The Tyranny of Choice

My little girl, age three, seems to be neither more or less interested in playing structured games than any other three year old. She likes to get my “grown up” game off the shelf and play with the pieces though - recently a couple of cavalry pieces fromBattles of the Third Age became horsies and a board of Helms’ Deep became a fair. But I digress. Recently I played two games with her in consecutive days that made me think, very hard, about an aspect of game design which has become so sacrosanct as to be almost a religious commandment: the need for a game of any length to present the players with “meaningful choice” in order to be a good design.