When I started the game design for Fiendish Genius, I knew I wanted to make a game that would be fast to play and easy to learn, while creating fun tactical challenges for the players. One major way to do that is through the end game conditions. As we all know, when you’re teaching people how to play a board game the first thing they want to know is how they win. Everything about the game flows into its final moments.
In Fiendish Genius there are two ways to win. You can either win by constructing a full Fiendish Plot of seven numbered cards, or by gathering five Genius Tokens. The game ends as soon as someone wins, and there’s only one winner.*
The ‘sudden-death’ nature of the game is a great way of building tension, and it works really well in a game like Fiendish Genius. Fiendish Genius is all about ramping up competition between the players. After all, no-one cares who the second baddest supervillain in the world is. The problem is it can be frustrating for the player if the game just suddenly ends, especially if you’re miles behind. So one design challenge was to make sure that no-one ever gets too far behind, and that all the players feel like they have a chance of winning.
Throughout the game, the players aren’t just adding to their own plots and racing to collect Plot cards. They’re also looking for ways to mess with their opponents, whether stealing other villains’ cards with Genius tokens, or by placing a card in their rival’s Plots and adding to their Genius token stash.
The challenge in the game comes from the fact that the number of Plot cards increases as the game goes along. Players place their Plot cards face-up and any card that’s not in a stack can be stolen by another player. There’s a need to watch one another with laser-eye focus, as within two or three rounds, there’s always a player who looks like they’re close to winning. That means that at least some of the other players are going to start to gang up on them to try and stop them from winning.
But of course the problem with trying to stop another player from winning is that you lost the focus on trying to win yourself. And so, the end of every game of Fiendish Genius has players constantly switching between trying to sabotage their rivals or make their own bid for victory. Which feels, well, extremely supervillain-like. It’s not the only way the game could work (there’s definitely scope in a bigger game for a victory point-type system) but in a fast and furious tactical game like Fiendish Genius, the sudden-death system creates a wonderful sense of competition.
What are your favourite ways to end games?
* There’s a theoretical edge case in which two people can win. But in all the playtests I’ve done, no player has ever wanted to do this.