The Timeless Game Design of 'Squad Busters' (2024)

Squad Busters is a 2024 game from Supercell, a company that seems to excel at making mobile games that are free-to-play and yet financially lucrative. I did not know any of this a couple of months when I was sick in bed and decided to try out this game.

It turns out the game is very good and fun and I’ve been playing it probably too much -— in my defense, each game is only 4 minutes! In this post I want to reflect on some elements of game design that this game does well. Will this be interesting? Perhaps! It may help give you a better understanding of what makes this (or other games) actually good or not.

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The elements I want to discuss are:

  • Positional balancing,

  • Strategic disequilibrium, and

  • Risk management.

But first I should probably explain how the game actually works.

The Timeless Game Design of 'Squad Busters' (1)

Each game lasts 4 minutes. You start by selecting a character who spawns out of a chest. With that character you do things to get coins: killing monsters, chopping trees, or picking carrots. You use the coins to get more characters and upgrade your existing characters. You can also attack other players’ characters, which gives you coins. But coins are just a means to an end! You win the round by having more gems than anyone else. Most of the things that give you coins also give you gems, but more difficult monsters give you more gems, and some things give you gems but no coins. Ultimately to win you need to avoid being killed, try to get lots of coins to build your squad of characters, and net more coins than anyone else.

Positional balancing

There used to be a great blog on game design called Mechanics and Meeples and it’s there I came across the concept of ‘positional balancing’ in games. The idea is that a good game discourages runaway victory where winning begets winning in such a way that a player can pull ahead and win by a massive margin. Instead, good game design slows down the leading players and also tries to give lagging players a boost. Mario Kart is a good example of this — you only get blue shells when you are coming last.

Catan, classic game though it is, is bad at this. Not only is there no positional balancing, once a player starts pulling ahead they can create an economic engine that other players simply can’t compete with. The only response is ‘social balancing’, where the players conspire to thwart the leading player’s ambitions. This is frustrating for everyone. Catan is a fun game with a unique contribution to human culture, but it is poorly designed in this regard. Power Grid does much better on this front: every round, the player turn order resets so that the player who is leading is disadvantaged in the turn order. When I play Power Grid, margins of victory tend to be quite close. This is a good sign in a game.

When it comes to Squad Busters, the most important thing they’ve done to avoid runaway victory is create a victory metric — gems — that is different from the currency used in each game to improve your squad — coins. This means that someone who is doing excellently at getting coins isn’t at the same time getting ahead on the success metric of gems, and someone who has heaps of gems isn’t building their in-game capacity, thus increasing the risk that their weak squad gets ‘busted’ before the game is out.

Exercise for the reader: what iconic game has a victory metric that has no in-game value and, in fact, has negative utility?

Strategic disequilibrium

In a well-designed game, there is no single optimal strategy. Rather, the best strategy depends upon what other players are doing, and so it constantly evolves in response to what is happening in each individual game, and also across individual games. I call this ‘strategic disequilibrium’ in that the strategy doesn’t settle into a steady-state: rather, it is dynamic.

This is how Squad Busters works. Broadly, there are three types of characters in Squad Busters: suppliers, who are good at giving you coins or gems; attackers, who are good at busting other squads; and defenders, who are good at taking damage and disrupting attacks. Correspondingly, there are three types of strategy that can help you to win, but if a strategy is too popular then another strategy will be superior. So a possible strategy is focusing on suppliers and getting lots of coins and gems that way. But if too many players are doing that, then a better way of getting ahead is to get lots of attackers and wipe out the squads of suppliers (which are bad at attack or defense). But then if suddenly everyone is getting attackers, a good strategy would be focusing on defense, and letting the attackers wear each other out while you eke out a victory. But then, if everyone is focusing on defenders, there is less risk in a supplier-based strategy.

This is basically the essence of game theory: the best strategy has to account for the responses of other players. Because each game is only four minutes long, there’s not heaps of room to innovate in the course of an individual game. But in ‘the meta’, across many games, it’s possible to have different strategies rising and falling over time.

And this is fun! Each game I play I need to rapidly evaluate which strategy to pursue, and then every time I open a new chest I quickly decide whether to stick to my strategy or shift it in another direction.Across games, I can adapt and tweak my approach.

In short: good game design means creating multiple paths to victory. None should be dominant in every situation: there should be options to counter it, and a player who is too committed to a single strategy should pay the price.

Risk management

Somewhat related to ‘positional balancing’, good game design also wants to avoid runaway losers: it shouldn’t get so bad that there’s no chance to come back.

One way to play with is give players options for taking different amounts of risk. When players are leading, they can play more conservatively. When players are behind they have less to lose so they can make riskier plays. This phenomenon is evident in many games, including sport! If you are playing football and your team is ahead by 5 goals, you shift to more defense; if your team is behind by 5 goals you need to take more risks to try to catch up. In Squad Busters, riskier play can mean making runs to scoop up loose gems or trying to pick off units in another squad and risking that they turn around and wipe you out.

The Timeless Game Design of 'Squad Busters' (2)

For example in a recent game, with about 60 seconds left I was close to last and had lost most of my squad. I temporarily retreated and rebuilt a little bit then, with just 30 seconds to spare, I realised I had to be more aggressive. I ran back into the fray, attacked some others, scooped up some gems, and somehow managed to finish in third place.

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This is a pretty widespread phenomenon in games. Mahjong is an example where taking a risk might mean discarding a tile that could be good for an opponent: you probably wouldn’t. In Dominion, or other deck-builders, a risk might be buying a powerful card and hoping that it happens to come up when you draw. Catan does not have many such opportunities! It is hard for a lagging player to get back into the game!This is bad design!

Conclusion

I have written this post to justify to myself the amount of time I spend playing Squad Busters. In doing so I’ve aimed to analyse the game and highlight the principles of good game design that are on display and that make this game so enjoyable. These are:

  • Positional balancing, in that losing players are given better opportunities, and that the win metric (gems) doesn’t provide in-game utility;

  • Strategic disequilibrium, in that the best strategy has to change in response to other players, there is no dominant strategy; and

  • Risk management, whereby you can shift your risk appetite in the course of the game, also creating opportunities for ailing players to take larger risks and possibly get back into contention.

These features are certainly not unique to Squad Busters and can be found in many games both ancient and contemporary. Hopefully an awareness of these dynamics can give you a better understanding of what makes different games good and enjoyable.

If you are inspired to give this game a go, you can sign up using my referral link here and apparently I get some sort of in-game bonus!

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