So, how do you win?
It’s a weirdly complicated question. A pure race where the first player to cross the finish line always wins is very true to real-life races, but in a multiplayer game, players quickly get disengaged as they slide into last place with no hope of catching up. So how do you balance a very strong reward for winning, while finding adequate and balanced ways to reward other forms of good play?
From the start I felt we would likely need 2 axes of scoring potential. We’ve had trophies for first, second, and third from the very first game. The first player to cross the finish line should have a significant point advantage and win the vast majority of races. It should take very clever work to outdo them.
In the first iteration we had a “crowd” mechanic that very mercenarily rewarded you for playing a matching card on their space. Managing your deck paid off for players but was very restrictive and thematically weak.
After a few map and system changes, I added special spaces and arches. These were also geographically tied and moving through them gave players a choice of a mechanical reward or points.
This was a mistake. I created a version of the game that begged players to optimize away their fun to win. I had envisioned this as a tense choice: should the player choose an upgrade that helped them gain an advantage, or should they choose a small point reward that could help them move up a place on the podium? Unfortunately, this was nowhere near subtle enough, it was a full sledge hammer.
At this point in development, arches were basically the only way to gain upgrades. In order to score optimal points, a good player would need to interact with the upgrade system a single time in the entire game. I loved the tangible incentive to take a harder path, but something needed to change.
This raised the question of which gameplay behaviors should be rewarded purely within the realm of gameplay: increasing your odds of gaining a trophy (less directly increasing your points) versus rewarding you with raw points for victory. Players could not be given the choice between raw points and a small advantage in a singular moment, this had to be a question posed and answered in aggregate over the course of their race.
How far are you willing to push and destroy yourself and still believe you can win? This is when the crowd mechanic finally returned to the game. I want greedy players. I want players to push and break their karts, run against those challenges, and just barely roll across the finish line.
The new version of crowd cards draw players into this space and finally reward them for it. Crowd cards now track your play through the whole race, a dozen moments of sacrifice and loss. If you can still cross the finish line while impressing the crowd enough, things will swing your way. You’ll still need to race well: the crowd’s love is enough to move you up one rank on the podium, but it’s not going to take you from last place to first.
Now it was time to turn our attention to the timing of ending the game. The crowd cards were a great innovation but their addition created a new conundrum. If three players crossed the finish line before ending the game, the first to cross was at a strong disadvantage in crowd cards, since you’ll need to spend more time in the race to earn crowd points. Players following behind therefore had more opportunities to meander through the challenges presented by the crowd, scoring points until they potentially surpassed 1st place, then just roll across the finish line.
At the same time, we were also combating a very natural but frustrating first player advantage. Unsurprisingly, in a race game with a fixed turn order, the first player at the end of their turn has a full turn ahead of their opponents and often crosses the finish line first.
We tried so many convoluted versions of the end of the game to help combat this. But during a game at Gencon with Justin Bell he made a suggestion that cut through the noise and mess. Now, when the first player crosses the finish line, we let the round finish and allow all players to have an equal number of turns. The finish line now has additional slots, numbered one through four. After every player has taken their final turn, we check who is in the highest slot and award trophies accordingly. This results in the first player to cross the finish line not necessarily winning the game, and rewards some strategic thinking about how and when to cross the finish line. This was such a simple, quick, and correct solution, and I am incredibly grateful to Justin for pointing me in the right direction.
With these new game end rules, trophies and crowd cards come into even greater focus and play off one another well. Players need to both finish fast and finish flashy. There is a tight window to place and execute these bets, and it provides a tight and interesting puzzle that enriches the map and your relationships to the other player’s progress. In Kart, you’re in competition on multiple axes: which can you afford to let slide and which do you have a plan to secure?