Harmony: A game to teach transitive game balance

Transitive game balance – balancing a set of game objects so that they all have the same cost/benefit ratio –is a difficult subject to teach effectively. While the theory behind it is straightforward, the games that would make the most practical examples tend to be too complicated for classroom analysis, and they often have some imperfections in their balance (there is no “perfect example” of balance). Furthermore, assessing balance in student projects is subjective (whether the game “feels fair”) and timeconsuming. To address these problems, a custom game was created. The game is simple to learn, small in scope, and the design “knobs” that a student designer can change within the game are constrained, so that it can provide a useful example of a real-world game balance problem while still being short enough of an experience to be suitable for use in a game design class. Assessment is done via automated AI-vs.-AI play, where the various game elements are played against one another in a large series of trials, providing the player with a Monte Carlo analysis of the relative power of each game element.