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I've noticed that in my area, multiplayer games tend to not be played at all, or tend to be extremely long affairs that drag out.

Odd numbered multiplayer games, or games that are free for all, almost never happen. I think this is a missed opportunity for miniature wargamers, especially for pickup games, where there might be an odd number of players at the game shop for the night and only 2 get to play.

While designing my own game rules, I've been trying to think of what holds this back.

What are some reasons why you think this is? What game design decisions are causing this?

What would make you want to play more 3+ multiplayer games?

For one, I'm thinking about including rules in my game for asymmetric team games, such as 2 vs 1. A problem I noticed in team games is that because every army has its full FOC (or equivalent for each game) there's only so much points for basic troops, and the number of specialty stuff can get out of hand unless you increase the point value of the game, which has another problem where the team game takes too long. I was thinking of having rules specifically for Team Lists, which allows a player to make a list specifically designed to operate as an ally to another player, having a more limited set of options or other rules to prevent things from getting out of hand.

There are certain intrinsic rules issues that are affect this. The aforementioned FOC list issue. Other things, like objectives might encourage enemy annihilation too much, rather than the completion of objections. A faster roll resolution system would help, as well as a turn structure that involves all players or quickly alternates between them.

Wargaming is very hard to do multiplayer. (unless it is 'team vs team)

RPG games and many board games are designed for multiplayer.

Not sure what causes stuff like this to be avoided, though I don't have the issue. I regularly see, and participate in 2 v 2s, or 2 v 1s depending on how everything is going. Makes a perfect pickup game, and you can learn a lot from the game by observing different peoples play styles and tactics.

When we needed a quick game, say everyone has some spare time, after or before a bigger game we'd play 1 HQ and 1 Troop FFA king of the hill games. Usually turned out to be pretty fun and ridiculous. We had some good rules, like random starting locations, time limits on turns(to speed up gameplay, though it was already quick) and a few other various house rules which I can't remember.

 Firehead158 wrote:

When we needed a quick game, say everyone has some spare time, after or before a bigger game we'd play 1 HQ and 1 Troop FFA king of the hill games. Usually turned out to be pretty fun and ridiculous. We had some good rules, like random starting locations, time limits on turns(to speed up gameplay, though it was already quick) and a few other various house rules which I can't remember.

Yeah, that sounds quite fun. I think the kind of short, many player, games you describe could actually do more for the miniature game hobby than any new big scale wargame.

It's like how a lot of the free to play online games are finding an audience, games like League of Legends or World of Tanks. Smaller games, frequently, and often times played with a bunch of friends. It seems to me that it would be much easier to get people into the hobby, or to try a new game, this way.

I play odd number multiplayer games all of the time. You may be playing games that don't work very well in that situation, or you may be focusing on a narrow selection of scenarios/objectives.

There are plenty of games that handle 3v3, 2v1, 4v4, etc. etc. very well. Freebooter's Fate, for example, is full of scenarios designed for more than two players to go at it.

Mordheim even has a whole supplement, Chaos in the Streets, about more than two player scenarios.

Somewhere in the 5th ed 40k rule book there were some rules for playing 3 player 40k. Never tried it myself but it looked fun.

3 player FFA games generally have some bad dynamics. You often get two people ganging up on the third, or two going at each other while the third sits back, then steps in at the end to pick up the pieces.

Most tables are squares/rectangles, which makes deployment difficult, often reinforcing one of the two common results.

2 vs 1 is a lot more balanced. If you keep the point sides even, you get a mostly fair fight. FOC issues can arise, but tend to be minor. One thing you can do is have the 2 player team share a FOC, or force the single player to play on a double FOC (if doing 2x1,000 vs 2,000 point games)

Playing on teams also means you don't have to worry about how to resolve close combats with 3+ players involved.

 Nevelon wrote:
3 player FFA games generally have some bad dynamics. You often get two people ganging up on the third, or two going at each other while the third sits back, then steps in at the end to pick up the pieces.

Most tables are squares/rectangles, which makes deployment difficult, often reinforcing one of the two common results.

2 vs 1 is a lot more balanced. If you keep the point sides even, you get a mostly fair fight. FOC issues can arise, but tend to be minor. One thing you can do is have the 2 player team share a FOC, or force the single player to play on a double FOC (if doing 2x1,000 vs 2,000 point games)

Playing on teams also means you don't have to worry about how to resolve close combats with 3+ players involved.

3 player is indeed an odd dynamic. I've almost never played it with miniature games, but I've done it with Magic and, really, it almost always went like Nevelon says. If you get into 4 or more players things tend to balance out a little better. I imagine you could make it work with wargaming if you made a clever use of objectives, but I've always found it easier to just play a 2v1 game (with the singleton having double points.)

I've played a lot of 3 player games but recently have scaled back on some of them.

As Nevelon pointed out, the dynamic is different as the choice to attack a particular unit (or not) is not very straight forward. If the two opponents are going at it, you probably just want to sit back. The flip side is that both could be coming after you which means you are seriously outgunned.

Hopefully, people won't get their feeling hurt if two of the players have a sort of unspoken truce while getting their butts kicked off the table.

Also I've noticed that 3 way 40k games tend to take a LOT longer than playing two 2 player games in a row. There is much more down time between your own turns.

The best is to simply have two sides, with the same points on each side. Even if one side has two people, the game goes smoother and faster.

4 people fighting it out in a free for all can also get bogged down (time wise), but tactically it's much harder to hide while the others duke it out.

The best part about 3 player gaming is picking the person who most likes winning, then two of you indepenantly both decide to bash them together. Hilarity ensues.

 Nevelon wrote:
3 player FFA games generally have some bad dynamics. You often get two people ganging up on the third, or two going at each other while the third sits back, then steps in at the end to pick up the pieces.

This is what makes multiple player non team games fun.

Some of my most memorable games from 3rd edition were playing the old Carnage scenario they published in White Dwarf. 4 players, 1000pts each. Each person deploys in a corner with the sole objective in the center. Closest model to the objective wins.

You get all sorts of buddying up and backstabbing, whether it lasts the whole game or a turn or just for one units shooting phase. 'Don't fire that Devastator squad at my tank and I won't kill your commander with my Terminators', stuff like that.

It's not for competitive play, obviously, but it's great for beerhammer.

There are issues with how many times your models get to fight in assault, too. I think movement and shooting work fine, but one unit fighting 5 times in the assault phase because there's 5 players gets silly.

One of my favorite 3e 40K battles was three ways... sort of.

Imperial Guard vs. Orks was the major battle... but on the side were a few units of Attilan Rough Riders and some Attilan foot.

The orks and Imperial Guard had mission objectives, the Rough Riders and their foot troops just wanted to shoot at both forces and then run away.

Their victory condition was completely separate from that of the main battle. Did they inflict more harm on the orks than they took? If yes, then they beat the orks! Hooray!

Did they inflict more harm on the Imperial Guard then they took? If yes then they beat the Guard! Hooray!

As far as both the orks and the Imperial Guard were concerned they were just a bunch of yahoos up in the hills taking potshots at everybody!

So there could be more than one winner in the battle.... (As it happens the Attilans did beat the orks, but were wiped off the map by a Leman Russ.... Good times, good times.)

The Auld Grump

I've played lots of 3 way games in Advance Wars (which is not unlike a tabletop wargame). The main problem I found is that they usually turn into 2v1, even when no actual pact is struck. It is often mutually beneficial for two players to just defend, and not provoke each other, while they have a battle raging on another front.

I would suggest that games could be improved by having some kind of mechanism that forces players to try and get rid of each other, rather than passively defending and making pacts. It needs to be more than just objectives. Unless of course you want big multifaceted diplomacy type games.

We do free for all warmachine games occasionally. It doesn't work for 40k though. The way assaults work in 40k, with your models fighting in your opponents turn makes a right mess of things.

Again, I think the issues raised come down to system and scenario.

3v3 can indeed turn into 2v1, but it is harder to do that if the game cannot be won by annihilating the opponent, and if players cannot share a victory.

There is a very fun FBF scenario called Treasure Hunt, in which you place 2 chests on the table for each crew playing the game. Only one chest has the treasure and the others explode when you open them.

The objective is to find the treasure and haul it to your deployment zone, which ends the game. If the game times out before anyone secures the treasure, it goes to Glory Points, which is essentially Victory Points, with a modest amount added to the crew if one of its characters is holding the treasure at the end of the game.

As long as one crew member gets off with the chest alive, I win. If not, having the chest is good, but we go to Glory Points which tracks how many points of models YOUR crew took out of the game.

Ganging up does not ensure that you will get the Glory Points, your "friend's" models may wind up doing the actual killing. Meanwhile, if you aren't putting effort into actually looking for the treasure, your models may very well wind up locked into bloody sword fights while some deckhand scuttles off of the table with the goods.

In practice, I have seen Treasure Hunt wind up as a swirling morass of small conflicts that arise out of proximity and quests to achieve advantageous positioning that winds up devolving into a mad dash to secure the treasure once it pops up.

Because you do not know where the treasure is, you have to be careful about committing your crew too deeply early on. It may be right next to you, and it may be right next to your enemy's deployment zone.

Because it only takes 1 model to win the whole thing, piling on too aggressively can easily leave loose ends.

Searching for the treasure can harm your models, but declining to search can easily leave the game-winning treasure in the hands of an enemy. If that happens, all of the running and killing in the world might not be able to stop you from losing the game.

It is a well-designed scenario for FFA play.

Mordheim has a similar scenario, called Treasure Hunt as well I believe, but it suffers from a BIG GW game problem.

Warbands can fail morale at 25% losses, which is a game loser. Treasure aside, all you have to do is put enough blood on your blade, and not much of it, to win. Why go for the treasure when you can hit your opponent hard and take him out of the game quickly?

This encourages a 2v1 pile on. Let's both crush Billy's warband and then actually start playing the scenario.

Objective-based gameplay is best for 3 and 4 player games.

That way you can't hang back and let the others kill each other.

Another thing about 4 player games that are not 2vs 2 is the time.
You play your turn and you wait.
and wait
and wait.

I mean, in a 4 player game, you spend three quarter of the game waiting.

So if some of the thing you have to do in a wargame are simultaneous, it could reduce the waiting time.

 M_Stress wrote:
Another thing about 4 or 4 player games that are not 2vs 2 or 2 vs 1 is the time.
You play your turn and you wait.
and wait
and wait.

I mean, in a 4 player game, you spend three quarter of the game waiting.

So if some of the thing you have to do in a wargame are simultaneous, it could reduce the waiting time.

(Emphasis mine)

This is why games with unit response systems are so great. There is so much more playing and so much less waiting that it totally changes the concept of what wargaming is.

~Tim?

 M_Stress wrote:
Another thing about 4 or 4 player games that are not 2vs 2 or 2 vs 1 is the time.
You play your turn and you wait.
and wait
and wait.

Try 3 on 3 Apocalypse games! If you get to turn 5 before people are tired of playing, you're doing something very right or very wrong!

Another thing about 4 player games that are not 2vs 2 is the time.
You play your turn and you wait.

Try a system with alternating activations or with gameplay broken into phases that all players participate in. You'll still be waiting the same amount of time though the duration between you getting to do something is much shorter, which makes it more playable IMHO.

If you want to prevent a 2v1 situation in three-player games, just assign the classic "attack the player to your right" victory condition (also known as "Assassin" rules). It's really common in multiplayer CCG games when you have an odd number of people and want to keep things fair.

Three players: A, B, and C.
A wins when B is dead
B wins when C is dead
C wins when A is dead
Game ends once a single player is eliminated.
It becomes a balancing act on whether you should wreck your opponent's offensive capability first (that's not focusing on you) or their defensive capability first (that is focused on you).

Keeps things fair and even and works in almost every game set. You may have to change rules on some things. Last time I did this in 40k, I took the Doom of Malantai (for obvious reasons) and decided to self-nerf it to only affect opponents' models on *their* shooting phases.

Not a fan of objective-token-based games, because usually it descends into picking on the player with the least defensive capability and then going after the other player. It leaves the picked-on player in the position of Kingmaker where they join in on the side of whoever they dislike least; it's a 2v1 scenario. If it's an objective in the center, again, it's a 2v1 scenario.

Elimination/killpoints is surprisingly the best way to go about 1v1v1 in this regard without it descending to a 2v1 fight.
Make the objective:

First player to get tabled loses; player who was assigned to kill that player wins; third player also loses.

If nobody gets tabled, calculate kill points based on lost units/models. Players gain kill points based on losses inflected on their target player regardless of how those units died in the first place. This encourages players to not attack/harm the player that is attacking them too much.

Straight up large scale games don't work with too many people.

Time. Attention. and keeping the game moving without dragging it out in a tangent and losing interest.

1-10 models, sure all day long.More then ten or twelve, you start losing it.

Last time I played a 3-player game it had Eldar in the centre and my Chaos and my friends GK's on opposite ends (short edges). The objective was to hold the middle. We didn't ally with one another, and no one sat back whilst the other two fought it out. It was gruelling, but not something you could do all the time.

4-player Carnage missions were always fun, although I'm a terrible player to have in those games as I ignore the mission objective and just try to cause damage.


A lot of the best multi-player games I've played have been Necromunda games, like when three gangs got together to take on the dominant Genestealer Cult in the campaign. That was an amazing game. So much death. So many heroic sacrifices. So many Genestealers!!!

Thanks everyone for their opinions and experiences.

You've given me a lot to think about and should improve some rules systems I've been thinking of.