For my critical play I played Balk, a card game designed by Andy Bergmann for ages 7+ that was suggested by one of the other people at game night. The game involved making “bets” from a limited hand of cards in order to try to win a card played by the dealer, also from a limited hand. Knowing that everybody, including the dealer, had the same hand introduced an element of skill by rewarding keeping track of what people had played so far.
While the game was not hugely addictive, the random ordering of the dealer’s play combined with the near-miss-like dynamic of being just barely out-bet by another player still likely contributed to some level of addictiveness. There were games which would certainly have been won by different players if the dealer had played in a different order (dealer plays were chosen by a random number generator, not the dealer themselves), leading to a feeling that even holding skill constant, we could get a win if we just kept playing. I also experienced a good deal of “not wanting to end on a loss,” though that’s far from unique to this game. As far as near misses go, a very common experience in the game was realizing I would’ve won if I had just bet more aggressively, leading to an inclination to keep playing because victory always seemed so close.
Certainly, we played it for quite a bit longer than we were expecting to. There was a good deal of talk throughout the game about trying to identify a mathematically optimal strategy, and soon we had started modding the game to try and make it more interesting and strategic. First we experimented with being able to bet multiple cards at once, which lead to an interesting tradeoff between making large multi-card bets for good cards, versus holding onto your hand and winning every remaining card once everyone else has emptied their hands. We didn’t like that one very much though, despite the interesting result of the two people who went hardest on the aforementioned two strategies tying for victory of the one round we played with that ruleset. After that, we decided to adjust for the lack of reason to keep low cards in your hand by deciding that, if the highest bets were tied, the person who played the lowest bet that round would win instead. This immensely improved the game, as suddenly both low and high cards had significant value and the decision of what to play moved beyond simply “do I want to try to win this one, or save my good cards?”
I can’t make much comparison between this and other similar games, as I tend to avoid the genre like the plague, but I can see why people get addicted. The constant possibility of squeaking out a lucky win, combined with the social aspect of the subtle bluff mechanics, created quite a compelling combination. (I learned this the hard way directly after my critical play, when I was taught poker and subsequently lost over three hundred (play) dollars, only to earn them back over the course of several hours.)
