When starting to write this article, the plan was to focus on balancing SETI and its upcoming expansion. But balancing is deeply connected with playtesting, player feedback, common misconceptions, and even the broader theory of what makes games fun. So instead of a single theme, what follows is a collection of notes and reflections – a look behind the curtain at how SETI has evolved, and how we try to keep it engaging for players of all levels.
BALANCING GAMES
An important part of game development is, unsurprisingly, balancing. It’s a long process of going through playtest reports, analyzing data, crunching numbers, adjusting values, tweaking effects, and sometimes even changing entire mechanisms.
But what’s the goal here? What is a well-balanced game, and why even bother?People often assume balancing is mostly about making sure no effect, card, ability, or strategy is significantly more powerful than the others. That’s certainly part of it. But the ultimate goal is always to make the game fun for everyone involved.
“The ultimate goal is to make the game fun.”
It’s fun to pull off powerful combos, to feel rewarded for your actions, to outsmart opponents, and to see circumstances turn in your favor. But it’s equally frustrating to watch an opponent gain a crucial edge and snowball to victory because of a poorly balanced effect.
“It is not fun to lose due to a poorly balanced game.”
Part of the fun lies in spotting opportunities and leveraging situationally powerful effects. And so when you balance a game, you don’t want to take this fun aspect away completely, but you need to make sure it doesn’t ruin the game for everyone else. This becomes even more important in longer and heavier games like SETI. In longer games, even smaller advantages can add up and make you run away with the game.
WHO TO BALANCE FOR?
At first glance, SETI may seem like a game with a lot of randomness, but in reality skill plays the central role. The spread of skill levels among SETI players is huge – and I mean really huge! Despite its weight, SETI has proven approachable and appealing even to more casual players. Some of them might barely reach the third gold scoring milestone (70 points) in their first game, and still have fun. On the other end of the spectrum, highly capable players consistently score over 300 points. During expansion playtesting, we even saw a few unbelievable scores over 500, albeit against the solo rival.
“There is a big difference between players.”
So how do you balance a game that should ideally work for both of these groups? Many effects are balanced around an assumed average value. Take the Deep Sky Survey organization, for example: its ability lets you analyze data without spending energy.
A casual player might use it 2–3 times, saving a couple of energy. An experienced SETI player, however, may use it 10 times in a single game! And that’s just one ability – you can imagine how these differences can stack up.
“Balancing for a wide range of skill levels is hard.”
Honestly, the wide range of player skill was the most challenging factor in balancing SETI and its expansion. If you pick a narrow target audience, balancing isn’t so difficult. But when you want to make the game fun for casual players and at the same time suitable for high level competitive players, you likely need to make some compromises.
And why is that a problem, you ask? So the more experienced players score higher – so what? The issue is that in SETI you can keep taking turns as long as you still have resources. It’s the kind of game where you want to squeeze out every last action before you’re forced to pass. Finding ways to prolong your turns is very satisfying, but the number of turns a player can manage (and with it, the overall game length) can vary a lot depending on their experience. And obviously, you don’t want the game to drag on for too long.
Another issue is how players perceive what they can achieve. If you balance more toward casual players, then experienced players may quickly hit a ceiling: they’ve developed all their techs, marked all the alien species, and essentially run out of things to do. If you balance the other way, beginners may feel like they’ve accomplished almost nothing and that the game ended just as they were starting to make progress.
And maybe the biggest challenge comes with cumulative effects, like the previously mentioned Deep Sky Survey ability. These are costed with a certain expected return in mind – but if less experienced players can’t extract that value, those effects may feel weak or uninteresting to them, even though skilled players can exploit them to great effect.
SCANNING TOO WEAK?
The perception of the scanning mechanic is a great example of how players of different skill levels can see things completely differently. Quite a few players found scanning underwhelming in the base game (especially at 2 players), and some introduced house rules to make it more attractive (often by adding neutral signals).Both the base game and the expansion went through a very extensive playtesting, and if anything, it shows us that people start to appreciate scanning more with experience, and that it can actually be one of the most powerful and rewarding approaches for skilled players. It’s not a weak option, but its strengths can be harder to spot and require practice to use effectively. So while we’d like to make scanning more accessible for casual players, we must also ensure it doesn’t break the game for experts who have embraced SETI and play it at a high level.
“What might be more suitable for casual players can be broken in high-level play.”
That said, I believe that the mentioned house rules can be perfectly fine for players who are just beginning their SETI journey. And it’s entirely possible that as their skill grows, they’ll find those adjustments unnecessary, or even inappropriate.
THE EXPANSION
When designing the expansion, we paid close attention to feedback from the base game. Many of its elements in the expansion were created to help players discover the game’s nuances more quickly. The new organizations are especially useful, as they highlight interesting strategies and unusual playstyles that players might otherwise overlook. Some push you toward probe-heavy play, others toward intensive scanning. Some demand a careful balance of the two, while others emphasize card play or techs, encouraging various less obvious approaches.
“Organizations make you explore diverse strategies.”
We noticed that new players often gravitated toward probes, which makes sense – that part of the game feels both very thematic and approachable. Scanning, on the other hand, may not seem as rewarding at first. But once more players begin to scan, the whole table tends to have more fun. It usually takes some initial signals being marked for others to follow, so one of our goals with the expansion was not to make scanning stronger, but to create more incentives to interact with it.
The new mechanics, from organization’s powers to signal tokens and quick start cards, were designed with this in mind. But again, the adjustments are subtle.
“Elements of the expansion give incentives for scanning.”
Signal tokens can be gained in several ways, most commonly through the new cards. Unless you’re playing an organization that specializes in them, you’ll probably only collect a few over the course of a game – but even a couple of signal tokens can have a big impact. They make it easier to close a sector, and can even let you snatch one away from another player.
In the base game, the player who invested in telescope techs usually had a clear edge in scanning. Without those specific techs, it was much harder to compete for sectors. Signal tokens now offer an alternative: they give you a fighting chance to win a sector without having to commit heavily to scanning. This means that even if you’re pursuing a different strategy, you can still dip into scanning occasionally – and sometimes come out on top thanks to a well-timed signal token
Quick start cards are used together with organizations. Their immediate benefits partly compensate for the skipped first round. More importantly, though, they mark certain spaces on the board during setup, creating greater variety and new incentives for actions you might not normally consider.
8 out of the 21 quick start cards add initial signals to the board. These are quite popular picks, since they can boost your income by granting data early on. At the same time, by marking signals they accelerate the scanning: with fewer data remaining in a sector, it becomes easier to close, and the rewards for scanning (1 publicity when a sector closes, and potentially the big reward for winning the sector) arrive more quickly.
The adjustment for 2 players is similar to house rules some players were already using, which involved placing neutral signals at the start of the game. However, many of those house rules went too far, often putting two signals in every sector. That may work for newer players, but it creates serious imbalances for those with more experience.
Our approach was more subtle. The adjustment doesn’t just seed scanning incentives, it also touches other areas of the game by introducing neutral orbiters and traces. The quick start cards helped us to make it nicely variable and to create a bit of a different situation every game.
And if players still feel the adjustment isn’t enough for their playstyle, the quick start cards provide a flexible platform they can use to fine-tune their game even further.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read these notes. The intention was simply to share a glimpse into the thought process behind the game – the challenges, the compromises, and the small nudges that hopefully make SETI more fun to play. I hope you have found it interesting.
At its heart, SETI is a game about exploration – not only in space, but also in exploring new strategies, mechanics, and ways to enjoy the game together. I hope this article has given you a deeper look into that journey, and I look forward to seeing how you continue to explore SETI in your own games.
And in case you haven't read it yet, feel free to check the previous designer diary from Tomáš Holek, focusing on Asymmetric organizations.
