Someone once wrote – I can’t find the piece, of course – that the reason Peanuts is better, and also weirder and sadder, than other gag comic strips is that it has four panels rather than three. Most comic strips find that three is enough, and why wouldn’t it be enough? Setup, development, punchline. The fourth panel in Peanuts is where things get weird and sad. A moment after the joke. A human moment, awkward and brilliant and often deeply memorable.
Anyway, I thought of this yesterday when pondering why most XCOM-alike tactics games have two action points, while Hard West 2 has three.
Let’s take it back to the start: Jake Solomon’s XCOM reboot Enemy Unknown hit on something very special when it reduced the complexity of a turn-based tactics game down to a simple idea: each unit can do two things per turn. You can move and shoot, or you can move twice, etc etc. It’s not really a reduction in complexity, actually, but a clever repositioning of complexity. By making the rules of the game clear and non-fiddly, it allowed players to understand that the really engaging decisions lay out there on the actual battlefield. It wasn’t how to move and shoot, it was what you might do through moving and shooting.
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