A common challenge in game design is achieving the right level of "player interaction". In a competitive game player interaction often means being able to thwart your opponents in various ways. In some games players vie for limited resources or space. Maybe you can deny your opponents the best tile or worker placement spot by grabbing it first. Other games may even allow you to steal or destroy your opponents' stuff through direct combat. Too much "take that" in a game can ruin the experience for some. On the other hand too little interaction can make the game feel like multiplayer solitaire. The right amount of player interaction to build into a game also depends on who you think will be playing it.
The earlier versions of Three Days on Callisto were much more combative than it is now. In the first couple prototypes you could, by having workers in "military" craters, attack opponents' workers in neighboring craters. With the right dice roll a successful attack meant eliminating an opponent's worker from the board. This didn't last long. Not only did it feel pretty harsh to the victim, it also wasn't very useful to the perpetrator. Subsequent prototypes tried to address both of these issues. Instead of being eliminated, an attacked worker would just get pushed to a neighboring crater. The attacking worker could either stay put or move into the newly vacated crater. If you were the victim of such an attack you may not get to do the action you wanted to, but at least you didn't lose your worker entirely.
Still, it sucked to have another player cancel an action you were planning on. So I tried allowing players to "attack" themselves. This meant you could use one of your workers to move another into a more desirable space. I even made the odds of success higher when you attacked yourself instead of an opponent. Of course this couldn't really be called an attack any more. But what was it? A "push"? The thematic patches needed to accommodate these changes were starting to get tricky.
The final step in the game's pacification was to remove any possibility of moving other players' workers*. You can now only do it to your own workers. What started as an eliminating attack action had now become a transport action to move your own workers. For a long time the game retained this curious mechanic, where workers could not move on their own but had to be pushed by a fellow worker in a neighboring crater. Eventually even this last vestige of the attack action was removed. It held on as long as it did because I thought it made for some interesting tactics, but it in the end it had become too detached and thematically unrelated to the rest of the game.
What I learned from this whole process is that I do like games to have a lot of player interaction, but only that of a certain kind. Being able to prevent other players from doing what they want, at least to some degree, is fun and dramatic. But being able to undo or destroy what other players have already accomplished seems too punishing and chaotic, especially in a longer game.
* In fact you can still move other players' workers, but not to a different crater. You can only move them to a different space within the same crater. What's more, this new space is even more likely to be better than the previous one.
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