Life As An Engine Builder

Given that I write blogs and make boardgames, it's in some sense shocking how FEW of my posts are just "you know, life is like a board game....".[^1] But here's one.

There's a popular genre of boardgames called Engine Builders. The idea, roughly, is that you spend different resources to build "engines" which create more resources. You invest early on and reap more and more of the resources as the game progresses, taking "bigger" turns as a result.

For example, one popular recent(ish) engine building game is Wingspan. The players have to juggle cards and eggs and foods to acquire more cards and eggs and food (to win points and win the game).

I think there's a couple of important takeaways from looking at life as an engine builder.

First, it's really important to realise there are multiple resources in the game simultaneously; that it's easy to get pulled in to one resource early on and not-realise that it's going to cost you in the long run (or, at least, narrow down your options). There's a stereotypical version of e.g. the person who spends their 20s and 30s attempting to maximize the "money" resource, and completely neglecting the "love" resource, which they later come to realise is also important to them. But even if all you care about is the money resource, sometimes you reach a point where your ability to acquire it is bottlenecked by (say) relationships, which you'd completely under-invested in.

Second, I think that engine-builders give a good intuition of how exponential resource-growth can be. "Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe" is a cliche but also sometimes true, and it applies to money and relationships and learning and many other things beside. I think this is one of the things that is least-obvious until you experience it: the early parts of an exponential curve don't look very different from a linear increase, and (depending on the numbers) could even be lower. But further down the line the exponential just mogs the linear so hard you want to cry.

One important note is that modern boardgame designers generally strive to include catch-up mechanics (or "rubber bands" in the parlance) that make sure the early leader doesn't just run away with everything. On my worst days I fear that the game of life is kind of broken because NOT ONLY does it not have rubber bands, the players don't even start with remotely similar resources, so some people just luck into an incredible engine early on and then run away from the pack by age 22. But I'm not so sure about this; part of me thinks that the meta-game is more complicated than the one I see before me, and that the real game is more subtle and better-balanced than it sometimes seems.

[^1]: I'm sure every hobby is full of people saying "you know, life is like [thing from the hobby]" and that this is annoying to everyone outside the hobby, but I'm going to do it anyway.