that watching other people have fun after you're eliminated is kinda depressing.

Yeah, I like the social element of tabletop gaming and elimination is antisocial. If I've lost, at least let me stick around and play spoiler!

I made a two player variant for tsuro where you play with two pieces and try to make them meet. It was sort of fun and removed the worst part of tsuro, which is how it encourages playing in a really lame way.
Which is like barely even related, but I don't know what else to respond. Game mechanics have weaknesses and strengths. Woopie.

I am very anti social but love playing games so player elimination is awesome for me. I can lose and go play another game with other people.

I'm going to be speaking mostly from a decade or more of playing Smash Bros., but here goes:

I dislike player elimination, especially in games that involve a measure of skill or control. While I am perfectly happy choosing to sit out a game in order to go to the bathroom, eat, or what have you, I have quite a distaste for being eliminated before the bell, as it were. You mention, and I agree, that if it's just two players there is nothing lost, but I find that the more competitive games drive themselves toward the elimination of the weaker player long before the game is complete.

Now, if a game is designed around player elimination like that Miskatonic School for Girls thing you describe, I can see that being enjoyable since the elimination is designed to come for everyone at once. In my experience, however, most games aren't designed like this, which is probably why player elimination has earned such negative connotations.

I'll take a game with player elimination over any game similar to Munchkin every time.

I'd rather play Monopoly than play Munchkin.

Honestly, the only reason I read this thread was because of Miskatonic School for Girls. Never heard of it before.

Why? I mean, Munchkin by itself is a horrendous game, but "first to X" isn't that bad of a win condition (racing games, as they are called).
They're also not all that common, since the market is mostly oversaturated with victory point derivatives.

they're both awful, but at least Munchkin doesn't take forever

out of curiosity those of you who dislike Munchkin, which of you play control type decks in card games?

I personally will not play Munchkin anymore, but I'm not sure that's Munchkin's fault -- it just seemed to bring out the worst in every group I've seen it played in. Not one game went to completion with fun being had by all: I've seen people flee in tears, turn the cards into projectiles, or just storm out in general. Out of seven or so people I played with, about four turned into that at one time or another. I don't even have a good explanation WHY that happened. We were all teenagers, true, but Lunch Money (another vicious game) never caused those kind of fits with anyone. Nor did Magic, nor anything else, just Munchkin. Eventually we all swore it off and I've stuck to that because I really see no reason not to: I never really cared for or enjoyed Munchkin much, I found it OK at best, barring the seemingly inevitable explosion. For those who enjoy Munchkin... good for you. Clearly you play with the right group of people, psychologically speaking, to have fun with it. I do not or at least have not in the past known those people.

For Trapped: I consider myself a diverse player when it comes to what I like (perhaps too diverse: I build a ton of decks but refine few), but I probably enjoy control more than I do aggro by a fair margin.

I played a game of munchkin once. I remember absolutely nothing about it.

Tevish Szat really summed up my issue with Munchkin. Racing games are fine, but a game where the rules itself promote cheating, and where you can go from nearly ending the game to being miles away from ending it are really miserable things.

One of the things I hate the most about Munhkin are the lose a level cards. You can be on the absolute verge of winning, and suddenly everybody is making you lose 4 or 5 levels and you are just sitting there frustrated in last place.