I’ve been obsessively playing Reiner Knizia’s Deck Buster on my iPad lately, despite thinking that it’s objectively not a great game, certainly not as good as his earlier offering Yoku-Gami. I think a lot of the addiction stems from the fact that I was an early adopter and managed to get the #1 global high score in one of the game modes early on… now I’ve been bumped down to #3 and, being a highly competitive person, can’t help but feel a need to try to win my crown back.
The trouble is that, when shooting for a score as high as I need to be #1 again, I find myself being forced to adopt strategies that aren’t nearly as much fun as the ones I was employing when I first started out. Whereas consistency is usually and intuitively a desirable trait in a game player, the nature of competing for high scores encourages exactly the reverse.
What I realize now is that there’s an additional problem with big group games that I failed to mention in my last post and that it’s really what’s going on here, because when the goal is a high score, a seemingly single-player game is actually more like an infinity-player game! Let me explain.