Dealing With The Meta

The Meta (not the social media behemoth) is a scary term, a bogeyman for gamers across the spectrum. From MtG to Pokemon, from League of Legends to SMITE, the Meta is always lurking, waiting to break (or make depending on your view) the fun in a game. Tabletop games are no exception, although the way a Meta develops is different. For the next few minutes, if you'll let me, I'm going to explain what Meta is if you've never heard of it, I'll show you how it shows up in board games and TRPGs, and then I'll give you some advice on what to do about it if you don't want it in your games.

So, first, what does it mean when someone talks about the Meta in a game? The term is shorthand for the idea of metagame. Metagame is the game beyond the game, where another level of competition happens. In every game, the game wants you to play a certain way, but there's almost always one or two ways to play that are simply better than the other ways. These are often expressed in an abstract manner, such as the idea in chess that you should control the center of the board, or the very common occurence of one faction or character being better than another in a game like Twilight Imperium or Talisman. It can be something as simple as knowing the best ratio of footmen to tanks in Axis and Allies. As this dominant strategy becomes known, the game becomes who can exploit the weakness of this dominant strategy best or who can deploy the strategy fastest.

If this doesn't sound familiar to you at all, you're a rare breed. Virtually every competitive games have a Meta and even a lot of single player games have one. Whether this is an issue is largely a matter of personal taste. For myself, I don't enjoy games that present multiple ways to engage with them but only some fraction of those ways are viable. To illustrate, let's play at being pirates for a moment.

Fun Fact: The "pirate accent" is just a Somerset accent. Robert Newman, who played Long John Silver in Disney's 1950 Treasure Island film, added some fisherman roughness into his native accent for the movie.

Let's pretend there's a game where everyone is a pirate competing to win gold. Let's say this game has three ways to win gold: raiding enemy ships, solving treasure maps, and running trade routes. If all three are just as easy, but trade routes earn less gold than the other two, then a player who wants to play by running trade routes will have a harder time winning the game, and the Meta is to focus on the other two. Hopefully that explains both why I'm not personally a fan of Meta and also what the Meta is if you still can't think of an example.

Now, how might we deal with the Meta showing up in our games? There are many, many options and you're likely to create your own answers over time, but there are four simple and effective methods you can try to start before reworking them to fit your table. These methods are, in rough order of difficulty, apathy, time limits, banning, rule changes.

Apathy first, not that it matters. The easiest possible solution is to simply not care that a game has a metagame. So what if that means you're probably going to lose every game or that your favorite way to play might be derided by game snobs? If you have fun, that's all that matters, and all at the low effort cost of not being upset about the Meta.

The zen solution of not being bothered, while easy in theory, is difficult in practice. So we can talk about the first real solution in the list: time limits. A person who is crunched for time is going to find it difficult to take advantage of meta strategy when the clock is counting down. This of course means you'll need to find a healthy balance between pressure and freedom. This also doesn't work as well for games that are very simple to play. Obviously a time crunch isn't very crunchy if you only need five seconds to plan and take your turn.

Banning the meta sounds easy to do, and in some respects, it is, but if someone really likes using the meta faction or the meta strategy for your game, this might generate some hurt feelings. You can also ban specific things, like banning a certain action or enforcing a truce for the first few turns of a game. These small scope bans get closer to fixing the issue for many groups but a better way to describe this is...

Changing the rules. Home rules are popular in many, many games. Uno may be the most famous game to have a popular home rule (despite what many people claim, you can't stack draw cards on draw cards to pass along the draw), although that one is not used to fix meta problems. There are plenty of other games that can use home rules. Some tables ban combat in Xia for the first turn or two, others have implemented restrictions on trade in Monopoly or Settlers of Catan. Home rules are a case by case fix for meta issues and may not be able to fix all problems.

What if none of the above work? Then you probably have some concern with the game on a fundamental level. Be careful. Two possibilities exist at this point: either the game isn't for you or it's poorly designed. While in some cases it can be the latter, it's almost always the former. Knowing the difference is something I might muse over in a later post, it's way outside the scope of metas.

If you've read this far, I hope this has been enjoyable for you if nothing else. If you didn't know what a meta was, hopefully you do now. If you have been looking for ideas on how to start fixing games with a meta, hopefully you have some now. And if you were looking for the secret to immortality, keep looking. In the meantime, maybe try fixing a game you've struggled with.

Best of gaming,

Shopkeep