Problem #1: Party Of Two Or Two Thousand

You know how board games always have something on the side of them that says, "For 2-5 players," or something like that to indicate how many people the game is sized for? It's partially a practical thing, they can't include enough cards or tokens or a board large enough for a group of 30, but it's also a factor in the game itself. It was never tested for 30 people, for that matter it may just not work very well when scaled to 30, 300, or 3000. There are PBBGs out there with 30,000 people on a single server, how do you even design a game like that?

I have no idea. Literally, no idea whether the game I'm working on now will be fun when I throw lots of people at it. It could suck. It will suck, the creator of BattleMaster virtually guarantees it, and you know what? He's probably right.

My current hope is that I've got a good idea for a game and I've taken the same path a lot of games take by giving every player basically the same starting conditions so they're left to their own devices in competing with other players. But is just starting with a level playing field enough? Is there a way other than playtesting and adjusting, playtesting and adjusting to have a better idea of how to make a game interesting when you don't even know how many people are going to play it?

One possibility I've considered is the idea of forcing division into groups upon the players. Creating a game and really balancing it well for say 25 and then as players join they automatically get assigned to a group until it hits the magic size and the game gets going in earnest. So a single server might be running hundreds of games at the same time rather than one game with thousands of players. Short of sites that let you play real board games online (e.g. http://gametableonline.com/) , I've not seen anything like this though and as with all these questions, I'm not very sure how well it would work short of building a complete game and testing it.

I know it does offer some possible advantages because you can actually have certain people fill certain roles. There will be only three people who can be doctors, two police officers, 12 zombies, etc. The roles are set and they play them out till the end of the game. Cooperative games are all the rage in the board game world right now and often they work on this very principal (e.g. Battlestar Galactica). I'm so-and-so and here's what I can do. I have in-game abilities that maybe nobody else in the game has and vice versa. You can even have traitors who are working against the group but nobody knows who they are or perhaps even if there are any.

But then, what do you do when one of them leaves? In my mind that's the next big problem with online games and I'll talk about it in my next post Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town.