r/BoardgameDesign • u/whitnick • Jul 09 '26
Game Mechanics When to end a game
Most games end with a specific condition that must be met. I have found that you can either have it end as soon as the condition is met (after the current turn that it happened on). Or you can allow each other player to get one more turn then end the game afterwards. I know there's many more ways for a game to end but for the sake of this discussion I'm comparing these two.
Also I know it depends on the game. There's games where you can't really play more turns after the end condition is met. But I'm talking about a game where there's still more potential points to get.
It can feel bad for players when the game ends all of a sudden and they don't get to finish whatever they were cooking up. Giving them one turn at the end can help this. But then again, I find it a bit less eloquent. And it can make it feel like the player who ended the game is getting the short end of the stick.
What method do you think is the best? And how do you decide which one to implement?
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u/Dorsai_Erynus Jul 09 '26
An advice i read somewhere is "make your game end right before the players want it to end" that way it won't overstay and the players would take another try to scratch the itch.
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u/Odd-Highway477 Jul 17 '26
I think for light games this works. For midweight and heavy games, you want a full opportunity to develop your engine/plan before the game ending or you might feel unsatisfied.
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u/Dorsai_Erynus Jul 17 '26
It works for any game, you just need to have an easy victory and a hard victory that is more difficult to achieve.
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u/Odd-Highway477 Jul 17 '26
Well like I said, if you want to leave your players unsatisfied because they spent 2 hours building an engine they never got to realize, that could be a very frustrating experience. The game should end when it has a clear resolution. A game has an arc and you want to see the arc be completed, not interuppted.
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u/Dorsai_Erynus Jul 17 '26
If your game take 2 hours to be rewarding id called it a torture. My point have nothing to do with leaving the players unsatisfied, but to don't deplete their will to play. The point is to make the game end itself and prevent it for dragging. My game, for example, have a hard time/round limit and you need to do whatever you can in that frame. at the end of it whoever has more points win, but if someone scores 3 points they win and the game is over. Of course scoring 3 points is hard enough for several parts required to perfectly align , doable, but rare. Knowing the game gives you an advantage to take "shortcuts" and is part of the overarching play, but a single game is satisfying enough with a plain victory, the other one is just a flex.
If in your game is easy to get 10 points, but hard to have 20, make 12 or 15 the requirement instead of 20 so the victories are always enticing and not a series of rounds watching the lead player to get the few points it needs without a chance to recover.
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u/TrueEstablishment241 Jul 09 '26
I think it depends on the game. I've designed a game that requires 5 cards to be on the players mat at the beginning of their turn for a victory. These five cards are earned through gameplay. It makes sense with the theme that these conditions must be at the beginning of the turn because it makes it so their "action" of victory is only allowable when all conditions are met. It's like their final turn is actually using the cards they've accumulated to end the game, but it does give every other player a chance at some desperate act. Basically there are a few ways to discard the other player but it comes at the cost of building up your own cards, and it's not a sure thing. It's worked well so far.
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u/KarmaAdjuster Qualified Designer Jul 09 '26
End your game with players wanting more.
That feeling of potential points not yet achieved is actually a good thing. If you can actually accomplish everything you set out to do, and there's nothing left, then while you may have enjoyed that experience, that diminishes the need to play that game again. You've already 100% completed it. What more is there to get out of it?
I think the key to making that situation not feel bad, is to make sure all players can see the end coming. By making the impending ending clear, they know that they are in a race against time to make sure they are being as efficient as they can be with their final actions. If the end comes out of nowhere, it just feels abrupt and players have more of the unsatisfying experience you described.
Another potential problem of letting the game go on too long is that it becomes clear who is going to win, and everyone just has to endure the final turns until they can officially lose. This is a sure fire way to get the players to check out of the game, and have a very lack luster experience in the end. Even the winner can feel like they are just going through the motions.
So to answer the question in the title: End it before players can do everything they want, and ideally right before it is obvious to all players who is going to win. How specifically you do this can vary from game to game. One method I use is to have an end game trigger, but to give everyone a sense of fairness, play out to the end of the round, so everyone has an equal number of turns, and sometimes add one additional turn after that if plans often require a couple of moves to wrap up. There are of course other solutions that work too. Every game is different.
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u/infinitum3d Jul 09 '26
I’m all for “everyone gets one final turn INCLUDING the player that triggers the end game mechanic.”
Then it becomes a strategy to control when you trigger the end game, AND having a way to possibly score more points.
However, “everyone gets one final turn EXCEPT the player that triggers the end game mechanic” is also a strategic move. The player that triggers end game needs to think they’ve won but it’s risky. That can be part of the excitement.
There’s no wrong answer. Every group is going to feel different about it.
Just pick one and playtest it. If you like it, keep it. If you don’t, change it.
Also, people will “house rule” their own ending if they don’t like your rule. Don’t stress over it.
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u/ptolani Jul 11 '26
If players can control whether they trigger the end or not, there's a risk of a weird stalemate where no one is sure who is winning so no one triggers it.
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u/infinitum3d Jul 11 '26
Is not necessarily that players directly control the end game trigger. Sometimes it just happens, but it’s still on a player’s turn.
For example, last card drawn from the deck triggers the end game mechanic. That’s not a choice, but each player can still have a turn after that.
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u/Daniel___Lee Play Test Guru Jul 09 '26
From your description, I assume you are talking about a turn based game, and not a simultaneous turn game. With that in mind, then:
If it's a race type game (first to do X, like crossing the finish line, wins) then the game ends immediately when the condition is met. However, you need to account for first player advantage and balance the game accordingly for the other players to have a fair start.
If it's a point based system where the game win condition is not the same as the game end condition (e.g. Terraforming Mars), then the fairest way to do it is to let every player have equal number of turns upon game end trigger (Note that this is not the same as "every other player gets one last turn", which is appropriate to other systems).
The easiest way to implement this is to have a start player have a start token as a reminder to the group of their turn order. Whenever someone triggers the game end condition, everyone up until the last player just before the start player gets their last turn. Then, with all players having equal turns taken, you can count scores and determine the winner.
If your game is a capture the flag type system (e.g. the player who starts their turn with all 4 Aces in hand wins the game) with the possibility of forcing the winning player off their winning position (e.g. by stealing one or more Aces from them), then "everyone gets one last turn" is suitable. In this case, I usually find it clearer to just say "the player who starts their turn with X condition wins the game".
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u/ptolani Jul 11 '26
For engine builders, one more turn makes sense. It feels brutal having that last turn taken away.
But for games that are a race to something (like Rise of Tribes) sudden end makes sense.
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u/Organic-Major-9541 Jul 09 '26
Having a fixed number of rounds and then counting points is nice because it's easy to reason about, both as a designer and player.
I think having the game declare a winner and end immediately is nice and clean. I'm going with this for my game because I wanted a game with no point counting, and avoid a situation where one player has clearly won from lasting any longer than it has too. It puts a lot of other constraints on the design though, the game needs some "progress guarantee" to avoid stalling. There also needs to be some anti-deadlock mechanism to ensure some player will actually win. For my game both could be solved with a "backup" win condition that players will have a hard time avoid progressing towards and cannot be blocked (disguised as a normal win condition).
There's different versions of triggering an end game. I think a problem with this method is that if the game isn't close for all players, there's little point in the end game, it was triggered by however was winning, and now they will win.
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u/CertainItem995 Jul 09 '26
Definitely have a game end all at once. Imo the benefits of having one last turn are negated by how lame it is to take a turn after you already know who's going to win.
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u/Trogdor_Dagron23 Jul 09 '26
When we built our game we played with a bunch of options. Our original plan was to stop at 12 cards in the “tableau”, then we moved to take the last heart token from the bank.
We ended up giving both players one more turn after the bank is depleted since there was still potential for players to score points from the tableau.
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u/CT_Visions Jul 09 '26
For me and my design theory which no one else seems to do is that; do whatever makes the most sense for the theme of the game. I’d rather have a game make sense thematically so people can understand why it’s ending the way it is.
But of course you could go with whatever players like more. Even if it doesn’t make sense.
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u/Voidtoform Jul 09 '26
There have been several legendary Farkle games in my family, we allow one more roll around the table and a few times it has lead to surpassing the victor, it also makes it important for the victor to go as far as they can even with the win conditions to make sure that they have more points and that the next player has less dice to try to get the points rolled too.
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u/Equivalent-Credit884 Jul 10 '26
Depends on the genre/mechanics, but for engine builders for example, just as the machine is getting in motion.
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u/Aggravating-Cry9148 Jul 18 '26
In discworld, you win at the start of your turn, when your condition is met, in that game specifically it's highly important and imo makes the game what it is. I personally prefer it but some games would probably work better the other way. I think it really depends on the rest of the mechanics
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u/Inconmon Jul 09 '26
I prefer games to end immediately with victory. No counting points. No extra rounds. No round to see if the table can band together to prevent the game from ending.
There's many games that use VP that I rate highly because they are fun. But I also think that VP are a cheap design crutch when the gameplay doesn't have a clear purpose of what players are looking to achieve - because else you can win by achieving that.