Kingmaking

What is kingmaking? Kingmaking is, when a player, who is clearly not going to win, makes a move that effectively hands the win to another player.

Kingmaking comes in various degrees, some cases are worse than others. A game has a true kingmaking issue when it meets all of the following criteria:

1) the player must make a move that decides the winner between other players
2) the player does not improve his relative standing in the game, regardless of what move he makes
3) the player knows he is making a move that decides the winner between other players

Take away one of these things and the kingmaking effect is less dramatic. 1) seems obvious, but if a player does not have to, but rather chooses to hit a particular player, for whatever reason, than it is not really a design flaw, just the effects of an interactive multiplayer game.

Race games, where a player wins when he reaches goal X, are more suspectible to kingmaking situations, because of the all-or-nothing nature of determining a winner. In victory point acquisition games, especially those with hidden VP's, hidden goals and/or extra VP's awarded at game end, kingmaking effects are often less dramatic.

A trick to lessen the effect of kingmaking is to use a more-or-less randomly triggered game end, to lessen the effect of kingmaking during the last round, because you never know exactly what the last round will be. Interestingly, these things also help lessen the effects of analysis paralysis during the last round.

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