Bad Decisions are Good Gameplay

Bad decisions are good gameplay.  What does that even mean?  It's mostly a mantra that I've developed to making my games more fun. Models and terrain should cause bad decisions.

There are games you will always lose.  There are games you will always win.  Those aren't games. Games are about decisions, games require interaction.  Entertainment where you always win is called Television, Movies or Books.  Entertainment where you always lose is staring at pictures of cats all day or something that I can't mention in friendly company (like Game of Thrones, duh - not porn).  Entertainment where decisions change outcomes are games. That's my main purpose for playing the Batman Miniature Game or Corvus Belli's Infinity.

One of the reasons why I drifted away from Warmachine was the lack of decision making. As the par for strategic-based games, the decisions are made at the beginning and the rest is just watching it play out.  I'm not very good at those types of games so they weren't very fun to me.  After agreeing to a game, we would decide which models to field and how to setup terrain.  You either fielded the better army and won or didn't. Only when compositions were similar in power and both players were comparable in skill did an actual game occur. Though, sometimes it would be fun to see a game awry simply because how how the dice rolled.

What interests me is the games where the outcome is only resolved at the final dice roll.  Granted, people get into the hobby for different reasons.  They like painting little war dolls, they want to pretend they're Batman, they want to 'forge the narrative', they want to hang out, they want to build a collection and/or they want to play games. For me, it is games that is what interests me and close games are based off of tension.

Tension occurs if there are stakes, such as winning the game, or drama in the case of film/television.  If there is no tension for victory or defeat, you don't care what happens to those invincible Supers.  With a game, you get the chance to have tense moments throughout the game.  This is what makes games fun. You don't know if you'll succeed.  Hell, that sort of drama is built straight into Infinity's mechanics.

What this means in execution is that there should be no obvious side to play when you setup or no choice of a symmetrical board.  The choice should make the player agonize because decisions that don't require contemplation aren't decisions.  Have choke points that force confrontation, so players don't know which corridors to fight in.  When a player forks your models, they've done you a service of deciding who lives and dies. These are all aspects of a game, the difficult choice is your own.