Consider, then, games with rising stakes.

Let’s look at traditional poker first. A gambling game, yes, and one where you can count on the wagers to rise as the game goes on. Why? Because as the first players lose out, the winners have that much more money to play with, and can make use of bigger bets as the means to pushing players with marginal positions over the edge. It leads to the classic final showdown that decides the game. So maybe you haven’t thought about it before, but the concepts of escalation and elimination go hand in hand here.

Now let’s think in particular about everyone’s favorite brand of poker, Texas Hold’em. Gamers should love T.H. for a number of reasons. From a designer’s perspective, T.H. takes that amorphous blob of a game concept called “poker” – a rule set that’s spawned thousands of unique variants – and carves out a repeatably taut, balanced, entertaining play experience. I’d say this comes mainly from the fixed buy-in that turns chips into more of a resource than actual money, and with the systematic raising of blinds that keeps the game on course and heading for the finish line. See – escalation in promotion of elimination! Another good reason gamers should love T.H. is that it accentuates many of the best “game” elements and thus provides a social-gaming platform where your sometimes-cloistered Euro-gamer fan can rightfully do well in and have fun at the same time. Versus, say, trying to convince a Puerto Rico fan that it’s fun to play the slots…

In board games, elimination is often a factor in war/conflict games, and escalation is its frequent companion there as well. In Risk, that great-grandaddy of them all, escalation comes via the mechanism of turning in sets of cards for bonus armies. Note that this feature does not necessarily bring a great amount of either balance or good game play – Risk games usually end with ridiculous back-and-forth surges of “bonus armies” that desperately try to cleanse the board before the next “bonus army” shows up to paint the world a different color. No one beyond childhood really likes Risk.

Escalation gets reigned-in a bit in wargames when the designer makes it part of a zero-sum equation. There’s escalation in Diplomacy but it’s limited by the number of supply centers on the board, so things never get utterly ridiculous. Similarly so for Civilization (not exactly a war game, but close enough) – geometric expansion lasts only a few turns, and then it’s your stock of counters that limits your size. In wargames that strike for more realism, the use of escalation is muted, since “real” wars are exhaustive contests of loss and endurance. You can see this in Axis and Allies, as the board gets drained of air and naval units, seldom to be replenished in the midst of raging hostilities. And that might be the first and only time I’ll ever cite A&A for it’s realism!

Titan is a game that use “tech-trees” to implement escalation. It’s not really the right term to use for a monster slugflest, but everyone is familiar with the concept of unlocking more powerful game elements from among a branched path of options. Titan has at least two other means to escalation built in: the growing power of the Titans, and the proliferation of unit stacks. (Summoning angels and archangels might be considered a third.) So Titan is all about escalation in the service of elimination! And to think, when our gang was on a Titan binge many years ago, we considered adding a house rule for expanded Titan-teleport powers to hasten the endgame – because sometimes all that escalation still wasn’t enough to get the game over with in a reasonable time.

These have all been pretty old games I’ve mentioned so far. And in fact, when we start start thinking about our contemporary board games, especially ones that aren’t war-themed, things are a bit different. Elimination is not a key concept in most Euro-games, and what good is escalation without his good buddy elimination to ride along with? Forced to change with the times, escalation perhaps takes on more subtle forms. One is in scoring systems. A good example of this, in a game I like quite a bit, is Alhambra. In Alhambra, you basically do the same thing across three successive rounds of the game. But in each round the scoring values go up, which puts a premium on that last one, even as you need to be mindful of each round’s scoring to do well. There’s another escalation factor at play, which is the size of your tile laydown. (Compare to Carcasonne, in which many of the earlier tiles played become closed off and unimportant, and the amount of “active” play area grows relatively little over the course of the game.) My only knock against Alhambra is that your efforts to plan and execute a given strategy of what colors to compete in can sometimes be too easily overthrown by the luck of the tile draws.

I am designing a game right now which is a sort of combination of tile-laying and trick-taking, and I am trying to incorporate escalation-but-not-elimination as a key play mechanism. It’s tricky! Escalation can be a cheap and dirty way of trying to make a game feel more exciting as it progresses, but if it’s not well-balanced all you end up with is a big steaming pile of randomness at the end. You also need to establish a sense that the groundwork you lay in the earlier stages of the game matters – that you’re setting up and in some way controlling your own escalation destiny. So I’ve been on the lookout for games with interesting or different takes on escalation as a game mechanism. It’s like game anthropology in action!

Unrelated postscript: this past week I played – and won! – my first game of Thurn and Taxis, a fun game, but not one with any significant (game-defining)elements of escalation. It’s a bit more in the “area-control” style of game, which doesn’t have much overlap with escalation. Read MetalJim’s review of it from last September!