You don't need business school if you play board games
I was on a motorbike in Vietnam with a Taiwanese colleague, Roy, discussing board games, when he made an interesting observation: "I don't like Istanbul," he said. "If you're losing, it feels like you're being left further and further behind, and there's no way to catch up."
We had stopped at a red light, on our commute home. I downshifted and turned my head so he could hear me: "That's weird – Splendor's exactly the same, but you don't feel that way about Splendor."
"Hmm." I said. The light changed and we started moving. "I think it's because in Splendor, you always feel like you have lots of options even if you don't. But in Istanbul, the further you get left behind, the lousier your options are, and everyone knows it."
"Wow!" Roy said, "So that's like life! You're ok if you're poor but you feel you can do many things to improve your situation, but if you're poor and there is nothing you can do to improve your life, you feel very unhappy."
I laughed. "I guess that also explains countries, doesn't it? In Malaysia and Taiwan, people don't feel like their kids would have a brighter future compared to themselves, while in Vietnam and Singapore people do. And it makes a difference."
"This is so deep. And from a board game."
I've gotten into serious board games over the past year at my old company, and I've been thinking about the business skills that these games teach you. For the uninitiated, when I say 'serious board games', I mean board games that are typically known as 'Eurogames'. These games have mechanics that are richer and more engaging than the old, 'American-style' games (think: Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk), are usually played in groups of 2-5, are deeply satisfying to play repeatedly, and have made something of a comeback in recent years.
I'm going to list some of the business/life skills I've learnt from board games in this post, but I don't want to spend that much time explaining the rules and the gameplay of the various board games that I'm going to talk about. I urge you to play the games if you'd like to see if I'm making any sense.
(This is an inherently risky thing to do! I know I'm probably not going to make sense to many people – I can already imagine people playing these games a number of times, shaking their fists at me, and saying I can't possibly know what I'm talking about, and I fully expect this to happen because one's experience of a board game is heavily coloured by the dynamics of your particular gaming group. But no matter.)
The last caveat is that I'm not, of course, going to talk about the obvious life lessons from board games. This lifehacker article talks about learning to negotiate, learning to think strategically, learning to work in a team and fostering a sixth sense for reading people. Blah. These are table stakes for any kind of decent game. I'm talking about the deeper lessons, the kinds of things you learn from experiencing a large variety of board game mechanics, over a span of repeated plays from a large enough collection of games. Here goes.
I think one of the most interesting aspects of board games is that the rules don't fully capture the experience of playing these games. Rules can range from simple to complex, but the emergent strategies, the interactions, and the emotions from play cannot possibly be captured from reading the rulebook alone.
Most gamers are familiar with the idea of a 'metagame' – the game of playing the game. In games like DOTA and League of Legends, constant tweaks to in-game items, character abilities and spell buffs lead to an evolving understanding of dominant strategies. Teams come up with new strategies around these game changes all the time, causing competing teams to develop responses to these strategies, which then cause teams to look for new strategies, and so on.
In trading card games, the meta is influenced by introducing new cards – with new spells, abilities, and items. In board games, however, the rules and game elements are fixed, so the meta is mostly driven by the gaming group itself.
An example of this is Splendor, a relatively simple game where you buy points (on expensive cards) with chips. The most obvious strategy is to build an 'engine': that is, buy cheap cards with no points that give you discounts for buying more expensive cards, eventually working your way to buying lots of expensive, high point cards, now made cheap due to the numerous discounts you've accumulated, and winning. But the metagame for Splendor evolves quickly, as soon as someone realises they can save up chips to buy the expensive cards, skipping the lengthy engine-building process of the first strategy. The response to this strategy, in turn, is very interesting; Splendor becomes a very different board game by the 10th play as compared to the 1st play, assuming a sufficiently competitive gaming group.
The most interesting thing about the metagame, to me, is that the experience of playing board games quickly becomes about finding and building an edge in the metagame, instead of playing the game itself. A sufficiently experienced gaming group should experience something like the following when encountering a new board game:
What are the basic rules of the game?
What is the first (usually most obvious) viable winning strategy?
Are there other viable winning strategies?
Is there a response to each winning strategy?
How can we know which strategy to use and when?
The better the game, the more complex the game, the more viable winning strategies there are.
After a couple of games, though, it becomes hard to not see the metagame in the world of business. To quote Ben Horowitz, from The Hard Thing About Hard Things:
Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left. There is always a move.
When you see the business world as a metagame of strategic moves, the same generic approach to the metagame applies, and your approach becomes 'learn the rules', 'learn the strategies', and then finally 'find the dominant strategy'. Mastery in the basic elements of a specific industry gives you the ability to see which of yesterday's unworkable strategies have become viable today; I think board games give you a taste of what that feels like.
I find the farming survival game Agricola to be a lot like building a company. In Agricola, you control a farmer and his wife, and you have to ensure that you end up with a good farm by the end of the game. This means executing well on a large number of dimensions: you want a large, upgraded farmhouse, a big family, a sufficient number of sheep, pigs, cows, vegetables and grain in your holdings, and you want to minimise the wasted space on your land by tilling enough field tiles, or fencing them in to become pastures for your livestock. Oh, and you have to make sure your family doesn't starve while doing so (which in turn eats into your reserves of vegetables, grains and animals).
What makes this doubly hard is that you're competing with every other player for a central pool of resources and actions. Being denied access to a particular resource or action prevents you from completing the necessary improvements in time, which then blocks the development of other elements of your farm. For example, feeding your family with livestock is a very efficient way of generating food, but this strategy requires a cooking hearth, which in turn requires clay and a build action, and of course an assortment of animals (sheep/pigs/cows). Collecting livestock requires fencing in portions of your farm to hold them, which in turn requires wood, which in turn requires taking turns to collect the wood, which prevents you from developing other parts of your farm you'll be scored on like tilling land and sowing grain/vegetables.
This is very much like business. Building a company requires you to execute well on a sizeable number of dimensions, roughly all at the same time. You need to hire sufficiently well, figure out product development, watch costs and cash flow, maintain inventory, build out various parts of the company (support, product, engineering, sales), figure out sales strategy, execute sufficiently well on marketing, build up a healthy sales pipeline, and pay attention to company culture, employee morale and employee growth, so as to minimise employee turnover and increase your efficacy of pursuing whatever high level strategy you're banking on.
And you have to do all of this with limited money and limited time.
In the early days, this feels very much like everything being broken all the time, and you're frantically rushing around putting out fires. (In Agricola, it usually means you have to get food from the fishing pond – something that isn't scalable, doesn't contribute to your farm or your score, but prevents your family from starving). Both Agricola and company building forces you to learn to prioritise: you might have a schism between two generations of employees right now (thanks to aggressive hiring you needed for the growth of the business), leading you to bleed key employees, but you need to close a deal with a major customer or your entire company is toast; so you set aside the problem of a toxic culture and close the sales deal, hoping that by the time you're done you'll have enough of a team to deliver to the customer.
Like Agricola, building a business is exhausting, but the exhilaration comes from playing well, and building something you can be proud of. It's no accident that Agricola is one of my favourite games.
One key component of finding a viable strategy is the idea of picking up on what's overlooked.
Race for the Galaxy is a civilisation card game that has four viable strategies to winning. The first skill level of playing RftG is to learn what these four strategies are. This is actually rather difficult, as nothing in the rulebook hints at what these viable strategies might be, and players are expected to figure it out, which means playing the game enough times and thinking about the many possible interactions between the 114 cards in the deck. Thankfully, at around 30 minutes per game, this is very doable.
The next skill level, though, is to learn which of the 4 strategies one should pick during the course of a game. And how does one do that? Well, you do it by looking at which of the 4 strategies are overlooked in your current game.
For example, if during a game the other players are obsessed with a producing/consuming strategy, a player that switches to a military/colonising strategy early in the game can take advantage of the many ignored military world cards to conquer a collection of high value worlds over the course of the game, hopefully ending the game early before the producer/consumer players produce large points.
This element of 'choose a strategy that is overlooked' shows itself in many other board games: in Ticket to Ride, where a player with few point-scoring tickets could make up for it by going after high-value but longer, riskier routes, or in Splendor, where you can build an edge by going after a set of relatively uncontested gem colours.
In life, however, this strategy takes the form of picking alternative competitions, instead of only going after those that are unambiguous and hotly contested. Peter Thiel tells a famous story of failing in the unambiguously prestigious, highly competitive race to be a Supreme Court clerk. He tells this story in the context of his lecture on competition: if he had become a clerk, he wouldn't have had started Paypal or become the billionaire he is today.
His conclusion was the pithy "competition is for losers", which – while perhaps not entirely accurate in the world of competing businesses – is a pretty strong argument against blindly going after competitive pursuits without first considering overlooked, alternative paths.
What are the hidden sub-skills?
I struggled when playing Splendor for a long time. By that I meant that I lost every game I played with my Vietnam colleagues, something that was to be expected given how much they'd played (and how much the meta had evolved) while I had been away to Singapore.
What made this extra puzzling to me was that the game had deceptively simple rules. I understood the rules and I understood the shape of the game, and I had been driven to desperation to google for working strategies. But I had played more than 10 games now, and it was clear that the better players in my company were able to see something I wasn't able to. They had mastered a bunch of sub-skills that were critical to playing well.
The three final pieces of the puzzle came to me around my 20th game. (I'm afraid I'm a slow learner when it comes to Splendor). The first was my colleague Tuan taking apart the level 3 and level 2 decks to show me that certain gem colour combinations were better than others. White, blue and black, for instance, tended to do better, as several high-scoring cards in the level 2 and level 3 decks cost smaller amounts of gems of those colours.
It turned out that when my skilled colleagues played, the first thing they did was to evaluate the different cards and nobles in the tableau, before picking what they thought would be the best mix of colours.
The second sub-skill was to realise that I had to keep a reserve of different coloured chips. Before I realised this, I went after one card at a time, collecting just enough chips to purchase that one card that was critical to my strategy. Naturally, when another player took the card, I was ill-suited to purchase others and had to waste turns rebuilding my chip composition. The right move was to instead build a collection of different coloured chips, to preserve my optionality, and to keep an eye on a small set of possible purchases that contributed to my overall strategy.
Finally, the third sub-skill was my observation that the good players would know when to switch from 'engine building' mode to 'end game race' mode. I haven't yet figured out how to do this, so I can't say much, but I know this skill exists; I've seen it at play.
This process of discovery was incredibly interesting to me for 2 reasons. First, it meant that the higher-level strategies mentioned in various online guides were useless until I had these sub-skills. Without the right mental frameworks to evaluate my moves, I would be so inefficient so as to render any macro strategy useless.
Second, I noticed that few of my colleagues were able to explain these smaller sub-skills to me. They were things that you were expected to pick up, naturally, as you played the game. My group of colleagues were divided into 'players that got this' and 'players that don't', and it was clear when one got it enough to make the jump from the former group to the latter, and start winning.
I believe there's something similar going on here when it comes to the other valuable skills one finds in life. Proficiency at management, for instance, comes easier to those with good people skills. This explains why management training makes good managers better, and does nothing for bad managers. Without sub-skills like 'is a good listener', 'can build trust', 'can build rapport' and 'can motivate a suitably large set of personality types', higher-level management skills like training a team or prioritising according to 'managerial leverage' whizz right over the bad manager's head. The bad manager therefore looks at his fellow good managers, who improve at a rate quicker than he, and struggles to find an explanation for his poor performance.
The idea that sub-skills aren't easily explainable is an intriguing property. My current hypothesis is that if you're naturally suited to a particular skill-set (e.g. you take to something like 'a duck takes to water'), then the sub-skills necessary for you to do well in that skill are so deeply ingrained that you experience it as intuition. (Intuitions are, by definition, difficult to explain to other people). Whereas if you're not particularly good at it, your path to greatness is to grind the various sub-skills that are necessary for you to even start using the higher-level, necessary-for-winning skills and strategies.
I see this in games: I regularly trounce people in Ticket to Ride, where I can't explain how I know to make the moves I do; but I suck at Splendor and to a lesser extent Istanbul and have to piece together various sub-skills or mental frameworks in order to have a shot at winning.
I see a similar sort of thing happening with my life. I'm an average programmer, and have had to come up with tricks to get started on a large, complex program; for writing, however, I sit down to write and find myself with 2000 words of mostly coherent argumentation a short while later.
Board games as business school
When I first started this hobby, I remember watching mathematician Gordon Hamilton talking about designing his board games:
Whenever I'm talking to parents, I tell them their number one job is not to go home and do worksheets with their children ... their number one job is to adopt a board game. And that's because the core of mathematics is problem solving, and games are the most joyous excuse for problem solving.
(Hamilton, by the way, is the designer of Santorini, one of my group's most enduring and well-loved games. I describe it as 'chess, but in 30 minutes, and with special powers').
I'm convinced that there are useful lessons hidden in playing sufficiently elegant, well designed board games, especially when you play them with a group of motivated, competitive players. These lessons are doubly effective when compared to something you learn in a business school, because you have to apply them to gameplay. The same application should hopefully make the jump to real life: the benefits of being able to map real-world situations to a simplified game is more helpful than you'd think, especially when most people have never experienced 'doing what is overlooked' or 'execute well on every dimension' in their personal lives.
I suspect Eurogame mechanics encourage strategic thinking and – like good art – imitate aspects of life that are real and true. But the best thing about board games is that you play them with other people. Hanging out over a game is fun. Playing games for lessons is just icing on the cake.
I urge you to go out and buy some today.
