I will be moving the content from the Weebly site since Weebly is now part of Square and the blog is not meant to sell products. This is a short entry about the six graphs that describe the depth of video games and board games. First there is the graph that follows a growth pattern like e to the x. Magic the Gathering, other collectible card games, and RTS games. As gameplay goes on each turn or segment of time has more decisions to make.
After that are inverted parabolas. Most rich decisions happen in the middle and twiddle down. A related graph is just negative growth. Classic board games like Go and Chess are like this. Competitive turn based RPGs like Pokemon are also like this. Material reduces over time.
Fighting games are a straight constant function. At all slices of time all moved are available for each player.
Games where you can grow and attack resources like YGO and the Pokemon TCG or force RNG onto an opponent follow a sinusoidal pattern.
single player games tend to follow the pattern of a series, converging to the optimal permutation of button presses or the best combination of elements like auto-battling metas of card games.
