by DaviddesJ
skipsizemore wrote:
How much playtesting would it take to balance a design this complex? A thousand plays? Maybe.
Many types of games are self-balancing. If players compete for resources or opportunities, and the fewer players who are competing for something, the more attractive it becomes, then the game naturally finds its own balance.
It's obviously bad to, say, publish a game with a whole set of options that never get used because people discover after publication that they aren't ever worth choosing. But that doesn't really happen all that often. Designers avoid that not with perfect balance, but with robust game mechanisms that adapt as the players learn more about the game.
I'm surprised you say, "given the number of games that prove to be broken". I think it's rare that a published game is broken, and usually it's because of something the designer expressly did wrong.