Through his company Asmadi Games, Chris Cieslik - however you might choose to pronounce it - has either published or designed some of my favorite games. A lot of people might be familiar with We Didn't Playtest This At All, but between Innovation, Red7, and especially One Deck Dungeon he's just associated with a lot of all timers. His next one, which will be at Gen Con, has the potential to be another Uno in my opinion. If you see him there, ask him for The New Shit.
Why Games Need to be Unfair
by Chris Cieslik,
Owner & Lead Designer,
Friends, Gamers, Countryfolk, lend me your ears. Or, well, your eyes...it's a text post. I'm here to share with you a little glimpse of a secret that lurks behind the velvety curtains of game design and development. A dark truth that once you see, once you learn, you'll never be able to unlearn. It's very simple. Sometimes games are, dare I say it...unfair. And when a game is unfair, in that way that makes a game controller fear being hurled across the room, dice tremble of being banished to the "bad dice place" or a deck of cards worry about being slammed to the table in tiktok-worthy fashion? We designers, developers... meant for it to be unfair. And it's usually for the best!
Shock! Dismay! Horror - how can any competent game designer make a game *intentionally* unfair? Isn't the whole point of games to be fair and equitable, contests either between players or between player and game? Nope! That certainly can be a part of it - but the core purpose of a game is to be an enjoyable experience, fulfilling, engaging, or, you know, a fun time. And as it turns out, that isn't purely attached just to winning or losing. How you get there matters!
Generally speaking, the journey of playing any game is making a series of actions / decisions that eventually lead to a result. This can be carefully timing your jumps in a platformer, deciding what routes to take through a level, choosing what cards to play / draw / activate, rolling dice, telling stories - all done with the knowledge that the thing you do will progress you through the game experience. The Game's job, of course, is to push back on whatever skill you're using. That battle between your growing skill and the game's resistance to it can be the core of what makes a game satisfying, even when the immediate result is frustrating - because the game should be winning it often! And calibrating that Frustration Engine properly (some call it "friction") is something that many of the best games out there excel at.
Balatro, a game a few of you may have heard of, exemplifies this. You start out with no clue what to do, and the luck of the cards is cruelly against you. It pulls no punches. You're going for flushes? Maybe you'll see a rainbow draw of suits each time, it seems purely random at first. But as you play more, and learn how to manipulate the Jokers, action cards, and planets, the game that seemed (and maybe even was!) tremendously unfair becomes controllable to a degree. You lose, you start over from scratch, and use a new strategy the next time. The luck is still there - the unfairness and potential to lose, but as you learn to mitigate that unfairness, you get closer and closer to winning. And when you *do* beat it, it feels great.
Then, the game introduces challenge modes, to swat away your confident defeat of the unfairness with fresh new unfairness! Overcoming the late challenges (which I refer to in official game-design terminology as "hot nonsense") feels incredibly satisfying once you break through that newly entrenched super-unfairness. The level of nonsense has to keep growing to outpace your skill, lest it become uninteresting!
Another pair of obscure games, Elden Ring and Silksong, "souls-likes" as I've heard them termed, navigate the sea of unfairness through the lens of player dexterity-skill. You do have non-gameplay choices to make (What to purchase, getting skills + items, which zones and areas to explore, who to fight when), but for the most part, you're fighting against the system. Can you press the right buttons at the right times? And when you start, *holy bananas* does it feel completely unfair. This is much like Balatro, but in this case it's actually your fault when you fail. You could've simply pressed every button at the perfect time!
Many of these challenges feel unfair at first, but as you play them more and more, your skill grows. Eventually, you overcome them, and there's a visceral satisfaction of overcoming the "hot nonsense" (and for a couple of the fights it's literally lava). It's unfair, right up until it's not. (Except Lace. Lace can go right to hell.) In this case, learning the systems and increasing your own skill through repetition is what lets you mitigate each seemingly unfair challenge. A lot of the enjoyment here is tied up in the difficulty growing as the game progresses, and each new challenge presenting itself as "unfair" at first.
It's easy to go overboard though! Push that unfairness / frustration threshold too far and we risk alienating players entirely. If the game crushes the player too often without any lesson or path to growth, they're going to eventually get bored and walk away. Designers can fall into lazy tropes like moving checkpoints further and further apart, bullet-sponging bosses instead of making them interesting, or even the dreaded multi-phase boss fight where one phase is trivially easy but takes forever, and the interesting one is very hard. Use them too much and the game won't be unfair - it'll be boring! The players have to feel like there's either progress being made or at least the potential for progress.
These are lessons we've learned and used in our own games. One Deck Dungeon has dice for randomness and hard to overcome foes, that seem unfair if not impossible at first glance, but it features a lot of tactics and systems and ways you can learn to defeat them. The dice, of course, can still tell you No - and that threat of unfairness (even though it can be heavily mitigated!) is part of what keeps people coming back again and again. Innovation is a game with wildly infinite possibilities, because any card you draw can change the game. But learning how to control that chaos and keep it in check, and being able to roll with the punches and change your strategy on the fly is amazingly fun. These games are still being played by a lot of people 10 and 15 years after their release, and a little bit of the secret? They're kinda unfair sometimes! And that's part of what makes them timeless.
And what do I hope you take away from this? Maybe not everything in a game needs to be perfectly balanced and 100% fair. Unfairness (used in moderation!) is a spice that can make a good game great.
P.S. You might notice I use dashes in my writing - I like dashes. I was using dashes before LLMs decided to wreck things for everyone, and I refuse to stop using them! I humbly guarantee not a single AI token contributed to this piece. In fact, here are some extra dashes - - - - - . Thank you for reading!
