Design Iterations & Simplicity vs Complexity

Today, we worked on making iterations to the game battleship (which I have a strong dislike for) in hope to try to make it more fun, and I thought it would be interesting to actually log in sequence the steps we took to turn this simple dull game into something we actually enjoyed playing.

At first we played the game in its normal state to identify what was boring about it.

We noted the game was slow paced, it was taking quite long to finish, and I was enjoying the moments where my opponent hit my ships, because even though I would lose, I was happy that the game was getting closer to an end.

Another problem is that, while the player has some decisions, the only meaningful ones are "where do I think he won't shoot?" and "where do I think my opponent placed his ships?". Beyond this simple "psychological" element, it is just a game of luck with not much satisfaction for achieving its goal.

The first problem we addressed was, giving the player more options, which in turn will also speed up the game. We did this by giving the players an option of either firing at a single tile, or choosing to use a sensor on a 3 by 3 area of tiles to discover whether there are any ships (as the other player would need to say "ships are or are not detected". Basically trading the chance to deal damage to a ship, in exchange for a much greater chance of discovering the location of enemy ships.

This did indeed make the game more fast paced as we intended, although the decisions were still not meaningful enough. Once players get used to the game they will realize it is always wiser to use the radar when the ship locations are unknown, and fire a normal shot when the location is known,

In our attempt to add more choices we decided that instead of 5 pre-set ships, the players would get a 12 blocks each from which they could build ships by doing straight lines using a minimum of 2 blocks per ship.

We quickly spotted what the problem would be however, it is obvious several small ships will be harder to find than a few big ships, so now we needed motivation for players to make their ships bigger.

For each 2 blocks used beyond the minimum 2 required to build a ship, the player gets an additional "ammo" per turn. This means if I build a 2 block ship I gain no bonus ammo, for a 4 block ship I would get 1 bonus ammo, for 6 blocks I get 2 bonus ammo, and so on.

This way the player finally has a meaningful choice: "Do I want to spread small ships around to be difficult to sink? or shall I make a massive ship which will be easy to sink once found, but get a lot of fire power in return?"

For the sake of balancing and for the game to make sense, we upped the cost of using a sensor to 2 ammo instead of 1, and made the bonus ammo given by each particular ship get lost for the rest of the game, once it sinks.

Finally we played the game, and for the first time we were actually enjoying it as we felt more involved with the game, and the victory condition felt more meaningful.

A question comes to my mind after all of this though: Even though this more complex version of battleship is more fun once you learn the rules, would it have been as successful as the original battleship game?

Simplicity makes a game easy to get into, complexity scares players away before they give it a chance.

On the other hand, simplicity makes for poor replay value, and gets boring quickly, while this added complexity would keep the player entertained for a much longer duration.

In the end what is the balance between simplicity and complexity? The answer would be easier in computer games, as complexity can be added on top of simplicity as you progress deeper into the game, but in board games, this never seems to happen.

So what should a game designer plan for board games? Is it worth taking the risk of making your game complex in order to make it more enjoyable in the long run...?