I know that a lot of you are probably making games that will require balancing through numbers at one point. Some of you are probably making 2+ player games. And if at any point there is a side A vs. side B, this post is for you.

First, let's talk about balance. Our favourite board games are examples of rather well-balanced games. In Go, the player that moves first has an advantage, so to counter this and make it fair, the player that moves second gets some number of points (off hand I think it's 5.5). To balance the game, they "give a bone" to the other side. But if you're designing your game well, you'll never have to do such a thing, because from the outset, one side is noticeably stronger than the other. Avoid this.

Chess is presumably a more balanced game because there is no bonus given to other side. If a side has a slight edge, there isn't enough of an advantage to warrant some kind of a boost to the other side. But chess offers one of the other pitfalls of games - the slippery slope. The slippery slope is defined as a situation that feeds itself. Slippery slopes aren't inherently bad though, there are plenty of games that you're probably familiar with that have slippery slopes. Most RTS games have them to one degree or another. Starcraft, the units you use to fight are also the things that give you vision. Losing units means losing the means to fight and see what's coming your way. Allegiance has a bit of a drastic slippery slope in once a player has been beaten, they can spend a maximum of 5 minutes unable to do anything useful due to being in an escape pod. The important thing to do is to control the slippery slope.

In chess, the means by which you win are by using the pieces you have on the board. You can remove pieces from your opponent by attacking them. So losing a piece from the board is losing the means to defend, attack, and win the game. This is the slippery slope. These are things you want to avoid but can be made to work. Chess can get away with it because it's played on a small field and the other player can usually make a counter move for it in a very short period of time. If the board was much larger, each piece would have much more value, so losing the piece would hurt even more. And since you can make a response play very soon, the advantages don't pile on against you.

Another thing we want are the tools to make the game exciting. Gameplay aside, we're going to look at the comeback. A comeback is when a team takes the lead from behind. These usually require some degree of skill to perform and make for exciting games. Now that's not to say that the early game should be disregarded, that the team that wins early should never be able to win late. But there should be some device through which losing teams are given opportunities to prove themselves instead of slowly lose. Let's contrast pool and chess this time.

In pool, every time you sink a ball, you get to shoot again. So a sufficiently skilled player can pretty much win as soon as the split goes just by sinking balls left and right. In chess, we don't have that. Chess would be horribly imbalanced if every time a player took a piece they got to move again. You could line up your bishop at the start of the game and destroy the back line instantly. In chess, the comeback mechanic is the ability to get back pieces that you have lost - the promotion of a pawn.

In chess, you start the game with 8 pawns and while most of them will likely die before the game has ended, successfully getting a pawn to your opponent's side of the board means that you may swap it for a titled piece that you have lost. Managing to do so means you gain some power that you have lost from the board, but your power will never be the same as if you had lost no pieces. Getting a pawn to the other side of the board takes some effort (I personally do it once or twice a game because I need my knights) but it does provide you with the tools to regain ground. This is part of how chess controls its slippery slope.

There are contrasts to the slippery slope which you may find useful to include. One such example is the infamous blue shell. While we all complain about the blue shell, there's no denying how important it is to the game. Or rather the full concept. Being further behind in Mario Kart boosts your chances of getting better items to use. The creators designed it this way because they wanted the standings to continue to shift, making the game ultimately more interesting for everyone. It's boring to win with no competition to make you try harder. And it's boring to sit in last place and try to catch up. So with varying items, the game is made more interesting for everyone involved.

The last thing I want to touch on is the concept of flat caps. Nintendo strikes oil again with their combat in Smash. Instead of doing what normal fighting games do and using flat health bars, Smash uses percentages which refer to knockback effects and other things. So while it does help to damage your opponents, it doesn't mean that you're always going to lose if you take more damage. 500% vs 100%, the 100% will probably win, but the 500% can still win if they play their cards right. In making this decision, the creators create an environment in which anyone can win. And it's the 'anyone can win' idea which makes exciting.