>>10970591Well I only make board games that cannot have drawn positions of cycles. That involves working out multiple layers of finitude mechanisms which allow operations which tend to generate cycles (removal of pieces, backwards movements, free movements) but ultimately are reconciled by some factor to generate an overall tendency for the game to resolve. Coming up with these mechanisms is the most difficult part. Preventing draws involves things like circumventing stalemated positions. Almost all my interest in board games is making mechanisms to prevent draws and cycles in interesting and novel ways.
But there is another point of interest and that is Coldness. Coldness in Combinatorial Game-Theory is the case where a player is compelled to make a move by the rules of the game but all moves are damaging to that player's overall position. Some of us designers though realized that this factor can be easily integrated into games by making the available options dependent on the other player's position and other more subtle methods. So that is the other aspect to abstract board game design. About the only game-play element you can reliably control is the coldness of the game. Often something that seems like a perfectly decent game is trivialized after a few months of play. That's the wages of abstract board game design; its a real crapshoot.
