How would you rank the following games in terms of depth (replayability, advantage for seasoned players, difficulty to build a competitive AI for, whatever you like)?
7 Wonders, Chess, Dominion (incl. all expansions), Go, Moon Colony Bloodbath, Puerto Rico, Texas Hold'em Poker
I haven't played 7 Wonders or Hold'em.
Depth is easy. I will just mention. If you're pursuing variety, depth will just come with it.
Depth isn't the same as replayability; you can just enjoy say the anagramming in Boggle, even though it's always the same experience, even if you never get better at it. But even if we just look at replayability as seeing different things, well depth is about how long you can keep getting better at a game, which is just so different.
Chess and Go only have replayability in that you can enjoy thoroughly exploring their particular spaces. You haven't just seen everything immediately, because the situations are complex webs of interactions. For me this is not what I'm looking for; for me they have the replayability of say Boggle, but I like Boggle more. They have depth, sure; depth is easy. It's so easy even Go has it. But I mean. It requires you to endlessly play this game that is not really showing you new things. You can get this depth from just so many games, if you're willing to endlessly play those games. It's not like something to be praised. What Chess and Go have is that people actually played them that much.
Dominion has its plenty of depth that it got automatically. The replayability is on the table, it's not such a complex web. It's a simple web, but you know, sharply varying. It has way more replayability for me; I haven't exhausted it in 18 years. Though that's cheating because I keep adding new stuff. In terms of, how long can you keep getting better at it, man I don't know. Long enough, for sure.
Puerto Rico - which I like - is very low on replayability. You play once and you've had the experience. There will be some buildings you didn't get, and the skill level of the player ahead of you will vary, but. I don't know how much better you can get at it; it isn't worth finding out, for me. I enjoy playing it once every few years. It's hard to judge depth because I wouldn't want to play it enough to find out how much better I could get.
Poker has a psychological element, which gives it really endless replayability and also depth. This isn't praise for Poker specifically; iterative Rock-paper-scissors also has endless replayability and depth. You're not exploring configurations of game elements, you're exploring how people think. And when you switch opponents, there's new space to explore. I'm a big fan of psychological games.
Moon Colony Bloodbath has tons of variety; I made it, what were the odds. You get variety from drawing different cards and pursuing different strategies, and also having different setups. It will take a ton of plays to feel like you've seen everything. We didn't reach that point; I just had to get playtesting done on other projects. We got better at it all through playtesting; it has all that free depth that my games get.
What percentage of games did you aim for getting Prophecies triggered? And on which turn?
It wasn't like that. It was, "let's play some games, and see what happens, and see how we like it, and change it to make it more how we like it." Prophecies wanted to typically happen, so as not to be sad, but there was never "here is my percentage." Turn, I paid no attention to that. Again it's not like it wasn't part of it - if the Prophecy always happened the turn the game ended, I wouldn't have liked that. It was a factor but there was zero "what turn is it, how happy am I with that number." I never knew the number.
